Wilderness Interface Zone

The usual warnings continue to apply.  Parts One and Two here and here.

April 22, 2010, Earth Day and M’s birthday.  Twenty-four hours have passed since the doctor put his words out there.  I’m still hot with anger and grief, still breaking into sobs at the slightest twinge of thought.  I’ve examined M repeatedly for signs that the doctor saw something I’d missed.

Our whole family has traveled a difficult road to buy her the safety and time she needs to make what she can of her outraged life.  Over the years, I’ve spent thousands of hours lying beside her, searching her body with my eyes, questioning it with my fingertips as I’ve struggled to discover causes—and relief—for her episodes of suffering.  With my voice—singing, asking, offering, praying—I’ve reached into her pain and distress and felt the arms of her trouble wrap around me.  Intense involvement and careful inquiry has been the only way to approach understanding and to help her.  It’s the only way to reach many of these children.

Her problems are legion, many have gone unsolved, but to my eye she appears as anchored in life as ever and a good deal more so than during her earliest days.  Her level of  awareness of and involvement in the world around her is at an all-time high.  After a few hours of doubt, I trust my eighteen years of twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week care and surveillance and douse the worry the doctor’s words sparked. M’s life is precarious—yes. The doctor’s appraising question about whether or not we had considered how to arrange her end had been premature at the least.  But I’m fully aware that worry over her condition is not the whole fire his question ignited.

Every Earth Day now I head to the cliffs of Crossfire Canyon to spend as much of the morning as I can sitting at the edge of how far I can walk in that direction.  Many qualities of the earth-air interface that cliffs offer single them out as sterling locations for observation and thought.  Especially on a day like this.  Thunder showers that began yesterday just as we left the clinic cooled off the region.  Walking toward the spot I have in mind, I take in the rain-washed day.  Overhead, scraps of the storm—flat-bottomed cumulus humilis clouds—float the flax-blue sky, drifting WNW.  At my feet, raindrops shimmy in low-growing clusters of white-petaled phlox, shining back the sun.  On the cliffs, a bit of a bluster huffs through on water-scraped winds. With it comes the scent of rekindling wood—juniper, pine—warming in spring sunlight.

The morning has a high polish, wind, water, and lightning having buffed it to a gleam.  Since I was last cliff-side, the green smoke of emergent cottonwood leaves has billowed up more thickly.  Looking straight up, even without sunglasses I see cloud vapor stretching, curling.  Cloud shadow falls into the canyon then pulls off, a tumble of sunshine filling the hole it leaves.  I watch a shadow approach my sunlit perch.  The stone goes grey as the shadow’s leading edge draws its chilly blanket over me.  Down in the canyon, the same shadow’s back edge flows off the cottonwood trees and their green cloud lights back up.

The canyon is very quiet, surprisingly so.  The occasional distant cluck of a raven twangs against canyon walls.  Usually by this time in spring the air is a-glitter with swallow and swift flight, their vocals jazzing up the stones.  But beside the raven and wind snagging on trees, I hear only the changing voice of the snowmelt pumping through Crossfire’s main artery, the rise and fall of its murmur, a chorus of energies braiding up into canyon-cutting flow.

Above the cumulus clouds spreads a feathery layer of cirrus fibratus (mares’ tails) looking like frost on a window. I glance up in time to see a rainbow appear in the pane of atmosphere where they’ve formed.  But I’m doing more than just “seeing” it. If sunlight refracts through ice crystals and there’s nobody with ocular organs to register the phenomenon sitting on a cliff at a happy angle to the refracting medium, does the rainbow shine?  The bow has a waxy burnish to it, the red hue smoky.  At the edge of the cumulus clouds closest to the cirrus bow, thin skins of vapor flush pink and green—bubble colors.  This nacreous bloom fades quickly.  I’m glad I happened to tip my head back at that moment.

Again, cloud shadow turns me grey and cold.  The warmer back edge of the shadow slides toward me, but the clouds seem to be growing and spreading, thickening the chill.

In the airspace directly ahead I see no flying insects, so maybe that’s why I’m not seeing swallows yet.  Today, the clouds—stretching, doubling back on themselves in an airborne taffy pull—those seem to be the things to watch.  The sun finds an opening and through clothes and skin I drink a draft of warmth.  But the next shadow is only a thousand feet away running like Mercury straight toward me.

I catch sight of a golden eagle very high up turning slow circles.  Which reminds me.  This last week and a half has been vibrant with bird migration.  The hummingbirds returned to our yard last week, some old hands showing up at the feeders.  Turkey buzzards arrived in their first wave.  Driving into town this earlier this morning, I forced a grudging, skin-headed pair to abandon their rabbit roadkill prize.  Mountain bluebirds have been back for a while but brightening the yard more this past week.  Larks have ramped up their jingles.  Little yellow and black birds—tiny things, very innocent and mild-mannered—have shown up to feast on our dandelion seeds.  These birds arrive every spring for the dandelions then move on after two or three weeks.  My neighbors’ barn swallows are back, flinging themselves into the wind above the fields, blue-black backs glinting in the sun.  From mid-April into May, San Juan County gets its wings.

The cloud vapor continues to churn, fronds and sprays and entire clouds whipping up like mud stirred in a creek.  Winds up there must be very strong.  Down here, air currents continue to pick up speed, growing more constant.  My fingers become chilled and stiff, uncomfortable, cold going into the joints.  When I notice their condition, I realize that my whole body is bunched against the wind.  Glancing south, my eyes alight on the Chorizo Mountains sixty or so miles to the south in Arizona, framed between Crossfire’s canyon walls.  New snow lies in creases between the mountain range’s highest ridges.  Behind me, I hear a woodpecker, tickbird of the trees, tap-tap-tap-tap-tapping.

This winter packed the Abajo Mountains and Cedar Mesa just north and west of here with a record heavy snowfall.  Crossfire’s head is an important water valve for the southern flanks of the Blues.  Here it is, the end of a cold April, and already the creek has gained water muscle mass.  The stream crowds to the edges of beaver dams, the main current pulling itself together to curl over the earth-and-wood structures in white chutes and spray, its leavings eddying around rocks and curling into the sides of push-up ponds.  It really is ingenious how the beavers garden the creek, harnessing the current so that ponds form but the watercourse trots along at near normal flow.  Alas, poor beavers.  This year, they’ll have their work cut out.

But maybe they know that.

Beavers have been back in the canyon just three years.  A neighbor tells me they were a constant there once but suffered wash-out in the late nineties during a flood.  Since their return, they’ve changed the canyon’s look and sound dramatically.  The creek used to flow rather quietly, its existence bound to springtime.  July’s heat pressed into the canyon and sopped up creek water, a dry sponge dabbing sweat off a brow.  I haven’t lived here long, but before the beavers returned, I saw the creek sink back to just a few spring-fed puddles during the hot months.  Everything else turned to mud then baked hard.

Another neighbor, an older man who works as a groundskeeper for the local LDS ward and stake houses, used to ride his ATV in the canyon with his family before the BLM closed it to off highway vehicles.  He hadn’t been down to the creek since just before the beavers made obvious their intentions.  When I told him they were building dams again, his face lit up.  “Beavers make the canyon beautiful,” he said.

They’ve certainly rewired it. Under the beavers’ influence, snowmelt and spring-fed waters last a little longer into the summer and flow a little further, much to the benefit of many species living in Crossfire and the cattle rancher who summers a herd of catlle.  At the height of the runoff in past years, the dams filled the canyon with a sound like water turbines as the beavers channeled the current to constricted points along the dams’ lips then sent it falling in a roar two to four feet into the creek bed below.

I told a friend, another long-time local resident, about the beavers’ return to Crossfire.  He expressed pleasure at the thought but cautioned me to prepare for tragedy.  ATV riders, he said, would likely dynamite the dams when they backed water “over their precious trails.”  Fortunately for the beavers, the BLM closed Crossfire to OHV travel just as they began damming the creek, greatly reducing that risk of their being undone via explosion.

Years ago, I watched a TV documentary about the history of Yellowstone Park.  I can’t remember the show’s title, who produced it, or really much else.  If I recall rightly, it focused on the history and development of America’s national parks. As I remember, the documentary told how during the park’s earliest days it suffered a series of incompetent park supervisors ill-equipped to consider the intricacies and majesties of the park’s environment.  These men committed strange acts upon the land.  In one case, park management decided to remove beavers from some of Yellowstone’s streams, thinking their presence somehow detrimental to the landscape’s aesthetic appeal.  The idea was that the actual draw for tourists—the money-making draw—was the sight of Yellowstone’s big mammals: moose, bison, elk, and bear.  The beaver dams were thought something of blemish on the face of otherwise stunning vistas and prospects.

Getting rid of them was a cosmetic decision that brought down trouble.  Once the beavers were cleared away, the waterways’ condition altered dramatically.  Streams silted up, threatening native fish species. A chain reaction occurred. Elements of the changes in streams’ lotic systems resulted in adverse effects upon others of the park’s animal populations, big mammals included.  Somebody somewhere worked out the error. Yellowstone management backtracked and reestablished the beaver population.  It turned out that the buck-toothed, paddle-tailed, tree-felling, overgrown water-rat-like critter kept matters open for everybody else.

That’s how I remember the show.  I’ve searched the Internet trying to find the reference and check memory against script but so far haven’t succeeded.  Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, point me to a source, or contribute additional information.

So.  Here I am now, sitting at the edge of how far I can bodily go.  But visually, cognitively, I’m able to extend presence of mind to the beaver ponds below, whose broad, smooth faces draw my eye.  Softened by grief and sharpened by anger, I let events of the last couple of days and loose thoughts about the ponds wind up together.   I’ve understood for a long time that people cannot achieve better behavior in the natural world as an isolated concern—as a special “treat your Mother Nature well” gesture.  What human beings do in natural environs is merely extension—sometimes more extreme, sometimes not—of what they do to each other.  The boundary between nature and the man-made, hardly more than imaginary in the exterior world, dissolves completely in the interior landscape of the human soul.  On the map, we might be able to draw or point to a line: This is where city ends and countryside begins; here’s where Old Man Smith’s spread ends and BLM begins.  But within us each of us there is no here or there, no north or south, no true better or worse.

If I’m disposed to exploit or control others, arrange them in my thinking to my liking, either to shore up my wanting life with comfort and wealth or to protect myself against loss or fear, I’ll be that same person when I enter the most breathtaking canyon and find myself face-to-face with nature’s “resources”.  I won’t look to see what’s in front of me but to determine what it does for me.  If I’m unable to look across at other people to see what’s there and meet it, I’ll filter each spectacular natural view through the same aversions, fears, and longing that I do when I glance at family members, friends, strangers and acquaintances.  I’ll look for the same opportunities and avoid the same questions that I do when I’m at church, at the mall, at work, or engaged in my favorite cause.  I’ll stamp my own image upon the land, using it to buttress my beliefs, seeing even a favorite place in my own terms.   If I’m inclined to hold my aesthetic sense against others I deem to fall short of “what’s beautiful,” I’ll confirm my thinking in every vista, forest grove, or cluster of claret cup cactus blooms and ignore or rephrase aspects of extraordinary truth that don’t support my usual take.   If I’m a nature writer, I’ll carve my initials into growing trees and old stone faces with the language I use when I write about place and about other species.  Whatever language it takes, I’ll hold tight to my position, ignoring evidence that there is anything—in me, in the human world, in the natural world, or in the divine—that lies beyond my sight or the grid I’ve imposed upon heaven and earth.

The wind picks up,  more pressing, cold, and constant.  My body wants to move to shake the chill.  The sun breaks through a chink in the cloud ceiling and a flash flood of warmth drenches the cliff.  I stay until the next cloud shadow arrives.

When I finally start for home, I come across a lightning-blasted juniper tree, just its wooden bones.  The bolt rent it years and years ago.  Its fallen limbs radiate out from a blackened, hollow trunk.  Juniper tree wood, contortionist by nature, has a sinuous, silver beauty when bared.  Looking at it, you can see the twisting currents of its growth.

Raindrops still glimmer in ground-hugging phlox, this time, a purple-tinged bunch. The sight of the blossoms—their pale, lilac petals sporting lucent beadwork—further cools my mind.  Feeling around inside, I can tell I’m not so sensitive to the touch of my own thoughts.  Movement feels good.  I’ll recover.  But there is no way I’m going to let those words alone: “If she ever does develop pneumonia, have you considered what you might want …” In her condition, as disturbing as it is, this child is a lodestar of cosmic event, an oriel opening onto so many mysteries.  And here was the doctor, the only prospect visible to him the prospect of her death, speaking to us as if we were entertaining the idea of remodeling a room and he a salesman inquiring into our preferences in language marked with the polite hunger of a sales pitch.

The words came too close and for no good reason.  I’ve heard variations on them for as long as I remember from folks trying to wrest away part of me.  They’re common and persistent and dress up as sympathy and concern.  They assert interest in human welfare and dignity.  They trim themselves in ornamental rhetoric meant to draw the eye of our deepest interests: “only thinking of what’s best,” “prevent suffering,” “for your own good.”

It’s the language of imposition.  Sheltering itself, as Martin Buber says, in disconnection and separation, the mind pressing it seeks to hold every matter to its own level, especially those extreme questions that ask too much, like my daughter.  A relationship with someone like her constantly springs leaks that let in the unimagined and the unsettling.   The mind that advances itself by way of  such words attempts through them to exert control upon the endless face of expression, whether it be nature’s face or the changing face of mankind.  Such language paints every window opening onto mystery with a silver back, making its pane over into words that can only mirror, the better to see its own, plain-faced image everywhere as being beautifully what is.

But that doesn’t really work, either.  Somehow or another, what’s out there shoulders its way through.

Spieglein, Spieglein, an der Wand,
Wer is die Schoneste im ganzen Land?

Frau Konigin, Ihr seid die Schonste hier,
Aber Schneewittchen uber den Bergen
Bei den sieben Zwergen
Ist noch tausendmal schoner als Ihr.

My translation, applying poetic license:

Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Who is the most beautiful in the whole land?

Oh Queen, you are the most splendid here,
But Snow White over the mountains
With the Seven Dwarfs
Is yet a thousand times more splendid than you.