STORYTELLING|LIMINALITY|NATURE

Old Man Palo Verde

Between the worlds

Palo Verde from the car — photo by the author

The little Palo Verde grew at the edge of a field where cows graze during part of the year. As the town spread around the field, the cattle came and went with the seasons, but the tree remained. Other than the desert grasses they fed upon, he was their only companion.

For years, the Palo Verde stood watch over the field, noticed by only a handful of people passing on the road. Drivers stopping at the corner light might rest their eyes on his green branches and watch them sway in breezes too hot to bring relief. Most saw only a tree, but a few saw something else.

Though he looked like any of the countless Palo Verdes scattered across the desert, those with a certain kind of sight could perceive what ordinary eyes could not. The slow shifting of his trunk. The gradual turning of his roots. Movements so slight that months might pass before they would become apparent. I first noticed it on a twilight drive home from work.

Something about him seemed different. I could not have said exactly what it was, only that he no longer stood quite where I remembered. Over the following weeks, I found myself looking for him each day. Little by little, I became certain. The tree was moving.

The movement was not quick. It wasn’t even slow by human standards. Sometimes I saw no change for weeks at a time. Yet each time I saw him again, there was a subtle difference. A lean toward the south, a turn toward the west. The tiniest progress in a journey measured in years, or so I thought.

One afternoon, while waiting at the light, I had the strange impression that he was no longer turning toward the west. He seemed to be turning toward the corner where I stopped each evening. I dismissed the thought immediately. A woman can imagine almost anything if she stares at the same tree long enough.

As I watched him, he began to resemble an old traveler carrying a bundle across his back. His branches bent forward as though under some invisible burden. I found myself greeting him from my vehicle as I passed. I knew better, but I often felt he could hear me.

Once, after several weeks away, I returned and looked for him automatically as I approached the intersection. When I found him, I was struck by the uneasy feeling that he had changed during my absence. He had not simply moved along his mysterious path but was turned slightly toward the road. It seemed as though he had turned toward me. The thought lingered, and I wondered where he was going.

As the years passed, his green leaves grew sparse. His yellow blossoms appeared less often. His trunk narrowed, and his branches thinned. Like an old man nearing the end of a long journey, he seemed increasingly bent beneath the weight he carried.

Many times, I expected to find him gone, but each morning he was still there. The cows still visited the field, though there were fewer of them now. Near the roadside stood a weathered sign announcing a housing development that never arrived. The sign rotted where it had been planted, while the old Palo Verde continued on his patient journey.

I began to wonder whether he noticed others like me. Surely, I could not have been the first. Before the traffic lights, before the paved roads, before the subdivisions creeping across the desert, how many people had paused and watched him pass? How many had recognized what they were seeing? How many had he remembered?

Today, he is little more than a skeleton of branches. To most observers, he appears dead. Each time I pass the field and glimpse his brittle silhouette, I think for an instant that he has finally disappeared. Then I see him still standing, still traveling, and still, somehow, facing the road.

I used to think I was the one keeping track of him. Now I am not so sure. Trees live longer than men. Perhaps all these years, while I measured his slow passage through this world, he was measuring mine.

One day, he will not be there, or perhaps I will not. I like to imagine that he is already partway into his true world, and that when he finally takes his last step across, nothing will remain behind. No ancient trunk, no pile of sticks. Only an empty space in the field where an old tree-man once passed through our world on his way to somewhere else.

Palo Verde from across the road — photo by the author