rule? Frustrations spawned by our own inadequacies will quickly engulf us. Unfulfilled desires will return before the evening is through. Newspaper headlines will provoke anger or despair. But for this moment, in this moment, we stand fulfilled by perfection of nature.
On the way down from the top of Frank, we ease past a small herd of elk drifting down through the oak brush—dark shadows against the white, barkless hearts of oaks stripped by the fire that swept these hillsides two years ago. In today’s patchy light, the mountainside alternates between muted greens and greys. When we reach the overlook at the canyon’s mouth, Utah Lake is again a disturbed dark slate to the west, silvered in places where the sun slants through a heavy western sky.
“The color of steel,” Sam muses.
“Bad metaphor,” I say. “The Geneva Steel Plant is a polluting cancer on the lakeshore.”
“Pewter,” Sam says. “A pewter lake.”
5 April, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
It’s Monday afternoon and we haven’t ridden since last Tuesday. Timpanogos is pristine under the brilliant white blanket of snow that was our April-fools’ surprise. Banks of grey and black clouds scallop the sky. A cold wind blows from the south. We head toward the canyon wearing the tights and wicking underwear and vests and gloves we thought we had put away for the season.
At the canyon’s mouth, a harsh, descending kreeeeeeer draws our eyes skyward. Two red-tailed hawks (Buteo jamaicensis) circle just above us, calling, diving, swinging up, diving, hanging motionless against the canyon wind, playing the mating game so precious and familiar to living beings. While neither of us can dance in the sky, we understand the mating dance and have done our best, each in his own way, to perfect it.
As we pedal along, I tell Sam that BYU decided yesterday not to retain a Jewish colleague because members of the Board of Trustees were afraid that, with only 98% of the faculty as practicing Mormons, we were in grave danger of becoming a secular university. “Arkady told me it was no big deal. He was used to being kicked out of Russian universities for being a Jew.”
“Arkady Weintraub,” Sam says. “One of the best math pedagogues in the world. Why do we keep working for these guys? You remember the Christmas fiasco when Ernest Wilkinson, the President of BYU at the time, wrote his own self-congratulatory history of the university and gave it out instead of the customary turkey? Someone renamed the book Mein Kampus and figured that the sequel ought to be called Free Agency: And How to Enforce It.”
I remind Sam that the title of my essay, “Clipped and Controlled,” was a quotation from the grounds-crew mission statement. “It felt like sphincters were tightening all around. Why do we work for these guys? Remember the dean who said you had been seen in the bookstore wearing shoes without socks, a clear violation of the BYU dress code?”
“Sure do,” Sam smiles. “I told him I had been wearing pantyhose. And when the same poor guy called me in to say students complained when I swore in class, I answered repentantly: ‘Sorry, Dean. I’m so sorry. I really fucked up. And, by god, it won’t happen again.’ Many deans, it turns out, don’t realize that swearing is a disciplinary requirement meant to supplement the precise descriptions and Latin names we use professionally. When I was still a graduate student, my thesis advisor, recently returned from military service, told me about a lunch with a visiting expert who had come to help determine the location of some very important fossil plants and who was looking to donate some money to BYU. My advisor absent-mindedly said, ‘please pass the horsecock…Oh my goodness, I sure fucked up there.’ Didn’t faze the donor a bit.”
A blue bird brings our attention back to the here and now. Seeing only the first flash of blue, we anticipate a mountain bluebird. When the bird alights atop the scrub oak just below us, we note its elongated head, long round beak, long tail, and large size. A scrub jay, Aphelocoma californica. The bird’s eyes flash as it looks us over—two scrub bikers.
7 April, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
We set off under a darkening sky. Halfway up Frank, Sam bends over the bluebells, none the worse for their blanket of snow. “There are maybe five species of these along the Wasatch Front,” he tells me, examining the center of the flower, “with an additional species occurring south of here. Two of these, Mertensia brevistyla and Mertensia oblongifolia are perhaps most common. They are quite similar, differing mostly by fine characteristics of the flower, including the length of the style, the elongated structure between the stigma and ovary. This one is short-styled, it’s Mertensia brevistyla, the Wasatch bluebell.”
At the mouth of the canyon, the storm whipping in from the southwest strikes us head on. With sleet dripping from my exultant face and a wide stripe of sop up my back, bucking, slipping, and sliding down the final knife edge ridge, I hear snatches of song behind me: “Amazing grace…sweet…wretch like me…” It’s Sam, celebrating the wonderfully depraved human condition and the splendor of our wild ride.
10 April, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
It doesn’t take long to reach snow, so we ride toward the mouth of the canyon along the dirt road built to service the big green aqueduct that has radically changed the region’s ecosystems by shifting the flow of water. We get off our bikes to sit on a sunny rock and watch a flock of robins.
“Turdus migratorius,” Sam notes. “The common robin. It’s odd that we learn to consider these wonderfully sonorous, brilliantly colored birds common. Perhaps it’s the old story of familiarity and contempt. Were we careful and attentive enough, familiarity would deepen our awe. That, of course, is the guiding principle of our daily rides up and down the same trail: meaning arises out of thoughtful repetition.”
My attempt to see the large orange breasted birds with new eyes is cut short by a fleck of purple on the hillside next to my rock. It’s a tiny, five-petaled flower rising on a long stem out of a cluster of even tinier leaves. Alongside the flower, a single distinctive fruit gives the plant its common name: storksbill. Sam confirms my assessment: “Yes, it’s storksbill. I’ve been expecting it all spring, a geranium, Erodium cicutarium. It is thought to have been introduced from Europe, though that’s something of a mystery since it was noted in the west by Fremont as early as 1844.”
12 April, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
We turn up Frank with some trepidation. It has been two weeks since we tried this upper section of the Great Western Trail, and at our age, muscles seem to atrophy overnight. Mine, in fact, are not quite up to the first steep corner. From where my head has struck the ground, I’m face to face with unfamiliar brilliant yellow flowers at the end of horizontal stems that snake through last year’s dry grass. A pair of cupped bracts frames each blossom like the frills on an exotic lizard. “I’m stumped,” Sam admits while I dust myself off. “Let me do a little research.” He tucks a piece of the plant into his shorts pocket.
Near the top of Frank, we spot a white patch across a gully on a south-facing slope and step off our bikes. When the patch turns slightly and catches the late-afternoon sun broadside, we recognize it as a venerable elk, white-sided and black-caped. It steps back into the oak brush, joining two smaller darker elk, and together they high-step to the top the hill and disappear.
On the way down, we stop to watch an orange-breasted bird with a black head and white slashes on its wings and tail: a Bullock’s oriole, Icturus bullockii.
13 April, Orem, Utah
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