botanizing

Luck and other facades

In the quiet, early mornings, I have been walking in downtown Durham, North Carolina.  Few others have been on the street as I walked.  A man in a suit, headed one morning toward a bank, nodded as he passed me and said hello.  Two police officers, passing in their cruiser, watched me make photographs.  Two men crossed the street behind me and called out to another who drove by in a garbage truck and then called out to the driver of a city vehicle that passed.  Those few encounters occurred on successive mornings.  This downtown has felt a little empty, a little forlorn.

Modern travels drop one quickly in new places—about which one knows little.  A morning walk offers few insights and many questions.  As I walked in Durham a few boldly designed buildings from the first half of the last century evoked earlier prosperity.  Numerous empty buildings and open lots spoke loudly about the loss of prosperity, at least in the downtown. 

What has been most striking about Durham is the proximity of the tobacco warehouses and processing plants to downtown. In a modern city, the industry would be at the margins, not next door to banks and stores.  The structure of Durham has made it feel from another time.

At one time this downtown must once have been an active place.  I have imagined workers passing from neighborhood homes through the downtown on their way to work in the brick establishments of tobacco.  Those workers must surely have gathered at cafes for lunch or sat with lunch buckets on surrounding streets.  Many must have stopped in bars and other joints after work.  The closeness of the tobacco plants to the downtown must have created a tight community.  Did this downtown smell richly of tobacco from the warehouses and processing plants as well as from the cigarettes of workers at midday?

The calm of my early morning walks has made me wonder when the tight community dispersed.  Was it the disappearance of tobacco or some other loss in the community that led prosperity away from this downtown?  Not all prosperity has disappeared—the buildings once occupied by tobacco are now boutiques and restaurants.  Tobacco has become heritage in Durham.  The facades of the old tobacco remain.  They have been bright in the early sun and have made me wonder about the stories behind the facades.

Minnesota

We’ve just boarded a flight from Spokane to Minneapolis.  There is a used car salesman from Kalispell in the row ahead of me.  His voice is a piercing, rough whine.

“I saw a ticket from Kalispell to Minneapolis for $280,” he says.  “When I went back the next day, the price had risen to $1000.”  He shakes his head.  “What’s going on?”

“For that price,” he says, “I had to drive over to Spokane to the airport.  The price from Spokane to Minneapolis was only $290, but I also had to get a motel room and there’s gas.  Ya know?”

We make a sharp turn onto the runway, and the plane accelerates quickly, pushing me back into my seat.  “Here we go,” the salesman says.

“Two days ago there were only middle seats on this flight,” he says above the rush of the jet’s engines.  “This morning I asked for a window seat, and they had one.”  He shakes his head at the mystery of it.  “Some times you want to sleep.  Ya know?”  He puts his head against the fuselage next to his window seat to mimic sleep.

The salesman is perhaps 45 and has dark hair that is parted on the left.  He wears a plaid shirt and blue jeans.  He moves swiftly in sudden jerks.  An elderly couple sits next to the salesman.  The couple listen, responding with nods or a word edged after his rhetorical ‘ya knows,’ with a hint of distraction from their own conversation.  He tells the couple about his house in Kalispell.  “I have a piano,” he says.   “It was my grandmother’s.  She played piano and gave lessons.  You play an instrument?” he asks his seatmates.

As we reach cruising altitude, he tries to recline his seat.  He bangs the seat with his left shoulder, but it won’t move.  He twists his torso perpendicular to the seat back and throws his weight against it . . .once, and then again.  Still, it won’t budge.  His eyes are fierce.  “Ah, it won’t go,” he says after banging hard a final time against the seat.  “You can recline yours’ if you want to,” he says to his seat mates.  They shake their heads no.

A flight attendant comes past with a beverage cart and snacks.  “Peanuts or cookies?” she asks.

The salesman hesitates at her question.  The flight attendant stares at him through pregnant moments—she lifts her eyes with expectation; still, she shows trained patience, widening her eyes and lifting her head as she waits for the salesman’s response.

“Mmmm . . .  cookies,” he says.  And then, “Could I have both?”

The flight attendant looks unsure.  She purses her lips.  One can see that she doesn’t want to say no to a passenger.

Before she can respond, the salesman reads her concern.  He says, “It’s o.k. if you don’t have enough.”

The flight attendant says, “If I have any left over when I’m done, I’ll bring you back some.

The salesman takes cookies from the flight attendant and relaxes for a moment.  He then turns to the woman in the middle seat beside him and says, “I’m going out to Minnesota.  Never been to Minnesota.  There are all these opportunities there.”

A land where the cookies and peanuts are plentiful, I think and smile, recognizing that I, too, have thought of Minnesota as a place of opportunities.  A wonderful place to visit and to live.  I hope the salesman finds what he wants in that land of many lakes, lovely Minnesota.

Woolf: A Gift in the Library

I stopped by the archives of the library to read in preparation for an upcoming trip.  The receptionist took my book request and stepped into the back to have someone retrieve the book.   A moment later I heard the voice of Trevor Bond, the head of the archive, call my name.

“There is something I want to show you,” Trevor said.

I followed him behind the reception area to a corridor where offices are located and then into a large room where books are stored.  This is one of the rooms where the library keeps some of its most valuable and oldest collections. 

Trevor spread his hand toward a wall of books.  “We’ve begun to reorganize the Woolf collection,” he said.

One of the important collections in our university archive is the personal library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, which includes over 9000 volumes.  The archive is in the process of reorganizing the volumes of the Woolf library to maintain them as an integrated group of books to enhance use by scholars.  Trevor knows that I have a fondness for Woolf and the Bloomsbury circle, and he wanted to show me the progress that was being made on the reorganization of the Woolf library.

The Woolf library is being placed on shelves that stand over six feet high and extend for nearly 50 feet along a wall through two rooms.  About 15 linear feet of wall are now covered by the Woolfs’ books.  “I expect they will ultimately extend all the way through the next room and around the corner,” Trevor said about the Woolf library.  I made a quick estimation that it would be about 300 square feet of books.  [And I also made a quick calculation of the square feet of books in my personal library . . . about 165 square feet, although my collection of paperbacks is hardly as interesting as the books in the Woolf library.]

As Trevor and I talked, I noticed a small volume on St. Kilda and thought about Leslie Stephen’s fondness for travel, especially in the mountains.  Many of the books that Virginia and Leonard had in the their personal library came from her father, Leslie Stephen. 

A copy of Frazier’s Golden Bough also caught my attention.  The Golden Bough was influential in the first half of the 20th century, and it played a role in my reading last weekend about the archeologist Arthur Evans and his investment of myth in the reports about excavations at Knossos.  I wondered whether Virginia Woolf had read Frazier’s Golden Bough and what she thought of it.

Trevor took the Golden Bough from the shelf and examined the opening pages to look for a name or notes.  On the end pages of the volume, there were handwritten notes in pencil.  “Leonard Woolf,” Trevor said, “made notes like that.  Organizing themes on the blank end pages.” 

Trevor then waved his hand with excitement and said, “Andrew just found this.”  Andrew is one of the graduate students from the English Department who is working this summer to reorganize the Woolf library.  Trevor reached for a heavy blue volume.  Its title was Men, Women and Things, Memories of the Duke of Portland.   Trevor opened the volume to an inscription written in a flowing hand.  The volume was a gift “presented to Mrs. Virginia Woolf by her devoted & obedient servant.”  It was signed “T. S. Eliot on the occasion of Christmas 1937.”  And at hand, I had a book handled by both T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.  It was a fine gift for an afternoon in June.

[The scan of the T.S. Eliot inscription in Men, Women and Things, Memories of the Duke of Portland was downloaded from the website of the Washington State University Libraries at http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/rssapp/rssviewer.aspx?Story=1127]

West Winds for Breakfast

As if a breeze could sustain . . .  As if a gust were a feast . . . I think of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” in the morning as a pang of hunger strikes.  Shelley’s West Wind was a driver of ghosts and dead leaves, a mover that brought spring from the decay of fall and dark of winter.  It’s simpler for me.  The West Winds is a restaurant in Green River, to which I often slip when the cottonwood leaves begin to rustle in the morning. When Adrian was here for a few days, I promised one morning to take her from our campsite to one of the finest breakfasts available.  As we parked, Adrian said, “It’s a truck stop.”  And so it is. 

Afterward, Adrian announced, “It’s my favorite restaurant in the world.” 

“Yep,” I answered.

It’s a little dark and cool inside, a respite from the desert outside.  There are humor books on the table even if there isn’t always jelly.  The always nice, middle-aged waitresses call you ‘sweetheart.’  When your breakfast is ready, the cook flips on a little light above the counter to let the waitress know.  When Adrian was here with me and asked for directions to the restroom, I pointed to the neon ‘le toilette’ sign. 

This is my last morning of spring fieldwork.  I was camped again last night in Gray’s Canyon on the Green River so I drive into town for breakfast.  There are truck drivers and a few others at the West Winds Restaurant this morning.  The locals are mostly men who sit at the counter and talk about television shows.  A television poised over the counter shows Fox News in silence, which is the only way I would want to watch it.

I have eggs over easy, hash browns, sausage, and wheat toast.  Sustenance for walking hills and then beginning the long drive northward.  But I promise myself to eat only yoghurt for breakfast for the rest of the summer.  I think about my plan for the morning—to head east of town on frontage road along the interstate, look for plants on the hills, and then make my way back to the Book Cliffs.  There have been many mornings that I’ve sat in this restaurant making plans about places to explore for the day.  My booth table offers an expanse to open a map and my mind away from wind and heat and biting insects.  I project across the table and my egg-yellowed plate the best adventures and most beautiful places.

Three hefty men sit in a booth across the aisle from me.  They finish a lively conversation and decide it is time to go.  The last man in the booth says to the waitress, “We’re going to see some sights we’ve never seen before.”

I am struck by the innocence and delight in his words.  Is there anything better than to see something you’ve never seen before?

“Where you headed?” the waitress asks him.

He hesitates—he is noticeably discomfited and at a loss for an answer.  He holds his head down as he thinks.  “Now what’s that park south of here?” he asks her.

“Arches?” the waitress asks.

“Yeah,” the man says.   “That’s the place.”

There are so many places to go from the West Winds Restaurant, but all the best journeys start with a full stomach.

Hills

A thousand meadowlarks sing.  The greasewood rings with their songs.  There is also the faint popping and hum of motors from the natural gas compressor stations that dot the Grand Valley and traffic on the interstate a few miles to the south.  I have stopped near Badger Wash at a hill with an S spine and a small round top from which steep flanks descend. 

It’s early morning, still cool and long shadowed.  I start walking up the steep western flank of the hill to achieve its spine.  The desert trumpets, which have ovoid stems below an umbel of branches that bear flowers, are dense, although they are only a few inches tall.  These plants have delicate, yellow flowers, only 3 mm in diameter, that look like tiny stars.  The thin branches of the umbel that hold the flowers are like lines drawn on a star chart to show the composition of a constellation.  I walk through a star field as dense as the Milky Way, although my footing is solid  rather than cosmic. This hill above Badger Creek has a yellowish brown pinnacle but its sides are gray.  The gray that I ascend is hard; it is crusted and has the appearance of dried mud.

I am looking for blazing stars, which are no more a star than are tiny flowers of desert trumpets, because I want to understand their distribution on the hills of the Grand Valley.  I want to understand where a poorly known species, the Book Cliffs blazing star, is distributed in order to ask next why it is there.

A small camissonia that stands no more than three inches tall catches my attention.  It has a bright yellow flower, in which there is a ball-like stigma that hangs to one side.  Aside from the stigma, the plant’s flower looks like that of an evening primrose.  The plant seems frail, and its single flower on a thread-like stalk turns in the slight breeze.

As I walk up the hill I see Thompson’s blazing star, not the species I hunt but a welcome find none-the-less. Although I knew that Thompson’s blazing star was in this area, this is the farthest east that I have found it.  It is an annual plant that flowers relatively early and all of the individuals that I find on this hill have young fruits.

After walking halfway up the hill, I turn back toward my truck without finding any Book Cliffs blazing stars.  I drive northward up a dirt road toward the Book Cliffs.  A Bobolink flies across the tops of the greasewood.  Its wings, which seem to fold like a Japanese fan as it flies, especially as it slows and lifts its chest slightly in preparing to land in a branch top, flash white and black.

At another set of hills between Badger Wash and West Salt Creek, I find the jaw bones of a rodent and the feather of a hawk but no blazing stars.

I backtrack to another road to take northward through the hills and stop where the road abuts the base of a gray hill.  Another hawk’s feather rests in the branches of a sagebrush, but this hill also has no blazing stars.

*

Hills occur in patches in the Grand Valley.  Some are oblong and nearly flat-topped like loaves of bread placed side-by-side on a shelf.  Others have more prominent peaks and sinuous ridges descend from these.  The descending ridges are sometimes humped with subsidiary peaks.  As I explore the hills, I begin to partition them into color and consistency categories.  There are gray hills that have clayey surfaces that feel like hardened mud.  Other hills are more reddish or yellowish brown, and these hills usually have gravelly surfaces, although sometimes they, too, have gray substrate below the gravel or even coal-like layers below the surface.

Each set of hills lures.  Foremost, I want to see whether they hold a population of Book Cliffs blazing star, but the lure is more general.  I’m curious about the mix of plants on each and whether I might find some flower that I haven’t seen before.  Finding weathered bones or raptor feathers is also satisfying.  The curves of the hills themselves have bodily shapes, like hips and the inflections of torsos, that elicit sweet wishes and memories.  Those senses of pleasure slip when one begins to walk up a steep slope, but pleasures return when one reaches the sinuous ridge.  Walking the S-curve that rises to a hilltop, one feels a part of the hill in each stride, sensing time and resilience, and one’s steps course like the elemental forces of water and wind that have shaped the sinuous slopes.

I drive out a road that has only two tracks to squat hills that have sparse vegetation.  I ease over large stones in four-wheel drive, then stop and walk to a broad peak.  There are no blazing stars or relictual bones or feathers.  There are three species of loco weeds, and they are pleasures enough.

*

What was once Highway 50 now parallels Interstate 70 as frontage road.  The old highway suffers neglect and heavy trucks.  It is rough and rudely patched.  Whole surfaces of the road built-up over decades of use and repair when it was the main highway through this area have eroded, and one drives now on one stratigraphic layer of pavement and then another.   It is a perfect road for botanizing.  The rough surface keeps me alert and forces me to drive slowly.  I watch the flowers at the roadside and wonder at the hills beyond.

*

It is late afternoon and thunderstorms have been passing through.  Wind ruffles the low vegetation.  At the Utah border, I see Book Cliffs blazing star where the old highway was cut through a gravelly hill.  I walk up the hill toward the plant. Stiff gusts of wind rock my balance.  When I bend to examine a plant, the wind pushes my t-shirt from my back to my shoulders.  I make notes and return quickly to the truck.

An obelisk marks the state line.  ‘Utah’ it says on one side and ‘Colo’ on the opposite.  The obelisk has been worn by winds and amplified by graffiti.

*

Another morning.  A gopher snake stretches across the road—it’s golden skin, spotted with dark patches, is bright in the early sun.  On my way toward Bryson Canyon, I stop at a gravelly hill with a surface of yellowish brown stone.  There are scattered junipers on the hilltop.  This is the environment that I have begun to associate with the Book Cliffs blazing star, but I don’t find it on this hill; instead I find white-stemmed blazing star, an annual that is widespread and common in the West.

From the hills to the mouth of Bryson Canyon, the land has little relief.  It is a sagebrush flat, like a lake of low shrubs.  Needle grass shines in the sun at the roadside.  Its fruits have long, needle-like awns at their ends.  As the plants sway, top heavy, in the light breeze, the fruit heads swing back and forth like the hair of a model shaken back and flipped around.  I watch the shining, swaying awns as I drive.  In the movement of the needle grass, time becomes  metronomic, ticking to the back and forth sway of the shiny awns, repetitive rather than progressive.  In this state, I stop thinking about needs and plans, about plants and places; I feel the warm sun and pleasure of moving through the landscape with hills in the distance.

Brown coat

As I drove in the morning toward the Book Cliffs, I passed through the flat bottom of the Grand Valley, which held an expanse of sagebrush and greasewood.  None of the vegetation was more than three feet tall.  It was an open landscape aside from patches of hills and natural gas pipelines.  I drove slowly up the road both to watch for plants and to avoid raising dust.

In the distance ahead of me, I saw something—a person, I thought, lumbering along the side of the road in a brown coat.  His walk was uneven.  Is this a person I want to encounter in this isolated place?—I wondered.  I was miles from any house or town.  What kind of person would be deranged or desperate enough to wear a heavy coat in this heat?  And he was clearly unsteady and slow on his feet.

I drove slowly toward the person and began to realize the person was nearer than I had thought—and this meant smaller than I had thought. Perhaps my person was really a cow--although if a cow, he would have had wide hips.

Finally, I stopped to look through binoculars.  I focused on the very brown butt of a bear.  It was three feet high at the haunches and had a smooth, thick coat.  The bear continued to walk up the road as I watched.  I started the truck and followed, stopping a couple more times to look through my binoculars.

When I was about 30 yards behind it, the bear stepped off the road into the sagebrush.  It took a few more steps, then turned around, and stood up.  I watched through binoculars, seeing the bear’s triangular face and dark eyes.  After its look at me, the bear was quickly down and turned around.  It ran through the sagebrush.  Fast and even. 

The spine of the bear showed like a fin above the plane of shrub tops.  His back moved neither up nor down, nor wobbled from side to side; the bear went straight, a brown line through the green shrubs.  He headed toward a canyon opening in the Book Cliffs, and so did I.

Fruita Washeteria

In my travel on the Colorado Plateau, I have reached my last pair of clean underwear.  After a morning spent exploring hills in the Grand Valley of western Colorado, I drive into Fruita to find a laundry.  At a minimart, I ask the cashier, a thin-faced woman who is perhaps 60 and has the tight skin of someone who has lived long in desert, for directions.

“Fruita has an awful laundromat,” she tells me. “Go down the street between us and City Market, then turn left.   It will be on your right.”  She stares at me, holding her stiff gaze in a challenging manner. Is my need desperate enough to test her challenge of the awful laundry?  Her shoulders shrug almost imperceptibly. 

I drive the few blocks and see the sign “Fruita Washeteria” above a low white building.  As I pull up, I can see through the string of front windows the white washing machines.  They stand with their lids open as if mouthing in unison a welcoming invitation.

My dirty clothes are in a large green stuff sack. I dump all in one washer without sorting the colors.  There are nearly too many clothes for one machine, but I don’t feel like doing two loads.  I shove tightly all of the clothes into one machine, slide two quarters into the money slots, and push the slider forward.  Water begins to fill the machine.  I wait to add detergent until the water nearly covers the clothes, then I open the small box of Tide and pour it on the clothes.  I push the still exposed cloth into the water and close the lid.

A sign posted at the end of the washers catches my attention:  “Please, work clothes in these machines only.”  The message is repeated in Spanish.  I wonder about the sign.  Does it mean that one should not wash dress or formal clothes in these machines?  Or vacation clothes?  Is the warning offered because the machines are rough and only work clothes are tough enough to withstand the rigorous wash?    I have too many questions.

*

Two other people sit in the laundry—a man and a woman, both middle-aged, and both are seated in chairs in front of driers.  The driers are all set in one wall and all are baby blue.  The man sits at one end of the driers and the woman at the other.  Both stare at the tumbling clothes in their respective machines.

I go outside to make a phone call.  When I come back to check on my clothes, the man is seated on a bench near my washer.  He is strongly built and wearing blue jeans, a green shirt and a green stocking cap.  It seems too hot to me to wear a tight stocking cap in the desert, even in the washeteria.  After I check my machine, I go outside to explore the surroundings.   At the coop up the street, grain is shot from a bin into a truck.  There is a derelict meat store next to the laundry.  I notice that the man in the green stocking cap now sits on the tailgate of small red pickup truck that is parked in front of the laundry, but he goes inside when I begin the photograph the front of the building.  When I go back inside the man and woman are again sitting in front of their respective driers.  Each sits in silence, head steady, watching clothes go round and tumble down as if entranced by the motion and the heat from the machines.  The woman’s driers stop a moment before the man’s driers.  She opens the door of a drier and begins to fold her clothes.  He is soon doing the same.  They never look at each other.  She has two neat piles of light colored clothes.  “Dave!” the woman says.  The sudden voice sounds hard in the small building enclosed by metal and glass. 

“Huh?” the man in green answers without looking up at her.  He continues to fold the clothes from his driers.

“I have a pair of your socks,” she says.

He doesn’t answer.  He doesn’t walk over to get his socks.  The woman doesn’t take the socks to him.

He carries his clothes out to the pickup truck, and, then, the woman gathers her two piles of clothes to carry them out to the same truck.  He gets in the driver’s seat and she in the passenger seat.  They stare straight ahead, neither saying anything, and they back from—their intimacy sufficient to have mixed up socks and yet not quite together—the laundry parking lot.

*

Only four of the driers work.  Two others have orange signs taped on their doors that say “Out of order.”  One of the signs hangs at an angle, held only by tape in one corner.  The control knobs to adjust heat have been removed from all of the driers.  I load my clothes in a drier that has a door that will not latch.  I move my clothes to the two driers that had been used by the woman.  As my clothes dry, I get a bag of potato chips from a vending machine and sit near the machine by the front windows.

Another woman, who is probably in her late 50s and wears black slacks and pink blouse, enters the laundry.  She sits against the windows at the opposite end of the room from me, where she reads a fat novel.  In a few minutes she walks toward me.  She has strongly permed strawberry blonde hair. 

“It’s turrble,” the woman says to me, “”I need somethun sweet.”

“Mmm,” I say—my conversational skills feel stilted and slow.  Why couldn’t I have offered something like “On days like this I want salty chips.”

She puts money in the vending machine to get a candy bar and then returns to her seat at the opposite end of the laundry.  Not long later, she takes her clothes from a drier and leaves.

*

A heavy-set man rushes in the laundry.  He wears black exercise pants and a red polo shirt that is stretched over his large, sagging belly.  His clothes are in a heavy duty washer, and he rattles its handle.  “Humph,” he says and throws his arms out.  “Guess you need a screwdriver to open this thing.”  He goes out and comes back quickly with a ballpoint pen in his hand.  He pries open the washer door with the pen.  The man reaches through the small circular door of the machine to bundle is wet clothes in his arms and walks out.

I’m alone in the Fruita Washeteria.

*

The wind grows stronger as my clothes spin in the driers. Dust clouds rise from parking lots across the street.  Clouds of grit blow down the road.  Small trees whip.  The flag at the H Motel across the street stands straight-out and jerks in the wind.

Thunder rolls the metal roof of the laundry.  Rain sprinkles ‘tink’ on the roof.

The loose front door moves open and shut in the wind.  The metal door scrapes the metal bottom of the jamb. SLICE . . slice . . SLICE . . slice . . SLICE . . slice . . SLICE . . slice.

Wind gusts sweep hard over the roof, and I feel a tense, but slight, lifting of the metal roof.  I wonder what one does in a weather emergency in Fruita?  If the laundry collapses will the town’s people come running with screwdrivers and ballpoint pens to pry open the metal and dig out the gravel to save me?

The wind subsides, and a gentle rain begins.  I take my clothes from the driers, fold them, and place them in piles.  I put the clothes back in the green stuff sack and run with them to my truck.  The rain spots the stuff sack, and I get wet, but I survive the Fruita Washeteria.

The Bighorn of Escalante Canyon

In Escalante Canyon of western Colorado, signs for ‘no trespassing,’ ‘no hunting,’ and ‘private property’ are prominent.  I appreciate the clear signage—it’s far too easy in some parts of the West to get onto private property by mistake, and I wouldn’t want to intrude on anyone’s privacy. The canyon bottom over the course of many miles is occupied by Escalante Ranch.  I drive through the canyon to the region managed by Bureau of Land Management.  Here the land rises fairly quickly into a thickly forested pinyon pine and juniper community.  I walk up-slope through the conifer woodland.  There is a low penstemon that has blue, trumpet-like flowers as well as Fendler’s sandwort, which has wiry stems topped by a small cluster of pale yellow flowers.  There are biting gnats that swarm me.  The bites sting, and I slap at the small, black insects.  When I spend more time swatting and stinging than looking at plants, I head back to the truck.

The canyon has a high rounded lip, below which the red Entrada sandstone is shaped in sharp facets where huge fragments have fallen away.  The boulder field of these fragments lies on the gentle slope above the road, where the pinyon pines and junipers grow among the large rocks.  Between the boulder field and the sandstone escarpment are gray toes that spread into the center of the canyon from half-way up the cliff.  I stop on my drive down canyon to explore the toe-like slopes that poke from the red cliffs on the north side of the canyon.  The gray slopes have little vegetation on them, and I assume that their soil has low fertility.  It’s a harsh place for plants, but those that manage to grow on the largely sterile, unvegetated slopes are sometimes very interesting, sometimes diverging from other populations that grow in more fertile, less marginal environments. 

I continue the drive down canyon, going back through the fenced and irrigated pasture lands of the Escalante Ranch.  In one of these dark green pastures, where leaves of the plush grass sway in the breeze, a bighorn sheep grazes.  The image is strange, even out-of-place.  I expect bighorns on bouldery slopes and stone ledges, not in irrigated meadows. I had not expected to find this day something so emblematic of wild accepting easy life in a ranch pasture.

Green River Camp

We camp in sand above the extra fat Green River.  Tamarisk at the river’s margin have water flowing among their stems.  Between us and the river stand not only a band of tamarisk but also a thick shield of skunkbush, a Rhus, which is densely branched and covered in dark green leaves. On the other side of our campsite stand chest-high cottonwood saplings, and, among them, there is a wispy legume that has long runners that sweep in gentle arcs over the sand, but I fail to identify it.

Flycatchers fly over the river and into a tall cottonwood.  I watch them for several minutes until I’m distracted by a Bullock’s Oriole, which is much showier.

The river is the color of chocolate.  It is as smooth and thick as a milkshake.  As the evening goes along, the river loses its brownness to shadow, but bands of yellowy sheen remain.  This light seems to trip over the low parts of the canyon wall and to slide over the surface of the river.

After dinner, we sit facing the river and the wall of the canyon on the river’s far side.  The canyon wall is also shadowed, except for high facets of promontories, which ripen to a sharp orange as sunset approaches.  I watch jets pass overhead and anticipate the dissipation of their contrails among the clouds.

When we settle in the night, I listen to the flow of the river, a massive continuous whir, and also to the gentler, repeating clatter and squish of waves among the stones that line the shore.

*

In the earliest light of morning, we hear geese honk as they fly upriver.  A hummingbird, attracted by Adrian’s orange sleeping bag, buzzes at the back of the truck.

I sit in the shade of the truck to toast bagels in a frying pan while the tea water heats. A Great Blue Heron flies upriver.

Tracks

The old jeep trail appears to be pressed into the white sandstone.  Its hummocks of stone are separated by stretches of sand.  It would have been a rough ride in the jeep, although no jeep has probably traversed the trail in 40 years. The jeep trail into Horseshoe Canyon is now part of Canyonlands National Park, which limits its use to foot travel.  The lower part of the jeep trail has washed-out, and it is blocked by a locked gate.

One steps lightly and quickly over the bulging white stone of the trail.  Going down the trail, my feet angle up and down with steps on the rounded outcrops of stone.  Between the stones, the sand snares each step.  Beyond the locked gate, the trail is entirely sand.  It is a narrow path lined by whisk-like clumps of peppergrass and broom snakeweed.

The canyon bottom is a broad wash in which a single channel snakes around point bars.  The round-shouldered bars that rise a few feet above the wash bottom are held by rice grass, willow, and cottonwood.  They are brightened by luminescent yellow cryptanthas, purple sage, and firecracker penstemons.

Between the clumps of rice grass, we see the tracks of lizards and other animals that scuttled close to the grain.  Lizard tracks are like the wash bed. They are channeled by dragged tail and are marked along the sides by the bars of feet.  Like the water channel, the lizard tracks are seldom straight long.  Wash and lizard seem each to have a natural distance of straight travel, before turning a few degrees of arc against some natural obstruction or the influence of an unseen force, then they move straight again before finding a new curve.

Some animal, possibly a lizard, has made a track that especially catches our attention.  It looks like the impression of a tank’s single-track but is only two centimeters or so wide.  Its margins have series of rounded depressions and between them run depressed bars; there may be the light touch of a tail amid the track.

There are old tracks.  On the jeep trail and a stone outcrop on a bar in the canyon bottom we find the impressions of dinosaur feet.  People have ringed each of these with small stones to catch our attention and keep us from stepping on them.

Our steps sink in the sand.  Walking tasks one’s sense of effort, which I feel in the muscles of my legs and even in a tug at my shoulders.  Our steps reach for harder surfaces—for the stability of vegetation, for cobbled stretches, and for hard pan in the wash bottom—but we walk mostly in sand.

People have been walking through this canyon for thousands of years.  Rock art has been painted and pecked into the canyon walls.  Archaic people left images of broad shouldered anthropomorphic figures.  Some figures are wide-eyed.  Some figures appear adorned in elaborate tunics.  Other figures are more like shadows.

Shadows gather my attention.  Rice grass fruits dapple the sand with shadows that look like raindrops.  The shadows of cottonwoods draw me.  As we walk down canyon on our return, I set my path to cross cottonwood shadows and the shade of canyon wall.  My course would surely appear erratic if it persisted for thousands of years.  My steps go straight then angle to another line in a way that would surely draw the wonder of viewers to question why such a trajectory would be taken.

The rice grass leaves weep.  They stand from the straw-like stalks to curve out and over, extending tips to the sand, where the leaves trace arcs in the bars.  I like to think about the rice grass etchings lasting thousands of years in the sand edges of point bars; but they do not last.  The fine curves swept in the sand by rice grass leaves are ephemeral--soon wiped away by wind.  The repetition is soothing.  A delicate mark is made.  Wind wipes it away.  Our steps are the same. Our steps repeat, one after another, tracing an eccentric path from shade to shade.  The wind, unconcerned about shade or path, presence or absence, will soon wipe away our tracks.

[Photograph by Adrian Aumen]