Equipped with a bucket and rag, I went down to the creek’s bank Wednesday evening seeking atonement.
Early last summer, I had planted two viburnum bushes about eight feet from the water’s edge.
Two things prompted their placement. That spring, a flood had swept away a fledgling aspen and we’d also lost an ancient cottonwood that reigned supreme over the lower yard.
In my eagerness to make up for those losses, we planted a swamp white oak and the infant viburnum.
The tree was dutifully staked and surrounded by fencing as much to protect it from wildlife as the elements. The bushes — now about a foot tall — were on their own.
As the waters rose Tuesday evening from that afternoon’s pounding rains, I kept watch over the bushes’ fate. Though they struggled valiantly to keep their heads above water, ultimately they were no match.
By nightfall, the creek had breached its banks and was well up into the yard.
On Wednesday morning, I was afraid to look.
But there they were, their branches bowed by the drying mud and other detritus carried by the floodwaters.
I felt so bad.
They hadn’t asked to be planted there. It was my vanity that insisted they’d be fine.
Though I don’t typically think of plants as sentient beings, I sensed their shame of looking so disheveled and drab.
And it was no small feat to bathe them. The caked-on mud required that I gently scrub back and forth, careful not to tear the leaves underneath. After a while I discovered a soft toothbrush worked better than the clumsy rag. Leaf by leaf, I freed the bushes of their ghastly shrouds.
Such work, naturally, takes one’s thoughts astray. I thought back to 2010 when the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded off the Gulf Coast, coating thousands of pelicans, herons and other birds with oil. Of the more than 8,000 birds collected, an estimated 1,246 were ultimately rescued.
Before long I was extrapolating the plight of my plants to that of mankind.
How politicians are showering the rich and powerful with tax cuts at the expense of adequately providing for the poor and elderly. How we’re sacrificing our planet to industries that rely on fossil fuels rather than investing in green energy. How innocent migrants are being rounded up in detention centers to meet an arbitrary goal of 3,000 a day. And how the lives of men, women and children are sacrificed for the vainglory territorial quests of leaders.
