botanizing

By the Selway

When we arrived in the dark the river was only slightly louder than the generator of the RV that was parked 50 yards away.  The river clattered as water rocked flat stones.  The RV droned like a stressed refrigerator.

I woke at first light to see we were enclosed by fog.  I had wished for fog when we went to bed.  In fog, I fell back asleep to wake hours later in bright sun and blue sky.

As I read by our campfire in the morning, I heard dancing in a cottonwood tree.  It must be a squirrel, I thought.  When I looked for the sound, leaves fell.  The brown leaves, stiff from an earlier frost, falling in a slight breeze, tapped and pattered against still held leaves like the feet of cloggers.

We walked into moist forest of the hills above the river’s banks.  Bright sprays of sword ferns stood on dark soil in the sparse understorey.  The shiny green fronds were like lights in the thick shade beneath western red cedar. 

Ravens roared above the dark woods.  I looked for them and followed a trilling screech as it curved down the ravine.  The birds were invisible.

Flowers for fungi

In the conifer forests at the edge of the Northern Rocky Mountains, flowers appear to be gone for the year.  It appears that flowers have been traded for fungi.  The woods bloom with fungi.

There are wooly chanterelles that have tops like shaggy funnels.  We find these in clumps, young and old together.  The young have burnished button tops. 

The western russulas are especially common.  The tops of their basidiocarps are purple and some approach six inches in diameter.  There is a slight dip in the center of the russula’s cap, and in those centers little moss communities stand where they have been displaced from soil to the top of the mushroom pedestal.  The western russulas do not age well.  They chip and crack.  Diamonds shaped cracks creep across the purple tops of the basiocarps to reveal white interiors.

Slimy red caps adorn the tops larch wax caps, which go also by the name Hygrophorus speciosus.  These caps—the diameter of a quarter and a half—we find tucked beneath the still green leaves of low plants.

There are upheavals of soil and duff at the trail’s edge pushed up by orange lips.  I bend my head to look and see down a throat to subterranean darkness.  It is as if we have found evidence of subterranean souls—like those belonging to Wagner’s Nibelungs that mine bright minerals.  I look closely and see the orange lip is the rim of a basidiocarp.  Gills stand behind the lip.  And yet, for a moment I think, those gills might be teeth, and this mouth, lips, throat and teeth might speak.  Whose mouth this is I cannot tell, but I stop to listen, hoping for words from the mysterium of mycelium.

*  *  *

Top photo is wooly chanterelle, Gomphus floccosus, and the bottom photo is western russula, Russula occidentalis (at least I hope those are correct determinations).  I've used the recently published Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest by Steve Trudell and Joe Ammirati as my guide for identifications.

A tense season

This is a tense season for leaves.  Green remains, but one anticipates its quick dissipation.  Laminas in this season look worn, and they are spotted or fringed by yellow.  The worst bear hard brown cankers as if lamina had given up its defense against infection and allowed bacteria or virus to establish themselves in the final days of photosynthesis.

Gentians

We walk in the Clearwater Mountains through lodgepole pines to the scrubby flank of a valley.  Canteen Creek lies below us, and its headwaters are ahead.

Little is in flower. Along the margin of the trail we walk, there are a few late season composites that have weedy proclivities. Fireweed release fuzzy fruits.  Petals have shriveled on the white rhododendron, and its fruits swell.  The once lovely, saffron flowers of menziesia, a cousin of the rhododendron, have browned. In lieu of flowers, we turn our attention to huckleberries, and eat as we walk.

We cross Canteen Creek on stones, and I find among the grasses of the far side gentians in flower.  Little is as lovely as a gentian flower. 

The blue of these gentians is like the summer sky boiled-down to pure essence of blue.  That distillation feels especially concentrated in mountain light. I know when I find gentians in these mountains that summer is about to fade.  The still, cool blue of gentians has foreshadow of ice.

Evening at Big Fog Mountain Saddle

After dinner at the Wilderness Inn Café, we drive up to Big Fog Mountain Saddle.  The days have been hot, and we want to escape to a cooler place.  The saddle, set in an angle of the Selway River, is a high perch in Idaho’s Clearwater Mountains. 

The road to the saddle is slow and dusty.  It is beset with switchbacks, which keep one in first gear, at least to avoid shifting from first to second and then back to first every seven seconds, where the road climbs the lower slope above the Selway.  When the straights lengthen, the road tightens.  Thimbleberries overhang the road, and we dodge their slaps at the open windows.  The steep, straight runs of road serve also the runoff, and the roadbed is as eroded and rocky as a creek bottom.  We creep and bounce over the rocks and ruts.

Big Fog Mountain Saddle is a swayback meadow split by a dusty parking lot.  A forest service toilet sits among broad patches of yarrow, whose corymbs of flower heads make white spots in the thin, wiry grass.  The pussytoes are beginning to fruit, producing fluffy, stellate efflorescences from the sides of their pinkish heads. Pearly everlasting, a close cousin of the pussytoe, has elegant heads of rice papery bracts.  A few blue flowers remain among the fruits, which have collars of wrinkled brown corollas, on the stalks of penstemons.  Bees and butterflies visit the bright, orangey yellow saucers of potentilla flowers.  Sentinels of beargrass stand in formation at the edge of forest.  The beargrass flowers have finished for the season, and the infructescences bear young fruits.

As shadows slip from the evening, we walk down a trail.  Spindly paintbrushes, heavy with fruit, sway like pendulums when our shins knock against them.  We pass from warm to cool to warm to cool.  The temperature differences along the trail are sharp.  Cool sweeps down slope in broad bands that surround the trickles and seeps of water.  Tofieldia grow in the seeps.  I break-off a stalk for a closer look and its many glands leave my hand sticky.  The lily-like fruits of the tofieldia are swelling with seeds.  Small orange flowers stand above the mosses of the seeps.  These flowers belong to the bog St. John’s-wort, a small plant that creeps across seeps.  Dense runs of mountain boykinia, a rough plant that has toothy leaves, edge the trail like fence.

We can see a fire in a distant side valley of the Selway River.  A small plume of smoke rises from the valley and pools in the air above it.

When we return to our camp, the gibbous moon stands over the forest service toilet. We sit beside the truck in the encroaching darkness and extend our feet in the meadow grasses.  We drink tea as the sunset fades in front of us.   Arcturus enters fuzzy and red to my left, and Venus brightens behind my shoulders.  There is a whistle, perhaps a pika, at the meadow’s edge.  Cool breeze sweeps from the east over my exposed thighs.  We sit on the last step of summer.

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.

Wind's ice

I lean between the haw’s branches to take a bite.  A wing of ice holds along the windward side of the branches.  The ice has built through the night and is now encrusted with snow, which still blows horizontally across the exposed ridge.  Careful of the haw’s thorns, I take a second bite of the ice blade.  It tastes like a circus snowcone, one sweetened by wind.

The Rice Paper of Fate

Turn, turn, my wheel!  All life is brief;

What now is bud will soon be leaf,
What now is leaf will soon decay;

From “Kéramos” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Leaves are dying.  In the understorey of the woods, leaves have become delicate. When I press my finger and thumb against the edges of a browned leaf of false Solomon’s seal, it crinkles then cracks to fall in fragments.  These brittle leaves are like rice paper.  Their thinned tissue, translucent now except for the sharp lines of brown veins, makes me think that fate has the texture of rice paper.

Leaves have their season.  Most plants, except for the conifers, in the woods and hills where I walk expand new leaves at the beginning of the growing season in the spring.  Those leaves have a set span of life before the deterministic processes of senescence turn on, setting a leaf’s end in a few weeks. 

A young leaf, made in a bud, initially draws nutrients from the plant that made it.  Foliage leaves transition from requiring foods made by other leaves to making their own foods and shipping the excess out to the rest of a plant.  The photosynthesis, drawing in sunlight to make food, peaks soon after a leaf has fully expanded.  Those leaves, just expanded in spring, seem greenest, turgid with life, and, undamaged by herbivores or weather, they have the perfection of a small child, who looks out without expectation about life. 

From their early photosynthetic peak, these leaves that have the life of a growing season begin to decline over the summer and into the fall. In our arid environment, the decline can be fast.  The end of spring rains brings regular summer drought, which serves as more of a signal than the cooling days of fall for fate of leaves.  In summer, leaves droop.  Some curl at the aridity.  The photosynthetic production of sugars slows.  Fewer mineral nutrients reach the leaves because they are diverted to flowers and fruits. By fall, the leaves of our woods and hills are well on the way toward rice paper.  They have stopped making new pigments for photosynthesis.  The chlorophylls that make the leaf green have worn, and the leaf fades.  Complex molecules in the leaf cells have begun to breakdown into simpler molecules that are moved from the leaves into storage regions of the plants.  In our environment, many of the plants have underground storage structures, such as rhizomes, bulbs, corms, tubers, or thick, squat caudices, or even storage roots, where molecules resorbed from dying leaves are housed along with sugars made by leaves at their peaks through the late summer, fall, and winter.  The evacuation of reusable molecules thins a leaf.

Fading and thinning.  Turning to rice paper.  The fate of a leaf.

Orchid fruits

I have a fondness for inconspicuous orchids.  These are orchids with flowers no wider than fingertips and colors as green as leaves or even as brown as shadows.  The flowering of these delicate orchids has ended in our forests, and when I walked in the hills two weeks ago I found their fruits were swelling.  When I squeezed them they were still a little soft.  On that walk I saw two kinds of inconspicuous orchids, rattlesnake plantains (Goodyera) and coral-roots (Corallorhiza).

Two weeks ago, the fruiting stalks of rattlesnake plantain stood erect and held their small green fruits to the side.  The blackened and dried fragments of the orchid petals remained like weathered ribbons at the tips of the fruits.  I slit one of the fruits with my knife to look at the seeds, which were extremely small.  Using my hand lens, I could see fine lines along the sides of the dun-colored seeds.

Further up the trail and closer to the sunny edge of the forest, there was a clump of coral-root stalks.  Each of these stalks was bearing fruits that were like fleshy, full wine botas.  These fruit flasks hung stiffly downward along the sides of the stalks.  Like the fruits of the rattlesnake plantains, the coral-root fruits had twisted bits of blackened petals at their tips.

I slit open one of the fruits and was surprised to find that the seeds were faintly yellow.  They were a little larger than the seeds of the rattlesnake plantain, but the fruits of the coral-root were also a little larger than those of the other orchid.  None-the-less, the coral-root seeds seemed delicate and wispy, which was accentuated, I suppose, by their yellowness.  With the split fruit and exposed seeds on my fingertip, I blew gently on them, and the light seeds caught the air and flew away.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been trying to find the time to revisit the woods with the fruiting stalks of the rattlesnake plantain and coral-root.  Yesterday, I walked back to them.  All green was gone from the rattlesnake plantain.  Its leaves had withered and the now brittle fruiting stalks of some had broken and hung sideways.  The dried fruits of the rattlesnake plantain had opened along lines on their sides that traced a slight curve, as if willing to twist into a helix.  Their seeds had been released.  The plump, reddish fruits of the coral-root had continued to swell in the last two weeks, and they remained fleshy rather than dried.  The fruit stalks stood tall with unopened fruits.  I thought about the anticipation of the seeds inside, how the slightest crack in those burgeoning fruits will break loose the yellow seeds, releasing them to wind and, eventually, to the shadows of soil.

Wet

The north fork of the Nooksack River, obscured from view by depth and thick conifers, rushed below us.  The clatter of the river flowed up-slope and seemed held against us by the canopy of cloud.  The river sound was as moist and cool as the gray air.  I shivered in shorts and t-shirt and pulled on a fleece sweater and anorak. 

We walked upward through forest, switching back and forth, going from patches of strawberry bramble to clumps of foamflower. Inch-tall seedlings of a conifer—each with a propeller-like ring of green cotyledons radiating atop a slim hypocotyl—stood in the brown needle duff like abandoned tops.  Also like abandoned tops were the cone-shaped and lemony yellow jelly fungi on the trunks of fallen trees.  The forest opened to a wet meadow, where a line of marsh marigolds grew along a rivulet.  We stepped lightly along the muddy trail, which turned to go up through the last trees.  Juncos swarmed in the trees and shouted, ‘Tsip tsip tsip.’ 

Knee-high blueberries made a broad cirque a field of pale green.  Towering lousewort stems tucked among the blueberries flashed spikes of light yellow flowers.  Marmots whistled shrill warnings in a boulder field below us.  We picked our way slowly over patches of rotten snow that had melted around boulders. 

The blueberries thinned.  The creamy tepals of western pasque flowers dotted the slope.  Just a few weeks ago high in the mountains above the Selway River in Idaho, these pasque flowers had globose floral buds and a few had recently opened; here in the North Cascades, the pasque flowers had already begun to fruit.  The cowlick of twisted styles in the shaggy mane of fruits held water drops.  Tiny and large, each drop reflected the white hairs of the fruits and a sliver of yellow from the sun. The sun was brief.  A wedge had opened in the clouds, allowing yellow light to spread across the cirque and around the water bubbles lodged among the hairs of the pasque flower’s fruits, and then closed, dissipating shadows.

A light rain began.  We stopped below the south face of Yellow Aster Butte and, on the leeward side of a little pinnacle of rock, tried to huddle below the wind’s chill.  We fixed cups of tea.  I held my cup in the palms of both hands and spread my cold fingers around the sides to absorb as much of the cup’s heat as possible.  The rain strengthened, and my anorak held the wet against my back.  As the rain gathered even more strength, we collected our cups and packs to return down the trail. 

When we reached treeline, the rain stopped.  By the time we were back to the trailhead, the clouds had parted, and sun shown on the peaks across the Nooksack.  We drove home in the warm evening light.