The above image pictures the scarred, flood-beaten trunk of a cottonwood, the frail remainder of a once stalwart monolith which may have lived to see the closing days of the nineteenth century. Nourished by the waters of the Big Thompson, which by the time it trickles into town could hardly be catalogued as more than a creek, this tree marks not only the manifold costs of the recent deluge, but emblematizes the somewhat fraught relationship between our city and the natural world that harbors us here at the base of the Rockies. In several places, though it is perhaps difficult to see, huge limbs have been severed from the core of the trunk, a human attempt to divert the organism’s waning energy from dead weight and channel it into the potential for new growth. A thin and scattered collection of new leaves inhabit the branches in a way that suggests mange more than the critical and final decline of which it is almost certainly a symptom. Though the monochromatic quality of the image obscures this fact, perhaps forty percent of this new outgrowth of leaves has already failed to take hold; brown and desiccated, they murmur dryly near the water in heat of August, more than likely sounding a somber death rattle. Then again, one imagines that in a century of life, this cottonwood tree has come out the other side of far worse and more violent encounters with the vagaries of the Thompson.

            Cut in a wandering line through the middle of Centennial Park lies a concrete pathway, freshly laid in most areas, but broken here and there into tracts of blackish gravel where the floods washed its predecessor eastward three years ago. An acrid smell washes across the surface of a nearby pond from the city’s recycling center and follows the walkway toward the horizon. Strewn now with tiny carcasses attended by wasps, swelling with the bloat of decomposition beneath the torrid Colorado sun, the path displays the casualties of an ongoing war between a veritable legion of grasshoppers and the innumerable bicycle tires and careless heels that daily traverse the park with a violence born of indifference to the little, late-summer kingdom of insects. Occasionally in the course of my meanderings, I discover the sad, cartoonishly flattened bodies of young toads, crushed under the imperceptive tread of the same men and women who continue to decimate the ranks of the park’s leaping arthropods. Pressed like flowers into the concrete, their sprawled and delicate skeletons recall dinosaur fossils. Centennial is further beset by human violence at its fringes in the form of noise. The distant sounds of traffic and human voices invade the park with a frequency that precludes the quietude of a natural soundscape at any hour of the day, a circumstance by which the city and the park seem strangely at war with one another. Left to tangle and grow according to its own inscrutable inclinations, the plant life of Centennial Park, nevertheless, sporadically provides the illusion of total escape from the surrounding urban environment. In some places, the overgrowth of the cottonwoods weaves itself into a kind of a canopy that harbors the walkway—through which only shards of sunlight are suffered to pass—a property which imbues the verdant tunnel of vegetation with a glittering, ethereal atmospheric quality in the mid-afternoon, a kaleidoscope of light and shade. In the middle of such a space, strangely, I feel at once alien and supremely human, the tourist in a lost, forgotten world perhaps, the shadow of some ancient, primordial Earth. The obstreperous growl of passing engines, however, ensures that this fantasy cannot endure, and I am inevitably returned to the reality of clicking bicycle wheels and middle-aged joggers and the dead grasshoppers left in their wake. If largely by way of contrast, these things, too, have their value.

            Greeley, the town I have lately escaped, housed a city park by the same name near an apartment in which I lived some years ago, a place where I often witnessed a curious harmony between the town and its wildlife and open spaces, where I once wandered upon a sleeping fox, its small form taking reprieve from an afternoon rainstorm in the shelter of the park’s tennis-court bleachers, draped carelessly across the clay surface in a furry, bedraggled lump. Unlike the meticulously manicured parks of Greeley—spaces which despite their loveliness, only manage a kind of parody of nature and thus, I think, partially inhabit a dimension of the surreal or even the grotesque—Loveland’s Centennial Park seems a remnant of the natural world, a site whose continued presence within our city is permitted, rather than designed. I prefer this wilder incarnation of Centennial, a place in which our community has issued but one meek challenge to nature’s sovereignty in the form of that snaking concrete pathway. Even so, the chunks of broken cement left in heaps along considerable lengths of the path speak to the sometimes unfettered power of the Thompson’s capricious flow and to the financial or bureaucratic impotence of our city to repair its destruction. Perhaps our intensely artificial and modified world of modernity is in need of sites like these which remind us of the inexorable will of the natural world and of our place in a system which so easily and heedlessly overrides our desires and improvements.

            In the end and despite its relatively small population on a given afternoon, Centennial Park is one of Loveland’s most precious and scenic resources, at least among those I have so far discovered. The ethos which preserves it, one for which I feel a certain profound affinity, has worked in recent years to interweave our city’s labyrinth of asphalt and drywall with the open spaces interspersed throughout and around it. As evidenced by the dying cottonwood at the top of this post, our efforts to stem or to alter the movements of the vast biological and geological system which contains us as much as the tree are often rendered touchingly powerless, possessed though they sometimes are of admirable and uniquely human virtues. Our city in this crucial respect admits its own impuissance, though, should we blunder and forget, the Thompson’s flood waters will doubtlessly return to serve as a reminder as they have every few decades for all of living memory.