I first came to the desert in 1969, during my freshman orientation at Prescott College. I felt an immediate and powerful attraction to the arid expanse of the Colorado Plateau and soon widened my explorations (and love) to include the Mojave, Sonoran, and Great Basin deserts. I was drawn—in a primal and innate way—to the calcined playas, the spare and empty lands, the naked rock, the backlit xeric ranges, the fractals of light and space that dominate the arid West. Heat and drought are integral parts of these landscapes and back in the 1970’s there was a point in my aesthetic evolution where I learned to embrace these things, too, as I chased feral burros through what was then Death Valley National Monument. And if anything my more recent obsession with the Inyo Mountains salamander, the many months of fieldwork in a country where water feels like an afterthought, has deepened my connection to the desert world. And yet my travels this summer, through a multitude of heat-blasted, drought-scourged, smoke-choked western landscapes, from mountain and forest to desert, wore me down. I learned a new language of catastrophe and I liked neither its syntax nor its vocabulary: heat domes, pm 2.5 air quality, a Tier 1 water shortage declaration for the Colorado River. I lost nothing along the way and suffered from little except inconvenience, and so my experiences were only the thinnest of notes from a much larger atonal symphony, as if Arnold Schoenberg had risen from the dead and brought his twelve-tone technique to twenty-first century atmospherics: 120° during an afternoon rush hour in Las Vegas; a mid-June absence of snow at 12,000 feet in the High Sierra; the Pioneer Range in Montana, shrouded in wildfire smoke and invisible from only five miles away; week after grinding week of 90°- and 100°-plus temperatures; an August campsite in a grassy meadow below Glacier Peak, where thick ice had lain fifty or sixty years before; and a cultural conflagration of sorts, a field of MAGA flags flapping against a smoke-strangled central Washington sky. No locusts, boils, frogs, or lice, though—just the Four Horsepeople of the Apocalypse riding hard across the American West, savaging the land and its people: heat, drought, and wildfires, plus a pandemic of human cussedness and intransigence. But just the facts, ma’am:
In late August the persistent stress of heat, drought, and wildfire smoke—leavened by the spike in Delta variant Covid-19 infections—helped send me scurrying back to western New York and what I somewhat surprisingly thought of as “home,” having felt like a partial exile for most of my thirty years in the region—never quite settled, always looking West. Yet there was a deeper psychic burden associated with my retreat, as frustrations with the summer’s extreme weather morphed into a more profound and general angst about climate change and the Earth’s slide toward some seemingly inevitable tipping point. But then a perfect late-summer’s day greeted me as I drove the final miles of my traditional I-90/I-80 eastward vector, an afternoon resplendent with brilliant air and the drift of electric-white cumulus clouds, the great blue sweep of Lake Erie to the north and west. And everywhere a rush of green in all its chlorophyll-rich magnificence, a riotous expanse of tree and vine and lush agricultural fields sprung from a fortunate intersection of climate, geography, and glacial history. And a few days later, during a long and lovely run along the Erie Canal, this rich palette of greens and blues welcomed me in an unfamiliar but blessed way. Although a string of gray and dreary weeks will undoubtedly trail through the region from November through March, on that early September day there was this great rising of sunlight and azure sky, plants and wind-chopped water—relief for my parched mind and body, on a morning that triggered more than a small splash of joy. And while most models suggest that in the coming decades the Great Lakes region will experience some effects of climate change, I suspect that western New York will escape the worst damages inflicted by rising temperatures and seas, apocalyptic hurricanes and forest fires, and diminishing air quality and precipitation. In spite of all the bad climate news that just keeps on giving, there’s something comforting about living next to twenty percent of all the fresh surface water in the world, where on a late summer’s day green and blue still feel like the dominant colors of the earth. Perhaps western New York will experience an economic and social renaissance in the coming decades, as climate refuges flock to the region and Rochester again becomes known as the “Flour City.”
Climate change and my associated discontent aside, I’m not sure what retirement and 2022 will bring—but I suspect that next April will find me deep in the Inyo Mountains, probing the dun-colored, arid lands. The salamanders and their desert silence await and sometimes I still imagine a move out West, perhaps to Montana or the far side of the North Cascades. And yet in the long run water and chlorophyll might help hold me here. “Thousands have lived without love,” wrote Auden, “not one without water”—and there is much to be said for a pigment that reflects green light, drives oxygen production and carbon dioxide uptake, and clothes this part of the world in such fecund and emerald beauty.
11 Comments
Gina Adams
9/15/2021 06:34:25 pm
Hi Chris,
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Christopher Norment
9/16/2021 03:22:14 pm
Thanks, Gina! Here's hoping that California gets a reprieve from the heat, drought, and fires. Would we have ever imagined such a summer, back in 1969?
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Nicki
9/16/2021 12:19:42 pm
Am winding up a 3 week sojourn in the land of unavoidable water: I lakes, rivers, bogs, oceans at every twist of the head. Green too…dense conifer stands persist but surprisingly also big sky…often low and gray but joyfully also bright and clear. But best for me…easy access to places of deep silence. About to make my return home to CT…ready because I am a bit road weary and tired of drying off two shaggy dogs but weeping inside at the thought of traffic, dispiriting news and grass too long now to properly mow. However I am glad to miss here the oncoming cold and snow but will miss this unique quiet beauty. Can only write this because I am sitting in a laundromat…still tied to the need to look and smell presentable when re-entering civilization. Loved your piece of writing…always thoughtful!!
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Christopher Norment
9/16/2021 03:26:44 pm
Hi Nicki - Thanks for the kind words about my writing, and safe travels as you head back to CT. I have always wanted to visit Newfoundland, which sounds like beautiful and harsh country. Lots of green and blue up there, at least during the summer!
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9/18/2021 07:25:57 am
Such a beautifully written, sad commentary on the U.S. (and to a lesser extent global) response to the greatest crisis ever faced by humanity. Like you, Chris, as a native Oregonian who has lived in western NY for nearly 45 years, I am lucky to live here now and for the foreseeable future because I agree with you that climate change here is likely to be much less severe here than in the western U.S. toward which my heart also has long yearned.
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Christopher Norment
9/18/2021 06:00:28 pm
Thanks, Jim, for your kind words. it was great to see you and Carol and the gathering this afternoon!
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Judd
9/25/2021 09:58:56 am
Chris, your writing is so striking it's hard to do it justice in a response, but just the facts:
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Christopher Norment
9/26/2021 11:49:32 am
Hi Judd - Good to hear from you, and thanks for your kind words. What have you been up to since your Balkan adventures? Hope you are well, and that are paths do cross!
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Judd Calvin
9/27/2021 10:44:05 am
I'm good! In a roundabout way I found myself back in Portland going to school for Medical Lab Science. I had always been hesitant to pursue a STEM degree but you are one of my influences in going for it!
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Christopher Norment
9/27/2021 03:30:33 pm
Hi Judd - Glad to hear that you are pursuing a degree in Medical Lab Science, and I know that you will do well at it. And I imagine that the degree will give you room to roam if you want to - you still doing long distance hikes? Speaking of influences, you have been an influence on me, too - trying to get my base pack weight down to 15 pounds.....much easier on these old(er) bones. 12/26/2023 03:35:31 am
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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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