pads made of salamander skin. “An ascomycete,” Sam observes. “It’s a beautiful little fungus related to the morels we could find here later. The fungal flora of Utah is not well known, and I don’t even know the genus of this beauty.” I’ll ask Larry St. Clair at BYU, one of my colleagues who has become an expert on fungi and lichens in the West.
Heading back down the trail, working our brakes now instead of our pedals, we hear unexpected voices. Two young bikers appear on the trail below us. We pull our bikes off the trail, respectful of the wheezing, perspiring, climbing riders. The scent of onion engulfs us. We’re standing in a patch of wild onions (Allium cepa)!
Having descended to the top of the final hill, an orchard stretching in orderly rows beneath us, deeply satisfied by this equinoctial adventure, we stand down and let the sun touch us. Sam’s body turns suddenly and I watch him listen intently. It comes again, the complex, liquid warble of a meadowlark (Sturnella neglecta). The lark, its fat yellow belly brilliant in the sun, perches on a tip of silver-green sage. It calls again and again, swelling and contracting with the effort. From an adjoining hill, another meadowlark answers, filling the draw with echoes as warm as the sunlight.
Sam’s standing form, silhouetted against the valley below, reminds me of early nineteenth-century paintings by Caspar David Friedrich. Responding to the new sense among German Romantics for the importance of the subject as it relates to objects of perception, Friedrich painted human figures from behind, their gazes turned to nature. “Nature,” Friedrich’s contemporary Schelling wrote, “is visible spirit, spirit is invisible nature.”
27 March, Orem, Utah
“Sam,” I say when he answers the phone, “the Salt Lake Observer’s out, and our first column shares the paper with Terry Tempest Williams’ ‘A Letter to Edward Abbey on the 10th Anniversary of His Death.’”
“You mean your first column,” Sam answers. “I’m glad none of my prose is up against Terry’s. There’s no way she’ll think I wrote any of that, is there?”
“Not a chance,” I reply. “She’s known you a long time. She knows you can’t put two sentences together. But get this, she tells Abbey things have changed since he died: “There is a new species that has inhabited Slickrock Country: Biker lycra siticus. It is everywhere on Porcupine Rim, White Rim, Slickrock, Sandpoint, the River Road, Behind the Rocks, wherever there is flat red rock or an incline or decline wide enough for a mountain bike’s tire, Biker lycra siticus is there.”
“Ah, shit,” Sam opines. “That’s a harsh judgment from a woman we’ve always been half in love with. Guess we’ll have to sell the bikes.”
“Maybe we’re different from the bikers she’s writing about,” I venture. “Maybe we ride more responsibly, more respectfully.”
“All I know,” Sam says before hanging up, “is that you’ll never see me in Lycra again. And I’m taking over half the column. This is too important to leave to your misperceptions and sorry lack of talent.”
28 March, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
The male boxelder trees (Acer negundo) are boldly in flower now, extruded stamens drooping conspicuously from long reddish pedicels. While we sit in the grass at the top of our lower loop, we notice several early grasshoppers. Last summer, following an extraordinary growth of yellow sweet clover, the grasshopper population exploded. The winter has been unusually mild. Grasshopper apocalypse approaching?
“Let’s do Frank,” Scott suggests, and we start up the unrelenting trail. We both make the early hills and are feeling good—small pleasures for half-grown children. As I approach the top of the second chute, an oak brush hand reaches out and grabs my bar-end and over I go. “Nice ride,” I tell Scott as he powers by. Farther up the trail, much farther than we expected to get today—a lot of snow has melted since last Sunday—we get off the bikes and walk among the naked scrub oak. “Oregon grape,” Scott shouts. “Isn’t March early for this?” He has discovered an entire hillside of Mahonia repens, thousands of yellow buds ready to burst into blossom and later make fruits that have long been important as native dyes.
I range across the hill, looking for the glacier lilies we ought to see here. Nothing. On the way back to the trail, however, I stumble across a single, elegant Dicentra uniflora—steershead. This unusual flower is pinkish white and really does look like the head of a lollygagging Jersey cow. It’s an unexpected and startling find, this single flower nestled among the resurrection green of a burgeoning hillside meadow. Scott has never seen a steershead, and bends over it enthusiastically, peering through his funny reading glasses.
I tell Scott I’ve been thinking about our earlier conversation about lumpers and splitters—and about ideologues. “I just reread your 1996 essay about BYU—“Clipped and Controlled.” You pointed out that, in his inaugural address, BYU president Merrill Bateman plagiarized his whole diatribe against moral relativism. You quoted him as saying that ‘If university scholars reject the notion of truth, there is no basis for intellectual and moral integrity…The university becomes a politicized institution that is at the mercy and whims of various interest groups’”
“He’s right,” Scott says. “If we have our way, the university will be at the mercy of immoral advocates of academic freedom. But enough of that. Let’s ride on up the hill.”
Spring beauties spread across whole meadows still matted from the snow. We ride higher and higher, wind through a still leafless maple grove, and halt where the trail cuts across the mountainside just before turning back into a series of final snow-packed switchbacks below the saddle between Little Baldy and Mount Timpanogos. Scott finds a bright yellow violet blooming on the trail, Nuttall’s violet, Viola nuttallii. After basking shirtless in the sun for a while, we swoop down the Great Western Trail, reveling in the precision of our fine machines and bursting with the magnificence of this mountain landscape.
30 March, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
All morning the sky has thickened and thinned with chasing clouds, an unsettled and unsettling day with moderate wind out of the north. “Must say this matches my mood,” Sam says. Timpanogos is veiled behind a thin white scrim of clouds. Colors today are heightened by patches of sunlight that race across meadows and up the slope of the mountain. Silhouetted against the slate-colored western sky, a dozen mule deer stand on the spine of the ridge, their enormous ears working the landscape of sound—elegant, rotating antennae scanning for danger. Standing for a moment to let our hearts slow down after what turned into a competitive sprint (Sam won, as he usually does), I spot blue flowers growing on the hillside. “Bluebells,” Sam reports. “Mertensia oblongifolia, perhaps. They’re in the borage family, related to forget me nots and hound’s tongue.”
Why do these deep blue flecks against a dark hillside have our hearts pounding again? Beauty may be the simplest answer. But why do we then stop and look into the blossom and count the stamens? Why do we speak to one another about this blossom? It’s because we want to know, I surmise. For a moment, this perfect natural thing overcomes our anger at the ongoing human destruction of the Earth. Good lord, these flowers are beautiful. And infinitely complex.
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