botanizing

A cottonwood idyll

Kane Creek meanders below high cliffs.  We walk out along a road that has been blasted from the cliff.  The view encourages us to look down on the course of the creek.  My gaze is drawn to the cottonwoods, whose upper branches shine feathery and white in the morning sun.  Although this morning is cool—even holding a sharp chill in the dense shade of the cliffs—I imagine the cottonwoods in a warmer season, when they offer a welcome shade beneath their clattering leaves.  There are no leaves on the trees in this season.  The cottonwoods’ leaves lie along the margin of the creek and in the erosional rills of the terraces that stand between the creek and cliffs.  The fallen leaves have mostly blackened, although occasionally I find one that has reddened as if infiltrated by sand.  I find one reddened leaf in a cage of prickly pear spines.   The cage is frosty, and the first light that comes over the eastern cliff gives the spines’ ice a blue glare.  Aside from the bluish ice, the pale, succulent green of the prickly pear skin, the blackened fallen leaves, and the white bark of the cottonwoods, this is a red world. The iron red cliffs erode to red sand, which is compacted in the terraces and relatively loose in the bed and banks of the creek.  Kane Creek appears to run red.  Even the brushy margin of tamarisk that lines the creek has a rubescent cast.

We cross the creek and climb a detrital fan of fallen stones below the cliff.  We look for petroglyphs, finding some on boulders and others that can be seen higher on the cliff face.  There have been hunters here in the past.  I suspect they may also have farmed.  On terraces below the cliffs, I imagine corn, bean and squash fields amid the boulders.  On hot days after a hunt or the cultivation of crops, I think about those people gathering under the cottonwoods along the creek for the cool water and the calming breeze.

Negro Bill Canyon

Water

We cross the creek repeatedly.  The channel meanders in the narrow bottom of the canyon.  Where the creek meets the sandstone wall of the canyon it has carved rounded alcoves.  Some of point bars have been stabilized—at least temporarily—by willows, alders, and oaks.  We walk through these thickets.  We walk up to the edge of the sandstone cliff of the canyon and cross over boulders and step down again among the sedges that line the creek.  We cross the creek.  The repeated crossings are not difficult.  The creek in this season is little more than a stride wide—in some spots it is two strides or even three.  Stones have been placed in the creek bottom to make crossings easy.  The stones are flat-topped and coated well with red sand from steps by many boots.  Neither the water’s width nor the stones matter much for the creek is only two or three inches deep.  I slip once from a stepping stone and plunge the toe of my boot into the water.   It doesn’t matter.

Stone

The color of the stone in this canyon is like the color of a person’s skin—it changes with perspective and light.  It changes with sky and time of day.  The stone’s skin can be beige or pink. Early in the morning or late in the day, the stone may be orange.

I find great delight in this sandstone.  Faces of the stone can weather smoothly and varnish black.  Fractures of the stone can be as sharp as wrinkles in an old face.   Facets of fractures would be cubist paintings—they could be vases or guitars or a nude’s face.  The facets hold different hues—orange, saffron, yellow—and their shades.  The colors seem painted by Picasso’s brush—you can see almost the brush work—the quick parallel strokes of shaded color on one side to lend the hint of form and the less clear strokes on the side of purer color where the facet seems to flatten.

The stone is cold.  We sit on a broad boulder in the amphitheater at Morning Glory bridge, but the chill is too great.  We retreat to a smaller enclosure—a space between a juniper and canyon wall—where we eat slices of summer sausage on savory crackers and gouda cheese on slices of honey crisp apple.  I am soon chilled and stiff from sitting on stone.  I shuffle awkwardly from the cold as we begin to walk down the canyon.

Canyon

This canyon opens to a larger canyon, which belongs to the Colorado River.   Steep, high walls follow the sinuous course of the Colorado.  Negro Bill Canyon is an opening in the Colorado River’s sandstone façade.  I would like to say that Negro Bill Canyon opens to the Colorado River.  Actually, it opens to a bend in busy Utah state highway 128 and a recently “improved” parking lot.  Beyond the highway, a thicket of tamarisk stands between the canyon mouth and the river.

The canyon has a small, narrow bottom. This bottom has lush sedge sweeps broken by boulders or sand bars.  The canyon wall curves to the bottom like a bulging belly.  There are high flat walls of black varnish or streaks of varnish that look like dumped buckets of coral red, salmon pink, maroon and shades between and beyond.  Above all of this is a sinuous rim, where the stone seem twisted around to be topped in turbans.

Sky

The slit of sky in the canyon is elusive.  It is too slim to be portentous.  Yet we watch the sky for signs of rain and time. We watch the sky change through the day.  The morning blue sky is cloudless and hopeful.  Our destination offers a dim gray sky that leaves no shadows, which is not a sign for dalliance.  Later, after we have walked a mile on terrace above the creek and below the alcove-cut walls, we find that blue sky has returned with cirrus fibratus clouds—a sign of rain but not too soon.   The canyon sky, no matter the color or clouds, is crossed by ubiquitous contrails; these serve as umbilici to civilization.

The sky mirrors the creek.  Each is a narrow band.  Each framed by stone.  Each curves along the canyon’s course.  For just a moment, where stone stills the stream and the canyon frames the pool, the water becomes sky.

Thicket

In a box branch of a canyon, we make our way through an oak thicket.  We must crouch to make our way along the faint trail of the thicket.  We hold back branches of the oaks from our faces to pass.

I hear steps across the creek.  Hooves thump.  Two deer.   They are slowed by the intermeshed branches of the oaks.  This would be the perfect spot for a mountain lion to ambush deer. 

When I was first in this canyon in 1978, we found a dead mountain lion.  It was early spring then, and we were exploring for plants on the sides of the canyon.   There was fresh growth of grasses, and their bright green leaves were long and their tips recurved.  Among the grasses we found the matted carcass—yet still with tawny brown fur—of the mountain lion.  It had probably died during the winter and might have lain for a month or more under snow.

Today, we have followed the fresh tracks of another mountain lion into this box branch of the canyon.  As we move slowly through the oak thicket —catching on branches, tripping on tangles of dried grass—I wonder whether the mountain lion watches my stumbles.

Thundering cliff

We’ve rented a house in Moab, Utah, for a few days.  On our first day, we drive up the Colorado River to Professor Valley to hike.  Although there was sun in the morning, clouds have come, and they hang close to the mesa-tops by the time we arrive at the trailhead.   A few raindrops fall as we shoulder our packs.  We walk over the sand and cobble hills and along a creek bed in a light mist.  Blackened cottonwood leaves that are spotted with mold lie like shingles on the creek margin.  Skeletons of last season’s penstemons and blazing stars, weathered to beige and dried to stiffness, stand along the creek.  The Indian rice grass—its leaves curved like scythes—has delicate fruit stalks that hold nothing—its ellipsoidal fruits have long fallen.

I have difficulty finding the trail, and we wander over hills and through ravine bottoms looking to intersect it.  Eventually, I see the ridgetop where I expect the trail. and we work toward it.  It is work to walk up the hills, then down, around junipers that block the ravine bottoms, over the bouldery edges of the ravine, and up the final ridge.  We find the trail.  We follow coyote tracks.  There are large prints and small—perhaps a mother and pup.

We climb among the iron-red hills.  A canyon has deepened below us, and hoodoos stand close on ridges above us.  Clouds have thickened and descended over the mesa-tops to obscure their high faces.  We are perhaps a mile from our destination and have entered the bottom of the cloud, where the mist is more persistent and more chilling. 

I hear a crack of thunder—sharp, then rumbling.  I look toward it—expecting lightning—half expecting the dark face and puffed cheeks of a storm god to look at us from the pass we are trying to reach.  Instead, I see a red cloud.  It expands from a high cliff face across the canyon from us.  The thunder was rock fall.  A slab has broken from the cliff and tumbled into rocks below, raising the loud crack, the cloud of red dust, and the rumble of falling stones. We watch the stones fall down a steep, narrow shoot in the fan of stone below the cliff face. How long does it last?  Long enough for my heart rate to raise and beat hard and fast.  A few seconds.  The dust cloud expands and dissipates in the mist.  We can see the oblong scar where the rock broke loose.  We see also the darker red trail of disturbed stone where the stones tumbled.

We continue to walk upward, but I am now very conscious of the cliffs directly above us.  I look from one detrital shoot to another where rocks have fallen repeatedly over the centuries.  How often do rocks fall?  How often do cliff faces fragment and send room size boulders tumbling down.  I look among the huge boulders that stand along the trail—each has fallen at some time and tumbled from the cliffs above us.  I wonder whether—if I heard another thunderous crack above me and saw stones coming down toward us—we could run for protection behind one of these large boulders.

Cloud driving

We have been driving through days filled by clouds.  Soon after we left home, we reached the margin of the plateau above the confluence of the Clearwater and Snake Rivers.  The valley of the rivers was filled with clouds, and the midday sun above them suffused the gauzy cloud body with yellow.  A hard yellow shine reflected from the upper arcs of some cloud billows.  The mill in the valley pumped smoke into the cloud.  The smoke seemed almost the source of the cloud mass, which was most dense and dark around the mill.  The smoke billows had brown shadows, and their sunlight was sulfurous.

We drove through mountains where the clouds lay like seas that spread across the sky to cover all or the peaks and ridgetops.  Among other mountains. the clouds meandered like rivers along the bases of ridges. 

Clouds hung on meadows and stood on willow tips above wetlands.  Old barns sagged it seemed under the mass of cloud.

We drove in and out of fog, slowing as needed or speeding up as allowed by cloud. 

It was nearly the end of our second day of driving before we saw the unobscured tops of mountains.  These were the round-topped peaks of the Black Pine Mountains, which stood on an ochre- and winter green-colored plain amid other nearby clouded ranges.  Their peaks and sinous side ridges caught an orangish-yellow light of the late day that edged through a pass of blue sky between broad, charcoalish clouds. 

Low clouds slept at the foot of the Black Pine Mountains, where the landscape rose between ranges.  We drove toward that rise of land, and soon we were in cloud.  Mist gathered on the windshield and our wipers, set to sweep periodically, made a squeaky scrape as they wiped away the drops of clouds.

Snow

As I lay in bed this morning, after the radio had come on, I listened to the list of school closures and could tell where the snow overnight had been heaviest.  There were towns along the northern edge of the Olympic Peninsula and the northwestern most part of Washington, towns on the central coast just south of the Peninsula, and towns near the eastern end of the Columbia Gorge.  The schools were open in our area.  We had received only three inches of snow during the night.

I shoveled the driveway before going to work.  The snow was powdery and light.  It was easily scooped and pushed.

Watching the snow fall was one of my primary occupations through the afternoon as I worked at home with a computer on my lap.  The snowfall was heavy and continuous, except for a 15 or 20 minutes near 3.00 pm when the snowstorm had a respite.  After the break, the snowfall became heavier.

I looked forward to evening.  Darkness is different during a snowfall.  Light becomes caged between snowy ground and cloud-covered sky.  Street light reflects from both snowy ground and cloud to create a curious luminescence.  Unlike daylight, this snow light surrenders shadow, which makes it feel depth-less.  To walk at night in snow light, as a heavy snow falls, is to enter a pointillistic landscape in which one’s vision softens.  The snow, when as large as large as today, is dark, and it seems as if night itself has fractured and the darkness falls in flakes.

Fire

White trees stand on a ridgetop.  For a moment I think the trees and surrounding ground are covered in fresh snow.   The fall days have, however, been far too warm and dry for snow.  It must, I think, be the light—which is now growing low beyond the hills—that has made the trees white.  As I look at the trees, I realize they are neither ‘full’ nor conical as I would expect for spruce and Douglas fir.  The white trees are thin trunks.  They are skeletons stripped of foliage and branches.

 After we round a bend in the river, we see smoke rise from the forested flank of the hill at the end of the river’s reach.  There is a forest fire.  I realize that the white trees on the ridge top have been burned—their lightness and high albedo is surely a consequence of having their bark burned away to reveal the more reflective surface of pale wood.

We stop opposite where the fire burns on a hillside across the river.  Much of the hill’s high flank has burned.  Most of the trees in the burn are now boughless and consist only of trunk.  The high, burned flank looks open and airy even in the obscuring smoke.   The active core of fire, which is neither broad nor raging, is about halfway down the hill.  We cannot see flames, although the smoke that rises from the core glows orange.  Even though the fire is across the river from us, we can hear, above the sound of the water, the pop of resinous wood as trees burn.

 Fires in forests of the Selway drainage must occur almost annually.  Perhaps most years many start.  Most of these must be small—limited in acreage and days—and very few must be large.  Few stretches of forest along the river, where I have walked, lack signs of fire.  Blackened scars are common on the trunks of living trees and hollow bowls of burned-out trunks are hardly less common.  Some drainages above the river consist of old black snags of trees and remain largely barren of undergrowth.  These most devastating burns are startling.  They demonstrate the awesome subtractive power of forest fires, but they provide also ecological opportunity. 

 I do not think about the ecology of fire in these natural communities as either good or bad; I can do that only when I add humans to the communities or to the broader set of ecological relationships.  As I stand across the river from the fire today, I can feel safe from it—at least in a cautious manner.  Yet I can also look responsibly ahead to realize the potential danger and force of a fire in a forest.  I think of that danger sometimes when I travel deeply into a forest along some narrow, rocky road in the dry days of August.

We might have camped today at the end of the Selway road, but the smoke from the forest fire blows upriver through the campsite.  Instead of remaining close to the fire, we drive back down the river a few miles, where we expect to be well beyond the reach of smoke and fire, even if the winds this night should shift.

Up the river with Ray

After we rise in the morning, I fix tea water and a breakfast of eggs and sausage for everyone.  We clean-up the campsite, and disperse to prepare our packs for a walk up the Selway River.  Ray, as he walks down the hill from the campground’s pit toilet, announces, “I read a poem by W. S. Merwin while on the privy.”  Debbie laughs.  “Ray,” I say, “that sounds like the first lines of a poem.”   

Soon, Ray shoulders his pack, grabs his pole, and walks to the trailhead.  A few minutes later, Debbie and Peter depart.  Adrian and I continue to pack and, then, we also shoulder our backpacks to walk up the river.  We walk for nearly three hours and go a little more than three miles.  

Debbie, Peter, and Ray lie on a point bar, where they bask in the hot afternoon sun after a swim in the chilly Selway, when Adrian and I arrive.  We chat through the remainder of the afternoon about the poems of William Stafford, Theodore Roethke, and Inger Christensen.  

Ray says, “Ouzels sound to me like change jangling in your pocket.”  Soon, as he sits with his back to the river, we hear the jangling call of a bird as it flies upriver.  Ray swiftly tilts his head to catch the call.  “Hear that?” he says, “It’s an ouzel.”  We always enjoy the ouzels on the Selway.  We’ve watched them dive from boulders to water at some campsites.  At other sites, we have waited pensively for those dives when the ouzels were contented simply to do knee-bends on riverside stones.  I wait, too, for Ray to write a jangling poem about the behaviors of ouzels as he has done for salmon and wolverines.  

As the afternoon becomes evening, we gather firewood, and Ray starts a fire on the point bar that will be our campsite.  We reconnoiter spots around the fire—expecting the wind to go either up river or down—and put our sleeping pads on the sand around the fire where we hope that smoke will not go.  

In the darkness, Ray reads aloud from the collected poems of Theodore Roethke.  He asks the rest of us to each read a stanza of Roethke’s poem “The Rose” and, by the light of our headlamps, we read.  Debbie begins:  “There are those to whom place is unimportant, / But this place, where sea and fresh water meet, / Is important . . .”  

This place, the Selway River, is important.  By walking this river over the years we have built of steps our history in this place.  Point bars have become the places of stories.  The river’s flow, its sinuous channel, and its rippled reflections of light have become poems.  

When we finish reading Roethke’s “The Rose,” accompanied by the rush of the river and the chirruping of tree frogs, we leave the fire to head to our tents for the night.  I think about this line from Roethke’s poem: “It is here that the poet claims to find his true self.”  I am not a poet, and I am uncertain about true selves, but many claims reside here for me.  I find on the Selway River solace, calm, and beauty as well as good friends, Ray’s stories, and nights of poetry.

* * *

The photograph of the group around the fire was taken by Adrian.

Luck and other facades

In the quiet, early mornings, I have been walking in downtown Durham, North Carolina.  Few others have been on the street as I walked.  A man in a suit, headed one morning toward a bank, nodded as he passed me and said hello.  Two police officers, passing in their cruiser, watched me make photographs.  Two men crossed the street behind me and called out to another who drove by in a garbage truck and then called out to the driver of a city vehicle that passed.  Those few encounters occurred on successive mornings.  This downtown has felt a little empty, a little forlorn.

Modern travels drop one quickly in new places—about which one knows little.  A morning walk offers few insights and many questions.  As I walked in Durham a few boldly designed buildings from the first half of the last century evoked earlier prosperity.  Numerous empty buildings and open lots spoke loudly about the loss of prosperity, at least in the downtown. 

What has been most striking about Durham is the proximity of the tobacco warehouses and processing plants to downtown. In a modern city, the industry would be at the margins, not next door to banks and stores.  The structure of Durham has made it feel from another time.

At one time this downtown must once have been an active place.  I have imagined workers passing from neighborhood homes through the downtown on their way to work in the brick establishments of tobacco.  Those workers must surely have gathered at cafes for lunch or sat with lunch buckets on surrounding streets.  Many must have stopped in bars and other joints after work.  The closeness of the tobacco plants to the downtown must have created a tight community.  Did this downtown smell richly of tobacco from the warehouses and processing plants as well as from the cigarettes of workers at midday?

The calm of my early morning walks has made me wonder when the tight community dispersed.  Was it the disappearance of tobacco or some other loss in the community that led prosperity away from this downtown?  Not all prosperity has disappeared—the buildings once occupied by tobacco are now boutiques and restaurants.  Tobacco has become heritage in Durham.  The facades of the old tobacco remain.  They have been bright in the early sun and have made me wonder about the stories behind the facades.

Cloud Chamber

Gray-brown mud is stiff under my feet, although the trail is not yet icily hard; frost has infiltrated the surface of the mud, leaving give to deeper layers.  The mud is the firmest part of the world. 

Fog has descended.  Where light would be, there is now texture.  I feel the cloud sweep across my cheeks.  The cloud is not like mist; instead, it is particulate.  Alpha particles, I think.  My mind sweeps the forest into a cloud chamber.  This nucleated cloud could consist of alpha particles, bound protons and neutrons, zigging and zagging in a kind of Brownian motion, taking them forth and back at sharp angles until those lost atomic nuclei bang my cheeks.  I look for their signature paths:  broad, straight streaks as the alpha particles rebound and short, curved arcs for electrons.  There are no light streaks in this fog, only a stretch of imagination.