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On the two nights before the full moon, I was camped on a hilltop in Utah above the Colorado River. The river, during the day, had the color and consistency of chocolate milkshake, but at night it turned black and had yellow streamers, where the moonlight flowed.
On those nights before the full moon, I watched the rise of moonshadows. The shadows of the day, when I would arrive from fieldwork in the late afternoon fell to the east. The shadow of a ten-feet tall juniper was retted by light and hardly large enough to accommodate my canvas chair and the extension of my legs. I sat in the darkest core of the gray shadow, where it lay on sand and stones.
Shadows give more than shade; they also provide form. Without the sheen of light grading to shadow, the sense of contour would be missing. We get shape from shadow. Sunset takes the shapes from stones, junipers, and flowers. Dusk flattens the desert, removing its shapely forms.
On those nights on my hilltop, the white moon, that had lurked in the late afternoon, would transform in the dusk to yellow brightness. Deepening darkness brought force to the reflective light of the moon. I watched the moonshadows rise.
Despite the fat waxing gibbosity of the nearly full moon, there was hesitation in the moonshadows. They needed time beyond dusk, a fuller darkness, to fall. At first, only the ridges, boulders, and largest plants, the pinyon pines and junipers, gained moonshadows. These earliest moonshaows were soft, all penumbra.
In the fullness of night, the moonshadows heightened, getting dark umbral cores and pale, ethereal margins. These dense moonshadows reformed the desert at night. The slight yellow-blue light and shadows differentiated blackbrush from Ephedra and greasewood from sand sage. Subtlety taken at dusk returned to landscape when crescent moonshadows formed around stones and dips in sandstone, when they grew at the edges of shadscale and made thin lines on the sand from the flower stalks of penstemons.
I have been in the sun too long. I am on a ridge opposite Delicate Arch in Arches National Park. The shade of a juniper offers retreat. I place my pack against the stringy trunk of a juniper and sit back against that cushion. Reclining under the tree, I pick up my book to read.
A couple comes up the ridge. They are in their 60s. She wears a red blouse that is tied at the waist, blue shorts, and a billed cap that has a skirt to shade her neck. Her husband, in a white tee-shirt, walks well ahead of her.
She calls up to him. "Can you see the cairns?" In a delicate southern accent, she pronounces the word slowly and divides it in two as "car ens." She looks around. She looks dubious about the trail. "There are car ens up here and down there." She points to the ravine that separates them from me. "Which is the trail?" she asks her husband, but he is unconcerned and has walked well ahead of her.
I continue to read after they pass. When they return, a little while later, I hear the husband say, "There."
"What?" the wife asks.
"There," the husband says and points toward me, where I rest under the juniper.
"Not where he's 'sposed to be," the wife says.
Cottonwoods clatter. A steady wind has risen with the evening. The multitude of fresh leaves on plump, flexing petioles slide and shuffle against one another. They make the noise of a crowd.
Sometime before my arrival there was a crowd in my campsite on the Green River. There is a large fire mound of old, gray coals and circling it is a broad ring of beer bottles. My predecessors, as they sat around the fire, must have tossed bottle after bottle over their shoulders. Many bottles per shoulder, I guess, and possibly several shoulders. The many bottles shout loudly an awful egotism, although bottle litter is a squalid sign of one's power and persistent presence. The bottle mouths had gathered sand before I arrived. I gather the bottles into a pile, and as I gather I find more and more among the bushes.
There is a crowd in the campground down the river about a quarter of a mile. River runners were lined-up for dinner when I drove past. Rafts were parked in the campground sites. I have used that campground in the past but now tend to drive past. My site up the river, despite the bottle litter, offers only the crowd of cottonwood leaves, a thicket of skunkbush, sand sage, and greasewood. It offers this: "kwip, kwip, kwip, kwip." The periodic song of a lonely bird, calling from a cottonwood for a mate.
My field is in the desert, where the sun dances delightfully on sandstone. I shall be gone for some days or weeks, and my posts are likely to be more sporadic than normal, while I collect my thoughts, stones, and blazing stars under the desert sun.
On a triangle of sand, extending up the Selway River from the mouth of Three Links Creek, we settle one-by-one near the fire. It is late afternoon. Smoke rises from the one log left through the afternoon in the stone fire ring. Ray saws a drift log into thirds. He grabs a branch of pine and saws-off a few finger-like branches. He puts the pine fingers along the length of the smoking log. He adds the drift log thirds. New smoke rises and twists. “You’re getting smoked-out in that nice perfect spot,” Ray says to me. I arrived first at the beach and settled into a spot with a stone backrest where I could extend my legs to the fire. The smoke tucks back into wind from upstream, allowing me to open my eyes. New wind gusts upstream, blowing back smoke that fills Ray’s face. I go to the woodpile, break sticks, and pile them on the new flame. The flame rises, the smoke goes. The sun, too, begins to go. The hill opposite us is half lit by sun. Aspen leaves hold yellow light against the infiltration of darkness. With the darkness, we share whiskey, chocolate, and words. We share the wind. It blows upriver on the edge of a new front. “In weather reports, news of the wind always gets my attention,” Ray says. “I like wind,” he says.
Kittentails are plants of the genus Synthyris, and I’ve been studying their diversity and evolution for the past 20 years. My work follows that of several others, including Fred Hedglin, whose 1959 MS thesis was a taxonomic survey of what was then a fairly narrowly conceived Synthyris.
Hedglin and his thesis advisor Arthur Kruckeberg went in search of the hybrid that Fred Warren had discovered. Here’s how Hedglin described the scene: “The terrain was dominated by a broad, gently side-sloped, rounded ridge running northeast to southwest. Besseya rubra grew on the open, grassy crown of the exposed ridge, where as Synthyris missurica var. major occurred on the cool, shaded northwest-facing slope, among shrub thickets. The few hybrid plants were found here and there in a zone between the areas of the two species . . .”
Experiments conducted by Fred Hedglin showed that the hybrids were infertile. He had self-pollinated hybrid individuals but found that they would not produce seeds. These were F-1 hybrids, Hedglin suggested. They were the direct off-spring of crosses between mountain (Synthyris missurica) and red kittentails (Synthyris rubra, which Hedglin knew as Besseya rubra). Each individual hybrid, borne from a seed, would die without making seed. The population persisted through recurring crosses between the two species, with pollen moving from either mountain kittentail or red kittentail and the other serving as the maternal parent that would bear seeds of the hybrid.
Without seed, the hybrid felt ephemeral. That’s why I went back to the population last weekend—I wanted to check whether Warren’s kittentail had persisted.
I first visited the hybrid population in 1988 soon after I had started my research on kittentails, and I had not visited the population since then. One of my students had looked for the hybrids a few years ago but had failed to find them. If either the mountain kittentail, which is restricted to the moist forest at elevations close to the Clearwater River near Kamiah, or the red kittentail of the plateau grassland were extirpated from the area, then the hybrids would be likely to become extinct.
Hedglin had noted that the area in which he found the hybrid kittentails had been logged about ten years before his visit. The slopes above Kamiah now have second growth woods, but these parcels of woodland are edged by pastures and fields. The landscape is a mosaic, with some patches more disturbed than others. Several houses and other buildings sit along the roads among the trees and fields.
Little of the cool, moist forest that mountain kittentail requires persists on the hillside, although a small population of the species remains on the lower slopes near Kamiah. The red kittentail can be found in the roadside grasses on the flat plateau above the slopes. Most of the plateau top, an arable landscape, is now farmed.
As I drove up the road above Kamiah, I saw flowering stalks of the kittentail wagging in the roadside grasses. These flowering stalks have the thinness and length of a kittentail’s tail, which is the source of the plant’s name. I parked in a narrow pull-off and walked down the road to survey the roadside ditch for Warren’s kittentail. I walked perhaps a mile. After going first down the road about a quarter of a mile and then walking up the road beyond my truck for another quarter mile or so, I found only about a dozen of the hybrids in the grassy roadside ditch or where I could see them on the other side of a fence at the margin of woodland. Where I walked along the roadside on a lower part of the slope, the hybrid kittentails were mixed among a few mountain kittentails. The hybrids were always in places where they were shaded by forest, a habit of the hybrid more similar to its mountain kittentail parent than to its red kittentail parent, which tends to be in more open, sunny and drier, environments
The small population, although it has persisted through the 20 years between my visits, seems tenuous. The lack of interfertility among the hybrid individuals seems like a boundary that narrowly circumscribes the existence of the population. I wonder whether there might be a few seeds produced each year by the population. The earlier artificial pollination studies that Fred Hedglin conducted could be followed-up with field studies to check for seed production by the hybrids. As I walked along the roadside, I thought about putting bags over the flowering stalks after the pollination season was completed but before the fruits had matured. The bagging would prevent loss of seeds when the fruits split open, and this would allow us to check for seed production in the natural population of the hybrids. The production of seeds, assuming pollen moving from one hybrid to another, would offer a little more opportunity for persistence of Warren kittentail.
How long has Warren’s kittentail existed on the Kamiah hillside? I spread widely the fingers of both hands and counted across the span, tallying 10,000 years as a possibility. About that long ago the climate of this area would have warmed after the last glaciation, the trees of the cool forests would have retreated from the plateau to the valley of the Clearwater River, and, with the opening of the plateau to sun, the red kittentail could have migrated to its current location. Ten thousand years is an awesome span of time for an infertile hybrid. Warren’s kittentail may have existed only for a much shorter time. A hundred years is a possibility or even less. As I walked through the population of hybrids, I hoped for 10,000 years and for more to come.
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Note:
Fred Hedglin’s MS thesis, A Survey of the Genus Synthyris, was submitted in 1959 to the University of Washington.
