In the planetary equivalent of a full house, a total lunar eclipse late on December 20th combined with the arrival of the 2010 winter solstice on the 21st to lay down a winning cosmic hand.  My family and I watched part of Earth’s occulting of the moon.  It was like seeing the moon speed through its full set of phases, waning then waxing in a few hours instead of a month’s time, with the “dark phase” played by the moon wearing a smoky red vizard. Except we didn’t make it to that climactic red phase.  When the shadow-serpent had swallowed two-thirds of the egg, clouds from a drenching storm out of the Pacific that had discombobulated parts of California rolled into southern Utah and eclipsed the eclipse.

Solstice morning I slipped out of bed, leaving my disabled daughter, over whose rest I keep close watch all night, sleeping soundly.  Sometimes she suffers choking fits, or her limbs become tangled and she can’t stretch them out.  Sometimes she suffers other difficulties that require attention.  If all goes well through the night, I take the chance and leave the house during the morning hours when she’s still sleeping.  This day seemed a good bet, so I went through my usual warm-up routine and set out for Crossfire Canyon.

Rain had let up but the storm system still prowled close by.  I guessed I had a few hours before it pounced again, and I had purpose.  I was on a haiku hunt, hoping to come into conjunction with an arrangement of rain-glazed oak leaves, some trick of light or bend in perspective–I was searching for any chance to fall into alignment with canyon particulars igniting insight that I could work into seventeen syllables. If I found and faceted to my satisfaction a jewel of connectivity, I meant to post it on WIZ to mark the year’s shortest span of daylight in this hemisphere—about nine and a quarter hours’ worth, depending on where you live.  You might have suffered sunrise later than average, courtesy of a mountain range close on your eastern flank, or an early sunset due to the same to your west. Or both, like Moab does, the narrowly set sandstone walls east and west of town stubbing the day down further.  I live on an open mesa, no mountains east or west for sixty miles or more either direction, only a low morning-side horizon trimmed in junipers that the sun crests abruptly, and a long, flat mesa to the west that daylight takes its sweet time fading below.

As I walked toward Crossfire’s trailhead, a car tagged with government plates and heading in the same direction passed by.  It crossed the cattle guard at the end of the road, drove onto BLM land, and parked at the trailhead.  The driver sat in the car shuffling papers as I approached, and we waved to each other as I dropped over the edge onto Coyote Way (for this name, see here and here) and descended the trail into the canyon.  Last night’s eclipsing rain had damped down the dust; footing was good if a little shifty in places.  Humidity-fluffed soils pillowed my steps comfortably, even during short, downhill bounds.

When I reached the canyon’s bottom I found that cattle had harrowed the trail.  All that weight on the hoof had churned into a choppy, puddle-pitted mess the ATV track that the canyon has been busily re-absorbing.  A horse’s hoof prints mixed with the cows’ cloven prints, and I guessed that a rider had moved his herd down canyon.  The air around the trail, usually scented this time of year with tinctures of sage (especially after rain), rabbit brush, decaying leaves, or other notes of native odor had turned gamy from the effluvium of manure and bovine musk.  I turned south, thinking I might travel outside of my usual route and walk down canyon a piece.  But the way proved messy and foul, too much work for too little pleasure.  A better haikuist would no doubt have transcended the miasma or found in cattle droppings seventeen rubies and emeralds of truth and beauty. That day, I saw only dung and mud.  After months of helping my family hold it together in the wake of my husband’s stroke, my tired mind wanted low-hanging fruits of beauty within easy reach.  Disappointed, I slid, sank, pulled my feet out of sucking mud, and turned back the way I’d come.  As I paused at one of my usual stops above Crossfire Creek to listen to the ice-free and energetic waterway chatter around the beaver dams, I turned to see the driver of the government-fleet car walking toward me.

I greeted him and asked, “What agency are you with?”  “BLM,” he said.  I offered my name, he gave his. He asked a question the observant pose when they come across me in the canyon—how did I get down there?  He had used the now-closed-to-vehicles trail that almost everyone takes into the canyon and hadn’t seen my tracks, yet there I was.  “Did you come down through there?” he asked, pointing to the way I had in fact taken.  The quickness with which his eye had singled out the wrinkle of a trail on the canyon’s flank unsettled me.  “There are lots of ways into the canyon on the west side,” I answered evasively.  “Not so many coming down from the east rim.”

He was persistent.  “Is there a cattle trail through there?” he asked, indicating my route again.  Because I hike alone and enter the canyon by a lesser-known track, itself something of a local secret, I dislike letting on where I go and how I get there and told him so.  “Okay,” he said, grasping the situation.  “I’m an archaeologist,” and he explained that he was looking for historic cattle trails in the canyon, so on and so forth.

“Oh! In that case, yes, there’s a trail through there,” I said.  Knowing the man was an archaeologist loosened my tongue, because over the years I’ve hung out with enough archaeologists to know that, generally, they hold information about cultural and natural features close to their chests.  We spoke briefly of other archaeologists we both knew, providing each other social and professional contexts.  I’m not an archaeologist, but I’ve enjoyed their company tremendously over the years and worked with good crews on prehistoric sites and a couple of historic ones.  We chatted about the trail, then I asked why he was in the canyon that day.  He’d come to locate some rock art sites to compare their current condition to documentation that previous site surveyors had produced.

“Ooo, rock art!” I said.  I’d searched for rock art in the canyon and found very little.  “Cool!  Would you mind if I …” I pantomimed my hope that he’d let me tag along.  He thought for a moment then said it would be all right.  He only asked that I …

“… don’t tell anyone.  I know.  I won’t,” I said.  My promise not to reveal the location of the rock art panels is the usual verbal agreement a person enters into with his or her guide to vulnerable sights in the backrocks.  At my assurance, we set off tramping up-slope toward an Ancestral Puebloan ruin I knew of on the bench above the creek.  The archaeologist said that the rock art was composed of knife-sharpening grooves.  “I know what they are and I’ve seen them, but I haven’t the eye to pick them out,” I said.  This seemed like a perfect chance to learn something new.  I find learning something new even more toothsome than those low-hanging fruits of beauty that sometimes offer themselves to hand.  But both together—fountain of youth stuff, the bliss of beauty and the wow-wee of discovery that sustains eternal jeunesse in an unhardened human mind.

Read part two here.

July 11, 2009.  As I take Coyote Way into Crossfire, I find its coyote gate keep reduced to little more than a fur doormat.  The carcass’s light bones seem to be floating away downhill.  Many are missing.  So that took, what?  A little over three months?  Three months for decomposition to the point of fur and bleached bone. 

We’ve had a run of hot weather, so I’m curious about how the beaver ponds in Crossfire are faring, especially the last one located along my route.  Around this time last year, that pond dried up completely.  Dozens of small fish locked in between its dams died in the mud as its last pocket of creek water turned inside out, summer’s heat having emptied it of its currency.

As I approach the dam, I can see the creek bed below it has run dry.  That means there’s no flow out of the dam.  That probably means … yes, the pond is empty. 

But walking to the bank and visually following the curve of the muddy pond bottom to its lowest point, I discover a puddle, three feet long and two feet wide, sunk in a crease.  Its murky, greenish-brown surface roils.  Desperate fish, I think, trapped in the last shreds of water heating up fast in the rising morning temperatures, losing oxygen, losing volume. 

I have to get a closer look.  I walk into the creek bed examining the mud not just for a passable route to the puddle but also to read something about who else has been here and what they did.  Raccoon tracks down to the water’s edge—can guess what that animal was doing here; deer—one, a fawn, tiny smiling hoof prints leading to the puddle; turkeys, large and small.  As I approach the puddle the scene stops me short.  Yes, there are fish.  Their backs show right at the water’s surface or just below it.  But there is something else in the puddle, too—something driving the fish into a frenzy of fear. 

Snakes.  Garter snakes.  The water seethes with them and with fish squirming, writhing, trying to get away but having no place to run.  Three snakes spot me.  Two abandon their fishing spots to wriggle through the mud into the tall bank grasses. These are wandering garter snakes, very common around waterways in Utah.  The third snake, the largest of the bunch, a beautiful animal over a foot long, remains half in, half out of the pool, watching me warily.  It refuses to abandon the bounty. 

My eye travels back and forth between the garter snake half out of the pool and the frenetic activity in the water.  Out of the corner of my eye, I catch movement in the mud to my right.  I look down to see a giant water scavenger beetle, approximately one-and-one-half to two inches long, rowing itself along the muck to the puddle’s rim.  It pauses there a moment then plops in.  It’s a fearsome-looking creature with a pair of large, jointed black forearms that have evolved to grasp, hold, probe, and tear.  This species of beetle feeds on the decaying remains of aquatic animals and when the opportunity arises will also catch live frogs and small fish.

Looks like the opportunity has arrived, and the beetle knows it.

The mud is very deep here, so to avoid sliding down into the puddle I step up carefully to its edge and sink my feet down into the ooze.  The drama in the pool transfixes me.  Small fish wriggle frantically through the murky water, the long, sea serpent-like backs of garter snakes gliding, twisting through the water all around them.  For the fish, it’s a nightmare.  The sight unsettles me, too.  I’ve never seen anything like this. 

With my walking stick, I pick up the big garter snake on the opposite side of the puddle, just to see what it does. It hangs in the air for a moment, then slides off the stick and falls in the mud with a thunk.  Then it glides away.

I want to know what kind of fish are meeting their end under such pitiable circumstances.  That necessitates reaching into the turbulent puddle, and who knows what else abides in the clouds of agitated mud.  Keeping an eye on the giant water scavenger beetle, whose carapace remains visible to my right just below the water’s surface, I swirl the water tentatively with my hand.  Mistakenly, I suppose that there are so many fish trapped in the pool that if I just reach in randomly I’ll catch one.  No.  The snakes having already stirred them to terror they flit away at the slightest touch.  I focus on the visible backs, pick one out, and plunge in my hand.  I come up with a bluegill or perhaps a bluegill hybrid, its broad silvery sides marked with stripes.  It’s about four inches long, wearing electric blue war paint on its cheeks, and sporting a black tab on each gill. 

I’ve held many bluegills in my hands. They’re lively when just out of the water, hard to hold.  Any healthy live fish will flop and writhe vigorously in a piscine version of the reptilian death roll as it tries to escape and flop back to the water.  Not this fish.  Exhausted from its nearly useless efforts to escape the inevitable, it lies weakly in my hand, gaping for breath but otherwise barely moving.  I put it back in the puddle, sample again.  Another bluegill.

These fishes’ prospects are about the grimmest I’ve ever witnessed.  Hot weather is predicted for the entire week; probably, the puddle won’t last through tomorrow.  Even if it does, its oxygen supply is being rapidly depleted.  The garter snakes are on top of the matter, taking every advantage.  When the sun goes down, fortunate raccoons and other predators will arrive for their share.

Pulling my feet out of the sucking mud, I pick my way back to the bank.  It turns out that the turkeys that left the tracks here in the mud haven’t gone far.  They break from the weeds on the opposite bank and take to the air— dirty-yellow fledgling chicks, scattering everywhere, their mother hen clucking nervously as she keeps low to the ground.  Images of the snake, fish, scavenger beetle flash in wild sequences as I regain access to the trail and head south.

In something of a daze at this unexpected encounter with nature’s rough side, I’m really not very interested in the rest of the trail.  As soon as possible, I loop back by the pool.  Three snakes lie out on the bank now.  Two of them are fat with a single fish each.  One fat snake and one yet lean and hungry snake flee, but the third makes only a short dash, its full load making it less inclined to spend much energy.  Its body is already deeply involved in the process of moving the fish down its digestive tract.  It stops and turns an eye toward me.  I return its look then allow my eye to slide down the snake’s body to stop at the bulge.  Muscles visibly contract around the fish, squeezing it slowly down, down, down.  After a couple minutes of us gawking at each other, I leave the snake to the business of converting the fish’s energy into its own, a process that will take several hours.  After this heavy, protein-rich dinner, the snake won’t need to eat again for a couple or three weeks. 

Now I want to see what the upper dams are like, including and especially the one just above this one.  Are similar assaults on stranded fish populations unfolding all along Crossfire Creek?  Walking around the full-bellied snake, who still does not move though it’s fully aware of my presence, I follow the drying creek bed north toward the next dam, soon hitting spongy ground.  Eventually I come to what’s left of the stream’s flow, a sluggish, brackish trickle containing a milky sediment, and clogged with small black snails making a clicking noise.  As I reach the next dam I’m faced with the question of how to get up the creek bank.  The only apparent trail requires I walk through water grasses two feet tall.  I haven’t seen any rattlesnakes in Crossfire any of the four years I’ve hiked here; still, one shouldn’t assume, especially when it comes to venomous snakes.  I feel uneasy over the prospect of walking through grass that hides the ground.

But wait!  This is one of the reasons I carry my willow walking stick. I beat the grasses then part them with the stick, making it with no trouble to a cattle trail leading up out of the creek bed.

All the dams above this point—or at least between this point and where the springs empty into the creek—are in fair to good condition, though algae has blossomed in bright green clouds in the summer-warmed waters and the water level at the dams shows the pools’ surfaces have dropped about eight to ten inches.  Still, fish are romping comfortably in the ponds, dipping at bugs trapped in its surface tension, chasing each other in the shadows.  Lucky, lucky fish.

A couple hundred feet downstream, life looks bleak for their comrades.  Great for the snakes, raccoons, and giant water scavenger beetles, but ineluctably unfortunate for the bluegills.

“Nature’s way,” I say, quoting a dozen or more people who speak of the privations, misfirings, and seemingly insensate conditions that nature gives rise to.  Saying it, I remember a runt puppy from my husky’s only litter who stopped nursing and crawled off into a corner, howling piteously.  “It’s nature’s way,” the vet said.  “But if you feel like you have to do something, get yourself an eyedropper and feed the puppy Gatorade.”

When I reach home and walk through the front door, I find my son. “Hurry and do your morning chores and eat your breakfast,” I tell him.  “There’s something I want you to do down in the canyon.”