botanizing

Latent Smoke

I have fixed a cup of Lapsang Souchong.  The tea has been withered over a wood fire to infiltrate the drying, collapsing cells of the leaves with smoke.  Infusion with boiling water brings back the smoke as the tea steeps.  Pleasantly, I think of campfires when I have cup of Lapsang Souchong. 

A derelict homestead along the Colorado River has been burned. I’m not sure when, although the house stood, seemingly empty for years, when I was last here in the spring.  It could not have been long ago.  The orange mesh fence that protects the burned house droops but has not lain long enough on the soil to be covered.  As I approached, the smell of smoke was in the air, the ruin steeped in the heat of the afternoon.  I thought of Lapsang Souchong but wondered also whether stories are like smoke.  Do the stories of a homestead infiltrate wood and stone, frame and foundation, and can they rise on cottonwood breezes?  Stories are miscible in imagination, and, I suppose, imagination, like boiling water on Lapsang Souchong, can infuse a burned ruin to bring stories from the smell of latent smoke. 

His wife always thought the place was more root cellar than house. Keeps it cooler, he said. When we get rich . . . he would say and occasionally she might believe, wanted to believe.  But this place was not like being rich; it was not, she thought, even like before being rich.   The round stones of the foundation had been quickly mortared.  When we get rich I’ll buy you a big house in California, he said. We won’t be here long.  She planted only two apple trees between the house and the outhouse.  We won’t be here too long.

Excited clicking was an uncommon reward.  His Geiger counter more often clicked slowly, oddly.  He made enough from ore to buy a few cows and borrowed to put in irrigation from the river for hay. She salvaged worn tires from his tractor, filled them with dirt hauled from the riverbank, and planted chrysanthemums.  She liked the florid abundance of chrysanthemums, at least she had liked them, when they had grown well in her mother’s garden, where there was black soil, rain, neighbors.   She canned from her garden in spring and summer.  She planted two more apple trees.  She had been young, but now wanted indoor plumbing; he eventually enlarged the kitchen, walling off a corner plumbed for ceramic toilet, bathtub, and sink.  When the county was electrified, they bought a refrigerator.  Twenty years later, they bought a new refrigerator, putting the first one in the back. It was the only new thing.  The truck was old.  Tractor old.  Irrigation pump old. The Geiger counter gathered dust as quickly as the cows; it quit while the cows kept on.

She was pleased with her last new refrigerator. Its coolness was so unlike this place.  It was their abundance. There wasn’t much else, she thought, besides the flowers, the hay when it was green, the young calves, and the cows when they were loaded for the stockyard.  It made her smile, their richness of refrigerators.

A Two Coyote Day

The coyotes were out in prairie dog towns.  A bewildered coyote, shoulders slumped, stooped with nose down. One can imagine his joy at the scent of several hundred prairie dogs at breakfast time, and his disappointment as one after another they disappeared at his approach. I had walked through a prairie dog town last Sunday.  “Tick, tick, tick, tick,” a prairie dog called as I walked across the hole-ridden, shadscale covered landscape.  When I was within 20 feet of the ticking it stopped, but off to the side, some 40 feet away, another animal started ticking.  I continued forward, not heeding the ticking to the side, and a prairie dog that I could see standing at his hole about 50 feet ahead began to tick.  I could virtually hear the distraction and warning of the ticking as the second coyote galloped this morning through the dried grasses.  Though the coyote moved mostly straight across the landscape, his run had darts, puckers of hesitancy where a step was taken aside before continuing forward, and you could sense his desire to grab at each tick, first on one side and then the other, but his focus remained ahead, possibly on some more wayward animals, and he galloped on.

A Golden Eagle sat atop an electrical pole in the prairie dog town when I went by in the morning, and it was on the same pole when I returned in the evening.  It sat still, moving only its head, side to side, constantly scanning the landscape.

And then there was the herd of bighorn sheep that grazed placidly on the flats between the edge of the highway and rough, rocky slope where, it seemed in my mind, they should have been.  The bighorns looked ragtag in coats too thin for the still cool season, although they were wearing very nice radio collars.

Just after writing yesterday that I didn’t expect to see any open flowers for at least a couple of weeks, I saw a first open flower of the season.  Where I walked over a south-facing slickrock slope, a single heronsbill (Erodium cicutarium) in a sand-filled crack in the rock had opened a flower.  I can’t count this as the beginning of flowering because the heronsbill is not native to the New World.  It was introduced from the Mediterranean region and proved a hardy invasive in the American West, where it is widely and abundantly available.  It was, however, delightful to see fresh pinkish-purple petals. 

Arches's Rumps

When I went out on Sunday morning, the Book Cliffs were invisible and the top of the Uncompahgre Plateau was also gone to clouds; wisps dredged the canyons.  What I could see of the slopes had fresh snow.  The clouds began to lift in the late morning, while I was on the Yellowcat, exposing blocky and columnar silhouettes on the horizon to the southeast. That pulling-back of clouds made a ruffled margin of bright light high above the shadowless landscape. I pulled-over to walk to the edge of a low rise that might, I thought, offer a reasonable photograph.  The sky spit sleet as I crossed through the dry, ochre cheatgrass, small browned ephedras, and blackbrush.  I made the photograph at the crest of the low rise, but grew curious about the break I could see of a canyon. I kept walking.  Down a shallow lip.  Across a wash.  Out of the wash to climb to a sand reach.  The sand stabilized as low dunes, heaps like broad, fresh graves, where oaks sprawled.  The dunes gave way to slickrock patches partitioned by sand rivers. 

I saw then into the canyon, where the lit slickrock was fleshy, and the stone projecting lay like nude torsos. Like the curve of a woman’s lower back rising to buttock, falling to thigh. I walked to where the land began to break away to channels and drops, but the canyon remained still beyond easy reach.

I must have walked a mile from the truck. My trajectory back was askance, following the right angles of a triangle whose hypotenuse I had used on the way out. Halfway back I found the road and realized it probably went the rim of the canyon. 

Back at the truck, I drove down the road; indeed, it ended at the canyon’s rim.  I walked down the slope to a backcountry gate to Arches National Park.  There was a broad wash in the bottom of the canyon and terraces between slickrock extremities that reached down from the rimrock.  At the back of the terraces, there were broad, deep alcoves, fine places for hanging gardens of glacial relicts, cool temperature plants stranded in the desert when the climate warmed at the end of the Pleistocene.  They will not yet be in flower; nothing yet has flowers, although as I had walked across the landscape earlier I found a mustard with flower buds exposed; the first flower buds of the season, and flowering will surely begin in a couple of weeks, unless the temperature drops. 

There was still chill in the wind, and I had my lunch at the end of the road, eating inside the cab.  I fixed tea for the drive back and thought about getting into the canyon for a closer look at the hanging gardens and those fleshy slickrock rumps.

The End

Across the flat of the Yellowcat and beyond the rise of badland is an east-west running ridge.   The ridge has angular capstones of brown and beige, which are skirted by talus.  The talus skirt drapes to and around knobby, knee-like outcrops that are flesh-toned and banded with pinks.  Morrison Formation, I guess.  Beyond the ridge, where it falls to the south, are gullied hills of the place called the Poison Strip. If I were Dante, Virgil would take me by the hand, lead me around the gullies, to explain the various torments of death, not differentiated by rings in descent, but staked in the creased hills, as the consequences of claims.  The Poison Strip has been staked, markers surely as rich in desire as any circle of hell.  There are fallen wooden stakes, grayed to the clay color of Mancos Shale.  Bright new lathe stakes bear synthetic red flags.  Rusted metal pipes with caps bear claim numbers. 

There was a time when vanadium, a metal used as an alloy to strengthen steel, brought a few miners to the Yellowcat.  Uranium ore was a common waste in the vanadium mine tailings.  Things changed.  In the early 1940s, interest in uranium began to exceed the interest in vanadium.  The government desperately wanted uranium; it subsidized the search and the industry.  The Yellowcat and other stretches around Moab experienced a rush.  There must have been a certain kind of high life on the Poison Strip when the miners congregated, and I can’t imagine them remaining solitary for the claims butt against one another.  The high life must also have been edged by uncertainty, not just the unknown quantity of a claim’s richness, but also a ruffling edge of rumor about the effects of radioactivity.  If only knowing Virgil were here to tell the stories.

A year ago, in another part of Utah, I was camped among pinyon and juniper and had my feet propped on a plant press while I sat back to enjoy the evening tea.  An old guy came walking up to ask about the plant press.  He started telling me stories.  His name was Milt, and he had mined uranium for a while on the Yellowcat, before getting out to operate heavy equipment.  “Most fellows I knew mining uranium are dead,” Milt said.  “Cancer got ‘em.”

Nicht Gletscher Milch

What might have been pieces of a puzzle pulled apart caught my attention in the wash stream of Devil’s Canyon, but no sooner had I knelt to touch the fragmented sandstone than my gaze was diverted by gray vortices, winding at the water’s edge.  I followed the turbulent flow back to my foot, where its pressure had released slatey grit from under stones into the channel.  It looked, I thought, like Gletscher Milch, and my memory turned back to years when I watched steep mountain creeks, bankfull or more, often swallowing clumps of marsh marigolds, in the season of snowmelt run turbulent gray from the grinding effects of ice high in the mountains.  Aber hier, es ist nicht Gletscher Milch.  There are no glaciers at the headwaters of this sandstone canyon, although there remain small patches of snow.

Trysts at an Old Nest

The tree beyond the window where I write in my apartment has a remnant of an old nest, a shallow bowl of thatch, from which trace loops of monofilament line.  A pair of House Finches flitted about the nest yesterday morning.  The male landed in the nest and the female in the next crook up.  He tugged and pushed the thatch about.  He gathered new material to tuck here and there.  The female watched.  My hopes rose for a day of watching nest building, but the finches flew and didn’t return.

This morning as I was having tea a pair of Mourning Doves landed in the nest.  Chest to chest, tails at opposite poles, they nuzzled, each bobbing head toward the other’s face, and face-to-face they both rotated beaks round and round and round.

Roan Cliffs in Pink

‘to unwrap the human package’

In the last hour of light I began to convert the marginalia of my reading of Lesley Chamberlain’s Nietzsche in Turin into electronic notes.   Her sentences could be zealous, but I grew enamoured of their feeling for Nietzsche as I read the book, and today, typing quotes and notes, I realized that she had created almost aphorisms on Nietzsche.  How appropriate that Nietzsche, with his tendency to render philosophy and world in aphorism, be played like a short melody, sweetened and simplified.

Out of context, as if held at arm’s length, Chamberlain’s almost aphorisms on Nietzsche have the art of epigraphs; that’s how I offer them here:

“He hated being stuck in himself.” (p. 75)

“Well, who knows, but certainly the problem of being effective in a life which rejected him hurt Nietzsche greatly.”  (p. 130)

“He listed his intentions to recover from crisis and they mainly consisted in living out his own fiction.”  (p. 141)

“Philosophy was for him a vital, charming and desperate business, in which he far preferred writing metaphors than concocting footnotes to Plato.” (p. 8)

“For, as he said, all great philosophies are disguised personal confessions.” (p. 106)

“Becoming a Wanderer, talking to his Shadow, gave him common experience with exiles from Diogenes to Dante.”  (p. 13)

“He was a philosophical troubadour who after the death of God found his vocation in singing of things near at hand; now he was to map the survival of the human individual, whom godlessness had locked inside his imagination; he was to unwrap the human package suspended between animal determinacy and the self-overcoming.”  (p. 159)

“The style leads to the man, even if he insists he is wearing mask.” (p. 8)

“He lay in bed in a white robe and recognized no one.”  (p. 218) [Weimar 1897]

[Each epigraphic quote is from Lesley Chamberlain, 1996, Nietzsche in Turin:  An Intimate Biography. Picador, New York]

That refuge, the novel

After working on a research manuscript and reading Lesley Chamberlain’s Nietzsche in Turin and Sanford Levinson’s Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies, I sought refuge in a novel.  There is, I think, reprieve in fiction.  When I read nonfiction, I project the ideas outward to my own concerns, moulding them to my world, and, at times—most times maybe—forcing arguments against them to see how they stand. To step into fiction offers the solace of habitable space, where one is more comfortable with the ideas, as if whatever the wear of the furniture one’s body fits it. It’s not that one doesn’t project outward from fiction’s plots, places, or characters or even that one doesn’t argue merits, actions, or sense, especially of characters, but one does it more genially with fiction than nonfiction.

I picked up Kate Walbert’s The Gardens of Kyoto. Few words are as allusively rich as Kyoto.  The combination of gardens and Kyoto conjures history, art, and philosophy—a mix of image and wish.  The conjuring power of the title is not diminished even by my own brief visit to the city, where I experienced little of the history, art, or philosophy that I imagined to be waiting, but found a beautiful, fascinating modern city. Travel tempers illusion and desire with the novel and various realities. I shall hope to have more time in Kyoto, and that is part of the richness of the novel, which so far has offered little of Kyoto on the page but has allowed me to relive other readings and my memories of the city.  That ability to step into and out of novels may be one of their greatest values as a reading experience.  One can read a few pages, living closely with the characters, then drift out with one’s own reveries.  I wonder if the lure to reverie is the source of fiction’s reprieve.

The Gardens of Kyoto is a book I’ve pick-up before, thumbed-through, and, for some reason, replaced on the shelf.  On Sunday, I finally purchased it and began reading yesterday evening; I had a wonderful sitting with the book, 7.00 p.m. to 1.00 a.m., reading slowly, as I do, and made my way through less than half while thoroughly entering the story.  I took a break about 11.00 to do a Google search on Kate Walbert, where I found and listened to an NPR interview made following the nomination of a recent book of stories for a National Book Award.  I read other interviews and capsule biographies and then returned to the novel.

There will be less time for reading tonight, but it’s time to return to that refuge, the novel.

Monument

The area around White Wash, where I walked yesterday, is strewn with rusted cans, wire, an old pail.  Wooden posts lie here and there, marking what must have been access routes in the age before ATV trails had turned this landscape to scraps between paths.  The rusted bits of life, I expect, date from mid 20th century mining.  The region is a well of vanadium and uranium.  Even more prominent are a few dead oil wells and a pumping station.  Rusting pipes radiate, disjointed, across the rock, covered partially in places by sand, from the pumping station. 

The relict oil pumping station sits prominently on a sandstone bench above the break in the landscape before the Green River and out beyond are the Book Cliffs.  The pumping station has the quality of a monument.  Kirk Savage has described public monuments as offering legitimacy to the memories they project.  Amid the public land at White Wash, the pumping station monument projects the legitimacy of the transformative capacity of industry to lay waste to the land, to a blithe ability to abandon.

[Kirk Savage, 1994.  The politics of memory:  black emancipation and the Civil War monument.  In:  Commemorations:  The Politics of National Identity, John R. Gillis, ed.]