botanizing

Desert rain

We drive a desert highway in the rain.  Water sprays from the wheel wells of on-coming cars. The truck feels as if it floats.  Rivulets of water run down the highway, following the straight channels where traffic has grooved the lanes.  The straightness is human; no natural river would run like these rivulets.   Nature would curve, evade, find the easy slope, and erode slowly any obstacle.

Amado

It’s Sunday morning, but there are no people at the Universal Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ, Inc in Amado, Arizona.  The Church’s empty parking lot is still moist from rain in the night.

The heat of the southern Arizona morning is intensifying.  Humidity amplifies the heat.  Despite the heat and humidity, I would like a cup of tea.

We have stopped in Amado for tea.  At a rustic minimart, the kind of community store that predates well the current craze of interstate exit minimarts which blaze neon and sport many islands of gas pumps.  The pair of pumps here are old.  I don’t see any tea water in the store and ask the cashier whether he has any.  “We have coffee,” he tells me.  “There’s hot water in the tap,” he says, “but it’s probably not good enough for tea.”  I pass on the hot tap tea but buy ice for our cooler.  From the cooler, I fish a cool can of sparkling water to drink instead of tea.

From Amado, we drive across a desert plain of ocotillo and scrub where birds sing.  Rabbits start among the cholla as we approach.  Adrian catches a glimpse of a javelina.  We drive into mountains. 

In a lush wash bordered by oaks and poison ivy, young seedlings of a Mentzelia stand about two inches tall.  These may be Mentzelia isolata, a species that reaches its northernmost distribution in the mountains of southern Arizona.  We also find a lovely cloak fern, perhaps Notholaena lemmoni, tucked among the thick layers of dried oak leaves and strands of club moss on the shaded higher banks of the wash.

Exiting a ring of hell

It’s about 8.00 pm when I get to Phoenix, where I will spend the night and then pick-up A at the airport in the morning.  I don’t have a destination in the city, except to find a hotel for the night, which should not be difficult.  I enter the city from the north on Interstate 17 amid thick and fast traffic and make my way to Interstate 10, heading east toward the airport, where I expect to find a hotel nearby but do not.  After looping through the airport, I find my way back to Interstate 10 going west, where I realize that the roadway is sunken and prevents me from seeing businesses at the exits, and there are no signs near the exits promoting hotels.  The exit for Interstate 17 comes, and I take it to the south, but still there are no hotels.  This highway loops back to Interstate 10, and I find myself once again approaching the airport.  I am driving in circles.  The heat of the city overwhelms the truck’s air conditioner.    I take the next exit for Interstate 17, and this time go northward.  I imagine myself returning to Flagstaff, which would take a couple of hours although the hotels would be visible and the air cooler, but spot finally a Motel 6.  After an hour of circling and searching, I exit from an inner ring of hell to the cool comfort of chain hotel's room.

Two evenings

I am again on the road. 

In a high valley between red mesas and conifer-covered mountains in southern Utah, I find a campsite among apple trees.  I park in the shade between two of the trees.  My site has a roughly weathered picnic table, where I sit to work on my notes.  There is a horse pasture behind me.  Two horses stand head to butt in classic horse pose, each swishing his or her tail to keep the flies away from the face of the other.

In the evening a young man leads the two horses across the pasture.  Another horse, two mules, and a young woman, who carries an infant, also follow the man.  He leads the two horses through a gate out of the pasture into an irrigated alfalfa field.  The third horse would follow them, but the man hesitates at the gate.  “Stay,” he says firmly to the lone, third horse.  The horse stops and stares at the man.  The horse whinnies, but I sense it is not an agreeable response.  One of the other horses responds.  The young woman’s hair is bright yellow in the late evening light.  She carries the infant on her hip slowly back across the pasture without waiting for the man.  The mules remain to forage near me. When the sun sets the mules bray.  This is long.  Each bray has many pieces—a squeal of drawn breath and barks of forced breath.

Mountain bluebirds forage in the grass of the horse pasture.  I watch them flit from the tufts of grass to the fence that stands behind me.

I listen through the evening to the irrigation—the cook-shook cook-shook cook-shook cook-shook of the sprinkler heads turning to an end and then repeating the motion.  The irrigation waters the same spot of alfalfa from the time I arrive in the evening until I leave the next morning. 

*

The next evening I camp among ponderosa pines at nearly 8000 feet in elevation on the Kaibab Plateau in Arizona.  I have camped before under these same trees.  This is not uncommon in my travels—I often return to camping spots.  When the sun sets below the horizon, the tops of the pines brighten with a harder yellow light.  A swarm of pygmy nuthatches moves from lit treetop to lit treetop.  They are restlessly in motion—hopping round the circumference of the branches as they peck at the bark for food.   A hairy woodpecker pounds a trunk behind me.  There is also an elegant flycatcher that I do not recognize, although I am impressed by the orange underside of its tail.

As the cool darkness comes down, I climb into the back of the truck and into my sleeping bag.  I can hear traffic on the highway that is about a mile away.  Using the light of my headlamp, I take out my notebook and begin to write.

Collecting the new Mentzelia

I stay close behind Melissa.  She walks up the desert wash in Chaco sandals and a skirt.  Her steps are swift and balanced.  It is difficult for me to match her pace. She walks through the creek.  I plant one huge hiking boot at the creek’s edge and look for a stepping stone at midstream—which I don’t see—then stretch my stride to reach as far across the creek as possible.  Melissa, who works for the National Park Service on vegetation management, found last fall a new population of our likely new species of Mentzelia.  Today, she’s taking us to the population.  Melissa had been working with her vegetation survey crew to gather data on the effects of tamarisk removal.  We arrived as she and her crew were finishing lunch.  Melissa put down her lunch box to lead Wendy, Max, Heidi, and I the half mile or so up the side canyon to the location where she found the new population of the new Mentzelia. 

Seeing the population will provide me with important details about the kinds of environments used by this unusual subshrubby lineage of mentzelias.  I want also to collect some additional individuals so that we can understand better the variation characteristic of this new species.

“It’s along here,” Melissa says and slows to look at the gravelly hump along the spine of the creek’s channel  “There it is,” she says a moment later and points to the plant.  The Mentzelia is growing in compacted gravel and sand in a shallow bank along the creek.  It’s an odd place for a Mentzelia of this sort—we usually find relatives of this species growing on steep slopes of loose rocks or on knolls that have gypsum crusts.  “There’s another one along here,” Melissa says.  I look up the creek and then see the other, smaller plant a few feet from the first one.  

Wendy, Max, and Heidi arrive, and we all admire the new mentzelias.  “We should expect them on these slopes,” I say, and we disperse to climb the loose, mud-colored stone of Muav limestone.  Wendy is above me on a steep slope when I begin to find additional plants.  She climbs to one of the plants that is growing on a stack-like outcrop of stone, and here she finds a single open flower.  We had not expected open flowers in this population, which we expect to flower later in the summer like other closely related subshrubby mentzelias.

As I walk along the slope above the creek, I find more individuals of the Mentzelia.  They appear to be most frequent in the angles where stone outcrops meet the talus slope, which probably offers some advantage in increasing the amount of water available.

Wendy sits in the wash to press our collections of the Mentzelia.  We talk about the oddness of finding the plants growing in the unstable wash, which has the advantage of offering more water than the steep, talus slopes but would be prone to scouring floods that could wash the plants away.  As we talk about the possibilities of the plant’s seeds to germinate and establish themselves in the wash, I look down and see five young seedlings of the Mentzelia.  These are young plants that probably germinated earlier in the spring.

Finding the Mentzelia population has given me a huge energy boost—which I need because we are soon expected at the rafts to continue our trip downriver this afternoon.  I fill my hat with water and put it on my head.  We begin swiftly to walk down the wash.

[this essay dates to 4 May]

On the water

I am not easy on water, having never learned to swim, flunking even the lessons in floating that I had as a small child at the swimming pool in Ft. Madison.  The thought of being on water makes me apprehensive. 

As the boatmen finish rigging the gear on our rafts, the rest of us find life vests.  We don and attempt to fasten the vests, which are too tight or too loose.  We adjust for each other the various straps until each of us, taking a deep breath, is able to snap our plastic buckles in place, and, then, breathing out, we feel our chests and ribs constricted by the now snug vests.  Just before we board the rafts, the boatmen give us instructions on what to do if we are thrown in a rapid into the water and how they will rescue us.   I waddle toward my assigned raft.  I feel Frankensteinian—that is, like that man’s constructed monster—made of cast-off and miscast parts—my arms are propped outward acutely by the life vest, and both arms and legs are enclosed in hobbling layers of stiff, synthetic fabrics and raingear.

We motor down the cool morning river.  The first small rapid splashes us with cold water.  I shiver and wonder at the cold ahead.  We stop soon—only a mile or so from the put-in at Lee’s Ferry.  

This trip through the Grand Canyon with the National Park Service is to conduct vegetation surveys and make collections of plants.  Lori, one of our leaders, introduced us yesterday to the projects for the trip, which are centered on the invasive shrub known as tamarisk or salt cedar.  Tamarisk was introduced to North America from its native range in Eurasia and Africa in the 19^th century.  During the dust bowl years on the Great Plains, tamarisk were planted to create windbreaks to limit soil erosion.  Since then, tamarisk have spread to the rivers of the southwestern US, where they form thick bands along the edges of rivers and washes, out-competing native trees, such as cottonwoods, and changing dramatically the vegetation of riparian zones.  Tamarisk are common along the Colorado River, and they became especially prevalent in the Grand Canyon after the Glen Canyon Dam was built upriver.  The dam regulated water flow, eliminating seasonal flooding of riparian zones in the Grand Canyon, which allowed the proliferation of tamarisk and various other changes in canyon ecology.  Lori tells us that the Park Service has not attempted to manage tamarisk along the Colorado River, but they are working to control its spread in side canyons (see this link).  Our trip is devoted partly to surveys of side canyons where tamarisk has been removed to determine the consequences of the removal efforts—whether tamarisk or native vegetation is returning—and monitor for the spread of tamarisk. 

A second facet of our trip is to survey for the presence and spread of tamarisk beetles.  A few years ago, biologists in Utah began to experiment with a natural predator of tamarisk—a beetle (Diorhabda carinulata) that forages and reproduces only on tamarisk—as a means of controlling population spread of the invasive plant.  The tamarisk beetles have moved south from their release points and have settled on tamarisk populations in the Grand Canyon.  The Park Service is interested in studying the spread of the tamarisk beetles and whether they can help limit the tamarisk invasion.  Our crew has been armed with insect nets and instructed on sampling for tamarisk beetles and beetle eggs.  At our first stop along the river, a team from our rafts samples for beetles using the insect nets, which they sweep across the branches of the tamarisk.

My mission on this trip is to collect plants, and I am joined by colleagues, Wendy and Max.  Wendy has been studying the flora of the Grand Canyon for many years, and she knows intimately the place and the plants.  Max, too, knows the plants of the region exceptionally well.  While much of my research involves plants of the Colorado Plateau and more generally the intermountain western US, I do not know the flora of this region like Wendy and Max.  I feel like an amateur in the face of their floristic knowledge.  While Wendy and Max marvel at a sedge that grows near the water’s edge, I wander the gravelly bar.  I find a lovely Orobanche (broomrape), which Wendy tells me is unusual this far northeast in the Grand Canyon.  I find also a population of Cronquist’s blazing star (Mentzelia cronquistii).  The blazing stars are my reason for being here.  I have been studying the evolution of blazing stars for several years, and Wendy and I believe that we have discovered a new species of blazing star in the Grand Canyon.  This trip through the Grand Canyon will give us a chance to explore for additional populations of the new blazing star and give me the opportunity to sample the diversity of the various mentzelias that are here.

We stop next at Cathedral Wash, where Apache’s plume and prince’s plume are in bloom, and a hackberry in bright leaf has fruits.  As the day edges onward, our stops to survey for tamarisk beetles become quicker, and there is little time to botanize.

The raft moves calmly on smooth water.  I grow comfortable with the boat and the water.  We are quiet in the afternoon, after shade descends on the channel.   The shaded river has a wiggly blue path at midstream where sky and water, in a way, meet.   Our course down the blue path is bordered by deep, rufous browns and viridian.   Where the river manages a reflection of a sunlit cliff face, the water shimmers with orange. 

We enter evening with a series of rapids.  I grab a firm hold on a rope that secures our gear (and hopefully me).  Each rapid begins with rolling arcs of shiny water—I am enamoured by the curve of water, and I would stay here on the rapid’s tongue where the water bends and shines like metal—and then we plunge into the holes where white, shattered water curves high, rising over the front of the raft, and back at us.  The frigid splatter hits like shots, and we twist away, recoiling tensely, at each strike.

In the mid day heat, I had taken off my rain gear, allowing the rest of my clothes to become soaked.  In late afternoon, when shade descended on the river, I grew cold and put on again my rain gear, which served to keep the cool air and chilling spray of water away from my skin, but the rain gear held a clammy cold from the wet clothes tightly against me.  Is this a pleasure?—I wonder to myself.  I am anxious to reach camp.

*

Sun shines on our camp.  When we arrive the rafts must first be unloaded.  We then receive instructions on how to set-up the kitchen and toilet.  I shiver through the instructions—my shoulders are tensed against my chill, and I can hardly move in my drenched, cold clothing.  When we are released, I take my gear to a pair of large boulders that will serve as the head of my bed for the night.  Fleece pants, a dry, cotton shirt, and a fleece pullover are readily at hand in my pack, and I walk upslope behind the boulders to change clothes among the shrubs.  In dry clothes, I warm quickly, and the pleasure of the place returns.

[this essay dates to 2 May]

Night at Lee's Ferry

Even the cacti—their pads and withering flowers ringed in fleshy pink and chilled purple—look wrinkled from cold at Lee’s Ferry.  The night’s cold causes me to pull the hood of my sleeping bag tightly around my head.  Only my nose and eyes are exposed at the opening of the hood.  With two fingers and the thumb of my right hand I reach across my body to find the Velcro flap that seals the opening of the sleeping bag at the top of the zipper.  I sleep warmly in the cold night. 

 

[this essay dates from 2 May]

Going to too much fun

The alarm clock, which seldom rings, shocks me a 4.00 a.m.  I rise, shower, and dress.   Fix tea, grab muffins made last night, and lug my packs to the truck.  The airport in Spokane is an hour and a half away.  The earliest edge of light rises at 4.45 a.m. as I drive over the hills outside of town. 

In the fluorescent light of the airport, while I wait for my flight, I mull the work that I leave behind.  There is this and that and that that I have not managed to finish in the past few very busy weeks.  I make notes for one of those needs—later today I will call back to have an associate follow-through to complete (I hope) a project that has been consuming me for days.

My flight to Phoenix leaves nearly on time, and I lose myself in New Yorker articles for its duration.  After we arrive, I make the calls about unfinished work at the University—I won’t think again about these work needs for the next week.  Soon I will lose telephone and Internet contact, and my world of concerns will narrow considerably.  At a restaurant on the concourse where I will catch my next flight, I have a southwestern salad with chicken for lunch.  A woman at a table nearby walks away without paying for her lunch, and the waiter—dismayed and angry—marches back and forth—he exclaims loudly his dilemma to co-workers and then he goes running down the concourse—I assume in search of the woman, who now must be little more than a needle in this airport haystack.

After the cabin door is closed on the small aircraft we will take to Flagstaff, the pilot announces that we should expect turbulence throughout the flight.  The flight attendant goes through the routine instructions on seat belts, oxygen masks, and  seat cushions that serve as flotation devices.  “As the pilot said,” she tells us, “this flight may be turbulent.  Please do not vomit.”  This gets our attention.   I’ve never heard a flight attendant tell me not to vomit.  “But it’s up to you,” she says, giving us a little leeway.  For a fleet moment, I think about vomiting as a kind of personal commentary on the quality of contemporary air travel, but it’s not my kind of statement.  “If you do vomit,” she says, “please use the small vomit bags located conveniently in the seat pockets in front of you.”

As we take off from the Phoenix airport, I continue to read the New Yorker, until the airplane approaches the Mogollan Rim, where we drop precipitously.  My stomach goes to my throat.  The plane bounces up and down and up and down.  The plane sways.  Right and left. Right and left and up and down. The New Yorker goes to my lap.  With both of my sweaty hands, I hold tightly to the seat in front of me.  My eyes are closed.  I wish for equilibrium.  I wish for solid ground.  Despite the drone of the plane, I hear groans—there is no background chatter of conversation on this flight.  It is a sickened silence.  I look over my right shoulder, and the two women in the row behind me are both throwing-up in their blue vomit bags.

Late in the evening, I have dinner at a restaurant near my hotel.  The middle-aged man and woman seated in the booth behind me are clearly on their first date.  The man talks about his ex-wife and ex-girlfriend.  He talks about his politics and his dietary restrictions.  The woman is largely not talking until her cell phone rings, which she answers with interest.  When she finishes the call, her date says, “I have a green peace sign tattooed on the bottom of my foot so I always have peace on Earth.”  As they stand to leave, he says, “This was too much fun.”

 

[This essay is from 30 April 2011]

Nocturne

My dreams, which I don’t usually recall—don’t commonly sense that I have, were especially vivid last night.  Perhaps it was the lateness of sleep or the lateness of waking.  Perhaps it was fatigue.   I have been travelling.  I have walked out of the Grand Canyon.  Flown back to the Northwest.  Driven home, where I arrived last night after 1.00 am.  Then dreams took me back to the Grand Canyon:  curving water with pink and yellow highlights—the shuffle of people, new friends, at breakfast and dinner—a kitchen in sand—my sleeping bag on sand—the Big Dipper at one canyon rim at sleep and at the other rim at waking—walking on cobbles—clambering up stone—the fragrance of service berry.

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.