(1855), for example, depicts a wheat field in a clearing, tree stumps still sticking up through the wheat. The site is a minor ecological disaster, but a divine light shines through the clouds to make the clearing glow. An accompanying quotation from de Tocqueville justifies the European rape of the continent: “In the moment God refused to give the native inhabitants the ability for civilization, he predestined them to certain ruin. The true owners of this continent are those who know how to use its riches.”
8 June, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
Nancy and I walk the Great Western Trail starting at Canyon Glen. We saw sego lilies (Calochortus nuttallii) near here about a week ago. Today, these three-petaled, three-sepaled beauties are everywhere—abundant between sage, emerging from cheatgrass fields, accompanying declining evening primroses. A mile up the trail Nancy shouts, “Sam!” and throws her arm out to bar my path. As I regain my balance, I see she is pointing at a small, silvery snake, shaded greenish and yellowing toward the underside. A yellow-bellied racer (Coluber constrictor mormon), a snake I love. Our Utah subspecies was purportedly named by a biologist not particularly enamored of the local Mormon population.
Black-billed magpies (Pica hudsonia) are plentiful today. I once told a visiting Native American historian that indigenous people referred to these birds as black-and-white long tails. “That’s true,” he said. “The more common name, however, is the bird that eats shit.” Magpies are gregarious birds that form long-term pairs, and males feed females throughout the laying and incubation periods. In the winter, magpies form groups of twenty-five pairs or so that travel and roost together. It is comforting to think of groups of magpies that know each other and prefer each other’s company through the winter’s dark.
9 June, Vienna (by email)
Sam—I ought to go to bed, but I’m still reeling from the events of the day. A couple of hours ago, NATO and the Yugoslav Parliament came to some kind of agreement that stops the bombing. And I’m just back from the world premiere of Peter Handke’s play in Vienna’s Burgtheater. It’s called “The Play of the Film of the War,” and has the filmmakers John Ford and Luis Buñuel in a Serbian town ten years after the war trying to decide how to make a film of the war. Interesting for you and me, Sam, was the scene when the really bad guys of the play, three “Internationals” who know all the answers, who dictate all the terms, and who can think only in absolutes, appear on the stage as follows: “Three mountain bike riders, preceded by the sound of squealing brakes, burst through the swinging door, covered with mud clear up to their helmets. They race through the hall, between tables and chairs, perilously close to the people sitting there. ‘Where are we?’ the first International asks. ‘Don’t know,’ the second answers. ‘Not a clue,’ the third says.” Sam, the American moralists—people without a hint of self-irony or humor, absolutists who run the world because of their economic power, clueless idiots—were depicted this evening as mountain bike riders. Same genus as us—but by god I hope they’re another species.
19 June, Teasdale
Several sage thrashers (Oreoscoptes montanus) sing at dawn in the flat on the north side of Boulder Mountain. They alternate for an hour or more with a meadow lark and a couple of mourning doves from the nearby grain field. An hour of melody, filling the cove with melancholy. Sage thrashers are shy birds that hide their twig-and-grass nests beneath sagebrush. Last time Nanc and I were in Teasdale, a male thrasher sang through most of the night, even though the moon was dark. I joined him in the sage, naked, and listened with attention for most of the hour or two before dawn, wondering if he had received “The Message,” “The Truth,” a “Portent of the Apocalypse,” and was singing it my way.
21 June, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
This afternoon as I bike up Timpanogos on the Great Western, still without Scott, I run into mourning doves (Zenaida macroura). I have always been partial to these birds, whose haunting call is unmistakable. Three fly off the trail in front of me. Even though I have not lifted a shotgun for three decades and have no desire to hunt again, in my mind my .410 single shot snaps to my shoulder and I follow the last of the three, squeezing the trigger just after my barrel passes the bird. “Think of watering your bird with a hose,” I hear my dad, nearly twenty-five years dead, tell me. Mourning doves are our most widely killed game birds. I find this a bit difficult to understand, though, after having shot a bunch as a kid and trying to make a meal of ten or fifteen. “Hell,” my dad said, “just as well eat hummingbirds.”
It’s the last summer solstice of the millennium this afternoon. I’m on the trail the very moment the Earth begins to tilt back toward the north, shortening the days in the Northern Hemisphere. I ride into dark black thunderheads on Timpanogos. Light slants under the clouds. A bit of rain blows hard from the northwest, silvered by the low sun. Birds are everywhere. All of the spring’s players sing for me, one by one, as I ride along. It is as though the spring birds take a curtain call and prepare for Act II, Summer.
Murderers, Fornicators, and Coffee Drinkers
June 25, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
Death close to hand on two fronts today. Someone has driven a blade along our low trail for no reason we can tell, snapping down several large box elders and oaks, leaving their shattered stumps and carcasses along the trail. And a lazuli bunting lies lifeless on the trail. No signs of struggle, no evident wounds. Its head and back still shimmer with turquoise color, and the orange patch burns bright on its throat. We lift the bird off the dusty trail and lay it into a patch of yellow sweet clover. It reminds me of another corpse I saw some years ago on this trail, and when I get home I look up the event in my notebook:
2 September 1993 – On a trail high in the canyon lies a mouse. Stretched taut with the gasses of putrescence, its skin shines with a healthy grey luster. The tail is a thin pole, and the two hind legs poke out stiffly to finish the tripod. There are no front legs. No head. The body has formed a new neck around the wound. Sucking on that tight pucker is a swarm of aggressive yellowjackets, bright yellow, dangerously quick, ominously thirsty.
At the time, BYU was losing its intellectual nerve, and Sam and I and several others were beginning to protest infringements on academic freedom. I saw the corpse as an omen.
26 June, Brighton
Sun setting at the end of a beautiful day. The nearly full moon rises while the sun sets. Standing on Nancy’s and Sam’s balcony, I’m east of the sun, west of the moon. For the first time in my forty-nine years, I understand that the phrase is a reference to evening. Before we go to bed, Nancy reads several of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I’m struck by two lines that remind me of the headless mouse and aggressive, ecclesiastical hornets: “And art made tongue-tied by authority, / And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill…”
It’s an old problem.
27 June, Great Western Trail, Wasatch Crest—west of the sun, east of the moon
This will be our first high-altitude ride this year, much of it above ten thousand feet, a stretch of the Great Western Trail called the Wasatch Crest. We climb from Brighton to Scott’s Pass, where we look down over Park City’s highest slopes. For some reason (it may have something to do with the two athletic young women riding aggressively behind us), Sam doesn’t
