The otherworldly power of majestic elm trees lining a street of sometimes shabby middle class homes was impressed on me one summer day when a great horned owl decided to hunker down in the top of a towering elm on 20th Avenue Southeast in the Minneapolis of my youth.
The tree this magnificent creature chose happened to be a Bazooka bubble gum wrapper’s throw from the house of my pal Junior Kryjawa. Junior was walleyed, like MAD Magazine’s Alfred E. Newman, and had six toes on his left foot. His pinky toe was split into two distinct lengths, each with its own toe nail. His father, like so many others in that blue collar neighborhood, worked on the railroad as a brakeman for the Great Northern. His teeth had rotted down to little black pegs while a prisoner in a Polish concentration camp during World War Two, and all he could eat was soft white bread soaked in milk. He refused to get dentures, or maybe just couldn’t afford them. Consequently he suffered from impacted bowels, which soured his disposition considerably. Whenever I came over to Junior’s house during mealtime (a dreadful habit I picked up early in life and have not yet rid myself of) I always noticed the large white bottle of Sal Hepatica that sat next to Mr. Kryjawa’s bowl of bread and milk.
Initially I was sick with envy at Junior’s good fortune in having this huge and ferocious looking owl lodged in a tree right next to his house. Why couldn’t that dumb bird have roosted in one of the dark old elms in front of my house? As soon as I was alerted to this fantastic happening I rushed over to his house. A crowd of gawking neighbors had already gathered, and soon the television vans from WCCO and KSTP arrived, with cameramen toting their bulky equipment around to get a good angle on the ruffled bird, who did not much care for the murmuring boors beneath its perch. It gave several tremendous hooty calls, spread its massive wings like Dracula spreading his cape getting ready to pounce, and then flapped away towards parts unknown. With a collective sigh, the neighbors dispersed and Junior was called back to work in the family garden, which consisted of rows upon rows of cabbage and kohlrabi -- two vegetables that were considered sinister foreign freaks of nature by my mother and never appeared on our table.
But I stood there for at least another hour, rooted to the spot, you might say, by the realization of how the overarching narthex of elm trees gave the street an a exalted green bliss. The wind blew through the elm leaves, making them scratch each other with a muffled rasp that reminded me of the sound of crickets. Gray squirrels flowed stealthily from one branch to the next like shadows, occasionally scolding each other over a disputed crumb. There was a peppery smell in the air, from the older leaves, ragged, yellowed, and brittle long before autumn, partially turning to dust each time the breeze rattled them. I ran my small hand over the deeply fissured bark, careful to avoid the large black carpenter ants that scurried up and down in the crevices. How had these princely things come to be here, I wondered to myself. Staring up into the tangle of black branches and dancing green leaves I felt uncomfortably humbled for an eight year old American boy -- scion of the prowess and plunder of the Military Industrial complex. Eventually I drifted back home, my head nearly snapping off its stem as I continued to gaze upward into that dark verdant welkin. My mother saw me stumbling along, long before I reached our front porch, and wondered out loud how I had managed to reach the house without falling and breaking my neck.
After that experience I really began noticing and appreciating the canopy of elm trees that lined so many streets in Southeast Minneapolis back then. Later on, after they were all hewn down, victims of Dutch elm disease, I learned that in the early 1920’s, when the original meadows and potato fields had been divvied up into lots for houses, the developers insisted on planting hundreds of elms on the streets and boulevards -- ignoring the advice of landscape professionals that a mix of other trees such as red maple and red oak would be prudent. The developers were not interested in prudence, they were interested in creating the kind of green cathedral canopy of mature elms that had already existed for hundreds of years in places like New Haven in Connecticut. They got their wish; and I became the beneficiary of their shortsighted obsession many years later.
During the dreary winter months, whenever I came down with bronchitis (a yearly occurrence back in those unfiltered Chesterfield days, when everyone, even my sainted mother, smoked like a chimney inside the house day and night) I asked to be allowed to recuperate on the living room couch. From there I traced the patterns the bare elm branches made against the dull gray sky -- birds in silhouette; grotesque faces leering down at me; even a sort of eldritch writing, like Viking runes, foretelling, no doubt, a hideous ruin for little boys like me who sometimes faked sore throats to get out of going to school.
During the flash and crash of summer thunderstorms I doted on sitting out on the front porch to watch those sturdy elms, whipped into a frenzy by the tornadic winds, stoutly resist the forces of nature to uproot them and mulch them in the whirlwind. The weeping willow in our backyard toppled over during a ferocious storm, and the vagrant cottonwoods down by the grade school were shorn of nearly half their flexible smaller branches -- but my elms, my splendid elms, stood up to the storms with nary a casualty. They were invincible, just like me.
Only . . . they weren’t. And neither was I.
Dutch elm disease, spread by bark beetles from the Orient by way of Holland, started felling the stately elms in Connecticut in the 1930’s, and by 1978 my beloved elms in Southeast Minneapolis were on their way out -- already victims of or suspected of being accomplices to the cursed bark beetle. And I, well -- it’s been many a year since I’ve set foot in Minnesota, let alone Southeast Minneapolis. My osteoarthritis keeps me close to home here in Provo Utah. But like the green bay tree mentioned in Psalms, the memories of my love affair with the genus Ulmus still flourish amidst the desert sand and sagebrush . . .
