But if the recent flash floods here in the western Great Basin were less deadly than these historic floods, they were nevertheless dramatic by local standards. Some area locations received more rain in two or three days than they normally see in a full year, and a few saw the better part of their annual allowance in a matter of hours. Up on Ranting Hill we were slammed by five major rainstorms within the span of a week; no old timer I’ve talked with here in Silver Hills can recall anything like it. The gravel road we use to reach our home was blown out in many places, its ditches full, its culverts buried, and its gravel surface swept out into the sagebrush flats. The roads on the nearby public lands fared much worse. Most became flowing torrents, and are now sliced through by erosion gullies three feet deep. In other places on the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), arroyos that I have hiked through hundreds of times, and which have never even appeared moist, ran at least four feet deep with surging water.
When we think of floods, we tend to picture rivers swelling, cresting their banks, and flowing out across floodplains. But here in the environs of Ranting Hill our situation is markedly different, for we have no rivers, streams, creeks, or rivulets—nary a trickle. There are a few hidden seeps and springs, and one endorheic lake bed, but no surface water. In an environment such as this, the spontaneous appearance of creeks and rivers is as remarkable as was the sudden birth of eleven waterfalls on that strange, beautiful day down in the red heart of the Escalante. A flood here is a matter not of a river rising but rather of a river appearing where none has existed in recent memory, and then vanishing almost as abruptly.
The marvel of a desert flash flood is intimately related to our incapacity to register environmental change that occurs on temporal scales that are uncalibrated to human perception. Although I’ve taken more than two thousand hikes on the public lands adjacent to Ranting Hill, I have never observed water in any of the arroyos, those dry, arterial gullies that run through the parched desert like a mysterious system of ancient, long-abandoned aqueducts. For that reason, I have come to imagine a desert shaped by deep time, by slow, incremental change that I will never possess the longevity or acumen to observe—the kind of change produced by wind sculpting rock. In their sudden appearance and disappearance, and in the profound changes they have wrought in my home landscape, these flash floods have reminded me that this astonishing place has been shaped by sudden as well as gradual change. To see this land for what it is I must learn to view it as a vital, pulsing labyrinth of desert ghost rivers—rivers that will flow with wind and light only for another twenty or fifty or a hundred years, when they will once again rage with the rare bloom of a sudden, unseen cloudburst.
ONE CRISP, BLUE DAY last fall, I dodged work to climb my home mountain with three friends who were also shirking their adult responsibilities that day. My buddy Steve was with us, a guy who has not only a huge heart and a thousand skills but, more important, a farting donkey named Flapjack. “Flappy,” who also goes by “Flatchy” (as in “flatulence”), has the unique ability to fart loudly, be spooked by it, which in turn causes him to fart, and…well, if you sit on Steve’s corral fence on a sunny day with a six-pack, you will discover the true meaning of the term “quality entertainment.” Also with us was a French visitor to the Great Basin, a guy whom I’ll call “François” not only because that is the ideal name for a Frenchman but because, by happy accident, that is his real name. My friend Rick was also passing through, sneaking in a trip to the high desert before hunkering down for another long winter in his wet corner of the Northern Rockies.
The four of us had enjoyed a perfect day atop the mountain, 8,000 feet up in the cerulean Nevada sky. We had seen pronghorn on the run and some nice late-blooming wildflowers and had even found a chipped, obsidian arrowhead when we stopped for lunch in a high meadow ringed by aspen and mountain mahogany. On our way back down the mountain that afternoon, we paused to drink at a small seep on a very steep face. While resting there, Steve noticed a hip-high boulder that he observed was perched precariously on the slope. “I’ll bet a couple of guys could roll that thing,” he said. Everyone was quiet for a moment.
“Maybe,” I replied, “but even if a couple of guys could roll it, they wouldn’t roll it. Would they?”
“Good question,” Rick said. “If a couple of guys—let’s say four guys —could roll that boulder, would they?” I suggested that it might be helpful if we each imagined reasons why a few hypothetical guys should not roll a boulder down a mountain.
“Could hit somebody?” Steve asked. I explained that this was impossible; I had just scanned the canyon below through my binocs, and it was entirely free of humanoids, just as it had been every time I had hiked this mountain in the past decade.
Rick then suggested, with a straight face, that moving the boulder could represent interference with the perfection of the natural order and might disrupt some divine plan as yet beyond human ken.
“But what if moving the boulder is part of the divine plan?” Steve responded. Everyone nodded in agreement.
“And you guys know what they say about gravity?” I added. “‘It’s not just a good idea; it’s the law.’ Would the divine natural order be guided by the law of gravity if huge rocks weren’t supposed to tumble down mountains?”
“Besides,” Rick added, “the uplift in the Sierra is raising this mountain two or three inches a year, so whatever a couple guys might do would be fixed pretty soon anyhow.” Once again, everyone nodded their assent.
“On the other hand,” I said, “that old coyote Sisyphus was tortured by the gods for messing with their order, so a few guys might meditate on his terrible punishment before doing anything rash. Then again,” I added, “Sisyphus was in trouble because he got it on with his own niece. You guys don’t plan to get it on with your nieces, do you?” Three heads shook emphatically from side to side.
“And speaking as a guest here,” Rick continued, “I should remind y’all that Sisyphus also killed his guests. You don’t plan to kill me, do you?”
“Not unless I run out of gorp,” I answered, glancing involuntarily in the direction of Donner Summit.
Steve now noted that “a couple of guys don’t know for sure if they could move that thing. Look at the size of it.” We all gazed again at the big rock.
“True, but it’s incredibly round,” Rick observed. Yes, we all agreed, the boulder Sisyphus had left on the pitch of my home mountain appeared uncannily round. It seemed made to roll.
“OK,” I said, “but my main concern is that, if a few guys rolled a boulder off this mountain, one of them might say something like, ‘Let’s rock and roll’ or ‘That’s just how we roll.’”
“We absolutely can’t have that,” Rick said sternly.
“No way,” Steve agreed. François didn’t say a word, but the expression on his face made clear that he was perfectly disgusted by the idea that anyone would contemplate saying such a thing.
We all sat in silence for a very long time, and we were all staring at that boulder, and I suspect we were all thinking the same thing: grown men—responsible men, men with jobs and mortgages and families, dedicated environmentalists—do not roll boulders down mountains. Yet there we were, all staring intently at that immense rock.
“Well, gentlemen,” I said at last, “we’ve reached an impasse. I suggest we consult an international expert. François, with the notable exception of wine and cheese, your people have done nothing for our people since the battle of Yorktown. What do you have to offer us now?”
“Whenever I am uncertain,” replied François, in a thick French accent so utterly authentic that it sounded hilariously fake, “I ask myself but one question: W W E A D?” When he had finished pronouncing each letter with meticulous emphasis, the three of us looked at him quizzically. “What would Edward Abbey do?” he explained coolly.
It was a beautiful moment, one in which absolute clarity had come to all of us at once. Witho
ut saying a word, the four of us stood up, walked over to the boulder, dug the toes of our boots into the mountainside, and began to push with all our might. The giant stone budged slightly, rocked a bit in its socket, and then, incredibly, started to roll very slowly. It soon picked up speed, however, and as the rock sped down the mountain, it began to leapfrog, launching itself off ledges, ramming and blasting apart other rocks, striking sandy slopes and snowfields on its unstoppable, half-mile-long, 1,600-vertical-foot plunge to the valley below. The boulder was racing now, each impact causing it to leap a great distance before landing again, and with every touchdown a cannonball explosion of rock, sand, and snow blasted high into the air. Each impact elicited a collective gasp or cheer, and I can’t begin to explain how cathartic it was to watch that big rock fly. I felt as if I had been rolling a boulder up a mountain my whole adult life and had now simply stepped aside and just let it go.
It took a long time before the boulder came to rest in the valley, its magnificent, explosive, kinetic energy expended. We then tracked its route down the mountainside, following the footprints of a stony giant that had raged through snow and sand and sage. To our amazement, we found that some of the impact craters were several feet deep, and they were sometimes as far as forty feet apart. The boulder had not rolled down the mountain at all but had bounced and flown down it. After an hour of picking our way along the boulder’s path, we at last came to the rock itself, resting serenely and alone in a sagebrush flat out beyond the mouth of the canyon. Here, we all sat together around the rock, staring at it as if it might still go somewhere.
I hike that canyon often, and I can report with authority that the boulder has not yet moved. It has, however, cast a shade so rare that it is already nurturing sprigs of bitterbrush and chokecherry—plants that will do their small part to transform this granite benefactor into desert soil. “Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split one boulder,” wrote the people’s poet, Carl Sandburg. The temporal scale on which we operate makes it hard for us to see that this rock, once rolling, is still on the move. Time will tell where it might go next. Roots or ice may fracture it. An earthquake may tumble or swallow it. The glaciers may return to carry it off. Or, it may simply melt away into the invisible, slow-motion, time-lapse photography of wind.
IT IS OFTEN SAID that we cannot see the forest for the trees, but that is not a problem out here in the western Great Basin. In moist slot canyons or riparian areas you will find aspen, cottonwood, mountain mahogany, ponderosa and even Jeffrey pine, but the open country is sagebrush steppe, largely treeless high desert where the “forest” consists only of widely dispersed Utah junipers. It is hard for most of us to conceive of a forest in which individual trees may be hundreds or even thousands of yards from each other, due to a lack of water. Our trees are like distant electrons within the vast, burning nucleus of the desert; this is a forest consisting mainly of space.
“Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite,” wrote Edward Abbey in his introduction to Desert Solitaire. “If a man knew enough he could write a whole book about the juniper tree. Not juniper trees in general but that one particular juniper tree….” In the high, open valley west of our home, which is all public land, there is one such particular juniper tree. It is not a very big tree, a young juniper, perhaps only a century old. Most remarkable about this tree is its isolation, as it stands alone on the floor of this expansive valley. From any hill or mountain ridge in the basin you can look down and see, in some cases from vast distances, this single juniper, standing solitary, a tiny island of green in a sea of shimmering sage. Abbey’s wisdom notwithstanding, I have no desire to write a book about an individual tree. But this one particular juniper—which I call Lone Tree—surviving in isolation out on those baked, windy flats, has earned itself legacy status.
The proper way to stalk a tree is to begin from a great distance, uphill and downwind, and then sneak up on it very slowly. I begin my approach to Lone Tree by climbing the three ridges my family has named Moonrise, Palisades, and Prospect, each higher than the last, that rise westward into the azure sky above Ranting Hill. From the crest of Prospect I gaze west over a jumble of boulders and out across the sweeping valley to our imposing home mountain, which rises above it. At this distance, Lone Tree is visible only to the eyes of one who already knows where it stands. Because the tree is more than a mile away and 1,000 feet below, it is a mere pixel, indistinguishable from other dots on the landscape, most of which are jumbles of granite boulders.
After descending the western slope of Prospect through a steep canyon, a half hour of scrambling brings Lone Tree close enough that, while still impressively distant, it is now discernible as a tree rather than a heap of shattered rock. I am still a half mile from the juniper and 500 or so feet above it, and I can tell it has not yet noticed me. This is an important distance from which to admire Lone Tree, because if you happened to be perishing of exposure, that tiny mushroom out on the sage flats would represent your only possibility of refuge from the desert sun. It is impossible to imagine seeing this green magnet from here in summer and not fantasizing about repose in its cooling shade.
Another twenty minutes of billy-goating down a slope that is by turns scree and sand brings me to the valley floor. I am now a quarter mile or so from Lone Tree, and I am better able to sneak through the sage, prowling low like a mountain lion. From this proximity, a distinct color palette emerges. The sidereal blue of the western sky is brushed with the diaphanous white of attenuated clouds, while the mountain below it is sere brown and corrugated, here and there shadowed by rock fields on north-facing slopes. Because I now have an eye-line view of the tree, I notice how beautifully it is set against the double-knolled hill behind it. That mounded rise is topped with boulders that, apparently, host enough chartreuse lichen to provide a hint of a yellow-green that is mirrored in a few ephedra bushes in the foreground, scattered among the dust-colored sage. From this angle and distance, Lone Tree is irresistible. I zigzag stealthily through the sage maze toward its welcoming shade.
Once I am within a hundred yards of the tree, what appeared to be lichen on the rocky hills behind it emerges, instead, as small bunch grasses growing in open patches in the hill’s broken granite tops. At this distance, the shapes of the image strike me as even more important than its colors. This perspective reveals how gracefully the domed arch of the juniper’s crown is repeated in the arched tops of the granite hills behind it, which are themselves reflected in the sinuous bulges in the ridgeline of the big mountain that fills the western sky. From here I see, for the first time, that the tree has a full crown but a skeletal, open structure beneath. I am struck by how this form is mirrored in the brushy tops and dark stems of the big sage that fills the valley. This top-heavy shape shows that Lone Tree has been cropped around its base, perhaps by grazing mule deer when it was just a sapling.
From thirty feet away, Lone Tree fills my view, crowding out the landscape and demanding my full attention. Darcy, the dog, has run ahead and is already reclined comfortably beside it. At this distance, I detect hopeful second growth spouting from the long-ago cropped trunk. The area beneath and surrounding the tree is clear of sage, suggesting that this juniper beacon provides shelter for open range livestock, for Old Man Coyote and other wild things, even for a wayward desert rat and his old dog.
Noticing a dark mass hidden within the tree’s crown, I make my final advance on this particular juniper. Now standing beneath Lone Tree and looking up inside it, I see cradled in its angular, scaled arms a large, intricately woven stick nest about eight feet off the ground. I do not know who lives in this nest, but I do know why: if you fancy an arboreal home, this is the only game in town. The nest leads me to the realization that this tree has accomplished something remarkable. It is growing in an exposed and unfavorable spot and has, at some point, been thoroughly munched. It has allowed many of its limbs to die in a succ
essful attempt to preserve its core vitality. Miraculously, it has even escaped the wildfires that scour this valley every fifteen or twenty years. Working entirely alone, this single, gnarled juniper has kept my scorching, windswept home valley from being treeless. I should be fortunate to achieve so much in my own life.
I spent a pleasant half hour with Darcy, both of us stretched out in the sage-scented alkali dust beneath Lone Tree. Only when we finally rose and shook ourselves off did I suddenly notice the other tree. I had made a pilgrimage to this solitary tree only to discover that it was not alone after all. Just to the north of this particular juniper was its shadow tree, a filigree of shade cast down for the benefit of every creature in the valley. It is this single juniper’s cooling shadow that makes it possible to traverse the valley floor during midday in summer. We stop at Lone Tree because it is all that can be put between ourselves and the sun. Beneath it you will find owl pellets and mustang dung, the coffee-bean droppings of pronghorn, coyote scat containing polished fragments of kangaroo rat skulls, tufts of matted jackrabbit fur, the gracefully curved alabaster rib bone of a calf, a pair of ragged raven feathers, an old beer can pull tab carried in from afar by an enterprising packrat.
How to Cuss in Western Page 8
