Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Canyonlands, Utah

Just returned from Canyonlands with Gary, my husband, and my 13 year old girl Lilly, ten other teens, and something like nine other adults. A Unitarian tribe in the desert. When we weren't hiking, collapsed in camp chairs or cooking, I climbed the rocks around our group site, Wooden Shoe, and holed up to write.

Woke up before dawn the last day and hiked out alone, jacket over loose pajamas in the blue air. The tents look like flags, blue and yellow and red scattered through the Wooden Shoe site. Such silence. An owl calls from the giant juniper, a tree twisted up from roots perhaps six hundred years old, standing over our red, green and yellow plastic tents scattered around the canyon bottom. Owls sound different in the enormous emptiness of Canyonlands, real loud, more gutteral, urgent like the throb of a guitar.

Up, over and across the road, right next to our dry wash, I find another canyon full of water, with one standing pool, tepid, somewhat smelly. But water! Stands of emerald green cottonwoods; masses of yellow rabbitbrush in full bloom; bright autumn Indian paintbrush, one of three paintbrush species here, that blooms with lemon lime spikes that shoot out past the red flowers. An explosion of lavender in thousands of bachelor buttons, which seem to be putting on a gala this year, among foot-tall handfuls of chocolate sunflowers, and a smoldering yellow-red species that resembles gaillardia. Bushes of smoky green four-wing saltbrush so thick I can't get around them.

Gary taught me that term yesterday, carefully prying open the saltbush leaves with his long fingers to show me the wings. He's a big guy, 6'6", ex-basketball player, but always gentled by nature, with a scientist's care and love of the Lillliputian. Was somewhat hard to leave his warm body curled up in the tent.

A whole field of green-yellow grasses are pressed down, a swamp that looks as if elephants had laid here. If not the grasses or the rock, where to step, to avoid the biotic soil fissioning up here like tiny black-towered cities? If I come back in ten years, my footprint will likely still be here. Crossing down to the canyon bottom through a wash, the light slowly coming up overhead, white sandstone turning yellow, I find small hoofprints of a herd in the wet sand. Everything adapts, so the deer, like the desert coyotes, might be smaller here too. There's one pinon three times the size of those I know in the high deserts of Colorado, and so I squat underneath to finger the emptied piles of cones.

Pinon used to be called "salt cedar," and in this moist canyon the tree smells deeply of that rich wood. Pinon jays filled the air yesterday, flocking around the trees, and last night we listened to a short, grave-faced ranger with greying tufts at his ears, pointing out to Squaw Flats in the campfire light, describe how the jays can tell by tapping the cone with their beaks if it's rotten, or partially or fully full of nuts. He sounded like an ex-professor but seemed like a wondering wanderer. The jay knows a lot, he said. And went on to tell of how the jay can store up to 60 nuts in a pouch in its throat, how one bird can bury 33,000 pine nuts in a season, or a flock up to 4.5 million pine nuts. They bury them all over the place, in handy sites.

I thought of all the pine nuts that must be buried in Canyonlands, and throughout the Western deserts. Unfathomable. A pound of pinon pine nuts equals a one-pound steak in protein, something I need to tell my newly vegan son, away at college, cooking happily on his pocket rocket stove in his beat-up climbing clothes. And the cracked shells of pinon nuts have been found at every archeological site in North America, so they've been traded and eaten for a while.


Could any of the first American tribes been vegan? C'est possible, non? So much endless speculation on how Indian rituals and art bridge the worlds between eating non-humans and communicating with the soul of plants and animals. But maybe, unbeknownst to us, there was a little movement with its own crowd of followers, an inner group that declared it would not longer eat any kind of meat.

I sit down on a bench up just above the treetops and try to meditate as the warm red light floods the Needles and the immense towers all around light up like fire, but it's impossible to close my eyes. Good God, you can't write, or meditate, only be here. We came here with the kids nine years ago, when we first moved from Oregon to Colorado, to do a backpacking trip, and when I got home I wrote Ursula Le Guin to ask if she'd ever been to Canyonlands, a place I couldn't even describe. Her postcard back was reassuring (The Great Mother, or the Unking, as we called her): yes, she'd been here, but hadn't written about it either. She said, "Words shrank it."

On with the impossible, then.

From my tiny perch in these vast phantasmagoria the eons of rock look poured, shaped in staggering turrets, arches, pinnacles, long-backed fins, steeples and tiny swirls of red Dairy queen cones and fidgety funny little top-knots of sandstone that make me think of Jane Eyre. ("All these topknots must come off.") I find all the West phenomenal and endlessly full of surprises, but what I love most about Canyonlands is how the trees and vegetation grow up out of the armpits, potholes, cracks and scooped-out shells of sandstone. (Yesterday, hiking over miles of slickrock, suddenly I went up a few feet of "steps"and came face to face with an enormous pinon juniper, curled into a huge sandstone bowl. A Zen master couldn't have arranged it better.)

The dark forest greens glow from the orange and red, make this otherworld country feel eerily like home. The rock rhymes with the trees, the trees -- as the ranger-professor explained -- breathe out water, transpire, keep the rock agile, from the tiny tap root of the tall cottonwood to the huge roots of the pinon juniper and pine. These, by the way, are more than half of the tree's mass, invisible underground, connecting under this rock, this damp clay earth as I make a way back through the field, where the water has pooled up and trickles of the canyon wren songs are starting to bounce through the walls, and I head over towards the dry canyon, a stone's throw across the road, two canyons in the thousands of canyons, so utterly different, nestled one against the other.

Still thinking about the trees and the ranger talk. It's thought that the puebloan tribes that were here until 1300, and the people in Chaco Canyon (where, I remember, many of the beams are still holding) cut down all the pinon and juniper, which took centuries to grow back, and -- yet another of the myriad swirling theories -- they left because they'd cut down all the trees and had to travel many miles to bring in wood. It should not comfort me, but does, that the tribes, who lived every breath in this land, may have made the same mistakes we've made in cutting down 98% of our old growth. Juniper especially resists rot, and both woods, when you hold a chunk of them in your hand, are extraordinarily hard, and almost unimaginably fragrant. Irresistible. Their foilage was boiled as medicine for stomachaches, eyesores, a long list of stuff, every part of the tree used, I think, to eat, drink, take in, its very soul.

The feeling I have in the great stillness of these canyons is of being part of something near and incomprehensible. We write what we know, Grace Paley said, about what we don't know, and I've just gotten a whiff of how these dark green trees, which are almost like stains against the massive rock, hold the very air, sandstone, and my own body. White morning clouds are blowing over the varnished black lips of the red canyon. To sustain something is to hold it.

Monday, September 15, 2008