Cottonwood vs. The Hunters
Leopoldo Tablante
photo credit: Leopoldo Tablante
People believe strange things. Like that global warming is a hoax, or that COVID-19 is a biological weapon invented by the Chinese in a lab in Wuhan.
A year ago, we went out to try to socialize our rescue dog: a boxer, sweet as cherry pie, but burdened with shelter traumas, especially when in front of another of her breed.
Three houses away, we approached the home of a family of hunters—a clan we refer to as the Band of Bad-Asses. They had a boxer of their own, and for some time, they’d been harboring a belief that our dogs could make friends.
The son of the Bad-Asses was unloading their hunting rifles from his Toyota Tacoma as we came near. Meanwhile, the father held their dog by its leash. Upon sight or smell of our dog, their boxer began to lurch erratically. The father gripped the leash tighter to maintain control.
Our dog lurched toward theirs, eyes red, muzzle foaming. Neither father nor son paid much attention to the danger. I suspect that, in their minds, dogs were no different than men, particularly “bad-ass” men. In both cases, they seemed to believe that a little fight might just be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Our dogs escaped unscathed. But we returned home, adrenaline coursing, hands sore and pulsating. The canine friendship our neighbors had anticipated never came to fruition. Instead, like our dogs, we had sniffed out our differences. From then on, for the sake of communal harmony, we cultivated our distance, maintaining the parabolas of our bullet-proof smiles and agreeing to disagree.
Before the shelter-in-place orders began to lift in Louisiana, most of us took living at a distance seriously. But for the Bad-Asses, it was too onerous a burden. They seemed to have felt the need to carve out a microcosm of their former universe in their backyard.
That microcosm orbited around the father’s man-cave, a large shed beneath a magnificent cottonwood tree, with a green Jessica Street sign above the entrance. There, he listened to classic rock while soaked in the blue light of his 50-inch TV, surrounded by the trophies from his wilderness exploits. On one corner of the roof, he installed a tall, metallic pole with a flag, crowned with the dome of a red beacon light. The device is always on at night.
One Sunday, the Bad-Asses hosted a family get-together, crawfish-boil and all. We could hear The Hollies “Long Cool Woman (in a Black Dress)” playing in the background, and their red beacon shined in the night.
Meanwhile, the number of COVID cases in the city kept rising.
Last Monday, a truck loaded with essential workers pulled into the hunters’ driveway. The workers were equipped with chainsaws, and apparently their mission was to cut down the Bad-Asses’ massive cottonwood. They assessed the situation, and then they raised one of their workers on a boom truck, like a knight out to dethrone the tree by removing its crown.
It took five hours of laborious effort for the crew to cut down the giant cottonwood, tossing thin branches down to be chucked into the wood-chipper, cutting thick sections of the trunk, endlessly rappelling and cinching up pulleys, exerting no small amount of fuel and sweat. In the end, despite the noise of men and machines, nature surrendered in silence.
In the place where a magnificent cottonwood once stood, the sun blazes in our direction. Today, the tree’s absence hovers over our yard. We sneeze and tear up in the glare of the sun, hoping these are symptoms of nothing else but grief.
Leopoldo Tablante is a Venezuelan-American writer and teacher. He lives in New Orleans and teaches Spanish at Louise S. McGehee school.