botanizing

Fred's Arena Steakhouse

There are many allures along dirt roads, but one does not expect dining pleasures to be among them.  Fred’s Arena Steakhouse had been recommended to us—if we liked meat—and it was one of only two restaurants in the vicinity of the bed and breakfast where we had been staying in the desert between Tucson and Ajo in Arizona.  We followed the directions we had been given, turning from the Ajo highway onto Sierrita Mountain Road, driving toward the mountain on the horizon, and then turning left on a dirt road.  Partway down the dirt road we passed a rancher, at the end of the day, using a chainsaw to clear mesquite.  He lifted the saw in acknowledgment of us as we passed by.  We didn’t see much else among the mesquite as we drove down the road.  There were no houses or other businesses in the vicinity.  It seemed an odd place for a restaurant.

A white pick-up truck approached quickly—lifting a plume of road dust—from the opposite direction.  The pick-up made a fast right turn just in front of us—it went into the parking lot for Fred’s.  The old, white pick-up sped to the far end of the lot, where it came to an abrupt stop.  A thin, bleached blonde woman jumped from the truck and rushed into Fred’s.

The parking lot was a surprise.  It was full. Looking like a used car lot in ranch country—one pick-up truck after another was lined-up in rows in the lot.  We parked at a distance from the entrance at a berm between two mesquite, well away from the competition of the trucks.  [We were driving a rental car—my pick-up was at home in Washington.]

The Steakhouse was dim inside, and we focused to find an empty table.  There were big u-shaped booths along the west wall and high round tables in front us before the bar, which was on our right.  An oxen yoke hung from the front of the bar.  Several tables were full, and we wound among them to a booth.  A young couple sat in the adjacent booth, but most of the crowd was past 60 and decidedly gray.  There were a few young kids at some tables—they were allowed inside until 9.00 pm.

The three waitresses worked the place with smiles and chatted at all of the tables.  They moved quickly from tables to the bar, kitchen, and large barbeque grill in the center of the room, which was about half the size of a basketball court.  After we sat down, the bleached blonde from the parking lot came to our table—she was our waitress and her rush to get inside was to start her shift.  I ordered a hamburger and fries, which was the meal recommended to me, and it was delicious when it arrived. 

The bar was manned by a young woman, and we questioned each other on whether she was Fred.  The bartender busily assembled beers, poured glasses of wine, and mixed drinks.  A lot of Budweisers moved from the bar to tables, although our waitress managed to find me an ale.

Fred’s was vibrant, although it was early evening when we were there.  Our waitress said, “it’s pretty unusual to see so few people, normally on Saturday this place is full.”  More people entered as the evening aged.  They walked first to tables of other people, where hugs were given all around.

Inn at Castle Rock

We have been for the past two nights at the Inn at Castle Rock in Bisbee, Arizona.  This morning I sat by the fireplace in the entryway as Chris, the owner, built a fire.  It snowed last night, and cool air holds to the stone tiles of the entry floor.  As Chris worked on the fire, I asked him about the Inn, which is built over a spring that became a well that started the copper mining boom of Bisbee.

The Inn, now the oldest wooden structure in Bisbee, was built in 1895.  It survived a 1908 fire that burned most of the rest of the town.  One has a sense that the Inn was quickly constructed during the mining boom.  The rooms of the inn have the feel of efficiency apartments—bedroom and kitchen combinations in an era of outhouses.  The former kitchens have been converted to be bathrooms, with old kitchen sinks, although not original to the late 19^th century, still in many of the baths.

The Inn is funky.  Chris tells me the funkiness doesn’t come from him.  He’s a trim New Zealander in a black stocking cap, blue work shirt (tail out and protruding below his brown work coat) and blue jeans.  He has a thick blond mustache.  The funkiness he says came from Jim Babcock, a former owner.  Babcock created the themed rooms that still give the Inn much of its character.  When we had first stayed here two years ago, we stayed in an Asian themed room.  On this visit we are in Return to Paradise, which has a photographic image of a tropical scene covering one wall, a copy of a Gauguin painting above the bed, palm tree table lamps, and palm tree embroidery on curtains.  There’s also a Pioneer room with a Coca Cola theme, the White Eagle room with a map theme, and Sultan’s Harem, which has voluminous drapery and images of a scantily clad harem, among several rooms and themes others.  Chris bought the Inn in 2009 from Jim Babcock’s daughter after Jim had died, and he kept Jim’s room themes and decorations intact.

Jim Babcock was an amateur painter, and many of his paintings are on the walls.  There’s a Van Gogh self-portrait in the entryway and another on the third floor.  Van Gogh was probably a Babcock favorite—there are other partially painted copies of Van Gogh’s paintings of street scenes in Arles.  The copy of Gauguin’s melancholic woman in a crimson frock, which is hung above our bed, is a painting I saw in its original Gauguin state only a few months ago.  Babcock’s version has closely cropped the left hand side of the original, and he has darkened it—his floor is more umber than Gauguin’s lighter brown, and the woman’s frock a more intense crimson than Gauguin’s more pinkish one.  Babcock captures Gauguin well—he has Gauguin’s short, vertical brushstrokes—but he had a little trouble with the woman’s ear, although Gauguin might also have had trouble with the ear.   

Chris says that he bought the Inn as a real estate investment.  He was divorced and had been planning to travel the world, when a corporation offered to hire him to travel the world to represent their mechanical interests.  He continues to travel the world from the Inn, which he uses as his home base.  His resident inn-keeper, James manages the Inn in Chris’s absence.  Chris says that he would like to spend more time in the Inn to interact with the guests.  He’s had about 6000 guests since buying the place, and, he says, only five of them have been displeased with their visits.  “Those five would be unhappy about anything.”  When he is at the Inn Chris says he focuses on keeping the place repaired and functional.  He’s an engineer—his expertise is the world’s largest mining trucks—and is adept at plumbing and carpentry—skills needed, he says, at the Inn at Castle Rock.  

In Muddy Creek

“Quick sand!” yelled a woman behind me.

My ankles had disappeared.

We had traversed a willow thicket on a sand bench above Muddy Creek.  I had walked at the very edge of the bench in the gap between the willows and the drop to the creek.  Others in the group had wandered through the thicket, pushing willows away from their shoulders and eyes.

The bench ended at a bend in the creek, leaving us on the flat, sand and cobble margin of the creek.   Canyon wall stood at the bend, cutting off passage on our side of the creek, and Scott, the leader of our group, said, “This is where you’ll decide whether you want to get your shoes wet.”  

The water in the creek was only a few inches deep.  Although hardly formidable, no one likes to think about hiking for the rest of the day with wet feet.  Some in our group sat on the sand to remove their boots.  I looked at the array of stones that stood above the water in the creek and planned a route.  The creek here was about 20 feet across, and there were well positioned stones covering about 14 of those feet.  I stepped the stones across the stream, keeping water from my feet.  I placed my right foot on the last stone, while my left foot stood a stone about two feet back. I pushed my right foot against its stone—where I would need firm footing to propel myself from it to the edge of the creek.  The stone wobbled.  Worse even than the wobble, the soles of my hiking shoes had a mud cake.  Without the mud on my shoes, I’d brave the wobble and probably splash my left foot in the shallow edge of the creek just inches shy of the water’s margin.  With mud on my shoe, I’d likely slip on the right foot stone when I pushed-off and end up with both feet in the creek while splashing water all over myself.  Rather than make the attempt, I reversed myself, stepping from stone to stone back to the beach where the others still talked and some were removing their shoes.

Where the canyon wall met the bend in the creek, the water channel was narrower.  I saw my route over a shiny mud margin to a cobble field, where the surfaces of the stones stood slightly above the water.  The cobbles didn’t cover the entire span of the creek, but I could walk the cobbles, getting only a little splash of water along the bottoms of my shoes, and then easily take the remaining span of creek in one long step.

That’s exactly what I did.  Or meant to do.  And attempted.  The mud at the margin of the creek was slippery near the canyon wall.  My balance wobbled.  The mud stuck and came up with my steps, slowing my motion and shortening my steps.  My first step to the cobble bed came up short as I slipped, and my left foot went in to water.  Then my right foot went into water and my arms came up for balance.  That’s when I sank, and woman behind me yelled.  She warned others not to follow me as I struggled and sank quickly.

When steady, I pulled one foot from the reddish gray matrix and stepped for the middle of the creek.  With one foot planted in water, I then pulled the other foot from the sandy mud.  I was pleased that both feet came out easily and with the shoes still on my feet.  My feet then were not only wet but also muddy.  I swished one and then the other in the water to clear as much of the mud as possible.  I stepped across the creek to the bank and walked to the grassy bench above the channel.  My feet squished and water bubbled from the mesh of my uppers.  I had at least solved the dilemma of how to make the many additional crossings of the creek that lay ahead—I would simply wade through the water.

This water was milky.  I expect light colored turbidity early in the season when the flow is higher and faster.  It seemed unusual in the fall, especially in a season and earlier summer that had received little rain.  The water also smelled.  It was a metallic smell—the odor of heavy metals.  Selenium surely.  Maybe arsenic and mercury.  Perhaps uranium.  This was not a creek to drink.  Not far up river, near the start of our hike, was the site of an old mine—a major mine—and we could see the fans of stone debris from the mines on the cliffs.  Was that disruption, the loosening of stone, the long-term dishevelment of the soil crusts and disturbance of the creek banks a source of the water’s milk and its strong scent?  I waded across the creek again. 

Muddy Creek has an honest name.  Mud margins alternated with cobbles.  The mud varied from flat and shiny to complex sculpted or incised forms.  Water run-off through mud made a complex topography of miniature hills and valleys.  Yellow sunlight reflected from the curves of the little mud hills.  The mud was mostly reddish brown, although the hilltops, drier than the mud vales, were gray or even bluish in shadows when I squatted beside them.  Where it met canyon wall, the mud was rippled from waves of water reflected back from the stone.  Where it dried, the mud cracked.  I find a shallow pool of gray mud that has cracked like a tree to have a main trunk and a canopy of branches.

We walked perhaps a mile or two with others of the group, and then we had lunch on a grassy bench.  After the good conversations of lunch, the others turned back, and we continued down the canyon.  We walked over the bench, down to the beach, and along the creek until the way was blocked by canyon wall at a bend in the channel.  There we crossed the creek by wading through the water.  On the far side, we climbed from channel to bench and walked on.  This was repeated over and over.  Bench to beach, cross creek, and climb to the next bench.  Walking Muddy Creek had a rhythm.

As we walked toward the southeast, the canyon deepened.  The high walls left only a narrow band of sky.  These walls were sheered to flat facets and shined from years of weathering.  Where they caught sun, they were warmly yellow.  Many facets had a dark patina of desert varnish and looked like leather patches amid more freshly exposed red stone.  There were panels of striped varnish—bands of siennas, umbers, and pinks—that made a painterly scene.  Sections of wall appeared to consist of laid bricks—orderly rectangles stacked one above the other in rows with a mortared dip between them.  My favorite sections of wall—these curved like a torso from ribs to back that rises over buttocks—held water pockets—fields of rounded holes in the flesh colored stone.  We walked until the canyon walls shortened and began, it seemed, to transition to hills—still reddish orange sandstone, but the walls became round-topped mounds, each somewhat separate, at least in their upper half, from each other.

When we turned back to return to camp, I began to walk up the creek.   Although shallow—hardly covering my ankles—I was surprised at the drag of the flowing water against my steps.  My muscles pulled against the water.  Walking upstream in the creek was not the best route for our return.  I took one more step and went from shoe-top water to shin-deep water, but worse than the water depth, I sank again in the sandy mud—quick mud.  I sank fast nearly to my knees.  Both legs were mired.  The water lapped my thighs.  As I tried to lift one leg and then the other I could feel the mud hold my shoes.  When I tried to lift my left leg, my right one sank.  A classic quick sand situation—sink quick to an awkward depth and then every movement takes you deeper.  I rocked my right foot, trying to loosen the mud hold, trying to keep my shoe on my foot.  It would be a long, long walk back to our campsite without my shoes.  I spread my toes to hold the shoe and rocked my right foot, and then I pulled slowly.  My right leg came out of the mud, and I stretched to plant it out of the mud without knowing where I might find solid footing.  Water splashed, and I wrenched but remained standing.  I began to repeat the process of rocking my left foot, toes splayed to hold my shoe, but with my legs now spread, my entire body rocked.  Back and forth, holding balance as I could.  Then I lifted, slowly and steadily, my left leg and it rose out of the mud.  I stepped for cobbles in shallow water.  My legs and shoes were coated in gray, gritty mud.  I swept water in my hands to clean my legs and swished my shoes in the creek.  When I tried to walk, I found ridges of mud pushed against the bottoms of my feet in my shoes.  I took off my shoes to wash out the mud, but the grit merely shifted its shape, flowing along the inner cushion of my shoe, and as the water drained the mud held, leaving patches of grit on my soles.  

Pick up and go

He was about 65, trim and energetic.  A talker, but curious—the sort that asked a question and could wait at least two seconds for your answer before he would begin to fill the space with his own story.  There was no pause between his story and his next question.  The space in his conversation was as tightly packed as the seats on the small airplane on which we sat.   He was behind me and across the aisle on a flight from Salt Lake City, and I listened to him talk to the woman beside him.  She was from Florida and was about his age.

He took the airplane’s magazine from the seat pocket in front of him and turned to the map.  “Now where you from?” he asked.  She showed him on the map the location of her home.

He said, “I remember going out to Key West when I was a kid—hitchhiked across the US at 19. . . I was a young guy that needed adventure. . . Tell you what I remember—the orange trees—those oranges with thin skins—a flavor I’ll never forget—like Vermont maple syrup—one of those flavors you never forget . . .They don’t grow peaches do they?—I love peaches—I don’t do with canned ones—they don’t keep—I love peaches. . . My grandma let me eat an entire banana cream pie—only a grandma would let you do that. . . Grew up on a ranch—not a lot of idle hands or idle time—you could eat a whole pie—putting up hay, feeding cattle and horses—I got out of there as soon as possible—got a scholarship and went to college. . . I worked for two corporations—one for 17 years—was vice president—just walked out the door—next one for 11 years—just walked out the door. . . Don’t regret a bit of it. . . Pick up and go.” 

A Year

A year.  A friend told me in an email that it had been a year since I had posted at Botanizing.  It has been a year of talking and cooking rather than writing.  Stories seemed never as easily at hand as a frying pan.

A year ago, we had just returned from a collecting trip in Arizona and Utah.  The monsoon rains had chased us from Arizona, and we spent our last few days of the trip looking for rock art in canyons of southern Utah.  From there we had a long drive home—through mountains, over passes, up intermountain valleys, through rain, and we stopped at Mollie’s in Snowville for breakfast.  Then we bolted across the plains, crossing and recrossing the Snake River, and then climbing into the mountains of Idaho, which we exited to meet the hills of the Palouse.  At home, young hawks were screaming in the nest behind the house.

Soon after returning from the desert we were in the Clearwater Mountains of Idaho, where a blocked road prevented us from reaching a trailhead we wanted to use for a backpack.  We retreated down the mountains to the

Selway River and to its tributary, Meadow Creek, where we camped.  We walked up Meadow Creek, where the dew wet leaves of grasses slapped against my shins.   The winged stems of Lathyrus hung like the weighted beams of balances over the trail.  The slope above us was an old burn, where snags of cedars stood.  The burnt cedars had trunks of black charcoal that shone bluish in the sun from the burnishing of wind and weather.  Adrian harvested thimbleberries and serviceberries as we walked. 

At the beginning of October, we made a backpack up the Selway River.  There was a wildfire—by then under control—in the river valley, where a scrim of white smoke covered the hills, and we stopped only a short distance beyond Race Creek.  Smoke was our gauge.    We camped on a sand shelf above a point bar, and in the evening, when breezes began to move upriver, the scent of smoke cleared.

It was also in October that I was asked to help lead the development of a new arts and sciences college at our university.  It had been decided a few weeks earlier that our then colleges of sciences and liberal arts would be merged to form a single college.  My next eight months were focused on merger planning and formulating recommendations for the structures and procedures of the new college.  This was an incredible opportunity—how often does one get to create a new college?

The first frost of the season came on 25 October to place briefly a light white coat on the roof of the house behind us.  I was reading V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, which began:  “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”  The arrogance was shocking.

We saw Carmen at Seattle Opera.  This was thoroughly enjoyable.

 

In early November, I went to an informal session on ‘Ecopoetics on the Palouse.’  One of the participants said that a “poem is an ecosystem.”  I wondered about this. It was unclear to me what the speaker may have meant:  was it meant as a simile or as a description of a poem’s complexity and function?   Most poems, especially any short of long, narrative verses, are too simple to stand in comparison to ecosystems.  What is the simile for a poem in the ecology of place?  A bunch grass, perhaps?  Maybe a lyrical poem is just a blade of grass?

I delighted in reading Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table.  The book had a lovely shadowy tone, a slight tinge of melancholy.  The story looked back to a journey to ask what had there been before and what was there after that event—“this voyage would be a great education,” one of characters told the young protagonist.

November was a brown season.  The hills of the Palouse showed dark soil or lighter crop stubble.   In the conifer forest where we walked on the north side of a tall butte, the woods were nearly a cave of brown tree trunks, and the trail was coated by a thick thatch of golden brown needles.  A brown Varied Thrush sat quietly on the shadowed branch of a Douglas Fir.  I looked to find the greens of the season:  dark canopy, stringy networks of lichens, and mosses.

In late December and early January, we traveled to Costa Rica for several days on the Osa Peninsula and then in Monteverde.  On the Osa Peninsula, our cabin overlooking the ocean was surrounded by forest.  Blackhooded Antshrikes pecked about the shrubby shadows while Riverside Wrens built a nest in the shrubs.  Amid their vital activities, I read on the deck.  We botanized and birded and spent a few minutes on the beach.  At Monteverde, we walked in the clouds while continuing to bird and botanize.  At the end of the trip, we visited the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in San Jose.  The old building occupied by the Museum was wonderful—it was barn-like in its first gallery and had rough, unfinished walls in a gallery of photographs.

Mid January:  Atop a red buoy, numbered 44, anchored in the middle of the former Snake River, now the Lower Granite Lake, which backs behind Lower Granite Dam, there stood a Great Blue Heron.  It seemed like a poem.

The dammed Snake, once

a river that slithered

among stone scaled hills,

lies in flat water

navigated by grain barges.

Red buoys mark channel.

A hunter watches,

still in evening shadows—

a Great Blue Heron

atop buoy 44—

awaits any movement—

a fish, a river.

At Seattle Opera, we see Verdi’s Attila, which I do not enjoy.  There was lovely choral singing, and there were a few beautiful arias, but the story and its violent themes were unappealing.  In contrast to the opera, we saw a fabulous performance only a few days earlier by the Ying Quartet at the University of Idaho.  They played two contemporary pieces and then Beethoven’s final string quartet.  The concert was absolutely energizing, and I spent days afterward looking around the web to hear other pieces related to the music that was performed.

“Ha . . . Ha . . .”  A Great Horned Owl called sharply as I approached home in the dark of a cold evening.   From another tall conifer its companion answered, “Hoo Hoo Hoo.”  The conversation warmed me.

We saw Glück’s Orpheus and Eurydice at Seattle Opera in late February.  It was lovely—the music, the singing, the ballet, and Amour portrayed as a woman on a bicycle.  We also went to the exhibit Gauguin and Polynesia at Seattle Art Museum.  This was a great chance to see not only many paintings by Gauguin from his time in Polynesia but also to see his carvings and material collections.

In March, we traveled to Indianapolis, where I had much of a day in the art museum.  One of the first paintings I saw was Gauguin’s “Landscape near Arles,” which was one of the first paintings he made after joining Van Gogh in the ‘studio in the south.’  The painting is a tight composition of a haystack framed by a building on the left, a house in the back, and by trees.  The haystack is colorful—in yellow and oranges done in narrow, short brush strokes—Van Gogh’s colors and Van Gogh’s brush strokes.  Whistler’s “Harmony in Pink and Gray:  Lady Meux” was exceptional.  I especially enjoyed the collection of work by Indiana painters and American impressionists from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries—many of these were artists that had gone to Paris for training and came home with lighter colors and bolder brush strokes.  There were wonderful pieces by the American modernists Sloan, Hartley, and O’Keeffe, and among these I discovered an artist unknown to be before:  Victor Higgins.  Higgins was originally from Indiana, but he had gone to Europe for training, and later moved to Taos, where he painted mostly landscapes.  His painting of barren hills in New Mexico made me want to take brushes and tubes of paint to the Southwest.

In April, the tributaries of the Selway River were in flood so we stopped our hike at Packer Creek and clambered to the top of a large boulder a few feet out in the river’s channel.  We watched dippers.  One jumped repeatedly in and out of the breaking white water from a steep stone in the river’s splash zone.  Fast and regular like the ratchet action of a machine, the bird was in and out, in and out, and in and out of the river.  After feeding, the dipper flew up the cliff face to land on a steep slab of stone just below a clump of dried moss.  It stood there—but did not stand still for a dipper is seldom still—it did kneebends and pecked at soil in the cracks of the cliff until it slipped into a hole at the base of the moss clump.  Soon anther dipper flew across the river to the same moss clump.  It, too, stood for a few moments and then slipped beneath the moss.

I went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in early May.  Before this trip I had read Patricia Vigderman’s The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner, which was marvelously quirky, much like the museum itself.  The book’s short chapters each had a title taken from a work of art in the museum, but they were less about art in the galleries than the art of making a life.  Vigderman does not tell a straight-forward biographical story about Gardner; instead, she writes around the life of Gardner, who had burned all of her personal letters, attempted to maintain the privacy of her life, even to remain elusive, and the book becomes a circumscription—bounding Gardner by stories about her home, her collections, and the painters, writers and friends that were close to her.  I enjoyed the museum as well, especially as the collection of one individual, which we rarely have the chance to see.

We see Madame Butterfly at Seattle Opera.  It’s too shallow despite some good music.

In late May, I left the northwest for several weeks of fieldwork on the Colorado Plateau.  We are exploring how the complex topography of the Colorado Plateau has shaped plant migration patterns, provided glacial refugia, and influenced the evolution of new species using Cronquist’s blazing star (Mentzelia cronquistii) and a few of its closest relatives.  I looked for populations to sample and spent days driving rough roads, walking hills, and clambering up cliffs—my favorite kind of travel.  Mostly I found dead individuals in populations that should have been thriving—possibly an adverse effect of the persistent drought in this region and certainly a detriment to our research.  After a week in Utah, I moved on to the Grand Canyon, which is the southernmost and lowest elevation reach of Cronquist’s blazing star, making this area a likely candidate as a glacial refuge that could have played a role in the repopulation of the Colorado Plateau following the Pleistocene glaciation.  With friends and others involved in the project, I backpacked through the canyon for a week.  Once we emerged from the Grand Canyon, I returned to Utah for another week of collecting.

In early July, I attended the annual professional conference for botanists, which was held this year in Columbus, Ohio, where recent high temperatures and violent storms had impacted the city’s environment.  During the three days I was at the conference, I went outside only once to have dinner a few blocks from my hotel; otherwise, I ate and spend my days in talks and meetings in the hotel and convention center complex.  My schedule and environment were entirely contained for days.  On my flight to Ohio, I read Frank Waters’s Pumpkin Seed Point and on my return flight read Gary Nabhan’s The Desert Smells Like Rain—two books centered on Native American life in Arizona.  While my body was contained in aircraft and hotels, my mind wandered the western landscape.

In the middle of July we were still having rain.  It had been a cool, wet spring and summer.  Snow and cold persisted through much of the spring and then rain and cool days through June.  Usually, by the beginning of July our days in the inland Northwest have turned dry—arid provides a better sense of those days—in which there can be a sharp heat and intense dryness.  This year, in contrast, we have been having regular thunderstorms, which in the past were exceptionally rare in this region.

We backpacked among the headwaters of Gedney Creek, which drains to the Selway River, in the Bitterroot Mountains.  The huckleberries were ripe, and Adrian ate as she walked.  We crossed Canteen Creek on stones.  Its shallow water, rippled by flow over the stones, projected shadows on the bedding stones that made the creek appear to be coated in yellow scales like the back of a showy, dryland lizard.  On the backpack, I read Maureen McLane's new book My Poets and was fascinated by its collage style that melded criticism, poetry and personal narrative.  It was quite beautiful.  I especially enjoyed the chapter on Elizabeth Bishop (Gertrude Stein) that was written in the style of Stein.

 

In the basement of the campus library, where seldom read books are kept (mostly untended and often in disarray) in compactors—one of my favorite places to gather reading material—I picked-up Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos.  It’s an odd book about Dodge Luhan’s interactions with D. H. Lawrence during the time he was in Taos.  Dodge Luhan addresses the book to the poet Robinson Jeffers, which she begins by saying:  “You know Jeffers, after I met you, I felt that you and Lawrence ought to know each other, that you would have liked and understood each other . . .”  I wondered if I should be in on this conversation, which seemed a personal triangulation that didn’t really involve me—after all, I have never really liked or understood Lawrence.  One wanted to ask Dodge Luhan why the distraction of Robinson Jeffers was introduced—while reading about Lawrence and Taos, I kept thinking about Jeffers in his Tor on the coast of California.  Yet, the trope of a private conversation—making the reader an eavesdropper—has its uniqueness and interest.  There was in the book (on page 4) this lovely description of the way Taos infiltrated one’s life:   “The mountain and the fields were not separate from one’s life.  One did not go out to things, one was part of them.  The mountain, if anything, came to one, came into the house; one ate it with the cake.”

I have been buying a piece of cake with the groceries each week.  We have our cake, our music, our art, and our mountains.

Photographs

1. Selway River; 2. Bisbee Antiques in Bisbee, Arizona; 3. Mollie’s Café in Snowville, Utah; 4. Cayuse Lake, Clearwater Mountains; 5. Meadow Creek, a tributary of the Selway; 6. Selway River; 7. Cloud above ridge along the Selway River; 8. Selway River; 9. Deleted; 10. Lower Ribbon Falls, Grand Canyon; 11. Petroglyphs in Buckhorn Wash, Utah; 12. View from our cabin on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica; 13. “Elvis 3D” by Juliana Barquero in the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in San Jose, Costa Rica; 14. Capuchin monkey, Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica; 15. Indianapolis Museum of Art; 16. Rock clematis (Clematis columbiana); 17. Selway River; 18. Selway River; 19. The Green River in Utah on a moonlit night with lightning; 20. Grand Canyon; 21. Backpacking in Grand Canyon; 22. In the vicinity of Last Chance Wash, San Rafael Swell, Utah; 23. Hotel room, Columbus, Ohio; 24. Stones in Canteen Creek, Bitterroot Mountains; 25. Leaning teacup in our campsite at Gedney Creek in Nez Perce National Forest; 26. Deleted; 27. Colorado River in Grand Canyon.

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.  We catch a glimpse of a javelina, and then we are 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 head to 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]