For some reason, I want to believe that I once heard it said that before the Japanese plant a tree, they carefully consider how its placement will affect the landscape over the course of the next one hundred years. Now this precept may be true, or it could just as easily be something I made up, a product of the same romantic Western notions of Oriental wisdom as Sobe and the Karate Kid. I'm not really sure. What I am sure of is just how much better the world would be given even a fraction of that foresight.
Towering cottonwoods crisscross the Bitterroot between Corvallis and Hamilton in neatly ordered rows. Valley lore maintains that famed Gilded Age industrialist Marcus Daly lined the avenues with these trees so that his carriage would travel in shade everywhere it went. The fact that the Anaconda Copper King passed long before the trees realized their full potential lends credence to more philanthropic motivations than that, but even if the original impetus for their planting was less than altruistic I believe that whoever put them there would be pretty disappointed by our failure to safeguard their legacy.
The trees are all dying. Whole lanes are being stripped as the giant cottonwoods become nothing more than hazards. The avenues, once so elegantly defined, a touch of cultivated formality and order in an otherwise uncivilized landscape, are being denuded. The sentinels, grown old and weary, are falling down. No juveniles stand ready to replace them. Generations have passed yet no generation rises beneath them. In the one hundred years since they were planted, no one has given them much more than cursory consideration.
I find this lack of forethought, this failure to account for the future, this inability to consider the whole rather than the part or the moment, this disavowal of any sort of planned progression indicative of America. Such manner pervades our culture, our economy, our manner and our mode. We are reactive, not proactive. We do not build upon the foundations of the past. We do not invest capital in the future. Ours is a society disposable. This is our zeitgeist.
We have been working on acquiring a foreclosed property from Fannie Mae. Unoccupied for only a short period, it is already quite literally falling to pieces. Owing to a broken hanger, a gutter that listed only slightly on our first visit has since collapsed completely. To the megalithic lien holder the value of this real estate is defined by a set of numbers on a balance sheet. For us, the home has a worth that is a bit more intrinsic.
If not simply to further our own interests, out of respect for Marcus Daly we should have preserved his legacy. We should have accounted for the inevitable demise of one generation and secured the naissance of the next. We should have planted young trees between the mature ones, so that through succession the prescience of Marcus Daly would endure, alive in perpetuity, shading future lanes and carriages for years to come.
On a bench above Corvallis, along the course of Summerdale Lane, there are planted ordered rows of cottonwood trees. How long they will remain is anyone’s guess, but let it be known that, should the Williamsons take up residence upon this path, their numbers shall surely increase.
Leave it better than you found it.
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