They’re damned happy to get rid of me.”
“I’m sure the feeling is mutual,” Sam surmises.
Back from the ride, remembering that Carl von Linnaeus first named cheatgrass, I pick up a new book by Linnaeus, edited by Wolf Lepenies. Not only did Linnaeus classify plants, he thought he could discern divinely guided patterns in human tragedy as well. In the collected accounts of what he called Nemesis Divina, he recounts this story:
Jacob of Saanas (community Stenbrohult in Smaland) lived badly with his wife. One Christmas (in my youth) as she wanted to walk over the ice to church, she breaks through the ice, holds on, 1/4 hour, to the edge of the ice with her hands, calls for help. Her husband stands on the bank, for it happened close to the yard, and says he doesn’t dare to venture out on the ice (because he would be happy to lose her). She drowns. Five years later Jacob’s fingers begin to rot, the fingers with which he could have helped his wife; and they continue to rot on both hands. Finally he dies of the disease.
Linnaeus collected hundreds of these stories, proof that GOD is watching you and will avenge. Our human obsession with meaning and order has a productive scientific component, but Linnaeus’s search for cosmic order also resulted in superstitious bullshit that is simply embarrassing. And psychologically unsettling. His Nemesis story feels like a metaphor, of sorts, for my own marriage. It has been a decade since our relationship settled into nothing but a shared concern for our children. We have been drowning one another in icy neglect and soul-rotting anger.
7 May, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
Today, the first fully open white flowers of death camas. In one inflorescence, we find a large, solid-red ladybird beetle. A scrub jay flashes blue as we ride past, scolding us harshly. These jays form long-term attachments between males and females and they have been observed to share lives with a third adult “helper” that aids in raising and protecting the young against predators. There’s a wide range, we note, of possible “natural” families.
“Let’s issue a ‘Proclamation to the World,’” Scott suggests. “A manifesto to rebut the Mormon one with that title that says the only natural family involves marriage between one heterosexual man and one heterosexual woman. Ours will argue that natural families are evolutionary experiments of the widest imaginable variety. We’ll make our case with science rather than theology.”
Butterflies are abundant again. I mention to Scott that identifying all of them is going to be difficult. “Why do we have to know or identify everything?” he asks. “For everything we know, there are fifty things we don’t.” His suggestion that we don’t have to identify them all is a momentary relief. But backing off that compulsion is not easy for a professor whose role in life is to have the answers.
9 May, Orem
“What a symphony of crickets,” Sam exclaims.
“What crickets?” I ask.
Last summer, Sam stopped suddenly and backed his bike away from a chunk of blue limestone. “What’s up?” I asked. “It’s a rattlesnake!” he said. “It’s buzzing like crazy. Back away.” I stepped off the bike the wrong way—toward the snake—and Sam said nonchalantly, “I’ll take good care of your bike after you die.” I eventually saw the snake, but I never did hear the high-pitched rattling. And now I can’t hear the crickets.
Faced with a steady decline of the various senses, it makes sense to start pairing up. Sam, for example, can protect me from rattlesnakes. And I see better than he does. It’s like the eighty-year-old man who announces his engagement to his friends. “Is she beautiful?” they ask. “No,” he answers. “Is she a good cook?” “Can’t cook a lick,” he says. “Is she nice to you?” “Not especially.” “So why are you getting married?” “She can drive at night,” he explains.
11 May, Teasdale, Wayne County, Utah
Last night was cold and cloudy. Nanc and I wake to a dusting of snow across the sage and piñon landscape. On Thousand Lake Mountain to the north and the Boulder to the south, lava flows are accented by the new snow, and the reds and yellows of the Mesozoic rocks have been delicately frosted. As we stretch awake in the thin and melancholy blue and orange light, fourteen deer cross a hundred yards in front of us after a night of good food in the alfalfa fields east of Teasdale.
There are robins here, several sparrows, an American kestrel, a few mountain bluebirds, a red-winged blackbird, two starlings, and several common ravens. I don’t agree there is much common about the raven. These birds (Corvus corax) are very smart—some say as smart as a good dog. They apply logic to problem solving and seem to be constantly running a con or just playing for the hell of it. A couple of years ago I stood at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon at sunset and watched a raven rise a thousand feet above the rim, fold its wings, fall like a bullet below the rim, catch itself, and start over again.
14 May, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
The day began with neon and ended with iridescence.
My eighth-grade son, Ben, appeared this morning wearing a neon-green shirt and bright purple pants and left home fifteen minutes before the bus was due. “My friend and I have to coordinate outfits,” he explained.
Late this afternoon I took my first bike ride in a week—alone, because Sam and Nancy are spending the week in Teasdale. After days of alternating rain and sun, the hills are furry with fresh grasses. New scrub oak leaves give whole hillsides an orange-brown hue. The first flax of the year, Linum lewisii, blue as a robin’s egg. Riding toward the canyon’s mouth, I wondered when the lazuli buntings would appear from their winter range in the mountains of Mexico. My notes from last year show our first sighting on May 17th. On cue, just before breaking out of the canyon, I heard a familiar call. Putting down my bike, I walked back toward the quick, high-pitched song repeated every fifteen seconds or so. An iridescent blue head shimmered at the top of a still leafless scrub oak. A male lazuli bunting, Passerina amoena. The familiar bright cinnamon breast above a white belly. Two white slashes across the dark wings. The bird sang again and again, and from the hill above, another voice answered with its own version of the song. I stood between the communicating birds, silent, thinking about my own pending migration.
Later I stopped at the ditch above the disappearing orchard (ten rows of trees now gone) and bent to look at the emerging dusky-purple clustered flowers and slender curved lingual leaves of the year’s first hound’s tongue, Cynoglossum officinale. Another European introduction. I straightened up to see a flash of yellow, then a second one. Two male western tanagers (Piranga ludoviciana) chasing a single female. The bright yellow breasts of the males contrast with their black wings and backs and are accented by their brilliant red heads. They, too, have returned from wintering in Mexico, albeit somewhat farther south than the buntings.
So much color! And to think that the evolutionary forces that developed the colorful buntings and tanagers are also at work in Ben’s choice of his own eye-dazzling plumage, meant to impress the girls and boys of the eighth grade.
15 May, Wayne County
On
