Wild Rides and Wildflowers. Scott Abbott
plant I have been trying to ignore all spring is abundant along the trail today—cheatgrass, Bromus tectorum. First named by Linnaeus from European specimens and first collected in Utah in 1894, this grass is native to Eurasia but is now widely distributed throughout the Americas. In our foothills and mountains, cheatgrass grows and sets seed early and turns reddish brown as it matures in the late spring and summer. Most hillsides in the west are abundant with cheatgrass, often a result of disturbance from livestock, which prefer native species until they are decimated. Look east to the Wasatch Range this summer, and the reddish cast you’ll notice on the hills is due to senescent cheatgrass. Some argue that it protects disturbed soils from erosion and has forage value for wildlife and livestock. While this is marginally true, cheatgrass is a miserable introduction that represents all that is problematic about exotic invaders.
Scott hears quail (Callipepla gambelii) chattering. Below us, high-pitched motors scream. Motorcycles, we think, or four-wheelers. But it’s worse than that. When we cross the last ditch, we see two men with chainsaws systematically felling the orchard we have ridden through for the past decade. Five rows of trees are already gone.
6 May, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
Five inches of wet snow yesterday morning, and this afternoon we are riding the Great Western Trail! I spent the morning at Utah Valley State College negotiating the details of a job and am full of the energy that comes from being wooed. Sam is quiet today. As co-founders of the BYU Chapter of the American Association of University Professors and as co-instigators of an AAUP investigation which determined that “at Brigham Young University infringements on academic freedom are distressingly common and the climate for academic freedom is distressingly poor,” we have worked together for over five years on academic freedom issues. It must seem to him like I’m a rat leaving a sinking ship.
“This almost didn’t come off,” I tell Sam. “You know the BYU retirement plan is a disaster unless you put in thirty years. With my eleven years, I’d walk away with nothing. I sat down with the academic vice president and laid out the problem: ‘I have a job offer I’d like to take, but I can’t leave BYU unless you give me a retirement package—a year’s salary added to my TIAA-CREF retirement account.’ He said they could come up with half of that, at most. ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I’ll have to stay here.’ After some overnight calculations, he offered me the whole amount. They’re damned happy to get rid of me.”
“I’m sure the feeling is mutual,” Sam surmises.
Back from the ride, remembering that Carl von Linnaeus first named cheatgrass, I pick up a new book by Linnaeus, edited by Wolf Lepenies. Not only did Linnaeus classify plants, he thought he could discern divinely guided patterns in human tragedy as well. In the collected accounts of what he called Nemesis Divina, he recounts this story:
Jacob of Saanas (community Stenbrohult in Smaland) lived badly with his wife. One Christmas (in my youth) as she wanted to walk over the ice to church, she breaks through the ice, holds on, 1/4 hour, to the edge of the ice with her hands, calls for help. Her husband stands on the bank, for it happened close to the yard, and says he doesn’t dare to venture out on the ice (because he would be happy to lose her). She drowns. Five years later Jacob’s fingers begin to rot, the fingers with which he could have helped his wife; and they continue to rot on both hands. Finally he dies of the disease.
Linnaeus collected hundreds of these stories, proof that GOD is watching you and will avenge. Our human obsession with meaning and order has a productive scientific component, but Linnaeus’s search for cosmic order also resulted in superstitious bullshit that is simply embarrassing. And psychologically unsettling. His Nemesis story feels like a metaphor, of sorts, for my own marriage. It has been a decade since our relationship settled into nothing but a shared concern for our children. We have been drowning one another in icy neglect and soul-rotting anger.
7 May, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
Today, the first fully open white flowers of death camas. In one inflorescence, we find a large, solid-red ladybird beetle. A scrub jay flashes blue as we ride past, scolding us harshly. These jays form long-term attachments between males and females and they have been observed to share lives with a third adult “helper” that aids in raising and protecting the young against predators. There’s a wide range, we note, of possible “natural” families.
“Let’s issue a ‘Proclamation to the World,’” Scott suggests. “A manifesto to rebut the Mormon one with that title that says the only natural family involves marriage between one heterosexual man and one heterosexual woman. Ours will argue that natural families are evolutionary experiments of the widest imaginable variety. We’ll make our case with science rather than theology.”
Butterflies are abundant again. I mention to Scott that identifying all of them is going to be difficult. “Why do we have to know or identify everything?” he asks. “For everything we know, there are fifty things we don’t.” His suggestion that we don’t have to identify them all is a momentary relief. But backing off that compulsion is not easy for a professor whose role in life is to have the answers.
9 May, Orem
“What a symphony of crickets,” Sam exclaims.
“What crickets?” I ask.
Last summer, Sam stopped suddenly and backed his bike away from a chunk of blue limestone. “What’s up?” I asked. “It’s a rattlesnake!” he said. “It’s buzzing like crazy. Back away.” I stepped off the bike the wrong way—toward the snake—and Sam said nonchalantly, “I’ll take good care of your bike after you die.” I eventually saw the snake, but I never did hear the high-pitched rattling. And now I can’t hear the crickets.
Faced with a steady decline of the various senses, it makes sense to start pairing up. Sam, for example, can protect me from rattlesnakes. And I see better than he does. It’s like the eighty-year-old man who announces his engagement to his friends. “Is she beautiful?” they ask. “No,” he answers. “Is she a good cook?” “Can’t cook a lick,” he says. “Is she nice to you?” “Not especially.” “So why are you getting married?” “She can drive at night,” he explains.
11 May, Teasdale, Wayne County, Utah
Last night was cold and cloudy. Nanc and I wake to a dusting of snow across the sage and piñon landscape. On Thousand Lake Mountain to the north and the Boulder to the south, lava flows are accented by the new snow, and the reds and yellows of the Mesozoic rocks have been delicately frosted. As we stretch awake in the thin and melancholy blue and orange light, fourteen deer cross a hundred yards in front of us after a night of good food in the alfalfa fields east of Teasdale.
There are robins here, several sparrows, an American kestrel, a few mountain bluebirds, a red-winged blackbird, two starlings, and several common ravens. I don’t agree there is much common about the raven. These birds (Corvus corax) are very smart—some say as smart as a good dog. They apply logic to problem solving and seem to be constantly running a con or just playing for the hell of it. A couple of years ago I stood at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon at sunset and watched a raven rise a thousand feet above the rim, fold its wings, fall like a bullet below the rim, catch itself, and start over again.
14 May, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
The day began with neon and ended with iridescence.
My eighth-grade son, Ben, appeared this morning wearing a neon-green shirt and bright purple pants and left home fifteen minutes before the bus was due. “My friend and I have to coordinate outfits,”