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This denigrating view of the Truckee has mostly changed these days, with a series of ambitious and largely successful river core urban renewal projects. We now have a whitewater park, pedestrian bridges, improved access, and more greenspace along the floodplain. And while all this exists in the shadow of towering casinos, it offers a helpful reminder that we desert rats had better pay tribute to the Truckee, without which our survival in this arid place would be tenuous. Even in the desert, a city without a home river seems to me a lonely proposition. I'm grateful that we've begun to appreciate ours.
Twenty years ago, before the Truckee corridor through Reno had been revitalized, I used to hang out down by the river a lot. At that time I wasn't married, didn't have kids, and had not yet begun to build our home out on the Ranting Hill, far north of the city and up in the remote, high-elevation canyons and ridges along the California line. Back then I was a new arrival in the Great Basin. My desert rat whiskers had only just begun to sprout, and I still felt more comfortable keeping water in view.
It is with the bittersweet sensation of a lost place and time that I return two decades later to revisit well-worn memories of those old days and nights along the Truckee. One of my closest friends at that time was Brad, a guy whose aplomb and cool had earned him the nickname "Smoo B" (as in "Smooth Brad"). I had plenty in common with Smoo B, but perhaps most important was our love of playing music together, something we did at every opportunity. He picked guitar and I blew blues harp, and we bonded over the fact that neither of us had ever met a note we didn't want to bend. As a little, two-man jam band we played out at cheap bars now and then—the kinds of dives that were adjacent to tattoo parlors, and once we even played in an acrid-smelling saloon that slung both rye and, in the back room, skin ink. One-shop stopping for Harley dudes. We never used the same band name twice, and I've forgotten all of them now, save "Jeebies and Stankeye." I no longer recall how we came up with that name, or which one of us was which, or if we even stopped to ask such questions at the time.
Mostly, though, we played on our own, whenever we could and wherever we felt like it. One unexceptional summer day, we agreed to meet down by the river in the late afternoon, just to pick and bend a few tunes before dark. We sidled along the Truckee for a while before sitting down on an old concrete landing near the south buttress of the Virginia Street Bridge, in the heart of downtown Reno. A double-arch gem built back in 1905, this bridge became famous in legend as the place from which newly liberated women tossed their wedding rings after finalizing a divorce in the nearby courthouse. In The Misfits (1961), John Huston's immortal cinematic tribute to the loss of the Old West, a fragile Marilyn Monroe contemplates doing just that.
Smoo B led, and I followed, as he unfolded a spontaneous set of river music: a relaxed take on Neil Young's "Down By the River," followed by a meander through Bob Dylan's "Watching the River Flow," which segued magically into B's crazy, mellow cover of the Talking Heads' cover of the Reverend Al Green's classic "Take Me to the River"—a tune he strummed with a staccato rhythm that made it sound like it was being played by Bob Marley rather than David Byrne.
"Dip me in the river / Drop me in the water / Washing me down / Washing me down." As Smoo B finished those lines and looked up, and I lowered my harp from my mouth and opened my eyes, we both noticed something curious. While we were jamming, three people had planted themselves on the landing not far from us. There was an older man, a middle-aged woman, and a very young man. They looked as if they knew each other, and yet they did not quite seem to be together. They appeared to have been attracted by the music, but despite a few furtive glances our way, they made no eye contact with us as they sat staring toward the afternoon light rippling on the river. All were shabbily dressed. The young man had a grimy backpack and bedroll, the woman a bulging, oversized canvas sack, the older man a plastic garbage bag half full of crumpled aluminum cans. It was clear enough that they were homeless. Here, in the shadow of the casinos, lived the river people whose luck had run dry.
I slapped the harp on my thigh and wiped the face of its comb across my jeans to give myself a moment to think. Then I looked at Smoo B and tipped my head in the direction of our audience. B smiled and nodded.
"We're worried y'all can't hear very well from over there," Smoo B called over to the strangers. "We've got some more river music coming up. You want to join us?" The three looked over with surprise and then, with only a slight hesitation, stood up and made their way over to us. With no further words, Smoo B built on the earlier reggae vibe with a sweet, lilting strum through Jimmy Cliff's "Many Rivers to Cross," which he nodded for me to sing. I couldn't remember the first verse, so I began with the second: "Many rivers to cross / And it's only my will that keeps me alive / I've been licked, washed up for years / And I merely survive because of my pride." By the time we finished the song, three or four other homeless folks had joined the audience; word had somehow spread among the poor people residing in the willow thickets and beneath the bridge overpasses of the Truckee River corridor.
Smoo B launched into a short, reckless version of Johnny Cash's "Five Feet High and Rising," though neither of us remembered many of the words. B recalled, "The chickens are sleepin' in the willow trees / The cow's in water up past her knees," and I came up with, "The rails done washed out north of town / We gotta head for higher ground," but mostly we just threaded out a lonesome jam, the end of which was met by an audience that had once again doubled in size. Although we had fumbled the tune badly, we still received applause, and there were smiles everywhere when B, while retuning, said with a grin, "Could be that one needs a little work. Well, any requests?"
After a pause, a homeless man who appeared to be in his thirties spoke up. "How about Springsteen's 'The River'?"
"Can you help us out with those lyrics?" I asked.
"Sure can try," the guy smiled back. B launched into the tune, and the man sang the sad ballad with genuine feeling, never missing a word. I choked up a little as I tried to nail the harp solo coming out of the final verse, which, given both the singer and the situation, was heartbreaking and poignant: "Now those memories come back to haunt me, they haunt me like a curse / Is a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse?"
When we three finished the tune, congratulations were offered all around, and the crowd of more than a dozen people now seemed to have grown more comfortable with an experience that was as unusual for them as it was for us. An older woman, who referred to us kindly as "boys," offered us a heel of bread that she had wrapped in a tattered, green bandana; a man, grasping a brown paper bag, explained that he'd traded a little work for vodka and that we were welcome to pull from it if we liked. Thanking them for their generosity we asked again if there were any requests. A white-bearded older man, perhaps in his seventies, laughed a loud, raspy laugh that revealed how few teeth he had remaining. "Let's have some hobo songs!"
The request was so ironic and well-timed, and was delivered with such enthusiasm and good humor, that everyone laughed together in a bonding moment that slung a bridge across a broad river of class, opportunity, and life experience. "Well, sir, we can handle that one," I replied, returning the man's smile with one of my own.
"How about a Woody Guthrie set?" Smoo B offered. There was general agreement on the plan, and we began the most memorable string of songs I've ever had the pleasure to play. I no longer recall all the tunes that set contained, but we hit "Hard Travelin'" and "Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad," "Vigilante Man" and "Pretty Boy Floyd the Outlaw," "Do Re Mi" and "I Ain't Got No Home in this World Anymore." The folks in the audience thanked us after each song, asked if we were sure we didn't mind playing just one more, offered us bites and swigs of what meager food and drink they possessed. They tapped their feet, clapped their hands, sang along when they knew the words, and greeted the last note of each tune with appreciative applause.
We played on and on until dusk began to settle. Smoo B's fingertips were turning to hamburger from playing so hard for so long, and my lower lip had begun to bleed from ripping and bending notes on the harp. Now dark was falling in earnest, and B proposed that he and I each choose one song to conclude the spontaneous musical event that our audience had already begun to refer to as a "concert." I chose the melancholy "Hobo's Lullaby," on which I laid down the sweetest, most languid harp notes I think I've ever produced.
Then, for our finale, Smoo B chose the upbeat "Big Rock Candy Mountain," the ultimate celebration of a hobo's imagined paradise:
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
All the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs
The farmers' trees are full of fruit
And the barns are full of hay
Oh I'm bound to go
Where there ain't no snow
Where the rain don't fall
The winds don't blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
When the last notes of this final song had tumbled downstream, and we had all returned from the pastoral fantasyland of the Big Rock Candy Mountain to the stark reality of the darkened Truckee riverside, our audience not only applauded but now gave us a standing ovation. There were more offerings of the food and drink that were so precious to them. One lady said it was the best afternoon she'd had in years. A younger woman invited us to come back any time, adding with a sweet smile that "We don't get too many concerts down here." And then, in what was the most touching moment of this strange and wonderful experience, a man in tattered, greasy clothes offered us what I suspect was the greatest gift he had to give. He asked, with a note of genuine concern in his voice, if we had a safe place to sleep, adding that he knew a secret spot where we could be sheltered from both weather and harm. "I don't tell anybody about it," he whispered, "but after what you did for us here it seems right to offer."]]>
While you might imagine that artificial Christmas trees may be traced back only as far as the glory days of plastic in the 1950s, people actually began making fake holiday trees in the mid-nineteenth century. The practice began in Germany, where extensive deforestation compelled folks to make "trees" out of goose feathers that were dyed green. I don't know what it says about a culture's environmental stewardship when its geese outnumber its trees, but if goose feathers seem like a weird thing to make a tree out of, try optical fiber or holographic mylar, the latest trends in holiday-spirited arboreal fakery.
Eleven million artificial Christmas trees are sold each year, and sales continue to rise in an industry that is worth 800 million real dollars annually. And this despite the fact that 80% of these fake trees are manufactured in China, where environmentally hazardous lead stabilizer was the chemical du jour in binding the PVC from which the trees are fabricated. Although the recipe has now been changed to tin stabilizer instead (which somehow doesn't sound much better), the EPA estimates that 20 million artificial Christmas trees still in use in the U.S. are slowly-detonating toxic lead bombs.
On the other hand, people who buy cut trees shouldn't rush to any sanctimonious claims of superiority over the fake tree folks. As it turns out, the farm-raised vs. artificial Christmas tree argument is about on par with paper vs. plastic bags at the grocery checkout. The live tree market is now worth more than a billion bucks annually, and employs around 100,000 people. But the industry also occupies 350,000 acres of land with a monoculture crop that is not particularly good wildlife habitat and is often treated with pesticides. The spraying, cutting, and transportation of the 25 million farm-grown trees sold each year also generates almost two billion pounds of greenhouse gases. I get that nobody wants to decorate their Christmas tree while pondering its contribution to global climate change, and I'm also aware that the acres not given to Christmas tree production are more likely to be planted in fertilizer-soaked GMO corn than protected as sanctuaries of wildness and biodiversity. Still, I don't want you live tree people to jump to the conclusion that you're necessarily more righteous than your neighbors just because your tree arrived in an eighteen-wheeler instead of a cardboard box.
Of course the fake vs. farm-raised fork in Christmas Tree Road (which reminds me of Yogi Berra's sage advice that "When you come to a fork in the road, take it!") leaves out a third route—a practice that was once ubiquitous but is now so statistically insignificant that the Christmas tree data nerds don't even bother counting it: hoofing out into the wilds to cut your own tree. Our annual family tradition is to take our two young daughters, Hannah and Caroline, and join the family of our buddies, Cheryll and Steve, and head out into the wilderness of central Nevada to cut our Christmas tree. Now you might think the Great Basin Desert, which is a vast sagebrush ocean dotted by glaring, white islands of salt encrusted-alkali flats, would be an uninviting place to hunt up a decent tree. Not so. Nevada has more than 300 mountain ranges, most of which are home to "the PJs," desert rat shorthand for a high-elevation desert forest consisting of dominant pinyon pine-juniper woodland.
In our part of this big desert, the pinyon-juniper biome occurs above about 4,000 feet and below the alpine zone. It requires 10-20 inches of annual precipitation (which falls mostly as snow), and so it exists in a band above the lower-elevation sagebrush steppe, which receives only 4-8 inches of moisture. Although the PJs have some scattered sage, rabbitbrush, and ephedra—even an occasional Jeffrey pine—this environment consists almost exclusively of pinyon pine and juniper trees. Although many people picture our part of the world as a bleak, treeless desert, almost 20 million acres of the Great Basin (nearly a fifth of its total land area) is occupied by the PJs.
In fact, these pinyon pine-juniper forests are colonizing more ground every year. Since the mid-nineteenth century the PJs have expanded at least three-fold, and perhaps as much as ten-fold. This expansion and infill, which has been caused by a number of factors including over-grazing and fire exclusion, is now encroaching on the sagebrush ecosystems that are home to threatened species such as the pygmy rabbit and sage grouse. Land managers here in the Great Basin are using fire—and fire surrogates like thinning—to check the advance of the PJs and protect the sagebrush biome they are so successfully invading from above.
Our annual pilgrimage to find a wild Christmas tree takes us to almost 7,500 feet in the Desatoya Range, on BLM lands about 135 miles east of the Ranting Hill. There we hike, search for fossils, play with the dogs, and scrape away enough snow to gather around a bonfire of dead sage, where we swap family stories, eat snacks, and drink warm "Abuelita" cocoa and chilled rye whiskey. The tree cutting is, in fact, a small part of a long, lovely day in the snowy, high desert mountains. Our BLM Christmas tree tag costs a whopping five bucks—about a tenth the average cost of a farm-raised, commercially sold tree—and while we burn plenty of gas in our pickup to get our tree, we'd likely be headed into the hinterlands to hike and snowshoe whether we were tree hunting or not. While slaying a wild tree for one's own ritual purposes might appear environmentally destructive, by cutting in BLM-identified areas, we're actually functioning as unpaid members of a small crew of stand thinners whose work helps to reduce fire danger and stem the advance of the PJs on the fragile sagebrush biome below.
Of course all this sounds mighty virtuous. The plain fact is that we love to be in the desert mountains in winter, sharing a family outing in a remote, spectacularly beautiful part of our home desert. If circumstances were reversed and a farm-raised tree cost five bucks while the BLM tree tag cost $50, we'd still be driving past the commercial tree lots in town on our way out to the desert to find a pinyon pine for our family's Christmas tree.
The species of pinyon we cut is single-leaf pinyon (Pinus monophylla), the state tree of Nevada—although in the interest of full disclosure, I should note that we have two state trees; the other is the bristlecone pine, which can reach ages upwards of 4,000 years. (The only other state to have two state trees is neighboring California, with whom we compete at every opportunity.) Pinus monophylla is a beautiful high desert tree: short-needled, grey-green, thirty or forty feet in height and about as wide as it is tall, gnarled, twisting, and wildly branching when mature, but when young is handsomely columnar—like a Christmas tree.
This tree is remarkable in many ways. For starters, it is the only single-needled pine on the planet (note to the 99% of us who routinely use the word "unique" incorrectly: perfectly fine to employ it here). It is also the most xeric pine in North America, enduring conditions of aridity and temperature extremes almost beyond imagination. And it is an old-time westerner. Fossil pollen records and fossil needles in ancient packrat middens show that the pinyon pine, having moseyed north to the Great Basin after the last ice age, has been native here for thousands of years. Individual trees can reach ages of more than 900 years, and usually don't become very productive of cones until they've been standing around for a half century or so.
It is the seeds hidden within those cones that are the pinyon pine's most extraordinary feature. While all pines produce edible seeds, the pinyon's seed is so unusually large as to be a major food source for both humans and for many species of rodents and birds—including the pinyon jay (Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus), whose harvesting and caching of the tree's seeds is an important mechanism of its dispersal. Pinyon nuts are not only large and delicious, but also have exceptional nutritional value. They are high in iron, manganese, and other essential minerals, are loaded with vitamin A and E, riboflavin, niacin, and antioxidants, and contain all 20 of the amino acids. They are even gluten free. And, at 3,000 calories per pound, pine nuts boast a fat content exceeding that of chocolate—thus providing a nutritional density that has made them a highly-valued wild food. Although the pinyon was not scientifically described until the mid-nineteenth century, the wonders of its delicious, nutritious nut have been known to Europeans since the tree's use by Indian peoples was first reported by Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca in 1535.
Pinyon nuts have played a vital role in Native American cultures, and evidence suggests that this food source was important to the prehistoric peoples of the Great Basin, just as it is still culturally important to our Paiute and Shoshone neighbors. Long before the appearance of the Christ who is celebrated with the Christmas tree, the native peoples of these high, cold deserts made posts from the bole of the pinyon tree, and enjoyed the special aroma of this pine as its branches crackled in an open fire that provided welcome warmth. Pinyon pitch forms an adhesive so powerful that it was used to mend cracked water jars, and in its boiled form, employed as a waterproofing that was applied to basketry and to the cradle boards in which infants were carried from one pinyon grove to another. Medicinally, pinyon resin was placed on a rabbit fur patch that was applied to wounds as an antiseptic, while the needles were boiled into teas and ground into powders that were used to remedy a range of maladies. And pine nuts were gathered, processed, stored, and consumed in an impressive variety of ingenious ways, while their harvest each fall was a major ceremonial and community event—just as it still is today. It has been said that the pine nut was as important to the native inhabitants of the Great Basin as the bison was to the Plains peoples.
In Walden, published in 1854, at exactly the historical moment when Christmas trees first became commercially available in America, Henry Thoreau wrote that "It is a vulgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked them." "A huckleberry never reaches Boston," he concluded, because "the ambrosial and essential part of the fruit is lost with the bloom which is rubbed off in the market cart, and they become mere provender." Thoreau here makes two points that are repeated throughout his work: the first is that the sweetness of nature's fruit is produced as much by our experience of nature as by the fruit itself; the second is that commodification of nature can compromise its meaning and significance.
Like Thoreau's wild huckleberry, our pinyon pine Christmas tree is something we harvested ourselves from the wilderness, and that is one of the many reasons we find it so beautiful. And with it we have harvested a memorable shared experience. When we gather by the woodstove to admire this pinyon shining in our home here on the Ranting Hill we see not just a Christmas tree, but also windswept high-elevation ridges and canyons, the rippling texture of bleached vermillion cliffs, the crests of range after snowy range flowing out to the distant horizon. We hear the sweep of downcanyon wind and the croak of jet-black ravens and the crackle of a little bonfire, smell pine pitch and hot chocolate, whiskey and sage. We remember tromping around in the snow, as a family, deciding together that this is the wild tree we will bring home and decorate, and beneath whose boughs we will place our gifts.
Our Christmas tree is neither as green nor as shapely as a farm-raised tree. It grew more than a hundred miles away from our home hill and so will never be handy by, like an artificial tree. It is almost too heavy to carry, too brushy to decorate, and too pitchy to handle. Its short, stiff, sharp, single needles jab us as we coast by it with warm milk or chilled eggnog in hand. As a Christmas tree, our pinyon pine could not possibly be more inconvenient. And that is yet one more way of saying that to us it is perfect.]]>
Out here in the windy expanse of the high, wild, western Great Basin Desert, highway 395 is our lifeline. Not simply the route south to Mono Lake and Yosemite, and north to the Lassen lava lands and Shasta country beyond, it is also the only way we can access diapers, tractor parts, beer—anything that can't be beamed to us from a satellite. Our remote home here on the Ranting Hill sits within a labyrinth of ridges and canyons on the eastern flank of our home mountain, which trends north-south and carries the Nevada-California state line along its rocky crest. On this side of the mountain is a classic, high-elevation desert landscape—a sandy, expansive ocean of sagebrush dotted with bitterbrush, rabbitbrush, ephedra, and desert peach. On the west side of the mountain is a broad, sweeping valley through which runs the distant highway, curving past the lone outpost of Hallelujah Junction. Beyond the highway is the pitched escarpment of the Sierra Nevada, which rises dramatically in a heavily forested palisade of granite turrets and crags.
Many world religions recognize sacred mountains, high places of spiritual power or significance. These holy mountains, which are often conceived of as living entities, are honored through rituals that involve walking. For example, Buddhist and Hindu devotional practice includes the kora, a ritual circumambulation of sacred peaks by which the devotee makes a pilgrimage not to the mountain but rather all the way around it. This ritual of walking meditation, which is always performed clockwise in order to follow "the way of the sun," is said to "open the mountain."
Because our home mountain is almost 20 miles long and is surrounded by broken flanks of foothills and canyons—not to mention a few ranches where the would-be meditating circumambulator might get a load of buckshot in his britches—I have instead made it an annual ritual to "close the mountain" before the first snow renders its summit inaccessible until April. To honor my home mountain I hike from our place on the Ranting Hill all the way over the mountain's high crest and down to Hallelujah, a ten-mile-long transect of the range that lifts me to almost 8,000 feet before dropping down the mountain's steep, western face to the highway, which snakes through the distant valley below. Much like the bear, my ritual is to anticipate winter by going over the mountain just to see what I can see.
I was recently set to make the mountain-closing trek over the ridge with fellow desert rats Cheryll and Steve, when the night before the hike an early season storm descended, blanketing the desert with low clouds and bringing a hammering rain that sent water coursing through the forking network of arroyos that runs through this desert like veins. Concerned that winter might beat us to the summit, we decided to try our mountain transect despite the foreboding weather.
We set out early, trudging through the driving rain carrying oversized day packs stuffed with extra clothes and food. Three miles into the muddy slog we reached the soggy, wildfire-scorched bitterbrush flats at the base of the mountain, and from there began an 1,800-foot ascent into the chilling fog. By the time we reached the small spring halfway up the mountain we were thoroughly soaked, and had already pulled on gloves, hats, and every piece of spare clothing we had. Looking homeward across the Great Basin through the swirling fog, we could make out occasional glimpses of the broken hills and sagebrush dotted sand flats rolling east to the gray horizon. Above us to the west wound a faint game trail, rising up through copses of bitter cherry and coyote willow and dodging between slick granite cliffs that gleamed in the rain.
By mid-afternoon we crested the summit ridge and entered a sweeping valley that is slung between two rocky peaks and graced with groves of gnarled aspens surrounded by the green domes of snowberry bushes. I tried to imagine this same spot in July, when the magnificent expanse of this hanging valley would be covered in an undulating, yellow blanket of flowering tower butterweed. But now the situation was more threatening than pastoral. The valley appeared ominous as the fog thickened, the freezing rain turned to snow, and a cutting wind rose from the flanks of the mountain.
"Looks like big weather," Steve observed, squinting.
"Way too exposed up here," Cheryll added. "Time to skedaddle."
Shivering, I nodded my agreement. "We wouldn't last long up here. Besides, I didn't bring the whiskey." I had already begun to lose sensation in my feet, and it was obvious that we needed to head for lower country, and that without delay.
The three of us now set to hiking with intense concentration, knowing that even a short pause would be an invitation to hypothermia. We soon reached the far side of the summit valley, from which we hoped our descent of the mountain's western slope would begin. Instead, we found ourselves staring straight down a precipitous, brush-choked ravine that was far too thick to bushwhack. Our only alternative was to ascend a steep boulder field to a secondary ridge from which it appeared a route down the mountain might be possible. The numbness in my feet had now overtaken my legs as well, and my fingers also began to deaden. It was far too late to turn back and still arrive home before dark, and so we began to pick our way up and over boulders slick with rime. Moving with silent urgency, I suspect we were all thinking the same thing: under these dangerous conditions, even a minor injury would quickly become a major problem.
After another half hour of climbing I was out of breath and dangerously wet and cold, but I could now make out the crest of the boulder field etching the horizon above me. At last reaching its top I clambered out onto an exposed ridge, where I noticed among the first flakes of sticking snow the scat of pronghorn antelope and that of black bear within a few feet of each other—a reminder that the keystone species of the Great Basin and Sierra overlap on my home mountain. If this mountain is sacred, as it seems to me, it is perhaps because it is the enchanted place where the magisterial worlds of mountain and desert abide together.
Emerging onto the ridge I first looked back across Nevada. Somewhere out among those endless, fog-shrouded ridges was a small hill, atop which sat a warm, glowing home, where I pictured my beautiful daughters reading by the woodstove. And then I turned west, gazing out over rainy California, spectacular in the lowering storm. Beneath the ceiling of dark clouds I now saw the ridge descend before me, narrow and sinuous as a dragon's back, but clear and passable, even as steep canyons dropped away from it on either side. Beyond the serpent's curving spine lay a broad valley through which ran the gleaming asphalt trail of 395. Only about four miles away, but nearly three thousand feet below me, the ribbon of highway looked as peaceful as a miniature stream, with insect cars floating along it, and occasionally the tiny box of an eighteen-wheeler passing through the shining, black artery like a rectangular bubble. I tried to imagine the folks inside those cars and trucks. How warm they must be. How sweet must be the music pouring out of their radios. What lives they might be escaping from or returning to. Whether they turned their heads far enough to notice the desolate beauty of my home mountain rising above them into the freezing fog.
We ran that winding ridge toward the highway below, warming quickly as we dropped in elevation, descending to safety and leaving behind us a network of peaks and ridges that would soon be buried beneath the season's first snow. Glancing over my shoulder occasionally as I hiked I saw winter nipping at my heels, closing my home mountain behind me as I strode for the lowlands.
Reaching the sage flats we bushwhacked through open desert scrub for several miles, our boots thawing out and then caking with mud. In a short time we reached Hallelujah Junction, an isolated roadside outpost that certainly lived up to its name on that freezing afternoon. As I pushed open the swinging door of the little store I smelled warm buttered popcorn and heard men talking idly of weather and of miles of highway behind them or still ahead. The sound of football crackled from a small television that sat on the checkout counter between a rack of keychains and a Plexiglas container of smoked jerky.
Steve and Cheryll and I circled the small, warm space, and then stepped to the counter carrying the kinds of things Hallelujah specializes in. I bought a box of strawberry frosted pop tarts and a small bottle of whiskey, which I emptied into a large cup of ink-black coffee. Hallelujah! We have closed the consecrated mountain, and that is how I know that this season has come to an end, and that another has silently begun.
Whenever I drive the Hallelujah stretch of highway, my memory triggers the aromatic smell of that bone-warming, bourbon-laced coffee. And that causes me to look up into my home mountain's towering canyons and imagine granite and lichen, bitterbrush and aspen, willow and chokecherry, pronghorn and bear. And three shivering hikers, huddled on a windy ridge in the swirling snow, looking down with relief on the gleaming, ribboned black snake of a distant highway.]]>
We nature writers do a lot of windy sermonizing about the value of staying put. We celebrate the decision to strike roots, encouraging readers to inhabit their home landscape with the kind of commitment and passion that might allow us to resist the transience that has characterized American culture since the first prairie schooner set sail for the sunset. And it is clear enough that in the West this frontier mentality has resulted in the sorts of problems you'd expect from folks who see their place as a stop on the way to some imagined better place just beyond the next ridge. I myself have staged a quiet rebellion against transience, digging in and making my stand out here in the remote Great Basin Desert. In fact, once the Amazon drones start delivering whiskey to these arid hinterlands, I may never go to town again.
The problem with this bioregional evangelizing can be summarized with a single word: October. When the wind picks up an autumnal chill and the nights turn cold, when the clock falls back an hour and the stove wood needs hauling before the snow flies, when the World Series comes to an end and the long winter looms, I experience an irresistible restlessness. In the opening lines of his wonderful poem, "How to Like It," Stephen Dobyns captures perfectly the feeling I experience every October:
These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
In praising rootedness we environmental writers have chosen our central metaphor from the plant world. But what if we derived our core concept from fauna rather than flora? We might then adopt a metaphor of movement or migration rather than rootedness, for everywhere around us we see animals passing through. October here in the high desert is the time when mule deer and pronghorn move downslope to avoid snow and mountain lions. Critters of every stripe are in high gear, driven by the shortening days to cache the supplies necessary to survive encroaching winter, while seasonal birds are stopping by on their way to warmer climes. Perhaps the most natural thing for me to do in October is not hunker down and set roots, but instead make contact with my animal self, get on the move, and light out for some unknown territory.
A rare visitor who has recently joined us on the Ranting Hill has me thinking about these issues of rootedness and transience. Although the Northern Mockingbird is so widely distributed as to be a regular neighbor to many westerners, in more than a decade out here we'd never before seen one. The first appearance of this remarkable guest occurred several weeks ago, when out of nowhere an unmistakable flash of white-barred wings appeared in the sagebrush. The bird has remained with us since then, and I wonder if it has come to make a home in this remote desert outpost or, as is more likely, it is just passing through on its way to a more hospitable place. For now, we are enjoying the bird in the same way we enjoy the final days of fall, with no certainty about how long the pleasure might last, and with a haunting feeling that it will soon be shut from our view as the doors of winter swing closed.
Unlike most of our desert birds, which are fairly retiring, the Ranting Hill mockingbird is gregarious, loquacious, almost fearless. It struts around on its tall, skinny legs, proudly holding its long tail up high behind it, acting like it owns the place. It perches on the lawn furniture and appears bothered when we head outside to check up on the mountains. It snags insects on the bare ground and in the low scrub, but also visits our woods rose and silver buffaloberry bushes to diversify its diet with fall fruits.
The main thing the Ranting Hill mocker does is sing. First described by Linnaeus in 1758, the mockingbird's modern scientific name is Mimus polyglottos, which means "many-tongued mimic." It is a name the mockingbird richly deserves, as individual birds routinely have thirty or more songs, and in some cases even up to 200! While these many melodies most often mimic the songs of other birds, the mockingbird's repertoire also includes mimicry of the sounds of insects, frogs and toads, and even mechanical noises. I first became aware of our visitor when I heard a bird song that was unfamiliar to me. Before I could solve the mystery of this new song I picked up a second tune I'd never heard before, and then a third. If only one new bird had appeared, many new songs had arrived with it, as if a flock of exotics had come to our home, like a visiting circus. Our mockingbird is a one-bird band, an avian karaoke machine, a multilingual messenger who has come from far lands, carrying all their songs with him. I've even tried to communicate with the bird by playing it blues tunes on the harmonica. While it hasn't yet consented to jam with me, it does seem interested, and I've not given up trying.
In this recording from California, a mockingbird cycles through several melodies before beginning to imitate a group of crows perched nearby.
Because mockingbirds are now so common and so widely dispersed, many of us are unaware of how rare they once were. During the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, a flourishing caged-bird trade decimated populations of many songbirds in America, including the cardinal, indigo bunting, and that most impressive of singers, the mockingbird. A 1904 issue of Bird-lore, a publication of the Audubon Society, celebrated the passage of new legislation protecting non-game birds, while also reminding readers of what was at stake: "A few weeks since the [Audubon] Chairman visited the store of a bird dealer in New York, and in one large cage saw not less than sixty Mockingbirds, some of them so young that when the cage was approached the poor birds hopped to the wire netting fluttering their wings and opening their mouths to be fed."
The most famous American to keep a mockingbird as a pet was Thomas Jefferson. In November, 1772, Jefferson purchased his first mockingbird from a slave for five shillings. At that time the wild mockingbirds that now grace the woods surrounding Monticello were still decades away from expanding their range to Virginia, and so the species was a true novelty. Jefferson would go on to own at least four mockingbirds, several of which were able to mimic the woodland birds of Virginia and also sing American and Scottish songs. In 1784 Jefferson even took a mockingbird with him to France and back, a trip during which the bird learned not only to sing French songs, but also to imitate the creaking of the timbers on the ship that carried it across the broad Atlantic. Jefferson also has the distinction of being the first U.S. President to keep a pet in the White House. His companion mockingbird, Dick, not only lived in the presidential mansion but in fact had free range within it. Jefferson routinely left Dick's cage open so he could fly around, perch on the president's shoulder while he worked, even sing duets with Jefferson as he played the violin. Jefferson's appreciation for this unique species is apparent in his suggestion to a friend that he should "[teach] all the children to venerate [the mockingbird] as a superior being in the form of a bird."
Jefferson's idea that the mockingbird is "a superior being in the form of a bird" is also present in many Native American cultures. The Cherokee embraced mockingbird as the embodiment of cleverness and intelligence, while Hopi and other Pueblo peoples told stories in which the bird was the bringer of language who taught the people to speak. Further west, Maricopa Indians believed that dreaming of mockingbird was a sign that the dreamer would soon receive special powers. Shasta Indian culture considered the bird a sacred guardian of the dead, while Papago and Pima folklore figured mockingbird as a mediator whose song functions as a bridge between the human and animal worlds.
The most prominent reference to the bird in Anglo culture appears in Harper Lee's 1960 classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, a book much beloved by our twelve-year-old daughter, Hannah, as well as by her Mom and Dad. In the novel, Atticus Finch tells his kids that "it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." When Scout, the young girl who is the novel's narrator, asks her neighbor, Miss Maudie, for clarification, this is the reply she receives: "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
I like to think of the Ranting Hill mockingbird as being in a kind of temporary residency, the way a visiting writer, painter, or musician might be. This bird has come from elsewhere to warble its unfamiliar tunes, and perhaps also to gather things: insects, berries, western meadowlark song, this bittersweet, late-season, low-angle shaft of high desert sunlight. I suspect that this remarkable bird, whose appearance here is unprecedented and unaccountable, will soon be moving on. A messenger between seasons and between worlds, the mockingbird is a transient whose existence is rooted in the air, a fleeting gift of autumn that makes its stand on wings.]]>
Our eight-year-old daughter, Caroline, has a knack for inventing characters, which she animates with distinctive traits, attitudes, accents, and even signature catch phrases. Among at least a half dozen others there's a crotchety old lady named "Grandma Chuck," a nameless, bloviating Scotsman (complete with a thick brogue), and Guido, a pizza impresario whose Sicilian, Jersey-inflected catchphrase is "If it ain't my pie, fuggidabawdit!" Lately, though, Caroline has come up with an entirely new persona, this one a space alien who, in an irony clear enough to grownups, is named "Norm."
Norm is far from the norm in every way. He has a wonderful, modulating, guttural voice, as if his vocal chords were pitched to perform in a very different gravitational field than the one here on earth. Norm can answer any question you might have about his home planet, and his replies are so amusing that Caroline's big sister, Hannah, keeps the questions coming. What does Norm like to eat? Earwax, belly button lint, and toenail clippings, though here on earth he must occasionally resort to pine cones. What does he like best about Nevada? The ground is firm rather than spongy, as on his home planet, and is thus much better for hiking. Although the black sky and purple sun surrounding that planet are "quite lovely," he prefers the azure skies and yellow sun we enjoy here in the Great Basin. What is his greatest frustration with living in Nevada? He hasn't yet found a cowboy hat that will fit his enormous, bulbous alien noggin. Norm is also a bit of a rascal, often using his professed ignorance of human ways to excuse his poor table manners, failure to finish his homework, or unwillingness to make his bed. I confess that it is difficult to lay down the law when I'm laughing at the same time.
Once Norm joined our family I was reminded of the most prominent alien from my own youth, the waddling, endearing little creature from Steven Spielberg's 1982 blockbuster ET. My wife Eryn and I decided that we'd screen this pop gem for the girls, just to see what Norm's reaction might be. In watching ET again I was reminded of the film's power to elicit our sympathy with the little alien. ET is a creature who is lost, who wants to find his home, who feels isolated, misunderstood, uncertain, and insecure. That is to say, he's just like us—or, at least, like those of us who happen to be in middle school. We empathize with ET because he feels alienated, a term that speaks both to his condition and to our own. Equally important, his appearance in the enchanted woods that survive along the edge of a homogenous subdivision reinforces what every kid knows: there is magic just beyond the asphalt fringes of the adult world. Hannah and Caroline love the film, and when it has reached its happy ending I ask Norm what he thinks of it. "I know ET," he replies. "He visited my planet one time. His real name is Earl."
Caroline, along with Spielberg, might be forgiven for her fascination with creatures from outer space. After all, American popular culture has long been obsessed with aliens, which have provided reliable fodder for novels, movies, comics, video games, and bad TV shows. Occasionally we are terrified by these aliens, as in Orson Welles's famous 1938 radio performance of The War of the Worlds, or the profitable Roland Emmerich flick Independence Day (1996) sixty years later. Sometimes we love these otherworldly beings, as in the old Robin Williams TV sitcom Mork and Mindy, or in the Spielberg classic that my daughters so enjoyed. Aliens seem to be with us always, a durable staple of our entertainment culture and also an important part of our imaginative landscape. The other day I noticed something that redoubled my certainty about the centrality of the alien in our daily lives: it turns out that my phone has an alien-head emoji, right there next to the similarly iconic happy face. An alien emoji. Too late to turn back now, earthlings!
Here in Nevada our obsession with aliens is everywhere evident. Our state leads the nation in UFO sightings, extraterrestrial abduction conspiracy theories, and alien spacecraft recovery and cover-up narratives. Perhaps this is because we Nevadans aren't the least bit afraid of bizarre, creepy, insanely otherworldly stuff—as anyone who has visited Las Vegas can attest. Nope, we roll out the red carpet for aliens here. We welcome them much as we do other odd tourists, high-rollers visiting from out of town, looking for the kind of good time they can't get back in their home galaxy. It is in fact a Nevada tradition to name things in honor of this most interesting of the many strange visitors we receive. Nevada State Route 375 has been officially designated "The Extraterrestrial Highway," and that lonely road goes through the little desert town of Rachel (UFO capitol of the world), where I'd recommend that you stop for a cold one at the Little A'Le'Inn. (After all, the hand-painted sign out front proclaims that "Earthlings Welcome!") Our state even boasts an intergalactically-themed brothel, the Alien Cathouse, located an hour north of Vegas on Highway 95. Here patrons may select from any number of themed rooms, including the "Holodeck" and . . . wait for it . . . the "Alien Abduction Probing Room." If this artifact of cultural bricolage doesn't strike you as proof positive that aliens have invaded our collective fantasy life, then just try to push this one out of your mind and instead focus on ET.
We Nevadans also have a legitimate reason to be cozy with this kind of fantasy, because we've had more UFOs in our skies than has any other state. Of course the term UFO, which began to see use during the heyday of the Cold War, simply means "unidentified flying object." Since its establishment as a top-secret military base back in 1954, Area 51 has produced about as many UFOs as has Hollywood. In response to a Freedom of Information Act filing, in 2013 the CIA for the first time acknowledged the existence of this remote, inaccessible, and heavily guarded detachment of Edwards Air Force Base. What they do not reveal, but is generally accepted, is that well before they were made public a number of remarkable experimental aircraft—including the U2, A-12, SR-71 Blackbird, and F117-A—have been tested here. If we Nevadans have seen our share of little green men, we've also seen more than our share of unidentifiable, unimaginably futuristic aircraft and hovercraft, the sorts of machines you would expect to see on a theater screen, rather than streaking weirdly across the desert sky.
Of course it is more than just extravagantly expensive aerial weaponry that sustains our imagination of alien visitors; it is also the landscape itself. The Great Basin Desert is so remote, isolated, and uninhabited, so open, barren, and wild, that out here anything seems possible. To a human mode of perception evolved to appreciate shelter, cover, forage, and water, this is in fact an alien landscape, one that we visit much as we might visit the broken, desolate surface of a distant planet. In a landscape that makes us feel like extraterrestrial tourists, perhaps the idea of other strange visitations appears more plausible.
The myth of the extraterrestrial visitor is central to our cultural imagination in this part of the desert West. It occurs to me that another of the most durable myths in this landscape is that of the cowboy. Perhaps some of you are unfortunate enough to have been subjected to the abysmal 2011 "science-fiction western" movie Cowboys and Aliens. Even Harrison Ford couldn't save this bomb, which detonates stinkage for an interminable 118 minutes in the most convoluted and ludicrous plot ever to ooze out of the southern California dream factory. The movie had everything going for it: not just Ford, but also Ron Howard as a producer, Spielberg as an executive producer, and a budget of $163 million (maybe we should instead have used the money to build an experimental aircraft?). Nevertheless, Cowboys and Aliens is the worst genre mashup in cinema history, not only unsuccessfully force-fitting the conventions of sci-fi and western, but also gratuitously tossing in a few resurrected nude corpses and, God help us all, an Apache medicine man.
But if Cowboys and Aliens is an epic fail that has unjustly stolen from me two precious hours I'll never recover, I can't help feeling that somehow this terrible picture was on the right track. After all, cowboys and aliens are among the most celebrated, mythologized, and iconic figures in the American West. They seem to belong in this landscape, even when we aren't sure if we do. Both figures come from afar, across the wide open spaces, and both seem dauntingly independent and self-reliant. Both depend upon their trusty steed: one an Appaloosa or Pinto, the other a whirling silver disk or darting interstellar trapezoid. Both are packing serious weapons and are defined by their ability to use them, for what is a flesh-dissolving laser if not a simple upgrade of a Walker Colt revolver? Both figures are powerful and dangerous, and yet somehow also enticingly mysterious and charismatic. They ramble from town to town, galaxy to galaxy, knocking back a little red-eye, harvesting a few human organs, just trying to get the lay of a new land. Part of their mystique is that neither sticks around for long, invariably galloping or whizzing off to the horizon, or beyond it.
Of course the main thing cowboys and aliens have in common is that both come seeking new frontiers—frontiers of knowledge, experience, or power. Both represent a myth of movement, domination, and possession. In effect, the cowboy and the alien both come to the American West as colonizers. Perhaps we love the cowboy because he represents our successful colonization of this region; perhaps we fear the alien becomes he instead represents a terrifying desire to colonize us. The cowboy embodies a utopian myth of unlimited freedom, the alien a dystopian myth of inescapable captivity. Who better, then, to fight off the invading aliens than cowboys, they who were the vanguard of the last wave of invading aliens?
I really don't mind having a daughter who is a space alien. Many Nevadans apparently believe that extraterrestrials have already hybridized with normal humans—just like the cowboys did—so perhaps that spaceship has already sailed in any case. But out here in this vast desert landscape, so bright with uncertainty, one thing is definite. I'll be taking Norm to our favorite tack and boot shop to have him custom-sized for that buckaroo Stetson.]]>
When you look at a fence, you are seeing something more than a material object. You're seeing an idea—a form of symbolic communication that not only marks a boundary but also stakes a particular kind of claim about the land and its uses. In feudal England most land remained in the "commons," shared fields where even peasants were allowed to practice subsistence agriculture. By the sixteenth century, however, wealthy landowners began to fence off the commons for their own benefit, dispossessing poor laborers and farmers, and privatizing a natural resource that had long offered sustenance to the entire community. While we'll never know who raised the first fence, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a guy who thought harder about the social contract than I'm willing to, wrote that "The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said 'This is mine,' and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society." In establishing a new kind of relationship both with his neighbors and with the land, that first fence builder caused some problems we haven't yet solved.
Here in the American West we have long had a complicated relationship with fences. The "commons" of the frontier West was the open range that was used by Native American peoples, by wildlife, and, much later, by ranchers whose livelihood depended (and in many places still depends) upon the use of public lands. But legislation like the Homestead Act (1862) and the Desert Land Act (1877) granted legal possession of land to anyone who could "improve" it, and a fence was (and still is) considered an improvement to land. In other words, the fence functioned as the primary marker of possession and assertion of ownership. The Range Wars of the nineteenth-century West were feuds over the right to fence off parts of this open range commons—particularly the parts that contained the region's limited water sources. If skirmishes in those wars sometimes ended with six-guns, they usually began with barbed wire—a technology invented not long after the Civil War, and one that profoundly transformed the landscape of the American West.
Beneath the politics and economics of the Range Wars is a different kind of conflict, one that is more a battle of ideas than one of land use. It is a war we're still fighting in the West today. Two of the strongest human impulses are the desire for home and the yearning for freedom—two noble ideas that are sometimes at odds with each other. In erecting a fence between ourselves and the so-called "outside" world—a world that was rendered "outside" by the fence itself—we are defining our home ground. In the parlance of the cultural geographer, the fence converts "space" into "place" by declaring the occupant's intention to separate a piece of land from the commons and stay put on it. Seen in this valorizing light, a fence encloses and protects a place that we care for, improve, nurture, and treasure. A fence communicates, both to ourselves and to our neighbors, an ennobling concept of home.
Don't fence me in
Just turn me loose, let me straddle my old saddle
Underneath the western skies
On my cayuse, let me wander over yonder
Till I see the mountains rise
I want to ride to the ridge where the West commences
And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
And I can't look at hobbles and I can't stand fences
Don't fence me in
Like Porter's crooning cowboy, we Westerners "can't stand fences." How, then, are we to reconcile our celebration of openness and freedom with the fact that we have run an inconceivable amount of fence—that our region is in fact an immense, tightly latticed grid of mesh and wire? While hard numbers on fencing seem impossible to come by, it has been estimated that the 350 million acres of western rangelands managed by the BLM and USFS contain over 100,000 miles of fence. Make that a five-strand fence, which it often is, and you'd have enough wire to get from anywhere in the West to the moon and back again (yes, literally). Does all this fence define our home, or limit our freedom? Does it protect us from the outside, or simply create more outside from which we then feel a need for protection?
Here on the Ranting Hill I too have a complicated relationship with fences, one brought to my attention recently when a new neighbor on our rural road had his property fully fenced before moving in. He chose a six-strand wire fence, 52" high with a bottom strand just a few inches above the ground. I should add that this approach of immediately fencing one's property with five- or six-strand barbed wire is the default approach here in Silver Hills, and that in choosing to leave our property unfenced I am expressing a dissenting opinion on the subject. I have done so because we are close to public lands that extend to California, and because our property is on pronghorn antelope routes and mule deer winter range. "Oh, give me a home . . . where the deer and the antelope play." It is an old idea, and still a good one. One of the pleasures of sitting at my writing desk gazing out over our property is seeing pronghorn and deer move freely across the land. After all, if they didn't I might have to quit looking out the window and actually work.
The negative impact of these kinds of fences on wildlife is very real. Although moose, bighorn sheep, elk, deer, and pronghorn can jump fences, fatal entanglement is disconcertingly common, with studies suggesting that each year one ungulate ensnarement death occurs for every 2.5 miles of fence. And fences present significant barriers to pregnant and young animals. The same study indicated that when ungulates were found dead near (but not entangled in) fences, there was one annual death per 1.2 miles of fence. 90% of these fatalities were fawns that were unable to cross the fence to follow their mothers. Multiply those casualty numbers by 100,000 miles of fence and that's a lot of carnage. Fences are also a serious hazard to low-flying birds such as swans, cranes, and geese, as well as the grouse, hawks, and owls that are native here in the sagebrush steppe. This is why northern Nevada's 575,000-acre Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge, established primarily to protect pronghorn, has removed almost 300 miles of interior fencing.
Like all landowners, I have firm ideas about what I do and do not want on my property. Although I do want pronghorn and do not want ORVs, I have plenty of rural neighbors who don't care about wildlife but choose to live in this remote area precisely because they enjoy their ORVs; other neighbors value both ORVs and wild animals, while a few don't seem to care about anything at all. But that's exactly my point. Each of us moved out here because we found town life too constraining, because we wanted to do what we damn well please with our own property and not have to conform to someone else's rules, or the values they codify. I am no different from my neighbors in this respect: I am here to indulge the fantasy that I can stake a claim to home without forfeiting any freedom in doing so.
"Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up." So admonished the not-at-all western poet Robert Frost. But around here most fences, which are both labor-intensive and expensive to build, aren't keeping much of anything either in or out. Technically this is open range, but there are very few cattle on the public lands hereabouts, and in any case those few head mosey around on the other side of five barbed strands of BLM wire. With the exception of some practical horse fencing, the miles of wire that crisscross this swath of hilly high desert serve a mostly symbolic purpose. Just as it has for centuries, fencing in Silver Hills functions primarily as a statement of ownership. Speaking as a guy who is especially fond of antelope, which have the most trouble navigating the kinds of fences we build out here, I believe that the loss of pronghorn on this land is too high a price to pay for a symbolic assertion of possession.
Henry Thoreau once declared that "any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one." The problem with this is that each of us thinks we're right. (It is no accident that Thoreau's neighbors didn't like him very much.) So let me back up a hitch and say not only that I recognize that some folks need fences, but that I believe all folks should have them if they want them. I'm not after anybody's barbed wire, six-guns, or rights. So in the spirit of compromise I'd like to offer some practical suggestions for how we westerners might have our fences—have them to fulfill all the real and symbolic purposes we want them to—and still radically reduce the slaughter of wildlife they are currently causing. I will summarize a few cost-effective, easy modifications that can turn our fences from impenetrable death traps into navigable obstacles.
In a moment I will refer you to several sources that offer helpful details, diagrams, information, and advice. But what I am about to tell you in this paragraph, short and simple as it is, summarizes the key findings from fence mortality research by wildlife biologists. Fences should be no higher than 42", a height above which ungulates find jumping perilous. The distance between the top two wires should be at least 12", because leg entanglement most often occurs between the top and second strands. Those of us in antelope country need to pay as much attention to the bottom of the fence as the top because, unlike deer, pronghorn are much more comfortable crawling under a fence than they are jumping over it. The bottom strand should be at least 16" off the ground (18" is better). While the middle wire (or wires) may be barbed, the top and bottom strands should be smooth, since these will make contact with passing animals, whether leaping over or shinnying beneath. If possible, the top strand should be made visible, either through the use of a white wire, or by means of any of a variety of simple flagging techniques (detailed in the sources I list below).
That's it. The modified fence I've just described will effectively keep cattle or horses in (or out) in almost all situations, and will generally be no more expensive to construct (and often less expensive to maintain) than the hazardous barricades we're currently building. If you have fencing needs not related to cattle or horses—or if you don't like the design I've suggested here—there are still many cost-effective ways to make your fencing safer for wildlife. These include seasonal and/or moveable electric wire fence, high-tensile electric fence, modified post and rail fence, wire suspension fence, adjustable fence, underpasses and goat bars, lay-down fence, PVC fence, dropped rail fence, and modified worm fence. The main thing to know is that your fence can accomplish whatever you need it to while also being cost-effective and wildlife friendly. Details and instructions on a range of fencing options may be found at either of these very helpful links: A Landowner's Guide to Wildlife Friendly Fences (Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks; second edition, 2012); Fencing with Wildlife in Mind (Colorado Parks and Wildlife, 2009).
Will Rogers once observed that there are three kinds of people: "The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves." But when we fail to consider the effects of the kinds of fences we build, it is not we who are harmed by the fence but rather the deer and the antelope, the grouse and owls. With a little thought about how we mark and enclose our territory, we can declare our own freedom without depriving wild things of theirs.]]>
To say that conditions here in the western Great Basin are extreme hardly does justice to the apocalyptic weirdness we often experience out in this remote, high desert place. Since making our home on the Ranting Hill more than a decade ago, we've seen temperatures close to 110 degrees on the top end and 20 below at the bottom, while day-night swings of 40 degrees are not uncommon. We've had high winds blow up into impenetrable sandstorms of whipping alkali dust, while other periods have been so breathless and stultifying that it seemed the earth had ceased to turn on its axis. There have been wildfires on the nearby public lands almost every year, and we have twice been subject to fire evacuation. Earthquakes have on occasion rattled books off our shelves, and smaller tremors are fairly common. A number of blizzards have snowed us in up on our hill, with one memorable series of massive snowstorms forcing us to snowshoe up to our house during the better part of an entire January. One year hordes of shieldbacked katydids (a large, sagebrush country insect often called the "Mormon cricket") invaded, blanketing these hills so thickly that their mushed guts rendered the paved roads slick as ice, even causing some major thoroughfares to be temporarily closed.
As all Westerners know, the apocalypse du jour in our region is drought, and I confess that even in these extremely arid lands, where desiccation is a condition to which we're well accustomed, this drought has been especially severe and troubling. Recently, though, we've had the opposite problem: not too little water but far too much of it, and in too little time. A series of unusual summer thunderstorms has hammered our area, fueling flash floods. You might think that a lot of rain is a good thing in a place that receives so little of it, and perhaps an ennobling metaphor like "quenching the land's thirst" might come to your mind. Once you've seen a flood in the desert, however, a different metaphor suggests itself. Imagine being so parched that dehydration is a real threat, and then being offered a sip of water from a forestry hose blasting at 450 psi; you'll get your water, but it will likely take your face off with it. Needless to say, this choice may cause you to ask yourself: "Am I really that thirsty?" As fellow High Country News writer Craig Childs puts it in his book The Secret Knowledge of Water, "There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst and drowning." According to the USGS, in American deserts, more people drown than die of dehydration, which puts the immense power of flash floods in humbling perspective.
In weather nerd parlance, a "flash flood" is distinguished by speed as well as volume: it is an event in which geomorphic low-lying areas are inundated in less than six hours. This event can be triggered by torrential rains or accelerated snowmelt, or by the collapse of an ice dam—or an artificial dam, as when 2,200 people were swept to their deaths in the 1889 Jonestown Johnstown Flood. While we don't tend to associate deserts with floods, flash flooding is not only surprisingly common but also especially dangerous in desert areas. The unstable temperature and pressure gradients that characterize weather patterns in arid lands can create a lot of water in a short time. Desert soils, both sand and clay, are ill-equipped to slow and absorb water, and in an open, mostly treeless landscape like ours there is little vegetation to help the cause. While heavy rain falling on a forest is much like water pouring onto a sponge, a torrent in the open desert is more like water dropping onto a rock.
Because this landscape does not have regular rains to help keep ditches, culverts, and drains clear, floods here tend to be heavily laden with debris, which creates blockages that exacerbate water damage. This effect is clearly visible on our rural road here in Silver Hills, where the recent flash floods uprooted sagebrush, Russian thistle, and tumble mustard, jamming them into the mouths of culverts, where they formed a mesh that captured mud, clogging the heads, impeding water flow, and causing the runoff to jump the ditch and rip across the road surface, where it sliced through the roadbed, rendering it impassable. Perhaps most surprising and hazardous, flash floods in the desert often occur beneath clear skies. Localized thunderstorms somewhere above release the water load, which gathers force as it tumbles downslope through canyons, arroyos, and washes, eventually blasting into areas where no rain may have fallen.
I had a memorable experience of this kind of flood twenty years ago while backpacking in the Escalante Canyons of southern Utah. If you've never seen this magnificent country, it is perhaps best imagined as an immense labyrinth of fissures carved into the exposed face of a vast tableland of mesas and plateaus. For the hiker, navigating these canyons means meandering through a maze of narrow slots, beneath sheer walls of Navajo sandstone painted with carbonate patina and streaked with desert varnish. The narrowness and depth of these sinuous canyons creates their undulating beauty, but also ensures that those of us walking within them have little idea what might be going on beyond the slice of sky we're able to see between the canyon walls.
On the day I witnessed the surprise flood, bright sun illuminated the red cliffs of the canyon I was following, while the sliver of sky visible above me remained pure azure, save for an occasional, puffy cloud drifting innocently across it. Despite these ideal conditions, by mid-afternoon I heard the distant rumbling of thunder, which was my cue to peel a weather eye and devise contingency plans. After hiking for another hour I reached a bottleneck in the canyon, and I knew that in entering it I would risk being trapped without an escape route in the unlikely event there was water running somewhere above me and beyond my sight. Instead, I decided to wait it out, remaining in a wide amphitheater of the canyon bottom, through which the small creek slid first against one wall, then snaked gracefully across the cobble of the broad wash to run gently against the other. I sat down on a sandy bench that seemed safely elevated above the creek, leaned back against my pack, and enjoyed the beauty of the place.
After a half hour I noticed the little creek begin to rise, and rather quickly. Within minutes, water that had been only inches deep—so shallow that I had simply walked through it perhaps twenty times that day—rose to a foot deep, while also quickening its pace. Then, around the bend of the canyon, came the aptly-named "snout," the leading wave that is pushed before a flash flood. It was several feet high, viscous and brown, loaded with debris, and barreling into the canyon with a volume and force that far exceeded anything the little creek could contain.
I grabbed my pack and clambered up to a broad notch higher in the cliff side. From there I watched as the coffee-colored snout led a wave that swept the canyon bottom, overrunning the shallow creek bed and spreading out over rocks and sand, tearing through reeds and bushes, encircling boulders and swirling around the trunk of a cottonwood tree that had formerly stood thirty feet from the creek. I watched in amazement as the canyon of dry cobble became a cliff-to-cliff river, shallow but roiling, spitting brown foam and ploughing forward with a tumbling load of upcanyon debris.
In the next moment something equally remarkable and surprising occurred. The sky darkened as I heard the wind rise and felt the temperature begin to drop. And then the rain that had been heralded by the flood exploded above me in a cloudburst so sudden and intense that it hammered the cliffs in deafening sheets. Water also began to run down the canyon walls and spout from their tops. Within moments the canyon bottom was being pounded by a series of spontaneous waterfalls, as the mesa lands above gathered the runoff and shot it over the canyon's sandstone brow. Squinting through the blast I counted eleven simultaneous waterfalls, one of which was launching from the cliff beneath which I had taken shelter, catapulting itself over me and into the canyon-wide torrent below.
In less than ten minutes the dramatic downpour ceased, and one by one the waterfalls shut off. As the sky turned back to sapphire the expansive sheet of spontaneous river beneath it retreated toward the creek's banks, leaving water standing in pools and debris heaped against boulders and cottonwood trunks and up in willow thickets. It was difficult for me to process what had just occurred, not only because I had never seen anything like it, but also because the force and power of the flood was matched by its incredible speed. An immense volume of water had arrived suddenly, blasted the canyon, and vanished, all in what seemed a matter of minutes.
The massive thunderstorms that hit northwestern Nevada this July packed a similar punch. Worse still, these storms rolled through in a tight series, reducing the land's capacity to absorb additional water, and tearing into areas where mud, silt, and debris deposited by other recent storms had already created obstacles to drainage. Our flash floods were minor compared with those that ripped through the Front Range of the Rockies in 2013, and they were smaller still than epic events like the 1976 Big Thompson Canyon flood in Colorado, when a foot of rain fell in a four-hour period, creating a twenty-foot tall snout that swept the canyon, killing 143 people who were unable to reach higher ground in time. Among those drowned was Sgt. Hugh Purdy, whose heroism is narrated in "Here Comes the Water," a beautiful, heart wrenching song by the Zen Cowboy, Colorado musician Chuck Pyle.
But if the recent flash floods here in the western Great Basin were less deadly than these historic floods, they were nevertheless dramatic by local standards. Some area locations received more rain in two or three days than they normally see in a full year, and a few saw the better part of their annual allowance in a matter of hours. On the Ranting Hill we were slammed by five major rainstorms within the span of a week; no old timer I've talked with here in Silver Hills can recall anything like it. The gravel road we use to reach our home was blown out in many places, its ditches full, its culverts buried, and its gravel surface swept out into the sagebrush flats. The roads on the nearby public lands fared even worse. Most became flowing torrents, and are now sliced through by erosion gullies running three feet deep. In other places on the BLM, arroyos that I have hiked through hundreds of times, and which have never appeared moist, carried at least four feet of surging water.
When we think of floods, we tend to picture rivers swelling, cresting their banks, and flowing out onto floodplains. But here in the environs of the Ranting Hill our situation is markedly different, for we have no rivers, no streams, creeks, rivulets, branches, or rills, nary a trickle. There are a few hidden seeps and springs, and one endorheic lake bed, but absolutely no running surface water. In an environment such as this, the spontaneous appearance of creeks and rivers is as remarkable as was the sudden birth of eleven waterfalls on that strange, beautiful day down in the red heart of the Escalante. A flood here is not a matter of a river rising, but rather of a river appearing where none has existed in recent memory, and then vanishing almost as suddenly.
The marvel of a desert flash flood is intimately related to our incapacity to register environmental change that occurs on temporal scales uncalibrated to human perception. Although I've taken more than 2,000 hikes on the public lands adjacent to the Ranting Hill, I have never observed water in any of the arroyos, those dry, arterial gullies that run through the parched desert like ancient, long-abandoned aqueducts. For that reason, I have come to imagine a desert shaped by deep time, by slow, incremental change that I will never possess the power to observe. In their sudden appearance and disappearance, and in the profound changes they've wrought in my home landscape, these recent floods have reminded me that this astonishing place has been shaped by sudden as well as gradual change. To see this land for what it is, I must learn to view it as a vital, pulsing labyrinth of desert ghost rivers—rivers that will flow with wind and light only for another twenty or fifty or hundred years, when they will once again rage with the rare bloom of a sudden cloudburst.]]>
One of the best reasons to celebrate Independence Day is that it reminds us to ask anew what it means to be truly free. This question is especially important for Westerners, since our region has so often been viewed as the nation's symbolic repository of liberty. In the American cultural imagination, to head west has meant to journey out into unfettered country, into a landscape where individuality trumps social convention. Among the many signs of freedom and independence in the Intermountain West, I'd count our intense individualism, the fierce beauty of our public lands, and our disdain for repressive social constraints. And no social constraint is more repressive than the widespread public prohibition against flatulence. That is why, as a small celebration of independence, I offer this Rant in defense of the fart.
Farting has long been associated with freedom from societal constraint, which is why flatulence is so often associated with humor, another form of attack on institutional authority and social conformity. In fact, it has recently been discovered that the oldest joke in recorded history, which appears in cuneiform script on a Sumerian tablet dated to 1900 BCE, is a fart joke. We've been writing fart jokes for at least four thousand years, and there's no telling how long backdoor breezes have been blowing in the humor of oral traditions from around the globe.
Classical literature is rich with flatulence humor. In Dante's Divine Comedy, the final line of Inferno chapter 21 reads: ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta. Translation: "And he used his butt as a trumpet." In Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale," the poor student, Nicholas, blows a bean before the parish clerk, Absalom. (Urban Dictionary lists 261 synonyms for fart; I'm taking pains to use as many as I can in this Rant.) Chaucer writes that Nicholas "let fly a fart as loud as it had been a thunder-clap, and well-nigh blinded Absalom, poor chap." And it's easier to find a Shakespeare play that features a fart joke than to locate one that doesn't. Act three of The Comedy of Errors contains my favorite of these Elizabethan breeches burners: "A man may break a word with you, sir; and words are but wind; Ay, and break it in your face, so he break it not behind." In other words, better to break a promise than to break wind. In the Arabian Nights' "Tale of Abu Hassan" a man flees in embarrassment after letting rip a fog slicer during his wedding. He returns from his self-imposed exile a decade later to discover that his vaporous transgression has become so famous that it's being used to date events in the recent history of the country. "Verily my fart has become a date!" the man exclaims. "It shall be remembered forever!"
There has also been plenty of comic celebration of gas on this side of the pond. The greatest of American poot humorists is Benjamin Franklin, whose wonderful open letter "To the Royal Academy of Farting" suggests wryly that the discovery of a means to convert flatulence into something more pleasing would represent a monumental contribution of science to humanity. In Moby-Dick, Melville gets to the fart jokes in the novel's opening chapter, where Ishmael explains: "I always go to sea as a common sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the forecastle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim)." Ishmael here refers not to the Pythagorean Theorem you vaguely remember from eighth-grade math class, but rather to the Pythagorean maxim, which is the injunction to avoid eating beans because they invariably fire up the trouser trumpet.
It is exactly this Pythagorean flatuphobia that Edward Abbey, the patron saint of environmental humorists and desert rats, denounces in the work of Henry David Thoreau. In "Down the River with Henry Thoreau," Cactus Ed first describes his own breakfast, then pivots to an incisive critique of Thoreau's take on food and farting:
Scrambled eggs, bacon, green chiles for breakfast, with hot salsa, toasted tortillas, and leftover baked potatoes sliced and fried. A gallon or two of coffee, tea and—for me—the usual breakfast beer. Henry would not have approved of this gourmandising. To hell with him. I do not approve of his fastidious puritanism . . . . Thoreau recommends a diet of raw fruits and vegetables; like a Pythagorean, he finds even beans impure, since the flatulence that beans induce disturbs his more ethereal meditations. (He would not agree with most men that "farting is such sweet sorrow.")
In referencing flatulence in this comic send up of a romantic line from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Ed Abbey invokes the material reality of the body to simultaneously challenge Thoreau and parody Shakespeare—no small accomplishment. Abbey knows not only that farts are funny, but also why. Flatulence has been a staple of literary comedy for millennia because of the remarkable power of a fart to explode human pretensions. And that is why we humorists keep comic farts in the neighborhood of high culture—because a healthy bull snort is an attack upon oppressive cultural authority and a powerful assertion of freedom and independence.
If the literary history of flatulence is distinguished, the natural history of farting is enthralling. Fart gas is composed of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and, for only about a third of us, methane—as well as small amounts of the mercaptans and hydrogen sulfide that give butt burps their notorious smell. When we squeak one out, the vapor we release is produced by the air we gulp, gas diffused into our intestines from our bloodstream, and, most importantly, gas produced by the bacteria that inhabit our intestines and digest much of our food for us. In this sense every fanny bleat is the product of an amazing symbiotic, interspecies collaboration without which we could not survive. The poet Galway Kinnell offered the scatological insight that "Those who don't poop, don't live, but those who do do do do do." (That's a paraphrase.) The same might be said of flatulence. As a mammal, every one of us is living a Fart or Die existence.
You heard me right, all mammals fart. From packrats to mountain lions to whales. Turtles have exceptionally fetid farts. Termites are prodigious farters. Some herpetologists can locate snakes by the unique stench of their farts. But among mammals farting is absolutely universal. Have you ever scanned the boggling diversity of the class Mammalia, that vast clade of endothermic amniotes, and wondered what unites us all? Well, I can tell you. It is the expulsion of intestinal gas through the anus. If you're a mammal, you're in the Guild of Flatus. You fart.
And if you're a human mammal you fart a lot. On average, we produce a half liter of gas each day; scientific consensus puts the average daily numerical fart count at 14. And, ladies, don't blame guys like me for peeling the paint. Although we men generally expel a greater volume of gas than you do, your flatulence has a higher concentration of the most odoriferous gases, so it all evens out in the end, so to speak.
The impressive frequency of human intestinal gas release—not to mention its telltale acoustic and olfactory potency—is obviously at odds with widespread social prohibitions against public farting. Never mind burning rubber in church or freeping during your own nuptials. Pretty much any gas expulsion—even popping a wee fluffy—is seen as rude in almost all social situations. So much so, in fact, that public farting leads to a difficulty known as "the problem of attribution." In a cowardly attempt to shift the blame we pin our poofs on the dog, or even poor old grannie. We cough or scrape a chair leg to disguise the sound; we sidle away from the scene of the crime to flee responsibility for the stench. The problem of attribution has led to myriad—and for some reason always rhyming—fart blaming phrases. We all know "He/she who smelt it dealt it," but I prefer "he who deduced it produced it." If I'm in a casual mood I go with "the smeller's the feller." When I'm feeling intellectual I opt instead for "he who inculpated promulgated." Of course there are also a variety of witty rejoinders to this kind of fart blaming. I'm partial to "whoever rhymed it crimed it."
When our first daughter, Hannah, came of age for instruction in basic social etiquette, we taught her to say "excuse me" whenever she produced a benchwarmer. But she didn't understand what we grownups know, which is that you say "excuse me" only once the cat is out of the bag. If you fart silently and can get away with it, then all etiquette bets are off. Not knowing this unwritten protocol, Hannah went around saying "excuse me" aloud all the time, which, because her flatulence was so quiet and inoffensive, was usually a mystery to other folks, who politely ignored her. One day, however, my sister-in-law, Kate, asked in reply to one of Hannah's requests for pardon, "Excuse you? What for, honey?" "I tooted, Auntie," she replied, without a touch of shame or guilt.
Kate's husband Adam, my brother-in-law, was so surprised by the frequency of Hannah's entreaties for forgiveness and so impressed with her unabashed candor that he suggested to Kate the brilliant idea that for a single week the two of them try the experiment of asking each other for forgiveness every time they did the one-cheek-sneak, whether detectible by others or not. Adam specified that this obligation would remain in force whether they were together or apart. Always a gamer, Kate readily agreed, and an oath was sworn. During the ensuing week there was a slew of gaseous emissions and admissions, the latter of which were duly confessed in person, by phone or email, or in text messages that read only "excuse me." It was a long week, and that is because Kate and Adam had to beg forgiveness for something on the order of 200 farts. After all, if it weren't for checking text messages, flatulating would be the thing we do most often in a day. Adam and Kate learned by experience what every gastroenterologist knows: we vent a lot of steamers, and it is not only normal but in fact imperative that we do so. Farts are an inevitable byproduct of our humanity.
Our social mores deem it perfectly acceptable for a person to take out a paper-thin tissue and publicly blow mucus out of their face holes. When we sneeze, which is far grosser because the mucus is being propelled at almost 100 miles per hour and can have a spray radius of up to five feet, people actually bless us. Why, if I am blessed for publicly detonating a high-speed snot shower, must I beg pardon for farting, as if it were a crime? So ingrained in the culture is this shame and embarrassment that it has given rise to "flatulence underwear," the best-known brand of which is actually called Fartypants. The webpage advertising this $40 product reads as follows: "Harnessing the same technology found in chemical warfare suits, these powerful pants are capable of stopping smells 200 times stronger than the average fart."
So here's the question with which I conclude my windy sermon. Why do we allow a little backdraft to send us reeling off into repression and humiliation, into the buying of underwear made to withstand mustard gas? Why are we obliged to be ashamed of this fine reminder of the astonishing interspecies collaboration that is the human body, this small but important thing we have in common not only with each other but with kings and popes, and with every fellow mammal from aardvark to zebra?
Thankfully, the emancipatory solitude of the Ranting Hill allows me the liberty to fart loudly, though I still find it impossible to do what Benjamin Franklin advised, which is, when in public, to "fart proudly." If Uncle Ben were alive today, he'd blast his butt bugle and then fist-bump everybody around. I know better than to take his advice on this one, so when I'm in town I begrudgingly conform to socially enforced fart suppression. But as a desert rat and a grateful denizen of these high, dry wilds, I've learned to appreciate that the sound of a ripper is still a small anthem to freedom and independence.]]>
A few months ago I offered a Rant celebrating a single juniper tree that stands alone in an open, windswept valley out here in the high desert. Why then am I, a confirmed desert rat, about to offer a paean to cutting trees—to cutting them first down and then up? The answer may be found in the intimate relationship between this desiccated, largely treeless arid landscape and the nearby Sierra Nevada, whose eastern slope is carpeted with conifer forests comprised of a variety of lovely tree species including white, red, and Douglas fir; incense cedar and western juniper; and, ponderosa, Jeffrey, lodgepole, and sugar pine. One of the many advantages of our proximity to the Sierra is that it makes it possible for us to augment the warmth produced by our highly-efficient passive solar home with heat generated by burning wood.
I've always loved to fell, limb, buck, split, haul, and stack wood, and I've been heating with wood most of my adult life. There's something deeply satisfying about making a pilgrimage into the forest and returning with a fruit so precious that it flowers a year later in the gentle, lapping flames that warm my little daughters as they play or read by the hearth. Think of it as the thermal equivalent of preparing and eating vegetables that you've grown in your own garden. Of course that's a pretty sentimental take on a backbreaking form of work that is done amid the roar of a chainsaw and the smell of diesel fuel and sawdust. But I truly love cutting, so much so that I do it not only to heat our home but also to avoid doing pretty much anything else that I really ought to be doing. The expansive woodpiles strewn along the half-mile-long driveway to the Ranting Hill provide clear evidence of how wonderfully I've succeeded in using cutting to evade the pesky, endless round of adult responsibilities.
In addition to offering an escape from the scurrying of grown-up life, woodcutting also has the advantage of being ridiculously gear-intensive. It isn't just the pickup truck, dump trailer, chainsaws, bars, chains, gas, oil, screnches, wedges, and files that I'm talking about, but also the stylish safety apparel. To begin with, there's the standard-issue head-to-toe Carhartt in the classic olive-drab green and monkey-poop brown. I've graduated from ordinary work gloves to gel-palmed saw gloves with wrap-around Velcro wrist straps; whenever I put them on I feel like I'm about to win the Indy 500. I've also traded in my steel-toed work boots for titanium-toed boots, which provide the same protection but are lighter and, more importantly, sound really cool. In fact, I'm considering "Titanium Toed" for my next band name.
In the area of eye protection, I've improved my look over time, from the boxy safety goggles of a high-school chemistry student to the reflector shades of an undercover cop to the tinted wraparounds of the professional bass fisherman. My final step has been to go for the full headgear: a bright orange hardhat with attached ear protection and stylish nylon mesh visor, which makes me look like an extremely orange medieval knight. Whenever I'm wearing this helmet I am transformed into Sir Rantsalot, the brave, saw-wielding knight-errant who can flip his visor up and deliver a cool, witty line every time. Unfortunately, I sometimes forget that I have it on and spit heartily without first raising the visor, a bush-league move that makes a guy hope the other knights weren't looking.
Of course the pièce de résistance of any chainsawing getup is the chaps. You can't help but feel studly as a bronc buster once you've strapped these bad boys on, and I speak from experience when I say that being wrapped in Kevlar is a good idea when wielding a tool with razor-sharp teeth that are moving inches from your body at 60 m.p.h. (around 90 feet per second). That valorization notwithstanding, chaps are essentially assless pants.
Several years ago on Christmas Eve, my wife Eryn let slip that Santa had brought me a new pair of chaps. (I had nicked the old ones, which, like a climbing rope that has sustained a fall, may have saved your life but should not be reused.) I was so excited that I snuck to the Christmas tree later that night—wearing only green, elf-themed boxer shorts—just to try on the new gear. The chaps fit so perfectly that I decided to treat myself to a celebratory nightcap. I was bent over, reaching into the fridge for an IPA, when I heard someone approaching behind me. I spun around to see my father-in-law, who was then visiting from California for the holidays. This guy is an ex-cop, and he has always seemed to me like he's eight feet tall. There he stood, towering silently over me. I had to think fast, so I opened the beer, extended it toward him, and said, "Remember how you felled a tree in the wrong direction and knocked out power to half of Oakland during a Raiders game? I won't mention that if you won't mention this." He took the beer and went back to bed with nothing more said, either then or since.
I do most of my woodcutting with my buddy Steve, who is so good that when we cut I call him "the good feller" and he just refers to me as "the other feller." Steve will take on trees twice the size I'd be willing to wrangle, and he'll do it even in rough terrain or in situations where the drop has to be perfect. Before Steve fells a tree he engages in a mysterious, elaborate ritual that appears entirely unscientific. He first breaks a branch, measures it against the length of his arm, and then backs away from the tree that is to be cut, holding the branch up in the air like a witchdoctor and squinting at it with his head cocked to one side. Then he stares around the canopy of the forest, as if searching for signs. After a period of inscrutable meditation, he sticks the branch into the ground and pronounces calmly that this is the exact spot where the tip of the tree's crown will strike on the drop. This is a little like Babe Ruth pointing to the spot in the bleachers where he'll smack the dinger, and about as difficult to make good on.
Once Steve begins to wedge the bole and then notch the hinge—which, on a big tree, he does using a massive Stihl with a 42" bar (take a moment to visualize this)—it is impossible not to admire the guy's sheer gumption. But when he cuts the engine on his saw and begins driving wedges into the notch with the head of his field axe, that's my cue to spring into action. First I coolly raise the visor on my helmet and holler "I'm here for you if you need anything, buddy!" Then I hastily retreat until I'm about a half mile from the tree, perfectly safe and of no possible use to anyone save my bartender, who cannot afford to lose me. Steve's hammering echoes through the forest, and is followed by the slow-motion sound of the holding wood cracking, the tree crashing through the canopy, and then the resounding thud as it meets the earth—a heavy vibration that I feel in my boots, despite my cowardly distance from the site. Reapproaching, I inevitably find that the tree has been dropped on a dime, with Steve's stick accurately marking the crown's position on the ground.
In addition to tackling trees well over 100 feet tall, including dead giants that threaten to destroy buildings were they to become windfall or be felled imprecisely, Steve is capable of making beautiful things with them once they're on the ground. Using his Alaska mill, a portable frame that guides a chainsaw, allowing its bar to move smoothly while cross-sectioning a length of log, he creates immense slabs, which he later crafts into a variety of lovely things. Our home on the Ranting Hill is graced by a gorgeous bench that Steve fashioned from part of an 85-foot-tall incense cedar that he felled. The bench is six feet long, but the entire piece is crafted from the same slab, so the grain wraps beautifully from the bench's surface around to its legs.
I have been a dedicated environmentalist my whole life, but it is my experience that fellow enviros aren't always warm to my passion for woodcutting. I understand why, intuitively, my hobby might appear to be the opposite of treehugging, especially to folks who hold the entirely reasonable belief that we humans should quit messing with nature and just let it do its thing. But the problem is that one of the many things nature does extremely well is burn stuff down, which has prompted massive fire suppression efforts in the Sierra—efforts which have led to forests that are unnaturally dense, combustible, and vulnerable to die-off caused by drought stress and beetle kill. When John Muir writes of walking through Sierra forests that are park-like and reminiscent of a cathedral, he's describing an open, fire-scoured landscape that no longer exists in many parts of this range.
The trees I cut are already dead, and even then I'm careful not to fell all the standing dead trees in an area, leaving the number of habitat snags per acre recommended by wildlife conservation biologists. I also try to cut in a way that mimics the thinning effects of a low-intensity ground fire, removing ladder saplings, jack-strawed ground fuels, and trees that have fallen victim to beetle invasion. In doing so I'm not only trying to make a patch of forest a bit more like it would have been under a natural fire regime, I'm also trying to use the environmentalist tool of the chainsaw to help create a forest that is a little less likely to be incinerated by the kind of catastrophic, stand-replacing canopy fire that can occur in areas where fuel densities have become extreme.
Of course the dead and downed wood I cut will burn, but in our woodstove rather than in the forest, which raises the question of whether heating with wood is an environmentally responsible choice. As with most good questions, the answer to this one is that it depends. In many parts of the world the unsustainable overharvesting of fuelwood is decimating forests, but that is not the case in the eastern Sierra. In many instances wood is burned in stoves that are inefficient; however, we use a remarkably effective appliance that employs a catalytic converter and emits less than four grams of particulate per hour. Even this small amount of particulate means that woodburning is generally not a good choice in urban settings, a concern that doesn't apply here in this remote area. In some circumstances wood is burned to heat houses that are thermally inefficient, but our passive solar home is so capable of capturing and holding heat that we burn approximately half the wood that would be needed in a conventionally designed home. If one burns sustainably harvested, well-seasoned wood in a properly sized, EPA-certified stove, this form of heating has a lot to recommend it.
But doesn't the gasoline burned in trucks and chainsaws mean that woodcutting depends upon fossil fuels and thus contributes to CO2 emissions? Yes, but each BTU of fossil fuel consumed to harvest wood produces 25 BTUs of heat, which is an impressive ratio. And, given that the trees I cut are already dead and that the carbon sequestered in them will be released into the atmosphere sooner or later (through controlled burn, wildfire, or rotting), the fact that the wood's combustion occurs in my stove limits both greenhouse gas emissions and the open release of particulate pollutants, not to mention that it also warms my family.
The real question is not whether burning wood is perfectly carbon neutral and pollution-free, but whether it is better than the alternatives practically available to me. I could heat with oil or gas, whose extraction and combustion are major contributors to the global climate change crisis; or, I could instead choose electricity, knowing that half of the megawatts produced in the U.S. are generated by burning coal, which doesn't seem much of an improvement. Once active solar is within our financial reach that will be our choice. In the meantime, I'd rather harvest the BTUs I need with my own hands from the beautiful tinderbox of a Sierra forest than to buy them from an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, a fracking well in North Dakota, or mountaintop removal coal mine in West Virginia.
But the greatest pleasure offered by my woodcutting occurs around the hearth, which is the center of our home up on the Ranting Hill. Here my family gathers together to enjoy each other's company, and to savor that deeply satisfying, bone-warming radiant heat that is unique to wood. It is amazing how often, while adding fuel to the stove, I will recognize an individual log, and remember its small story: not only what species of tree, but precisely where it stood or fell, if it was snowing or shining the day I hauled it, whether it was bucked from the trunk of a tree surgically dropped by that good feller, Steve.
A Zen proverb offers this guidance: "Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water." There is something nourishing and elemental in this harvest. And this Sierra wood has warmed me more than twice, for in addition to warming me through work and by fire it has kindled my imagination in a way that no turning of a thermostat dial ever could.]]>
Now that Chautauqua season is nearly upon us I feel compelled to rant about this bizarre cultural practice, which Teddy Roosevelt once called "the most American thing in America"—never mind that this honor obviously deserves to be shared by baseball, blues, and bourbon. Chautauqua is defined by its practitioners as "a public humanities educational event in which scholars portray historical characters." A more helpful definition was offered by our seven-year-old daughter, Caroline: "it's when grownups play dress-up and act like dead people they really like in a tent." It remains unclear to me why a form of education intended to be accessible to the entire community was given a name that even sober people can't pronounce, much less spell. I am also troubled that Chautauqua is described as "living history," a term every bit as logical as "congressional action," "industrial park," "clean coal," "serious comic," "adult male," "true story," and, in honor of this Rant, "act naturally."
I am uncomfortable with Civil War reenactors, department store Santas, and Chautauquans, all of whom I suspect of being not only impostors, but also drunkards and pedophiles. That said, I agree with Chautauqua's core presumption, which is that anything is better than reading a history textbook. Given the choice between a scholarly tome and a lawn chair and a cooler of IPAs, the decision to support Chautauqua isn't so difficult after all. And if the concept is, as I understand it, to trick benighted Americans into learning something meaningful about our country's past by seating us in the shade of a tent in a park and letting us drink beer, well then I'm all in.
My favorite thing about Chautauqua is that, like other entertaining spectator sports, it can go off the rails in a heartbeat. The source of this peril is the fact that folks in attendance at the event are permitted to ask questions of the performers, who are obliged to answer while remaining in character. I once saw a Chautauqua performance of Henry David Thoreau in which the would-be Transcendentalist was excoriated by an older woman for supposedly failing to do his own laundry. "Get a job, you bum!" she yelled at the hapless Thoreau. I've seen FDR interrogated about repealing Obamacare, Harriet Tubman asked when the Underground Railroad to California was completed, Christopher Columbus exhorted to condemn the team name "Redskins," and Mae West called out on her claim to have been Snow White before she drifted ("That just seems confusing," observed the earnest young woman from the audience). I've even seen Will Rogers verbally abused because of his "obviously entirely super false claim" to have never met a man he didn't like. I should add that the inquisitor in this case was such a bloviating asshat that his behavior went a fair piece toward making his point.
My buddy David Fenimore, who is the most gifted of the one Chautauquans ever to visit the Ranting Hill, has stories that last until the last bottle is empty. Once, while portraying gold baron John Sutter, David's audience included a drunk guy dressed up like a Forty-Niner—a "One-Eyed Snaggle-Toothed Shaggy-Haired Hillbilly" who pulled a wagonload of pickaxes and gunny sacks behind him and shouted "Kick mah mule!" throughout the performance. On another occasion David was playing Woody Guthrie to an appreciative crowd when a lady in a wheelchair rolled herself up to the stage and began loudly accusing him of being "a damned communist!" Imagine spending months studying every detail of a fascinating life—David preps by memorizing 1,000 5x7 cards with facts related to his character—and then being hollered at by a drunk miner and a handicapped libertarian. Now that is public education in the New West.
In some instances the folks doing the portraying are every bit as batty as those on the receiving end of the performance. David related a wonderful story of a local mountain man who was a self-appointed Chautauquateer. "During the week he made these giant, crappy chainsaw sculptures of bears, but every Saturday he'd come to town wearing a leather do-rag and claim to be Benjamin Franklin," David explained. "He really looked like Franklin, too—long stockings down below, long grey hair up top, big forehead, round specs—only everything he said was pure anti-federalist tirade. No more taxation of kites, that kind of thing. Sort of a Joe Chainsaw portraying Donald Trump portraying Rush Limbaugh portraying Ben Franklin. You shoulda heard him when he got going on getting rid of the postal service."
The approach of Chautauqua season and the fact that today is John Muir's birthday (born in Dunbar, Scotland, April 21, 1838) remind me of a memorable run-in I once had with some fake John Muirs. Having some years ago written a book on Muir (John Muir's Last Journey), I was making the lecture circuit, blathering at anybody who'd listen. At one point I was booked at a conference of hard-core Muirites, where I shared the program with Lee Stetson, an experienced Chautauquan who'd been commissioned to do his acclaimed performance of Muir that evening. Lee has been doing his fake Muir thing since about the time Muir died in 1914, and it is honed. He has quite simply out-Muired Muir. Lee looks like Muir, acts like Muir—he's even got Muir's mild Scottish brogue nailed. I'd believe him if he told me that he smells like Muir. And don't make the mistake I made, of pulling on Lee's long grey beard, because his face foliage is as real as Muir's own.
The trouble started that night, at the party that was held after Lee's truly accomplished Muir Chautauqua performance. I wasn't selling many books, so I abandoned the signing table for the libations table, pitching my camp next to a large tub of icy Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. After a half hour of energetic elbow bending I noticed Lee across the room. He was wearing Muir's familiar, well-worn leather vest and signature weathered hat. A crook-handled Sierra cup dangled from his hand-tooled belt, and though he faced away from me I could just make out a bit of his flowing, white beard. I drained my ale, crossed the room, and tapped him on the shoulder to congratulate him on his excellent performance. But when he turned I was surprised to discover that this was not the real fake Muir, but rather was an interloping fake fake Muir, a second-rate wannabe who apparently had his own John O'Mountains fetish.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"Waahl, Laddie, of caarse I'm none otherrr than Johnny Muirrr!" he shouted at me. I cringed at his abominable brogue, which was closer to Mike Myers's portrayal of Fat Bastard in the Austin Powers franchise than it was to Sean Connery's portrayal of Agent 007 in the James Bond franchise. His costume was somehow too Muiry, as if he were suited up to play the famous preservationist during a spirited evening of trick-or-treating. Plus, this cartoonish Muir was unacceptably amped-up, as John Muir might have been had he lived in the era of the Venti Triple Cinnamon Dolce Crème Frappuccino. Needless to say, I beat a hasty retreat to the beer bucket.
After hoisting a few more ales I glanced up and, once again, saw the fake Muir across the room. But this time I noted that the tan of his leather vest appeared darker, and his hat had a slightly different cut to it—though the Sierra cup and beard dangled just as before. I surmised that this must be the authentic fake John Muir, and so I grabbed my ale, cracked a second one for him, and once again strode across the room, this time intending both to congratulate Lee on his performance and also alert him to the presence of the impostor fake Muir. As before, I tapped him on the shoulder, but when he turned I discovered, to my horror, that this was yet another fake fake Muir, disconcertingly different from both the real fake Muir and the first fake fake Muir, and considerably less convincing than either.
I looked him dead in the eye and took a long slug of first one beer and then the other.
"And who are you?" I asked.
"Why, matie, I be the man John Muir!" he exclaimed, with an enthusiasm every bit as cloying as that displayed by the other fake fake Muir. But rather than featuring a thick brogue, this guy just sounded like he was doing a flaccid imitation of a pirate, and his costume was much worse than a Halloween get-up. He looked like a transvestite outfitted to play Muir in a burlesque show. He also wore heavy makeup, and I picked up a whiff of what seemed to be pine-scented perfume.
"OK, this won't do at all," I said. "Go wait by the beer bucket, happy pirate. I'll be right back." I combed the room until I found the first fake fake Muir, and instructed that he also adjourn to the pale ale station. Then I asked around until I located the real fake Muir, who was sitting calmly outside on the porch, chatting with a friend.
"Lee, have you seen this shit?" I interrupted at first sight of him. "This place is crawling with fake Muirs, man. They look awful and they sound worse. One of them even smells like cheap air freshener. We have to put a stop to this." I thrust a beer his way. He thanked me, took a slow sip, and replied calmly that a proliferation of Muirs was surprisingly common. Speaking in the kindest tone imaginable, he added that he not only tolerated but even provided friendly encouragement to these bogus fake Muirs wherever he might encounter them.
Lee's reply was so humane and compassionate that I paused momentarily before returning to my senses. "Nope, no, no, no, no, nope," I said. "Absolutely not. We are not going to encourage this kind of thing. This party isn't big enough for more than one fake Muir. Come with me." I coaxed Lee up, and into the reception we went, where we found both of the fraudulent fake Muirs waiting, as instructed, by the ale tub.
I whistled to draw the attention of the sixty or so people at the party. "It is intolerable to have three guys walking around acting like Muir," I declared. "We'll settle this hot mess right now. We're going to have a Muir-off. Side betting is allowed, but no assisting of any Muir will be permitted. The two losers must never again pretend to be a fake John Muir." I popped open another brew and began peppering the men with questions.
"In 1866 you saw your first piece of writing published. What was its title?" I asked.
"'A Glorrrious Saunterrr'," guessed thick-brogued Muir.
"Be it 'A Botanical Ramble'?" asked whitebeard the pirate.
"The Calypso Borealis," answered Lee Stetson, quietly.
"Calypso Borealis is correct," I said. "In 1867 you set out on a walk that took you a thousand miles from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico. But what was your original destination?"
"Florrrida!" yelled broguey fake Muir, enthusiastically.
"It be Cuba!" trumped pine-scented burlesque fake Muir.
"The Amazon," said Lee in a mild voice.
"The Amazon is correct," I said. "And before you started on that journey you were temporarily blinded when you accidentally struck yourself in the eye with what object?" I asked.
"A scrrrewdrrriverrr," replied Fat Bastardy fake Muir.
"It be a file," answered crappy pirate fake Muir.
"The tang end of a file," corrected Lee, gently.
"The tang end of a file is correct," I confirmed. Switching my beer to my left hand in order to rest my right hand on Lee's shoulder, I announced the verdict. "I hereby declare victorious the only guy at this party who both stabbed himself in the eye with the tang end of a file and also knows what the hell the tang end of a file is. This, my friends, is the one-and-only true, original, authentic, genuine real fake John Muir." There followed a robust round of applause. Lee smiled graciously, without a hint of condescension.
"You there, Fat Bastard and Swashbuckling Crossdresser," I solemnly addressed the pair of impostor fakes, "relinquish your beards." The two men sheepishly removed their fake beards—which weren't even glued on but rather were strapped to their faces with cheap elastic cords—and laid them down on the table. I handed each of them a beer and gave each a consoling slap on the back, which triggered a second round of applause. The crappy pirate Muir retreated honorably, and returned to the party soon after dressed like an English professor. The broguey Muir became quite drunk, strapped his fake beard back on, and claimed to be the nature writer John Burroughs.
Of course it's easier to rag on a Chautauquan than to be one, which is why I'm a reclusive humor writer and not a public performer of "living history." But I am in sympathy with all those fake Muirs out there. And the counterfeit Thoreaus, Tubmans, and Twains too, the impostor Stowes and Lincolns, and the imitation communist Woody Guthries—even the do-ragged chainsaw bear sculpting libertarian fundamentalist Benjamin Franklins. Given that most of us spend a fair amount of energy pretending to be somebody we aren't, we might as well aim high. I'd say we could do worse than to emulate the guy who kept the Wal-Mart out of Yosemite Valley. So Happy Birthday, John. Here's a pint of Sierra Nevada in the air to the hope that we could all be a wee bittie more like you.]]>
It is often said that we can't see the forest for the trees, but that's not a problem out here in the western Great Basin. In moist slot canyons or riparian areas you'll find aspen, cottonwood, mountain mahogany, even ponderosa pine, but the open country is sagebrush steppe, largely treeless high desert where the "forest" consists only of widely dispersed Utah Junipers. It is hard for most of us to conceive of a forest in which individual trees may be hundreds or even thousands of yards from each other. Our trees are like distant electrons within the vast, burning nucleus of the desert: this is a forest that consists mainly of space.
"Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite," wrote Edward Abbey in the introduction to Desert Solitaire. "If a man knew enough he could write a whole book about the juniper tree. Not juniper trees in general but that one particular juniper tree . . ." In the high, open valley west of our home, which is all public lands, there is one particular juniper tree. It is not a very big tree, a young juniper, perhaps 80 or 100 years old. Most remarkable about this tree is its utter isolation, as it stands absolutely alone on the floor of this expansive valley. From any hill or mountain ridge in the basin you can look down and see, in some cases from vast distances, this single juniper, standing solitary, a tiny island of green in a rolling ocean of shimmering silver sage. The wisdom of Cactus Ed notwithstanding, I do not wish to write a book about an individual tree. But this one particular juniper, this lone tree, surviving out on those baked, windy flats, has earned itself a Rant.
The proper way to stalk a tree is to begin from a great distance, uphill and downwind, and then sneak up on it slowly. I began my approach to Lone Tree by climbing what I call Moonrise, Palisades, and Prospect, the three unnamed ridges, each higher than the last, that rise westward into the azure sky above the Ranting Hill. From the crest of Prospect I gaze west over a jumble of boulders and out across the sweeping valley to our imposing home mountain, which rises above it. At this distance Lone Tree is visible only to the eyes of a person who already knows where it stands. Because the tree is more than a mile away and perhaps a thousand feet below, it is indistinguishable from other dots on the landscape, most of which are piles of rocks.Descending the western slope of Prospect through a steep canyon, a half hour of scrambling brings the tree close enough that, while still impressively distant, it is now discernible as a tree rather than a heap of granite boulders. I am still a half mile away from the tree and five hundred or so feet above it, and I can tell that it has not yet noticed me. This is an important distance from which to admire Lone Tree, because if you happened to be dying of exposure beneath the desert sun, that tiny mushroom out on the sage flats would be your only refuge. While the Prospect view was too distant to create longing, from this perspective Lone Tree is a green magnet, and it is impossible to imagine seeing it from here in summer and not fantasizing repose in its cooling shade.Another twenty minutes of billy-goating down a slope that is by turns scree and sand brings me to the valley floor. I am now a quarter mile or so from Lone Tree, and I'm better able to sneak through the sage, prowling low like a mountain lion. From this proximity a distinct color palette emerges. The sidereal blue of the western sky is swept with the diaphanous white of attenuated clouds. The mountain below it is sere brown and corrugated, here and there shadowed by rock fields on north-facing slopes. Because I now have an eye-line shot of the tree, I notice how beautifully it is set against the small, double-knolled hill behind it. That mounded rise is topped with boulders that apparently host enough chartreuse lichen to provide a hint of green, a yellow-green that is mirrored in a few ephedra bushes in the foreground, scattered among the dust-colored sage. From this angle and distance Lone Tree becomes irresistible. I am now within its orbit, and it pulls me forward, zigzagging through the sage maze toward its shade.
Once I am within a hundred yards of the tree, what appeared to be lichen on the rocky hills behind it emerges instead as ephedra and small bunch grasses growing in open patches in the hill's broken granite tops. At this distance the shapes of the image strike me as even more important than its colors. This perspective reveals how beautifully the dome shape of the juniper's crown is repeated in the arched tops of the granite hills behind it, which are themselves reflected in the sinuous rises in the ridgeline of the big mountain that fills the western sky. From here I can see for the first time that the tree has a full crown but a skeletal, open structure beneath, and I'm struck by how this form is mirrored in the brushy tops and dark stems of the big sage filling the foreground of my view. This top-heavy shape shows that the tree has been cropped around its base, probably when it was just a sapling.From thirty feet away, Lone Tree fills my view, crowding out the landscape and demanding my full attention. My dog, Beauregard, has run ahead and is already reclined comfortably beside it. At this distance I notice hopeful second growth spouting from the long-ago cropped trunk. The area beneath and surrounding the tree is clear of sage, suggesting that animals have been attracted to this juniper beacon, and the shelter it provides for open range livestock, Old Man Coyote and other wild things, even a wayward desert rat and his drooling dog.
Noticing several dark masses hidden within its crown, I make my final advance on this particular juniper. Now standing beneath Lone Tree and looking up inside it, I see cradled in its angular, flaking arms a pair of large, intricately woven stick nests—one about eight feet off the ground, the other higher, about twelve feet. I don't know who lives in these nests, but I do know why: if you fancy having your home in a tree, this is the only game in town. The avian duplex leads me to the realization that this tree has accomplished something remarkable. It is growing in an exposed and unfavorable spot and has at some point been thoroughly munched. It has allowed many of its limbs to die in a successful attempt to preserve its core vitality. Miraculously, it has even dodged the wildfires that scour this valley ever fifteen or twenty years. Here is no forest. Working entirely alone, this single, gnarled juniper has kept my scorching, windswept home valley from being treeless. I should be fortunate to achieve so much in my own life.I spent a pleasant hour with Beauregard, both of us stretched out in the sage-scented alkali dust beneath Lone Tree. Only when we finally rose and shook ourselves off did I suddenly notice the other tree. I had stalked Lone Tree only to discover that it was not alone after all. Just to the north of this particular juniper was its shadow tree, cast down for the benefit of every creature in the valley. It is this single juniper's shadow that makes it possible to traverse the valley floor during midday in summer; we stop at Lone Tree because it is all that can be put between ourselves and the sun. Beneath it you'll find owl pellets and mustang dung, the coffee bean droppings of pronghorn, coyote scat containing fragments of kangaroo rat skulls, tufts of matted jackrabbit fur, the gracefully curved alabaster rib bone of a calf, a pair of ragged raven feathers, a shiny beer can tab brought in from afar by an enterprising packrat.
Our way of seeing the world is conditioned not only by experience and belief but also by scale, by the distance, angle, and perspective from which we choose to view things. I find it useful to back up from something I'm concentrating on—a problem, a memory, an essay—until I am so far away from and so high above it that it exists in that liminal zone between the world of granite and the equally beautiful universe of the imagination. I also find it helpful to begin far from and high above something I hope to discover—an idea, a way of understanding the desert, a lone juniper—and stalk it through registers of scale until it becomes solitary, focused, all-consuming. Perhaps the nature of a desert is veiled by its sage-filled valley, and the nature of its valley is hidden within the arms of its solitary juniper tree, and the nature of that unique tree is concealed within its woven nest, and the nature of a nest is a latticed pattern so exquisitely complex, imbricated, and minute that you must begin from a distant ridgetop in order to learn to see it clearly.
Photographs by Michael Branch.]]>
One of Henry Thoreau's many prose lines of pure poetry (his poetry, by contrast, is as prosaic as the side of a milk carton) sings that "the bluebird carries the sky on his back." It is a line almost as lovely as the bird itself. The mountain bluebird, which is the state bird of Nevada, is a year-round neighbor here on the Ranting Hill. Of course the profusion of bluebirds here may be due to the unfair advantage my daughters and I give them by mounting nesting boxes not only on our property but also (illegally, no doubt) on the public lands surrounding our home. There is hope in this small gesture of nailing little wooden homes into the tangled arms of junipers out here in the far reaches of the high desert.
Unfortunately, not all my associations with bluebirds are positive, for a bluebird restoration effort was my final merit badge project before being ejected from the Boy Scouts. To be more precise, I was formally excommunicated from scouting before managing to earn the cultishly named "Arrow of Light," a rite-of-passage symbol which sounds like a cross between a cheap appropriation of Native American mythology and a thinly veiled secularization of a fundamentalist religious ideology. I realize that in saying this kind of thing I've stepped over an invisible line in our culture. Who rags on the Boy Scouts? Especially among those of us who deeply respect outdoor experience and wilderness skills—not to mention less practical character attributes like trustworthiness and honesty—there is something sacrosanct about scouting.
Before failing to become a Boy Scout I was, under duress, a Cub Scout. I made it just far enough to become a "Webelo," which is Scouting's equivalent of a "tween," a boy no longer a cub but not yet whatever was supposed to come next. A man? A bear? An eagle? A fake Indian? (Webelos are referred to as a "tribe," a designation my Native American friends fail to appreciate.) To make matters worse, "Webelos" was given the "backronym" of "WE'll BE LOyal Scouts," which served as yet another reminder that the fundamental principle of the organization was unremitting conformity and respect for authority.
I submit as further evidence of this the "Cub Scout Promise," by which we were compelled to swear allegiance to God and country and to "obey the Law of the Pack," which sounded vicious and scary. Worse still was the "Scout's Law," which enjoined us to be "trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent." Is this a reasonable standard for any kid? I suspect most parents would be satisfied with "Look, you don't have to be reverent or brave. Just stop hitting your brother."
As a boy I took seriously the moral imperative to achieve that long, aspirant list of noble traits—which is to say that I was from the beginning doomed to failure. The rhetoric of scouting invoked a weirdly "courteous" version of self-determination, even as in practice it required utter conformity. Scouting emphasized hierarchy and respect for authority, and it seems clear enough that profoundly anti-authoritarian nature lovers like Emerson and Thoreau—never mind Thomas Jefferson or Cactus Ed Abbey—would have made abominable Boy Scouts, an observation that provides me genuine comfort.
Back in those days there was a lot of pressure on us little scouts. Lots of performance tests and social comparisons and merit badges earned or, more often, endless strings of minor failures that prevented the earning of badges. In retrospect it all seems sufficiently ridiculous. Who even knows what it would mean to receive a merit badge in "Composite Materials"? Who really cares about achieving the "Coin Collecting" badge? (Better to earn the considerably more useful "Lifesaving" badge, so you can attempt to rescue your numismatist friends as they die of boredom.) How were we supposed to keep our priorities straight as we aspired to earn points in an organization where "Dentistry" and "Nuclear Science" had equal value? How were we to decide between "Insect Study" and "Welding," between "Truck Transportation" and "Space Exploration"—all of which are actual Merit Badges?
It seems to me that "Wheelie Popping" or "Talking to Girls" or "Not Getting Your Ass Kicked by the Neighborhood Bully" or even "Fart Detection" would have been more useful than most of these merit badges. The value system of the entire enterprise appeared arbitrary and oppressive. If the camel was made by a committee, scouting seemed to have been created by a committee consisting of a Baptist missionary, an accountant, a government bureaucrat, a hippie back-to-the-lander, a marketing agency executive, a cigar store Indian, a New Age charlatan, and an undercover cop.
If you are speculating that the unhealthy energy around my not-so-warm-and-fuzzy memories of scouting suggests that I'm protesting too much—that I'm trying to cover something up—you are correct.
One lovely June my all-white "tribe" of Webelos was on an extended camping trip in the mountains, where we were commanded by Scoutmaster Williams, a man who took the "master" part of his moniker seriously. Master Williams was a "drop and give me twenty" kind of leader, though it was common knowledge among the boys that beneath his goofy uniform and hyperbolic Davy Crockett rhetoric was a plain old suburban dad, a henpecked, three-martini lunch, lawn-mowing, golf-playing, mid-level sales guy. While the forest smelled of pure freedom, being there with Master Williams was a highly regimented and competitive experience. We boys wanted to explore the woods, play hide-and-seek, scramble up rocks and go fishing. Under Master Williams's leadership, our experience was instead the opposite of play.
I do not exaggerate when I say that we couldn't dig a hole to take a shit without him turning the occasion into a competition—fastest hole, deepest hole, even roundest hole—and had there been a badge for meritorious dumping he would no doubt have adjudicated that contest as well. By the third night of the campout I had been forced to participate in so many competitions that I felt like an exhausted decathlete, only one whose events included boot waxing, dish washing, and melodic whistling. The only thing that pisses you off more than being forced to compete at whistling or scrubbing dishes is having your ass handed to you time and time again by the other boys, who seemed naturally to possess either the skills necessary to excel at such things, or the sheer drive to humiliate you in head-to-head competition. It may sound silly now, but at age eleven you just don't want to be a loser every time, even if what you're losing at is whistling or shithole digging. Why couldn't I make that damned hole rounder?
On our third night Master Williams arranged yet another competition, this one to determine who could build the biggest, best, fastest fire using only a single match. This challenge had everything Master Williams liked best: implied masculine potency, a pretention to survival skills, the drama of a winner-take-all race to the finish, and immense potential for the utter humiliation of the losers. The idea was that we would each gather our own materials—tree bark, twigs, leaves, whatever—to first lay and then ignite a fire that would, if we were truly skilled, be the first to leap high enough to burn through a string that the Master had tied tightly between two trees.
Master Williams blew his whistle to begin the first phase of the contest, a mere five minutes in which we fanned out into the woods to collect whatever we judged to be the most flammable and therefore choicest materials. Already exhausted, I headed into a thick stand of brush beyond the muddy spot where my own leaky pup tent was pitched and began to rifle through the duff on the forest floor in search of something dry enough to assure victory. But everything I gathered was thoroughly damp; even spruce cones and the cups of acorns felt moist through and through. A feeling of dread gathered in me, my chest tightening and my breathing accelerating as the seconds remaining to find something ignitable ticked away.
When Master Williams whistled out the one-minute warning, I felt an utter sense of desperation and panic wash over me. It was in that moment of despair that I made an observation that would forever change the trajectory of my career as a scout. I noticed, sitting near the mouth of my little, green tent, the small, red can of Coleman fuel that we had used to refill one of the troop's cook stoves. Grabbing the can I stepped behind my tent, squatted to the ground, and sprinkled some gas—and then a little more, just to be sure—onto the moist pinecones and twigs I had harvested from the forest floor. In that moment I was not thinking of my pledge to be "trustworthy." I didn't think about what I was doing at all. Something in the reptilian part of mybrain just felt—felt that I couldn't face another defeat after the embarrassing drubbing I had taken in the melodic whistling and poop hole digging trials.
Arriving at the group just seconds in advance of disqualification, I now had five more whistled-off minutes to align and lay a fire consisting of my pathetic little sticks and cones. I stooped to one knee and hunched unsteadily over the spot where I would be tested, trying with trembling hands to construct the ideal little teepee-shape that was rising in front of the more capable boys working to my left and right. But the harder I tried the more my little stick umbrella collapsed, and I could feel Master Williams's critical glare fall upon me, even as a tidy row of twig wigwams materialized up and down the line. The tension was palpable, the concentration intense. I knew what was at stake. This was the decisive test of who I was and who I would become. To build a fire. It was the ultimate primal challenge, the critical rite of passage into manhood.
At last the final whistle blew, and Master Williams counted down from ten, as if NASA were launching an Apollo rocket right there in the soggy woods. We ten truck driving dentist lifesaving welding coin collecting insect studying wood carving astronauts prepared for blast off. Three . . . two . . . one . . . ignition! Up and down the line I heard the synchronized scratch and pop of ten individual wooden matches as they were simultaneously struck. Each boy remained kneeling over his little stick tepee, cupping his precious flame with both hands and carefully lowering himself to touch the tiny flicker to just the right spot of bark or twig. The material had to be dry, the placement precise. That single, tiny, flickering point of sulfurous fire was all that stood between triumph and humiliation, and I guarded mine as a kind of eternal flame, one that would either be extinguished in a moment, or would burn brightly into manhood.
I balanced awkwardly on one knee, too afraid to shift position, and bent forward slowly, lowering toward my half-collapsed structure of twigs and cones, trying through sheer concentration to will that tiny flame to remain lit, trying one last time, in my little, collapsing world of inferior whistling and inadequately dug poop holes, to keep my hopes from being extinguished. I chose a promising spot in my stick pile and lowered the match slowly toward it.
I do not remember the moment in which the match made contact with my little pile of damp sticks. I do recall that the resulting detonation sounded like a concussion grenade, and that the rising fireball blew me backward onto my shoulder blades. There followed a welter of gasping and scurrying, and when I came to awareness I was looking up through swirling smoke at the face of Scoutmaster Williams, which wore an expression of genuine concern. I was coughing just a little, and the smell of singed hair was unmistakable.
"Son," he said at last, "you've burned your damned eyebrows off. Are you alright?"
I nodded yes, though I didn't have the slightest idea.
"You're disqualified," he added, flatly.
I don't recall now whether I cried. The rest of my story is the unvarnished truth. Kicked-out scout's honor.]]>
For a solid year now our eight-year-old daughter, Caroline, has been imploring us to get her a pet hedgehog. Nobody in the family can reckon where she got this idea in the first place—"hedgehog" has certainly never crossed my mind, let alone my lips—but it is deep within the grain of her nature to grasp an idea and refuse to let it go. Like a weasel or gator with jaws clenched, Caroline is incapable of giving up, a quality that makes her both difficult to live with and also, in some small, important way, my hero.
As Christmas approached, Caroline redoubled her efforts to get me to relent on the hedgehog, which meant that the hedgehog "discussion," as my wife Eryn still insisted civilly upon calling it, had devolved into a Neanderthal battle between two of the most stubborn people ever to walk these bare, dry hills. Tenacious little Caroline tried every angle; I was equally unyielding.
"Dad, hedgehogs are the coolest animals ever to be on earth. Wait until you see how cool. It's going to blow it out your mind!"
"Honey," I replied, "we have hens that don't lay eggs, a cat that won't chase mice, and a dog that drools in gallons rather than ounces. The last thing I need is another useless pet to take care of."
"Well, Daddy, I'm not sure I care for your attitude," she observed coolly, turning one of my pet locutions against me.
"Honey, why can't you just want a cellphone, like a normal kid?" I asked.
"Because normal kids want phones, like you said. But I'm unique! And a hedgehog is unique, so it's definitely the thing for me," she answered.
"Where did you learn the word unique?" I asked.
"Yeah, most kids my age don't know it. That's part of what makes me unique," she insisted, a little proudly.
This standoff continued well into December, when Caroline came to us with what was billed as an important family announcement. She hated to have to go against our wishes, she declared, but she had decided it was necessary to skirt our opposition and instead ask Santa Claus to bring her the long-desired hedgehog. As evidence of her determination, she displayed her letter to Santa, which included the following appeal: "plese plese plese even though my mom says it is vary vary vary unlikely and my dad says did you bonk your head? PLESE PLESE PLESE get me a H E G H O G [followed by ten giant exclamation points]."
Well, this was a new angle, and I was nonplussed. Eryn, who is both more intelligent and also quicker than her husband, wisely observed that Santa communicates regularly with parents, and that there's practical collaboration, even in the magic that is Christmas morning.
"We'll see," said Caroline, defiantly. "Santa knows my heart." And with that she spun on her heel and returned to her room, where she immediately planted her shoulder against the side of her dresser and, like a football player driving a tackling dummy, began to shove it away to make room for the hedgehog's cage. Nothing we said made a lick of difference. This feisty little mule saw her new pet as a fait accompli, and so she remained perfectly resolute. "Santa knows my heart," she repeated firmly.
In an essay I once referred to parenting as "the art of improvisation," but it might just as well be glossed as "an interminable series of Catch 22s." Eryn and I now faced a choice that seemed epic in significance. Through pure stubbornness, Caroline had placed us at a checkmate in which our "choice" was reduced to getting a hedgehog or blowing the lid on the Santa myth. How is it possible that parenting so often provides us with this kind of "choice"?
My wife remained respectful of my desire to live a long, happy, and entirely hedgehog-free life, and it pains me to confess that it was I who caved. One night after a few tumblers of sour mash, I told Eryn that I wasn't prepared to be remembered as the guy who murdered Santa. "I don't want the blood on my hands," I said, in a moment of profound cowardice. "Please get a damned hedgehog." And with that I poured another drink.
Arrangements were made, money changed hands, and on the morning of December 25 there was, beneath the tree, that most precious of Christmas miracles: an unwanted pet. When Caroline raced out to the living room to see that, indeed, Santa knew her heart, the look on her face conveyed a sublime combination of pure joy and "I told you so," which I suspect is the only way pure joy can be improved upon.Knowing just enough about captive-bred hedgehogs to suspect they'd likely make a terrible pet, especially for a kid, I tried to lower Caroline's expectations without dampening her enthusiasm.
"CC, I'm really happy for you. But you need to know that this isn't a warm and fuzzy pet, like a bunny. This guy is spiny, reclusive, and nocturnal. He might be hard to love."
Eryn looked at me and smiled. "Well, Daddy," she said, "there's somebody else in this house who is spiny, reclusive, and nocturnal."
"That's right," chimed in eleven-year-old Hannah, "and we still love you."
As we rolled into the New Year, I found myself not only reconciled to "Uncle Hedgie," as Caroline had named the little beast (though it might be Aunt Hedgie, for all we knew), but in fact fascinated by him. First of all, there was no denying that the thing was, to use a four-letter word that I've tried in vain to scrub from my personal lexicon, cute. He was a spiny little ball—larger than a baseball but smaller than a softball—with handsome salt-and-pepper coloration on his long spines. His small ears were delicately cupped and jet black, like a bat's. The little eyes, glossy and bulbous, were also black. His face consisted of a long, narrow snout which, although not very porcine, had given rise to the "hog" part of his name. The tip of the snout was polished black, with small nostrils, and graced with long, downward-curving whiskers. Hedgie's nose twitched constantly, suggesting an intelligent suspicion of the lumbering apes that gawked at him.
Of course I also admired his bad attitude. He spent almost all his time hiding under a piece of cloth. He was only active in the middle of the night. He didn't enjoy being handled, and he never hesitated to prick up his spines when he was grouchy, which was most of the time. In a world full of pets bred to be affectionate and loyal—a saccharine world of kittens and puppies—here at last was an honest misanthrope. His best trick, which he performed at the slightest irritation, was to hiss loudly and convulse forward into a perfect ball of spines—one in which it was impossible to locate his face or his ass, or even to know whether he was in possession of either. This ability to become utterly spherical is why, in Alice in Wonderland, the White Queen commits the indignity of using hedgehogs as croquet balls. Back on this side of the looking glass, I can only imagine that a predator, upon seeing this prickly ball of trouble, might just scratch its head and walk away. In fact, I envied Uncle Hedgie this unassailable form of self-protection, and found myself wishing that I had the capacity to deploy something like it during meetings at work.
The Ancient Greek poet Archilochus observed that "The fox has many tricks, and the hedgehog only one, but that is the best of all." But Archilochus obviously lived in a time before toilet paper, because our hedgehog did have a second trick, and it was his best. Uncle Hedgie loved to stick his snout into a cardboard toilet paper core (which I slit to prevent it from lodging on his noggin), after which he staggered around waving it in the air like a tiny, spiny drunk. How could I not like this little guy?
I didn't confess it to the family right away, but I had also been nerding it up by reading about hedgehogs. First of all, there were no living species native to the Americas, which is why we Yanks celebrate Groundhog Day in place of Hedgehog Day, a holiday that has inspired drunken revelry since the time of the ancient Romans. What intrigued me most was the ancient pedigree of the species. Despite his weird appearance and even weirder behavior, this animal hadn't changed much in the past 15 million years. Given my own idiosyncratic behaviors, I was inspired with hope at the idea that weird had been working so well for so long. Hedgie wasn't as ancient as a sponge or a jellyfish, but 15 million is a lot of evolutionary birthdays for a mammal. Think of local critters like coyotes and bobcats, which are a few million years old at best.
In fact, the hedgehog is so old that his resemblance to the porcupine and echidna is simply the product of convergent evolution, which is a fancy way of saying that because this is a world in which we might all do well to be covered with protective spines, different species developed this physiological defense mechanism through completely unrelated evolutionary paths. Uncle Hedgie is a mammal, just like you and me—only he's been around forty or fifty times longer than we have. I couldn't help but respect how antediluvian this little thing was, and I came to feel that having Uncle Hedgie living with us on the Ranting Hill was the equivalent of sharing our bathtub with a sturgeon or coelacanth.
If Santa knew Caroline's heart, she herself knew her mind. She honestly wanted nothing more for Christmas, and having received Uncle Hedgie was entirely thrilled. Unlike most grownups, Caroline always knows what she wants in life; also unlike us, she is satisfied when she gets it. She loves to play with her unique pet—at least, such play as is possible with a cranky pincushion—and she takes excellent care of him. For my part, I like that having a hedgehog around forces me to remember how ridiculously young we humans are as a species, and how few of our current, mostly infantile, behaviors are likely to be sustainable for the next 15 hundred years, let alone 15 million. When Uncle Hedgie looks me in the eye, I detect in his glare an unmistakable message: "Back off, sonny. I've been doing my thing since you were in evolutionary short pants." If, in the impossibly distant future, humans are still around—and can do things like convulse into a perfect ball of spines—then we will have earned the right to cop an attitude of superiority. In the meantime, I've decided that Uncle Hedgie has earned not only Caroline's affection, but my respect.]]>
Every New Year's Eve, drunk people from around the world sing some approximation of "Auld Lang Syne," a song whose words they rarely know—though one of the song's many strengths is that when arm-in-arm revelers slur out "For hold and sign" or "Fart old Ann Zyne" or "Four old aunts shine" it still sounds damned good. But even when we do know the words we don't know what they mean. This confusion is forgivable, since "Auld Lang Syne" literally means "old long since" (huh?), and even idiomatic translations like "days gone by" or "long long ago" don't entirely clarify the situation. As Billy Crystal's character puts it in the chick flick When Harry Met Sally, "'Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot?' Does that mean that we should forget old acquaintances? Or does it mean that if we happened to forget them we should remember them, which is not possible because we already forgot them?"
"Auld Lang Syne" emerged from the great Lowland Scots ballad tradition, but is most closely associated with Robert Burns, who brilliantly recrafted the song as a beautiful poem that was published in 1788. As Scots, including my own kin, emigrated to every corner of the globe, they took this traditional ballad with them. It thus became Scotland's greatest cultural export—though, in fairness, the competition was haggis, bagpipes, and plaid skirts for men—and is now beloved by inebriated folks the world over. The version of Burns's poem we sing today is radically simplified, and omits a number of lovely verses which, if sung in the original Scots, would make a decent field sobriety test. My favorite of these is Bobby's original closing verse:
And there's a hand, my trusty fiere!
and gie's a hand o' thine!
And we'll tak' a right gude willie waught,
for auld lang syne.
On the off chance you're as confused as a character in When Harry Met Sally, "willie waught" is the world's most lyrical euphemism for drink. Here, then, is Burns's poetic celebration of hand clasping and cup raising in memory of times gone by. It is among the oldest gestures known to human culture.
Thinking about this song caused me to wonder if anything in Nevada might be named for it, which led me to discover the existence of Auld Lang Syne Peak, an obscure, 7,400-foot mountain out in the North Central part of the state. I say "obscure" because this mountain lives in a nearly uninhabited stretch of the Great Basin Desert, where it resides amid innumerable other mountains, including much higher ones like Star Peak and Thunder Mountain, nearly 10,000-footers in the nearby Humboldt Range, where Mark Twain went broke chasing silver back in the early 1860s. But it was the name of the peak that drew me, not its lofty elevation, and so I recruited my hiking buddies Steve and Cheryll and we set out for Auld Lang Syne.
"Let's find something else to climb while we're here, y'all, 'cause in a half hour Auld Lang Syne will be in our past," I say.
"We'll see," Steve replies. "There's more vertical out here than you'd think."
Our route is up this low ridge, then across the canyon mouth via what looks like an earthen dam but is actually a giant tailings pile. We scramble up a steep, rocky slope, where the detritus of old mining operations is everywhere visible. Here are the collapsed remnants of a tin shed, there a prospect hole made into a mirror by snowmelt. We guess at the vintage of what we find by observing the nature of the junk. Cheryll finds a piece of threaded pipe, which became widely available in the 1880s. Steve notices a few nails with round rather than square heads, an innovation that dates to the invention of wire nails in the early 1890s. We also find shards of old bottles, many of which are sun purpled, an effect produced when the magnesium dioxide-infused clear glass produced during the second half of the nineteenth century is transformed into a lovely hue of lavender by long exposure to the sun's ultraviolet rays. Here on this remote desert mountain we are surrounded by the scattered fragments of auld lang syne.
Even on the steepest pitches we find vertical shafts whose bottoms remain invisible, though the echoes that return when we drop a chunk of quartz into one suggest impressive depth. Soon we stumble upon an actual mine, which we peek into but know better than to enter. For some reason it makes me uncomfortable to think of people up here so long ago, ghosts digging into the earth with their hands. I wonder if they found what they were looking for inside this dark hole, on the flank of this mountain, in the middle of this illimitable expanse of desert. It is the kind of place where it is easy to imagine great dreams being fulfilled, and also easy to imagine them perishing forever.
Climbing above the long-abandoned mine, we begin what turns out to be a surprisingly difficult ascent through the snowy scree, as we separate and begin to traverse obliquely across the north face of a high ridge and toward a narrow saddle that is strung below the peak. Keeping my head down as I cross the steep slope I see plenty of scat. Probably elk, since it appears large, roundish-oval, and less dimpled than mule deer scat tends to be, though this rough terrain and high elevation also make desert bighorn a contender. As I pick my way across the steep face I occasionally go to three-point, using my uphill hand to stabilize my footing as I work my way toward the distant peak. It is on this slippery traverse that my faulty estimation of the wee, half-hour climb becomes palpable, and I suck wind working to achieve the saddle, which appears to recede before me. Pausing to catch my breath, I look up to see that a second mountain has come into view. Behind what I assumed was Auld Lang Syne is a sister peak that is more distant and also higher. It is in fact the further of these twin summits that we're bound for, and while we're already quite a few half-hours into this climb, it is apparent that there are plenty more ahead.
"That's so beautiful," Cheryll remarks, admiring the eagle's effortless gyre. "Perfect! You should write about that."
"A lone eagle, ignited by shattered sunlight, describing perfect circles over the crown of a domed peak, as if signaling that this unnamed summit might yet have some special significance?" I reply. "I can't write about that. Way too nature writery. Sounds staged. We know this is actually happening, but readers will think it's horseshit." Steve, smiling, points silently to a nearby pile of wild mustang dung.
"Well played," I reply in response to his wordless punch line.
The eagle circles a few more times, counter-clockwise, winding the hands of time backward, and then is gone. Now for the final pitch of the climb. We scramble around the shoulder of What Used to Be Auld Lang Syne Peak onto a rocky bridge between the twin summits, and then start straight up the exposed crown of the mountain. This is the steepest part of the climb but also the shortest, and we soon find ourselves standing together on the peak. Once again I am the last to arrive, and Cheryll greets me with a serenade that she has arranged in order to celebrate the occasion. She's loaded a melancholy pop version of "Auld Lang Syne" onto her phone, from which she now plays a crooning, heartbreaking take on Bobby Burns's old gem.
Of course the moment is intended to be ironic, we three self-consciously reveling in the summit climax of a wilderness experience by cranking pop tunes on an iphone. But the genius of this song is that it will brook no irony. While I subscribe firmly to the maxim that "nostalgia ain't what it used to be," the Burns ballad belies any hip dismissal of the imaginative power the past wields over our experience of the present. This tune is the world's greatest anthem to ephemerality, a poignant expression of the desire to check the rush of time, to turn back on the trail, if only for a moment, toward the always lost country of our past.
As I listen to the song's verse about friends separated by oceans, and by oceans of time, I think of the families who lived here 150 years ago. When the Dun Glen miners scoured these hills, they had to assay what they dug out of the earth. Assay, which in its mining context refers to the testing of ore to determine its quality, is actually a much older word, and one with broader connotations. Since the fourteenth century, an assay has been a "trial, test of quality, test of character." To assay is to "try, endeavor, strive." The sister word to assay is essay, whose etymological pedigree also points to the idea of trying, and of trial. An essay is a weighing, an examination, an endeavor. An essay, ever and always, is an attempt.
As the would-be irony of the song is overwhelmed by the genuine emotion it produces, I gaze in all directions from the summit of
I don't recall exactly what I was thinking when I decided it was a good idea to move out to this isolated hilltop in a remote area of the high desert, but surely it must have had something to do with a desire for quiet. (We writers, who talk incessantly and insist that people listen to us, are famously enamored of silence.) No less an expert on pastoral silence than Billy Wordsworth wrote that "with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things," and so I had been persuaded that true insight must be correlated with harmonious silence. If I could get away from the relentless din of humanity—so little of which has substantial or lasting value—I too might gain the power to see into the beauty of this Great Basin landscape, and the strange and amazing life we live within it.
Of course when we first came out here we didn't have kids, and I now realize that when one is a parent there is no refuge from the incessant torrent of noise that we both produce and are subjected to. Trying to parent and have quiet is like trying to swim without getting wet. It isn't only my daughters' talking that breaks the silence around here, it is also their regrettable habit of waking throughout the night and feeling obliged to come tell me all about it. The other night Caroline, our eight-year-old, marched into our bedroom at 1:45 a.m. and blurted out, "Do you think if you crossed a camel with a monkey it could go without water and still climb trees?" I replied as any exhausted parent would. "Do you need to know the answer tonight, honey, or can I give that one some thought?" Hannah, our eleven-year-old, is even worse, because she breaks the silence in a creepier way: she sleepwalks. A week ago she zombied her way into our room at 2:30 a.m. to ask—in that eerie, flat affect of the somnambulist—why we had decided to turn our home into a seafood restaurant and had forced her to become a waitress, thus ruining the birthday party she had planned for her BFF, Taylor Swift. In our family, apparently even being asleep isn't a good enough reason to stop talking.
In addition to these human distractions, my quiet is routinely disrupted by our worthless pets. My wife Eryn's cat, Buster Posey, has a meow as loud as a barking dog, and frequently celebrates the witching hour by using my temple as his ass throne. My dog is worse. Beauregard not only has long, floppy ears, but also huge jowls, which gives him a ponderous, mint-julepy sort of look. But it is the acoustic force of his ears and lips that is most astounding. Whenever he shakes his head, which he does each time I'm about to enter deep sleep, there is a prodigious flapping, a sound so rhythmic, resonant, and loud that it sounds uncannily like the beating of helicopter blades. It is as if a Huey were landing at the foot of the bed, only it is a chopper that also strafes saliva up the walls in a uniform splatter pattern. Even when Beau is silent, which is rare, he is still deadly. His flatulence is so unspeakably toxic that when awakened by it I find myself wishing he would shake his head some more, just to fan the stink away with his billowing lips.
All these disruptions to my quiet occur within the house, but it is outside that the real acoustic trouble originates. Mice scurry along the window sills and frequently succeed in gaining access to the walls. Once they've breached the levee of the stucco exterior—which they can do through a gap as small as a quarter of an inch—they delight in using their little claws and teeth to scratch away at the drywall, which acts as a drumhead, amplifying the scraping sounds so that, as I lie in bed wide awake, I estimate the average mouse's weight at seventy pounds. Worse are the packrats, gifted climbers that, in the absence of a handy cliff, scramble straight up the exterior of the house, where they gnaw away at the soffits all night in an attempt to enter the attic.
But if the rodents are small, the wind out here is huge, ripping down from the Sierra in winter, and blasting up from the desert canyons as the Washoe Zephyr in summer. It isn't simply the unrelenting howling that is disconcerting, but also the associated effects of the big wind. Some of these are predictable: flying tumble mustard plants bouncing off the windows, or the familiar sound of our deck furniture first sliding along, and then tumbling out into the desert. But there are also weirder effects of the big wind. For example, once I'm awakened by the violent creaking and whistling of the gusts I sometimes stumble to the bathroom, where I stand above the toilet watching the water rock back and forth in the bowl; especially by moonlight, this gives me the peculiar feeling that I'm trying to take a leak from the deck of a pitching ship, where even the can is a moving target.
It isn't only the wind that howls, but also the coyotes. What could be more romantic than coyote song at night? Western nature writers croon about the experience of hearing the pack, a transformative moment in which one is apparently obliged to feel an overwhelming spiritual bond with the nonhuman world. I, instead, nurture a deep bond with the fantasy of someday getting five hours of sleep. Coyote song is not as advertised in the movies. Their chorus, if we want to stretch a valorizing metaphor so far as to use that term, is less a sonorous howling than a chaotic cacophony of yips and yelps. I'll go with chorus only if I may stipulate that it is a chorus of inebriated kindergarteners. These selfish animals also refuse to yelp on my schedule, instead taking special pleasure in busting loose just about the time I've finally rid myself of sleeptalking daughters and farting dogs.
Old man coyote isn't alone out there. There are also the great horned owls, which, like the coyotes, do not often produce the pastoral night song we have been led to expect. Gentle hooting? Forget it. The signature, charismatic Hollywood hoot comprises about a fifth of their repertoire, while the remainder is a dissonant amalgamation of cries, whistles, shrieks, barks, and hisses. And may I be wrapped in rattlers if an immature owl doesn't sound like a human baby screeching in agony because its little leg has been caught in the teeth of a combine. We aren't talking about a sound that shatters silence, but rather one that splinters sanity.
Last Sunday this immense desert night provided me with an unremitting sonic parade, a noisy nocturne in which the usual annoyances occurred serially over the course of what might otherwise have been a decent night's sleep. Sleeptalking kid, face-sitting cat, lip flapping dog, scurrying mice, gnawing packrats, surging wind, yipping coyotes, shrieking owls. Then, at 3:45 a.m., our chickens started clucking and squawking. Yet another of my ill-advised pastoral affectations, these hens are almost as worthless as our pets. We feed them, clean their coop, keep them watered and warm, and generally enable their selfish, indolent lifestyle. They, in return, sometimes appear to perhaps be nearing the contemplation of maybe almost laying an egg, but then rarely follow through. Now, in addition to being unproductive, smelly, high-maintenance, and lazy, they were also being loud.
In a moment of pure frustration I succumbed to that special kind of exhausted anger that arises when a desperate need for rest has been thwarted one too many times. In this odd moment some biological imperative exerted itself, as a deeply buried survival instinct eclipsed my last shred of equanimity and convinced me that sleep was worth fighting for and, if necessary, worth dying for. Enough was enough. If the chickens were blathering of their own accord, I intended to shut them up—for good, if necessary. If it was instead Old Man Coyote who was riling up the birds, then I intended to holler until I drove him a mile into the sagebrush ocean, where his racket could be drowned out by wind ripping through bitterbrush. Jumping out of bed I grabbed the handle of my big, yellow flashlight, and stomped angrily out into the desert wearing only boxer shorts (lime green, with bright red ladybugs). "Shut up!" I shouted into the night. "All y'all chickens, coyotes, owls, zip it! I moved out here to get some damned peace and quiet! Shut . . . the . . . hell . . . UP!"
As I cursed into the darkness, the darting beam of my flashlight caught a reflection in the sage. I now swung the beam back and panned slowly from right to left in search of whatever glint the light had caught. Suddenly I froze as the beam locked on two greenish-yellow lights that appeared to beam back at me. They were low in the sage—far too low to be the eyes of Old Man Coyote. They were also too far apart to be coyote, and in the penumbra of light glowing through the sage I could now make out the large, rounded face of a big cat.
I'm not afraid of rattlers or scorpions. I'm not even afraid of bears, which are scarce as hen's eggs around here in any case. But I am afraid of mountain lions, whose mule deer kills I've found atop my home mountain, and whose immense paw prints I discover left like hieroglyphics in the hardened caliche mud out on the flats near the canyon spring. As I stood barefoot and paralyzed, with the wind ripping through my boxers, I suddenly had a profound sense of exactly what sort of mistake I had just made. Not only was I unarmed, nearly naked, away from the house, and twenty feet from the eyes of a big cat that was not budging an inch, but I had just screamed at the King of the High Desert Hills to shut the hell up. I had a momentary worry that in addition to being killed I'd also be featured in the Darwin Awards: "A Nevada man walked up to a mountain lion in the middle of the night in a remote area of the high desert and shouted at the big cat to 'shut the hell up'. The cat responded by attacking the man, killing him quickly with a vicious bite to the neck. The kill was silent, an irony the man did not live long enough to appreciate." I imagined what I myself would say had I read this entry in the Darwin Awards. "Hey, check it out. This guy was so mad about noise that he yelled—and loud enough to be killed by the quietest animal in the West. Totally got what he deserved. What a dumb ass!"
Trying not to focus on the comic potential of my looming death, I began to back away slowly, keeping the flashlight beam locked on those silent eyes, expecting every moment that the big cat would be upon me. But those greenish-yellow lasers remained unblinking, and after what seemed like forever I backed into the door, turned the knob behind my back while keeping those glowing eyes in sight, and eased into the house. Shutting the door quietly, I made several resolutions instantly. First, I would never, ever go outside again. Second, I would let my wife's cat out immediately. Third, I would change my boxers as soon as possible. And, fourth, I would snap on the exterior light in hopes of spotting the cat. I quickly hit the switch and pressed my face to the window. Slowly, calmly, out from the sagebrush walked a huge . . . bobcat.
Because bobcats can have a home range of over 100 miles, and are elusive and retiring under any circumstances, the odds of getting a good look at one are vanishingly slim, even for a wild desert hillbilly like me. In a decade living on the Ranting Hill—and walking around 13,000 miles in the hills, canyons, and playas out here—I've had only a single glimpse of Lynx rufus. Now, out of nowhere, came this desert ghost, strutting to center stage on a well-lit catwalk of its own. The bobcat strode gracefully across the desert flat beside our house and walked calmly beneath the girls' swing set. I was surprised at how long and cheetah-like its front legs appeared. The rear haunches were muscular and powerful, an adaptation for pouncing, if not on Darwin Award winners, then on big jackrabbits. The coloration of the thick fur was spectacular, a wild combination of bars, dots, and bowed splotches that helped the animal remain invisible among the dappled sage.
Before the bobcat receded into the darkness beyond the reach of the porch light it stopped just once, momentarily turning its head in my direction. Its face was beautiful, unmistakably lynx-like, with upright, black-tipped ears, and bright eyes, while the broad, curved flair of its whiskered cheeks made its head appear impossibly large. And then it was gone. Although it was only 4:00 a.m. I made myself a mug of strong java, and sat in silence—at last, silence—looking out into the inky darkness, already treasuring the memory of the best night of sleep I never had.]]>