BY DON SNOW

You often see groves of magnificent cottonwoods in irrigation country, their glass leaves flashing against a summer sky. When you draw close to them, you can hear them rustle like the sound of rushing streams. Consider that these trees are vertical columns of water—great, vascular fountains made of wood—and the sound makes a kind of poetic sense. 

If you live in plains country, you come to cherish cottonwoods, for in summer the air all around them is cool and sweet and full of birdsong, and in winter they can stop the wind. They are the trees of waterways, the markers of rivers and riparian life, but in irrigation country, they also follow the ditch banks, tracing patterns of intelligence applied to the land. When I spent my days among great cottonwoods, I always thought each tree alone looked like a brain, a maze of ganglia in silhouette against the sky. They marked the cunning flow of water. 

For six years I lived and worked as a farmhand along a stretch of the North Poudre Ditch in Colorado, a few miles north of Fort Collins. The ditch had been there a hundred years, and with it came the cottonwood trees. It was a big ditch—big enough that a crazy philosophy professor from New York used to ride his kayak on it—big enough to create its own hydrological system underground during the eight months of the year when it carried water. 

At the north edge of our farm, where Tart Hill Road made a "T"with Owl Canyon, the Mattingly family's orchard drew irrigation water from a measuring gate in the earthen ditchbank. And just upgrade from the orchard, where the ditch made a broad, looping turn around the head of a natural slough, stood a grove of hefty Plains cottonwoods, the largest, oldest cottonwoods I'd ever seen. In the center of the grove a small pond glistened like an eye open to the sky, and beyond the pond to the west ran the remains of an ancient creek bed. 

The hydrostatic drift beneath the big ditch pushed water to the surface and held it there in the pond and sometimes in the streambed beyond. And the trees, being phreatophytes—water lovers that breathed a mist of transpiration into the sky—thrived in the riverine conditions made by ditch, pond, and creek. It was a small forest, really, an accidental tangle of cottonwoods, willows, currants, and wild rose, where whitetail deer could fawn, and ring-necked pheasants waited out the storms, and great-horned owls took over abandoned magpie nests to raise their young. We all gathered in that oasis, every mammal, every bird, every amphibian and reptile of any standing in the community. If you went there at night, you heard a symphony of frogs. By day the air quivered with the songs of thrushes. 

I went to the woods more frequently than anyone, returning week after week in every season, as my journals from those farm days show, while the others who lived or worked on the farm visited the grove only during the time of wild asparagus. In the hot summers, long after asparagus had branched out and gone to seed, I'd sit for hours in the cool shade of the trees, waiting for the nighthawks to come out and commence their insectivorous booming in the sky. During autumn, I went there like a schoolboy to wade in leaves, to gather the yellow leaves up to my hips, up to my elbows, to my neck if I could, and make a fool of myself in the eyes of the magpies. In winter, I would huddle against the leeward side of the trees and watch the wind rush past while the resident juncoes and sparrows darted from tree to ground and back again, holding their own against gusts that could shatter their tiny bodies in a heartbeat. 

I reveled in the fact that for eight months of the year, the months when the farm ran at full throttle, the big ditch at the edge of the grove made an impassable barrier and separated those quiet woods from the Germanic pounding on the fields below. While the water ran, you had to access the grove from a quiet country road to the north—a quarter-mile walk across a patch of shortgrass prairie teeming with burrowing owls, prairie dogs, and small rattlesnakes. Time seemed not to exist in the grove, nothing bore interest, and politics went no further than acts of solemn exchange between predator and prey. A hired hand like me could hunker down there and grow Thoreauvian, thumbing his nose at the frenzied cultivators whose engines buzzed on every horizon. 

For a long time, that small forest of cottonwood trees filled me with confusion as much as with delight. I wondered if those woods were "natural" at all, for they had clearly been created not by a wild river or stream but by an artificial ditch, a work of engineering. And not a very primitive work, at that. Although the North Poudre canal had been constructed in the late 19th century, it was a marvel of technology. It drew from a small reservoir situated in a canyon of the North Fork of the Poudre River, then immediately began wandering from the canyon through a line of foothills and hogbacks far from the course of the original stream. Using only the most primitive surveying instruments, the mustachioed men who sighted and dug the canal managed to make it flow evenly and slowly across the cascades of the hills, more than fifty miles in all. If the water ran too fast, it would wipe out the earthen banks of the ditch; too slow, and it would stagnate under the pounding July sun that promised to evaporate much of the flow. Where the ditch had to cross shallow ravines, the water disappeared underground, tumbling into concrete-lined siphons, then emerged on the other side, a smooth brown tongue lolling from a cement mounth. 

But although the water flowed, it could hardly be said to resemble a river—kayaking philosophers notwithstanding. There were no riffles, no tumbles or rocky falls, no braided channels. Where the river of its origin was a freestone trout stream transparent with mountain water, the North Poudre Ditch ran chocolate with silt, then lay ugly all winter, filling with dirty snow drifts and windblown leaves. In nature's terms, it seemed as impoverished as every other damnable thing wrought by human hands. 

It occurred to me that my adopted cottonwood forest was really little more than an irrigated tract, in one sense not so different from the picking corn we were cultivating on the first field below the orchard. If someone would have turned off the water in the North Poudre Ditch, and left it off indefinitely, my cottonwoods would begin to wither and die. The little pond would probably dry up over time, and the old creekbed, running into the grove from the north, would go back to its intermittent flows. 

As a young scholar of the wilds, those possibilities bothered me. Was my beloved grove "wild"or even "natural" at all; or was it an artifact, a creation of something we called "civilization" and the hydraulic transfusions that kept it all on life-support? And where should my allegiances rest in the middle of all this? If my pursuit was the pursuit of the wild, how could I become so enamored of a woodlot that had been forced into being through irrigation? I decided to let the birds tell me. 

Two miles from the grove where I habitually hid from work and jotted philosophical ramblings into my journals stood the cabin where I lived. It was a two-room affair, a clapboard shack built originally for migrant laborers then moved onto the site a year or two before I arrived at the farm. 

My water came from a cistern a hundred feet from my front door. Once every six weeks or so, a tanker truck would drive up and empty about 2,000 gallons into my concrete silo underground. Atop the cistern and protecting the pump and pipes from freezing stood a wooden pumphouse with a sharply peaked roof and a heavy, insulated door. The little building seemed stark and unfinished when we completed construction, so we dressed it up by hanging the skull of a ram above the door. He had been a big, old ram, and his horns spiraled upwards into a full curn, with sheaths of black keratin still slightly attached. The plywood walls of the pumphouse never got painted, but the skull offered a sort of stark decoration in keeping with the bony look of the building's exterior. 

In the spring following construction of the pumphouse, a pair of Say's phoebes shows up and began looking for a suitable nestsite around the buildings there on the home section. They had their choice among main house, silos, milking shed, loafing sheds, Chinese elms, and cabin. All of those structures had ample niches for phoebe nests, but the birds, having minds of their own, chose the pumphouse. In fact, they placed their nest between the horns on the ram's skull. It didn't take much thought to figure out why. The east-facing doorway offered excellent shelter from winds and rain; the heavy ram's horns probably felt as solid and stable to them as any tree branches; and perhaps most importantly, it was the one building that witnessed practically no human traffic. They felt safe, I reasoned, nestled between the curling horns and the flat, protected wall of the pumphouse, and we were delighted and amazed at their choice. But the better reason came soon enough into play. In a few weeks, tiny phoebes began peeking out above the eye sockets of the ram's skull. Their parents' choice had been poetic, and whether or not they knew or intended it, poetry made all the difference. 

So it was through the avenue of poetry I set my case over "naturalness" to rest. I came to see the cottonwood grove much as I saw the pumphouse: a shelter set there because of transported water. I came to realize that in the struggle to survive on that harsh prairie, any big stand of trees was fundamentally and most importantly a shelter, a greathouse. To the wild creatures who gathered there and lived their lives in harmony with their surroundings, the way in which that shelter came into being did not matter. The distinctions were all mine; they were my leisured impositions on the landscape—and they involved moral judgments, besides. It was as if the cottonwood forest was somehow deficient, in my mind, because it could not be said to be, strictly speaking, "wild." 

I came to see that practially everything about the farm, indeed, about our life there in the country, was like that: it was all based on the interpenetration of the wild and the not-wild. If you sat and watched long enough, the distinction ceased to matter. If you bided your time, and were patient, and decorated your own living with the paints and sculptures you could find all around, maybe some phoebes would come at last to nest at your door. Maybe you would come to see that you, too, were just another creature in the greathouse. 

Don Snow
Article courtesy of Northern Lights Magazine

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