The man picked up and said, “Mrs. Brennan? I have your husbands file open in front of me. I have to tell you, I did not think anyone would ever call about it. My predecessor flagged it thirty years ago. What is happening out there?”
I told him about the young man from the energy company, and the pipeline, and eminent domain, and the fourteen cottonwoods Tom planted, one for every child and grandchild.
“Here is what your Tom did,” the man from the Department of Agriculture said. “In 1970 he enrolled that north row in a federal conservation program. A windbreak, a protected shelterbelt. It is registered with the United States government, and it has been renewed on our end every cycle since. A private pipeline cannot simply condemn a federally protected conservation planting. The document in that tree hollow is his enrollment certificate.”
I had already pulled the bread bag out of the hollow at the base of the first cottonwood, the one Tom planted for our son in 1970, and the federal seal was right there.
The young man said it was just a few trees. The United States government had been protecting them for fifty-three years.
The department sent its own letter to the energy company, on federal letterhead, and the tone of things changed overnight. The pipeline could not run through a protected shelterbelt. The engineers came back out with new maps and routed it along the section line, a quarter mile from the trees.
Not one cottonwood came down.
They still turn gold every fall, all fourteen of them, and people still drive out from Garden City just to see them. I water them myself, same as always. And the first one, our sons tree from 1970, is the tallest of the whole row, with a hollow at the base where a farmer once hid the one piece of paper that saved them all.