botanizing

Tonight's moon

Tonight, the moon, a hand-length at arm-length high in the sky, just topping the still green leaves of trees at dusk, shaped like a wedge of orange, is orange.

Not where he's 'sposed to be

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.

Talking

At the airport, I am in line for a cup of tea. 

“How you doing?” the man in line ahead of me asks the cashier.

The cashier hesitates. “O.k., I suppose,” he offers.  “My wife is having a baby this summer.”  There is tension in his voice.  He did not have a good night.

“Congratulations,” the man in front of me says to the cashier. 

“After that,” the cashier says, “I’d say my day is really good. Thank you.”  The cashier is now smiling.  “It’s our first child,” he goes on.  “We find out what it is next week.”

Again, I hear some worry in his voice. Is this child to be fish, reptile, or amphibian?  At six months gestation perhaps we are all reptiles.

“I didn’t want to know,” he says.  “My wife did.  Since she’s carrying it for nine months, I guess she gets what she wants.  She doesn’t want anything ambiguous.  No baby wearing yellow—you wouldn’t know what it was.  It’s our first child.  We’ve done everything in order.  Been married five years.  Got a car, a house, then a dog.  Now the baby.”

The cashier’s red hair waves over his head.  He talks fast.  Just to talk, I suppose. 

“Where you going?” he asks me.  Ohio.

“You going home?”  No.

“What you going for?” Invited to speak.

“I’m finishing my degree at [a nearby college].” He has assumed I’m a professor.

“I love my biology classes,” he says  [At the nearby college he attends, one of my former PhD students teaches in the biology department, but I don’t mention this.] 

“Did running start,” he says.  “Did chemistry that way.”  He scrunches his nose—chemistry often doesn’t smell good to biologists.  “It was hard,” he says. “But I like the chemistry that relates to biology. You know, biochemisty and . . .” His voice trails.   

He fits two corrugated sleeves over my tea and hands me the cup.  “Have a good trip and speech,” he says.

I never think about my professional talks as speeches, but the thought stays with me as I fly off to visit Ohio University.

Wheat Changes

Last night was full.  Fall had slipped into summer.  The air had the edge of chill.  I would not have called the air crisp because crisp air would have been thinner.  Last night’s air was full, smelling of wheat harvest.  I think of this as chaff air filled as it is with the detritus of harvest, the scents of crumbled brittle stalks of dried wheat, papery glumes, and the dust of growth and fruiting.  The wheat fields, so recently green, so quickly turned ochre, have been shorn.  The hills have a stubble cut.  Combines without their headers travel down the roads.

I anticipate the convergence each year of fall’s tentative steps into the summer night just as the night air thickens with the scent of chaff.

* * *

On my evening bike ride, I pass a square-angled grain elevator.  Through most of the year the elevator is quiet, although its sheet metal skin creaks in the wind.  It has been dusty by the elevator for the past couple of weeks.  Trucks have been unloading harvested wheat.  A milky tan dust blows from the wheat as flows from truck to elevator.

The elevator smelled a little odd when I rode past this evening. I thought of fermentation.  Tightly packed wheat, still a little moist, breaking down its sweet sugars in musty biochemical reactions.

When I turned at the far point of my ride to return, I could see a tall plume of smoke in the distance.  I didn’t recall the smoke when I had left town.  There is roadwork near my ride, and I assumed the smoke was from demolishing a hillside or the grinding of gravel.  As I neared town on my return, I could see the smoke was coming from the top of the grain elevator.  Then acute spikes of flame came from the top of the elevator.  The smoke darkened.  A fire truck ladder had been lifted and a weak stream of water curved to the side of the elevator.  That stream of water strengthened, shooting up toward the flaming top of the elevator, but looked weak against the surging flame.  Flame ripened—an awful orange—at the bottom of the elevator.  The smoke continued to darken and swell, twisting around, a sad shroud, enveloping the old elevator. 

I have always enjoyed the old grain elevator.  I like its character.  Now, everything has changed.

Here comes the sun

“What would you do if I sang out of tune?” John Lennon* sings as I walk into the video store.  “Would you stand up and walk out on me? Oh . . .”

“Just this one today?” the delicate young woman behind the counter asks.  She has a globe of Art Garfunkel hair.  “Phone number?”  She wears a green tee shirt that says ‘The Beatles’ above a cartoon-like picture of the band.  “Four thirty-one please.”

Then that light guitar lead, like glimpses of sun between branches of a tree, pops sharply:  “Here comes the sun . . .”

>  >  >
*See the comment below from Ford, who points out that it's really Ringo Starr singing.

If I had told the story in its fuller details it would have started like this: 
I was exhausted from fairly nonstop work over the past few days on my upcoming talk on hydrangeas, and on my way home from grocery shopping I stopped at Video Quest, a small, privately owned DVD place, for a film that would take my mind away from the talk.   When I heard “What would you do if I sang out of tune?” playing a little too loudly - sort of stridently - in the store, I was pleased.  The song was like an old friend.  Beatles songs are like old friends.  The song seemed odd, however.  I didn't recognize the voice as John Lennon's, and I wondered who the cover was by.  But there were other songs, and then came "Here Comes the Sun," and I knew they weren't covers.  It had to be John Lennon, I thought.  I thought I'd simply lost track of his voice.  But it wasn't just voice, I've apparently lost track of the Beatles.

Fours

Four Japanese women stroll.  At a flower-bed they stop to admire a tall, century plant that is in flower.  The flowering stalk is twelve feet high and topped with a cluster of tubular yellow flowers.  One young woman, who wears of green dress with a skirt like an umbrella, stands next to the plant.  She looks down, smooths the flare of her skirt, and checks the inches between her legs and the pointed tips of the leaves. Her long black hair sweeps over one of her eyes.  She extends her arm to the flowering stalk, pointing delicately her index finger so that only its tip touches the thick stalk.  A companion makes a photograph.

Four teenage boys with skateboards rustle in the shrubs at steps on the sidewalk. Branches hang along the steps where they will practice jumps.  Three of the boys tear at the branches; they twist and rip them from a small tree. They laugh and throw the branches in a pile to the side of the sidewalk.  A smallish boy with a mop of sandy hair that covers his eyes stands on the walk.  His up-ended skateboard rests on the toe of his shoe.  He looks up, shaking the hair from his eyes, to watch my approach.

Abandoned Sword

A pirate or a knight has abandoned his sword, leaving it lying on my lawn, where I found it when I mowed.  Perhaps his mother hollered, catching his attention, and he dropped the sword.

Imagination can ebb at a mother’s call, but it flows and is an easy step away.  That step into imagination—into the plot to find play—may require only that we reach for the sword in the lawn.

I reached for the sword in the grass, thinking of taking sword from stone.  It had good heft—if I were a five-year old.  I carried the sword across the land, a place where adventure has played, a place where seas have washed, where knights have dallied—I carried the sword across the marches, the border of one kingdom to another.  I placed the sword on the neighbors’ swing-set and went back to my lawn mower.

What Fell

Cherry petals rained last weekend, leaving my driveway and the road spotted white.  Maple flowers fell on Friday.  I swept them from the sidewalk.  On Saturday, cottonwood fruits fell softly, moving laterally more than downward, tracing the slightest breeze.  True rain fell last night.  Pollen was washed from the air and from my truck.  Maple flowers covered the sidewalk again this morning.

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.

The Everyday

As I drove back to town yesterday, I saw a school bus drop-off a young, red headed boy at a farm. A long, straight lane lay between the highway and a white farmhouse.  The boy shuffled along, chin tucked to his coat in the cool afternoon.  He must make this walk most days of the year, and I began to wonder whether he notices the place as he walks, or perhaps his head is filled by other thoughts (or filled by music in his ears).  I wondered how the lane and the farmhouse would change as he makes this walk for several more years, but mostly I wondered how his view of the place would change over time.

What do we do with ‘the everyday’ in our memories? 

When I was the age of the red headed boy, I lived only three blocks from school.  I remember the sun on the houses, a brightness, as I walked.  I remember an older man in the neighborhood who would stand under his buckeye tree to wait for his grand daughter.  From a little older, it’s the winters I recall.  I would walk home in the darkness from basketball practice, the cold freezing my breath, and I would identify constellations in the night sky.  Find the Big Dipper.  The Pole Star.  Find Orion.  When I was in high school, I drove my Chevrolet Impala each day to a schoolhouse situated on the prairie—really just a spot among cornfields—between the three towns of the ‘consolidated’ school district.  After school, on my drive home I would slide a tape of Bob Dylan in the 8-track and sing loudly along:  “HOW . . . many roads . . . must a man . . .walk down . . . BEFORE . . . we call . . . him a man.”