Requiem for a boulevard along Derdall

Editor’s note: This story first appeared on the Brookings Beacon Substack on Oct. 1.

ALONG DERDALL DRIVE — Look, I know even as I write this. The moment you start getting nostalgic about trees, you’re an old man.
Still, here we are.

The boulevard along the south side of Derdall Drive, where the city recently removed scores of ash trees.
Specifically, we’re headed south from Hillcrest on 16th Ave., about to hit the dead end at the railroad tracks and turn left on to Derdall Drive. I am driving home from my buddy Tim’s place, about to hang a right on 17th. That’s exactly when I saw it.

There’s a stop sign there, headed east on Derdall and looking up the hill to 22nd Ave. Not that I needed it.
I stopped.

The entire canopy of trees that should have been swaddling the road was long gone. It felt like walking in on your grandmother in just her slip.
All down the road, little graves lined the space between the sidewalk and street, where the trees once stood.

It’s important to note here that I grew up on this street. Grew up on this street in the 1980s and 90s, so any time I went anywhere, it was likely on foot or bike or skateboard or scooter. I know who used to live in every one of these houses, and every spot where one of roots of one of those ash trees pushed a slab of sidewalk up just enough that I could use it as a jump on my way to the pool or ballfield.

At least I used to.

Now, in my 4Runner, I creep down Derdall, all the way to 22nd, just above an idle, casting about for some context for the feeling of driving through the past and seeing only an uncertain future.

I talked to some nice folks at the Parks department and they told me the missing were all ash trees that had been infected by the Emerald ash borer.

They didn’t have an official number that were cut out, just yet, because they still have more to remove, but said “it was a lot.”

An understatement, that.

I wonder if those little green bugs know they were chewing up more than trees. They are chewing up people’s memories.

We spent hours climbing those trees, especially the ones close enough to a house that we could get up on someone’s roof and look out over the whole neighborhood, drunk on a child’s joy of changing our perspective so massively, looking down on a whole different neighborhood.

That canopy of trees kept us in the shade nearly all the way to the pool, back in the day, pedaling our Schwinns and Huffys with our towels around our shoulders and our B passes sewn on to our swim trucks, down Derdall and then up the hill on 17th, another total canopy, until we made the turn at Hillcrest and were thrust out into the South Dakota sunshine.

We’d kick along their leaves each fall as we walked our way to school, feeling the early morning chill in our bones as the days got shorter and the morning light seemed to weaken with each passing day.

Those elms were the shade for our pop-up camper that got parked in the driveway so my older sister could have sleepovers in the driveway in the summer, the catchy scratch of Cyndi Lauper or the Brit synth-pop of Tears for Fears drifting through one open window to another.

Those trees, fallen now, gave up the last half of their leaves all in one night on Halloween 1991, when a blizzard swept across the Upper Midwest — including our little neighborhood along Derdall — dumping nearly a foot of snow scattered by 60 mile-per-hour winds, heading all the way to the North Atlantic where it would create the Perfect Storm.

And now here I sit in my truck, knowing this neighborhood will never look right to me, at all.
I did this once before. The other house where I grew up in Brookings is on the corner of Fourth Street and 11th Ave. The derecho a few years back took way too many of the trees there. The city took down the water tower where we used to play whiffle ball. I drive past every so often, now, and the whole neighborhood just doesn’t sit right.

But those trees did offer one last lesson in perspective. Sitting there, I looked around the neighborhood as it is now and saw it again with middle-aged, Midwestern eyes. With a good 15 years spent in different neighborhoods, all over the country.

Hard against the railroad tracks and when it was developed, nearly the outskirts of town, our little collection of mostly ranch houses — on Derdall and Elmwood and Olwein, along 18th and Lincoln Lane and Morningside Drive — didn’t just become a great place to grow up. People worked hard at it.

We had block parties and pool cookouts at the Zinks and camper sleepovers in the driveway and parents who looked out for other people’s kids. Our moms bought and sewed our Bs to our swimming suits and dads took the neighborhood kids fishing and we carpooled to the ice rink nobody yelled at little boys for climbing trees. Maybe for getting on the roof.

A group of dads even tried to take us trick or treating down Derdall that fateful night in 1991. Snowsuits under our costumes, we idled down the street and then trudged through the swirling snow to knock on the doors of confused neighbors. I don’t think we made it three blocks, but I promise, the effort was there.

The old saying goes that a society grows great when old men plant trees under whose shade they will never sit. And there are small trees, barely more than sticks, replanted in some spots along the road, now.

But while we wait for those to grow, we’re still here. And I am going to do my best to be grateful for what we had, and try to tend to the best of it as best I can. Maybe, with enough care, it’ll outgrow our little neighborhood, one day.