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.
4 Comments
CAS
9/16/2017 09:22:02 am
Excellent. i can feel it!
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Ken Kingsley
9/16/2017 07:04:25 pm
Beautiful images of an area I love
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R.
9/17/2017 02:26:14 pm
If this be the opening salvo to your sabbatical, then Onward, Ol' Sport! Glad (and totally unsurprised) to see how all that wide open country quenches a soul long-parched from interminable department meetings!
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Jim W
9/18/2017 02:37:16 pm
Keep writing, tell us more about this place!
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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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