botanizing

Grand Valley: Labors for Consumption

WHEEEEEEEWWWWWW.  A hard, shrill whistle blows across the desert.  I am reminded of the whistle that blew at 7.00 a.m., noon, and 6.00 p.m., in the small town where I was reared.  That small town whistle framed the workday and set our meal times.  Breakfast to prepare for work, 7.00 a.m. whistle; dinner to feed the day’s exertions, noon whistle; and the time to let the shoulders sag and have supper, 6.00 p.m. whistle.  I recall that schedule from the long days, the 48-hour week, I worked as a teenager in a nursery, where planting, cultivating, irrigating, harvesting, and shipping all seemed to require exhausting, physical labor.

I labor now, 30 years after that nursery job, in the study of plants and look for research materials as I walk on a scree slope of shadscale and junipers at the mouth of a canyon in the Book Cliffs of southeastern Utah.  The whistle in the desert makes me look at my watch, and there is some coincidence, I guess, that it blows at noon.  The whistle, however, surely calls from some pressure other than manual labor. 

Repeated blasts of the long whistle blow from the Westwater Compressor Station, part of the expanding architecture of our energy consumption. The Westwater Compressor Station, a fenced acre or so that recently replaced a plat of desert, pumps natural gas from beneath the Grand Valley.  The whistle must come from one of the natural gas dehydrators or reboilers or from a glycol still vent hooked-up to a thermal oxidizer.  It might emanate from one of the storage tanks, which needed to let off a little pressure.  On my way out of the Book Cliffs, I stop to gaze through the fence at the Compressor Station.  There are diesel engines and smoke stacks, some of which spew nearly 76 tons of nitrous oxide each year. There are also metal buildings, a mobile office, and a pea green portable toilet.   I wave to the lone workman on the site as he walks toward the toilet.

There are about 16 miles between the Book Cliffs and Interstate 70.  That span, which I drive slowly to enjoy the desert, is the bottom of the Grand Valley.  The dry plain of Grand Valley has widely scattered junipers, none of which is more than six feet tall, except on the hills, and the junipers are the tallest of the vegetation.  Here and there a greasewood or sand sage stands thigh high.  Otherwise, the ubiquitous shadscale, standing pale, even silvery in the sun, is little more than ankle high.  The mariposa or sego lilies are now in full bloom.  They have bloomed this year in large patches, growing where the purple ground of spring fresh cheat grass is thickest, in a mix of white and pink flowers—white when they start then aging to pink.  There is wiry mountain peppergrass and bastard toadflax, both white-flowered, and red in the tufts of Indian paintbrush and mounds of claret cactus.  Yellow wands of prince’s plumes wave in the gullies of the gray hills.  These hills, the Grassies, Cisco Mesa, Bread Knolls, Windy Mesa, and others without names on my map, disrupt the plain.  So, too, do the storage tanks that dot the landscape.

Every desert is rich, and this one also has fossil fuels. Gas pipelines cross the valley.  Some pipelines are shallowly buried, but others make black lines across the land.  Pipes with round valves rise from the plain. Roads, already common from the generation of Uranium exploration, are becoming more common as the oil and gas wells proliferate.  Each well has a tank or several, buildings, and old pick-up trucks, where pumps or rocking wells or hump-backed pipes protrude from the ground.  Night Fox Drilling. Running Foxes Petroleum. Dusty white trucks of Desperado Trucking Inc. run the dirt roads to the storage tanks.  Despite the signs at each claim that offer legal status, there is a slight connotation of sly connivance in those names that suggest businesses operating at the edge of convention and legality—as if this were all a stealthy night harvest by bandits.  The connivance in the conversion of this desert to storage tank stitched by pipelines is our consumption habit. 

At the interstate, I drive west for a few miles to an exit that offers another dirt road.  At a large mound of gravel placed by the side of the dirt road, I stop to fix lunch and tea.  The wind is strong, and I set up my stove behind a shelter of plant presses.  The purplish cheat  grass throbs in the gusts of wind.  As I wait for the water to boil, I notice that numerous white tanker trucks have turned from the interstate and driven past me on the dirt road that goes back toward the Book Cliffs.  The largely unmarked trucks—some have writing too small to read on the doors—are all nearly identical, probably bought at the same time and relatively recently in the rush to harvest fossil fuels in the Grand Valley. One after another the tanker trucks pass, coming from the interstate and heading toward the Book Cliffs or following the opposite route.  I begin to time their passage:  one tanker truck every two minutes.  What does the desert become when the tanker trucks are as common as the Lark Sparrows? 

In the cooling wind, the canister of stove fuel empties before my tea water boils.  My tea made with lukewarm water is not satisfying. I look up from the tea to the Book Cliffs. The desert in the Grand Valley rises in plumes of dust, tail feathers for tanker trucks.

[This was 15 May.]

National park

[As an aside, I notice that Typepad, the host service for this weblog, seems to have added a new fuzz factor to its reproduction of photographs.  Every picture I now upload is reproduced here with far less sharpness and clarity than the originals and with diminished quality relative to what Typepad offered a few weeks ago.]

Moonshadows

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.

Near Harvard, Idaho

Spring Light

Histories of Wilderness

“No one has written a history of any wilderness area,” my friend said.  I thought about this for a couple of minutes, trying to come up with an exception. We were sitting at our campfire.  The night chill kept us huddled near the flames. “People have written about the concept of wilderness, and they’ve written about the history of the Wilderness Act; but there is no history of any particular wilderness area.”  A river behind us flowed gently from a wilderness area. “They are so new,” she said.  “It’s only because they’ve been in existence since 1964.  In a hundred years, these wilderness areas will have histories.”

As I rolled in my sleeping bag in the night, I thought about the absent histories of wilderness areas, and, the next day, as I walked in a wilderness area, I stepped on and over and through notions of its history. 

The Wilderness Act, passed by Congress in 1964, established a system of wilderness areas.  These were located mostly in the American West, where roadless public land remained.  The congressional act offered the following definition of wilderness:

“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this chapter an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value.”

“[W]here man himself is a visitor who does not remain” must be a place with a holey history, I thought as I walked.  I thought narrowly about history as something inherently human—I wanted to think that way.  The geology, biology, storms, and fires and such are features of a place, and they change over time.  When stories of those physical and biological features are written they are sometimes called histories, but I wanted to distinguish those geologies, biologies, climatologies, and catastrophes from the idea of history as a record of human experience.  History and wilderness areas were incongruous in the bright sun in which I walked.  Wilderness areas must, I thought as I shuffled down the trail, lack human histories. The primary effect of “forces of nature” in shaping wilderness areas as well as the human transience at the center of the Wilderness Act should set those designated landscapes outside of history.

My thoughts had snags. 

The first snag was human prehistory.  People of indigenous American cultures may have had significant lives in what are now wilderness areas.  They were people who were likely to have lived differently on the landscape than we do now and they lived in what can be called ‘prehistory’—in a cultural time before writing.  There was undoubtedly prehistoric human activity in what are now wilderness areas and some of that activity may have substantially modified the environment. When we ‘dig’ into the times and effects of those indigenous cultures, what is written might be called archaeology.  How those prehistoric cultures affected the environments of what are now wilderness areas raises great questions.   Questions about those prehistoric effects on what we regard as natural environments were on my mind as I walked in the wilderness.  How do we know where the effects of prehistory ended and historical effects on landscape began? 

My thoughts snagged also on the knowledge that our current wilderness areas may have encompassed significant historical populations.  There had been trappers, hunters, loggers, and miners of European descent for well over a century in most of the landscapes that were designated as wilderness areas.  There were also less transient human populations in some of the wilderness areas—they had held once ‘permanent’ populations centered at least loosely in communities.  These historical populations may have dwindled as resources slimmed or economies changed, and the people largely left what became wilderness areas before road systems were built.  Their stories could be written, and they would legitimately be histories of landscapes that became wilderness areas.

The story of a wilderness area would have its geology, biology, climatology, and natural catastrophes, but it would also have a prehistory and a history up to the time of the Wilderness Act.  Since its designation as a wilderness area, how much history could a particular landscape have gained?  How much historical human activity could a wilderness have and still be wilderness?  We will want to write histories of wilderness areas, and I am unsure what those histories will mean for wilderness.

Irrigation

The mass of snow

I think about painters’ concerns with mass.  How should one depict a muscle’s bulk or the weight of breasts?  I am in deep snow and deeper cloud through which snow is falling. The bulky, wet snow makes cold friction, wearying my steps, making each heavy.   

In this cloud, there are no shadows, which are essential to the perception of painterly mass, yet in this forest, in which depth has been fogged, I sense the mass of snow.   This is partly from the displacement of expectation.  It’s the way the boughs of Douglas firs are pendulous.  Their angle of repose is too steep.  I touch a low bough.  Its covering pad of snow leaves only a fringe of deep green needles.  The bough waivers ponderously – cautious, perhaps, of slipping in the snowy air.

High in the Douglas firs, the branches curve downward  under the snow to make question marks.  In a flurry, we have snow queries.  This is now a forest of a thousand questions.  All might ask about the weight of snow.  Bent under the emphasis of snow, a branch might ask when the snow will fall.

It falls. Frosty detritus falling through tree needles is like the clatter of paper. THUNK . . . THunk . . .thunk.  I turn quickly.  A rift in the fog moves uphill, and snow clumps fall upslope.  THUNK is the mass of snow.

Cornice tree

Bennington, Vermont