Last month, Boulder resident Catherine Harley was returning from Lafayette to the People's Republic when she came to the intersection of 75th Street and Arapahoe Road, where she was shocked to find that the cluster of century-old cottonwood trees that had graced the space -- trees that occasionally housed owls and eagles -- had been leveled for a state highway-widening project. Overcome with emotion, Harley went back to her house and cried. Then she returned to the site of the massacre and apologized to the felled trees -- but she still didn't feel that enough had been done. So she decided to throw a funeral for the trees at her apartment.
This is where What's So Funny planned to enter the picture. I would brazenly waltz onto the scene, puff out my chest and deliver some devastatingly clever opening line, like: "If a tree falls in Boulder and only a state-ordered demolition crew is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Yes, the sound of a hippie's empty gesture." Boo-yah! Oh, how utterly Boulder, we all would have agreed. What a fucked-up, otherworldly place.
But when I knocked on Harley's door two Saturdays ago, I couldn't find the funeral. Either the ceremony had not yet commenced or I had the wrong address, which was entirely possible, as I had been drinking absinthe for three days straight. So I decided that I should visit the site where the mighty cottonwoods once stood. I headed east on Arapahoe, away from the Boulder that I know and am not particularly fond of, watching as development all but disappeared. Clusters of suburban homes gave way to large storage lots, which dwindled into empty fields, the real-estate signs and bulldozers a testament to their numbered days. Beautiful, large tracts of land sat peacefully on either side of the road, each property anchored by an aging farmhouse, grazing horses and cattle. This was wide-open country. This was unspoiled land. This was gorgeous.
When I reached the appointed address, I immediately spotted an enormous Cat sitting where the stand of trees used to be. I saw the pile of wood chips and the plastic netting of pending construction, and they made me sad. Then I spotted a donkey in a nearby pen, and that made me happy. But then, as I sat at a red light at the intersection, I could see the woodland cemetery through the windshield, and it made me sad all over again.
As I waited, an uppity yuppie woman sneaked past me to make the same right I was signaling, impatiently driving with half her vehicle in the dirt rather than waiting her turn like the rest of us, and I wondered why that bitch couldn't slow down a little, take in the beauty of her surroundings, relax for a few meager seconds? People like her are the reason they had to rip down the harmless trees, to accommodate the swelling of impatient traffic.
And in that moment, I felt glad that Catherine Harley was holding a funeral for the cottonwoods. That her gesture, no matter how hippie in nature, was a way of acknowledging a small pocket of lost beauty, swallowed whole by the inevitabilities of an ever-bloating state. Of course, such emotions confused What's So Funny; it felt strange to depart from the prototypical mockery so often utilized in these pages, especially when the target had been so easy. So I continued east, deeper and deeper into this beautiful section of the state, vowing that next week, I'd remember to kick a hobo in the face or something.
