botanizing

What Holds

Spring whitlow-grass (Draba verna), a diminutive mustard, is one of the first plants to flower on the Palouse.  Its flowers, a few standing on each burgundy shoot, are hardly two millimeters in diameter.  Patches of the plants look like salt shaken on bare ground in grassland.  The flowering of spring whitlow-grass is ending.  Its fruits, tiny silicles, each with a pug-nosed, pollinated stigma at its tip, are elongating.  Each silicle is surrounded by its flower’s four, cleft petals, which clasp, holding tight against the fruit.  This won’t last; in a few days or weeks the silicles will fill, expanding slightly with maturing seeds, and begin to dry; then the delicate, browning petals will wither and fall away.

Nothing was dry this morning.  There was rain.  When the rain finished, I walked on a grassland ridge where drops held tight to the clasping petals.  I thought about the tension in this time.  Each flower like a quest.  Each fruit like will.  Quest clasps will, one adhering to the other, surface to surface, in the shaky transitions of spring.  The water drops, holding drying in abeyance, held all—petals, fruits, spring—together in a patch speckled by reflected glints of sun.

Erythronium

Epochs of Hiking Boots

Time is but a trail I go walking on.  It takes boots, and I have begun to wonder whether we might profitably gather spans of time in the lives of hiking boots.  Because boots are not ephemeral—they last—they are a possible measure, less than a generation or a decade, more than a year, unless we are in a foot-growing phase, of life experiences.  These are hiking boot epochs.

I grew-up in a family that did manual labor.  My first walking boots were working boots.  Those rough boots, possessing neither soft insoles nor padding at the ankles, were leather and scuffed.  They had a steel shank that consolidated winter cold at the soles of my feet.  It was after reading Thoreau’s Walden as a high school sophomore that I began to wear my dusty, stiff work boots after work.  I began to walk the creeks, coal hollows, and hillsides of southeast Iowa for the purpose of walking itself, and, I suppose, seeing and thinking, exercising a sort of Waldening. 

In college, I fell in with a crowd that camped, climbed, and backpacked.  They wore lug-soled, sno-sealed boots to class.  I read every sentence of Colin Fletcher’s The Complete Walker as well as the narrative of his long walk through the Grand Canyon in The Man Who Walked Through Time.  I wanted to shoulder a pack for long walks.  I bought hiking boots.  They were heavy and uncomfortable.  I wore them, soon after the purchase, on a botanical foray in the Big Bend of Texas.  The boots blistered and blunted my feet.  The pain was terrible.  I continued to wear those boots, working to break them in.  I walked Iowa prairies and Utah canyons in them.  They were awful.  It was several years before they became even remotely comfortable and by then the soles had thinned and the lugs were worn-away.  In an older age, I’d have had the boots resoled and worn them for another decade, but in that time I could think only of new, lighter boots. 

I was living in Berkeley and hiking and backpacking throughout the summers in the Colorado Rockies. Although too expensive for my graduate student stipend, the new hiking boots I purchased were Italian.  Asolos. They were sage green.  Beautiful. This was the first generation of boots to use Gore-Tex in the uppers.  Light.  The first steps and all others were pleasures.    After ten years of walking, the Asolos were worn, their stitching frayed, and oval holes gaped between the Gore-Tex and leather when I decided to retire them in 1993.  I was planning a long walk on the Welsh coast.

Not long before leaving for Wales, I bought new boots.  The selection wasn’t good.  The boots seemed a little tight.  I made a few short hikes, flew to London, took the train to Wales, and stepped out of my B&B in rain and gale-force wind carrying an extremely heavy pack and wearing the new boots.  The boots were severe.  The second day I could hardly walk.  The nails of my big toes had broken and were lost ultimately.  My feet were in pain.  It was a year of mistakes—1993, a bad boot time; for the few following years I returned to using the comfortable Asolos, which were beaten but reliable.  I used them in the Dolomites, the mountains of western Japan, and all over the American West. Walks on rough Hawaiian lava flows finally ripped the last life out of the Asolos.

It was 1999 when I bought my next pair of hiking boots at a shopping mall sporting goods store. The sales person advised against the Nike boots.  People had complained that they lasted only a year. The boots, however, were light, comfortable, and sleek.  I bought them.  They’ve been a pleasure to wear, despite the design flaw of having only eyelets for laces rather than a set of hooks near the top.   The fully eyeletted laces made the boots difficult to put-on and take-off, but they were good wearing and walking boots.   They’ve also lasted much longer than the sales person originally expected.  On a recent backpack I noticed the soles were separating from the uppers, making this season a time for a new boot epoch.

Last weekend I drove up to REI.  I went first for the Asolos.  These stylish boots had bright red slashes, like folded wings, on the ankles.  My heels slid up in the size 13 boots and the 12s were tight at my toes.  I tried another brand that had broad toes; they were comfortable, but I was concerned about the ankle support.  Next I tried a pair of Vasques.  The fit was good, the ankles were supportive and padded, the tongue had folds to shield rocks, the weight was nearly as light as my dying Nikes – I offered my card for them, and I tucked them in the truck.  A new blind date with hiking boots.

Some Nights Ago

The sky still held a little blue.  A broad belt of retted cloud was suffused with saffron.  I drove up the Selway River to camp above a cobble bar of white stones.  To take my place here, I tossed the day’s New York Times in the fire ring and piled-on handfuls of fallen sticks.  The Times was reluctant to catch fire.   I grabbed dried grasses and handfuls of cottonwood leaves to place on the newspaper and humped the sticks over them all.  The grasses and leaves took a match and fire transferred to the Times.  The fire rose into the sticks.  The first moist smoke drifted down to the river and across the Selway.  As the flame steadied, I added logs from home to the fire.

I fixed tea from hot water in a thermos and sat in my canvas chair next to the fire.  The gibbous moon rose up river, and, in the dusk, milky Venus sat over the conifer-covered hills to the west. I began reading C. S. Giscombe’s Giscome Road, poems about travels in and the landscape of Canada.  Giscombe’s uneven, sometimes interrupted lines, following the length of fast steps, exerted breathing, or a steady gaze taken at a long rest, reminded me of Gary Snyder’s work. 

“The song’s a commotion rising in the current . . .” the volume's first poem begins.  The sound of the Selway rose.  A river finds its volume when the commotion of day dies away.   At the campfire, I read the poems aloud to myself, my frosty breath mixed with the fire smoke.  “ . . . the voice was always centerless talking that was leading up to song, was about to / be the horn that marked the edge of the water–”

I went to bed when I finished reading the volume of poems.  In the morning I was up at first light and drove three miles down river to the Wilderness Café, which wasn’t yet open.  I sat in the parking lot in my truck to wait, certain that it wouldn’t be too long.  The owner arrived about 6:15. He went inside but didn’t turn on the lights.  He turned on the television, a garish, shifting glare of yellow, red, and green behind the counter.  I waited.  Perhaps ten minutes later, another man arrived, and he opened the door of the restaurant.  The owner stepped outside with the man, and they smoked cigarettes while leaning against the building; each man stood with a knee bent to put a foot against the siding. 

My friends, writers and English professors, arrived at 6.30.  Cecil Giscombe, the poet, was with them.  We would all backpack up the Selway River.  After breakfast.  After a cup of tea.  We put on packs, then began the walk.

“[A]t the river-landing the field name verges on the day name: / at the river-landing’s the place where the river’s 'noble' in a description of it there—/ the river’s aimless self & the portage trail are something else, one goes / off into the trees”  the poet said.

*  *  *
Quotations from “Sound Carries” in Giscome Road by C. S. Giscombe (1998, Dalkey Archive Press)