botanizing

Screams and a Lullaby

I looked to the scream of a hawk. My attention had been on the searing heat, which seemed to come not only from the sky but also from the tub of slickrock and sand in the wash that I descended above the Colorado River. I caught the bird as it back-pedaled—despite the pale orange that shown through its tail from the higher, sharp light of the sun—it was a flutter of white, standing back from harassing a Golden Eagle.  As the hawk backed, the eagle rolled.  The sound was immense, high above me:   WHUUP—the rolling eagle’s wings swept the sky.  Out of the roll, the eagle wheeled, and the hawk had flown on a tangent but turned back for a second attack.  It came fast till just above the eagle, where it pulled back, holding its wings as sails, just out of range of the eagle’s roll: WHUUP—the long wings pushed around the air.  As the eagle righted, the hawk was with it—they flew together into the sun—which blinded me, and I turned away, squinting, but heard then the eagle’s evasion as the force of its wings turned sky to wind: WHUUP.

As I had tea on my deck, the ravens and magpies were in an uproar.  A raven, launched from a tree, became a black projectile, till just short of my neighbor’s roof, wings flapping to slow its motion, it pulled back, squawking and pushing its claws forward.  The raven held stationary—except its beating wings and loud screams—for a moment.  A Great Horned Owl sat on the edge of the roof just before the raven’s claws—it ruffled, then roiled its wings, a flutter, the arched wings flapped. The owl was quiet.  The raven returned to its tree and continued to squawk loudly, along with the magpies, through the rest of the evening while the owl, which moved to the top of the house’s chimney, sat quietly, turning slowly, repeatedly its head.

The next evening the Great Horned Owl returned, but the ravens remained quiet.  The magpies clattered but hid.  The owl called: reeeek . . . . . reeeek . . .And that’s the sound to which I settled that night—the shrill imploring of a Great Horned Owl, my lullaby.

Nelson’s Marine Bar, Hoboken

When Edward Abbey signed and dated the author’s introduction to Desert Solitaire, he appended the location as Nelson’s Marine Bar, Hoboken.  After his first term as a seasonal ranger in 1956, Abbey left Arches National Park for Hoboken, New Jersey, where his wife and son were living.  On his ostensible last day at Arches, Abbey wrote in Desert Solitaire:  “After twenty-six weeks of sunlight and stars, wind and sky and golden sand, I want to hear once more the crackle of clamshells on the floor of the bar in the Clam Broth House in Hoboken.  I long for a view of the jolly, rosy faces on 42nd Street and the cheerful throngs on the sidewalks of Atlantic Avenue.”

I’m uncertain how much of Desert Solitaire was composed in Hoboken or whether any of the author’s introduction was written in one of the city’s bars.  The earliest surviving outline of what would become Desert Solitaire dates from July 1962, when Abbey was working as a welfare caseworker in Hoboken.  The possibility that Desert Solitaire, one of the most beautiful books about the Colorado Plateau, was conceived and composed in Hoboken is fascinating; it raises the question how one place influences our view of another.  Abbey’s longing on city streets and in Hoboken bars must have elicited a memory shadowed by distance, shifting subtly the tones of the sandstone landscape of Utah.   I am curious about the desires we fulfill in prose rather than place.  Longing flaps-about at memory’s edges, wearing it away, allowing through various projections, brighter views, simpler places.  The biting flies and midges that light at the edge of memory are the first to be worn away, to be lost in the projection.  Through projection the abrasion of sand is lost; it becomes golden.

Abbey claimed that the composition of Desert Solitaire required little more than transcribing his journals as typescript.  David Petersen, who edited Abbey’s journals, found them “far short of anything approaching even a coherent book outline. . .”  The journals had descriptive notes, literary and philosophical allusions, and hyperbolic rants; they didn’t hold Desert Solitaire.   I wonder about the Hoboken invention of Desert Solitaire and how Abbey’s scant notes were amplified by the bars and echo the dense populace.

As I walk and drive I scrawl notes.  In field this spring, my evenings were often busy pressing and identifying plants and keeping my collection notebook up-to-date; I didn’t initially transcribe my notes until I returned to my apartment, by then details were fading from my memory, and my largely illegible notes were more curiosity than comprehensible—too much was lost.  I bought a larger sketchbook into which I transcribed the rough field notes in the evenings—taking the time to record a narrative, allusions, and hyperbolic rants.  When I look back at the notes I wonder, however, how my reading in another place is influenced by the scream of magpies rather than the streaks of mountain bluebirds, how shade from my spruce, cherry, and maple cools the heat of the desert, what comes from desire for a distant landscape.

*   *   *
Notes: 

Quote from p. 265 in E. Abbey, 1968. Desert Solitaire, A Season in the Wilderness, Touchstone (1990 reprint).

Information on the original outline of Desert Solitaire and Abbey’s work as a welfare caseworker comes from Cahalan, J. M. 2001.  Edward Abbey, A Life.  University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

David Petersen quote from p. 40 in “Cactus Ed’s Moveable Feast:  A Preview of Confession of a Barbarian:  Pages from the Journals of Edward Abbey” from Western American Literature 28: 33-41 (1993).

Leaving the Desert

My rags turned orange.  After spending the day cleaning my sabbatical apartment and packing the few possessions I’ve had here, I wiped the dust from the cab of the truck.  It was deep orange dust.  I left grit and sand on the floor mats to rub against my feet as I drive for the next two days to the Northwest.

It’s difficult to think about leaving.  I went out on Wednesday to try to fix a sense of the place and smiled at my utter foolishness.  My impressions are fleet so I picked up stones.  I couldn’t hold them—they were too hot.  I would pick up a stone, then roll it to the back of my palm to relieve the shock of the burning heat on my fingers and then roll it further up my arm where the skin was protected by sleeve or cradle the stone between my sleeve and my chest.

That’s what I need to do:  find a way to cradle the heat, hold the stones against my chest.

The Dipper On Its Bowl

The Big Dipper emerges with its handle high in the darkness; it stands on its bowl.  The heat of the day was intense, radiating into evening, cooling slowly in the darkness.  I think of cool water flowing from the dipper’s bowl.  I hear the water flow, which is continuous from the celestial surreal, pouring over sandstone spouts to slap the curved bottoms of splash pools.  It clatters over cobble beds.  I slip on my glasses to sharpen the dipper’s stars.  No water spills from its bowl—the sound is Onion Creek, which pours past my campsite from the canyon above.

Coal Cliffs, San Rafael Swell

Tea with Sand

Tea with sand was on this morning’s menu.  The wind yesterday came strongly out of the west, and, as I drove east, the dust overtaking me welled in the cab of the truck.  It was gritty red dust, adding layers to earlier red and more recent white and tan dust to create colorful strata on my dashboard.  In a plan to find a wind block, I camped last night in the lee of Cedar Mountain on the San Rafael Swell and hoped it would block the wind.  A butte to my north had a high, blocky face of rimrock as well as a trailing spire.  The force of the wind on the high face of this butte sounded like a fast river in flood.  I looked up repeatedly when I heard the slam and flow of wind gust against the butte.  My camp was a wash—which extended from the west, coming down slope from Cedar Mountain.  As I sat with a cup of tea this morning on the weathered trunk of a long-ago fallen juniper, the wind forced ships of sand—an armada of ships with curled prows of wind lifted sand—down the wash over me.  The rim of my cup and the tea took a sandy glisten, and the crystals gave it a tinny taste.

The Written Place

At the beginning of her Anthropology of Turquoise, Ellen Meloy described days on a sandstone spine:  “The ridge runs from a crumpled mountain range in southern Utah to the Arizona desert, jumping a river along its way.  It is an elongated, asymmetrical reef of Mesozoic sandstone with a face and a flank, two sides so different you think that you are somewhere else when you are in the same place.  The face rises brick-red from a broad wash, nearly vertical but for a skirt of boulders along its talus.  The flank is the crazy side:  an abruptly sloped flexure of ancient rock beds tilted upward into a jagged crest.  Most of the massive slab is Navajo Sandstone, the Colorado Plateau’s famously voluptuous field of windblown sand dunes now consolidated into nearly pure quartz crystals.  Against the steel-blue sky of a summer monsoon, the ridge bleaches to white.  Moonlight blues it, and bright sun turns it pale cream or, if you are making love atop it, blush pink.”

In an odd, unexpected convergence, I was on Meloy’s sandstone spine—had walked that afternoon in canyons of the tilted flank—when I read that description.  She never named the sandstone spine but from the description above and from other descriptions of her nearby home the identity of the place was clear.  I’ve written here about the place over the spring, and I also have never named it.

Both Meloy and I have held the place in ambiguity.  I suppose for each of us the place retains a semblance of personal possession and private experience by writing without naming.  The absence of a name can allow a reader to map the place to his or her own imagined coordinates in a poetic projection.  Indeed, I may have mapped Meloy’s sandstone spine to my own coordinates, projecting my experiences onto ambiguity that she left on the landscape.

An epigraph at the beginning of the Anthropology of Turquoise describes words as prismatic, and I think that descriptions of place are similar.  Descriptions of place bend our understanding, directing, shifting, confining our outlook.  I have been trying to understand how Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire has shaped my understanding of the canyon country on the Colorado Plateau. I sometimes wonder how, or even whether, I see this landscape separate from Desert Solitaire.  I walk this landscape in a Borgesian maze, turning corners in Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey.

The written landscape persists through repeated experience.  Thunder shook my camp in the Wasatch Mountains on Thursday, but I heard a rooster:

Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning

I cannot hear thunder in mountains without thinking of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” where the rooster crows in the poem’s final part “What the Thunder Said,” where “There is not even silence in the mountains / But dry sterile thunder without rain”.

I quarrel with Eliot as I drive the landscape. Eliot would have kept an old European scheme with religious formalism and ordered class structures, but dissonant technology and cacophonous cultural forces impinged; Eliot saw the ominous ruin of the old order.  I see ruins on the landscape but cannot accept his projection. Despite the beauty and power of his poetry, Eliot’s nostalgic sense mis-imagined the ecological causes of erosion, the economics of ruin, and the value and sense of disparate cultures.  Still, despite my quarrelling, the power of Eliot’s writing influences my view—even though I try to see around his “Waste Land.”

*  *  *
Notes:

The photograph is not or may not be the place described in the quotation from The Anthropology of Turquoise.

The Ellen Meloy quotation is from pages 3 and 4 of The Anthropology of Turquoise (2003, Vintage Books).

The epigraph at the beginning of The Anthropology of Turquoise is from Susan Brind Morrow’s The Names of Things.

You can read T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” including the section on the rooster and thunder, at http://www.whatthethundersaid.org/framer.cfm?frame=http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html.

Moons, Bones, a Blazing Star

This line of crescent moons is jumbled. Back to back, point to back, flip and flop, ring and around, they lie along the land, the edge of an old fault.  These connected crescents are a band of hills.  The mid point on the back of a crescent is the high point on its ridge, and the curve of the crescent has a sinuous top of progressively lower peaks that extend around the curve to its points.  These hills could be the white of the moon, but they are more the texture of bone, dirtied by the elements, in my mind.  They are like scabrous, weathered bone; they have a surface of gravelly flakes.  The gravel, which adheres to the surface crust of the soil, crunches underfoot, but it gives way easily because powder lies beneath the crust.  The powder variations—greenish gray, pinkish tan, dirty bone white—depend, I suppose, as much on light as place and adulteration. 

They are simply the White Hills.   They lie below Triassic reds and pine green slopes of the Wasatch Plateau.  They are a decorative white band that is 35 miles long; they rise sharply from the edge of the flat Sevier Valley.  Their bony slopes are the only place where the Arapien blazing star (Mentzelia argillosa) is known.  I have been walking the White Hills, the red slopes that lie behind, and the mirroring white hills on the west side of the valley to understand better the distribution of the Arapien blazing star.

This blazing star takes its common name from the substance of the hills; their powdery base of white, with its shades of gray, tan, green and pink, is Arapien Shale.  This shale is rich with gypsum.  Scattered on the surface of the hills are hunks of selenite, a crystalliferous form of gypsum, which looks like layer after layer of fused, slightly cloudy glass.  Gypsum from these hills is mined and processed in a facility, layered in bone white dust, near Sigurd.  The powder of gypsum-rich, Arapien shale flows into my shoes with each sideways step I make down steep slopes.

Gypsum (hydrous calcium sulfate) can be advantageously mixed into the soil of one’s garden, but in arid environments of the American West, where it occurs naturally and richly in some soils, it can limit the growth of plants.   The intolerance that some plants have for gypsum rich soils, as well as the converse—the attraction to, even restriction to, gypsum-rich soils by so-called gypsophiles, is not well understood.  Limitations imposed by gypsum can be at least partly physical: gypsum-rich soils in arid environments tend to form surface crusts that can be difficult for the roots of newly germinated seeds to penetrate (1).  High calcium concentrations in soil may also limit the ability of some plant to take-up nutrients like phosphorus and iron (2).  Gypsophiles may have adaptations that enhance uptake of these two required nutrients from the soil despite the problems presented by its calcium-richness.  For gypsophiles, there may be advantages to living on gypsum-rich soils.  The relatively depauperate plant communities on gypsum rich soils can reduce resource competition for gypsophiles.  Gypsum crusts can also provide strong thermal insulation, which enhances water retention (3).

The arid western landscape has islands and archipelagos of gypsum-rich outcrops, and gypsophiles can be limited to a single island or small archipelagos of gypsum.  Plants that are limited geographically and specialized for life only on a particular kind of substrate are called edaphic endemics (edaphic comes from the Greek edaphos for ground). The Arapien blazing star, which is endemic to the White Hills, may be an edaphic specialist, a plant adapted to the soil conditions of this local environment.

Art Kruckeberg, a great student of soil specialization and plant distribution, suggested that edaphic endemics evolve from ancestors that are less specialized—they could become established and persist on restrictive as well as unrestrictive substrates (4). There are different models for the evolution of edaphic endemics.  Peter Raven applied the idea catastrophic selection in which small marginal populations become isolated, suffer a rapid decrease in number of reproductive individuals, and, subsequently, adapt rapidly under strong selection from an extreme environment as narrow edaphic endemics (5).  In contrast, Don Levin’s model of ecological speciation portrays edaphic shifts occurring more gradually, and possibly with interbreeding between the newly evolving edaphic specialist and its less specialized ancestral group.  Levin’s model calls primarily for shifts to “benign sinks”—environments that are not extreme and can permit the establishment of various species—that require little genetic change.   Levin’s model for the gradual evolution of edaphic tolerance and, perhaps, specialization, emphasizes that changes in few genes may be involved (6). 

These models emphasize new evolutionary change to account for edaphic endemics.  Some have pointed-out that we must also carefully distinguish species that are narrowly distributed because they are newly evolved (so-called neo-endemics) from those that once were more widespread but have become more narrowly distributed over time (so-called paleo-endemics).  These paleo-endemics may have narrowed distributions because of climate change or increasing competition for resources.  Paleo-endemics may not have evolutionary specializations for life on restrictive substrates but simply may capable of tolerating the restrictive conditions, especially as a refuge from competition or intolerable environmental changes in their former ranges. With paleo-endemics, we should perhaps look for the absence of specializations and for the signs of escape.

As simple as the models sound, these studies that test evolution, specialization, and distributions have an inherent complexity.  Some studies have been consistent with Raven’s ideas of rapid edaphic specialization, but others may be more consistent with Levin’s model.

I take the steps to understand why the Arapien blazing star is living only on the White Hills.  I walk the hills to find the limits of its distribution and to core the soil for later tests of chemical composition.  Our studies of evolutionary relationships among species of blazing stars show so far that the Arapien blazing star is in a group of species that live on high calcium substrates (7).  These insights on evolutionary relationships may be among the first signs that the Arapien blazing star is not a neo-endemic; instead, it may be part of a paleo-endemic complex, one that evolved from an ancestor that was already specialized to high calcium soils.  This calciphile ancestor may have been geographically fragmented (or dispersed) under pressures of climate change, which led to the reproductive isolation of regional groups of populations.  If that hypothesis is correct, then speciation—leading to the origin of the Arapien blazing star among others in its complex—may have simply followed geographic isolation, and its adoption of the gypsum-rich White Hills may not have been an evolutionary stimulus.  For the Arapien blazing star, the bony crescents of the White Hills may be as much refuge as a source of adaptation.

Notes

(1) For more information on gypsophily and gypsum soil crusts see the following:

Borselli, L., R. Biancalani, C. Giordani, S. Carnicelli, and G. A. Ferrari, 1996.  Effect of gypsum on seedling emergence in a kaolinitic crusting soil.  Soil Technology 9: 71-81.

Meyer, S. E. 1986.  The ecology of gypsophile endemism in the eastern Mojave desert.  Ecology 67: 1303-1313.

Parsons, R. F. 1976.  Gypsophily in plants—a review.  American Midland Naturalist 96: 1-20.

(2) For more information on nutrient limitations that may result in calcium-rich soils see the following:

Gries, D. and M. Runge, 1995.  Responses of calcicole and calcifuge Poaceae species to iron-limiting conditions.  Botanica Acta 108: 482-489.

Misra, A. and G. Tyler, 1999.  Influence of soil moisture on soil solution chemistry and concentrations of minerals in the calcicoles Phleum phleoides and Veronica spicata grown on a limestone soil.  Annals of Botany 84: 401-410.

Tyler, G.  1992.  Inability to solubilize phosphate in limestone soils—key factor controlling calcifuge habit of plants.  Plant and Soil 145: 65-70.

Tyler, G. and L. Ström, 1995.  Differing organic acid exudation pattern explains calcifuge and acidfuge behavior of plants.  Annals of Botany 75: 75-78.

Zohlen, A. and G. Tyler, 2004.  Soluble inorganic tissue phosphorus and calcicole-calcifuge behavior of plants.  Annals of Botany 94: 427-432.

(3) For more information on thermal insulation and water availability in gypsum soils see the following:

Meyer, S. E. and E. García-Moya, 1986.  Gypsum grasslands of northern San Luis Potosi, Mexico:  patterns of vegetation, soil, and seasonal moisture availability.  In Occasional Papers of the Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute, Alpine, Texas.

Muller-Stoll, W. R. and G. Lerch, 1963.  Model tests on the ecological effect of vapor movement and condensation in soil due to temperature gradients.  Pp. 65-82 in Water relations of plants, Rutter, A. J. and F. H. Whitehead (eds.).  Wiley and Sons, New York.

Verheye, W. H. and T. G. Boyadgiev, 1997.  Evaluating the land use potential of gypsiferous soils from field pedogenic characteristics.  Soil Use Management 13: 97-103.

(4) For examples of Art Kruckeberg’s work see the following:

Kruckeberg, A. R.  1984.  California serpentines:  flora, vegetation, geology, soils, and management problems.  University of California Press, Berkeley.

Kruckeberg, A. R.  1986.  An essay:  The stimulus of unsual geologies for plant speciation.  Systematic Botany 11: 455-463.

Kruckeberg, A. R.  2002.  Geology and plant life.  Univ. of Washington Press, Seattle.

Kruckeberg, A. R. and D. Rabinowitz, 1985.  Biological aspects of endemism in higher plants.  Annual Review of Systematics and Ecology 16: 447-479.

(5) Raven, P. H.  1964.  Catastrophic evolution and edaphic endemism.  Evolution 18:  336-338.

(6) The Levin ideas on edaphic specialization and ecological speciation are from the following:

Levin, D. A.  2004.  Ecological speciation:  crossing the divide.  Systematic Botany 29: 807-816.

Levin, D. A.  2005.  Niche shifts:  the primary driver of novelty within angiosperm genera.  Systematic Botany 30: 9-15.

(7) The studies on evolutionary relationships in the group of blazing stars that include Mentzelia argillosa are part of the ongoing research of my student JS.

Out botanizing

I'm in the field for several days and will be unable to post until I return.

The photograph is Enceliopsis nudicaulis in the Mohave Desert.