One Tree
By Terry Tempest Williams
"One Tree" by Terry Tempest Williams. Originally published in Natural Home Magazine, May/June 2000. Copyright © by Terry Tempest Williams. Used by permission of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc. All rights reserved.
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I want to speak about a tree. One tree. A cottonwood that arches over the road to our house like a great matriarch welcoming her children home. I love this tree. I love her massive, gnarled, weathered trunk that, when I touch it, reminds me of how life shapes us. It takes three, maybe four, human beings holding hands to circle her completely. I know because once, on a clear October day, my three nieces, my father, and I wrapped our arms around her. You may think I have fallen into cliché by hugging a tree, but isn't love always threatening to undermine our most sensible, skeptical, and cynical selves?
In the presence of this tree, I am reduced to exactly what I am, simply another form of life that benefits from her generosity. Be it a flicker in her branches, a line of ants departing from her trunk, or a wood moth resting with splayed wings against her bark.
Our community of two hundred or so people in this redrock valley of southern Utah honors this tree. At Christmas, someone quietly places a red velvet bow on her trunk. On New Year's Eve, fireworks fly past her crown and explode, creating a momentary flash of frosted boughs and limbs against a starlit sky, exposing her architecture. In the spring, it is not uncommon to find individuals simply sitting and reading under the chartreuse buds; no shade is too small not to be savored here. And in summer, the cottonwood expands to her full eminence, green leaves trembling in the slightest of breezes, bending in the most wicked of storms, her enormous branches lifting and stretching and framing the eroding buttes and mesas around her. Even in a flash flood, the waters part around her.
Roots. Trunk. Branches. Leaves.
Growing still, this cottonwood continues to guide and remind us of what it means to live in place.
This tree stands where two roads-one dirt, one paved-take different directions. Sometimes I take the dirt road just so I can see this magnificent tree from another point of view. I recognize it as a Fremont cottonwood, one of the signature trees of the Colorado Plateau that promises the presence of water nearby. And there is water, just below, a small creek that runs through the valley carrying melted snow from the LaSal Mountains to the south, which will eventually empty into the Colorado River just a few miles north.
In the hands of the Hopi, the roots of cottonwoods become kachinas carved out of the soft, yielding wood. Crow Mother stands on my desk. She is Cottonwood. She is Root. She is the ceremonial kachina with her turquoise-painted face and black triangular mask hiding her eyes, nose, and mouth. Black wings fan from her ears like flames. A woven blanket drapes over her shoulders, black, green, and white, just like the tree. She holds in her hands a basket of seeds.
This tree was once a seed, blown by the wind, which settled in red sand and began to reach downward and upward at once. We are all here by some gesture of grace. Or perhaps Crow Mother planted this Spirit Tree a century ago. The elders who know say this is one of the oldest trees in the American Southwest. I believe them.
Roots. Trunk. Branches. Leaves. Growing still, this cottonwood continues to guide and remind us of what it means to live in place. This tree brought me home. Here, now, she stands, her deep quiet registering as the patience I so wish to learn. Here, now, I live, forever mindful of the presence of one tree.
I think about her death every day. And then I see her leaves catching light and wonder why we cannot simply be held in the beauty of this moment.
--Terry Tempest Williams