the hell are you doing?” I shout.
“It’s a misdemeanor to harass wildlife,” Sam bellows. “We’ll have you sons of bitches hauled into court.”
“We weren’t hurting them,” the four-wheeled maniac says flatly.
“The hell you weren’t,” Sam blusters. “It’s the end of the winter and they’re in compromised condition. The stress you’re causing will kill them. You understand the word compromised, dipshit?”
The steely eyes of the motorcycle rider reveal only disdain. His bike spits dirt as he leaves us standing. His buddy follows, blatting a foul exhaust.
We head home through an apple orchard, then cross 8th North into the Orem neighborhood where we both live.
“Those boys will find it hard to discount our well-reasoned arguments,” Sam deadpans.
“As do our children,” I add.
2 March, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
Sam has a rough ride up the steep track near the mouth of the canyon. In the early going, he falls twice, both times into oak brush (Quercus gambelii) that embraces him with a brittle crackling. At the top, mounting his bike after standing for a while on winter-matted grass to admire the view, he falls again. “That ties our record,” I tell him. “Three falls in a single ride. But neither of us has done it in a hundred yards before.”
“You know,” Sam says from the ground, “I think I fell that last time out of pure wonder. Who gets to witness this glorious landscape again and again and again?”
I point to green tips of new grass, drawn out of the earth by lengthening days, warming temperatures, and new angles of sunlight. “Harbingers of spring,” I observe.
“Harbingers my ass,” Sam replies. “You’ve spent too much of your life in eighteenth-century Germany. This new-looking cheatgrass has been here since mid-fall, waiting under the snow for an early start, aiming to bear seed before the heat and dryness of summer and before its later-emerging competitors.”
“I study the German Enlightenment,” I respond proudly. “You’ve lived your life hunched over a microscope counting diatoms, whatever the hell those are!”
“Add this to your so-called enlightenment,” Sam says. “A diatom is a single-celled alga, common in any wet or moist habitat in the world. Nearly all are photosynthetic, and it is estimated that diatoms produce up to half of all the oxygen on Earth. Diatoms are beautiful, ranging from round to elongate in face view, with thousands of shapes and sizes. They produce glass cell walls and can last in sediments for millennia. Furthermore, diatoms grow preferentially in habitats with different chemical or physical extremes. You can identify changes through time—climate change, for example—by studying density of diatoms in sediments and cores.”
Dumbfounded, I respond with a non sequitur: “Where did the word ‘dumbfounded’ come from?”
“Same family as ‘thunderstruck,’” Sam answers, climbing back onto his bike.
6 March, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
We ride along the Provo River into the canyon, turn up a dirt road that leads to a snaky green aqueduct, and then follow the pipe to where a single-track trail bisects the road. Erosion this winter has left the trail narrower than ever, but this section of the Great Western, an ambitious trail projected to reach from Canada to Mexico, widens some as it makes a double dogleg up over a bed of what we call shale but that is really quartzite. If you’re still on your bike when you reach these loose rocks on the steep part of the trail you have lost much of your momentum and your legs and lungs are burning but since you have made it this far you try to power your way up onto the rocks, feeling in your legs for that tricky point beyond which your efforts will make your back wheel spin out and finally, the bike gods willing, you make the sudden climb up from the quartzite onto the gentler trail that skirts the hill until it swings away from the precipitous edge (fortunately, there are tall herbs and a fringe of oak brush to shield your vision of the drop-off to the river five hundred yards below) into a beautiful forty-acre bowl of native grasses bordered by scrub oak.
“Johnson’s Hole,” Sam says at the top of the treacherous trail. “Empty now, but homesteaded more than a century ago by early pioneers.”
It’s easier for me to nod than to use my lungs for speech. Notch one up for Sam.
“I’ve always been interested in places folks homesteaded and then abandoned,” Sam says as we ride on up the ridge. “Did they survive? Did they leave for a better place? Years ago, I was collecting algae from ultra-saline habitats at the north end of the Great Salt Lake. Along a lonesome dirt road was a brown-grey, disintegrating wooden slab home leaning east into four huge, half-dead cottonwood trees. An old-fashioned rose bush, still producing a few blossoms, slumped to each side of the front doorway. And in the middle of what used to be the front yard was a three-wheeled wagon, rusted, battered, apparently not worth taking with the family when they pulled stakes. Why? Did they lack room? Was the wagon too ‘used up’? I sat by the wagon to eat my lunch, a buzzard overhead. I found myself spinning the one wheel that was still mobile. Ever since, I have wondered about who and where the little girl is who had to leave her wagon, and, by god, I have longed to take her a new Radio Flyer ‘fat-tire’ and ask about her life.”
On our way down, I remind Sam that after his discourse on diatoms I was dumbfounded. “So I looked up the word ‘dumbfounded,’ I say.
“Where does the word come from?” Sam asks.
“It’s a marriage of the adjective ‘dumb’—unable to speak—and the verb ‘confound,’ which originally meant to throw into disorder. Learning new things makes me rethink old ideas and, for a blessed moment, I’m silent. Dumbfounded.”
8 March, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
Yesterday’s rain and snow are long gone by the time we reach the trail on this Monday afternoon. A new storm is blowing in from the south. Streaks of rain shroud Mt. Nebo. Utah Lake is troubled, a rumpled grey slate to the west. Far to the south, the sun breaks through and spotlights the valley floor. Sam gestures at the gully-slotted hillside: “Greys, browns, and yellows. Colors that match my mood over the last month—maybe my whole life. Did you see the Zigadenus paniculatus?”
“Huh?”
“Death camus, the spiky-leafed plant emerging in the middle of the trail.”
I had missed it—but, alerted to the possibility, I spy a second one thrusting its sharp leaves through the loose dirt of the trail.
“Zigadenus,” Sam says, “is in the family Liliaceae, the lilies. Most of the members of this family are non toxic and several are edible—onions and garlic, for example.”
“Why ‘death camus’?” I ask.
“The generic name,” Sam explains, “refers to the active agent, an alkaloid called zygadenine that makes this perhaps the second most poisonous plant in the west, after hemlock. It causes a quickening and irregularity of the heartbeat, slows respiration, and brings on convulsions, just like riding this damned trail does. Because it is one of the first plants to appear in the spring, livestock sometimes eat it. Lois Arnow, author of Flora of the Central Wasatch Front,
