Rants from the Hill

by Michael P. Branch

  Recently, Hannah lighted on a new “Daddy is so weird” behavior, which she asked me to defend: “Dad, why do you read while you walk?” Reading while I hike through the desert is a habit I developed so long ago that it never occurred to me that it might require explanation. I could have replied, “Because I walk about 1,300 miles a year around here, I get bored,” but while I do walk that much, I never lose interest in this landscape. I could have said, “I have a lot of work to do and can’t afford the time to hike unless I’m also reading,” but that’s not quite true either. I might have pointed out, “I’m no weirder than the knotheads you see walking around town checking their phones until they bump into each other,” but my pride would not allow the comparison. Ultimately, I decided that I should try to give Hannah an honest, helpful answer. To do that, I would first have to scrutinize my odd habit of peripatetic reading.

  For starters, walking and reading are two of the most important activities in my life, so perhaps it was inevitable that I would eventually combine them. The two are also similar in many ways. Walking and reading are both forms of exercise: one working out the body, the other the mind. Both are excellent when pursued in solitude. Both get us from one place to another, and yet the main purpose of each is the journey, not the destination. If this were not the case, why would we re-read a beloved book or repeat a favorite hike? Both activities enlarge our sense of the world, expanding the territory and helping us to place ourselves within it. Of the many meanings of the word walk, “to go away” has been in use since the mid-fifteenth century. Isn’t this precisely what we do while reading? Doesn’t a good book, like a good hike, offer a salutary voyage away from home and into a series of challenges and surprises that ultimately gives the concept of home its meaning? Finally, while most of us are capable of both reading and walking, few of us do much of either. Mark Twain is reputed to have observed that “the man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” I would say the same about a person who has healthy legs but chooses not to walk.

  While Karl Marx made some perceptive pronouncements about the value of books, I prefer the insight offered by that wiser Marx, Groucho, who used to say that “outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” A book, like a dog, is good company, and I do not cotton to heading out to hike without taking both along with me. I also like the contrasts a carefully chosen book can create with the landscape through which I move. There is nothing like being on the Mississippi River with Twain or at sea with Melville or pond-side with Thoreau or along Tinker Creek with Dillard while I am shuffling through the sagebrush and alkali dust. When it gets hot, I love a book like Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams or Rick Bass’s Winter. When it turns cold and windy, I head to warmer climes in books by Wendell Berry, Gary Nabhan, or Ellen Meloy, or I voyage out to the Hawaiian Islands in the inimitable poetry of W. S. Merwin.

  While the cultural dominance of the automobile has profoundly reconditioned our sense of space and time—as when we ask someone how far it is to a place and receive a reply in minutes rather than miles—I like knowing the precise relationship between walking routes and pages. If I intend to read a twenty-page essay, I choose a canyon-bottom stroll that will bring me home just as I am turning the final page; if I prefer to read a novella, I will need enough time to crest the Moonrise and Palisades ridges and loop back around Cow Canyon past the spring.

  Even John Muir, who is surely among the most justly celebrated of great walkers, packed books on the trail. On his famous 1867 thousand-mile walk from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico, for example, he carried the New Testament, Paradise Lost, and a book of poems by fellow Scottish countryman Robert Burns. Muir was also familiar with the “book of nature,” a trope known since the time of Plato but also present in many cultures, both ancient and modern. Liber naturae, the book of nature, is the idea that the natural world is a form of sacred text and that the revelation of its divinity is dependent upon our willingness to read it carefully. For theologians of the Latin Middle Ages—and even for Muir—the world of the book and the book of the world were intimately related to each other.

  Of course, I am no Plato or Muir, and by temperament I am closer to Groucho than I am to Karl. And this is a wide-open desert with a thousand hazards. It is true that I have, on a number of occasions, read myself into trouble while on the hoof, as when I paused to enjoy an especially engaging Pattiann Rogers poem only to discover that I was standing atop a mound of irate harvester ants. I have also stepped into the tunnels of California ground squirrels, a risk that, for some reason, seems especially acute when I am reading Chuck Bowden or Terry Tempest Williams. Most concerning are the Great Basin rattlers, which maintain a “don’t tread on me” (or is it “don’t read on me”?) attitude, even if I am enjoying a book by a herpetophile like Cactus Ed Abbey when I come upon them.

  But most of the surprises that come from simultaneous reading and hiking are good ones, because looking from the world of nature to the world of the printed page and back again becomes a game of peekaboo: now you don’t see it, now you do. Once, I looked up from reading to see a pronghorn buck etched into the ridgeline above me. On another occasion, I glanced up in time to notice a pair of coyote pups, not more than a few weeks old, cross a sandy island in the sagebrush sea. One evening, as it became too dark to make out the page, I lifted my head to witness the thinnest possible crescent moon, in close conjunction with Venus, floating just above the summit ridge of our home mountain.

  When we read a travel guidebook while walking in a city or a natural history field guide while hiking through a forest, we are considered normal. It is understood that we need the book to know and name the things of this world and to prevent ourselves from becoming lost within it. As I explained to Hannah, I believe good writing plays the same orienting role: it can help us discover where we are and why our connections to each other and to this world we walk through each day are so precious to begin with. While she still insists that I am totally not like other dads, Hannah’s own passion for reading ultimately persuaded her to accept my reasoning.

  “Yeah, Dad, I can totally see that. Thanks for taking time to explain it to me,” she said. “Now, what about that no pants thing?”

  HENRY DAVID THOREAU’S neighbors generally thought of him as a lazy, confrontational, sanctimonious pain in the ass. They might be interested to know that, on the big issues, he turned out to be right about nearly everything, from his strident support for the abolition of slavery to his scathing exposure of the racial injustice of the Mexican-American War to his embracing of then-new evolutionary theory to his claim that the American relationship to nature was becoming commodified and exploitative. The best example of Thoreau being correct and ahead of his time, however, is offered by his vehement condemnation of the American lawn. In his brilliant 1862 deathbed essay, “Walking,” Thoreau wrote, “Hope and the future for me are not in lawns.” Instead, he imagined establishing his home on a plot of land covered with wild plants and trees. “Why not put my house—my parlor—behind this plot,” he asked, “instead of behind that meager assemblage of curiosities—that poor apology for a Nature and Art, which I call my front yard?”

  Calling his neighbors’ front yards a “poor apology for a Nature and Art” is the sort of sarcastic face-slapping that was cranky Uncle Henry’s specialty, and it is revealing that one of his final utterances before departing this world was a condemnation of lawns. How prescient was he? Riddle: considered acre-for-acre, what is the most pesticide-, herbicide-, water-, labor-, and cash-intensive crop grown in the United States? Right. Your lawn. In America, turf grasses, which are mostly non-native, cover twenty-one million acres (think the state of Maine), cost forty billion dollars per year (more than US foreign aid), consume around ninety million pounds of fertilizer and eighty million pounds of pesticides per year (which sometimes contaminate our groundwater and surface water), and slurp up an inconceivable nine billion gallons of water per day (at least
half of all residential water use in the arid West is associated with lawns and landscaping).

  All this is before we reckon the colossal time suck that lawns represent. Each year, Americans spend an average of three billion hours pushing or (even worse) riding mowers, most of which pollute at a rate ten times that of our cars. In fact, if a lawn were a car, it would be a Hummer: a resource-intensive, plainly unsustainable luxury item that looks cool but is environmentally destructive. As for biodiversity, forget it. Lawns are exotic, barren monocultures. While they are sometimes referred to as “ecological deserts,” this characterization is an insult to deserts, which are remarkably biodiverse ecosystems. Consider also the unfortunate symbolic connotations of the lawn. As the food writer Michael Pollan points out, the American lawn is the ultimate manifestation of our culture’s perverse fantasy of the total control of nature. As Pollan put it so memorably, “A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.”

  Now, hang with me while I descend from my eco-soapbox to offer this surprising confession: I have a lawn. I’m a Westerner. A desert rat. An environmentalist. Even an admirer of Thoreau (though it chaps my hide that he’s always right). But I hereby confess to having a lawn. My dual status as arid lands environmentalist and lawn-watering dolt has provoked in me a serious identity crisis, one that reminds me of another of Thoreau’s insights (this one, from Walden, paraphrasing Matthew 6:3): “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand does.” Am I proud of my lawn? Absolutely not. I am completely ashamed of it. I have a terminal case of lawn guilt. But, at the risk of having my membership in the Wilderness Society revoked, it is time to come clean about my immoderate love of the lawn I have planted here on Ranting Hill.

  For me, the first challenge is squaring a condition of brutal lawnlessness with fond memories of my suburban childhood, in which the grassy yard provided the most immediate respite from concrete and asphalt. Lawns were our play zones, the part of the vernacular landscape that could be experienced with all our senses, and one of the few suburban spaces not designed specifically to accommodate cars. Even if your old man was on his hands and knees pulling crabgrass every Saturday, for the rest of the week the lawn remained the sovereign province of children—a little patch of freedom that functioned as a clean, green canvas that we kids painted with our imaginative play.

  Like a lot of suburban boys, I also experienced the lawn as the first significant site of labor. Before I reached age sixteen and landed my dream job stocking the beer cooler in the local drugstore, the lawn was the only game in town for an enterprising kid who was willing to work hard and needed a little cash. I built a pretty decent side biz as a mower; in this sense the American lawn bought me a new bike, a fishing trip, and tickets to some memorable blues concerts. As I got a bit older, lawn mowing even functioned as my French Foreign Legion. I spent one summer as a mower for a small, under-the-table and off-the-books outfit made up entirely of guys who had been recently dumped by their girlfriends. In fact, having been jilted was a formal requirement of employment with this crew. My mowing partner that summer was a Harley dude named Chaos, who somehow survived on a diet consisting solely of Schlitz beer and corn nuts. Sometimes, Chaos and I would knock out twenty lawns in a day. Between yards, we would crank up the tunes on the battered old truck’s cassette deck and lament that we’d been cast away by girls who, we reassured each other, did not have their heads on straight. When I later got my own head on straight and went to college, so revered was the lawn that my school had a world-famous precision lawn-mower brigade that routinely stole the show from reputable marching bands during parades.

  Of course, these are memories from another place and time, and rationalizing turf grass at 6,000 feet in the Great Basin Desert is another matter entirely. Still, I am willing to attempt a modest defense. To begin with, our lawn is quite small, on only one side of the house, and is surrounded by the rest of our property: nearly fifty acres of wild desert that we have deliberately left undisturbed. I never use herbicides on the little yard, the fertilizer I apply is organic and slow-release, and the watering regime is strictly limited and carefully timed for efficiency. Outside the lawn, every tree and shrub I have planted is a local or regional native, most of which are hardy and xeric. The lawn keeps the dust down and has reduced the number of scorpions and rattlers we encounter immediately outside the house. It also works in concert with the wind to act as a giant swamp cooler, helping to make it possible for us to live in the desert without air conditioning—which, in these parts, runs on electricity generated primarily from carbon-polluting coal-fired power plants.

  Unlike a suburban yard, our lawn functions as an oasis: the only patch of green anywhere around and the sole moist spot between here and a seep that is 1,000 feet above us and three miles to our west. In an area that receives only seven inches of precipitation each year—and most of that in the form of snow—a little water creates a lot of magic. Modest as it appears, our patch of grass sustains a bumper crop of insects, which, in turn, makes our home not only a haven for Say’s phoebes, western kingbirds, mountain bluebirds, scrub and pinyon jays, and many other bug-eating birds but also a refuge for seed eaters like collared doves and California quail. The insects have also made this a terrific place to be a lizard, and we have seen an increase in our populations of both western fence and leopard lizards. And, to my relief, the lawn is cropped so constantly by desert cottontails and big black-tailed jackrabbits that I hardly ever have to mow!

  All these insects, songbirds, lizards, and small mammals have, likewise, made the lawn a prime location for raptors and coyotes, which have been quick to take advantage of the food chain reaction triggered by our damp spot. In fact, the coyotes denned so nearby this year that for a month this spring we had the daily pleasure of watching three tiny pups peering out at us from the sage. The lawn has also become an oasis for our girls. I suppose Hannah and Caroline did fine playing on the alkali-encrusted hardpan that existed here before I installed the lawn, but they now seem encouraged to play more games and do more handstands, not to mention enjoy the childhood rite of passage that entails running through a sprinkler after staining your tongue blue with Popsicles.

  I admit that this defense of my lawn amounts to morally feeble equivocation, which is why I make sure to keep handy a bourbon barrel–size load of guilt about it. Wallace Stegner wrote that Westerners need to “get over the color green,” but my challenge has been to get over having gotten over the color green. Driven to desperate measures by my shame, I recently had the bright idea to rebrand the lawn “the firebreak,” which is a concept everyone out here on this wildlands interface understands and respects. This is disingenuous on my part, since I maintain other firebreaks that function perfectly well without being lined with water-dependent, non-native turf grass. But it just sounds better to say “firebreak,” so much so that I now insist that we all use that term and that term only, and I fine the girls a quarter each time they slip up and utter “lawn” by mistake. The family is now pretty well retrained, and so it is common for little Caroline to say, “Daddy, I’m going out to do cartwheels on the firebreak.”

  Henry Thoreau would have seen right through this feeble apologia, and he would have instantly called “horseshit” my cowardly rebranding of the unsustainable indulgence that is my lawn as a “firebreak.” But I do have a longer-term plan to mend my ways. When the girls someday go off to college (hopefully one with a brigade of precision lawn mowers to bring some laughter to those boring parades), I will bring in three end dump truck loads of sand and bury the lawn completely, making a nice little island beach up here in the heart of the trackless sagebrush ocean. In the meantime, I have decided to ditch Thoreau and, instead, go with Walt Whitman, who, in Leaves of Grass (1855), testified that “a leaf of grass is the journey-work of the stars.” Journey-work of the stars just has such a lovely, ennobling, poetic ring to it. It may not be quite as lyrical as “firebreak,” but for now I will accept any substitute for that unspeakable, four-letter word: L***.
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  ACTUALLY, HANNAH AND CAROLINE never really asked me to build them a tree house. I came up with that idea myself, got them attached to it, and then pretended that my efforts were strictly for their benefit. But their spontaneous enthusiasm provided the necessary cover for me to do what every grown man secretly wants to do: construct an arboreal retreat, far from unpaid bills and truck repairs, uncertainty about the future, and inescapable news of gun violence or environmental catastrophe and the grief these unthinkable losses engender. Never mind a long weekend in the mountains or going to a baseball game. What I really needed was to climb up into a tree house and pull the rope ladder up behind me, leaving my worldly woes behind.

  The problem with building a tree house in the Great Basin is that we have so few trees, and even fewer that provide tolerable support for any kind of structure. Because Ranting Hill sits at almost 6,000 feet, we are high enough to have Utah junipers here, but they are tangled, tight, scratchy trees that are uninviting for inhabitation. As a result, the girls and I devised a plan to build a platform house that would stand on stilts amid a dense grove of junipers. Construction began only once I had persuaded the kids that a platform house in the trees does officially count as a real tree house. Because my main goal was to make the thing so tall that it would produce an exhilarating feeling of being in the treetops, I chose for my main structural timbers four sixteen-foot-long 4 × 6 posts, which I balanced carefully on my shoulder, hauled to the juniper grove, and set up in concrete. This would not only produce inspiring height but also allow a design featuring both a lower and upper platform, making the structure resemble the bunk beds of a desert giant. Next came horizontal 2 × 6 supports, then 2 × 4 cross ribbing, and finally the two floors themselves, each consisting of a full 4 × 8 sheet of marine plywood. After adding an upper safety railing and buccaneer-style swinging rope ladder, the retreat was complete: a thirteen-foot-tall, two-story, sixty-foursquare-foot platform house nestled into a thick copse of aromatic Utah juniper.