I began my sabbatical year at 8:00 a.m. on September 9th, as I drove out of Brockport and pushed west toward a three-week stint as a writer-in-residence at Great Basin National Park. Fifty hours and 2,200 miles later, I arrived at the park—worn down by my insistent motion, but happy to be in the West. My pedal-to-the-floor drive was in some ways exhilarating (crossing the hundredth meridian, the rhythmic flow of miles and music, the knowledge that I can still do this), but it also felt like a metaphor for my professional life. In place of a relentless cross-country drive, substitute the mix of teaching, administration, service, and research (or mostly administration of student research) that dominates my academic days (and nights) at Brockport, and it makes for a pretty accurate representation of the pace at which I live—particularly since becoming chair of my department four years ago. Since taking up my writer-in-residence position, though, I have attempted to slow down. I have tried to turn off my smart phone, disconnect from the Internet, ignore most emails. I have tried to be still—not necessarily in a physical sense, but psychically. I do not want to recreate some Great Basin version of my professional life, here. But I confess that it has not been easy to let go of business and busyness. I suspect that over the years I have programmed myself (and let others program me) to operate in constant, semi-hyperactive state. Subconsciously, I have sought to become the Perfect Master of Multitasking, while in the end perfecting only my ability to do things in an unfocused and incomplete way. Perhaps I should found a school of Anti-Zen practice. As much as I admonish my students to pay close attention to the world, I sense that in too many ways and far too often, I do not cultivate awareness. Instead, operant conditioning has wedded me, more than I care to admit, to electronica. The constant avalanche of “must do” items that pour into my inbox has made it increasingly difficult for me to concentrate on any one thing. I dance to the ping of my iPhone and all that it represents. I wonder if this frenzied jig is simply a matter of learned behavior, or if my body has been transformed by the pace of my professional life and the cumulative impact of electronic media: new neural synapses formed, adrenal glands enlarged, mixtures of neurotransmitters altered. Chris Norment, the perfect Pavlovian man, his theme song cribbed from the Talking Heads: “Tense and nervous and I can’t relax.” But in the Great Basin, I am trying to slow down. My writer in residence responsibilities are nebulous and I mostly do as I please. My work here is to wander the trails, write in my journal, tag along with bat-banding and cave-crawling biologists, talk to folks in the local community, think, and write. A few days ago I climbed Wheler Peak on a gloriously cool and clear alpine day. I spent an hour on the summit, just watching the land, letting the 360-degree sweep of space seep into me, accompanied only by a flock of ravens and two Slovenian radiologists who had blown by me on the snowiest and steepest part of the climb, the young punks. Later on, in Baker, we drank a few beers together and talked of the mountains we love. All of these activities are part of my current performance program, and I take them seriously. My most important work at Great Basin National Park, though, is to monitor the sunsets as they spread over the Snake Valley and the mountains of Nevada and Utah. I have a favorite hill where I go for this critical task—a trailless place, dotted with scraggly junipers and pinyon pines. The only tools I need are my journal (sometimes ignored), a light jacket, and a small sit-pad. On a windless evening the soothing, white noise rush of Baker Creek drifts up to my perch, but otherwise it’s mostly a silent place. The aspens and narrow-leaf cottonwoods along the creek are turning to gold and there’s an autumnal presence in the air, a changing of the seasons. The evening light laves the Basin and Range vastness, cultivating the space, hopefully teaching me something about stillness.
Yet even on the hill it can be difficult to remain quiet. There is in me a deeply ingrained Protestant work ethic, and the more recent (and I suspect more insistent) behavioral patterns that demand allegiance to schedule, activity, and “communication.” Sometimes I shift uneasily in my seat, glance at my watch, wonder if I shouldn’t be doing something more “constructive.” The wheel, seductive as ever, still beckons. The hamster has his habits. I am learning, though. The land, and all it represents, pulls me back into this place, and into a kind of grace. It’s as Wendell Berry describes in A Timbered Choir: I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water. My tasks lie in their places where I left them, asleep like cattle. And so as night falls over the Great Basin I sit among the junipers and pinyons, immersed in the lovely view and deep stillness. My stirring becomes quiet and my tasks settle into their places. It’s a state of being that I plan to cultivate as I move on from Great Basin National Park—first to the Inyo Mountains and my time with the salamanders, and later, to my post-sabbatical life and work in Brockport. I am hoping that the lessons of this place will prove stronger than the pull of the wheel. For beyond all else, there is the view of Snake Valley, its presence in my life.
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One of the great joys of my writer-in-residence “position” is the opportunity to explore some wonderful aspects of the Great Basin with National Park Service biologists. Last night was one those occasions, when I tagged along with a crew headed to a nearby cave to band bats. The cave is a well-known roost for migrating Mexican free-tailed bats, where they collect in the millions before departing for more southerly wintering sites. We arrived at the cave entrance before sunset, which we reached by an easy scramble up a limestone outcrop. At the lip of the cave there was a broad bench overlooking the Spring Valley. It was a beautiful evening: calm and mild, with wonderful views of “typical” Basin and Range topography (a great gulp of valley-space, cupped by fringing ranges of 11,000-foot-plus mountains, snow on the highest peaks in an autumn of early storms). But what dominated the ambiance of the place was the powerful odor of ammonia. The smell was as much like gauze as air; it settled in my mouth and nose, wrapped me in its sweetly acrid stench. The odor wafted up from the portal of the cave, where the bats would soon emerge, rising up out of the darkness in a counterclockwise spiral before launching themselves over the valley to hunt for insects. To catch the bats, we erected a harp trap at the entrance to the cave. The trap consisted of a metal frame supporting a series of vertical monofilament lines; when a bat hit the monofilament, it tumbled into a canvas pouch, where plastic sheets funneled it into dead-end spaces on opposite sides of the trap. It then was easy for one of the biologists to grab the bat, note its sex, age, tooth wear, and reproductive condition for the data recorder, and attach a numbered aluminum band to its forearm. In this way, scientists working the cave have banded 30,000 Mexican free-tailed bats over a three-year period. Thirty thousand bats sounds like a lot (and it is)—but it is only the tiniest fraction of the estimated two to three million Mexican free-tailed bats that use the cave over the course of four months, from June until mid-October. Two to three million bats, each weighing about 12 grams—or in my favorite units, about 15 to 20 raisins—roosting in densities of about 170 bats per square foot. Imagine the impossibly claustrophobic, hot and crowded and fetid cave-darkness, which is their bat-home—and so the wonder of that….and then the explosion of bodies pouring into the gathering dark, up to 2,000 per minute, which would mean 120,000 per hour, or 240,000 in the two hours that we were banding at the cave. The bats were everywhere, flying within inches of our bodies, hitting the harp trap, pulsing out into Spring Valley, silhouetted by the setting sun: a great and lovely shivering of wings streaming out of the cave, the numinous, bat-quick air suffused with light and life. And in some years a pair of peregrine falcons wait above the cave and plunge into the swirling mass of exiting bodies; they take what they can, but the bats keep coming. No one knows where these Mexican free-tailed bats come from, or where they go. Of the thirty thousand bats banded at the cave, handfuls have been recaptured at the cave entrance, a few elsewhere. They are present in the Spring Valley for four months and then they vanish into the ether. Perhaps many head towards Mexico, as one banded at the cave was later captured in Arizona. They colonize the night and unknown, distant caves. But the bats of the Spring Valley also colonize our imagination: an aerial river of life, millions of creatures, so alien in how they make their way through the world. Yet they remain our hairy, milk-drinking kin, our brothers and sisters, and they speak to us in a language as mysterious and potent as the ultrasonic clicks with which they hunt their prey. . . . We left the cave entrance around eight o’clock, down-climbing the small outcrop in the dark, and then heading back to Baker. On the way home I thought about the bats, of course, but also the opening lines from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that a friend had sent me a few days before: Let me be to Thee as the circling bird, Or bat with tender and air-crisping wings That shapes in half-light his departing rings. . . Those “air-crisping wings”: millions of them, flowing out into the Nevada night, a motion and a presence that haunts my heart and mind, and which will be with me always. PS: Thanks to the NPS biologists who let me tag along with them, and get in the way: Bryan, Kathleen, Joey, and Kelsey. They are doing good work.
Yesterday an early storm brought snow to the high country. In a day or so, as September temperatures warm, meltwater will percolate through the thin soil, and where the rocks are right it will slip into limestone fissures, carrying a hint of acidity deep underground. As it has done for millions of years, the water will slowly make its way into deep time, dissolving the soft rock as it travels, forming a latticework of caves throughout the Snake Range. Some of these caves have eroded away, leaving only remnants of a former world, as with Lexington Arch, but in other places the cave systems remain. One of them, Lehman Caves, is large and filled with elaborate formations of precipitated calcium carbonate, and draws tourists from around the country. Others are small, less elaborate, and mostly unknown. But whatever their structure, many of these caves share a common feature that is more amazing than the most fantastical formations—endemic invertebrates, adapted to life underground, finding their way through an environment devoid of natural light, part of an ecosystem that subsists on the barest influx of energy from the outside world. I was fortunate to see four of these endemic cave invertebrates with Gretchen Baker, a National Park Service biologist who guided me through Lehman Caves while they were empty of tourists. Along the way we (well, mostly Gretchen, who has developed an amazing search image for creatures that are in some cases no bigger than a fleck of dandruff) found the Snake Range millipede, Great Basin cave pseudoscorpion, and two types of springtails, close relatives of insects. The largest of these was the pseudoscorpion, perhaps ½ inch long, the apex predator in the system. The millipede, which feeds on detritus, was a slip of a thing, maybe 5 millimeters long, not much wider than a cat’s whisker. And the springtails—they seemed like little more than a whisper of life, just a millimeter or two long, almost impossible to see without a hand lens. There was much to think about in the quiet dark, as we flipped rocks and probed out-of-the-way alcoves—nutrient cycling and energy flow, adaptations to a subterranean environment, fossilized packrat middens that preserve a Pleistocene world. And then there were the effects of humans on the cave: entire ecosystems based on moss and algae growing around small light fixtures, springtails gathering their sustenance from lint left behind by visitors. But mostly I was taken by the stories of those tiny creatures: how they came to inhabit the caves, how they have persevered and flourished in such an alien environment, what they might teach us about the world. Thousands and thousands of generations, adapting to the great environmental changes that have wracked the Great Basin, living out their lives in such a place, unique to this world, minute miracles of exoskeleton and muscle, going on. Later that day I grabbed my journal, a sit-pad, and an IPA, and walked up a nearby hill to watch evening slip over the Great Basin. The hill commanded a spectacular view of the Snake Valley and its surrounding ranges—and although it stood only one-half mile from the compound where many park employees live, there was little evidence of recent visitors. It was quiet and peaceful, with just the slightest breath of a downslope breeze sifting through the pinyons and junipers. A scatter of cloud-shadows drifted across the desert, turning toward red-brown and gold as evening came on. Around the settlements of Baker and Garrison, clusters of electric-green center-pivot fields lay like symmetrical islands in a sea of saltbush and greasewood. Rough Cambrian limestone beneath my pad, the distant complaints of a Steller’s Jay, a faint scent of sage: a nice place for an IPA, an even better place for contemplation. It was difficult to wrap my mind and heart around the space that lay before me: to the north, the great bulk of Mt. Moriah and long run of Snake Valley; to the east, forty-five miles away, Notch Peak; to the northeast, perhaps sixty-five miles distant, the tip of what I took to be the Fish Springs Range, a shadow rinsing behind the Conger Range. I wanted the view—or my visceral response to it—to lodge permanently within me, but desire is stronger than memory and I knew that the presence of the place would become less substantial with the passage of my days. Still, the vastness of the Basin and Range country pulled me into what the Australian writer David Malouf described as “an opening distance” in myself. But my imagination was drawn, just as powerfully, to the tiny cave arthropods that I had seen earlier. The juxtaposition of scale and effect—from what felt like the infinite (this view!) to the minute (the seemingly most insignificant of animals)—left me giddy and slightly disoriented. But I understood that the invertebrates of Lehman Caves were every bit as beautiful as the great and widening space before me.
As night came on I gathered up my things and descended from the hill. And as I wandered through the pinyons and junipers, I thought of pseudoscorpions and millipedes and springtails, and the first stanza of William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”: To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour. I climbed Pyramid Peak on a day of broken clouds, bitter winds gusting hard out of the west, a few flakes of September snow in the air. On the summit I sought shelter behind a low rock wall, huddling in its lee and hoping for a respite from the wind, so that I could relax enough to enjoy the view. I’d come to the alpine in search of Holmgren’s buckwheat, a plant endemic to the Snake Range, with the hope of bivouacking above treeline, where I might sleep, quietly and alone, beneath a brilliant night sky - but the gale-force winds meant my camp was hours away. Still, before me there was this 7,000-foot drop into Snake Valley, a broad sweep of alpine habitat rising another thousand feet to Wheeler Peak, and the seemingly endless iteration of mountain ranges and valleys running toward the cloud-torn horizon. Beyond all else, the view from Pyramid Peak encompassed time, in all of its magnificent variety and complexity: the deepest time of Pole Creek Limestone and Prospect Mountain Quartzite, formed more than 500 million years ago, during the Cambrian Period. The fault-block beauty of the Snake Range, Confusion Range, Fish Creek Range, Wah Wah Mountains, and Snake Valley—the dip and thrust of the Basin and Range country that began 17 million years ago, during the Miocene Epoch, and continues on, into the present. Tectonic convulsions, mountains rising from the plains, valleys falling from the mountains, mountains slowly drowning in their own rock-spall debris. Remnant glacial cirques and moraines in the highest ranges. And then the salt pan playas and ancient beach strands, remnants of Pleistocene Lake Bonneville, which was one thousand feet deep and the size of Lake Michigan fifteen thousand years ago, when its southwestern arm reached far into the Snake Valley. Imagine that. Imagine the lake, the giant ground sloths and mammoths and short-faced cave bears and saber-toothed cats roaming the Great Basin, before both the waters and beasts began their long retreats, into a great drying and perhaps greater dying. Just imagine. And closer at hand, somewhere in shallow time, some nine hundred years ago, were the Fremont people who once grew corn and hunted antelope near present-day Baker; the waxing and waning of mining and ranching, scattered cabins collapsing into forest and meadow, the creation of Lehman Caves National Monument in 1922, Great Basin National Park in 1986. The National Park Service bought out the last Snake Range grazing leases in 1999 and the meadows are thick with basin wildrye. In some areas invigorated aspen clones advance into meadows; in others white firs invade aspen stands, a legacy of one hundred years of fire suppression. Pine bark beetles and fir engraver beetles flourish in this twenty-first century drought. In places the beetles’ host trees die, while the remnant glacier beneath Wheeler Peak—the only one in Nevada—retreats before a gathering warmth. But the bristlecone pines, some almost five thousand years old, live on. Deep time and even shallow time: the ultimate antidotes to hubris. They’re almost enough to give me a proper perspective—on my own mortality, sure, but also on the shit and stupidity and inhumanity that characterize so much of today’s news.
And up on Pyramid Peak, confronted by that great sweep of time, I thought of my favorite Theodore Roethke lines, from “The Far Field”: I learned not to fear infinity, The far field, the windy cliffs of forever, The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow. . . . But it occurred to me, as I started down from the mountain, weary of the wind and cold, that I’d write that last line differently, although with much poorer poetic effect: “The presence of time in the white light of the past.” On my hike Holmgren’s buckwheat would prove elusive, and the winds eventually drove me from the high ridge where I had hoped to bivouac—but I hung onto time, and so came away happy. And for a brief while I was content. In the late afternoon I drive out from Baker (population 68), cross U.S. Route 50, and take the long and lonely road running north towards Gandy, Utah, and the 12,000-foot-high Deep Creek Range. The gravel road tracks the eastern edge of the Moriah Range through the Snake Valley, on past an occasional ranch or ramshackle double-wide mobile home. It’s all Basin and Range ambience out here, parallel north-south trending mountains funneling the great distance down a wide and empty valley. Perhaps six miles north a plume of dust tracks from a lone pickup. Scattered herds of cows graze well-watered bottomland pastures, a solitary raven drifts downwind, beneath a thin wash of gray clouds. An occasional sign points off into some unknown, dirt-road distance: Antelope Springs 28. Marjum Pass 36. Next gas 83 miles. The drive towards Gandy gets me thinking about “Great Basin-ness”—which is not the same thing as the Great Basin, which is defined hydrographically as “a 165,000 square mile area that drains internally.” Here, no rivers run to the sea, and water disappears into the air or slips into the earth. The Great Basin’s portion of the Intermountain West includes almost all of Nevada, plus parts of southeastern Oregon and western Utah, a touch of Idaho, and much of California’s Mojave Desert. Geographers may debate the exact boundaries of the Great Basin, but the basic concept is easy to grasp. In contrast, Great Basin-ness is that potent mix of landscape qualities that stimulate in me such an intense visceral response. Being here is a bit like standing before a painting by Jan Vermeer, say Girl with the Red Hat in the National Gallery (a softly drawn breath in the presence of great beauty, the gentlest of touches to the solar plexus)—but for me the difference is that this country goes on and on and on. I can walk away from Vermeer’s painting in a moment, but I cannot abandon the Great Basin’s essence in the same casual way.
And for whatever reasons (a PhD in ecology and overdose of academia, I suppose) my musings about Great Basin-ness oddly turn to the British-American ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson and his 1957 definition of the niche as “a multi-dimensional hypervolume.” It’s a description that I appreciate both for its usefulness and its opacity. What I like about Hutchinson’s definition is how it captures the complexity of an organism’s relationship to its environment along multiple “resource axes.” The perplexing and amusing opacity of the phrase is due to the way in which “multi-dimensional hypervolume” lacks any direct linguistic connection to life itself—like too many aspects of modern quantitative ecology. But on the road to Gandy, no matter. What interests me about Hutchinson’s definition is how it helps me understand the emotional niche of Great Basin-ness, this sensory and aesthetic “multi-dimensional hypervolume.” Great Basin-ness has too many sensory axes to explore here, but several seem most potent: Basin and Range topography, in which parallel mountain ranges rise along either side of a broad valley, channeling the great distance; a massive sky, preferably strewn with cumulonimbus clouds, gray-hanging virga draped above the farthest horizon, scattered sunlight and shadow drifting across the land. Some empty highway, running straight on for ten, twenty, even thirty miles. Aridity, of course, contrasted with small pockets of moisture in the highest mountain ranges. Salt pan playas and isolated ranches, miles from their nearest neighbors. The scent of big sagebrush after a rare rain, leavening the air. But beyond all of the other sensory axes of Great Basin-ness (or perhaps because of them) there is that profound and glorious space. Walt Whitman never made it to the Great Basin, never had the good fortune to travel deep into its widening distances and so feel how this country can open up the heart. But if he had, he would have recognized the place. He would have loved its emptiness and felt even more intensely his impassioned prayer: “O to realize space!” What I am thinking about on the road Gandy is, of course, why we love the places we love. A friend once likened boredom to “driving Interstate 80 across Nebraska,” but that’s never been my experience. I’ve crossed the Great Plains from east to west at least thirty times, riding the Interstates and secondary highways out of the humid Midwest and into the arid West. I love the transition from one ecology and aesthetic to another, what the poet and essayist Merrill Gilfillan calls “that satisfying transcontinental dovetail’: maple and hickory forests giving way to grasslands, eastern meadowlarks yielding to western meadowlarks, the land opening up as the trees retreat into swales and bottomlands. Massive grain elevators anchor scattered towns to the earth, mechanized irrigation systems roll through fields of corn and alfalfa. The West arrives, more or less, near the hundredth meridian, the approximate position of the 20” isohyet for rainfall. to the east, traditional agriculture is possible; to the west, irrigation is necessary, except in rare, well-watered places. As moisture drains from the High Plains, so do humans: since the 1920s many counties west of the hundredth meridian have hemorrhaged people, particularly their young. Sustainable economies are hard to come by; poor dryland farming practices nurtured the Dust Bowl, and now we suck the Ogallala Aquifer dry, ride the boom and bust of Bakken oil shale towards another kind of collapse. Dreams of winter wheat, center-pivot irrigation, hydrofracking: on and on. Abandoned farm buildings and rusted windmills whisper of loss and betrayal: not so much by the land as by the politicians and companies who have sold a fantasy—“rain follows the plow” or its modern equivalent—to the innocent for more than 150 years. And so out in western Nebraska, near Gothenburg (population 3,475, milepost 211) the soundtrack for my drive suggests the Tragically Hip’s “At the Hundredth Meridian”: “Left alone to get gigantic / hard, huge, and haunted….”—a hard and huge land, haunted by our stubborn hubris. Yet on the High Plains I always return to the immense sky, distant horizons, pillars of electric-white cumulonimbus clouds: endless fractals of light and space and energy, a perfect setting for long drives, an achingly lovely place on just the right summer day, gently warm and windswept, the prairie an endless green wave, perhaps a curtain of gray-hanging rain on the farthest edge of the earth. . . . Driving I-80 across Nebraska for hour after hour: it’s an activity and land conducive to thinking, and on this long roll I have been considering beauty, pulled there by an NPR interview with the Irish poet and philosopher, John O’Donohue: “Beauty,” said O’Donohue, “is that in the presence of which we feel most alive.” And so as I hurtle towards the Great Basin, I am transported by beauty as much as by an internal combustion engine: tracking this great space, O’Donohue’s words, and my own desires, beneath a western sky. |
AuthorI am a professor emeritus of Environmental Science and Ecology at SUNY Brockport. What began in 2017 as a sabbatical blog continues in a haphazard way, as the spirt moves me and time allows. The focus, though, remains the same - the natural world, in all of its complexity and beauty, and our relation to it. Archives
November 2023
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