What Would Ruess Do? The uncertain fate of desert streams

I can’t think of many things that are more beautiful than the autumn sunlight as it plays off of sandstone.  All the harshness of the sun’s blazing summer self has faded as it makes its way across the narrow piece of sky I can see from the bottom of the Paria Canyon. On this late October day I scamper higher up the wall, following the sun like a lizard.

I have just been dropped off by the horse packer, Justin, a cowboy out of Cedar City, Utah who packs people and gear into the wilderness for a living as well as occasionally driving cows between the high and low country for his family’s livestock operation.  Today he carried the food and gear for our Grand Canyon Trust volunteer crew to spend a week in the depths of the Paria Canyon killing invasive tamarisk trees.  We got five miles in where the canyon narrows to less than 20 feet wide before we encountered the first chest-deep pool—remnants of a mid-September flood that scoured out several like it, making the task at hand slightly more daunting. 

During our ride I discover that Justin is yet another soul who would relish in the death of this greedy tree who has achieved dominance over the majority of our desert streams.  I also sense a quiet fervor for wilderness and cottonwood trees as he talks about the places he works—Kanab Creek, the Virgin River, the Paria. I suppose it isn’t that hard to become passionate about desert streams. The fact is they are pure magic. They are havens from the harsh, dusty desert teaming with life. Today I encountered a tarantula, a hawk clutching its prey, a floating chipmunk, and a sphinx moth larvae chewing on a sacred datura plant.  When you consider the rustling of cottonwood leaves as their goldenness sparkles against the breeze then you understand why some of us will go to great lengths to remove tamarisk from the picture. Luckily we are not alone.  There are many who are willing to sign on for a week of hard labor in exchange for wildness, beauty, fellowship and food.

My thoughts lead me to the lonesome vagabond life of young Everett Ruess, who traveled these very canyons with his two burros. He explored many beautiful places that he did “not wish to taste, but to drink deep.” He lived a life in search of beauty, only to be swallowed by the vast landscape of southern Utah never to be seen again.  The recent discovery of remains near Bluff, Utah was thought to be those of Ruess, but more extensive analysis has refuted earlier DNA evidence.

Part of me is comforted by the abiding mystery of his death. I feel a certain strange comfort knowing that it was possible to disappear and never be found, that such wilderness existed. And it makes me wonder if a person could still meet the same unresolved ending in this same somewhat less wild landscape.  Had he lived, Ruess would be 94 years old today and witnessed startling changes in the land he loved. What would he have to say about tamarisk?  Would he take up a saw in defense of his beloved declining desert streams?

I think he is lucky to have missed out on the last 75 years of “progress” in the West.  Sure, we love our Ipods, and vehicles can get us where we want to go, but I hear him even today, arguing for the music of a trickling stream. In the last letter Ruess wrote to his brother, dated November 11, 1934 he wrote: “I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities." 

Justin said it best as we ambled deeper into the Paria Canyon, as he looked back at his pack horses, loaded with food and a 5-gallon bucket that serves as our leave-no-trace toilet.  “Heck, we got all that we need right here.” 

Indeed, we do.

Rancho Conitaca Ruiz: The Gift of the Pig

When my sister Kelly invited me to a Valentine’s Day pig roast in Sonora, Mexico, my curiosity peaked. The idea was initiated last year when Kelly visited her Tucson friend and neighbor, Marcelo’s rancho in Imuris, Mexico and was gifted a pig for helping to construct a corral, but also because he understands that she is a huge fan of pork. So when Kelly’s cochi came to the end of his time on this earth, a multi-national fiesta ensued south of the border with a wild gathering of gringos and local Mexican ranchers.

Rancho Conitaca Ruiz was named in honor of Marcelo’s mother’s childhood ranch in Sinaloa. Mexico.  Marcelo was born and grew up in Tucson spending the summers on his grandparent’s ranch there. He purchased the rancho in Imuris so his two young sons would also have a chance to grow up and experience the traditions of ranch life in Mexico. His grandmother taught him about the gift of the pig and now he too is able to pass it on.

The butchering of the cochi took the better part of the first day and was carried out by a cadre of neighborhood ranchers, Tecates in hand. Three of the four ranchers are named Jesus, and all three go by “Chuy” for short. We learned to distinguish the Chuys by age, dress and demeanor. Then there was José Angel, a weathered yet spry cowboy whose easy smile is framed by several missing teeth.

When the hard work was finished the only evidence of the barnyard cochi was a pile of hair-stained blood on the ground as the animal was scattered between large cook pots and coolers filled with body parts. When the ranchers bemoaned the lack of a horseshoe game one of the gringas assuaged them with her knife throwing set. “Isn’t that a little dangerous?” they asked as sharp knives hurled headlong at a wood fence post. Meanwhile Doña Alma, another neighbor, orchestrated the rest of the gringas in the task of chopping cabbage, radish, onion, and cilantro for the garnishes while she stewed a big pot of posolé over an open fire in the kitchen.

The sun sank low on the horizon, casting long shadows along the fallow pastures and igniting the clouds in shades of fuchsia and vermillion. Outside the smell of carnitas marinated in the crooked hat Chuy’s secret Sinaloan recipe cooking over an open fire in a gigantic copper pot filled the evening air. At first, communication across our language barrier was difficult, yet as the night wore on beer, knives, food and music became the universal language. The song “De Colores,” was well received and soon enough the Mexicanos were calling for an encore performance of “Wagon Wheel.”

José Angel became enamored with Kelly’s friend Jill when we went on a late night town run for beer, cigarettes and candles. He was in awe of the way she commanded her 4-wheel drive pickup truck, negotiating the rugged dirt roads and stream crossings at high speed. At the liquor store we all took turns posing with the life size tequila bottle donned with a bumper sticker that read: “Boot Bush.”

As our last night at the ranch wore down, fueled by bacanora, the local moonshine tequila, the women took turns dancing around the fire with José Angel, whose 18-year old white horse was tied up to the bumper of the truck, ready for the ride home under the stars. Banda music from Sinaloa blasted from the open cab, songs filled with melancholy lyrics and the soulful cries of trumpets.

This pig represents a great gift, an offering shared across borders, a connection that is that is extended not just to Kelly and her gringo friends, but also throughout the food chain including those who helped care for, butcher and feed us the pig. Marcelo is in a position where he can afford to share with his neighbors, but many of them are not so lucky. Yet Marcelo will continue to struggle with the fact that since his sons are not Mexican citizens they cannot inherit Rancho Conitaca Ruiz and could lose their tenuous ties to Mexico in the future.

In the name of homeland security we continue to build fences along a 2,000-mile artificial border that has been crossed freely by humans and animals for several thousand years, before policies and fear separated us. Despite the fence, we felt the generous spirit of Mexico in the sharing of food and culture. I am ashamed that U.S. immigration policies only allow for this intercambio to be a one-way exchange. The loss is ours.

Time and Loss: A tangled story

When I first landed in the southwest it was for an internship at Canyon de Chelly National Monument. I was twenty-one year-old East Coast white girl stepping for the first time on the dusty red soil of the Navajo Reservation. I lived alone in the park campground in a doublewide trailer, in a yard crowded with tumbleweed skeletons. I had a pair of cowboy boots, a bicycle, and $50 in my pocket. 

“Shawna Tso” befriended me and became the closest thing I had to family at that time in my life. Shawna was a butch lesbian Navajo guide at Canyon de Chelly. She wore a Redskins baseball hat with an eagle feather affixed to the top that flickered and twirled in the wind. She was a husky woman, with an ample chest, and when she laughed, her entire body shook with the tremors of it.

My first week at the visitor center, I confided in her that I was nervous about giving an interpretive talk about the hogan because I had never actually been inside a traditional Navajo home.  I felt like a complete fraud. Later that day Shawna took me to her hogan, built by her grandmother, and shared with me all she knew about the traditions.  Over the course of our friendship she told me many stories behind the rock spires, alcoves and mesas, bringing the landscape to life. She taught me how to express exasperation in Navajo in one catchy phrase ”Ya-de-la!”.  She shared the secrets of throwing a rope, dancing the two-step, and navigating two feet of reservation mud in a two-wheel drive pickup.

Shawna was my Navajo superhero, and perhaps elevating her to that level left her nowhere to go but crashing down.  Shawna’s problems were very real.  She was a high school drop out who had been in and out of jail.  She was a victim of abuse who self-medicated with alcohol, the very elixer that fueled her brawls with loved ones. Despite the darkness, her light shone bright enough for me to recognize her as my mentor, a sage and—at times—a prophet. Shawna balanced precariously on the edge of her culture never appearing to care whether she fit in. I admired her sense of freedom. 

           

Sixteen years later I am looking at a photograph of Shawna taken a month before she died. Her face appears twisted and swollen with a lifetime of pain. I notice the red scars on her neck where her mother tried to strangle her as a baby. I wish in vain to smooth the rough spots, to make her laugh.

She died from a stroke on the first day of this year. I was never able to say goodbye. Now I am left to unravel the tangled story of a friendship that ended 10 years ago late one night when she busted into a downtown Flagstaff house that I shared with roommates.  She was on a bender, rolling through town. At that moment she seemed indistinguishable from the drunks that roamed the streets of our neighborhood, only she was calling my name.

In the end I wasn’t able to watch her drink her pain away and hurt the ones she loved so fiercely. I cannot understand why it was difficult to reconcile Chinle and Flagstaff; two worlds that each shaped large parts of who I am today. The shame of turning away from Shawna has infused me with a streak of darkness that is mine alone to carry.

When I returned to Chinle after her death I saw the way time has played out on people’s faces, including my own. I was overwhelmed by the connection I felt to the landscape and those who remembered me despite all the years that have passed. I witnessed the loved ones she hurt the most, her girlfriend and her daughter, struggling to reconcile their loss swinging on a pendulum between courage and quiet despair.

Tumbleweeds spin cartwheels across the desert plain and come to rest along the fence margins. We leave Shawna’s grave, a fresh mound of burnt orange soil covered in plastic flowers, surrounded by so much emptiness. The spring parsley flowers push up through the cracks in an unforgiving landscape. I imagine that these tender flowers are tiny offerings of hope, beacons of beauty pushing though the impossible, inpenetrable grief.  I wish for them to survive.

The World at Fifteen Miles Per Hour

When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.  ~H.G. Wells

How many of you can remember the moment your mom or dad let go of your bike seat and you were riding for the first time, completely free? For many of us, our bicycle was the first major step in our independence.  When I get on my bike the sense of fun and freedom from my childhood is still nearby. I’ve been tapping into that childhood joy and sense of independence to embrace bike commuting. I begin my day lost in thought, but attentive to the rules of the road, with Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” on my Ipod shuffle while I cruise the Route 66 bike path towards town. The 45 minutes it takes for me to ride to work is my time to contemplate the world around me. The sense of motion and the free moments take me far away from the clamor of civilization.  Author Christopher Morley deemed the bicycle “the vehicle of novelists and poets,” and Albert Einstein conjured his theory of relativity while riding a bike. Besides inspiring creativity, I like to think that if I keep up with this I won’t need Dick Cheney out there waging wars for my share of the oil.

Besides all of those reasons, riding a bike is just plain fun.  I delight in the things I notice on my bike that I would miss in my car. Like the stink beetle with its rear end pointed towards the sky as a warning for me to keep my distance. Or the red-shafted flicker; wings outstretched, undulating in flight ahead of me on his own daily commute along the Rio de Flag urban trail. I savor the rich fragrance of the willow stands.  I catch a raven drinking out of someone’s roof gutter.  I discover a whole other world out there on a bike with the breeze blowing in my hair and a smile on my face.

And I find that I am not alone.  I admire the myriad of personalities of the other riders—the professional lady in a leather jacket, the commuting dad with his kid in a trailer on his way to day care and the woman on a cruiser who calls out “You go girl!” as pass her. There is a camaraderie we share on the bike path that is not present between fellow automobile commuters.  In my car I am impatient and other drivers are often my enemies, while in the biking world a friendly nod or a wave is common practice, as are impromptu conversations while waiting at a stop light. 

A little more than half of all Americans live less than five miles from where they work, according to Bicycling magazine, yet only 1.67% of Americans commute by bicycle. The United States consumes 17 million barrels of oil daily and driving accounts for almost half of that consumption. Think of the difference we could make if even 10 percent of us opted for our bikes. Industrial world cities typically use at least one third of their land for roads and parking lots for motor vehicles. If more of us took to our bikes, imagine how much pavement we could replace with gardens and parks. It’s easy to conjure a better world from behind the handlebars of a bike, and more people are opting for that perspective.  The number of bike commuters in the United States doubled between 1983 and 1990.  In Flagstaff the there is an ever-growing biking community.  This year 1,157 individuals participated in Flagstaff’s Bike to Work Week festivities—that’s over 50 percent more people on bicycles than in 2007.

I relish the freedom that I don’t need a car to get where I am going.  At first the 15 miles round trip to work doesn’t feel like much in the face of global climate change, but as the summer wears on and I sink into my routine, the miles start stacking up.  When I convert that to tanks of gas I didn’t have to fill, my pride and commitment deepens.  And there has never been a more critical time in the life of our planet to feel the simple power of creating our own motion. 

Chasing the Eternal Spring: From the Sonoran Desert to the Colorado Plateau

I grew up barely surviving the grey-skied, early darkness of New England winters. Beneath several feet of snow, I watched the naked branches for signs of life, anticipating the buds that would someday become green leaves. It was painful. I suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), walking my rural Vermont neighborhood looking out into the lifeless woods considering how my life might be different with a change in season. Spring always seemed like a miracle lurking in the distance with the promise of something new.

When I moved to the Southwest after college I discovered winters with ample sunshine that culminated with spring at a range of elevations that lasted several months. Each year I feel like I go on tour like a groupie chasing the blossoms from the desert to the mountains. Living at 7,000 feet I just can’t help but partake in spring incrementally. It is just too hard to wait, especially knowing that down the hill in the Verde Valley the natural world is coming to life. So while the plants sleep in the mountains I escape to lower elevations to witness the coming of spring again and again.

The tour usually kicks off with a trip to the Desert Botanical Garden in mid-February for a conference of Arizona Botanists. It is an annual opportunity to bask in the world of plants, and exchange ideas and knowledge with other plant nerds. We ponder the complex mechanisms desert plants employ to protect their offspring in these harsh environments, and the crucial role of pollinators, so much of which we still barely understand. Outside agaves send up their stalks like tender shoots of asparagus, and the cadmium yellow desert saucers bloom in the sunshine.

During spring break I venture into the Paria Canyon with a volunteer group from Lewis and Clark College. There is more magic around every bend, as spring makes more of a showing with every passing day. There is the newness of everything green, just impossibly so, and in technicolor shades. Thousands of individual leaves greet the world of the sun, each in their own sparkling exuberance. The box elder leaves are soft and still curling inward, twisting and lengthening into their greatest selves, unfurling into a broad and merciful canopy that will provide shade later in its short life. In the cool, narrow walls of Buckskin Gulch I find a dead sphinx moth who is likely to have perished in the absence of nectar-rich blossoms like primrose and sacred datura. I am reminded how timing is everything and how tenuous and fragile this existence.

In early April I descend to the bottom of the Grand Canyon to meet up with my husband and good friends passing through on a river trip. All along the South Kaibab Trail I am greeted by the luminous blossoms of Sego lilies that arise from the sandy soils of the Tonto Plateau with spidery foliage and a golden star for anthers, thick with pollen. The slopes are shades of chartreuse—a blend of green foliage and the flowers of brittlebush and blackbrush. The Kaibab agaves wave their yellow spikes in the breeze, so new and sweet, surrounded by crowds of bees and butterflies.

Meanwhile, back in Flagstaff the apple trees are expectant with blossoms, fists clutched tightly in bud, waiting for the perfect moment. I enjoy a walk along Schultz Creek with my friends Mike and Melissa and Sally the Dog, meandering along the ephemeral snowmelt from the San Francisco Peaks. The gurgling of water over stone set the tone for our conversation, consisting largely of praise for spring and water, with pauses to notice a bold mustard peeking out from the ground.

Our Flagstaff spring has been delightfully reluctant this year, with intermittent snowstorms in between 80-degree days. I love watching my gardens come alive slowly, and cherish a visit from a passing oriole that perched in my aspen grove for a rest. A raven pair and two different house finches have built nests and are tending to their new babes.

It is all so fleeting and for this alone, to be treasured fully. Soon I will be hiding from the cruelty of the sun. I relish spring, not just because I am a plant lover, but also because it is a season synonymous with hope and new beginnings. I enjoy the possibility of it all. I want to be just like a new leaf, inventing myself again each spring, coming alive simple and green, new to this world, awake to the wonder.