OCTOBER SNOW

This year the October snow came a little early -- several days ago. Usually it hits the last week of October, often around Halloween. (And the usual last snow in the spring is liable to interfere with the Easter Egg hunts.) But it was welcome, if only because my big cottonwood on the south needs water in order to complete its separation cycle with its leaves, so that they fall off instead of staying on dead all winter, depriving my house of needed sunshine.

The storm was not so bad as the one back east that tore down whole trees. I lost no major limbs, but I did lose many “flags” of twigs with green leaves on the ends, partly because of the snow and partly because of the vigorous and warming wind that removed the snow and set the branches to dancing. A tree prunes itself, I guess. The main branches, which extend out a long ways, had drooped until they formed a green tent around the trunk, touching the ground. In nature, a shelter. Over my driveway, an obstacle.

One main branch, which goes up in the center, is dead, silvered, because of lack of water.

In their native riparian zones (floodplains), Populus deltoides (prairie cottonwood) and P. fremontii (Fremont cottonwood) commonly experience substantial branch die-back. These trees occur in semi-arid areas of North America and unexpectedly given the dry regions, they are exceptionally vulnerable to xylem cavitation, drought-induced air embolism of xylem vessels. We propose that the vulnerability to cavitation and branch die-back are physiologically linked; drought-induced cavitation underlies branch die-back that reduces transpirational demand enabling the remaining shoot to maintain a favorable water balance. (From springerlink.com)

The tall evergreen next to it has spots of orange where it has sacrificed needles. A narrow balance between sparing town water and sparing my trees. The trees need occasional deep watering. Some locals are not sympathetic to cottonwoods, considering them “messy,” which they are. At least these two trees are far from my water line, so not likely to break into it to get their own drink.

But I’ll bet the poplars have designs. The poplars on the north side were bare before the storm. Even the stubborn green ash is skeletal. The wild plum in the backyard dropped most of its leaves during the snow. Much of the little tree is dead -- it must be pretty old -- and when the ground gets hard again (right now the legs of a ladder sink deeply into the softened ground) I’ll do some tree surgery. It’s running into the power line anyway. The infrastructure of nature is always trying to interrupt the infrastructure of human habitation.

At night it’s a little too cold to leave my bedroom window open, not so much because of the temperature as that the young rancher who lives in town across the street runs his diesel pickup a long time in the morning to warm it up, and the fumes come in my window.

These recent nights have not been so quiet as usual because of the sounds of the economy. That’s when the railroad spur by the grain elevators does a lot of switching back and forth to load up hopper cars, because if the string of cars is more than a few units long, it can’t help blocking the highway through town, at least temporarily. Not everyone who passes through Valier realizes that they can go around on dirt to cross the railroad farther West. So there are train sounds in the night: the big engine revving up, crashing hookups, whistle signals, even sometimes shouts between men.

On the other side of the highway is the Valier Stockman’s loading chute and corral complex. The main night sound from them is generally cattle bawling when penned overnight. Each cow must be inspected before shipping. They always go out in stock trucks, never on the railroad. I don’t know why. In the daytime, with ranchers hanging around, dogs in the backs of their pickups, lots of laughter, cows scrambling in and out of the trailers -- it’s an attractive scene for extroverts.

Insomniacs know that tanker trucks, carrying petro products, seem to travel at night. On the quietest nights one hears the 18-wheelers from miles away, wheel-roar getting louder and lower as the vehicle comes closer, the loud staccato stutter of “Jake brakes,” then the Doppler effect withdrawal. Early Jake brakes were invented by a guy named Jacobs and because his company was called Jacobs Brakes, it was quickly abbreviated into the kind of catchy rhyme that can’t help becoming a generic name. Much to Jacobs’ chagrin, since many people are not fond of that sound in the middle of the night and many towns are posted at the edge, “NO Jake Brakes!” Today Jacobs claims that THEIR brakes are relatively quiet and the imitators are the loud ones.

Jake brakes are invaluable on a big truck because they work by engine compression, sort of comparable to “gearing down,” rather than depending on wheel brakes that date back to wagon wheel blocks and are prone to wear or even failure. On mountain roads one is likely to see “runaway escapes” for trucks, branching off uphill so a driver could swerve onto them to stop, the ultimate recourse if your “Jake brakes” fail.

Fall here is much like winter in Portland where I grew up, so it throws me back into many sense memories. I grew up with a wood and coal furnace, so the locals who use wood provide incense. Wet leaves, though not the kind or color of Oregon leaves, are a familiar soft and slippery carpet underfoot. The tap of rain on window and the gurgle of gutters are lullabies. Wet cats want to warm themselves on my lap and stick their snouts under whatever I’m reading so they can judge what my response might be. Sitting in a pool of incandescent light (politically incorrect, I know), I’m not inclined to turn them away.