Requiem to a Shoe Tree

Last Monday's article about modern-day Kilroy's mentioned the Shoe Tree near Middlegate, NV. This is a more detailed story about its destruction and resurrection.

Requiem to a Shoe Tree

The first sight of the Shoe Tree near Middlegate Station, NV, delighted me as a clever visual pun.  At first, I thought it was a quirky, “very-Nevada,” expression of Great Basin humor. When the Shoe Tree was destroyed by vandals in January 2011, the responding outcry told me the Shoe Tree was far more than desert road art. It was a monument made by hundreds of people traveling across a long stretch of highway between sparsely inhabited towns.

In recent years, some of the former eateries have either closed or been taken over by surly purveyors of racial and political hostility. Some wayside stops are communities in and of themselves, yet extend a welcome to visitors. Named the "Loneliest Highway in the World," Highway 50 lives up to tag. There is a lot of "out there" out there.

Another tree that I know of, north of Reno on Highway 395, had hundreds of shoes hanging from its branches. A few years ago, some curmudgeon demanded that the tree be cleaned of the shoes. To answer this person’s wish, the shoes were removed, at sizeable taxpayer expense, to be sure.

The official Shoe Tree, a 70-foot cottonwood near Middlegate, suffered a more violent fate when someone sawed the tree off a few inches from the ground, toppling it into the ravine.

Many wondered, as I did, why anyone would object to these shoetrees. Apparently many consider the flinging of shoes into trees as an act of littering and the perpetrators should be fined. There's also the quiet voice suggesting maybe the trees are damaged or threatened by the weight of all those shoes. That's a valid concern, but litter?

Those shocked by this vandalism expressed their sadness with a memorial held in mid-February 2011 around the fallen cottonwood. Tokens of precious memories once dangled from those branches. It was not only a depository of worn out footwear; it was a story tree, and people shared their stories at this gathering.

The first pair of shoes belonged to a newlywed couple who camped beneath the tree after losing their money gambling. An argument occurred and the wife threatened to walk away from her husband. In response, he took her shoes and threw them into the tree. What else could she do but stay and work it out. They returned a year later with their baby and threw a pair of booties into the tree.

Since then, travelers have stopped to rest and marked their trip across Nevada by adding their own tribute. Instead of carving a heart and initials into the flesh of the tree, they sacrificed shoes. Expensive ones.

Many of those people came from all around the West to remember those moments under that tree, and to retrieve those shoes, only to pitch them into a neighboring cottonwood. In collective rebellion, these people defied the vandals' destruction with a kind of resurrection.

Such spontaneous desert art comes in many forms, from Basque arborglyphs and indigenous petroglyphs to patterns of stones assembled on playas or stacked to mark trails. These primitive “yawps in the wilderness” speak to people’s need to substantiate their existence and connect with others engaging in a common adventure. We all do the same thing on social media by "liking," commenting, and posting everything from life events to what we ate for lunch.

Certain rites of passage, while common throughout humanity, hold mythical importance in our lives. Each person considers the finding of one’s mate or reaching a hard-won goal to be unique and heroic. These events are what take us from place to place as we wind through our time on earth. We want to yell it all to the world: "We exist! We are important! Hear us!"

The fact that cottonwoods were chosen as shoe trees also displays the special place they hold in the Great Basin. Thick forests of pinions and cedars have fed Paiutes, Shoshones, and Washoes for thousands of years. The aspens and firs in the mountains shelter the deer and antelope. The "Big Empty" is broken by towering cottonwoods that define the space settled by newcomers from around the world. For them, thriving cottonwoods meant life.

My father-in-law told us that if you're in the desert and you see cottonwoods, there's water there. Sometimes you have to dig down a few inches, but water needs to be there year-round for cottonwoods to survive. There is a lot of water in the Great Basin, although much of it is like the Amargosa River, considered the longest underground river in the world.

Over 150 years ago, ranchers planted cottonwoods around their houses to protect them from the intense summer heat.  From a distance, these trees appear as solid as fortress walls. Their gossamer seeds take root near streams and other drainages, shading the fragile ecosystems there. Windrows of cottonwoods prevent erosion of the land.

Many of these trees still exist, their gigantic, heavy limbs lining the highways throughout the Basin. We lovingly refer to these as Heritage Trees. It is a sad thing to see how misshapen they become when branches are removed or the whole tree needs to be hewn down because of wildfire damage or rot.

Sometimes you'll see an enigmatic grove of cottonwoods marking where a family’s house once stood. Only the trees that survive a hundred years later bear witness to a family’s struggle and final demise. Perhaps a foundation remains. Or not. The wind through the clattering leaves whispers a tragic story that disappears with the bearers of that history.

A memorial to the Middlegate Shoe Tree not only honors a living thing destroyed by malice, it unites a group of people together in a common effort to celebrate their joys and triumphs and maybe even a few failures.

As they traveled the Loneliest Road in America, they took a moment to leave a reminder, for themselves and others, that they passed this way. They exist. Their loneliness in traveling this empty byway is shared by thousands of others.