botanizing

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]

Taken by Shadows

Portland, where we spend a weekend, is a city of few shadows.  It is a city of overcast, where light filters frequently through fine mist.   In the Portland Art Museum, a contrasting—hard, bright—light surprises me.  I sit in one gallery, resting my back, where my attention is drawn more to shadows than to the artworks on the walls.  Beams from ceiling lights strike the art at acute angles, and the ornate frames from the 19^th century cast hard, distracting shadows.

The shadows are like tableaux, emblematic arrangements set not to be enactments or exact replicas but more as evocations.   Some shadows evoke stone eroded by the actions of waves and others the mosaic of stem, leaf and sky that I might see when looking through a forest.  Another shadow evokes the New York cityscape seen across Central Park from the top of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I watch other visitors to the gallery look at the shadows.  They point to the shadows.  People touch the shadowy grades on the walls.  Some think the shadows are part of the art—like gray drapery suspended from frames. People talk about the shadows. The curious crane necks to find the light source and point to the light and then the shadow to show companions.

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.

The last bright bits of fall

I worked yesterday in the rain—a gentle, but steady fall—of yellow maple leaves and golden larch needles.

The maple leaves have a slip-shod descent either twirling downward, tracing eccentric helices, or slicing crescents of air as they slide more sideways than downward till they catch their drift and switch back at a hard angle, sweeping another broad, falling arch until this swoop is also brought to a point of reversing and falling. The maple leaves slap compatriots that already line the ground with a concave sound—‘puck sllp’—because they strike and slide slightly before resting.

 The fine rain of linear needles from the larch could not differ more from the fall of the maple leaves.  The needles, tip first like missiles, descend straight downward.  They strike the ground with the gentlest, softest ‘tuck.’

 I worked throughout the afternoon yesterday to paint our new shed, which sits beneath branches of both a maple and larch.  The leaves of both trees fell in my paint.  The maple leaves lay flat on the surface of the brownish red paint, acquiring a color that made them seem like wishful mimics of the reddened, fall leaves of oaks.  I plucked the maple leaves from the paint but left the thin, linear larch needles.

 As I rolled paint on the walls of the shed, the larch needles went on as well.  Needles shed from the larch stuck to the wooden walls of the shed.  This was delightful. While the larch cannot hold its needles for more than a year, I hope the shed holds the larch’s needles for many years.  In each of those years forward, I anticipate looking at the needles in the shed’s paint and thinking of this warm, bright, and beautiful fall day.

 *

There was pseudo-earliness to my rising today.  The shift from daylight savings time to regular time meant that I gained an hour to read this morning. 

 Rain that began in the night continued through the morning.  I sat in the living room, listening to the rain on the roof and watching it fall through the broad expanse of the room’s windows, as I read for three hours.  The rain doubled the pleasure of the reading.

 In the middle of my reading, a wind rose.  Branches of a maple lifted and rotated in the wind and leaves poured from the tree.  Freed leaves in the fluid wind filled my view as they rode up in a current and, then as if on a playground slide, slid in a curve to the ground.

 The weather front that arrived in the night is bringing winter.  The temperature has dropped ten degrees from yesterday and is forecast to fall further this week.  Snow, too, is forecast for the middle of this week.  The winter I see, however, may be manifest less in snow and cold than in the barrenness of trees.  The rain and the wind will in the next few days strip the remaining leaves from the deciduous trees, leaving the branches bare, creating brown-limbed spareness that I associate with winter.

 *

When I came into my writing room at the edge of evening, I saw through the window the trees to the west were lit with the orange of sunset.  The leaves that remain on the maples and the needles of the larch held a bright orange glow.  I made photographs of the trees, holding in these evanescent moments their last bright bits of fall.

Façade

Her brothers, Osbert and Sachie, had seen Parade, a ballet conceived by Cocteau that had sets by Picasso and music by Satie, in Paris, and they urged Edith Sitwell to collaborate with William Walton, the composer, who was then not quite 20, on a project that would be an artistic event in London to equal Parade.  Walton, who was living at the time, 1922, with Osbert and Sachie, was dubious.  Thus, Façade was born.

Edith Sitwell wrote the poems that became Façade.  These are nearly nonsense rhymes meant for a laugh.  Walton set the poems to jaunty, jazzy music.  In order to hear the poems over the music, the Sitwells decided to use Sengerphones, which were large paper mâché megaphones to magnify the spoken voices.

The first public performance of the piece was held in June 1923.  Walton conducted the music.  Edith and one of her brothers stood on stage behind a curtain to read the poems through the Sengerphones.  There were friends, critics, and others in the audience.  Virginia Woolf was there.  Woolf wrote soon to a friend, “Though I paid 3/6 to hear Edith Sitwell vociferate her poems accompanied by a small and nimble orchestra, through a megaphone, I understood so little that I could not judge.”  Critics hated the performance.  Of course, it became famous, and Façade gained in popularity. 

We drove over to the University of Idaho this week for a performance of Façade.  Like Virginia Woolf, I understood little of the poems, although they were declaimed well and without the use of megaphones.  One simply surrendered to the rhythms of the poetry, offset as it was by flute, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, cello, and rackety percussion, and listened for the few instances of comprehensible lines.  I hear the male reader begin “Sailors come / To the drum / Out of Babylon;” and understand nothing of the rest of the poem.  And when the second poem begins, I hear the woman reader say “In the early spring-time, after their tea,” and I begin to think about the tea I haven’t had this evening, and my thought drifts through the line  “Through the young fields of the springing Bohea,” and Bohea . . . gathers my concentration as I try to conjure an image of the plant when the alliteration of the poem’s “Jemima, Jocasta, Dinah, Deb / Walked with their father Sir Joshua Jebb –” sends my head and foot to bob.  I listen to the flow of the music and allow the words to flow as well over me through the poems “Country Dance,” “Polka,” to “Jodelling Song” (but what is jodelling I wondered till I heard the poem’s lines about William Tell and “And the mountain streams / Like cowbells sound”), “Scotch Rhapsody,” and “Popular Song.”  My eyelids and shoulders were sagging by this time, for the evening was late, and I looked forward to the final poem, “Sir Beelzebub.”  The Sitwells wanted it to be “fun,” and Façade was fun.  In 1923, Façade was avant garde, and it still, this week, had the ‘feel’ of a modernist event—a little surreal but also beautiful and fun.

* * *

Notes:  Lines of poetry are from Edith Sitwell’s Façade (1987, Duckworth).  The Virginia Woolf quotation is from p. 78 in Victoria Glendenning’s Edith Sitwell (1981, Knopf).

An engaging date in NYC

Patriotism of hydrangeas

“They couldn’t have been spies,” Ms. Gugigi said.  “Look what she did with the hydrangeas.”

p. A3, New York Times, June 29, 2010

In a report in The New York Times on a Russian spy ring, hydrangeas surfaced as possible evidence.  Perhaps even as contrary evidence.  The purported spies were deeply planted—putting down roots even deeper than those of hydrangeas.  They were largely married couples living in American cities, where the Times reported “they seemed to be ordinary couples, working ordinary jobs, chatting to the neighbors about gardening and schools.”  These insidious gardeners were, however, also reported to be swapping orange spy bags in stairwells, writing in invisible ink, and living with borrowed identities on forged passports.  [Personally, I think that all gardeners live with borrowed identities.]

It was, of course, the role of hydrangeas that caught my attention in this story.  Ms. Gugigi, a neighbor to one of the putatively spying couples, noted to the Times that one of the spies was an “accomplished gardener.”  Ms. Gugigi made the statement above, equating effectively good hydrangeas with patriotism if not wholesome American-ness.

I am dubious about Ms. Gugigi’s assertions.  Good gardening surely shows the influence of the English.  And the hydrangeas . . . I bet they were originally from Asia!

From my couch

The low sun was sharply yellow on the couch, where I read in the middle of the afternoon.  The quiet this day has been delectable.

My Nobelists

The Nobel Prizes were awarded today.  Each fall, I anticipate reading about the awardees.  Collecting a Nobel Prize is surely the childhood dream of many aspiring young scientists.  We love to dream of that intellectual accomplishment and the recognition (as well as the check).  Soon enough in our careers, most young scientists realize that receiving a Nobel Prize is unlikely.  I, too, had that realization, but in lieu of the Prize I began to collect Nobelists.

That is . . . I began to encounter Nobelists and recognized that I was collecting a curious set of experiences.

My first Nobelist was Norman Borlaug, who received the Peace Prize in 1972 for his contribution to the so-called Green Revolution.  Borlaug was a wheat breeder.  In the 1940s, he was persuaded to move to Mexico and breed wheat that would feed undernourished people in poor parts of the world where populations were rapidly expanding.   He succeeded.  The wheat varieties bred by his team were dramatically more productive than those that had been available for Mexico.  Unfortunately, the approach advocated by Borlaug required the use of high levels of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, all of which were costly and served to drive up debt in poor parts of the world.  The pesticides—such as DDT—were eventually implicated in ecological devastation, especially for bird populations.

In the late 1970s, Borlaug was invited to speak at Iowa State University, where I was an undergraduate, studying botany.  A dinner was held for Borlaug in the early evening before his lecture, and I had been selected to sit beside him.  I began our dinner conversation with easy-going chit-chat, one of my strengths.  “When you started the field experiments,” I asked, “did you think about monitoring the effects of the pesticides on other organisms?”

“Aachhh,” Borlaug said, betraying his Norwegian roots.  “You could walk to the edge of the fields, where there was a cliff above the ocean.  There were birds everywhere.  Thousands of birds.  We never hurt the birds.”

*

The rural area of Iowa in which I grew up did not offer much in the way of foreign languages in the schools.  When I went to college, foreign language courses were not required.  So I had no experience what-so-ever with foreign languages when I began work on my PhD, which required that I pass a foreign language exam in which translation skill was demonstrated.  During my first year of graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, I took German classes. 

Each day at noon I walked across the broad path that separated the Life Science Building from Dwinelle Hall, where various language departments were located.  I struggled in the German courses, stumbling over grammar and striving to pick-up vocabulary. Each day after German class, I would stop at the rest room, and there, each day, was Czeslaw Milosz.  He was then a professor of Slavic Languages and Literature and had that fall of 1980 been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.  I had been reading his poetry and his nonfiction book The Captive Mind.  I assumed that Milosz was on his way back to his office after lunch about the time that my German class finished.  There we were, day after day, elbow to elbow at adjacent urinals in Dwinelle Hall.  He would sometimes look up, his eyes were subtle below his thick gray eyebrows, when he turned to walk out after washing his hands.  I never started a conversation, never mentioned in the Dwinelle rest room that I had been reading his books.

*

Berkeley is one of the few places where Nobelists are virtually thick.  You could be on the way to the refrigerator for a beer and run into Nobelists.  One of them was William Giauque.  In the kitchen, he was known as Bill.  Giauque, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1949, for developing a process called magnetic refrigeration to achieve super cool temperatures—colder temperatures than anyone else had managed—was a friend of my landlady, Bernice.  He was a very stooped, very old man when he would pass me in the kitchen, each of us with our minds on different kinds of refrigeration.

*

After taking all of those difficult German classes in graduate school and finally passing the foreign language exam after multiple tries, I received my PhD and took a postdoctoral research position in Zurich, Switzerland.  I arrived in Zurich in the fall of 1986 just about the time that Heinrich Rohrer won the Nobel Prize for Physics.  Rohrer, who lived and worked in Zurich, was invited to give a public lecture at the botanical garden in the building where I was then working.    I decided not to go.  A lecture in Swiss German was beyond my limited language abilities, it was an agony not worth an encounter with another Nobelist.