a letter to the editor defending us. Get this:
I would like to remind Terry Tempest Williams and Scott Abbott, both of whom I consider friends, and the mountain-biking, botanizing Sam Rushforth, that Ed Abbey had a mountain bike. He rode a red one in the ‘80’s, while he was holed up at Pack Creek Ranch writing his fat masterpiece, The Fool’s Progress. I even remember a photo of him astride it, replete with his shit-eating grin. After observing mountain bikes and their damage, near Arches, Wendell Berry remarked that riding mountain bikes is ‘a hell of a lot of work to go to, just to give your ass a ride.’”
“So Wendell Berry doesn’t like us either. This is no vindication.”
“Sure it is,” Sam explains. “We’re okay as long as we ride with shit-eating grins, which come natural to us. But get a load of this second letter:
Dear Editor, I can’t believe you let Sam and Scott misspell camas (‘death camus’) numerous times. It wrecks their credibility and yours. The column they write is interesting to me. People are trying to extend the Great Western Trail in Cache County, and I worry about Terry Tempest Williams’ “bikers lycra siticus”—people who zip by the botanical beauty without seeing it. Now I know some see it, but I hope they do their homework next time before they write it in the paper. Star Coulbrooke of Smithfield, Utah
“Abbott, what happened? You misspelled the word in the first draft, and I corrected it. How the hell did it get back to the French existentialist?”
“Sam, I saw your correction when I was going through the final draft, but I changed it back. Must have been a subconscious indication of how I view your intelligence, or maybe the “death” part of the name triggered the existential part of my brain.”
“Brain?” Sam replies. “Camus’ fiction is much scarier to me than death camas. Remember that last sentence from The Plague: ‘…the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good’? In any case, we’ll have to thank Star for pointing out our mistake and you’ll have to promise not to amend botany with philosophy in the future.”
14 April, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
For the first time in too many days, we’re able to climb back up to where we saw the steershead. Although there is still a lot of snow, that particular south-facing slope is dry. The yellow flowers of Oregon grape are everywhere. Nuttall’s yellow violets are plentiful. Spring beauties are recovering from two weeks under the snow. But we can’t find the little steershead. Its elusiveness today reminds us that we were lucky.
“Scott,” I say as we sit on a sunny hillside, “the other day I was talking about wilderness with Jim Harris, Dean of Science at Utah Valley State College. ‘More and more,’ he said, ‘wilderness for me is about small wild places, even wild moments, rather than wilderness designated on maps.’ Jim is one of Utah’s strongest wilderness advocates. But he also understands that along with designated wilderness we must have wild hearts if wilderness is to survive. I think that there are places along our stretch of the Great Western Trail that are wild in every way imaginable.”
We ride on up the trail and stand finally in a two-acre swale that burned hard two years ago. Skeletons of Gambel oak skirt the trail, ten feet tall, crooked-branched, silhouetted against the eastern sky. At the feet of fire-blackened trunks, hundreds of root sprouts have erupted, some of them already several feet tall, their leaf-buds swelling. In the crook of a dark oak branch, last year’s hummingbird nest is perfection in miniature, a soft bed of woven yellow grasses for tiny hummers.
On the way down, we are forced to slow at a dangerous curve made even more difficult by horse traffic in mud. Scott notices a flash of blue and we skid to a stop. An early larkspur, Delphinium species, unexpected at this time of year. “Another plant dangerous for livestock,” I tell Scott. “Early settlers used a tincture of delphinine to eliminate lice. The name Delphinium comes from a Greek story about a dead fisherman carried to shore by a dolphin and then restored to life as a flower the color of the sea with a bud shaped like a dolphin carrying a load on its back. Some Greek looked closely and named the flower after the shape of the bud—as did some English speaker who was more partial to larks than to dolphins. And now you and I are telling our own stories about flowers, by damn.”
“Stories deeply colored by the Greeks and Romans,” Scott replies. “Stories guided by Thoreau and Goethe, by your botany textbooks, and by the fact of growing up white and male and Mormon in the mountain west. Are we telling stories or are the stories telling us?”
“You’re talkin’ like a book, Abbott,” I say. “Let’s drop the bullshit and see if we can get off the mountain alive.”
15 April, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
Taxes due tonight. I tell Sam I generally like the feeling of being a productive citizen of this country, but the idea of writing a check today to a government that will use it, however indirectly, to drop bombs on people I care for in Belgrade pisses me off.
We ride slowly in the canyon, limestone cliffs protecting us a bit from the cold wind blowing from the northwest. The sun warms our backs. A red-tailed hawk hovers above us, a lethal living presence that disappears as suddenly as it appeared. We get off the bikes to watch a swarm of black butterflies swirling around a maple tree just starting to bud. A hillside blooms with hundreds of bluebells: blue bluebells, lavender bluebells, pink bluebells. Walking among them, we raise the scent of wild onions. Mule deer watch us from above and below, their scruffy grey-brown winter coats sloughing off to reveal slick brown undercoats. We engage in a pleasant and desultory conversation. A fat ground squirrel scuttles down from a high perch in a dead tree. We lie on a grassy hillside and soak up the sun.
War rages in what was once Yugoslavia.
16 April, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
Scott and I are both on edge today, worries about children the immediate cause. He’s got seven, I’ve got four. How the hell did that happen? Slipping gears on my bike feel like a metaphor. While I have tried to be a fine father, it is perhaps difficult beyond my abilities. We exchange stories, express concern, venture the only advice we can muster: they have to live their own lives. Small comfort.
A purple flower rising above wrinkled silver-green leaves changes our focus. Locoweed, the year’s first Astragalus. “This is a difficult genus,” I tell Scott. “Stan Welsh, the world’s expert on these plants, recognizes over 110 species and many varieties of Astragalus in Utah. We are going to tear our hair over these before the year is over. Today’s plant is most likely Astragalus utahensis, variously known as Utah milkvetch, early locoweed, or lady’s slipper.”
“I never had a botany class,” Scott breaks in. “How the hell do botanists deal with so many names for the same plant?”
“Naming,” I reply, “is a tricky business. Each member of the Earth’s biota is formally named using a Latinized binomial—the genus and species names. It’s a system devised by Carl von Linné, or Linnaeus. Any plant (or animal) may have a whole slew of common names and these often vary locally. But the Latin name is constant and must be used in scientific studies. Formal rules exist to name a species, and they are
