A Different Kind of Christmas Tree
The black willow fuels the fires of a great river tradition.
Nobody knows exactly how the Festival of the Bonfires started or what exactly fueled the need for such a massive riverside party. The origins of the bonfires have given historians and folklorists plenty of fodder for a good story. University of Louisiana-Lafayette’s Dr. Marcia Gaudet, a folklorist, calls it “a spectacle of questionable tradition with shades of pyromania.” She’s heard accounts of a French priest who started the first fires when he moved to the area after the Civil War; but evidence for that is spotty. Some theories point to European fires burnt for St. John the Baptist, and others reach to ancient pagan solstice rituals for the deep roots of the tradition.
The facts we know are these: every year, in the dark of Christmas Eve, hundreds of flaming towers light up a thirty-mile stretch of Mississippi River levees in Lutcher, Paulina, and other riverside communities. Beneath those flames is a mystery even older than the French priest or even the pagans, older by about ten million years. It’s the quiet story of the black willow, a lowly tree that can fly, a story as fanciful as any swamp-dwelling Santa with a team of magical alligators; and it is, to the best of my knowledge, true.
The story starts with “snow” in summer when, during the height of Salix nigra’s seed production, an inordinate amount of snow-like seeds blast across the landscape and float down the Mississippi River. Paul Orr, the Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper, explained the adaptive assets that help the black willow thrive in the riverine ecosystem: “Their seeds,” he said, “have downy tufts on them that let the willow seeds float for miles on a windy day to ensure that any open space in bottomland habitat will rapidly grow up in willow.” So many seeds are produced that, if you were able to gather a pound of them in your hands, you’d hold the fate of a whopping 2.3 million possible baby black willows; the live oak, by contrast, produces about 352 seeds per pound.
With the right kinds of flat, sandy conditions, the seeds land, wash up, and germinate in vast stands as uniform as a planned pine forest. In their first year of life, the willows can grow up to four feet high. And when the water rises, instead of drowning, the trunks of the young trees sprout extra roots that capture slow-moving sediment and secure the strength of the willows on the new bank. That quick and crafty proliferation along “newly created spaces,” according to Orr, “has allowed the tree not only to survive, but to thrive in the hectic environs of the Lower Mississippi, with all its varying water levels.”
The same is true of the bonfire-burning people of the River Parishes. Tucked between the Mississippi River and a twelve-mile tangle of swampy bayous, the communities are uniquely situated to be able create these massive bonfires year after year, and they have certainly seized the opportunity.
By most accounts, more than one hundred fires burn on the levee every year, the majority of which are the twenty-foot teepee design, each requiring two or three trailer-loads of wood. And then there are the more ornate designs, which require significantly more material: the fighter jet, the fleur-de-lis, the oil rig, the bag of Zapp’s Potato Chips, or the three-story-high “Everwillow Plantation,” complete with a working chimney and a [working] double spiral staircase.
Raymond Poché, who lives in Paulina, knows well the blessings and curiosities of the willow tree. “I’ve been building bonfires my whole life,” he said. Poché used to go right over the river levee, down to the batture, to cut the trees; but the land has changed. “They’ve put those cement mats down, put rocks on the riverbank, so it’s kind of hard for [the trees] to come up; and it’s hard to get to them with all those big rocks,” he said.
But they’re still plentiful in vacant lots, ditches, and abandoned crawfish ponds. This year he’s got his eye on a spot “on the side of Crescent City Ford, over there in Jefferson,” he said. “I’ve been noticing they got a bunch of willow trees on it.”
Poché is pretty fascinated by the willow’s tricks. “When we cut the trees,” he said, “and you leave a piece of branch of the tree just laying on the grass, in two or three weeks, [it starts] to sprout.”
“Willows are famous for their sprouting abilities,” explained Dr. Mac Alford, a taxonomist at the University of Southern Mississippi, who specializes in the willow and its relatives. He said that the tree produces a special hormone that allows them to produce new roots at hyper speed, cloning itself like a worm.
The black willow is even more famous for another of its chemical potions: it’s one of a few natural producers of salicylic acid, which is enjoyed across the animal kingdom for its pain-relieving effects. “Often times, if you find a big grove of willows, you can see where they’ve been gnawed,” said Alford. “Beavers, rats, rabbits, squirrels … lots of animals will chew on willows.” Eventually, he thinks, humans followed suit.
Etched in six thousand-year-old stone tablets is evidence of the Assyrians’ use of the willow to reduce fever and relieve pain. The Egyptians, a thousand years later, recorded willow prescriptions on sheets of papyrus. The Chinese, the Babylonians, and, more locally, the Houma Nation, all have turned to the willow for pain relief and healing.
And, though you’ve probably never tasted the bitterness of its sprig, chances are you’ve known the tree’s healing potential thanks to a discovery by a young German named Felix Hoffman, who synthesized salicylic acid into Aspirin.
There’s still a lot of murky water surrounding the willow family. Dr. Mac Alford has spent most of his career trying to untangle the strange relationships that intertwine the members of this large family across the globe. The great naturalist Anna Botsford Comstock prophesied Alford’s dilemma when she wrote her 1911 Handbook of Nature Study. “The one who tries to determine all the species and hybrids must conclude that of making willows there is no end,” she wrote.
Alford agrees: “I’ll always have a job with this family.”
Alford thinks that certain willow family idiosyncrasies have helped it thrive on the long northward migration from the moist, warm comforts of the tropics to the much colder, and at times drier, environs of North America.
“They just don’t follow the rules that other plants follow,” he said. That’s because there are 450 [known] species of them, and each can be a male, female, or some weird mix of both. On top of that, they hybridize, and at other times, double or triple their chromosomes. “So instead of having just one copy of some gene, then you’ve got four copies, or eight copies; and then you don’t know which one you’re working with,” he said, exasperated.
Back on the river levees of Lutcher, Paulina, and Gramercy, thousands of willows will end their march through the centuries in glorious blazes, shooting embers over the river like the downy seeds that sprouted the trees in the first place, lifting the spirits of thousands all the while.
Details. Details. Details.
Festival of the Bonfires festivalofthebonfires.org