Cool breeze under cottonwood trees

On the Trail


 

As summer finally gets real about its true intent—withering heat after a dank gray spring— we are suddenly tasked with locating an immediate place to cool down to avoid meltdown.

The recent arrival of climbing temps has the perspiring masses beseeching the weather gods for relief. I’m among the beseechers, only weeks after grousing mightily about the protracted June gloom weather.

Now I’m shedding layers faster than my overheated dog sheds fur and searching for a break from the parched pavement and steamy stagnant air molecules, the hellish car interior and the table fan on the fritz.

Well, I’m here to inform fellow heat-harried outdoor lovers that there is a remarkable wind tunnel effect churning most days through Triunfo Community Park.

It’s as if Nature has tossed a life ring to rescue us from the deepening pool of sweat threatening to consume us.

Located at the junction of Aranmoor Avenue and Triunfo Canyon Road, the park offers oak-shaded parking stalls.

Send emails to Gloria Glasser at whirlawaygig@gmail.com.

Send emails to Gloria Glasser at whirlawaygig@gmail.com.

Some workers on their lunch breaks roll down all their car windows and revel rather than roast in their vehicles as cool air barrels in, courtesy of the Polar Express making a detour to the Westlake portion of Thousand Oaks.

Drivers sigh as they dine, watching the wind ruffle burger wrappers on their dashboards. Some recline in their seats for a breezy siesta.

Me, I’m drawn to the park’s big bright green lawn and the rustling cottonwoods, so I plop down for a picnic beneath a cottonwood, leaning against the trunk’s rough, deeply grooved surface.

Cottonwood leaves are glossy and shaped like the ace of spades. While the park is also planted with oaks, pines, sycamores and California pepper trees, the cottonwoods are royalty among trees with fluttery foliage.

With the steady forcefulness of the wind, you’d expect the Pacific Ocean to be just over the park’s hilly backdrop, but it’s merely Lake Sherwood.

Can a modest-size man-made lake generate such blustery action? Not likely.

Whatever the precise source, it is most welcome.

Go, take a moment to chill (literally) under a Triunfo cottonwood. The wind is so live- ly. It somersaults across your bare skin then tunnels through sleeves and buttonholes and up pant cuffs or into shoelace eyelets to tickle and soothe your heat-pinched flesh.

A thousand pleated fans propelled by invisible wind pixies heighten the delightful sensation of this skin-scampering cool caress.

Damp strands of hair plastered to your forehead go airborne, waving to and fro as rhythmically as a line of hula dancers.

The sun glistens overhead on all these jostling leaves but cannot breach the massed foliage’s sheltering dappled shade.

Occasionally a hint of heat does infiltrate the cool oasis.

The sensation is that of an oven door briefly opened and shut. But the wind promptly dispels the invader.

After an hour or so you’ll have gooseflesh and be thinking of donning a sweater as you enjoy your wind-in-the-cottonwoods idyll.