Lately I have been thinking about the opening stanza from a poem by Emily Dickinson: Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all. . . Dickinson was right. “Hope is the thing with feathers”—for who hasn’t been stirred out of darkness by a bright pulse of northern cardinal song on a bitter February day, or lifted into light by the explosion of a dawn chorus on some transcendent May morning? But for me hope also has become “the thing with permeable skin, four toes on its hind feet, no lungs, and a distribution restricted to a desert mountain range in eastern California”—in other words, the Inyo Mountains salamander. Not a lovely title, that, and never destined for a poem or book jacket, unlike Christopher Cokinos’s 2000 book, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds. Yet the salamanders have found a perch in my soul and I hear them sing, in their own silent, improbable, beautiful, and hopeful way. And so what I want to consider here—what I feel every time that I flip a rock somewhere in the Inyos and discover a small salamander coiled there, perhaps only a few inches from a killing desert world—is the question of value. Just what are these salamanders worth to a human world that has almost entirely ignored them? Why should anyone study them, or treasure their existence? Why should the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service spend even a few thousand dollars to subsidize my research (mostly to cover some of my driving expenses, purchase a few small items of equipment, and keep me supplied with almond butter and jam sandwiches while in the field)? Rough calculations suggest that the cost to the federal government for my fieldwork is equal to approximately 4 minutes of flight time for a B-2 bomber, or between 9 and 27 minutes of one of President Trump’s golfing weekends at Mar-a-Lago, assuming that it lasts forty-eight hours. (The numbers for the latter item are very murky, but the concept is not.) Wouldn’t the money allocated for my salamander research be better used to fly a B-2 bomber for 4 minutes, fund 9 minutes of the President’s golfing weekend, or help reduce the tax burden on our country’s billionaires? I'll ignore the societal costs of B-2 bombers or Trump’s golf game, but I do believe that there are many reasons why the Inyo Mountains salamander is worth the minor expense necessary to study and protect it: how understanding the history of the species would help elucidate evolutionary processes; the way its populations could act as sentinels, relative to climate change, disease, and other environmental threats; and even what environmental economists call its option value—how undiscovered Inyo Mountains salamander biomolecules might someday benefit humans. (One never knows, as research on East Africa’s naked mole rat has demonstrated.) And then there is the species’ intrinsic value, its right to exist, independent of human concerns. Finally, its beauty and stunning presence in a desert world offer us a story of great importance. But as much as I passionately believe in “all of the above,” I will leave them aside for now. Instead, I want to consider the view of the Inyo Mountains, and several canyons that support salamanders, from the Manzanar National Historic Site, which is located a few miles north of the small town of Lone Pine in the Owens Valley. The site commemorates the experiences of the ten thousand Japanese Americans who were “interred” there during World War II, as well as the more than 100,000 other internees who were imprisoned in other camps throughout the American West and Midwest. As such Manzanar is a powerful reminder of how racism, fear, and ignorance can poison the spirit of a country—and thus a potent lesson for our times. I have visited Manzanar often, most recently with a friend a few weeks ago, and although the armed soldiers, guard towers, and rows of barracks are more than seventy years gone, it remains a place where the past is always with you; there are ghosts, and a visceral sense of suffering, anger, and injustice. To wander among the reconstructed barracks and mess hall, to visit the cemetery on the western edge of camp, or to see a garland of “peace cranes” draped around a wooden post, is to walk with the spirits of the dead, and touch upon a profound and bitter sadness. I do not pretend to understand much of anything about the experiences of the Japanese Americans who were imprisoned at Manzanar. I do not know how they and their descendants have managed to transcend bitterness and forgive our country, despite the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, which granted a payment of $20,000 and an apology to former prisoners of the war relocation camps. I wonder if I would be capable of such forgiveness if I were subjected to a similar experience. But I do know this: that all of us have suffered through our own tiny Manzanars, our large and small imprisonments. And for me the view from Manzanar, of the Inyo Mountains and the salamander habitat they contain, is of some consolation—both for the history of the place, and for the difficult experiences that have come to my life, my personal incarcerations.
For there is comfort in understanding that, beyond the reach of human folly and stupidity--beyond all of our concerns, petty and important--Inyo Mountains salamanders have crawled and drowsed their way through the millennia. Wonderful travelers of time, they have survived the uplift of the Inyo Mountains, the explosion of the Long Valley Caldera, the waxing and waning of the waters, the repeated drying of their mountains. They were present millions of years ago, in the ancestral Inyo Mountains—long before there was such a species as Homo sapiens—and they were present when loyal and law-abiding citizens of the United States were imprisoned at Manzanar. The Inyo Mountains salamanders have endured, and one of their gifts to us is the understanding that we also can endure, in our haphazard and imperfect ways. This wisdom—the wisdom of the salamanders—is the primary reason why I am here. It explains why I care for the Inyo Mountains salamanders as much as I do, and why they offer up the promise of hope in a world that too often teeters on the edge of hopelessness. Note: Portions of this post are adapted from a chapter in Relicts of a Beautiful Sea.
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Recently, I had a week of fieldwork that illustrates the highs, lows, and in-betweens that comprise most scientific projects. Research proceeds in fits and starts, whether we’re talking high-energy particle physics, molecular genetics, or (most critically) Inyo Mountains salamanders, as during my week of contrasts: Day 1—My goal was to investigate a possible salamander locality on the west side of the Inyos, which took two hours of walking and 1500 feet of elevation gain to reach. Although the locality looked promising, there were only about 60 meters of decent habitat, few flippable rocks, and no salamanders lounging about. Salamanders may occur in the canyon (it is difficult to conclusively demonstrate that a small, cryptic species is not present in a place with appropriate habitat), but the chances of this seem slim. Yet even though I did not use my SED (Salamander Entrapment Device) to good effect, the trip was moderately successful because I gathered some useful observations about factors affecting Inyo Mountains salamander distribution. Rating for the day: +. Day 2—Downhill plummet. . . My plan was to investigate a documented west-side locality that I had not visited before. Because access to salamander habitat in the canyon is blocked by a sixty-foot-high dry falls and I did not want to tackle the barrier on my own, I took along my local friends and hosts, Stacey and Ceal, plus a rope and some climbing gear for safety. Hah. At the base of the falls we found a class 4 route that looked passable without a rope. We started up a series of ledges and cracks, with Stacey in the lead, me in the middle, and Ceal in the rear. When we were about halfway up, I heard Stacey remark, “This block feels loose.” I glanced up, just as a piece of rock perhaps one foot by two feet came hurtling free. I was about eight feet below Stacey and only had a moment to flinch before being enveloped in noise from shattering rock, dust, and pain, and then hearing Ceal cry out from below. I was hit in the head and left hand, but was more worried about Ceal—who fortunately avoided getting whacked in the head, although large rocks hit her calf and foot. We were able to down-climb our route, and once in a safe spot determined that we had avoided serious injury—a lucky thing because “it” could have been very bad. For me, a thick hat (and hard head?) prevented a scalp wound or concussion, and although my left hand was swollen and bleeding, nothing felt broken. Ceal also was free of any broken bones, although her calf soon swelled to the size of her thigh and an orthopedist eventually diagnosed temporary nerve damage to her leg. We retreated to the car—enough high-angle salamandering for one day—and hobbled into a more accessible site. We managed to uncover a few beasts there, but the day was still demoralizing, especially in the after-wash of my rockfall-induced adrenaline rush. There were several ironies about the accident. First, in all my years of mountaineering, I’d never been involved in a rockfall accident, although I’d had several close calls along the way. Second, I am more nervous about working alone in difficult terrain, and yet the accident occurred in the company of friends. Even though no one was seriously hurt, the day was hard going and its rating had to be at least: ———. Day 3—Not much to say about day 3, except that it involved 3,000 feet of tough elevation gain up a very steep trail (followed by the subsequent, equal loss), only to find a site completely unsuitable for Inyo Mountain salamanders. Crap. (Actually, my language at the time was a bit more colorful.) My head and hand still hurt badly; I was tired and generally pissed off about the whole business, but at least I did not get assaulted by flying rocks. Rating for the day: ——.
Day 4—My best Inyo Mountains salamander day, ever. I found twenty (large and small, gravid and non-gravid) in two hours of searching. It was a lovely day for fieldwork, with mild temperatures, plenty of sun, and a beautiful autumnal desert sky. The High Sierra stood clear to the west, I was working amidst small waterfalls and tiny alcoves of maidenhair fern and columbine, and although my head and hand still throbbed, the abundance of salamanders and the canyon’s magic graced my entire project, rockfall and all. Lots of excellent data, and a rating for the day of: + + +. Day 5—I returned to a site that I had visited three times before, over the course of several years. During the hour-long hike in I pledged to slow down, relax, look, and ask more questions about the whys of salamander presence and absence. I worked slowly and deliberately, and found twice as many salamanders as during my previous visits to the canyon. My hand and hand felt a bit better, and I was happy and content in the presence of Batrachoseps campi, enveloped in silence and the pleasures of good work. Rating for the day: ++. So it went during my up-and-down research week: two excellent days, one mildly decent day, one bad day, and one awful day. Two weeks later, I am reminded of the rockfall accident whenever I flex my left hand, accidentally bump my bruised bone, or see Ceal limp by. But I recollect, even more powerfully, the pleasures of day 4, when there were salamanders everywhere and I was taken, fully, by my good fortune: to work in such beautiful and challenging country, with an even more amazing creature. Recently, my son and I discovered a “new” population of Inyo Mountains salamanders, perhaps the twenty-first documented locality. It was in an unexpected situation—a seep just eighty yards long, which we reached after a long walk up an otherwise waterless drainage. A thin trickle of water slipped through a rank growth of grass and goldenrod, then disappeared into a dry wash. Although the little seep felt good, in an Inyo Mountains salamander sort of way, there did not seem to be enough habitat to support a viable population. As Martin and I began flipping rocks I figured that our hike had been a waste, at least in terms of salamanders, and the Spotted Towhees and Mountain Chickadees complaining from the nearby willow and wild rose seemed to accentuate what I assumed was the futility of our search. But when I lifted a rock a few yards beyond where the small seep trickled from the ground, at the very end of decent habitat, a salamander coiled—and a second salamander lay beneath a rock just a few inches away. Both were large (if an animal roughly three inches from its snout to the tip of its tail can be thought of as “large”), with a dark, chocolate-brown background color and delicate, silver-green speckles along their backs. Beneath the translucent belly skin of one salamander lay a yellowish mass of eggs, a promise for the future. I sat down and took the data that I needed, but after I was done, my world narrowed. The scolding of the birds, the random mental chatter that all too often accompanies my salamander searches, the quiet susurrus of wind in the pinyon pines, even the drift of falling water—they all fell away, and I was left with just those two seemingly fragile creatures, here, in such an unlikely place. The seep lay over a mile from the nearest water and known salamander population. If a restless salamander were to attempt such a journey, it would involve twenty-six hundred feet of elevation gain and loss, across arid, killing ground. It seemed very unlikely that any immigrants could have reached the seep since wetter times ended, some 12,000 years ago. After I released the salamanders and watched them crawl into their refuges, Martin and I packed our gear and headed back to the car. And as we walked I thought about the stories of the population we had just discovered: how and when the salamanders had first arrived in the canyon and how they managed to hang on, through all of the environmental changes that had been visited upon the Inyo Mountains. If the molecular geneticists have it right, the Inyo Mountain salamander lineage is five to ten million years old, meaning that the species would have survived the tectonic upheavals that gave rise to the Inyo Mountains, some three to four million years ago. Then came the waxing and waning pulses of precipitation during the Pleistocene Epoch—and 750,000 years ago, the violent explosion of the Long Valley Caldera, sixty miles to the northwest. Geologists estimate that the eruption was 2,500 times stronger than Mount St. Helens, and blasted out 144 cubic miles of ash and molten rock. Lethal pyroclastic flows of gas, ash, and pumice would have spilled across the land; perhaps this is why there are no salamanders in the White Mountains, just north of the Inyos. And more recently, roughly 7,500 to 4,500 years ago, the climate warmed and dried, and treeline moved far upslope of its current position.
Through all of these changes, the salamanders have persisted—as a species, and presumably in many of the drainages they now occupy, including the tiny bit of habitat where Martin and I had just been. The two individuals that we had found were members of the most recent among thousands of generations of their kind, living out their silent lives in that small place, a population riding the long waves of geological, climatic, and ecological variability into the present, going on and on. And although the details of their story are unknown (intrinsic rate of population increase, reproductive ecology, lifespan, population size, when the population was founded, how often the population has fallen toward a final extinction but then recovered) the theme was clear: endurance, sometimes in the face of great adversity. “Just imagine,” I thought, and then I wondered at it all—for there was something touching, and vitally important, about the lives of those salamanders, and their stories. And so what I considered, as I worked my way through the boulders and brush, were hope and some kind of proper perspective on my own life: here in the Inyo Mountains, but also in the larger world, in this time of grief and angst and anger. At most colleges and universities, as at Brockport, tenured faculty are eligible for a sabbatical every seven years. It’s a wonderful privilege, with few analogs for most working Americans. For me, a sabbatical offers the time to put aside my normal duties—which run mostly to administration, teaching, service, and supervision of other people’s research—and immerse myself in the natural world, research, and writing. Hopefully, my sabbaticals have enhanced my “professional development” and benefited the college, through fresh approaches to teaching, enhanced scientific skills, and new research ideas. However, I have been considering another benefit of my sabbaticals: empathy. Why empathy? Because sabbaticals remind me of how challenging it can be to embark upon a new research project. It’s a daunting, visceral feeling that I confronted during my Masters and PhD programs, but the winnowing effects of memory have dimmed my recollections of the challenges those times presented. And so, too often, the empathy that I should feel when helping a student develop a research project has been replaced by an academic advisor’s version of the Nike aphorism, “Just do it.” I need to be reminded that it is not that easy. Take for example my first sabbatical, which I spent studying Australasian pipits in the Australian Alps. When I reached my isolated alpine research site, the ground was snow-covered, the weather “changeable.” Everything was unfamiliar. There were poisonous snakes (a non-issue in the North American alpine) and huge, venomous funnel-web spiders wandering over the snow. Although I’d studied North American pipits, for a while the behavior of Australasian pipits remained mysterious. They were difficult to catch and band, and I had no search image for their nests. And I mostly worked alone—no one to help understand the pipits, no one to commiserate with when the flies and heat got bad, or I stepped on a nest of biting ants, again. Sometimes I wondered why in the hell I was where I was, pursuing those devious birds. But eventually, I learned. I found enough pipit nests, came to treasure my research site—the soft light at the end of a long day, the clatter of the small creek near my tent, the lovely blooms of alpine flowers. With time, the pleasures of fieldwork, of living close to the land, of coming to understand a species, perhaps a system, made my earlier angst much less compelling. I confronted different issues on my second sabbatical, but the feelings of “What am I doing here?” and “How will I ever figure this out?” returned in full force. Instead of pursuing a hard-core scientific research project, I was interested in writing a book of creative nonfiction about rare and endangered species of the Death Valley region. I had ideas, but no clear path. I had few contacts in the region, and for a while I floundered. Again, I worked alone, far from friends and loved ones. On my first night in the field, I sat in a suffocating car, eating a dinner of cheese and crackers as fifty-mile-per-hour winds pummeled me and the vehicle, gritting my teeth and wondering, “Why?” But during the night the winds calmed. And when I stepped into the beautiful wash of a full moon and strolled down to the spring where Owens pupfish hung suspended in the crystalline waters—a species that twice had come within the thinnest breath of extinction—I understood that “things” would be okay. it would take time to find the right direction, but I would get there. Generous people would share their knowledge and friendship, and I would understand what I wanted to say, and how to say it. But most importantly my experiences helped me develop a deep affinity for the beleaguered species that I was studying—and the book that I envisioned would come. And now there are Inyo Mountains salamanders, one of only two desert salamanders in the world. They are restricted to twenty or so rugged and isolated canyons in (go figure) the Inyo Mountains, in the rain shadow of the High Sierra. The species has been petitioned for listing under the Endangered Species Act, and my objectives are to assess its population status, evaluate current and potential threats, and develop a better understanding of its ecology. And although I know something about the salamanders, I have confronted the same types of discomfort that I faced during my earlier sabbaticals: doubt, uncertainty, and the daunting feeling that I lack sufficient energy to do this. It has not been particularly easy, partly because of the Inyo Mountains themselves, which rise 7,000 to 9,000 feet above the Owens and Saline valleys: no maintained trails, rugged topography, many drainages choked with tangled shrubs and blocked by steep cliffs. The salamanders have chosen a great place in which to hide themselves away, and I am often left contemplating the title of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, No Country for Old Men. And as on my other sabbaticals, I often work alone. On my first day of fieldwork, I trudged for two hours up a dry desert wash, found only a thin trickle of water guarded by thickets of flesh-ripping wild rose, got hung up on cliffs way too high above the ground, and saw no salamanders. Damn. From my previous experience I knew that the canyon was a poor site, but my walk back down the wash was still a discouraging one. At my second site I managed to find one salamander, but could not survey the entire drainage because I was unwilling to climb a sixty-foot-high cliff, alone. I carry a personal locator beacon, but that cliff seemed way too steep and high, and too far from home. . . And then there’s the critical issue of developing “a feeling for the organism,” which is how Evelyn Fox Keller described the Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock’s affinity for maize and its genetics. This involves more than developing a simple search image; instead it’s a matter of “thinking like a salamander”—which when considering the evolutionary gulf that separates humans and salamanders, is no easy thing. But I am learning (slowly), and adapting. The approaches seem a bit less steep and long, the cliffs not quite as high, the country not so lonely. In some canyons I have found lots of salamanders. I am not yet thinking like a salamander, but their ways seem a bit less opaque. Sometimes I am lucky enough to have companions, and then the work is easier. And best of all, there are those times when I flip a rock and find a creature coiled in moist soil, a refugee from a wetter time, enigmatic in its history and presence—Here, in the high desert!—and I am taken (again) by the beauty of the world, and its great wonder.
And so, when my sabbatical research is done, I hope that I will return to Brockport with a full cache of data, a better sense of the Inyo Mountains salamander, and a renewed understanding of what it is like to begin—again, or for the first time. Recently, two friends and I hiked into the High Sierra and camped for two nights at a beautiful timberline lake, beneath granite cirques rimmed with last winter’s snow. Along the way we spent a long and delightful day rambling across the broad alpine expanse of Humphreys Basin and scrambling up Four Gables peak. From the summit, the views were intoxicating: to the east, the 9,000-foot-deep gulf of Owens Valley and the 14,000-foot-tall White Mountains; to the south, west, and north, “mountains beyond mountains.” The weather was unusually mild for October, the country washed in lambent light. At night the waning moon was brilliant and crystalline, and a clear peace lay over everything. It was a lovely hike, through spectacular and (using John Muir’s favorite adjective) glorious country. My companions were also wonderful—a couple I’ve known for thirty-eight years, good friends with whom I’ve shared many wilderness adventures. And even though we sometimes were silent, our conversations covered a lot of territory, on topics ranging from contemporary politics to medicine and the Irish poet and philosopher, John O’Donohue, whom I mentioned in an earlier post (“Across the Hundredth Meridian”). Talking about O’Donohue got me wondering, once again, about beauty, its qualities and iterations, the ways in which I am moved by those places where I feel most at home. As we walked I thought about the spectacular qualities of the landscapes that have touched me most deeply, from the Antarctic Peninsula to the Himalayas, Grand Canyon, and High Sierra: massive glaciers plunging into ice-choked seas, and penguin colonies numbering in the tens of thousands. Mountains rising to 29,000 feet, through 11,000 feet of ice and rock and snow. That great gulf of time and space that falls away from the South Rim of the Canyon, to the Colorado River—or the great expanse of alpine tundra and sky that grace Humphrey’s Basin. But I realized that I am equally moved by the details of places, by quiet alcoves and tiny seeps, by intricacy and intimacy, by the whisper of a country as much as by its shout—as was the case at Great Basin National Park. Although I was drawn to the vastness of the evening view across the Snake Valley, the empty spatials along the road to Gandy, and the Basin-and-Range sweep of space from the summit of Wheeler Peak (the North Snake Range, Deep Creeks, Fish Spring Range, Schell Creeks, Confusion Range, on and on), one of my favorite places in the park was the little valley that sheltered Pole Creek. On my many walks there I came to love the way the trail first crossed the rush and clatter of Baker Creek, before it climbed away from water, into a dry canyon filled mostly with juniper and pinyon pine. Then came a thin trickle of water, aspens and water birch, a riparian world made more welcome by its almost tentative presence in the narrow canyon, where the sound of falling water was only a murmur. In late September this section of Pole Creek was filled with the rich texture of autumnal colors: the brilliant reds of skunkbush and Rocky Mountain maple, and the bright golds and yellows of aspen and willow, blending with delicate greens of white fir and pinyon. Above the water, the canyon broadened into a lush valley, where soft swaths of basin wildrye lay among the aspens and ponderosa pine. Although Pole Creek is part of my favorite long trail run in the park (up the creek and over the divide to Timber Creek, then the long downhill fall to Baker Creek, past the Grey Cliffs and back to the trailhead), it is best visited leisurely. Travel slowly, and pay attention—to Pole Creek’s details, to the subtle transitions in vegetation and the essence of the place, to the quiet fall of water. Take a pad and find a place upvalley to sit, among the grasses. Accept what the poet Lisel Mueller describes as, “The Need to Hold Still.” If you are with a companion, stay silent. Remain there for an hour or two, before making your way, slowly, down canyon. Think of your stroll as right practice, as what Zen Buddhists term kinhin, or a walking meditation.
There’s a lesson here, I think. So often we yearn for spectacle, whether in beautiful country, entertainment, or (most importantly) our relationships. We are pulled toward what we hope will be intense experiences. In doing so our attention is drawn away from the “unremarkable” details of our lives, those events that form so much of the warp and weft of memory and desire: a lover’s gentle touch, the scent of baby shampoo in a young child’s hair, the morning’s first sip of great coffee (or in my case, tea), some beautiful line of poetry that hangs with you forever, that lovely moment and movement in a favorite song, the perfect dry fly cast on your favorite river—or the trickle of water in Pole Creek, among the aspens and the stillness, where for a few hours everything in the world fits together, almost perfectly. 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. 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. |
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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