Below the Dam

“Excuse me”, I say from the edge of my neighbor’s campsite, “excuse me, but do you have a flashlight I could borrow? Mine is dying and my tent just went for a swim.”

The campgrounds above the dam had been full, it was, after all, a Saturday night in August. But “the guy below the dam” had space and set me up down by the river, signed me in, and sped off on his golf cart with a “so long, girl” cast over his shoulder.

Hungry and tired, I pitched my tent and set up my stove. Half way through warming a can of beans, I looked up to check on my tent. It seemed, oddly, a bit further away than where I’d placed it. When I got closer, I noticed that it was, in fact, floating on the river. I’d neglected to stake it out, and the wind had picked up while I cooked. I grabbed the poles where they crossed at the top, and hauled my tent back to land. Peering inside with my dying flashlight, I found a few puddles, but not the full swamp I’d expected. I pulled out my gear and spread it on the ground to dry, then walked back to my car holding my tent, which threatened to become a box kite with each step I took. I pulled stakes from my car while still holding my tent, found a more or less level spot and pinned the tent, pausing to slam my flashlight against my palm in hopes of eking more out of the battery.

Miguel turns from the grill and comes over. He grabs his Ryobi floodlight powered with the battery of a cordless drill and walks back with me to my site. He checks my stake job and assesses the puddles. “Keep it”, he says, “as long as you need.” This time I’ve pitched the tent into the wind and left the front door wide. I was in Utah, remember, and already the tent was well on its way to dry.

Miguel’s wife and daughter came over to check on me. They offered towels and a comforter, which I declined. “A beer?” offers Miguel and I join them at their campfire while the wind finishes its work.

My birding friend comes to mind. As we had exchanged favorite parts of our trips, he recalled asking for help with a flat tire and how the evening ended with his helpers inviting him to join them for grilled salmon and cold beer.

Tonight I’m up later than usual, enjoying the company and a Miller Genuine Draft – never my first choice – though tonight it tastes fine. I watch the stars spread above. I walk to my now-dry tent, crawl in, and fall asleep smiling.

Utah Desert

I pulled a long haul across Nevada, choosing to take Rte 50 instead of the interstate. It didn’t disappoint: seventy miles an hour and beautiful every sing mile. At Ely, where I’d left 50 for Rte 6 on my way west, I turned north on Rte 93, which ran the long valley parallel to the Schell Creek Range range.

From West Wendover, the Utah desert loomed, a white ghost to the north and east. The state line was painted on the pavement, but also with the buildings. Casinos bumped up against each other on the Nevada side while Utah offered motels and fast food joints. I merged onto I-80 east and passed the turn off for the Bonneville Speedway, a broad expanse of hard-packed, salt desert where, among other landspeed trials, Craig Breedlove set a record traveling 600.601 mph in his jet powered Spirit of America in 1965.

A mist loomed, it seemed, as dense as the fog on the Mendocino coast, and obscuring the sun. But there was no moisture. Wind leaned against my car causing me to steer to the right for miles. My mist, I realized, was salt dust whipped from the desert floor. Ten miles in, the dust settled, but the wind did not. Two motorcycles passed me listing south at a ten-degree angle.

The ground began to glint as slow-formed crystals caught the light. Frost, my mind said, ice, new fallen snow. Along the roadside, tire tracks revealed the depth of the mineral crust. Black stones formed names, patterns, and spirals. Smiley faces and peace signs stood out against the white earth. In one place someone had stopped to dig a hole.

Beyond the railroad tracks that paralleled the highway to the south, lay the Dugway Proving Ground, a military test site for chemical and biological weapons. Dugway, which in addition to “protecting national interests” and “rendering danger from chemical/biological agents irrelevant”, cites “fostering environmental stewardship” in its mission. My initial sarcasm burned to anger. I know that the “weapons” testing to the south does not help the surrounding biota. Its presence lent to the eeriness of my crossing.

Then, finally, the now-familiar contours of the Great Salt Lake, and water.

Bristlecone

My mind keeps coming back to the trees – the bristlecone pines. I keep coming back the way their contorted wood stands silver in the dry air for hundreds of years after the needles are gone. How, on those still living, whose buttressed trunks anchor in the talus slope, how one rope of bark covers the living tissue, and rises to one spray of needles. How the young bristlecone, four feet high and already my senior, its growth slowed by wind and winter and lack of rain, holds the promise of age.

I come back to how the wind filled the hollow of my ears and sang there. How, when I reached the talus slope, the now-silent cascade of rock, the wind whipped and buffeted me, challenging me to stand, to root, to stay upright. How they thrive in this wind, call this sere and punishing place home, that they don’t choose any other place to live. How when this one, this great grandmother was released from her cone, the alphabet was born and charioteers maneuvered ancient streets.

I remember how the wind kept me from sitting with them, kept me from staying, turned me back toward the comfort of dinner and a tent stretched out in an aspen grove. How, though I wanted their company, I was glad to leave that place, glad to find a place the wind didn’t pull the moisture from my skin and send me side-stepping for balance with its fingers.

Stone Mother

It was astonishing to come across a lake in the desert, even though I was expecting it. Even though it was my destination. I had held off on breakfast until reaching Pyramid Lake, and then it stretched before me, the mirage of a mirage: water in the desert.

I pulled down a dirt track and parked above the beach. The story of Pyramid Lake mirrors that of Mono Lake. Its one inlet was dammed and partially diverted in the early 1900s to irrigate crops in Fallon, fifty miles to the southeast. Instead of these changes affecting bird and invertebrate populations, it’s the native Lahontan trout, reliant on upstream spawning grounds that are threatened.

But there are other stories as well. This remnant of the ancient Lake Lahontan is much as it was when the great lake subsided after the last glaciation. It is much as it was when John Fremont passed through in 1844, and as it was when the Paiute Tribe approved their constitution in 1936. The shores hold only sagebrush, mustard and a few maintained dirt roads; there are no signs of development along the lake.

There is another story here too, the story of the Stone Mother who wept the lake into being when her husband sent her warring children away. Some stayed with her and they became the Paiute tribe who’s reservation still surrounds the lake. Others he sent west, and she cried for them until her tears formed a lake around her, cried so long she turned to stone, and there she sits today.

And, if you’re reading this from your iPad, you’re seeing yet another story. Pyramid Lake (at Night) a photograph taken by Richard Misrach is the background picture with which the iPad ships.

What other stories are cupped in this bowl of water, sand and sky?

I finish my breakfast and drive along the lake to its southern end and the mouth of the Trukee River. Coots gather here by the hundreds; a Great-blue Heron fishes along the shore. A cloud of white pelicans rests on the water. I turn away, following the irrigation pipes to Fallon and on across Nevada in search of the next story.

Donner Pass

I danced her story once, Tamsen Donner’s. It was part of a series called Portraits of Women. Two of us, students at Connecticut College, were cast in the part. We donned long prairie dresses that covered our necks and wrists, and swirled wide from our ankles when we spun. I have a photograph of the piece: I am flying, horizontal to the ground, gazing outward, or onward, across an imagined prairie, suspended on my friend’s hip.

So they must have carried each other along, those who tried to cross this pass. I came from the west, in a car, speeding along I-80 in search of a campsite for the night. I came in summer, but still my breath condensed in the air. They came in wagons from the east, the Donner Party, in autumn, when the pass was bound in early snow.

She was born in 1801, Tamsen, and set off, at the age of 44 with her second husband, three daughters, and eighty other travelers for San Francisco bay.

Traveling east on the interstate, my thoughts were on a place to spend the night, the falling light, and my turn toward home. A blinking LED road sign announced that the Donner Pass rest area was closed. I passed a sign outlining the Donner ski areas, Donner Pass road and Donner Memorial State Park and was startled into the present.

And she was with me, Tamsen, in her long prairie dress. Shivering out her last night with her fatally wounded husband, while her three daughters, rescued, awaited her arrival in Sacramento. Few in the party survived and tales of cannibalism bring the terror, and cold, and will to survive into focus.

I find a campground well off the freeway and pitch my tent in the glare of my headlights. The yipping of Coyotes wakes me in the night and I smile, curl deeper into my sleeping bag and sleep again. In the morning, wearing a wool hat and down vest, I ease out of the campground and back to the interstate. I shift into low gear and head down the mountain leaving Tamsen, and California, behind.

Cross sections

As I had done twenty years prior, I had traveled across country alone to visit my Ampie Gail. “Ampie” was my attempt at Auntie, in a mouth too young to form the sounds, and “Ampie” she stayed. The week we spent together was a cross section of her life: we visited friends; attended her writers’ group; stopped by the Goodwill and Salvation Army stores in search of bargains; and prepared meals together.

Gail introduced me to Mei, the proprietor of her favorite restaurant, Tian Yuen in Cloverdale, and a close friend. We walked with Mei, her son and nephew in a wilderness area tucked behind a housing development. We paused by a stream and Mei pulled out a red tablecloth for us to sit on. She offered simple sitting instruction, tailored to each of us, and we sat in meditation while the boys threw rocks in the stream. When she broke the silence, Mei lead us in tui na, a form of acupressure massage. We ate at Mei’s restaurant, which offers a delicious sampling of pan-Asian foods, and left with mind and body nourished.

Together, we also embarked on a cross section of northern California. Rte 128 leads west from Cloverdale winding through the vineyards and orchards of Sonoma County before climbing into coastal redwood forest. We pulled into a turn off amid the redwoods and turned off the car. Wood Sorrel bloomed, dark pink, in the shade of the tall trees. We stepped into a circle of trees and stood in silence. Tall and straight, the trees remained supple, dancing lightly in the wind.

We continued west, back into the sunlight and pulled into the Navarro Winery for a tasting. There, I found the juniper in the Muscat blank and the pineapple in the Gewürztraminer. I swirled Navarrouge across my tongue and sought out the spice and berries in the Syrah. I bought a couple bottles, wrapped them in two wool sweaters and a down coat and buried them in my backpack, praying they’d last the three thousand hot miles home.

From the winery, we continued out to the coast. About ten miles inland, the fog began to swirl; by five, it had enveloped the sun. We turned up Rte 1 and headed north to Fort Bragg and the Mendocino Botanic Gardens. The gardens were a well-planned tumult of color and texture. As we ate our lunch on the patio just inside the entrance, I heard a woman comment to her husband “We should have come here before re-doing our lawn!” Decorative grasses mingled with monkey plant and butterfly bush. A kidney of heathers, blooming in a profusion of pinks and purples kept bees busy, while the neighboring plot held cactus and succulents, well spaced in their sandy soil. A covered shed housed fuchsias and begonias, carefully tended and in peak bloom. One begonia, rare in having a scent, smelled of Gewürztraminer, a strange perfume, and only recently familiar.

At the Mendocino Headlands, the wilderness of the sea greeted us with the sky-tossed calls of Western Gulls. Oystercatchers, Ruddy Turnstones and Surfbirds sought out their meal following each retreating wave. We paused to look out over two offshore islands and found them crowned with Pelagic Cormorant and Common Murre colonies. Several cormorants were still on nests.

And then we turned east. Away from the coast, out from under the fog, through redwoods and vineyards. After a night in Cloverdale, I continued my cross section east, through Napa and the snarled rush hour traffic of Sacramento into the foothills and finally the high sierra. I was headed home.

Pacific

One of the things I love about Point Reyes is that the bay that separates the point from the mainland, cradles the San Andreas Fault. Becca and I talked about this as we hiked the two miles to our campsite. Better in a tent here, we decided, than a ten-storey, earthquake-proof building in San Francisco.

After setting up our tent we walked through the fog to the ocean. Here, at last, was the Pacific. Perhaps ironically, at this furthest point in my journey, I had reached a familiar place.

The first time I came to Point Reyes, my mother and I had walked out the long tongue that lies between Tomales Bay and the Pacific. We walked out to see the Tulle elk. One, a bull, had caught the moon in his antlers. On the walk back, my mom hoisted two branches above her head and became an elk herself, which made us both giggle. I have returned many times since, and each time, have found sanctuary in this jut of wilderness and water.

The San Andreas slept peacefully that night, and so did we. In the morning, the fog clung to us, curled our hair, and dripped from the coast pines that lined the trail. The orange faces of monkey plant shone out against the grey.


With the day still young, we reached the car, each of us rested, pacific, from this lull in our traveling. I left Becca at the ferry terminal. She headed across the bay, and I turned north on 101.