- A Big Tree

A Big Tree

Dave Motes

The hydrologist had advised Cal to “assess the big streamside trees.” Cal didn’t know what he was assessing exactly, so the assessment was brief, and wrong. The maple was big, but not nearly as big as the cottonwoods and sycamores that grew closer to the water. So the maple escaped unassessed. It was a good five yards back from the water’s edge, and upslope too. He and his dropout protégé Jason did the active things the hydrologist recommended: they filled chickenwire baskets with big rocks to prevent erosion at certain points, according to xeroxed instructions. They created woody cover in the bends, and made sure the banks were thickly grown with buffer plants. They paid no further attention to big streamside trees.

Then one hot night the TV was all weather all the time and four million Minnesotans watched blobs of vivid color superimposed on street maps. The hail killed soybeans and the twisters ate barns and silos and part of a small town forty miles to the west. Closer to home it blew hard and rained like a cow pissing on a flat rock, and sometime in the night the big maple came down squarely across Yellow Creek.

Bob Kinchley came back from the Wall Run in a lather and they all went out to look at it. The creek was still dark and high from the rain, but even sideways the tree loomed forty feet higher. The massive root ball had twisted out and arched two stories over the far creekbank. The heavy leaves were full and green above, pale silver undersides more visible now fluttering in the current. The tree spanned the stream without trying, angled slightly down-current but unmoved by the pressure of the water. Forty yards of riffle had become a fathom-deep run that worked over, around, and under the huge trunk, itching to find a new way.

“What are we going to do?” Kinchley said breathlessly. He was an anesthesiologist at Mayo, one of the original members of the Trout Club. Cal admired that imperial ‘we’.

“Don’t know,” Cal said. The tree would have been big on somebody’s front lawn. Waist-deep in the club’s best nymphing riffle, it was gigantic.

Cal had only recently begun to draw real wages for his maintenance and repair work. The members had become keen on measurable results now that they were paying someone to do what had been so long neglected. Kinchley frowned, hands on hips, and looked meaningfully at Cal, then at the tree.

Cal and Jason waded out with the chain saw. The wood was sticky and green, and the leaves heavy with water. Cal chewed off a twenty-foot bough, and the current yanked it loose. Jason was a big kid but the branch mauled him under before Cal could lift it off him. They couldn’t stop the branch from sailing away downstream. It traveled awhile, quivering, and hung up at the top of Stack Hole.

The saw was wet and wouldn’t start. Jason was wet, and wouldn’t start. Fifty more branches and an eight-foot trunk eighty feet long mocked them. They waded back to the bank under Kinchley’s annoyed supervision and sat sulking like prisoners on a road crew, avoiding eye contact. But Kinchley didn’t take the chainsaw and wade his own elderly ass out for round two. Instead he went off upstream, clinking and jingling under everything Orvis sold.

The stream was conforming to the tree already. The root ball had settled down into the bank, and the water had worked up to and through it. A long gravel flat was appearing among the topmost branches. Stuff had already accumulated along the main trunk and among the heavy middle branches. The pool upstream was calm. A trout rose steadily in the center of it.

“What’s going to happen there?” Jason said. They’d both become interested in stream dynamics since the hydrologist had been around.

“Haven’t the faintest,” Cal said. “But we’re not messing with it anymore.”

Jason looked relieved.

Sunday was an impromptu meeting, far too well attended to be coincidence. Cal easily identified the anti-tree faction by their cohesion and uncharacteristic attention to Roberts Rules.

“We got to get that thing out of there,” said Andy Olson decisively. Murmurs of assent, and somebody yelled ‘second!’

“I been fishin’ that run for forty years,” said Kinchley, with a reproachful look at Cal.

Cal said nothing. His status with the club membership was delicate. Major expenses, such as the removal of a tree the size of the Edmund Fitzgerald, might endanger his wages.

Consensus was building toward acclamation when Tom Maradonna spoke up. Maradonna was the club’s resident elitist Izaak Walton-quoting British chalk-stream spey-casting snob, and his buttery upper-crust accent made the Minnesotans lock up. He winked at Cal. “Gents, it’s a stream, a river really. It has its own rules. The fish don’t care. Leave it be.”

The freighted silence that followed was the Midwestern equivalent of an angry roar, but Cal saw some nods and smiles, among them Rob Bell and Gilbert Hedtstrom, two of the more pragmatic members. But they were in a minority. The old timers reiterated their arguments for another hour, persuaded the fiscal conservatives and the contrarian assholes, and won a motion to do something 16-7. What, or whom, was not specified. Further study was suggested.

Cal and Jason were digging footers for a set of steps up the steep side of Camp Hill when Kinchley and Mike Parker showed up with two construction types and looked at the tree. The strangers seemed skeptical but returned soon with a gigantic vehicle that Jason identified as a heavy-duty boom truck. When presented with automotive problems, Jason became wise; the rest of the time he was silent.

The bank above the Wall Run was low, so they were able to back the huge vehicle down to the river’s edge then forty or fifty yards along it, destroying the undergrowth and chewing down the secondary bank under 18 or 20 wheels. Cal noticed several small maples among the casualties. Cal found himself hoping they’d get the thing stuck and have to call another, larger truck, and so on.

One of the men waded out with the cable and lashed it to the midsection of the trunk.

“Naah. No way,” said Jason. “No way. They should come up, you know, from downstream, like to turn it with the current. Still I don’t think it will move.” It was the first decisive unsolicited statement Jason had made.

The men ran down hydraulic legs from the side of the truck and cranked it up. The cable came tight, the winch lugged down, the diesel throttled up, and nothing happened. The tree flexed a bit didn’t move an inch as far as Cal could see, and he had a good view. Kinchley and the head tow truck guy shouted at each other and waved their arms. They tinkered with the machinery a moment, and tried again; nothing happened again. The cable had cut so far into the bark of the tree that one of the men had to gouge it loose with a screwdriver. The truck ground back up to the road, did more damage to the buffer growth, and muttered away, leaving Kinchley standing by the water, hands on hips.

It rained all weekend, a smoky drizzle punctuated by squalls under a swirling eastern retrograde front, or so the TV said. Cal and Jason had the property to themselves. They rented an earth auger from Home Depot in La Crescent and burned two gallons of gas on footings for a riverside deck, walkways over two spring seeps, and the rest of the stair set up Camp Hill. It went way faster than the posthole digger.

Cal kept hiking up to look at the big tree. He knew the stream intimately, and caught far more fish than the next four members combined. The tree radically changed a big chunk of the prime stem of the best riffle water on the property, but Cal was oddly happy about it. He tried to understand why, but was too tired and jangled from wrestling the earth auger to get anywhere.

Sunday evening Cal bushwacked to the beaverponds on the far downstream edge of the property. He saw that Tom Maradonna was right: the ponds were full of trout. The club had bought a dozen acres of dairy pasture and hayfields at the top of the creek four years before, and fallowed them since, rescuing the unnamed branch from muddy irrelevancy. There had always been beavers, but nobody in the club had ever mentioned any trout.

Cal fished an Adams with difficulty through the overhanging ash and popples. Every cast that hit the water got hammered by a five-inch brookie. The Yellow didn’t hold brook trout. But freelance bucket biology was a long Minnesota tradition, and brookies were pretty and cooperative. Tom Maradonna had done his own part in the continuing saga of nature versus man. The ponds were deep and clear, the dams well maintained. Cal had to quit fishing when he broke the tippet knot and left his only fly dangling four inches above the water. The gullible little brookies took turns jumping up to whack at it.

It warmed up and the rain quit as evening fell, and Cal found himself with a six pack of Pig’s Eye sitting just upslope of the big tree, still trying to cope with his enjoyment at the sudden reorganization of staid and settled old Yellow Creek.

The branches in the water were now stripped of leaves, but several large boughs that stood clear were bright green and fresh-looking. The tree had settled lower, as if it had burrowed into the sand and cobble. Upstream the current was held in a broad triangular hold, pillowed up and shuffled off to each side. In the foreground, against the bank, the creek had cut a broad channel that had somehow filled itself with boulders, or perhaps the boulders had simply been exposed. The gravel flat was very pronounced, running up and under the branches and downstream in a curve around the top of the tree. The water riffled through a bend into what had been a shingle bank and beach, lapping nearly to the secondary bank where the tow-truck’s ruts and divots were still visible. On the far side, the huge root ball had been mostly cleaned of soil. Water no longer pumped underneath the trunk there, but it ran through and around the lower half of the roots and through a slot against the far bank among several car-sized rocks, the kind that had detached and fallen from the rock faces above. They had a name, but Cal couldn’t remember it. Along the great trunk the water was still deep and tangled, but a new bar was humping up dead center downstream. Altogether Cal found it different but not ugly or troubling; permanent, even proper.

Now that he knew what to look for, Cal found several more large scallops in the creekbank where, he presumed, other large trees had fallen. Of course they had—what else would the trees do? Some of the cottonwoods were fifteen feet around, and they leaned out over the stream on massive interwoven exposed complexes of roots. Some day they would fall; they all would fall. It was stupid to try to change it whether you could or not.

Cal had a vote, of course. He was a member, obliged to pay the yearly dues and any additional assessments for hydrologists or recalcitrant handymen. But he was by far the youngest member, and he was also an employee, so he deferred to the group on most issues. The tree was the first question in memory that had resulted in any serious debate, come to think of it. The problem had begun to feel like a question of philosophy, not force.

Monday morning Cal had questions for Carl Showalter. Carl was the DNR trout specialist for the region, and Cal had invited him out several times, bribed with a quid of lunch and fishing for a quo of management advice. Yellow Creek was one of the largest trout streams in the watershed and a main tributary of the Root, so the DNR kept an eye on it even though there was no public access.

They scouted the beaverponds. Cal didn’t mention that the brookies were all of a size; Showalter raised his eyebrows but didn’t comment. “Well, they’ll be here for a while, then they won’t,” he said. “These dams won’t last forever, though sometimes they take on a life of their own even if the beavers go. The beavers will stay, unless you shoot them or we get a sudden influx of timberwolves or Voyageurs. Long as the beavers stay, your brookies will stay happy. You’re not getting much silt. Both these bogs here are springfed, looks like, so even more cool water coming in. Big flash floods maybe, like on the Whitewater last year, that might do it. If the dams go out, you’ll have brookies in with your rainbows and browns for a while, but they won’t make any headway. You could pool up this creek, meander it, maybe build some log retainers, but the rainbows and brownies would outcompete your brookies eventually, maybe not up to the highest stretch. I’d say, enjoy it while it lasts. The water’s yours to change, if you want, but gravity’s patient.” They walked upriver.

“Whew, that’s a big one,” Showalter said.

“Any problems from it?” Cal asked.

“Naah. I mean, it will rearrange your channels, you can see that’s happening already. That riffle was good repro water for the rainbows, but reproduction isn’t great, never going to get much better, which is why by the way your rainbows are so big. The riffle will probably just move downstream as the current flows change. Anyhow, there’s plenty of spawning gravel around for what you’re going to get. You’re not going to get any better rainbows unless you go with a different gene set, maybe not even then. This is Minnesota.

“You’ll get some sediment movement, here where the bank is getting cut down, over there, but it’s zero sum—something’s always picking up, laying down. Your water quality is excellent, you won’t even notice it. A little burst of silt, that’s it. Too bad for the shade, but again with the springs you’re ok, you don’t get fatal warming. You got lots of trees. No problem, just a big splash. Looks like you’ll have an island here pretty soon, and long term that might push the river left here in a meander, but we’re talking decades. It’s what rivers do. Fish don’t care.”

“That’s funny. Somebody else said that,” Cal said. “Could we pull it out if we wanted to?”

“Sure, with enough horsepower. Would take some kind of crane, a big one. And would tear up the creekbed pretty bad, but you could do it. We sure wouldn’t.”

He paused, nodding. “Leave it alone. This isn’t a dang golf course.”

Cal was getting tired of Kinchley’s interruptions. He liked interruptions in general, of course, especially when the order of the day was toting 40 pound bags of Sakrete along two hundred yards of unreliable path then mixing them with a shovel. Cal would have preferred another trip, but instead it was Kinchley and Gene Orvig who appeared and began hectoring about The Tree.

“Why do you fellas think I got any say about it?” Cal said.

“You keep the grounds. People pay attention to what you say,” Kinchley said.

Cal was impressed. “Who’s that, again?” he asked.

Orvig blinked. “Well, Tom, and Okash. Couple others.”

“We think it’s important to correct the damage,” Kinchley said earnestly.

Jason hummed something faintly but kept mixing, head down. Cal stood up and wiped his hands on his pants for time to think.

“Well, guys, I guess it’s not up to me, but if it was I’d say leave the tree alone. Maybe we should let things go, as far as the way the creek, you know, wants to go.”

Both men shifted, tightened.

“Well, we make plenty of changes in the woods and paths,” Kinchley said. “Look here, you’re pouring footers for steps. That looks kinda permanent. Not exactly natural.”

Cal didn’t have an answer for that.

“Damn fish aren’t natural, either,” Kinchley said. “Rainbows, browns, all imported.” Brookies too, Cal said to himself.

“Yeah, that’s right. I didn’t say I understood it,” Cal said.

Orvig ,who was a tall, hunched old man with a long, mournful face, seemed uncomfortable at open debate.

“DNR hydrologist said it,” Cal pressed on. “Said it’s what creeks do. Won’t hurt the fish. Might help even. Also it’s not going to be easy to do anything. I mean, we really can’t do much at all. You saw. That’s a big sumbitch of a tree. And it’s worked in there now.”

Kinchley looked up the path, smirked dismissively. “Well, you’re pretty young. I guess, to, you know, want to keep things the same they’ve always been.”

Cal kept his face flat.

All paused.

“Well,” Cal said carefully. “I’m not sure what’s right. I’ll help out with whatever the club decides,” he said, regretted it. As a group, the club was stupid, like all groups. Cal did know what was right. He’d hesitated in the face of older, more powerful men. Kinchley had nodded and walked on before Cal could revise. Shit, he thought, and went back to work.

“The fuck are you grinning about?” he said to Jason.

“I ain’t grinnin’, boss,” Jason said, grinning.

According to the bylaws of the Trout Club, any measure requiring a ‘significant expenditure’ had to stay tabled for three months before it could be adopted. Like the rules excluding Catholics and ‘coloreds,’ it was unenforceably stupid, but the rules had never been changed; they were simply ignored. Important matters were handled by the president, amiable doofus Tom McKenney, and treasurer Tom Parker, and an informal council of guys who cared about details and decisions, including Kinchley and Orvig. Monthly meetings were for show. Roberts Rules and old business, bitching about finances on principle, maybe a slide show of somebody’s trip to Alaska, then drinking and lies unless it was nice out, in which case a few people went fishing and the rest drank and told lies. It was a club.

But something had happened. Cal couldn’t tell exactly what it was, but he could see the outlines like they were chalked up on the blackboard like a football play. Maradonna was smilingly edgy. McKenney was blinking, uncomfortable. Okash Vishnapanyu, the wiry little Sri Lankan genius who was one of Cal’s favorite members, was absent, absence being his most powerful public statement. Kinchley, Parker, Orvig, and a dozen other members confabbed conspiratorially, glancing around. They looked like a Politburo photograph Cal had used in a civics report in the tenth grade. Ten or twelve others stood around, twisting up their faces at the smell of conflict and commitment.

“The tree has destroyed Canada Riffle,” Kinchley began.

Cal had never heard of Canada Riffle. The names for distinctive features of their mile of stream were a perfect example of the Principle of What Sticks. He knew that Kinchley’s use of the name was another claim on authority. Anyone who asked why or when it became Canada Riffle was admitting they didn't know its name, and might as well bow out of any discussion about how to save it.

“It’s disrupting the best spawning water for rainbows, and it is a sign that the property is reverting to an uncontrolled state. Our assessments are rising, but we’re not getting anything for our money. I for one want the river returned to its former state, to its natural state. We need to move the tree out, restore Canada Riffle, and make a better effort to keep this property up.”

The contradictions didn’t nullify the threat. Cal’s status as live-in handyman in the best trout-bum Nirvanna available in southern Minnesota was now tied to a very big dead tree.

Maradonna had a go at the “that’s what rivers do” defense. Few listened.

Kinchley was up again. “There’s one person who has the best insight into what needs to be done around here. Cal Noble—we all knew his father—has been working around the place, as we know. Cal told me that he would get to work on the tree if the membership wanted him too. He thinks it can be taken care of. And we know he has some experience in stream management—we’ve all seen the work he’s done in the Braids area, and in the paths and bridges and the lodge house here. We’ve got what we need to solve this problem, and I say we get to it.”

Cal was still admiring the dissonance between “an uncontrolled state” and “all the work he’s done” when the vote went 19-4 in favor of removing the tree, details to be provided by Cal Noble after the fact, budget undiscussed, supervision by Bob Kinchley, any more new business. Cal abstained then went fishing, a gesture nobody noticed. Lower Pool fished well and he caught a five inch brookie at the confluence of Yellow Creek and the unnamed feeder stream. Walking back, he mulled names for the creek he might inject casually into conversation with the members. He carefully did not think about trees.

Jason solved the problem in the first week of September.

There had been no action on the tree, though Kinchley had called a meeting with the stated purpose of developing an “action plan.” Cal and Jason worked hard to build decks and stair rails, finishing the summer's projects.

Jason traded his labor for fishing privileges and instruction in the fly rod. He’d made the deal with Cal under the duress of being being nabbed for trespassing with a grocery bag full of strictly catch-and-release trout. His history and resume did not promise success, but successful it was. He worked hard each afternoon, and applied himself to the flyrod in the evening.

Learning the flyrod is hard and Jason was getting frustrated. He was an apt pupil but his loop was not tight and like any young man he remembered the easy success of a spin rod and hardware. To make it worse, August was tough fishing, all terrestrials and picky little tricos; Jason managed one good trout in two weeks of trying. Jason was trout-horny enough, but perseverance didn’t run in his side of town. As the tree settled in, his rod drooped.

Then Cal hit on the idea of introducing him to a bunch of hungry first-generation brook trout. It was perfect, but the overgrown ponds would be a nightmare for a novice caster. So Cal authorized himself to do a little grooming. They cut two patches on the north bank of the smaller upstream pond and connected them with paths. The downstream pond adjoined an open wetland space to the east; they cleared the trees from the water’s edge to make backcast room, and hauled the trunks to the stream and knocked up a crude bridge, and laid corduroy on several other soft spots between the ponds and the main path. That evening Jason caught dozens of trout; he was so enthralled that at one point half a dozen bulging mosquitoes slurped unslapped on his neck while he caught and released, caught and released.

Walking back, Jason was ebullient. “That was cool. It was cool to see them come up and take it. And I saw how you wait, just a second, then lift up, you know, not too hard. Wow. That was cool.”

Cal let him natter, remembering the first time it had been really easy for him: with his dad on the Delores, a blizzard of caddis, rainbows and brownies bashing bugs, blasting straight out of the water like Triton missiles, sometimes jumping right out from under the hookset, tearing around the river. They were strong, and they made him impatient with their long, slashing struggle because he didn’t want to fight them, he wanted to fool them--wanted to drift the fly again into the certainty that a fish was going to choose it this time or the next. He found the angler’s comfort in knowing they can be fooled, that you have them, that you know what to do. When they don’t take, you know the reason is only detail--drag, or a damp fly or a poor line of drift, details you can fix—something within easy control. On the long drive back to Telluride, he had tried to remember four or five 18-inch fish, all new personal bests, but the rose-cheeked trout were a blur in the net. What he remembered: big snouts rising up, for him.

Cal came back to something Jason had said: “That would cool them out, make them forget the stupid tree.”

“Huh? What was that?” Cal asked.

“Get those stiffs out there on them beaverponds for a while. Then maybe they’ll get off our ass on the big tree in the, up there, you know, what is it, Canada thing.”

Cal stopped as Jason clumped on across the deck and into the lodge house. That, he said to himself, is just the thing. 30 seconds later he had Tom Maradonna on the phone.

* * *

In March a heavy wet snow and a thaw moved big ice down the Yellow, and taught Cal that two of his projects had been poorly planned. The small deck on River Flat below the lodge house was surrounded and demolished, posts and boards scraped out and tumbled in a frozen tangle along the bank, their hard-built concrete footers uprooted and discarded like big dirty beer cans. The lowest step on Camp Hill was locked in and dragged into a flat rhombus. Cal knew he was lucky the entire stair hadn’t been yanked out all the way to the top like a thread from a sweater. Next year he’d place a large stone as the first step, and cut each tread loose from the next so higher ice or floods would take only one step at a time and teach him where to begin.

Brookie Creek—Cal’s name had stuck—ran high and clear, though the ponds were still locked up. It looked like the beavers would have some work to do come spring, but there was still plenty of water so the members would have at least one more season of easy pickings on dumb-ass brookies. Leaning on his ski-poles, Cal wondered whether they would be as gullible next summer, another year bigger, another year fewer. Then he laughed aloud in the quiet as he heard that thought applied both to brook trout and trout anglers. According to the sign-in book, members had spent more angler-hours on the club that September and October than any previous fall. Cal and Jason’s path had seen a lot of traffic.

Cal skied back again upriver, sweating under his fleece, full sun-glare off the dripping trees and settling snow. He was rusty on the skis but the snow was deep and heavy, good news for soil and aquifers and spring fed troutstreams. He cut across the valley, through a bean field and along the virgin snow of the upper road and came out on the creek above Camp Hill.

The Birch Pool dam stood up to a big ice stack with good flow over and around. That dam had been in place for forty years.

The big tree had changed. The water was open below and on either bank end. Full ice stretched bankwide across the pool upstream, veined by water pushing up through the cracks, brown against the rotten white. Ice sheets mounded over the huge trunk. Two upward-pointing limbs remained, turned at new downstream angles; the rest were gone. Jagged, twisted stumps and trailing shreds of bark revealed the slow violence of ice. It had done what the boom-truck couldn’t: moved the tree along a clock-dial five or ten minutes further downstream. The new angle caused water to pile up against the flat of the root ball on the far bank, which was now an eight-foot haystack of 18-inch-thick plates of ice layered neatly against each other, a great force bending and breaking roots and whittling others down.

While Cal watched the tree nothing happened. The sunshine went back to winter; the trees had stopped dripping. Water murmured under and over the ice, and he watched a few small pieces circulate in the flow then drift off downward toward Stack Hole.