Stalking the Fragrant Catalpa

Just north of the village of Penninsula, alongside the winding riverside road that parallels the turgid mud brown Cuyahoga, in front of an old Western Reserve farmhouse, I spy them: four perfect specimens.

Arrayed evenly across a rolling front lawn, thick stout trunks and round leafy canopies, they have the perfect proportion of a tree a child might draw in front of an idealized house. Except instead of the perfect round red apples a child is wont to draw, these graceful rounded crowns are studded with creamy white orbs of vaguely vanilla scented blooms.

Catalpa.

The name rolls off my mind's tongue in a honey-sweet Southern drawl.

One of the sweet pleasures of returning to your homeplace after 22 Junes away is seeing familiar terrain through the lens of a life's experience.

I have a vague memory of identifying, using a dichotomous key, a Catalpa on the grounds of an old, overgrown arboretum during my horticulture school days. But I am fairly certain I have never seen one in bloom, and I had no idea the extent to which they studded the banks and mud flats of the river that wends its way crookedly through my old home grounds. Like Stuckey's Pecan Logs, Goo Goo clusters and Moon Pies, I considered them, for some reason, a purely Southern pleasure.

As with many things, my first acquaintance with the Catalpa was literary, a story I read in fourth grade. A child's beloved horse is grievously injured during a fierce storm. Stranded on the muddy bank of a steeply-gorged creek, immobile with a broken leg, the child watches helplessly as an overhanging creek bank, with a small catalpa sapling rooted in it, collapses in a muddy rumble, entombing his loyal steed.

Each spring he visits the spot, where the tree grows and blooms with abandon.

Even viewed through a windshield on a winding country road, at some distance, I knew with a certainty that is not quite rational, that those four perfect specimens with the giant heart shaped leaves, bigger than my outstretched palm,  with strangely graceful trunks and branches, were the Catalpas of my adolescent memory.

And then, like most things that have been there all along but you never before noticed, I see them. Everywhere:

On the banks of the old beaver marsh across from the Botzum farm.

Beside the Everett Road covered bridge.

Next to the glacier-carved lake where I spent so many carefree summer days.

On the steep ravines of the Cuyahoga's deepest gorge.

In the front lawn of a house not two blocks from my old childhood home.

A Great Blue Heron silhouetted against stark branches in the old beaver marsh.

 I had never before set out to stalk the fragrant Catalpa, but I felt an urgent need that afternoon. Like the trilliums that are our state wildflower, and other spring ephemerals, I knew the show they put on would last but a few days.

I traded the car for my trusty French racing bike, which is stuck in low gear, and descended toward the river, into the Valley that is now a National Park. I knew if I wanted to see Catalpas, the lower and wetter I took myself, the better.

Alongside the old canal towpath which I remember as overgrown and sapling-studded, before it was paved into a recreational trail, and all along the twisted muddy Cuyahoga that seeps listlessly beside it in a sandstone flecked gorge, I saw and smelled the creamy white panicles of ruffled, yellow-throated Catalpa blossoms.

Across from the old Greek Revival Mustill Store, an 1840s stop on the Ohio and Erie Canal, they grow in the crevices of the old stone Lock.

Old stone Lock at the Mustill Store

An artist has set up an easel on the precipice the lock forms, and paints a bend in the river decorated with the Catalpa's lush green leaves and trumpet-like blooms.

Following the towpath's winding, level path, I am rained on by the fluffy seeds of unseen Cottonwood trees. A visceral memory of summertime on my friend's block of 9th Street, where each year at this time a giant cottonwood rained down on us and our banana-seated bikes, while we invented a game called Dodge the Fuzzies. I stop to watch the seed fluff land and float on the inky black surface of a dark, boggy pool, and look up to see that same pool shaded by a graceful Catalpa.

This is also the time the mulberry trees drop their messy purple fruit, and every so often I scatter a gaggle of voracious, perhaps slightly inebriated, cat birds who seem oblivious to my presence, until I am almost on top of them.

I take a back trail to a little pond I know, which is filled every spring when the Cuyahoga predictably overflows its banks. I see a tangle of abandoned bikes heaped in the tall grass, their riders so anxious to get their fishing poles in the water they let their bikes fall where they may. I pause for a moment to take in this most Tom Sawyer-like scene, boys and bikes and fishing poles and and croaking frogs.

Of course, the fishing hole is ringed by Catalpas, which despite visiting this very same spot innumerable times in my youth, I had never noticed. I approach the shoreline to view the blossoms up close, and out from the brush wades a sharp kneed and impossibly slender Great Blue Heron. It is all sharp beak and spindly legs, and unlike the drunken oblivious cat birds, it seems wise and aware of my presence but not particularly concerned.

And then, it holds its great wings aloft, and lifts off silently and gracefully, disappearing like a dream that vanishes at the cusp of dawn.

I was on quest for Catalpas but found so much more. Blooming after the magnolias and apples and dogwoods and other springtime show horses, in a bit of a late spring lull, they light the velvety green foliage of the season's new leaves, before they are scorched and munched on and subjected to the ravages of a hot and steamy summer.

I discovered despite I-pods and Gameboys and air conditioning, boyhood is still about bikes and fishing poles.

I discovered that you think you know a place, but can be humbled by enormous showy trees that are all around you, that you never took the time to notice, perhaps because you were never out three days before June's Full Strawberry Mon to stalk them.

I discovered that words and imagery from a book read decades ago can live in you, and come to you when you spy a perfect specimen of a tree you previously only knew in a story.

Thinking all these things, down in the lowlands of the canal and the river, it occurs to me that I somehow will need to ascend these steep valley walls, and my bike only has a low gear.

I trace the topography in my mind.

If I take a left at the old Mustill Store, I can likely make it about halfway up the Howard Street hill under my own power. I can then turn down Glenwood, and terrace my way midway across the Little Cuyahoga's valley, until I come to the old crumbly steps at the back entrance to Water's Park, from whose peak, across from the hospital of my birth, I watched so many decades ago a wrecking ball pathetically try to tap away at the old stone North Hill viaduct, to make way for the new Y-Bridge.

I portage my bike up those steep crumbly steps. I stand on the peak and look down on the valley from which I have ascended.

To know a place, to feel its topography in your bones, is a good feeling, even if you were unaware until this picture perfect June afternoon in your fortieth year, that the place is lousy with Catalpas, which always bloom at the time the Cottonwoods rain their seed fluff, and the cat birds get drunk on mulberries, and the Full Strawberry Moon is about to ascend this beautiful, fecund valley.