10.22.2010
Hello out there!
Today is Day 59 (past half-way!) and day 12 without a shower or creek-dip. This morning we are leaving Comb Ridge near Bluff, Utah and driving into Arizona to visit a chapter on the Navajo Reservation and a coal-fired plant near the Grand Canyon Dams.
Wow, it’s been a long while. Mmkay, breeze-by:
[[September 20th – 26th ~ Escalante, UT. Working with ecologist Mary O’ Brien in Dixie National Forest . Mary is a passionate scientist with an obsessive love for litigation, a long wolf-gray braid and the stride of a graceful primate. We took a breath away from desert land and slept in the lullabies of whispering aspen leaves. I greedily soaked up every leaf of green I could, and for the first time on this trip, it felt like autumn. With Mary, we sampled all sorts of field work: vegetation transects, cow-counting, ant-mound monitoring, aspen stand surveys. At Fish Lake, we surveyed beaver dams and studied their role in restoring watersheds damaged by cattle-grazing and beaver-trapping.
September 27th ~ We stopped at the Lectrolux Café (one of two stores) in Baker NV, population approx. 25, to speak with Terry Marasco. Terry brewed coffee and tea with artistry, served us rich chocolate cake for Eric’s 21st, and taught us a thing or two about water exploitation in the arid west. Terry and the county are fighting to prevent the development of a water pipeline that would extract 90,000 acre-feet of “fossil water,” or deep stores of ground-water, from an aquifer underneath Spring Valley. The water would be pulled from the rural west for the growth of neon Las Vegas.
September 28th ~ Jackpot NV. Met the fabled John Marvel, who spites the fences that trace desert fields and dreams of the day when cattle and their ranchers will disappear from the American West. He is a one-man army bellowing his way through ranchlands, hated by cattlemen and praised by academic circles for water rights. I don’t know what to think of him.
September 30th ~ Lava Lake Ranch near Craters of the Moon, ID. Lava Lake Ranch started in 1999, when Bryan and Kathleen moved in from San Francisco, bought the land of 5 old ranches, and started up a sheep-herding operation. They work with conservationists and field biologists who are searching for the sweet spot where livestock-raising meets land health and conservation.
The history of sheep-herding is colorful; first came the Irish, raising their wooly herds. The Irish were gradually replaced by the Basque, who left cursive carvings of names, dates, and women in the aspen bark. Today, the majority of sheep-herders are from Peru on work visas.
October 5th – 8th ~ Rafting down the Colorado River, from CO to UT. We were in the middle of the craziest storms. Our first night camped on the river, the tents started going airborne, and one of the paddle boats flipped over four rafts before landing in the water again. Lightning was cracking on the edges of the canyons above our heads. I understood why Wind can be such a forceful figure or personality in mythology, carrying messages or power or forewarning. On our last day on the water, we dug tamarisk trees, an invasive species, out of the sand banks with a National Parks Service crew.
October 9th – 12th ~ Journalism and podcasting workshop with Michelle Nijhuis. Driving into Paonia, Colorado, we passed farmers markets with crates of apples and pumpkins and jugs of cider. Much apple crisp was consumed. We stayed on Michelle’s property, where she and her husband, Jack, (and little girl Sylvia) have built several straw-bale houses with Jack’s students in sustainability classes. Jack and Michelle are both free-lance journalists, or “a kind of professional amateur” Michelle liked to say. We got to play with a few different articles, discuss journalism hurdles and tactics. We listened to some radio clips and started rough pod-casting projects. Met with High Country News, the non-profit journal of the American West, that focuses on public lands, tribal issues, environmental policy, water. There were garden cherry tomatoes sitting out on the table, beside books on water rights and a home-made altar to the West made from scrabble letters, glitter, and plastic cowboys and Indians.
October 13th – 15th ~ Slept in cabins in Eastern Colorado! We stayed at one of the Westies’ family cow camp outside of Aspen, CO. It was frosty and crisp in the morning and evening, and the cabins are nestled in golden aspen and snow-dusted mountains. We met with a few different speakers on renewable energy solutions (solar and hydroelectric). But more importantly, we explored downtown Aspen and spent a night dancing to a bluegrass band at the “Belly Up.” I spent an indulgent afternoon in a bookstore curled up with a mountain of fresh books and a mug of tea. Aspen is absurdly affluent; as Kate put it, it’s a white-pants and cardigan town. Most of the houses on the hill are owner’s third homes, larger than most highschools. Some homeowners will turn on all their lights at night before flying out of Aspen so they can see their houses glowing from thousands of feet up.
October 16th – 19th ~ Writing (hiking) workshop with Craig Childs in Canyonlands Utah, outside of Moab. Perhaps our most poetic experience yet. Every morning we rose at 6:45 am and gathered silently on the sandstone. Craig played the flute while we watched the sun rise over the La Salles mountains. The colors before sunrise are beyond a human palette. For all the poetry and pigment that we create, I don’t think we would ever have the capacity to bottle or pen or play the color and light just before dawn.
During the day, Craig led us up and down and through the canyons he loves, climbing and exploring and writing in spurts. One day he let us loose into a stretch of redrock, and I found an alcove above the canyons where I napped and wrote. That day it rained, transforming the desert smell and dampening the color of sand and juniper. The raindrops and raven calls were the only sounds for miles.
October 20th ~ Near Bluff, Utah, with Jo Pachak. I’m still in complete awe of this day, and haven’t yet unearthed the tools in my mind with which to understand the stretch of human history we observed. Jo took us on a hike into Navajo sites thousands of years old. We walked through dwellings and kivas in alcoves that have stood for at least two-thousand years. You could still see the handprints of families painted on the cave walls in ochre, yellow, sienna, black. Some had traced spirals into the palms. The mud pressed around the stones in the walls were dimpled with hand- and finger-prints, even children’s feet. The dry washes we walked through were filled with chipped stones and ceramic pot shards. We visited a panel of rock art filled with human figures with three-fingered bird hands, people traveling with crook-necked staffs, deer and pronghorn, infants carried on backs, yucca plants, snakes. Reverence. Wonder. Bafflement.
The mesas across the valley rolled out like gingerbread dough, thick, cracking along the edges of the flattened pancakes of flour, butter, egg, sugar, molasses. Someone baked the giant raw sheets, not having the patience to cut out walls and roofs and bite-size men and women. Then they left the mesas to cool and forgot them on the desert floor, they go stale and crumbs slide down cliff-faces to make a sweet skirt of red and white boulders.
Mounds of sandstone slide across the valley floor, spilt piles of wheat flour that clump and crack in the rain. The lumps of stone wear down smoothly into the fine grains of flour if you rub them against each other. Lobes of sandstone calve off into loaves of bread. Human roads are highlighted in the distance where the wear of wheels scrapes off the layer of green mold: juniper, sagebrush, ephedra and buffalo berry growing slowly on the surface. ]]
Gracious, I’ve written too much. I apologize for the deluge of words, but plan on sending this anyway.
Been writing a lot of lists lately, I’ll end with this in hopes for a shower and laundry.
Thinks that Give a Clean Feeling:
Brushing my teeth after breakfast
Smell of wet the morning after rain
Vegetable broth
Clair de Lune
First morning light
Lemon zest
Simple haiku lines
Folding mint leaves in my fingers
The deep breaths after crying to the stars
I miss you all loads and hope you’re having a wonderful autumn!
Very much love,
madelyn
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