botanizing

From dry to wet

On Friday evening, I tucked into a spot at Johnson Bar, where the only drink was river.  I camp regularly at this point bar on the Selway River.  When was I last here in early April, the river showed no sign of snow melt.  It had a wintered thinness; water was held to last summer’s late channel.  The cobble point bar was broad, extending perhaps 25 yards from my campsite to the river channel.  The cobble bar is now gone.  River washes at the trunks of the cedars and ponderosa pines that line the margin of my camp. 

In the past week, I have gone from desert to moist forest.  I have gone from dry sand in the wind to wet sand on my feet. A week ago, I crawled under pinyon pines for shade.  Here, clouds preclude shade, and water drops hang from the needles of the ponderosa pine in my camp.

Dinner at the Wilderness Inn

The café at the Wilderness Inn is my favorite place to eat.  It’s at Lowell, Idaho, just up the Lochsa River from its confluence with the Selway.  Yesterday, after walking along the Selway River, I stopped at the Wilderness Inn for dinner.  I had a pork tenderloin sandwich and onion rings.

It was 20 years ago—10 June 1988—when I first ate at the Wilderness Inn. On that day I drove over Bitterroot Mountains at Lolo Pass on Highway 12 and down the valley of the Lochsa River. I was searching for kittentails for a research project on flower evolution that I was then just beginning.  Synthyris missurica, the mountain kittentail, is common along the side creeks that enter the Lochsa River, and I was making collections of its flowers at various creeks as I drove down Highway 12.  The morning of collecting work was long.  There had been little food in the truck when I had a quick breakfast and fixed tea earlier at my campsite in Montana.  As I collected along the Lochsa my hunger grew intense, and there were no stores or restaurants.  The drive down the Lochsa valley was slow.  Logging trucks loaded with large cedars crept down the mountain highway.  The curves were tight, coming one after another, and I passed, as I could, the logging trucks and tractor-trailer rigs.  I grew ravenous, wondering the distance to food, feeling certain that Highway 12 in the Lochsa valley was the most extensive food-free zone in America.  And then I saw the Wilderness Inn.  It was situated across the highway from the river, sitting behind a small parking area.  That first meal at the Wilderness Inn was several years before I moved to the inland Northwest and began my regular visits to the Lochsa River.

My research allows me to range widely over the American West, and I enjoy eating in local, independent restaurants as I travel.  A week ago, on my return home from the desert, I stopped in Cascade, Idaho, for breakfast.  I had camped the night before in the mountains to the south of Cascade, and I arrived at the restaurant at 6.30, looking for both breakfast and tea.  Two women were sitting at a table by a front window when I arrived.  They stood when I entered—they were the waitress and cook.  The waitress brought a menu, and the cook went the kitchen, where she began to complain loudly about her job, her employers, and why the restaurant was losing money.  It was a sour breakfast.  Not an experience I’ve ever had at the Wilderness Inn.

The waitress at the Wilderness Inn has a good laugh.  We look up as she laughs, and it helps us see who else is having dinner.  A couple of late middle-aged women at a table talk about their favorite hunting spots, and two retired gentlemen at the counter comment on their favorite soap operas.  Current and former forest rangers speak softly.  Shiny motorcycles line-up outside—I admire them as I eat and think about travelling with the wind in my hair (no helmet law in Idaho!).  Tables of young, white-water rafting guides set my reveries to youth and adventure. “Here ya go,” the waitress says as she hands me a menu, although I know what I want. 

A month ago, I met DL for dinner at the Wilderness Inn before we went camping on her birthday.  The week after that CF and I had lunch there on a day when we searched the river beaches for garden stones.  Two weeks after that, I was back in the restaurant with DL, Peter, and Ray when we were cold and wet from walking 15 miles in the rain at the end of a backpack.  The young waitress that evening kept the hot drinks coming to our table.   For each of those meals and all of my other lunches and dinners at the Wilderness Inn, I have a pork tenderloin sandwich.

Breaded pork tenderloin sandwiches are practically the state food of Iowa, where I grew-up.  The pork tenderloin sandwiches at the Wilderness Inn are fixed Iowa style, which is uncommon.  Iowa style is basically a wiener schnitzel with thinly pounded meat—about the thickness of corrugated cardboard (and sometimes it has the taste of cardboard as well)—served on a hamburger bun.  The piece of meat should be twice the diameter of the hamburger bun so that the sandwich with the overhanging rim of breaded pork looks more like a flying saucer than a hamburger.  One puts ketchup on this sandwich, probably also mustard or mayo, and tomato, onion, lettuce, as well as pickles.

I’ve eaten breaded pork tenderloin sandwiches this way since childhood.  It was my mother’s favorite food.  After I moved away from home, she would always fix them for me when I returned to visit.  In her mid-80s, when she no longer cooked for herself, she would ask, “Do you want a tenderloin sandwich this evening?”  She would then call a minimart near the senior citizens’ apartments where she lived in old age to place an order for the sandwiches.  “Will you walk over to pick them up?” she would ask after the order was placed.  It takes only a few minutes to cook the meat, and by the time I walked to the grill at the nearby minimart our sandwiches would be ready.

Each time I order a pork tenderloin sandwich at the Wilderness Inn, I think about having dinner with my mother.  I think about her love of breaded pork tenderloin sandwiches.

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.]

Worshippers and lunatics

They gather before the standing stones.  Priapic stones draw their urges.  The balanced rock, knobbed columns, and parapets of hoodoos are dark silhouettes against the sunset smear of orange and flare of yellow.

A woman dances.  One leg out and down and then the other—her slow twirl takes her from toes of one foot to those of the other.  Her extended arms catch the last orange light.  Her long, dark hair becomes the last shadow.  There are perhaps 20 others who have gathered for the ceremony.  They stand in the sand.  They face west.  Men and women and children.  Every family has a camera.  These are worshippers of sunset.

I sit at the edge of the Garden of Eden, which is just uphill from the worshippers, in Arches National Park.  I’ve put my canvas chair below a line of sandstone fins to watch the ceremony and have a late dinner.  I eat a bagel with ham and Swiss cheese and sip very cold orange juice.

The dancing woman dissipates in the heat and dusk.  The dark gap between sunset and the rising moon makes the crowd disappear—they become disembodied voices, cacophonous among the junipers.  They talk not about the sunset but about the moon.  We talk about heat but not about the sun.  We swoon silently before sunsets.  The moon makes us talk.  This is the night of the full moon.

“We checked the Internet,” I hear a woman say, “sunset was at 8.37 and the moon rises at 8.47.”

“Where will it rise,” a voice asks.

“Behind the mountains,” another woman says.  “I came to watch it rise over the mountains.”

We follow the moon.  I, too, have come to watch the moon rise over the La Sal Mountains.  I am among the lunatics. 

A yellow glow broadens behind the mountains in the east.

*   *   *

This was the 19th of May.

Evening contrails

From my campsite along the San Juan River, near Bluff, Utah, on 20 May.


From my campsite on a hilltop along Entrada Bluffs Road in Grand County, Utah, on 18 May.

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.

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.

Gray's Canyon

Cottonwoods clatter.  A steady wind has risen with the evening.  The multitude of fresh leaves on plump, flexing petioles slide and shuffle against one another.  They make the noise of a crowd. 

Sometime before my arrival there was a crowd in my campsite on the Green River.  There is a large fire mound of old, gray coals and circling it is a broad ring of beer bottles.  My predecessors, as they sat around the fire, must have tossed bottle after bottle over their shoulders.  Many bottles per shoulder, I guess, and possibly several shoulders.  The many bottles shout loudly an awful egotism, although bottle litter is a squalid sign of one's power and persistent presence.   The bottle mouths had gathered sand before I arrived.  I gather the bottles into a pile, and as I gather I find more and more among the bushes.

There is a crowd in the campground down the river about a quarter of a mile. River runners were lined-up for dinner when I drove past.  Rafts were parked in the campground sites.  I have used that campground in the past but now tend to drive past.  My site up the river, despite the bottle litter, offers only the crowd of cottonwood leaves, a thicket of skunkbush, sand sage, and greasewood.  It offers this:  "kwip, kwip, kwip, kwip."  The periodic song of a lonely bird, calling from a cottonwood for a mate. 

Dance in the field

My field is in the desert, where the sun dances delightfully on sandstone.  I shall be gone for some days or weeks, and my posts are likely to be more sporadic than normal, while I collect my thoughts, stones, and blazing stars under the desert sun.

Like wind

On a triangle of sand, extending up the Selway River from the mouth of Three Links Creek, we settle one-by-one near the fire.  It is late afternoon.  Smoke rises from the one log left through the afternoon in the stone fire ring.  Ray saws a drift log into thirds.  He grabs a branch of pine and saws-off a few finger-like branches.  He puts the pine fingers along the length of the smoking log.  He adds the drift log thirds.  New smoke rises and twists.  “You’re getting smoked-out in that nice perfect spot,” Ray says to me.  I arrived first at the beach and settled into a spot with a stone backrest where I could extend my legs to the fire.  The smoke tucks back into wind from upstream, allowing me to open my eyes.  New wind gusts upstream, blowing back smoke that fills Ray’s face.  I go to the woodpile, break sticks, and pile them on the new flame.  The flame rises, the smoke goes.  The sun, too, begins to go.  The hill opposite us is half lit by sun.  Aspen leaves hold yellow light against the infiltration of darkness.  With the darkness, we share whiskey, chocolate, and words.  We share the wind. It blows upriver on the edge of a new front. “In weather reports, news of the wind always gets my attention,” Ray says. “I like wind,” he says.