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Tammie and Me: It's Complicated

By Michael Wolcott

It's an hour before dawn at the bottom of Grand Canyon. The waning half-moon sinks in the west while my campmates sleep. The only sounds are the rush of the Colorado River and the hiss of a backpacking stove. Once the coffee has brewed, I raise a toast to my sworn enemy and newfound friend: Tamarix ramosissima.
Few plants have altered the Four Corners landscape more dramatically than tamarisk, and probably none has had a more positive impact on my personal finances: since last fall, I have made my living by killing the stuff. As a trip leader for tammy-whacking expeditions, I make a living wage and am often praised by park visitors. That's because tamarisk is the plant people love to hate.
For readers not up on their botany, let me start by telling you this: tamarisk is amazing. Introduced to the Southwest from Eurasia less than a century ago, this prolific, lavender-fronded invader tends to dominate riparian plant communities anywhere it can get a start. In our part of the world, that's in practically every drainage below 4,000 feet of elevation.
A fast-growing shrub or tree, tamarisk has a handful of traits that ensure its enormous success in desert waterways. It is more drought- and flood-tolerant than native trees. It slurps moisture like crazy, lowering water tables in ephemeral streams and pools, putting them out of reach of some competitors' root systems. It is wildly fecund-a mature plant can produce millions of seeds each year. The seeds can germinate in less than 24 hours and produce as many as 16,000 seedlings in one square meter of soil. The cut stumps quickly become green hydras, sending up vigorous new shoots eager to flower and produce more millions of seeds. Even cut branches will sprout new roots. And tamarisk actually salinates the soil, poisoning other plants and earning it the moniker "salt cedar."
While I'd like to say that I'm some kind of white knight, driven on principle to defend the virtue of native cottonwoods and sycamores, the truth is a bit more complex.
For starters, I like tamarisk. Though my sympathies are usually with the underdog, I also admire excellence, and it is hard to see tamarisk's colonization of the Southwest as anything but a smashing success story. It is damned good at what it does. It also produces one of hot country's most treasured commodities: shade. And unlike its sometime neighbor, catclaw acacia, tamarisk does not rip at your body with barbed thorns. Besides that, it's pretty.
Still, I line up as a mercenary on the native-plant side of the line, leading volunteer groups on search-and-destroy missions in the park's side canyons. Our intention is to restore these places to some semblance of their previous ecological stability.
It's simple, enjoyable work. The actual killing of tamarisk is pretty straightforward: dig it up if it's small enough, cut the stumps and apply\herbicide if not. The process is satisfying, in the way that weeding your garden is satisfying. You know you're not exactly done, but at the end of the day you see progress.
More importantly, for me, is the high quality of our working conditions. I prefer jobs in beautiful places that do not involve much use of internal combustion engines, desktop computers, or florescent light. Grand Canyon meets and exceeds all these criteria nicely, and offers other perks that I appreciate more with every trip.
First among these is time spent with the volunteers themselves. They are my kind of people, adventurous types who love being outdoors and are willing to take on the challenges of a weeklong backpack trip. They care enough about their public lands to work on them for free.
Our time together is rich with good talk and laughter. We travel for days at a time, in groups of five or six, just the right size for sharing a wilderness camp. (We were built for this practice, by the way: humans evolved wandering the land together in small bands.)
Ostensibly we are roaming Grand Canyon to kill tamarisk. But all of us know better than that. Really we are here to share the sound of the river and the splash of sunlight and the unfolding of yet another day in this miraculous place. And for that we have tamarisk to thank.

Writer MICHAEL WOLCOTT pursues all his love affairs from Flagstaff, Ariz.