Hold The River Banks Up

BLACK WILLOW
salix nigra
Eleanor Warner
You have seen them: when the river runs low, its banks are strewn with
vibrant magenta spider webs, strands and coils washed in disarray by
the current, trailing out from the banks. Wait, you think in sudden
terror – is the river bank wired? With river-wide electricity? Is that a
hidden power grid? Some apocalyptic new infrastructure I’ve never
yet dared to imagine, undergirding even the tired Mississippi clay?
No! Those are willow roots. Those are the tapestries of filament that
hold the riverbanks up.
One summer, Stix busted his knee the day before we had all planned
to race down through the irrigation flumes, towering wooden
catwalks that pipe privately owned water across miles of rugged
sierra backcountry. Stix was carrying Scoots the dog so carefully out
of Candy Rock Canyon. He slipped in the river and fell, cradling
her so that her weight landed on top of his own all together precisely
funneled into and ricocheted through his left knee, cracked like
gunfire against the bedrock. That night, Jen took us to find a plant
that could help. We searched the overgrown fields, the tool yards,
the shadows of shed roofs and woodpiles. Willow crowded the creek
beds. Jen pointedly encouraged Stix’s girlfriend to put her hands on
each of the steps: to harvest the curls of bark, to strip the leaves with
her own hands, to heat the pot pushed full of stems, to administer the
steaming jug of willow tea and the boiled hot rags full of medicine.
Her fingerprints mattered. Her meticulous motions, invested and
patient, made the willow warm to its task.
With confirmed anti-inflammatory, pain-reducing, fever-lowering,
and antiseptic properties, willow bark has an important place in the
herbal repertoire of many cultures. The bark and leaves contain
salicin, a naturally occurring salicylate, which is modified into
salicylic acid in the body. Chemically related to aspirin, [it has]
similar properties. Salicylate content of willow bark varies widely,
depending on the species and time of year. 1
+++
Lead was outlawed in house paint eight years before I was born.
No longer viable stock, thousands of cans of lead-laced house paint
were sold cheap in the South. I remember standing jaw-dropped
in an agricultural supply tienda in Guadalajara; a gleaming counter
presented a lineup of guileless pesticide bottles recently banned in
the united states, still abundant, still needing to be distributed, sold,
used... somewhere. When I first moved to New Orleans, I spent a week
triple-washing every dimension top to bottom of Kitty and Ross’s
sculptural house, because their one-year-old tested dangerously high
for lead toxicity. Lead in a child hampers the development of impulse
control. Lead in a community maps more perfectly the likelihood of
violent crime than any other studied factor, including poverty.
Willow reputedly was able to extract lead, according to small,
anecdotal studies conducted in uncontrolled urban garden settings.
Perhaps, the thinking went, willow was especially good at binding
metal soil constituents into its tough wooden body so that they
became biologically unavailable. We should propagate black willow
from the river, I urged. Let’s plant it thickly down every street, give
over our soils and their industrial nightmares to its roots. Sunflower
plantings had been pushed for this same reason, but sunflowers lived
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