18th and Valencia

I took the wrong exit off of Rte 101, and called my friend who directed me through the streets of San Francisco using her i phone. Becca’s mom was my second grade teacher, we took dance lessons together in elementary school and attended elementary school, now twenty-two years later, we are again friends. I picked her up and we headed to Green’s restaurant on the bay.

For a moment, I felt dissected, like light passed through a prism. I had awakened that morning at 5:10, dressed in the dark, and walked to the zendo where I sat for an hour with students, priests and guests. Now I navigated the hills of Divisidaro Street, avoiding the Muni, stopping at traffic lights, and catching up with an old friend. I had migrated from the intense sun of the high desert to the fog-bound coast.

Once operated by San Francisco Zen Center, Greens still maintains a loose affiliation. They buy vegetables from Green Gulch, an organic farm in Marin County and sister temple to Tassajara. Their food is exquisite. For two hours we found ourselves pausing, surprised into silence by a combination of flavors or by the simple sweetness released from a beet.

Back in the Mission District, where we were staying, the effects of a week’s practice lingered. Instead of rising irritation at the Saturday night revelry, I found amusement, and drifted off to sleep sending Cricket well wishes for a safe night.

In the morning, I pulled aside the red curtains to find fog edging between the buildings and obscuring their upper floors. Becca and I dressed and walked up to Tartin, a French patisserie. Already this Sunday morning, the line stretched past four buildings to a white garage door. A man in pink scrubs waited ahead of us; a father, with his curly-haired son strapped to his back, read something on his phone; a pregnant woman maneuvered her three-year old into a stroller while holding a cup of milk and an orange juice. I looked up and saw a bronze Buddha face cupping the arm of a traffic light. His half smile remained unchanged when we left, each carrying a pan au chocolate.

We loaded the car, and eased out of the city. The fog was thinning, but still encircled the crown of the Golden Gate Bridge. I exhaled when we turned off on Rte 1 and headed up the coast to Point Reyes, not realizing I’d been holding my breath.

Cricket and I were back on the road, and for a moment, in delightful company.

Kitchen

Sometimes, Matt said, when I’m preparing green beans, I’m not thinking about taking off their tops, I’m thinking about… Skateboarding.

One of the teachings of Zen is that meditation practice continues outside of the zendo. So when, after three days as a full guest, I began a brief period of guest practice, I continued my meditations in the Tasssajara Kitchen.

This kitchen has seen decades of practice, and its clean and well-kept tools bespeak mindful work. That precedence was the stock from which I prepared my soup. Already the foundation existed. All I did was arrive, ready for whatever might be needed and attend to my task with as much presence as I could.

With a small crew, I peeled and sliced a box of oranges, separating the peel from the flesh with a chef’s knife. The task took my full attention, primarily to keep my fingernails and skin attached while depriving the orange of its. It took attention, working the junction of peel and flesh, neither leaving peel behind nor wasting flesh by cutting too much away.

We worked using what the Zen practitioners call functional speech, which makes room for instructions and questions but eliminates the chatter that causes our minds to move too easily away from the task at hand.

I found, while working silently that I was open to beauty: the heart of a red beet shot through with white rays (beets, 4.5 gallons); the smell of lemon oil released as I chopped the peel (lemon zest, 2.5 cups); the feel of firm beans under cold water (green beans 4.5 gallons, yellow wax beans, 4 gallons).

Of course my mind wandered, not to skateboarding, but all over the country: to conversations, memories, plans. But realizing it was wandering, I brought it back to slicing cabbage (4.5 gallons, half-inch shred) or pitting plums (2 gallons, small chop) or washing my knife, drying it and putting it away.

Every task is set up with the best tools for the job and in a way that is most efficient. Bowls for compost and finished produce are set so each person can reach them easily.

The mindfulness bell rang. We all stopped, put down our knives and vegetables mid-peel. We stretched, brought our minds back to that moment, bowed, and returned to our tasks.

Water Ouzel

As my mother and I sat eating our lunch a mile or two up Tassajara Creek from the village, a little bird landed on a rock that jutted out at the head of a waterfall. I saw it only for a moment, slate-colored, slightly smaller than a robin, with a cocked, triangular tail. “I knew it”, as Mary Oliver says “from the pages of a book; it was a dipper”. 1

I had never seen an American Dipper before, though I had looked several times this summer, waiting by rushing streams, trying to imagine a bird that would call this torrent hospitable. Dippers can swim, using strokes of their wings, twenty feet underwater in currents swift enough to knock me over.

So excited was I to have seen a Dipper, that my chatter startled it off again, and it flew downstream. We walked more slowly then, my mom and I, letting our fleet slide along the bottom to find the surest footing, and relying heavily on our walking staffs for balance.

But the little, agile bird seemed to grow accustomed to our presence, and soon we were able to watch as it landed on rocks mid-stream and bobbed its body with quick bends at the ankle. We watched it land in the water and walk along the bottom, snorkeling, its third, white eyelid drawing closed to protect its eyes from grit and debris. It was making a meal of the stonefly and caddisfly larvae whose cast off casings we had seen earlier along the rocks.

When we got too close or made too sudden a movement, the dipper flew ahead, genuflecting from the top of a rock before continuing to search for lunch.

John Muir loved these “darlings of Nature” he knew as the Water Ouzel, and wrote about his encounters:

“Here I find the little water ouzel as much at home as any linnet in a leafy grove, seeming to take the greater delight in the more boisterous the stream… its song is sweet and low, and all its gentleness, as it flits about the loud uproar, bespeaks strength and peace and joy…. A yet finer bloom is this little bird than the foam bells in eddying pools. Gentle bird, a precious message you bring me. We may miss the meaning of the torrent, but thy sweet voice, only love is in it.2

Our gestures, my mother’s and mine, bespoke joy surely, but our walking in the creek held neither strength nor peace. “Oops, I was talking again,” my mother said as her attention shifted away from her footing. She reached out to catch her balance on a rock and sat mid-creek with a look of surprise and delight. We laughed, startling the Dipper. She levered herself upright with the staff, and we paused then to pick blackberries, sun-warmed, before feeling our way forward again.

1. Mary Oliver, “The Dipper,” Owls and Other Fantasies.
2. John Muir from My First Summer in the Sierra.

Ancient

I entered the zendo, my left foot lifting over the door-sill. I bowed to the altar, and walked to the back for my seat assignment. I had entered Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, tucked in a valley of the Ventana Wilderness just inland from Monterey, California, where my mother is a resident. My arrival coincided with the full moon and its ceremony replaced the usual evening sitting.

I stood at the edge of my zabuton, a three-foot square cushion of padded, black cotton and watched as the officiating priest entered, offered incense and the chanting began.

This, my mother had told me, was the oldest ceremony still practiced. It has been practiced since the time of the Buddha, twenty-five hundred years ago. The ceremony itself is a restating of vows: I will not kill; I will not take what is not given; I will not misuse sexuality; I will not lie; I will not intoxicate body and mind of self or other; I will not slander: I will not praise self at the expense of others; I will not be avaricious; I will not harbor ill will; and I will not abuse the three treasures: Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.

A resonant monotone of chanting, filled the zendo, our voices muffled briefly as we bowed our heads to the zabuton in a full body bow. Through the ceremony, the repeated offering of incense, the call and response chanting, bells and gongs gave instruction, kept time, and signaled a movement. Their function added simplicity.

I had spent the morning in an ancient presence as well. After leaving the Sheep Creek Campground and driving out of King’s Canyon, I stopped for breakfast at the Grant Grove and walked among the sequoia. There is a picture of a US cavalry detachment standing ready to defend the General Sherman tree. Ten of them, mounted on horseback, stand abreast and still the trunk is visible on either side. So it is with the Grant tree, forty feet across at is base. But as the early Buddhists practiced the full moon ceremony, the seed of this tree sat sealed in a cone awaiting the fire that would release the cone, allow its scales to open, and its seeds to fall to the ground. Twenty-two hundred years ago, that fire came and the Grant tree seed germinated.

My mother and I left the zendo in the silence that would last through the next day’s breakfast. We climbed the hill to my cabin and sat on the porch, the full moon anchoring us. As we sat, the crickets resumed their songs. These too, I thought, these too are ancient chants.

No Expectations

Its true. I drove through Yosemite without stopping. Some might call it sacrilege, but I think, given how parked cars spilled out of every trailhead lot, and how drivers headed into the valley stopped suddenly or swerved to the margin to snap a photograph, that John Muir himself might well have applauded my decision. Don’t get me wrong; the Tioga Pass Road was well worth the price of admission and the views I had of El Capitan and Half Dome made me laugh in disbelief. But as Cricket and I wound up the road from Fresno to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, I knew my choice had been a good one. The village at Grant’s Grove was still too busy for my taste, so I headed in the thirty miles through Sequoia National Forest to the Canyon itself, deep in the Sierras, along the South Fork of the King’s River, and settled in for the night.

I was determined to do a full day hike, ten or fifteen miles at least, during my one full day in the canyon. So I left my campsite as the sky was just beginning to pale, and headed to the Copper Creek trailhead. I switchbacked up and up gaining over two thousand feet in the first few miles. I paused to greet manzanita and ceanothus, two familiar shrubs of the California hills, and a deer that watched from the trail above. At 7000 feet the chaparral gave way to conifers: sequoia and pines whose needles softened my walking. The sun had reached me, and in the growing heat, their shade was welcome.

A couple passed me, headed down, the first people I’d seen in the three hours I’d been hiking. My destination, the saddle, they told me, was buggy, and the basin beyond, which I’d hoped to explore if time allowed, held some of the worst mosquitoes they had ever experienced.

I was surprised to find the news relaxed me. Now I had no expectations. I would climb as high as I could, take my time, watch birds, and let go of the self-imposed pressures of time and mileage. I delighted in the vertical unfolding of spring. Flowers already past their prime in lower elevations were in full bloom here, paintbrush, penstemon and mariposa poppy. Hearing chirping in a knot of shrubs above a small drainage, I waited until a MacGillivray’s warbler hopped up. It hid quickly, and I waited for a second look. In Upper Tent Meadow I looked out to see the first cumulous clouds passing from the far peaks. I knew that I would not reach the saddle before needing to turn back. But somehow, perhaps it was the mosquitoes, it was OK.

I climbed up through the meadow turning often to look out over Avalanche Pass and the Sphinx Crest. The peaks still held snow in the cirques and north-facing slopes. Here I could feel, in the “untrammeled wilderness”, the spirit of the man who strode through these mountains with a crust of bread in his pocket and a plant press in his backpack. Here was the high sierra. And then, as the cumulus clouds towered into thunderheads, I turned and strode down along the path I had come. I watched the pageant of the summer storm unfold without disappointment.

A Story of Water

There is a certain irony to the County Park owned by the city of Los Angeles and leased to Mono County. It was one of the few places in town I saw a green lawn.

Though a number of tributaries carry fresh water to Mono Lake, laid out at the eastern base of the Sierra Nevadas, it loses water only through evaporation. Minerals carried from the mountains remain behind making the water saline, more hospitable to brine flies and brine shrimp than fish. Because of the abundant flies and shrimp, the lake is an important destination for migrating birds; Wilson’s and Red-napped Phalaropes and other shorebirds, come here to double their weight before flying south.

In 1941, Los Angeles began diverting water from the eastern Sierra for city use. Because of the diversions, less fresh water flowed into Mono Lake lowering it from an elevation of 6417’ to its present day level of 6382’ and doubling the salinity. With the system on the brink of collapse, a citizen’s group, The Mono Lake Commission, began a decades long litigation to restore water to the lake. The commission continues to work statewide to educate consumers about water conservation. Did you know that a lawn in LA uses more water to maintain than a swimming pool?

I read a study once that demonstrated that humans are fundamentally, and perhaps evolutionarily drawn to water. The researchers asked participants to rate forest scenes and grasslands compared with those containing lakes, rivers and streams. But the pictures had to be screened carefully – one forest scene was chosen again and again as preferable until the researchers noted, after looking closely, that indeed a stream flowed through the trees.

So was I drawn to Mono Lake. I spent the afternoon walking its shores and bird watching. Wherever I went in town, the lake drew my eye. The tufa towers—built from mineral deposits from underground springs—entranced me, hardened mounds like dribble castles built by children then eroded by the tide. Once underwater, the towers now stand amid blue-eyed grass, paintbrush and willow.

I stayed at the County Park until the sun set behind the mountains and the light left the lake, casting the far shore in mauve and violet. I stayed watching phalaropes spin for their meals and Long-billed Dowitchers probe the alkaline flats with their bills. I stayed to hear the raucous calls of California Gulls as their rookery settled into night. As I walked back to my car Violet-green swallows and bats vied for insects, and then the sprinklers kicked on keeping the green lawn green and sending the tributaries of Mono Lake into the dry dessert air.

Interlude

In case you're one of the folks who is reading this to make sure I haven't fallen into a canyon, been carried off by grizzlies or run away to join the circus, please know that I will be away from my computer until July 31. More then.

Parallax

I remember watching corn-rows disappear into the far horizon as we drove. I don’t know if I sought an explanation or if my father, observing my fascination offered the concept. It was the summer I turned five and my parents and I embarked on a six-week loop around the lower forty-eight.

Parallax: 1. a. Difference or change in the apparent position or direction
of an object as seen from two different points.1

The phenomenon came back to me as I drove across Nevada, nearly causing me vertigo forcing me to re-set my gauge of distance. I followed Rte 50 west to Ely then headed Southwest on Rte 6. Next Gas 164 miles.

I descended from the Egan Range and the White River Valley stretched before me. Basin. I could see the entire length of road until it climbed the Grant Range. I guessed—10 miles? 15? I checked my odometer. Twenty-five miles later I downshifted and headed up. Range.

Each Basin, each range was distinct. My guessing game continued, some stretched 13 miles, 18, 20. Descending from the Grant Range to the tapering foothills of the White Pine Range, there were no signs, no habitations, only the range fencing that stretched on and on. In Railroad Valley the first cut of hay was in, irrigated by the water of Bull Creek. The next valley was the pale silver green of sage. Dried grasses gave the next a yellow cast. So too were the ranges identifiable. Some were toothy and jutted against the sky; others were rounded, eroded, sloping. Some had the clear horizontal layering of sedimentary rock, one showed vertical folds as if fifty-foot-high lengths of crepe paper stretched across its face. At a rest area trashcans huddled in the shade of junipers.

After the Black Rock summit a sign pointed to the Black Rock lava flow and even from the road I could see the tumult of basaltic rock on the otherwise level valley. A coyote jogged across the road in front of me then broke into a sprint, it seemed, for the pure joy of running.

Telephone poles gathered in the distance like an art lesson on perspective. A pronghorn walked across the road in front of me then trotted into the sage. He didn’t hurry; I didn’t touch my break.

I passed the Tonopah Speedway and Airport; Joshua trees marked the entry.
A knife’s edge of snow hung above the next range: the high sierras, 40, maybe, 50 miles away. The space between low, mounded plants grew, and stretches of white and grey sand filled the void until, further on, it was mostly sand. This is a parched landscape. The washes I passed had held ATVs more recently than flowing water. By the road a concrete shell of a building still boasted “Bar and Sluts” over the door, around it lay smaller, equally vacant outbuildings. I turned right and follow 6 toward the peaks and California.

Through it all, the foreground kept pace while the distant ranges held their ground; the middle ground shifted into being only through movement. Parallax.

1. "parallax, n.1" The Oxford English Dictionary.

Through an Ecologist’s Eyes

So often when we think of climate change, the magnificent images of an ice sheet calving or a polar bear adrift dominate our thoughts, but as I hiked up Death Canyon in the Tetons with a dear friend of mine, she began to play out a story far more intricate and complex than the charismatic stories that dominate the news.

I first heard of Clark’s Nutcrackers in an Animal Behavior class in college. They are master cachers who have evolved a mutualistic relationship with the whitebark pine in western montaine systems. The gumminess of the pines’ cones prevents the wind from dispersing their seeds, a common seed dispersal method for most pines. But the Clark’s Nutcrackers are seed-eaters; they pick apart the cones and hide seeds all over their territories. For the most part, the nutcrackers remember their caches, though quite a few are intercepted by grizzlies. The grizzlies find enough of these caches that the pine nuts constitute an important part of their diet, especially as they are fattening up for hibernation. Those left behind by the nutcrackers and bears often germinate and grow into new trees.

So what does this have to do with climate change? The mountain pine beetle, always present here, is no longer being held in check by the sustained cold of winter. More and more larvae are surviving to adulthood, surviving to fly to whitebark pines and gnawing their way into the bark to lay eggs. The adult beetles carry a hitchhiker: the blue-stain fungus, which, both breaks down the trees’ resistance to the pine beetles and, when admitted into the sapwood of the pines, begins to limit and ultimately cut off the supply of water and nutrients that move through the trunk. Eventually the tree dies.

So because of milder winters, the beetles are able to carry the fungus to more trees. The trees are dying, which limits the food supply for Clark’s Nutcracker and Grizzlies. Still, some may ask, “So what?”

It is highly likely that hungry grizzlies, unable to fatten themselves on pine nuts will venture into the valley for Mc Donald’s instead, or trash, or whatever else humans have to offer. Inadvertently, the beetle’s survival may lead to increased grizzly-human interactions. And there’s more. Either because of their growing requirements or the Clark’s caching preferences, the whitebark pine is a pioneer species, meaning it grows in recently disturbed and open spaces. As it becomes established, it anchors the snow pack, causing the snow to melt more slowly and creating the sustainable water supply that we humans depend upon.

I am amazed by this story. The intricacy and complexity of the communities that surrounds us delights me. And I am dismayed by their unraveling at human hands. I wonder, of how many more puzzle pieces are we not yet aware? How many species and interactions will calve from our world without our knowing until we hear the great crash of extinction and it is too late?

Dim Sum

When I was eleven, I flew across country alone for the first time. Leaving my home outside of Philadelphia, a came to visit my aunt in San Francisco for a week. I loved the freedom and adventure of traveling alone – I suppose I still do.

My aunt opened my eyes and taste buds to worlds I had not imagined. We walked in the Japanese Garden, went out for sushi and joined one of her friends for Dim Sum in Chinatown. The restaurant was fairly dark, and carts of mysterious food came again and again by our table, each dish named in a thick accent. I remember the sticky sesame and red bean buns, which I loved, and the duck’s feet, which was one of the few things I refused to try. Years later, when I lived in Brooklyn, I would detour through Chinatown to pick up a red bean bun at my favorite pastry shop.

In many ways, this trip has been like Dim Sum; I’ve gotten small tastes of dishes from which I could make entire meals. I felt that way when I passed up a trip down to Quivara NWR in Kansas in favor of moving on, and again as I hiked out of the Roaring River drainage in the Rocky Mountains, leaving the rest of the park and adjacent National Forest unexplored. And again in southern Utah choosing between Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Bryce, Zion, Escalante.

And here again at Antelope Island, a four and a half by fifteen mile long island in the Great Salt Lake. On the island, drove out toward the Fielding Garr Ranch pausing to watch a black-tailed jackrabbit bound into the sage.

The full course would have included at least one night camping on the island and a hike up Frary Peak, its highest point, then another walk on Buffalo Point, a promontory out into the Great Salt Lake. I would have settled into the Visitor’s Center to fully explore the exhibits and watch the film instead of just popping in for the bird checklist.

But I settled for a taste as the cart went by, and hiked up Dolly knob. As I walked, grasshoppers sprang from the trail, their flight the rasp of seedpods dried and tossed by the wind. A pronghorn startled at my approach, turned to watch me for a moment then bunched his muscles to bound over the bench left behind by the ancient lake Bonneville. Near the summit, in the shadow of a 2.7 billion year old outcrop, I settled in to write. Before me stretched the Great Salt Lake. A meadowlark’s liquid song and the scour of an airplane broke the silence. It was a sere landscape, grasses and flower stems browned by the summer sun and little rain. On the updraft from the playa below, I could hear the grunts and bellows of heard of bison. Clouds of dust rose from their rolling and pawing the ground.

Not quite satisfied, I eased across the causeway and onto the next offering.

In search of the Western Wood-peewee

In 1983, after several years of record rainfall, the Great Salt Lake rose. It threatened the city and destroyed the system of dykes at Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, dykes that corralled the fresh water of the Bear River. In her book Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams chronicled the rise of the Great Salt Lake, and correlated the destruction of the refuge with her mother’s struggle with breast cancer. It was Terry Tempest William’s book that put Bear River on my itinerary. But it was also the birds.

I am a birder—that is I enjoy watching birds, studying their behavior. But my observations are often more than incidental; I’ll go birding, keep a checklist of what I see and work to identify everything I encounter. I keep a life list, a list of bird species I have seen or heard and could identify again. My mother considers herself a bird-watcher, she is less concerned about identification but loves to observe color and behavior, to really sit and watch the birds that surround her. On my trip to Bear River, I met David, a lister. He keeps a year list as well as a life list, does a “big day” each year to see how many birds he can identify in 24 hours in one county. He teaches English and spends his summers wandering the west and fleshing out his year list – checking in with old friends.

I began the day at Bear River with a Yellow-headed Blackbird clicking from his perch on a cattail. The Refuge, I found out, was closed as they paved the autoroute. I was fully aware of the irony of Terry’s book drawing me to a refuge once again closed. The staff was, however, offering guided tours, and I happened to arrive on a day when a tour was available. David and I joined a mother and her 11 year-old son and the two local birders who were leading the tour.

As I waited for the tour, I walked around the half-mile loop outside the visitor’s center. A red fox stalked into the reeds, body frozen. One paw lifted imperceptibly and then he pounced, pounced again, and rooted for his prey. He caught me watching him and bounded into the grasses. A Sora, usually illusive, walked across an opening in the marsh offering me perhaps my first look, though I’d identified them by sound before. A mother Ruddy Duck, blue billed and russet bodied trailed six ducklings.

The van drove out along one of the reconstructed dykes on the south end of the refuge. We stopped for White-Faced Ibis and Wilson’s Phalarope, both life birds. Marsh Wrens worked the reeds and we spied a few of their grass-ball nests. At the first pool of water, Black-necked Stilts, Franklin’s Gulls and Coots, with their red-headed young, probed and dove for food. In the deeper waters, where a channel ran between impoundments, Western, Clark’s and Eared Grebes swam in pairs, preening. A line of White Pelicans edged the horizon. Smaller groups swam toward the shallows herding carp, then circled, trapping the fish and eating as many as their bellies and pouches could hold. On the mud flats, American Avocets, Stilts and Marbled Godwits probed with their long bills.

The van returned to the visitor’s center by noon and David and I tapped our leaders for other local “hotspots” where we could continue our birding. Chris was looking for a Western Wood Peewee to add to his year list. I was just happy to spend the day birding.

We drove up Logan Canyon into the Wasatch-Cache National Forest, winding higher and higher to Tony Glen. The wildflowers, as our leader had promised were at their peak: a profusion of reds, blues yellows and purples. I recognized only a few and could happily have spent the next few hours keying out plants, but that’s another story. Walking around the lake, we added Clark’s Nutcracker, Western Tanager, Red-naped Sapsucker and White-crowned sparrow to our day’s list.

It’s a strange thing encountering a stranger and joining in travel for a short time. We knew only each other’s first names and broadest geographies: I from Massachusetts, he from Wisconsin. And yet, we both shared a passion for birding and for writing. We had read many of the same books. At the end of the day, after stopping twice to look for a Dipper, we shook hands and headed our separate ways. I headed into Mantua (Man-ua) to the reservoir where grebes nested on their mats of floating grass. Along the edge, Western Kingbirds and Lazuli Buntings claimed power lines and willows.

I’ll admit, I tallied my list over dinner: 65 species, 6 life birds. We never did find the Wood-peewee.

photo: http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Western_Wood-Pewee/id

Gift of the Desert, II

I am a woman, traveling alone. When I first began hiking alone, I was often afraid, of men, mostly. Of rape. But as I spent more time alone in the backcountry, I began to celebrate that solitude, long for it.

Instead of celebration, however, I find that my aloneness is most often met with amazement or dismay. Hiking down from the saddle in the Rockies, I met a couple, and stood aside as they climbed up. “And there’s another behind you, I expect” was the man’s greeting.

Camped in the Arapaho National Forest in Colorado, I passed a woman gathering firewood. (She was camping with a man.)
“Just you alone in that tent?”
“Yep.”
“Do you do this a lot?”
“This summer, I am.”
“You don’t… have any problems?”

While I have not encountered anyone who wished me physical harm, I find the expectation of harm toxic. Encountered suspicions gnaw at my confidence and remind me that my solo travels are unusual, unexpected and, some would suggest, unsafe. I’m not afraid, but I’m also not dumb. My family knows my plan; when I’m out for a hike I’ve usually let a ranger know where I am. You won’t find my planned route on this blog. When I sign into a campsite or trail register, I use my first initial: “J” could be Jason as easily as Jennifer.

***

I rise early from my campsite in the apricot orchard. The sun has not yet crested the reef and the valley holds the cool of night. I follow a trail, switchbacking up and up. White-throated Swifts’ calls, like fingers plucking comb tines, echo off of the canyon walls. I reach the mouth of the hanging canyon and step into sunlight. I raise my arms above my head in greeting and welcome the warmth. Down through the canyon, I find evidence of yesterday’s rain. A pothole cups water, reflects sky. At the base of side canyons sand holds the shape of running water, carved like muscles into channels, deltas and fans. Here, the water ran, and here, and here. A Rock Wren edges nervously to a puddle and drinks. The trail follows the wash then rises above the canyon floor onto the slickrock. I sit in the shade of a Juniper. Rooted to the rock, I breathe in and out; I loose water. I do not think safe or unsafe, should or should not. I simply am. I drink and spill a few drops on the ground in thanks.

This is why I woke early: to sit tall and alone in the desert; to understand that I am not separate from the vastness that surrounds me, from the ancient seabed that supports me; to sit open eyed and open-hearted to what this landscape has to offer—patterns of light and shadow, unwary movements of animals, the slow passage of time. This is the second gift of the desert: Solitude.

Gift of the Desert, I

When I began this blog, I didn’t know I’d signed up to describe Capitol Reef. Driving along Rte 24 I began to understand why my father is passionate about geology. The road parallels the Waterpocket Fold, and I stopped to gawk; huge slabs of rock stories high thrust out of the earth like a line of spears aimed to stop the oncoming cavalry.

Driving through the reef itself, I shook my head in disbelief and wonder at the spires, cliffs, domes, fins, hoodoos, and chimneys all layered in red, green, grey and white. In places they rose three thousand feed above the valley floor where the Fremont River wove a thread of lushness. At Fruita, an historic Mormon settlement, the confluence of the Fremont and Sulphur Creek offered enough water to sustain orchards: apricot, pear and apple. I bought a bag of apricots, Apricots! In the desert! and savored each juicy mouthful.

I found a trail to a band of petroglyphs and hiked out through the canyon. A Towee sang, but otherwise the land was still and quiet. Clouds massed overhead. I crushed a sage leaf between my finger and thumb and brought the scent to my nose.

I had the petroglyphs to myself, miraculously. Horned faces hung above me looking down, a bighorn sheep leapt from one absent rock to another, bear prints crossed a sinewy line of river. But there were other markings too, names of travelers beginning in 1902, bullet holes riddled one spiral shaped glyph and other shapes, mocking the ancient ones and mutating them. My stomach tightened in anger and grief.

Thunder rumbled overhead: my cue to hike out, and fast. At the first flash of lightening, I began to count hoping I had time to reach my car, and looking for a safe place in case I didn’t. I saw the rain before I felt it, moving in sheets across the canyon – the sound undistinguishable from wind in the cottonwood leaves, but the leaves were still. I reached my car peppered with the first thick drops.

Have you ever smelled the desert in a summer thunderstorm? The bruised sage I had smelled earlier infused every inch of the land around me and mingled with the scents of juniper and grateful soil. It is the smell of things coming alive, of reckless abandon, of elation.

The storm was brief, enough to make the washes run, but not to fill them. Enough to send Black-throated Sparrows flitting from shrub to shrub across the desert. I ate another apricot, window down and rain splashing in. What a gift, water in the desert.

And the Challenges?

By the time I secured a campsite and drove into Moab it was 101˚. I wanted to check my email, find a cold beer and do as all desert dwellers do during the heat of the day: hide. The Grand County Library was lovely and after decompressing my camp fuel, so that it wouldn’t explode in the heat of my car, I found a desk and settled in.

By four, hunger and an urge, or perhaps a responsibility to see Arches National Park drove me back into the heat. Arches is lovely, the curve of red rock against Utah blue. It was also crowded. I pulled into the Windows parking lot: CO, NH, OH, CA, NY, NY and on. Tour buses idled to maintain their cool interiors. I filed out along the third of a mile trail as part of a herd who snapped pictures of each other, trail signs, and of course the arches. North Window silhouetted a father and daughter in bright tee-shirts.

I moved on. A spur trail lead to Turret Arch on the same manicured trail, edged in sandstone, with level sandstone steps where necessary. I turned left and followed the primitive trail, a footpath marked with cairns and the passage of hundreds of feet. At South Window, I settled into the shade and began to see time: the slow wearing away of stone by wind and water as German, Korean and French bounced off the canyon walls above.

The trail lead around the arches and below them, then wove back through the desert to the parking lot. Violet-green Swallows swooped overhead. I reveled in the illusion of solitude and arrived back at my car still restless, but glad, at least, that I’d come.

Where waters begin

The wind woke me, roaring in the trees overhead and sending my backcountry permit slapping against my tent. I rolled over to write, hoping the wind would die down as morning warmed.

By 6:45 I was on the trail watching the sun light ease into the valley. Still short of breath on the ascent, I paused often, turning to face the immensity of space surrounding me. Ruby-crowned Kinglets flitted in the trees overhead, alpine sunflowers lifted their faces to the rising sun, a White-crowned sparrow flew across the path then sang from the top of an alpine willow. Waterfalls poured from under lingering snow banks, the roaring water audible over the wind.

I climbed higher. Conifers gave way to willow shrubs, and long-stemmed wildflowers to low, matted species. Moss campion bloomed atop its cushion of leaves, and Colorado columbine danced in rock crevices. American Pipits bobbed their way across the tundra in search of food.

I reached the bottom of a snowfield, rocks and gravel lined its margins: the snow too recently retreated to have allowed plants to emerge. My hiking poles dug in and slowly I worked up the slope, my feet less sure on the loose ground.

The saddle opened up above me, a gently rounded expanse of alpine buttercups nodding in the wind. Vegetation had erased the trail, marked now only by cairns, which rested on scattered boulders. I crossed the saddle and sat, lifting my binoculars. On the falling slope of Fairchild Mountain five bighorn ewes grazed. Three were gray, the color of the surrounding rock, only their white rumps and movement distinguished them. The other two were lighter, buff and beige. As I watched two lambs leaped from a higher outcrop and ran, stone to stone, to join their mothers. They tore around the group inciting play among the older sheep, who bucked and danced in return.

Behind the sheep hung the high peaks of the Rockies, still etched in snow. Snow that as it melted would run to the Pacific, the Atlantic. When I crossed the divide tomorrow, the rivers I followed would flow west.

Awaiting the storm

I settled in at Lawn Lake late morning, eager to climb to the saddle between Hague’s Peak and Fairchild Mountain. Mummy Mountain towered thee thousand feet above my campsite, nestled in the bowl created by the three. I shed my pack, grabbed binochs, lunch and a few extra layers and headed uphill through wildflowers threaded by meltwater creeks.

Just above treeline, switchbacking up through alpine meadows, I met a man on his way down. We exchanged greetings then he asked my destination. “Up as high as I can get!” I answered. And he pointed behind me to darkening cumulous clouds pouring over the mountain. “Keeping an eye on the weather?” he asked then told me he was headed back to tree line. I followed.

I was back at my campsite by 12:30 am, humbled and facing an afternoon with my own company. Like many in my generation, I have gotten used to being entertained. I don’t require much: a hike across the prairie or a good book will do, but I was facing eight hours till dark and a pending thunderstorm.

I sat on a rock and leaned back against a tree, skimming my western bird book. Perhaps because of my stillness, or perhaps because of an innate curiosity, a marmot approached my tent, paused and edged closer and closer still. Then he ran, his tail inscribing circles behind. A chirp behind me introduced me to two more, touching noses and tussling. Fascinated, I watched marmots come and go, wander close and run away, court each other, mate, and stand on their hind legs to eat, holding some morsel between their front paws.

I wandered down to the lake keeping an eye on the boiling clouds, and scanned the surrounding peaks, at the saddle, I searched out the trail and was surprised to see people headed down. Still, I felt gratitude rather than resentment at the advice to turn back. I paused to look closely at the wildflowers that carpeted any open area, their form and colors – none familiar, but all remarkable for surviving at 11,000 feet. Back at my campsite, I thumbed through the Lone Pine guide to Rocky Mountain Wildflowers and wondered why I’d left my reading book in the car.

A scolding in the trees above alerted me to a Clark’s Nutcracker, a bird whose social behavior I had studied in college, and a life bird. Another movement caught my eye and I looked up to see a mule deer crossing above my campsite. Unaware of my presence, she paused to graze before moving on. Thunder rumbled over Mummy Mountain. I crawled into my tent and found myself drowsy.

Thunder abated and the sky cleared, the storm never fully materializing. I resolved to wake early and try again before the clouds blew in. How rarely I take a moment, let alone an afternoon to sit still without the distraction of some other task, and again, how humble I felt at the challenge of awaiting the storm.

Into the backcountry

In Eastern Colorado the crops abandoned their linear blocks and instead followed the sweeping arc of the irrigation boom. The morning was cloudy as I headed west on Rte. 36 to Denver. As the clouds broke apart and cropland turned more and more to native scrub, patches of sunlight played across the landscape. Lark sparrows and mourning doves erupted from the pavement at my approach. I knew, and was slightly dismayed that the beauty of the landscape through which I traveled would be diminished by the Rocky Mountains. But for the moment, I reveled in it.

I reached the backcountry permit office as the first rumbles of thunder began. I reserved two nights, packed my backpack and headed uphill in a light drizzle. My pack was full; there’s no division of essential items—tent, food, stove, fuel—when going solo. I carried it all, and though I had spent the night at four thousand feet the night before, I was not remotely acclimated to the altitude.

So I took it easy, pausing for breath often, drinking lots of water and even pausing to take my pack off on a trail I could have sprinted up at lower altitude.

A wooden sign marked the turn off to my campsite and I crossed the Roaring River on a wooden footbridge. The rain had stopped, the thunder abated and there, beside the trail that lead up to the tent pad, a Three-toed Woodpecker fed his young at a nest cavity in an aspen. Everything, it seemed, was just fine.

Oil & Ag

I saw my first pumpjacks in Marion County, Kansas just after leaving the Tallgrass Prairie. The “nodding donkeys” as they’re also called, increased as I drove west. By Ness County, every field boasted one. Whatever other crop they were raising, they were raising oil too. Ness City, the county seat is a windswept town. Six blocks of Main Street are paved in brick and wide enough to park cars head in on both sides without interrupting traffic.

I stopped for gas, not sure when I’d next have the opportunity. The woman at the pump ahead of me noted my plates: “Massachusetts? How’d you end up here?” She was born on the Vinyard, turns out, and still had family out on the Cape. She was sick about the thought of oil reaching those beaches. Her son eyed me incredulously as if he’d never envisioned his mother as a child.

I turned north on Rte 283 and headed out past oil supply contractors and well drillers, past the bones of old pumpjacks and lines of new ones ready to take their place.

283 is a scenic route up through the Smoky Valley. Like the other “blue highways” I’d traveled today, the speed limit was sixty and the road straight as the corn rows it bordered. But soon the topography shifted slightly, small crags rose above the surrounding fields and creeks carved into them. Where land held native vegetation, it was sparser and drier than that of eastern Kansas.

I pulled into a crossroad, well graded but unpaved and cut the engine. I first noticed the wind, constant. A few barn swallows chattered, but underneath was silence. I wanted to walk, feel the wind on my face and puzzle out this landscape. A nighthawk perched on a fence post and opted for camouflage rather than flight. A lark sparrow landed on the barbed wire and sent me scouring my western bird book.

Torn between this spare and lovely place and the sinking sun, I eased back onto the road and north to I-70. To Colorado and my campsite.

Crossing the Prairie

On the beltway around Kansas City, the silhouette of a Sioux Indian and his pony stood in the median. I was startled to see them, even in oxidized iron. Three bison followed and then a covered wagon and pioneer family. Three more bison. The nod to history struck me instead as a memorial for what once was.

Traffic eased more quickly than I’d hoped and I sped south and west on Rte 50, which joined I-35 for nearly 100 miles. It left the interstate at Emporia and I followed. I stopped for gas across from the Tyson plant a hulking complex of towers and low warehouses. Its gleaming metal and white paint stood in sharp contrast to the surrounding town. About twenty miles west of Emporia, I turned north on Rte 177 toward the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve.

The grassland, already mid-thigh high was studded with life and movement. Butterflies and bees visited a dozen different species of wildflower nestled among the grasses. Some of these grew more rapidly than the surrounding prairie and served as perches from which Dicksissel, Grasshopper Sparrow and Meadowlarks proclaimed their small territories. Overhead, Nighthawks carved buoyant circles in the sky. The sky itself, stretching for miles and miles was a mottled grey that gave full vibrance to the greens, purples and oranges below.

I crested a low rise followed the ridge to next pasture. Low brown shapes rose form the grass ahead, and as I rounded a bend in the trail they revealed themselves as bison. They eyed me cautiously; a calf struggled to its feet and was nuzzled by its mother. Three lay in the grass chewing not bothering to turn at my approach. Then the leader dropped his head to browse. This was what the iron on the beltway memorialized; yet here we all were inexplicably and unpretentiously alive.

Auto Tour

After navigating the morning traffic around Cincinnati, I left the interstate and joined Rt 50: a two-lane highway that cuts from Ocean City, Maryland to San Francisco. My gas tank was down to a quarter or less and I was stretching to reach Seymour, Indiana to refill.

Before I embarked, my Aunt Gail had offered 10 rules for the road. At the top of the list was “Follow your intuition”, close behind was “Visit any National Wildlife Refuge you can”. So when I saw the sign for Muscatatuck NWR, I turned in. The map at the Visitor’s Center detailed a four-mile driving loop with several short walking trails leading off of it. With Seymour only two miles beyond the refuge entrance, I headed out on the loop, fingers crossed that the four miles (averaging seven miles an hour) wouldn’t eat into the remaining gas too much.

The auto tour is a relic of an older age. I remember visiting Bombay Hook NWR and Edwin B. Forsythe NWR as a child, my parents and I would check the recent sightings list and then crawl around the loop, our speed ranging from ten to zero with intermittent stops to walk to an overlook tower or take a closer look at a bird without the interfering vibrations of the engine. Even then, though I loved the birds, it seemed a bit strange: driving as a form of entertainment.

But it is not just Cricket that is running out of gas. I whole-heartedly believe that our dwindling global fuel supplies will result in some drastic changes in the not-so-distant future. One of which may be the extinction of the auto tour.

So why, you may ask, am I plowing through a tank and a half of gas a day working my way from one ocean to the other? It’s a question I’ve grappled with myself, and one I bring up with some chagrin. One reason is that, in typical American style, I’d like to drive across the country while it’s still an option. I’m also visiting people I dearly love, some of whom I haven’t seen in years. Perhaps to assuage my guilt, I’ll note again that I’ve brought Cricket along for the trip, a fuel-efficient vehicle driven in a way that minimizes my use of fuel (except, I’ll admit, as I drive around the loop at Muscatatuck).



But this morning, creeping between trail heads and impoundments on the refuge, I watched an Indigo Bunting sing from a laden blackberry bush. I marveled at crayfish chimneys lining the path and bruised a pawpaw leaf to make sure I had the correct identification. I watched a Great-blue Heron fish for its lunch and gawked as a Prothonotary Warbler arrowed into the underbrush. Feeling sated, I eased out of the refuge onto route 50 in search of a gas station.

Sacred Lake

I slipped out of Candor on the morning of the 5th before the ground fog had burned off. All along main street lawn chairs, construction cones, saw horses and even a garden hose reserved spots for the afternoon’s parade.

I meandered along back roads through rolling hills and farmland before joining I-86 at Corning, NY. Having zigzagged across New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio many times, I sought only to cover as much distance as I could. Just before noon I crossed the chimney of Pennsylvania and entered into Ohio.

Years ago I had watched a Tibetan monk sweep his hand across a sand mandala three days in the making. I followed the procession that carried the sand out to the lake and stood slack-jawed as the Lamas played their Dung Chens – long horns (up to nine feet) whose resonance I felt in my chest. The ceremony sanctified the lake, transferring all the benefits of the mandala to its waters.

It seemed madness to pass so close to the sacred lake without paying my respects, so I turned north on Rt. 11 to Ashtabula, OH and hung a left at the lake. At Geneva, I found a township park: a quiet stretch of lawn on a hill above a busy beach; a lake breeze offered respite from the growing heat. I settled into the shade full of gratitude to eat lentils and turnips my host hand packed me.

Candor, 4th of July

Shelling heirloom calypso beans: a growing mound of white beans dipped in black lacquer. Some of the lacquer spatters the white lending them their other name – yin-yang beans.

We walk to the garden to harvest fresh mesclun, collards, turnips, tomatoes for our meals and add them to the stored black beans, ground corn, salsa and onions from last year’s bounty. Gonner, their one time cow offers ground beef for the meal.

We weed, harvest, walk the land and swim amid a profusion of bird song. Bobolink and meadowlark, gold finch and indigo bunting, rose breasted grosbeak and yellow warbler all nest around their home. Beavers have dammed the stream and a bear left scat among a tangle of raspberry bushes.

We did, of course, drive to town for the fireworks display. Kids with glow sticks and light sabers competed with the great blooming fireworks overhead. It was the stars though that filled me with awe, our distance from town and a waning moon left the sky stripped bare of brighter lights and allowed the stars to shine through with the smudge of milky way in their midst.

My hosts’ groundedness provides a solid warp to my wandering weft; from their settledness I drive west, leaving my home landscape behind filled with gratitude and the bounty of summer.

On Staying Still

You could say that I’m home; although, as I have left “home” three times already on this journey, you may not believe me. Some say home is where the heart is, but a friend of mine has a better handle on it, I think. She says, “Home is where you never have to hold your pee.” If we take her definition, then I am home. I’m at grandma’s, a place I’ve been visiting for 15 years. It’s the place I sleep late, walk slowly and take a deep breath. Here, with little agenda outside of three meals a day and an occasional scrabble or yatzee game, I’ve come to pause and prepare. I feel like a diver on the platform: focusing, breathing and raising my arms slowly above my head. I finally got around to joining AAA. I’ve stocked up on dried fruits and nuts to see me across the plains. And I’ve traced my finger back and forth across the map seeking out treasures, gauging distance and imagining the road ahead. Tomorrow I will rise on my tiptoes and punch my weight down on the platform in order to hurl myself into the unknown. But for the moment a scrabble game awaits.