Wild Rides and Wildflowers. Scott Abbott
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.
Our children will worry us again when we return home. What future will they have in an overpopulated world where greed is the 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,