Siberia has no palm trees. I’ve never been there, but I’ve read about it in magazines, and I’ve watched videos about there, the sorts that take Patagonia clad fly fisher types and helicopters them into this great forsaken land. They fish rivers that no one else fishes, and they watch out for bears. Wolves, too. They only fish there in the summer, because in the winter who could? No one would, that’s because it’s dark there, cold there, windy there. It’s desolate, cruel, viciously fatal. The rivers freeze, the bears hide, the wolves wonder why they can’t do either. The thing about Siberia is that it’s hard to get to, far away in a direction that most people don’t want to head. Siberia, it’s unattainable. North Walworth Road on a winter day is as close to a Siberian experience as most of us will ever achieve. North Walworth Road, there are no bears and no wolves, but things freeze.
The road runs East and it runs West. It doesn’t run in any other direction. There are fields on either side of the road, great long and wide fields of beans and corn, some years corn and beans. When it snows, the plows make their way down that road. If it snows at night, you can bet with absolute conviction that the roads will be plowed. They’ll be plowed by the next afternoon, maybe evening, depending. Once the plows do their shoveling, the roads stay clear for a few minutes. Then the wind blows more and the snow pushes over the road, gradually building at the edges and then adding and adding until the great drift sweeps over the road itself, which leaves motorists wondering why the plows haven’t been there yet, and if they have been there, they wonder when they’ll be there again. This is North Walworth Road, or TINWD.
Along that road, to the North of it, on the end of the road that would be considered the East end by everyone except those who live to the East of it, there is a humble row of trees. They’re not by the road, not at all. They’re out in the field somewhere, running in the same sort of direction as the road itself, but not exactly. They must define one field and border another, and they’ve yet to meet the plow blade of a dozer. Grain prices have led to land lust, which has led to farmers cutting, plowing, or otherwise eliminating any land that isn’t tillable. These small strips of trees, the scrubby ones like Boxelder and Mulberry and Hickory, the sorts that grow twisted and tall along fence lines and have, until now, been left unmolested- these are the trees that are being cut and burned. Reclaiming farm land for farming is the farmers prerogative, but it sure hasn’t been kind to wispy trees that for generations have clung to those field’s margins.
This row of trees, the one to the north of the north road, it’s still there. The trees are tall, slender, not bushy and bold like a Silver Maple, but tall and lean like a young Elm or am oddly trimmed, youthful Willow. They might be something else, but they can’t be one of those young trees because who would have planted a row of trees so far from anything on that road that connects very little to hardly anything? They must be old, these trees, and while I cannot be certain what they are, it’s easy to see that they are, indeed palm trees. The sand that blows from the fields and onto the road, creating dunes and bars that stretch into and over the road, it comes from where those trees are. It comes from way out in that field, and it’s white sand, delicate sand, covering everything now from the road to those trees. They’re tall, those trees, straight and narrow with only a fluff of leaves on the very tops. They sway in the wind when the wind blows, which is always out there.
The sun lit those trees this morning. It lights on them every morning, but this morning the sky was soft and pale and pastel. The sun lit the sky as subtly as any tropical sky I’ve ever seen, lighting on the white, windswept sands that fell two nights ago. That sand was blowing today, blowing to the road and drifting into those dunes that the plow will someday come to push out of my morning way. The trees were there, lit in that wonderful way, swaying back and forth, bending under the billowy pressure of that northwest gale. North Walworth Road might as well be Siberia, but if you squint on a chilly winter morning, it just might be a far away beach.