Then two years ago, members of that same storytelling festival committee recruited me to participate.  I was assigned to write an introduction for the festival, a preamble that would signal to visitors that the storytelling was about to begin.  Another purpose for the introduction: To support the opening ceremony during which each of the evening’s participants carried a lit candle into the auditorium as they entered single file.  The candles symbolized the intentional passing of stories–heirloom narrative valuables–from generation to generation. 

I decided to write a story–a faux folktale–explaining where the old stories came from.  It was an interesting process, composing a story that all the cultures involved found acceptable.  I had included a reference to the German story about the wolf who ate a family of goats.  One of the Navajo committee members asked that I take that out because, as she said, “Navajos can’t hear about bad things happening to their animals.”  Navajos, of course, herd goats and sheep.

Through this revising process and that, I worked up a story that all approved of.  It’s just a light thing, addressing an audience containing children, meant to support the festival’s theme and to work in the significance of the candles.  But the festival committee liked it so much that they used it for two years in a row and plan to use it every year.  So my dream of releasing a story into the common narrative environment, free and open to effects of use, came true.

I tell about this here at WIZ because I consider language to be part of the natural world and human language to be something creation has given rise to for purposes perhaps beyond our ken and certainly beyond our grasp.   To my thinking, the condition of this planet is deeply dependent now upon the quality of human language giving rise to expression.  One of narrative’s most important energies: creating and communicating the range of possibilities from which other beings in the world might choose to create their own prospects.

Here’s the story:

Pass the Flame

A long time ago, a man and woman had many children.  They taught their children how to walk, wear clothing, and eat food to stay alive. 

But they didn’t know how to teach their children to be wise.  So the children made the same mistakes over and over, which caused everyone a lot of trouble.

The man said to the woman, “The things we taught our children aren’t enough.  We must teach them to be wise.  But how?”

“We have nothing of ourselves we can do this with,” said the woman.  “We must look for a way.” 

So the man and women set out on a journey.  After walking many days, they came to a strange mountain.  On one side was a desert with sand dunes.  On another side was a tropical rainforest.  Yet another side was covered in fir and pine.  There was frozen tundra up there, too.  The sea lapped at the mountain’s foot.  On this mountain, summer, winter, fall, and spring happened all at the same time.

The man and woman climbed the mountain and sat down to wait.  “How will this place help us?” they wondered.

They saw shapes in the distance moving toward them.  The first one was a bear.  When the bear reached them, it said, “I will tell you why I have a short tail instead of a long tail, like I used to have.” 

Behind the bear was Coyote.

“This is what happened when I stole the sun and the moon,” said Coyote. 

Behind Coyote was an Eskimo.  “This is how mosquitoes came to us,” the Eskimo said. 

“This is why my tail is bald rather than bushy, like it used to be,” said Possum.

“This is why I have big eyes,” said Owl.

“This is how I taught Anansi not to be rude to guests,” said Turtle.

“This is how me and my blue ox Babe carved the Grand Canyon,” said Paul Bunyon.

“This is how I became a spider,” said Arachne.

“This is the sad story of how I became a weather cock,” said Half-a-chick.

“This is how I tricked Raven into dropping his cheese so that I could take it from him,” said Fox.

“This is how I defeated the dragon with my golden reed pipe, thereby saving my sister,” said a boy named Bayberry.

“This is how I learned not to speak to wolves in the woods,” said a girl in a red riding hood.

And so it went.  After many days, the man and woman were so filled with stories their eyes glowed with light.  The animals and flowers and trees and people who had told the stories said to the man and woman, “Now you have some wisdom to give your children.  But for the wisdom to work, your children must in turn tell the stories to their children, and they must tell them to theirs.  If they don’t, life will go back to the way it was, with everybody making the same mistakes over and over.”

The man and woman thanked the creatures that told the stories.  They went home and told their children all of the wonderful tales they had been taught.  When the children heard the stories, their eyes also glowed with light.  It was as if someone had touched a burning candle to an unlighted wick in each one, causing wonder and wisdom to leap up like flames.

Tonight, we who have inherited these stories and the love of storytelling honor those who taught us by doing our duty and bringing our tales to you like lighted candles.  We invite you to tip your candles toward us so that we may pass the flame.

“But we really wanted to see this,” one said.

“This sign?” I said, puzzled.

“Yes.  A picture of it appeared in the AARP Magazine.  They did an article on it.”  She said “AARP” as if it were a word.  I had difficulty understanding.

“Art Magazine?” I asked, thinking some artist or group interested in Ancestral Puebloan art had called attention to this canyon for some reason.  “No, AARP,” they said.  One spelled it.  “A-A-R-P.”

 “Ah, okay.  A-A-R-P.”

 “I just admire the group that did this,” Talkative Woman said.

Doubting she meant the Bureau of Land Management, the “group” that erected the sign, I said, “You mean, the group that got the canyon closed?”

“Yes!”

 “The …” I tried to remember. “The Grand … uh, Great … Old … Broads for Wilderness?”

“They’re the ones!” Talkative Woman squeaked.  “I really admire them.”

So these two were Great Old Broads for Wilderness groupies—maybe even members.  The organization is based in Durango, Colorado but has thousands of members in numerous “Broadbands.”  While the group has done admirable work and is to be commended for caring so deeply about wilderness, the GOBFW’s purely objective-driven actions in this area—sweeping in from out of town, working legal mechanisms, and catalyzing Crossfire’s closure to OHVs without (to my knowledge) a word of dialogue with invested locals—touched off turmoil about which these two hadn’t  a clue. 

“Preserving cultural resources” is the reason often given for such acts, and indeed, the cultural resources do need protecting.  But sometimes these efforts—especially when initiated by “outsiders”—have opposite results as defiance mounts against them.  Certainly, at times it is not only necessary to regulate or stop exploitative or destructive behavior but it’s also measurably effective.  However, having lived in this area for almost five years, I’ve become aware of the more painstaking, deeper work that some in these isolated communities have been doing for decades, the actual turning-of-hearts teaching that lays the foundation for peaceful and lasting change.  The kind of lesson the GOBFWs taught the locals effects change in the way that pulling a rug out from under somebody teaches that person a lesson.  Compared to the more involved efforts others have made locally, what the GOBFWs accomplished with their “evidence gathering” activities in Crossfire comes off as the cheaper trick, an assertive rather than persuasive act.

Indeed, what my two new acquaintances appeared to adore here was the “silver power” aspect of the project, the sword-wielding gleam the act had to it.  They seemed unaware of the depths to which these matters run or of the effects they produce, especially in confluence with other acts.  Nor did they seem aware of the tragic circumstances that had unfolded in the community over the past few days, the highly-publicized, federally executed artifact raids, code-named “Cerberus,” after the three-headed dog Greek myth assigns guardianship of the underworld. 

I thought I might try showing these ladies something of the depth of feeling along whose trail they were so casually hiking.

I turned to the sign.  “As you can see, the sign has suffered some abuse.  Shot four times in the back and four times in the front.”

The more talkative of the two groaned. “Why would they do that?” she asked.

“It’s language in response to the sign.”

“Do you really think that’s what it is?”

 “I’m sure of it,” I said.

 “Oh, that’s just hateful,” Talkative Woman said.

 “Well … I guess it depends on how you look at it.  Come over here, I’ll show you something else.”

Down the trail a little ways I showed them a pile of juniper logs pushed off to the side.  These logs had once barricaded the trail—rather ineffectively—against OHV travel.   Two months ago someone broke up the barricade and pushed the logs aside.  Beneath the largest log now lies the brown plastic BLM sign prohibiting OHV travel, bent to the ground, its top anchored with stones, its prohibitive language silenced.

“Those butt-wipes!” Talkative Woman said.

I sighed.  “Like I said, it depends on how you look at it. Do you know what’s happened in this community over the last week?”

 “No,” the women replied.  “What?”

I told them the short version, how just two days earlier, a small army of armed and flak-jacketed FBI agents had ended a two-and-a-half year undercover investigation of illegal trafficking in antiquities, raiding the homes of and arresting twenty-four individuals in the Four Corners area, many of whom were from my community.  One of them, Dr. James Redd, was in my LDS ward. Federal agents dug into Dr. Redd with language threatening the loss of life as he knew it—the suspension of his medical license, years of imprisonment that could carry the sixty-year-old doctor well into his senior years, financial ruin, and so forth.  The next morning, Dr. Redd arose, left a note telling his family they could find him at the pond on his property, drove his Jeep there and took his own life*, apparently via asphyxiation.

“Oh, that’s awful.  How old was the doctor?” Talkative Woman asked.

“Sixty,” I said.

“Oh, that’s going too far,” she said.  Whether she meant the federal agents had gone too far in intimidating Dr. Redd to the point of despair, that the doctor had gone too far in taking his own life, or something else entirely, I couldn’t say.

 “Whatever the condition of this community has been, these events have thrown it into crisis,” I told the ladies.

This gave them pause.  The more quiet of the two said, “Some of these people had their collections before the Antiquities Act and other laws came into existence.”

“That’s true,” I said, opting again for the short answer.

 “Is there even anything out here anymore?” she asked.

 “You mean artifacts?” I asked.  She nodded.

How to answer posed some problem because it’s a more complicated question than the simple “yes or no” form supposes.  The answer is: Yes, there are lots of “things” still out here.  As far as the Ancestral Puebloan culture is concerned, and in spite of decades of pot-hunting and other acts of digging and collecting, a tremendous amount remains, buried in the middens of uncounted undisturbed sites and even in many of the disturbed ones.  

Crossfire is full of such sites.  I knew of several within the mile-long stretch I usually travel.  They include rubble mounds, rock shelters, and other features often littered on their surfaces with telltale sherds and lithic scatters, bits that provide records of trade and movement  to those able to read them.  Also, many of these sites hold tight in their middens and unexcavated spaces other meaningful artifacts. Many “things” have been left elsewhere, such as in rock chambers and cracks in canyon walls. But what did these ladies really need to know?  They had come here with ideas, their own and other people’s, ideas that they liked.

“Things are tucked away here and there,” I said.

 Quiet Lady said, “They say it’s a squeezed orange.”

 “That the artifact content of the area is a squeezed orange?”

 They nodded.  “That’s what some archaeologist said.”

The image flashed across my mind: half a ripe orange, a mere husk of a fraction of a whole, collapsed, drained.  More heightened rhetoric, a sound bite, a mind’s-eye-catching artifact of somebody’s more deeply buried intentions. It’s true that much has been lost, but it’s also true that much remains. I made no reply.

By now the no-see-ums had gathered and the two ladies were swatting the air and spritzing themselves and each other with insect repellant. I leaned against a rock, arms crossed at the wrists.  The insects swarmed me too, but from experience I knew that it takes a while for the nasty mites to work into position and bite down, and I guessed that our conversation was winding down.

 “Well, we’re going to move on on account of the bugs,” Talkative Woman said.  “Thank you, Dearie!”

“You’re welcome,” I said, turning in the opposite direction, heading home.  Out of curiosity, I found their car and checked their plates: Colorado.

I’ve seen pot hunting damage firsthand, sites hit very badly.  I’m haunted by images of skulls and other human remains churned up and tossed aside—men, women, children—remains meaningful to diggers only as signs that grave goods like pots, jewelry, or other unique or marketable artifacts might lie nearby.  The exposed human remains don’t trouble me so much for their grim “to this we must all come” reminder—though there’s always something show-stopping about coming upon human bones. Nor do they impress me for the unsettling evidence they offer of the pot hunters’ disregard for law.  To me, what’s telling is the pot hunters’ complete objectification of a culture, the shrinking of life down to “things.”  In reducing the ruins of this prehistoric civilization to mere exploitable resource, pot hunters and other kinds of dedicated collectors reduce themselves to the role of predator in a predator-prey relationship. Such a mind sees the other culture, animal, mineral, stretch of land—whatever the object of their interest might be—as existing mainly to service his/her hunger for whatever gain or obsession they seek to gratify.  In the case of pot hunters, their connections with the culture thus damaged, they further fail to imagine the importance of these “things” not only to sciences constructing the human narrative in general and the Anasazi story in particular but also to descendent cultures not so far south of here, the Puebloan peoples of New Mexico, Arizona, and Mexico to whom the Anasazi gave rise and who consider their roots—what we call ”cultural resources”—in this area as sacred.  Thus pot hunters fail to see the life that the “things” signify.

Beyond this, collectors and traffickers in illegally obtained artifacts can’t feel the havoc they wreak upon their own psyches and, by extention, to their cultural surrounds, because really, when it comes down to it, in our communities we act in concert with or in reaction to one another.  What we do will affects others, sometimes others so far down the road they are out of view.  Many of the acts an individual engages in on self-seeking “It’s my life, I can do with it what I please” premise misdirects the language of freedom.  The entelechy of freedom—the vital force of true liberation—arises not in being able to do whatever one wants but in being able to do better than one does, alone or in company with like-minded people. 

In being so quick to call the locals “hateful” and “butt wipes,” Talkative Woman similarly reduced a culture to an exploitable resource, in this case getting her dig in to bolster tightly held beliefs.   Just as the area’s  isolated Anasazi ruins make easy targets for pot hunters, the people of Southeastern Utah are an easy target for rhetorical exploitation and ideological  artifact collecting.  The towns here—originally Mormon settlement communities—are small, separated from each other by wilderness.  Their populations are not especially vocal.  Furthermore, as targets go, they’re politically uncomplicated. Amy Irvine’s Trespass, the bulk of which takes place in southeastern Utah, is nearly cover-to-cover cultural artifact collecting and glassed-in display, as was the GOBFW’s newsletter when they touted their good work in the world, reserving the Crossfire for what they called quiet users.  The BLM, too—I’ve heard, here and there, the set of their language as they’ve come down the trail discussing enforcement matters.  Crossfire’s acoustics are excellent. 

Human language is both a cultural and a natural resource.  If exploitation of a culture for personal gain is wrong, whether it be for monetary gain, to enhance one’s sense of righteousness, or to advance oneself socially or professionally, then given the amount of digging language focused on this region there’s been enough tossing of skeletons and upending of lives, present and past, in and around Blanding and Monticello to go around, including from out-of-area crusaders who visit higher truth upon the heathens. 

If you upend a culture to teach it not to upend another culture, then the act becomes more about the upending and much less about the teaching.  To find the better way, find the better language.  Creative, proactive, reaching language opens the frontiers, does the necessary work to build bridges, and produces an array of possibilities from which others might choose.  It maps the unexplored terrain of actual relation, it gets across.

As for the FBI codenaming their investigation and subsequent raid “Cerberus”: Ovid tells us that the triple-headed hound of hell’s saliva was poisonous.  When Hercules dragged him up from the underworld in the process of completing one of his labors, Cerberus in a foaming fury drizzled the area with spittle.  Foaming around the mouth suggests not only that Cerberus was in a rage but also that he was rabid.  According to the story, this poisonous spittle engendered the growth of aconite, a plant of deadly toxicity.  The witch Medea used this plant’s poison to try to kill Theseus, her husband Aegeus’ son.

_________________________________________________

*A second person Cerberus bit has taken his own life, Stephen Schrader of New Mexico.

However, something did come to mind the other day, musings upon a kind of predator-prey relationship that I jotted down in my hiking journal as I strolled through Crossfire.  It isn’t pretty, but I thought I’d pass it along.

Warning: This post shows Patricia in a mood.  If you’re in a mood today,  you might want to skip this one.   

May 21, 2009

Overcast, humid, cooler-that-has-been morning.  I set out for Coyote Way, the trail leading down into Crossfire Canyon.  As usual, I pass my mouldering friend, the dead coyote  lying off to one side of the trailhead.  I stop to look at him whenever I take this path.  

After a month of decompostion he looks considerably worse for wear, though that lovely triangular earform still holds up well.  Gone, the shine and softness his coat had when he was first dumped.  Matted patches have loosened, as if he were going through a heavy shed, or they have been peeled back in the course of some other scavenger’s work.  A gaping entrance into his inner cavern has formed in his side.   His coat has taken on the patina of old carpet across whose nap mud has been tracked and into whose fibers a wide variety of liquids has soaked.  The flies that earlier clouded his vicinity have gone through their cycle; no insects are visible, though something must be creeping through the body. Every time I stop here, I wonder how and why this animal died.  Anything could have happened, but the dominant reason folks kill these animals—if, in fact, he was killed—can usually be summed up in this word: competition.

 A week ago, winds blowing up out of the canyon carried the scent of the coyote’s chemical crush into the earth.  Today, cliffrose pollen lightly perfumes breezes swirling past.

Cliffrose bushes growing along the trail into Crossfire and scattered along its rim are approaching anthesis—their peak of efflorescence.  This time of year, the desert wind goes swaybacked carrying its heaviest loads of flower fragrance.  Nights have been awash with cliffrose musk, that grainy silver light the moon sheds, and loosely-jointed notes of mockingbird song. 

A few days ago when I was out here with my two ambulatory kids the wind raised redolent breakers of cliffrose pollen that splashed over our olfactory senses.   

Daughter: It smells like those three-color candy canes out here.
Me: That’s interesting.  I was just thinking how the desert smells candied.
Son: Just be glad we’re not living in the late Cretaceous Period.
Daughter: Yeah.  That’s when many plants smelled like rotten meat.
Me: Really?  Huh!
Daughter: Some plants still have that rotten meat odor.  Like carrion flower and skunk cabbage.

My son explained later that some scientists believe that when plants first began developing flowers they scented them like decomposing flesh to attract potential pollinators who were not yet pollinators, insects and animals that had evolved knowing nothing but decay.

Lately, Crossfire’s canyon bottom has smelled of cows and their calves.  I catch wind of them as I descend the last fifty or so feet into the stand of ancient cottonwoods that have begun dropping heavy limbs almost every storm.  The herd has been keeping to the better-watered sections of the canyon, clinging to the pools behind the beaver dams.   This happens to be the same section I travel on my walks.  Unlike the cow-less canyon rim, where flowers bloom untrodden, uneaten, and freely fragrant, here waft the ammonia and manure odors of cow urine and feces.  Fewer flowers bloom on this ground; either they’ve been eaten or, as I’ve seen before, they’ve been trampled before they could go to seed.  Cows’ hooves, bearing their 1000-1300 pounds of weight, churn up the ground, breaking it away in chunks along stream and arroyo banks.  Walking beside the stream, I discover cows have been using one of the beaver dams as a bridge, grinding it into the creekbed. 

Looking into the water below the dam I see tadpoles lying at the bottom of the creek.  Occasionally one stirs from place and shimmies to a new spot in the current.

About a week ago I came into the canyon only to be met by at every turn by the herd of black Angus (or maybe Angus-cross) cows and calves.  They’d spread themselves out along both sides of the creek and were drowsing in the heavier shade falling across the trail.   The trail itself was a mess.  I tried to avoid the bovines, but everywhere I walked I either rousted cows or they rousted me.  Their acrid odor hung thick around them.  That day, I saw a fair number of spring wildflowers blooming in the canyon.  Now, splashes of color from purple broadleafed penstemon and scarlet desert trumpet are greatly reduced.  Only the cacti thrive, having cleared safety zones around their succulent pulp with their pointed and hooked spines: clarets cup, hedgehog cacti, prickly pear, fishhook.  Their flowers proceed unmolested in efflorescence.

Two weekends ago the ambulatories and I hiked Kane Gulch.  That was a beautiful canyon, I intend to go back, but cattle had trodden heavily there.   Their waste showed that at the very least they likely had giardiasis, a highly contagious disease caused by a microscopic parasite of the Giardia genus, usually Giardia lamblia,  common to the region.  Over the last twenty years, giardia has become a prominent  cause of waterborn illness, infecting animals such as beavers and many domestic animals as well as humans.  Symptoms of the disease include flatulence, nausea, stomach or abdominal cramps, and severe diarrhea.  Rapid weight loss often occurs as a result of a giardia infection.

Kane Gulch was the worst-smelling trail I’ve ever hiked.  The air was bitter and weighted with the odor of disease—another kind of rotten-meat odor.  Rather than cow pies, sickly manure plastered the dirt of the trail.  The Crossfire cows seem healthier, but in the last four years I’ve been hiking that cayon I don’t think I’ve seen the ground in greater disarray, even when ATVers roared up and down the trail.

As I stand on the bank of the stream studying a beaver pond, I hear a sound and look up to catch sight of black hulks moving through the p-j forest on the opposite side of the creek—cows, lumbering, I think, more deliberately than usual.  When cows walk through the desert, they walk with a grumble, stamping the ground heavily.  They are the picture of awkwardness, moving along with the heavy crackle of brush, the clomp-clomp of their footsteps, and the clack of dislodged stones. As I watch them, my ears pick up an un-cowlike sound, a sharp metallic clatter over stone.  Looking upstream I see a young man wearing a baseball cap riding his horse down a stony knoll, cattle-driving.  Does this mean the cows are leaving Crossfire, at least for the time being?

Well, I’ve done a little cattle-driving.  Back in my BYU days, one of my roomates hailed from the Malad Valley of Idaho.  Whenever it worked out, I went home with her for the holidays.  While there, we helped out the family with ranch chores.  Once, her father asked us to move a herd of cattle to a fresh pasture, so we mounted up, my friend riding an experienced cutting horse, me riding a mare with a new black foal.  The foal felt afraid of me, panicking somewhat over my interest in his mother, but once I was on his dam’s back he pressed up against my leg as I rode, thinking me part of her.   The three of us plus my friend and her horse rode into the pasture, opened up the gate to the intended fresh-grass goal, then carefully worked the herd into that corner of the grazed-down field.  Just as we were about to drive the cows and calves through the gate, that shy little foal got a notion into his head.  He ran into the middle of the herd of cows and bucked madly, scattering them.  My friend and I laughed in surprise and started all over again.

Another time, we took a small herd up into a nearby canyon.  This one had a bull with it.  With dogs helping, we moved the cattle across the fields, me feeling slightly intimidated by the bull, behind whose ponderous rear end I rode.  

The buckskin gelding I rode wasn’t intimidated.  Periodically, it extended its neck and bit the bull on the rump.  The bull skittered forward.  Meanwhile, the dogs milled around the herd, nipping at heels and biting legs, generally lording it over the cattle.  From time to time, the dogs turned to look anxiously into their masters’ faces, watching for cues, listening for praise.  They respected the horses because people rode them.  In this community of life, a clear hierarchy emerged to my view, one where cattle occupied the bottom rung and the ranchers the top.  Even that little foal had seemed to understand that small and new as it was it stood a little higher than the cattle.

While this barnyard caste system is in some ways inherent in the ancient history and natures of these animals, each of which have competed against the others over millenia for territory, food, and continuation of life, I think it wouldn’t exist to this degree, with cattle suffering as they do the arrogance of other animals’ supremacy, if human beings hadn’t through  intention and choice brought these creatures together in such tightly controlled social stratification.         

Right now, my concern is to stay out of the young man’s way, so I move out of his range of activity and minimize my presence.  We pass each other without a word, he on one side of the creek up in the p-j, I on the other.  I have no wish to holler across to him, and he makes no inquiry about my being there.  Like hikers and ATV riders, hikers and cattlemen have few words for each other.  Had I been on his side of the creek, I’d have spoken, but trying to make myself understood in an echoing shout?  Silence seemed the better option.

As I walk further north, however, I hear him whooping at the cattle: “Hey-yey, hey-yey, hey-yey, hey-yey, hey-yey, hep, hep, hep!”  Echoes fly loose, multiplying his notes and occasional sharp whistles.  I backtrack to listen more closely.   The canyon fills with this one voice, brims with it.  Its masculine quality stands out clearly, distinguishable in echoes.   In spite of its abrasion of the birdsong and overall quiet, I think, “That’s a beautiful and interesting noise.”  It reminds me of a male coyote’s call, which I’ve heard, a long wolf-like sound that halves the silence.

But having already begun over the last few years questioning my reasons for eating meat, recent experiences have cinched it: my days of eating beef are more or less over.  Ecologically, aesthetically, teleologically, the raising of cattle for human food is a disaster.   If I came across such messiness in language, my mind would reject it in distaste.  As I leave the canyon, stepping over cow pies, picking my way over rough-up ground, I think: There’s nothing here for me anymore.

My son Saul took these pictures using a Kodak DX6490.  He shot somewhere around four hundred photographs, from which we chose these seventeen.  Many spring flowers haven’t yet bloomed.  Hopefully, we’ll be able to get nice shots of can’t-be-missed subjects to add to this collection.

Locations for the subjects of these new photos include the rim of Crossfire Canyon, Kane Gulch, and our back yard, all in southeastern Utah.  The male black-chinned hummingbird (Archilochus alexandri) is one of the hummers frequenting our back porch feeders.  Saul took the closeup of the honeybee (Apis mellifera) on a dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) in our yard.  Dandelions have their charm, of course, but there’s something gorgeous about honeybees.  As my daughter says, “They look like their own honey.”

The cactus pictures are from Crossfire’s rim.  Those reddish flowers bloom on claret cup cactus (Echinocereus triglochidiatus), a type of hedgehog cactus.  I believe those wide-eyed pink flowers erupt on another type of hedgehog cactus, Engelmann’s hedgehog (Echinocereus engelmannii). 

The striking photos of aspen trees (white-barked trunks) against stone were taken in Kane Gulch, part of the Grand Gulch Primitive Area.  I’ve never seen aspen trees like these before—they have completely  different bearing and branch structure from aspens I’m used to seeing.  They belong to the genus Populus, to which the cottonwood tree also belongs, but I’m not sure what this particular species of aspen is named.   If you, dear reader, know the scientific name of this species of aspen tree, please tell us all.

With the exception of the old photo of the colorful green and purple rock stratigraphy, taken in Montezuma Canyon, the rockforms are all from Kane Gulch.  The detail of the streaks of black patina on sandstone I thought had animals fur tones to it, fun to look at.   The old science on how such a patina comes to glaze stone was that water either leached or carried in minerals and deposited them on rock surfaces in the course of its downward flow.  More recent science suggests that microbiotic organisms actually import the patina materials for their own purposes, but as far as I know, no one understands yet what those purposes are.  I would guess some kind of stabilization work.

The lizards are members of the swift family, genera Sceloporus and Uta, a rather varied group of lizards, especially in Kane Gulch, where these photos were shot.  As I more specifically identify the species I’ll post information.  An interesting note: Some lizards like to have their pictures taken.  They not only run up to you out of curiosity but will sit still long enough for you to get a good bead on them.  Generally, the friendlier lizards were females.  The larger, blue-throated and blue-bellied males usually ran away without so much as a “Humph.”  The one exception is the lizard posed along a slightly inclined piece of angular stone.   If you look closely, you can see a bit of his blue underbelly.

The stunning red flowers with a trumpet shape to their unified petals are, I think, scarlet gilia (Ipomopsis aggregata), also called desert trumpet, a member of the phlox family.  That picture was taken in Kane Gulch.  The blue flowers are blue flax (Linum lewisii) growing in my garden.   The “lewisii” part of the scientific name honors Thomas Jefferson’s secretary Meriwether Lewis of the 1804-1806 Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery expedition commissioned to explore the West.  At the rate these flowers are spreading in the yard, in a few years we’ll have enough to make our own linseed oil. 

The leafing sapling twig is some kind of willow, maybe a coyote willow, also located in Kane Gulch.  The creamy yellow flowers filling their frame grow on the cliffrose bush, Purshia stansburyana, a member of the Rosaceae, or rose family.  This time of year, these flowers lend to the desert their heavy perfume.

We also have, of course, berries of the Utah juniper, Juniperus osteosperma, taken during our winter shoot, but these trees still hold many of their blue berries in May.

Always fun to go out and shoot these photos.   To make new photos appear in the gallery window, simply refresh your screen.  Reader corrections and elaborations are welcome; please add them in the comments section.

Why do I still do this?  Why, at my age, do I follow as if I were nine years old unmarked, unpaved trails away from what I know into the wilds of what I don’t know?   That’s how this striving creation—part light, part water, part air, part earth, and all aspiring flesh—shows itself to me, in the mutual bodying forth between us. It seems an involvement composed of equal slices revelation and formation, since in discovery, everything changes, the New erupts into being, not just in me, the older wide-eyed child, but in this juvenile Creation.

Today, I begin at the Crossfire Canyon’s cliffs, taking inventory of the birds.  A few days earlier I saw cliff swallows flash between the rims, returning or passing through.  Had they stayed or gone?  To find out, I take to the air myself, or at least to the boundary between earth and air, the rimrocks.  

No swallows present themselves, nor white-throated swifts, whom are said to arrive in May but actually begin slicing the wind in Crossfire in April.  Down in the canyon, the southwestern version of the spotted towhee calls.  Chee-chee-chee-vrrrrrrrr, chee-chee.  In the Sibley Guide to Birds, Sibley remarks that geographic differences in plumage and voice among the towhees are “poorly understood.”

I chuckle.  What understanding doesn’t feel poorly? 

Up-canyon, a raven croaks. 

In the crease below, Crossfire Creek (not its real name) steps down-canyon in a series of beaver dams, built over the last three years.  Evidence of prior beaver occupation exists around the creek—a few weathered tree spikes where beavers harvested the tree’s woody height, trunk damage more fortunate trees recovered from, forming scabs of new wood and bark on their wounds.  I’ve heard rumor that a former neighbor trapped out that previous beaver population. 

When I first moved to this area four summers ago, arriving just before the new wave of beavers, the creek was a wiry marathon runner making a tense dash of snow melt from the Abajo Mountains before summer played it out.  By July, its flow foreshortened to spring-fed stretches and pools formed around the roots of gigantic boulders that had sheared from cliffs and tumbled to the canyon’s lowest points.  When I first arrived here, the creek stopped flowing within view of where I now sit.  Or it pumped flash floods down to the river running twenty-plus miles from here. Under the beaver’s lavish attention, ephemeral Crossfire Creek has grown more stable and Rubenesque.  Now, instead of tenuous and occasional depths, sinuous silver riffles, tight channels and leaf-littered shallows, deepening green pools plump between a growing number of beaver dam belts. Many of these ponds outlast the summer, a little water made much of.

Approximately two miles upstream from here stands one of the county’s twenty-eight human-built dams, 265-acre Crossfire Reservoir, completed in 1984.  At spillway crest, it stores 9,319 acre-feet of water and 16,000 acre-feet at dam crest.  In the summer of 1983, I remember riding with BYU archaeology field school students on the old highway that dipped down into Crossfire’s then narrow canyon and rose again before falling once more through the pine and juniper forest to the cleared outskirts of the town were I now live.  Some of the archaeologists I worked with the summers of ’83-‘86 conducted the archaeological assessment of Crossfire’s banks in preparation for the dam’s construction.    

The old highway now serves as access to the north and south shores of the lake, its crossing lying below water with a mean depth of 35.2 feet.  A fine new highway of safer design runs over the reservoir’s south-westernmost end, across the dam.

I have upon occasion used the beaver dams below to cross the creek. 

No swallow, no swifts.  The ones I saw earlier in the month must have been migrating through.  Except for butterflies flowing down from the mesa behind me, launching themselves over the cliffs and diving for landforms below, and other winged insects recently hatched, the air is unoccupied.

The desert has begun dabbing on perfumes.  In the wind, a dry, clean, sweet odor, light on turpenes from the sun-warmed pinion pines and sage, and maybe something that rises from the dust of ages when spring temperatures loosen the soil.  General notes of reviving vegetation in the fragrance.  The ephedra stands robust, erect bristles losing their wintertime palor, flushing pine green.  Prickly pear cactuses, whose paddles flush purple during winter dormancy, likewise greening up.  Cliffroses fill out their stalks, erupting miniatures of the leaves that will cover their black twigs and brances.  Soon intoxicating incense will drop from clouds of pale yellow flowers, forming pools around each plant that will flow out in redolent call to local pollinating insects.  The princess plumes are awakening, green blades rising along tall stems toward the flowerhead, a large, ornate structure of yellow-blond bloom. 

Flicker.
Scrub jay.
Canyon wren: tew-tew-tew-tew-tew-tew-tew, in falling scale.

Raven: Aw-aw-aw-aw.

Today, the canyon is a music box of birdsong.

Lacking swallow- and swift-flight to wonder at, I feel the itch to move.  I pick up book, pen, canteen, and walk south, following the cliffs.  There’s something about keeping to the cliffs, treading the edge of my physical possibilities.  The perspective, for one thing—as close to a bird’s eye view as I get.  But by this deer trail and that flow of gravity, I find myself fifty feet below the canyon rim, then one hundred.  I realize I want to go down into the canyon and begin looking for a way compatible with the truth of my flightless condition.

Threading my way along slopes whose soils hang loose from weeks of freeze-thaw, dancing gingerly across fields of clattering, shifting rocks flowing in stone creeks however slowly toward the canyon floor, I slip, slide, and stumble my way down.  Indian paintbrush flashes up in scarlet flames from inside other plants, including a pigmy sage with tiny leaves and delicate stems.  Don’t know its real name.  I pick a couple leaves and breathe in their scent, sweeter and lighter than the much larger sage species growing along leveler ground.  It’s a rock creature, this little sage, up here on the canyon’s steep slopes with other species able to flourish the uneven terrain.  The paintbrushes foretell the arrival of hummingbirds, who follow red flower flames back and forth across hemispheres.

My knee, injured over a year ago, isn’t happy at all with how I’ve gone about this day, so I try to make short work of the descent without doing myself further harm.  I’m now about a hundred feet above the canyon bottom, in a bench zone where another spring flows toward the creek.  I have unanswered questions about this area but have already pushed past my time limit and have a couple miles to cross to get from home. 

After resting, I continue flowing down to the streambed and strike a cattle trail, a promising one.  Animals, like deer but especially cattle, prefer following paths of least resistance, so I can depend on the navigability of this trail.  I backtrack it, following the up-going hoof prints down, till I hear—then see—the creek.  As I pause to consider options for passage down the steeply eroded bank, I spot a well-used cattle trail running off in an intriguing direction.  Not the way home, but what’s around that bend?

Standing in quiet consideration, I become conscious of a thick humming noise.  The sound pulls me around abruptly and I look for the source.  Below I see a tree—no, a small thicket of trees—covered in a yellow haze of tiny blossoms.  Hundreds, maybe a thousand or more honeybees and smaller bees and flies work the split buds.  The honeybees’ thighs are bulging with yellow pollen.  Ants carrying objects flow out from the foot of this thicket, whose highest branches reach maybe twenty feet into the air.  Haven’t seen anything like this anywhere else in the canyon.  The trees—whatever they are—might be producing blossoms, but the whole thicket appears to be spreading from subsurface roots.

Worth seeing, this Thicket of Life.

Whatever is going on here, for the local bees this tree grouping is among spring’s earliest and most abundant providers.

I could stay here for a long time, considering this thicket, but I’m out of time. As I walk along the creek here looking once more like that thin marathon runner trying to beat time, thin skin rippling over sand and pebbles, I think, “The beavers have not come this far down the creek.”  Moments later, I discover the most remarkable beaver dam I’ve ever seen, the archetypal beaver dam, the Platonic Ideal. 

Its curved berm, a good fifty feet long, has been stacked up three-to-four feet above the streambed.  Layer upon layer of rough but efficient latticing, woven of cottonwood and willow branches and bits from other trees, maintain its staying power.  Along the dam’s outer edge lie dozens of gnawed-off tree trunks and branches, ranging from three to almost five feet in length and up to fourteen inches in diameter.  None of the upstream dams have this feature and at first I think this jumble of wood sloppy work or unfinished business.  But then I see that the ends of these branches and logs have been planted in the stream bed and bank at various bracing angles against the dam’s convex surface or laid such that an end presses down on the dam’s crest, clearly a deliberate engineering choice, though I’ve never seen this kind of fortified damwork. 

A smooth pond of deep, green water—deep for desert—backs up behind the reservoir and curves out of sight, I’m guessing about two hundred feet.  Wow.  Wow.  None of the upstream beaver dams amount to anything like this, having between them walls modest by comparison, no more than twenty feet wide, woven from reeds and much smaller tree parts.  Such water impoundments pale next to the one stretching back from this structure.  Water runs over this dam’s spillway at what I imagine is the stream’s normal flow rate. From the dam the creek slithers south-southeast, running once more flat against its bed.

Talk about intelligent design.  I am in awe of how much beavers can do with so little water, of how much change they have brought to the canyon in the three years they’ve been here.  Depending on what happens during the summer months, I expect to see dry-boned, wry little Crossfire Creek become something of an Eden for the local tight-lipped flora and fauna. 

I follow the trail running along the western edge of the pond to discover I’m wrong about the length of the pool.  The backup runs at least two hundred feet beyond what I guessed, submerging what used to be the trail’s stream crossing beneath water approximately two feet deep for a twenty-foot stretch. 

As I stop to consider my options, I hear a hawk’s scree. 

A mourning dove’s coo-ah, hoo, hoo. 

Can’t cross without getting powerful wet, and I don’t want to get that wet this far from home.  Have to find another way.

Towhee.

Raven.

Dove.

Woodpecker’s duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh as it drums.

Taking de tour, I come across a wood rat’s nest (?), a mound of twisted sagebrush parts standing about eighteen inches high.  Also the odor of cat urine, bobcat probably, though puma is not out of the question.

I follow a cattle trail on an up-and-down byway till I meet up again with the main trail, stitched here with turkey tracks.  Now I’m tired and running out of water.  The rest of the path is familiar, but the next point where it crosses the stream contains the seed of another dam.  Soon this crossing, too, will lie underwater.

Worn out and sore-kneed, the water in my canteen reduced to a rattling slosh, I work my way home.  As I pass the smaller upstream beaver dams, I think how fortunate I am to have moved to this canyon before the beavers arrived so that I could witness what unfolds from their prowess in hydraulic engineering.  A multiplying of fishes and plants, an arousal of uncanny green.  A reduction of walkable ground.  The ATV trail, which remains outlawed, submerged and rendered impassable.  Shifts in animal populations as new creatures utilize the abundance of water and old residents undergo population surges.  Almost certainly, a lot more biting gnats and mosquitoes.

Yep, look at me here, in the right place at the right time.   I’m one lucky 53-year-old kid.

To this we must all come.  But who has come to it now, and where?    

Walking deeper into the field of decomposition gases, I looked around, guessing what I would find.  I was approaching the gravel pit, a dumping ground for domestic and wild animal carcasses and the scene of occasional war crimes of the sort some people commit against animals.  It’s common to find coyote remains around the pit, along with elk and deer carcasses, tree prunings, the ashes of bonfires, articles of clothing, and aerosol cans—the residue of ”huffing” parties.

My eyes had a difficult time picking out the body of the coyote because his full winter regalia of desert-soil-hued fur blended in well where he had been dumped against the weathered  juniper barricade some rancher erected decades ago to prevent cattle from wandering.  I’m guessing the coyote was an adult male because of the animal’s size.  Wind ruffled the luxuriant fur, and my own hand felt drawn to touch.  But I didn’t.  Touching the animal might spark a response that under the circumstances I couldn’t support. 

The animal’s head was turned away and its rust-tinted, smooth-furred triangular ears—with some exceptions, the common earmark of un- or less domesticated canids—caught my eye.  Having lived with huskies, I have learned to watch upright ears like these for expression of feeling and intent almost as much as I watch the animal’s eyes, mouth, and tail. 

These ears—silent.

That the animal still had ears and scalp told that it had not been killed to collect the twenty-dollar  bounty paid for coyote scalps.  I don’t even know if the county is running a coyote bounty this year.  Without closer examination, I could get no indication of how the coyote might have died.   Later, I might go back to the carcass.  But not now.

Lambing season has been in progress for over a month, with some lambs showing up early in December.  Possibly, a sheep rancher picked this animal off because it threatened his herd.  Maybe it posed someone some other problem.  Or maybe it had been killed because, as I’ve heard it put, “It’s a coyote and deserves it.”  Maybe—just maybe—it stopped there and laid its life down on its own. 

To reflect on this coyote’s death, I thought I’d explore some of the stories people tell about coyotes, specifically the Navajos. 

Navajos have a deep and amazing tradition of Coyote stories, though Coyote is different things to different Navajos.  In “The Pretty Language of Yellowman,” Barre Toelken tells how the Navajo grandfather Yellowman told Coyote stories to his children and grandchildren.  Why?  Because, he said, “If my children hear the stories, they will grow up to be good people, if they don’t, they will turn out to be bad.”  Coyote, of course, represented the “bad” end of the spectrum of cultural and spiritual possibilities.  Yellowman’s stories encouraged his listeners to laugh at Coyote’s antics, not because the stories are funny, but because laughing at wrong behaviors helped set in his children’s minds the logical boundaries of Navajo social behavior. 

For other Navajos, Coyote is evil incarnate, the first witch, which of course associates him with skinwalkers and that whole tradition of doing evil to get power over people and resources.  This tradition—the tradition of the Evilway singers—is quite serious in nature.  You don’t laugh at this Coyote because evil is not to be laughed at, only driven away.  I suppose this is in some ways a fundamentalist view of Coyote, similar to Mormon fundamentalist views of Satan and evil, whereby the world is infused with evil, a very dangerous place indeed, and you make every effort to separate yourself from it.

To another kind of Navajo, Coyote is not evil incarnate, but like you and me, prone to get himself into trouble by “Coyoteing around”—that is, he brings his suffering upon himself through bad choices.  But rather than being identified as an evil that must be driven out, this Coyote is held up by tradition to be the first patient, the first beneficiary of the Coyoteway healing ceremonial.  Thus he is the type for all sufferers who scald themselves in physical and spiritual hot water yet have a chance for treatment and recovery.  Such people are “killed” by their actions, like Coyote is in the stories, over and over, yet with communal and sacred helps and invocations he always resurrects.  In the Coyoteway Ceremony, Coyote’s particular trouble is that he loses his skin, that largest organ of the body through whose responsiveness we sense the world.  In Coyoteway ceremonies, Coyote’s pelt is returned to him and he is healed of the devastation. 

Some hold that skinwalkers (the evil incarnate side of the story) take parts of the Coyoteway out of context and use it in “transformation” ceremonies where they don the skin of the animal whose powers they wish to exploit for whatever bad purpose, “becoming” that animal.

Then there are all the Navajos who believe part of this and part of that. Some non-traditional Navajos seem to be moving away from these “children’s stories” or have not been given them.  Since it’s hard for a white girl like me to know on short exposure which kind of Navajo I’m talking to, I avoid raising Coyote issues with Navajos.  However, many Navajos, traditional and non-traditional, associate Coyote with bad luck, and here it’s especially hard to tell where Coyote the folk figure ends and Canis latrans begins.  Crossing paths with a coyote (Canis latrans) is cause for great concern. Yet killing the animal could bring even worse luck, since it would upset the natural balance and immerse the world into sickness and chaos.

I grew up in the animal-rich environment of rural piedmont Virginia.  A convert to the church, I had already imprinted on the natural world and was deeply involved with animals before I learned that people, only “a little lower than the angels,” are the appointed stewards over the earth.  People, I was taught, are children of God and have the potential to ascend above the angels.  And while animals, before they were created in body, were “intelligences,” they rank below us in intelligence (indeed, in some versions of stewardship, animals are apportioned only instinct).  God did not endow them as he did us, and so, except for animals that have wisely proven themselves helpful to man, they have no real foothold in our community and no community of their own.  This idea that animals are … well, just animals … doesn’t quite jive with my experience with them.  From my earliest days, I have seen intelligence in their eyes and body language and interacted with them as beings with an equality of intent and desire for life.

This is perhaps why, when I think of Coyote (big or little “c”), I lean toward the Coyote-as-first-patient narrative strain of folk stories.  Something about this metaphoric Coyote levels the playing field.  That we often get ourselves into trouble by “Coyoteing around” seems like a fair appraisal of our human and our animal conditions.   That we might “resurrect” when we kill ourselves through our bad acts is a wry herald of divine hope, echoing, in down-to-earth language, more familiar scriptural narrative that tells us the way to life is losing it and that our hearts must break before they can become whole.

The kids’ tales are good, too.  In Virginia, when I was a child, folktales were an important part of the reading curriculum.  Many stories have stayed with me, acting as a kind of guardian language. 

The Coyote-as-evil-incarnate—I’ve seen some of that as well, but not from coyotes the animals, who after all are opportunists and take advantage of whatever circumstances seem good, including ones we set up for them, inviting their exploitation. 

At the gravel pit, I’ve come upon one harrowing scene of violence done upon a coyote and her pups.  But in spite of the to-be-expected instances of coyote bodies turning up at the pit, I understand that coyotes are not so easy to catch or kill as some wish they were.   Like anybody else, they can make mistakes.  If they survive them, they learn from them.   And their biology is such that any if many animals fall victim to large-scale bounty-hunting, shooting, trapping, or any other attempt to curtail their presence, they will resurrect their population by means of increased fertility.  And they can pose threats—many actions, human and animal, do.  Yet after having had a little experience with these creatures over the last three years and reading about them in order to try to understand them, I’m coming to believe that to catch and kill a coyote takes a bigger Coyote.

 But it’s been difficult business breaking up their bonds with interior spaces and tempering their fascination with electronic frontiers.  Until recently, many of my attempts at getting them “out there” into the yard and surrounding countryside were met with grim doubtfulness.

That first spring after our arrival in San Juan County I took them to the Four Corners Indian Art Market, held every May at Edge of the Cedars State Park in Blanding, Utah.  On display was a wide variety of Native American arts and crafts—silverwork, beadwork, and stonework, including fetishes, images of animals, actual and mythical, carved from stone.  My then nine-year-old girl admired a necklace, the showpiece of which was a small horse fetish carved from red jasper, a form of quartz.  My daughter begged; I bought.  I helped her put on the horse necklace and thought her glow of gratitude worth the eight bucks.

After watching the entertainment, I drove the kids—daughter happily wearing her new necklace—out from town and along dirt roads running through Mustang Mesa, where we happened upon a herd of free-ranging fox-trotter broodmares, many of which had gangly foals.  We stopped to admire the spring babies, several of which stared back at us with cuteness-suffused curiosity.  Then I noticed a palomino pinto mare down on her side, her hind end pointed conveniently in our direction, sides heaving and back legs stiff, one slightly raised.  “There’s a mare foaling right now!” I said.  The kids looked, but since few computer games contain images of birth, they had a hard time recognizing what they were looking at.  Finally my daughter, ten years old at the time, said, “Oh, yeah, I can see it!”

The foal emerged from the birth canal front-legs-first followed by the head and more of the body.  Like a collapsed bubble, the birth sac remained intact around the baby.  Every once in a while the mare lifted her head, looked at her hind end then lay back down, neck outstretched, chin slightly raised as she strained with the effort of giving birth.  Finally the baby fell onto the ground, still encased in his bubble.  At first he lay flat, occasionally writhing in the filmy membrane, a ghostly and weird image.  Just as I began to worry he wasn’t getting out quickly enough, his front hooves pierced the sac and he wriggled out, wet and wide-eyed, body spasming.  With effort, he sat up and looked around, breathing heavily. 

Damp as he was, he looked reddish-brown—the color of the jasper fetish on my daughter’s necklace.  His mother stood up, still trailing the birth sac.  She nosed him then raised her head and curled her lip—a scent-imprinting behavior, but it looks like a silent bugle of triumph.  To give him a good, long look at her from all angles, as well as, I’d guess, to surround him with her own scent, she began grazing in a tight circle around the foal, who lay on the ground, head held erect, legs tucked against his body.  Occasionally the mare nuzzled him, encouraging him to stand.  He tried, but his legs gave and he collapsed into the dust, rocking comically on his side.

We were already overdue at home and couldn’t stay to watch the foal gain his footing.  Reluctantly, I broke off my kids’ involvement in the spectacle of new life and drove away.  When we arrived at the house, I said playfully to my daughter, “See?  You never know what’s going to happen when you get out there.  We buy a horse fetish and then see a horse be born.”

My son, then sixteen, heard.  He said, “Wow.  I wonder what would’ve happened if we’d bought the dragon!”