Wild Rides and Wildflowers. Scott Abbott

       29 April, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos

      Sam’s in New York City for a conference on biodiversity, so I’m riding by myself today. My mood is tending to a not unpleasant melancholy when a skunk (Mephitis mephitis) ambles out from behind some rabbit brush next to the trail. Its small head swings around, its tail swings around, I swing around. The skunk makes its way back into the brush with an undulating gait that makes the white stripes on either side of its fat back ripple like waves.

      I ride out of the canyon ahead of a rain squall. The air above the river is alive with swallows. I stand and watch the long forked tails open and shut like scissors as the agile birds fly jagged lines from insect to insect. They are barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) with red-orange chests and dark heads and backs, recently back from Argentina. How is that possible?

      I’ve been jealous of Sam’s reference library, so today I bought Weeds of the West, now in its 5th edition. What is a weed? the authors ask. “A plant that interferes with management objectives for a given area of land at a given point in time.” The Mormons who settled the Great Basin believed God wanted them to make “the desert blossom like a rose.” This meant that many native desert plants became weeds. Similarly, Sam and I have become weeds at BYU. My plan to help educate my fellow Mormons hasn’t worked out, I think. Somehow, the expansive theology behind the church university (“the glory of God is intelligence”) has given way to doubts about free inquiry and demands for absolute obedience.

      My thought turns to my brother John. He grew up Mormon, went to BYU, served a mission in Italy, trained as a chef, and then came out as gay. Talk about interference with LDS management objectives! He lived in near exile from the family until he died of complications related to AIDS. In 1995, four years after John’s death, the Church released a statement on the family. “Gender,” they proclaimed, “is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.” From this premise, and from the commandment to “multiply and replenish the earth,” they argued that marriage should be heterosexual and that John was thwarting God’s plan. As a professor at BYU, I have been lending my name to a religion that denigrates my brother and others like him. That can’t continue.

      1 May, New York City (by email)

      Scott—the New York biodiversity conference is good. Plenty of folks who know what they are talking about are discussing worldwide biodiversity loss. On a global basis, habitat loss or damage is the most important factor causing the loss of native species. Second is the invasion of exotic species. These two are related, since exotic species often invade areas with degraded habitat. Global or local, the perturbations are the same.

      In Utah, we have had a century and a half of habitat destruction. Livestock overgrazing and mismanagement are among the top causes. Even many years after livestock are removed, their impact remains, including soil erosion by wind and water, stream gullying, degraded water quality in our streams and lakes, the loss of wildlife, and the loss of native plant species. Many of the invasive exotics are well suited for life in disturbed habitats. For example, they often tolerate reduced or periodic moisture, infertile and compacted soils, high soil temperatures, and so forth. Many reproduce rapidly and produce copious seeds. Furthermore, such plants are often more resistant to the various local pathogens and pests that have evolved with native species. All in all, invasive species are scrappy and tolerant of a wide variety of ecological conditions. In undisturbed habitats, exotic species have a harder time. There simply is less room for them, fewer open niches. So, the trick to saving native species is to protect native habitats. And in order to protect habitat, we need to have a close look at grazing management in the West. There are some places, including much of the Colorado Plateau, where livestock should not graze.

       2 May, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos

      Hoping the trail will have dried off after three days of rain, I head off for a Sunday ride, alone again. Sam’s not back from New York. Low on the mountain, I spot the first paintbrush on the slope this spring—Castilleja miniata. Its muted red-orange bracts cum flowers are the perfect complement to the silver-green, three-toothed leaves of Artemisia tridentata, the sage growing next to it. The paintbrush is semi-parasitic, living in part from water and nutrients it draws from sage roots. Near the paintbrush, the small yellow flowers of another three-toothed plant: bitterbrush, Purshia tridentata.

      I think about my family as I ride. They are in church this morning. For more than four decades, I have attended church every Sunday, happy to be there, grateful for the company of people trying to improve themselves and determined to serve one another. I paid a generous tithing. I observed the “Word of Wisdom”: no smoking, no tea or coffee, and no alcoholic drinks. But last year, when the BYU Board of Trustees announced a new policy that required a bishop’s certification that faculty were obeying those commandments, I balked at the requirement. Unless my bishop certifies my worthiness, I’ll lose my job. I know myself well enough to predict I won’t succumb to coercion. What I don’t know is where this will lead. Today it has led me to the mountain.

      I climb past bur buttercup, spring parsley, Wasatch bluebells, Oregon grape, storksbill, loco weed, sweet vetch, phlox, leafy spurge, larkspur, Nuttall’s violet, and spring beauty before I see the next new flower: ballhead waterleaf, Hydrophyllum capitatum. The golf-ball-sized sphere of tiny lavender flowers bristles with stamens and stigmas. High on the mountain, my legs showing signs of palsy, I come across some kind of composite, a sunflower-like flower. Its silver-green, arrow-shaped leaves help me identify it as arrowleaf balsamroot, Balsamorhiza sagittata.

      Hell, maybe I can do without an accompanying botanist.

       5 May, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos

      I’ve been off my bike for a week in Mexico and a week in New York. I was nervous about riding with Scott, figuring he’d be poised to demoralize me on the trail. Fortunately for me, Scott is feeling dreamy today. He has just been offered a job at Utah Valley State College and is full of the possibilities.

      Sitting in the meadow, Scott wonders aloud what it would be like to teach at a place where you were rewarded, rather than punished, for pushing the limits of the known and accepted, for arguing against the status quo, for questioning political and religious certainties. “What will it be like,” he asks, “to