Mike Branch Reflections

Summer 2014

Michael P. Branch
Long Term Ecological Reflections Project
Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center
Penn State University
In residence June 10–13, 2014
Manuscript completed February 1, 2015

Pre-Amble: Desert Rat Parts the Curtain of Green

In the fall of 1867, John Muir left Indianapolis — where he had recently recovered his sight after having been blinded in an industrial accident — and walked 1,000 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico. His goal was to walk down the entire continent, studying plants, avoiding towns, traveling alone and by the “wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way” he could find. It was an epic American hike, one that would help to transform him from a poor factory worker into our country’s preeminent environmental educator and preservationist. In some indirect, untraceable way, Shaver’s Creek is part of that invaluable legacy of conservation and education. But the aspect of Muir’s amazing, 1,000-mile adventure that is rarely remembered is the palpable discomfort he feels once he has walked so far south as to be out of his comfort zone as a naturalist. While he appreciates the beauty of the southern environments through which he tramps, he also experiences anxiety that he no longer knows the names of the plants he sees or recognizes the songs of the birds he hears. Although Muir believed firmly that nature is our widest home, he also felt that in walking beyond the range of his intimacy with the particularities of the more-than-human world he had somehow become disoriented, unhomed.

This odd feeling of displacement is what I experienced when I arrived at Shaver’s Creek. Yesterday morning I was in the Great Basin Desert, on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, at 6,000 feet, crossing the wide open, sere brown, skeletal landscape of western Nevada, where rain is rare, surface water is almost nonexistent, and the hot wind blows incessantly through the sage and bitterbrush. That is my home, and in that remarkable place, where I have now walked more than 15,000 miles, I have learned the name and habits of most plants and animals within the scope of my observation. I can teach you how to distinguish pronghorn scat from mule deer scat. I can explain how the gopher snake has evolved to mimic the appearance, motion, and sound of the rattler. I can show you a packrat midden that has been in continuous use for 30,000 years while I tell you the story of how the artifacts cached by these ancient rodents have become crucial to our understanding of long-term global climate change. I have been reading and rereading that high desert landscape so closely and for so long that whoever I am is no longer separable from it.

But that was yesterday morning. This morning I found myself walking along Shaver’s Creek, through an explosion of green so profuse and vibrant as to appear hallucinogenic in its intensity. Until relatively recently, it would have been impossible for a human to move from one landscape to another in so short a time, and I have a vague sense that evolution has not prepared me perceptually to deal with a change in physical environment that is so sudden and overwhelming. The project of ecological reflection that I am here to join is deliberately long-term, but this experience of moving from desert to forest has been sudden and disorienting. Here I am a stranger in a strange land, and although I walk a marked and established trail, the incredible density of both vegetation and birdsong, along with the sound of moving water and the sultry heaviness of this humid air, makes me feel as if I have entered an Amazonian rainforest.

My feeling of exhilaration at being in this unimaginably fecund place is followed closely by a feeling of mild anxiety that I know so little about the plants and creatures here. I now have a better understanding of how Muir must have felt on his trip through unfamiliar climes. To say that I am a visiting writer is also to say that I am a foreigner. An ecotourist. An introduced species. A non-native exotic. As I part this curtain of green, I am struck by the depth of my ignorance, by the profound ecological illiteracy I bring to the interesting task of reflecting on this remarkable place. Since my condition of ignorance can’t be remedied immediately, I decide to embrace it, and to hit the trail with enthusiasm.

With any luck, I might run into a group of local school kids who can tell me if the magical flash I just saw in the hemlocks might have been a pileated woodpecker. It is a glimpse I have not had since I was a kid myself.

1. Twin Bridges: In Search of Signs

This is the first site I’ve visited, and as a neophyte here I am looking for a way to access and communicate with it, just as I do when meeting a person for the first time. I take a quick reconnaissance, scanning the treetops, the dense vegetation, the newish look of the double bridge, the water as it slides along the verdant banks of the nearby stream. Give me a sign! And, like all people looking for a sign, I get mine. Only this sign has been offered not by God but by man. That man turns out to be Josh, a gifted naturalist who has been coming to Shaver’s Creek since he was a kid and has now come full circle to join the staff. Josh made this sign many years ago while working as an intern here, and the plastic laminate installed to protect the panel is pretty well splintered away by now, exposing the wooden frame. Nature has begun to break down this cultural artifact, just as it does the fallen trees that the sign exists to explain. Josh’s sign, which is all about change over time in the forest, is itself becoming an illustration of such change.

A sign can’t help itself. It structures your experience of a place. It says “Stand here.” “Ask these questions.” “See the place in this way.” “Remember this idea.” “Question how this fits into the bigger picture.” It also — and here is the most important part — puts text into the woods. That is, a sign forces you to become a reader. But to be a reader also means to pay attention, at least momentarily, to something other than the land itself. Perhaps while reading this sign I have missed my only opportunity to have a second glance at what might have been a pileated woodpecker arcing through the canopy. But the compensation is that every line I read on Josh’s sign helps me to see more when I look up from it. This, I think, is what all good books are intended to do. We read them and then return to the world with the hope that we can see more than we could before. If we lose a moment or two with our heads down, we’re rewarded by the new eyes we bring when we lift our faces to the world again.

Josh’s sign is a single-panel book, and a very good one. It explains with admirable clarity a few core principles that can help us to “better understand the history and future of our local landscape,” which is precisely what I’ve come here to do. It offers a few terms, but does so in ways that are compelling, imaginative, and accessible. In reading this sign I am struck by how our understanding of the more-than-human world shows everywhere the signs of our own experience. The mounds and divots left by fallen trees are, we learn, referred to as “pillows” and “cradles,” respectively. The log that results, if it decomposes at just the right rate — neither too fast nor too slow — will nurture a new generation of seedlings and is thus referred to as a “nurse” log. Pillow, cradle, nurse. These are words we not only understand but also feel. They resonate because they have imaginative power that we recognize from our own domestic lives. My daughters back home in the high desert are aged seven and eleven years old, and yet I now find my mind wandering back to their birth and infancy. They too were nursed and cradled, and I have a clear memory of placing them carefully between pillows to protect them from rolling off the bed.

This place, as Josh’s sign attests, can help us to think about the agents and evidence of change. It seems to me that the places we live our lives, like the lives themselves, are constantly racing into the future. If the decomposition of a nurse log doesn’t appear to be a process that is racing, perhaps that is only because we have not adjusted our scale of perception to appreciate the change that is constantly taking place here. The sign also notes that in the 1870s Emanuel and Rebecca Erb lived here with their eight children. That family changed this place, and it must also have changed them. I find difficult to imagine what their experience was like, living in the wake of the Civil War along the banks of this lovely creek. They are all long gone from this earth now, but the signs of their passing through are still marked on the land.

What is it that is so compelling about the two bridges at this site? There are bridges over just about every creek, rivulet, and muddy spot along the trail, but there is something about these two bridges — something, I think, about the way they are somehow both together and apart. Are they the two halves of a single bridge, since they cross the same creek, or are they two bridges? The LTERP project, devised by my friend Ian Marshall in collaboration with the Shaver’s Creek folks, calls them “twin bridges” — not “twin bridge” or “the twin bridges,” but just “twin bridges,” as if to acknowledge the duality of this singular place. I suspect the pleasure may be in looking up while crossing a bridge only to see another bridge ahead that needs to be crossed. What is the natural thing to do when crossing a bridge? Stop in the middle to have a look down and around. But when I pause on either bridge I see the bridge ahead and have the immediate urge to cross it. I know the Wordsworthian thing to do would be to stand or sit at the center of one of these bridges and contemplate the stream. Instead, I find myself crossing the forked creek across both bridges, then turning on my heel to do it again in the other direction.

And it is worse than that. Not only am I crossing and recrossing these two bridges like a madman, but because I love the way they sway a little I am also rocking the bridges to produce a pleasing sensation of lateral movement. If anyone up in the hills is observing my weird dance through their birding binoculars, they may feel compelled to let the Shaver’s Creek staff know that a strange man is losing his mind down by the creek. What in hell is wrong with this guy? Keep the school groups away! Cross, sway. Cross, sway. Recross, sway. Recross, sway. Re-recross, sway. Re-recross, sway. I’m aware, of course, that some poor day hiker may come upon me doing this and feel uncomfortable, but I’m prepared to explain myself if necessary. First, I’ll say “It’s ok. I’m not a troll. I’m just a writer.” Most reasonable people are willing to accept an urge toward creativity as an adequate excuse for eccentric behavior. That failing, I intend to stand in the middle of the bridge, face the hiker squarely, and explain “I am from the Great Basin Desert and have never seen water before. I am here to contemplate change and time in this place. I am turning these bridges into metaphors of the past and future. One is the bridge of life and the other the bridge of death. I am the ghost of Emanuel Erb!” Or, perhaps, just this: “I have come to give you one small gift: the story of the time you encountered a ranting writer at Twin Bridges.” Once this place is wedded with story, it becomes unforgettable.

Josh’s sign, the swaying of the bridges, the LTERP project itself — each asks us to think about what this place will be like in a future that is sufficiently distant in time that I will by then be hoisting pints with Emanuel Erb. I’ll hazard a guess, though. These blackberries will still be here, blossoming in their brambles, and so will this twining Virginia creeper, and the slender grasses that rise near the gravel bar at the stream’s edge. But this bridge that is two bridges will be gone, carried away by flood or by the flood of years. Josh’s sign will be gone. But there will be other signs here, forever and always. If we’re lucky, there will be still be folks around here who can read them — or, at least, somebody who has an earnest wish to learn.

2. Rudy Sawmill: Laboring with Ghosts

Why reflect on a place for 100 years? Why not 5 years or 50 or 500 or 5000 instead? Why even use a round number? Why not meditate on this place for 97 years, two months, four days, eighteen minutes, and twenty two seconds? While the number 100 is arbitrary, as the latest LTERPreter of this place I’d like to go on record as approving of this choice. Here’s what I like about 100. First, the human mind has a demonstrable attraction to round numbers, a fact I find fascinating precisely because it is entirely illogical. Most of our pretentions to rationality, if scrutinized, break down rather quickly. We are the illogical, emotional, superstitious people who live in the greatest age of science the world has ever known — a paradox I keep trying to remember not to forget. We are the evolved creatures who live in the age of palpable global warming, while at the same time many of us refuse to “believe” in either evolution or anthropogenic climate change. The term “belief” is useful, because it reminds us that our spectacular ignorance is based not on lack of exposure to information about the world as it is, but rather upon our own charged projections of the world as we wish it were. This is one reason why we need artists as well as scientists to interpret the land. If that sounds too mushy and philosophical, I can phrase it more pragmatically: 100 is the right number because we like the way it sounds. And since the attempt to educate people about nature depends ultimately upon communicating with irrational, illogical, emotional subjects, I’d say the century mark is perfect for LTERP PR.

More importantly, 100 years is a sufficiently long period of time that we can imagine significant environmental and cultural change occurring within it. A century ago electricity, automobiles, and motion pictures were the Next Big Things; now I’m out here recording birdsong on my IPhone. A century ago these big beech and maple trees were seedlings; now they are so tall that I can’t make out their crowns through this thick forest canopy. We like to say that “shit happens,” and it makes sense to us that over a century a lot of shit happens. To put it otherwise, even shit that happens very slowly (by our human timescale) can become visible over that temporal expanse. Families can appear in the woods, create farms, build sawmills, and vanish. Saplings that are fortunate enough to escape a thousand hazards can reach the sky and shade what once was open meadow or plowed field.

I also like the LTERP 100 years because, with few exceptions, the term is beyond the reach of a single human lifespan; certainly it is beyond the reach of the lifespan of an LTERPreter like myself, who comes at middle age into a long-term program that is still in its infancy. I very much like the idea of participating in something that I will not live to see finished, and in that sense this project has in common with parenting that each day is somehow spent preparing for posterity. “Long Term Ecological Reflection Project.” While most of us have projects, in this age of hurry few of them are truly long-term, and few of us have or make the time to reflect; fewer still reflect on environmental change; yet fewer place those reflections within the context of long-term prospects. LTERP is a long-term project flourishing in a small but lovely corner of a human culture that tends to operate according to short-term thinking — a weakness in our species to which many of our major problems can be attributed. One of the things this place has to teach us is that the cut-and-run dash of our daily lives is actually occurring within cycles of time and environmental change that are vast. To see where we are, we must look up and down the trail, but also up and down the scale of what we might call “time in place.”

More so even than at the old Erb homestead that is adjacent to what is now Twin Bridges, here at the Rudy Sawmill site I feel palpably how ghosts can help us to reckon change. For here the changes to the landscape are obvious and impossible to ignore. There is the crumbling stone foundation that must once have supported the axle of the mill’s water wheel. Some of the rock blocks used in the construction are impressively large. Perhaps they were nearby and were rolled or dragged into place. Or instead they may have been skidded by mule or plow horse. In any case, in looking on what remains I find myself thinking of labor — of the immense effort it would have taken to make a life here during the nineteenth century. I can only speculate about how grueling these days of work must have been — days that would end not with baseball on the radio and IPA in the fridge, but rather with a few small, quiet pleasures before another day of work began before dawn.

This impression of the Rudy site as a place of labor intensifies as I walk along the old mill race. Of course there are trees growing in the race now, a number of hemlocks and one good-sized tulip polar that looks to be at least four feet in circumference. Because the poplar rises from the belly of the race’s swale, I suspect that if dating were necessary the tree could be cored and its age would reveal the approximate year in which the mill site was abandoned. I am surprised that the race remains so deep after all these decades, that its presence in the landscape is so marked and clear. It has backfilled much less than I would have expected, perhaps because it has been so soundly stabilized by the roots of the trees that now rise from it. In particular, I’m impressed with the height of the berm that was produced when the earth was dug out and removed to create the race. In an age of hand labor, this excavation must have represented an immense amount of work. I can only hope that this industrious family was also boiling some corn hooch in a leafy draw somewhere nearby.

It is hard to imagine this land as a place of working farms, orchards, and mills, but that is an important part of understanding the action of time in place here. The work done here was an investment, of course, an exchange of one form of power for another. The power of muscle was necessary to move those rocks and to dig this run. Once constructed, the mill would have operated with the far more impressive power of water. As a desert rat I find this doubly impressive. In this site was a water-driven mill. Where I am from there is almost no surface water, and certainly no saleable timber to mill even if water were available. Back in the Great Basin, a sign on the land is a Paiute or Shoshone arrowhead, or a test hole hand dug by mining prospectors who would have been at work at about the same time the Rudy family was laboring in this now serene and silent spot.

Wandering the trail and the woods surrounding the Rudy place I notice a few things that I remember from my childhood back in Virginia: the unmistakable call of a cardinal brings back bygone days. Skunk cabbage fills the wet spots along the trail. Fifteen-foot tall rhododendrons grace one part of the steep bank above the trail. There is poison ivy, and Virginia creeper, and a small, bright yellow mushroom that looks like a fall leaf fallen here on the floor of the spring forest. Best of all is the rich, peaty smell of mud at each bridge along the trail.

Looping back to the sawmill site again once more, I find a small, empty snail shell — ash grey, with small, brown spots — beneath the duff near the partially fallen tree against which I lean for one last look at this place. Once a mill site, all that turns here now are the wheels of the seasons, and the wheels that are always turning on the axle of my imagination. In my mind’s eye I can see the water sliding down the race, see labor being performed all around by the ghosts. I’m glad that the LTERP term for this place is “Rudy Sawmill.” Not “The Place Where the Rudys Once Lived, They Who Lay Buried up the Hill in the Family Graveyard.” Not “The Place Where Once There Was a Mill and Now There is None.” Just “Rudy Sawmill,” as if the people and their work remain in place here. It is important, I think, that the project has a map that includes these industrious ghosts, and encourages appreciation of the hard labor they do in a place like this.

3. Chestnut Orchard: Which Side Are You On?

My friend Ian Marshall, founder of the LTERP project, has offered to lead me through the forest to the Chestnut Orchard site today. He and his son, Jacy, who is also a volunteer at Shaver’s Creek, grab their day packs and walking sticks and head off down the paved road toward a break in the canopy, through which we enter a green tunnel into the woods. Before I can settle into much of a hiking rhythm we come upon a huge eastern hemlock tree — one that does not look at all well. With some discernible heaviness in his voice, Ian explains that the tree is being killed by the Hemlock wooly adelgid, and he bends the tip of a low-hanging branch up to show me its underside, where the adelgid’s cottony egg sacks are thickly distributed. Next spring the larvae will emerge from these sacks and proceed to spread hemlock death to other trees.

Hemlock wooly adelgid was introduced accidentally from Japan in the early 1950s, but its spread has accelerated in recent years, and now more than half of the eastern hemlock’s natural range has been affected by what amounts to a pestilent form of biological contamination. Although the adelgid has been less destructive in the colder, northern half of the tree’s range, the ecosystemic and phenological shifts associated with global warming could make even the northernmost hemlocks susceptible to disease. While many of the hemlocks in the forest through which we’re hiking today appear healthy, that could change quickly. One recent study grimly suggests that most of the hemlocks in this part of the range could be dead within a decade.

The useful, painful term “anticipatory nostalgia” has been used to describe that odd, poignant feeling that strikes us when we look closely at something beautiful that we have reason to believe is about to vanish forever. This wounded feeling heightens our appreciation but also casts a pall over our enjoyment. It is an experiencing of the wound before the injury has occurred, a way of mourning the death of something that is still alive. In this sense it brings the future into the present, death into life. The thrill of seeing the hemlocks in this forest is dampened for me as I wonder how many more LTERpreters will be able to share this experience. Perhaps some future visitor will write about having seen hemlocks only in photographs.

The prospect of this sort of catastrophic loss is hardly hypothetical in this forest, where as we hike toward a high ridge we identify ten-foot-tall American chestnuts. These are nothing more than chestnut suckers, small shoots of the once giant trees (up to ten feet in diameter) that were wiped out across their historical range by chestnut blight, a disease caused by an Asian bark fungus accidentally introduced during the early twentieth century. Within twenty years the disease had killed several billion trees. Here in Pennsylvania, where a quarter to a third of the forest once consisted of chestnuts, the devastation was inconceivable. These suckers we see along the trail, which have no chance of surviving to maturity, are reminders of the ghost forest that is growing here — one consisting of giant, graceful, useful trees that are gone forever. Seeing these doomed shoots is a constant reminder of how real the threat to the eastern hemlock is. Will the hemlock forest also become a ghost forest?

Along the trail ahead of us Jacy spots a black rat snake, one of the largest I’ve ever seen. We take a visual field mark on the location of its head and tail and then, once it has crawled away into the leaves and duff, use Ian’s walking stick to take a measurement. We agree that this is a six-footer! I remember that this beautiful snake is not only an excellent climber and good swimmer, but is also a constrictor, suffocating its prey in the tightened coil of its lithe, shimmering body. In this sense its species name, obsoleta obsoleta, might be better applied to squirrels, rabbits, and birds than to the snake itself. Black rat snakes have on occasion even been known to vanquish the kind of birds that you’d think would be its predator rather than its prey: daunting raptors like great horned owls and red-shouldered hawks. When not hibernating with timber rattlers and copperheads, these guys often climb trees and inhabit woodpecker holes, from which I imagine they have a nice view.

At last we crest a ridge and see before us something remarkable and strange: a second, smaller forest enclosed within a wire cage. This is the so-called Chestnut Orchard, where a variety of chestnut species are being experimented with in an attempt to develop a strain that will preserve the genetic integrity of the American chestnut while also being resistant to chestnut blight. Theoretically this experiment could result in a new tree — or, more precisely, a new genetic variant of an old tree — that could survive to maturity, and thus might be replanted throughout the devastated American chestnut’s historical range. It is a big dream to hang on such a small plot — a big idea to imagine that billions of vanished trees might someday be replaced with trees arising from these few acres of test specimens. But I also think of Gregor Mendel in his little patch of pea plants, making observations that would change our understanding of life itself. Long before Watson and Crick described the mechanism, the friar had intuited the process of hybridization and cross-fertilization that would profoundly change the human relationship to other organisms in the biosphere.

Ian and Jacy eventually head back, leaving me to contemplate this strange place. I pace the perimeter fence, like a caged animal, but on the outside looking in. Perhaps this plot is a kind of zoo, with its rare species well protected behind the stout fence through which we are to observe them. Or am I the animal behind the fence? I enter the test plot through a hatch in the fence and stroll the orderly rows of trees in what now comes to seem like a chestnut garden — an orderly, well-tended, fence-encircled garden of trees. Not long after I enter the plot, though, I find myself looking back at the “real” forest that grows outside the fence. Now the Chestnut Orchard has come to feel a bit like a prison (are there surveillance cameras somewhere around here?) and increasingly I’m in the mood for a jailbreak. I climb back out the hatch and into the weeds growing alongside the dirt road. Orchard, forest, zoo, garden, prison. This place is hard to get a handle on.

I think my problem with this spot is making a clear determination about which side of the fence is inside and which is outside. Robert Frost once wrote “Never take a fence down until you know why it was put up,” an insight that applies to more than just fences around trees. But I do have an urge to tear this fence down. Free the chestnuts! Island biogeography teaches us that habitat loss has left us with only scraps of ecosystems that once were whole — scraps that are often isolated and remote, scraps that now comprise little more than an archipelago of fragments. Putting up a fence doesn’t change that, but it does remind me of it, and of that majestic ghost forest that now grows only in our imaginations, and in suckers that are born to die. This plot is a small, isolated piece of a larger story inscribed on manuscript pages that are now tattered, scattered by wind.

Perhaps understanding the meaning of this fence does not have to do with determining which side of it contains what is natural and which side contains what is artificial. In an era of anthropogenic global climate change and obscene biodiversity loss, maybe the lesson of this fence is that there no longer is an inside or outside. Although it makes me uncomfortable, this fence simply makes palpable what would be true with or without it. Any viable distinction between nature and our influence upon it is packed up in a crate that is stored deep within the hold of a ship that sailed long ago. In my imagination the planks of that ship were hewn from American chestnut.

4. Dark Cliffy Spot: Naming a Place, Placing a Name

Where I live, at 6,000 feet in the Great Basin Desert, virtually no natural features are named on USGS maps. The largest mountains have official names, but numberless canyons, hills, playas, and ridges do not. Each year I walk more than 1,200 miles within a ten-mile radius of my home, an experiment in bioregional awareness that I have performed unfailingly for the past eight years. Over that much time and distance — that many hours and miles — it just makes sense to be able to tell your family where you’re headed. I never sat down with a map and starting naming places. Instead, the names grew organically over time and were linked to my experiences in those places. “Moonrise” is what I call the hill closest to our house, because it is an excellent spot from which to watch the moon levitate above the desert hills on summer nights. “Cornice Canyon” is named for the crested brow of windswept snow that develops atop its summit ridge in winter. For every Cornice Canyon there are a dozen other places that, through naming, I have also added to my personal cartography of that high desert landscape. These names express and mediate my relationship to place in meaningful ways.

In my meditations as an LTERPreter, I have often reflected on the names of the sites I have been invited to visit. But it is the “Dark Cliffy Spot” that I find most problematic, and I’d like to add right away that my friend Ian Marshall, who dreamed up the LTERP program, is personally responsible for this terrible name. I will of course take this up with him, but why should I do so only in conversation around the campfire when I can instead ridicule him here in my LTERP ruminations, where for the next century visitors to Shaver’s Creek might join me in mocking Ian for his poor judgment.

Let’s begin with the least intellectual formulation of the inquiry I propose: What in the hell kind of name is “Dark Cliffy Spot”? This isn’t even a name, really, it is a description — and not even a good one. Why don’t we just call central Pennsylvania “Green Hilly Spot” or call Yosemite “Sheer Rocky Spot”? Maybe Ian would prefer if I dropped his given name and started referring to him as “Tall, Guitar-Playing White Guy.” Dark Cliffy Spot? The problems with this awful name are legion. To begin with, every place is dark at night, so this isn’t a terribly bright way to distinguish a landscape feature. How would you find a dark spot at night? Just don’t visit the Dark Cliffy Spot with a flashlight. You’ll ruin everything!

Worse yet, “Cliffy” sounds like a noncommittal way to identify a cliff, as if the namer (in this case Ian himself) were hedging his bets in case some Nevadan who hangs out in Yosemite were to come to Shaver’s Creek and say something like “Dude, you call that a cliff?” Then, presumably, Ian could reply, defensively: “Look, I didn’t say it was a cliff, I said it was cliffy.” Even “clifflike” would have been better, because it would have the dual advantage of being a more transparent and thus more honest form of hedging, and would also sound less like the name of a guy from Connecticut who likes to play golf. (Can’t you just hear it? “Hey, Cliffy, did you get us a tee time?”) Or, if you’re going to insult the cliff anyway, you might as well call it “cliffish.” It all amounts to the same thing: “cliffy” conveys instantly that the feature I am about to experience is NOT A CLIFF! “Cliffy” is a cowardly moniker, one designed to lower my expectations. Next time I review a book Ian has written I’ll be sure to characterize his writing as “creativish.”

Having established that “dark” and “cliffy” were bad calls, we must now reckon with “spot.” What is a spot? Something you do to a football. Something you get on your pants when you spill red wine. Something you name a dog. Something this dog leaves when it takes a leak on your neighbor’s lawn. And in terms of locating this place, “spot” sounds oddly precise. The cliff is only “cliffy,” but suddenly we are again in a world of certainty, where X makes THE spot? But which spot did Ian have in mind? And there’s the still larger problem that “dark” and “cliffy” might be understood to describe the “cliff,” or they might be thought to describe the “spot,” which is itself entirely ambiguous in any case. In short, Ian’s name for this place is as imprecise and spineless as a name could possibly be.

Now allow me to reveal the real scandal of this ridiculous name. The Dark Cliffy Spot is . . . wait for it . . . not the actual spot of the original dark cliff that was intended to be one of the LTERP sites. It turns out that while looking for Ian’s Dark Cliffy Spot, a pair of Shaver’s Creek naturalists walked right past it. Little surprise, since it was daytime, the place has no cliff, and the spot is unmarked — though with these notable exceptions Ian’s name was a model of precision. No, these skilled, trained, attentive naturalists weren’t even close to being dumb enough to find the spot Ian had picked, and instead hoofed right by it and discovered an entirely different spot that is much darker, and is not only cliffier but in fact actually has a cliff. Guided by Ian’s signally unhelpful name for the place (and perhaps also by Momus, the Greek god of irony), these explorers failed to find the spot his name denoted and instead discovered a spot that is in fact a much better match with the name.

Now Ian had a problem. He hiked in there to check it out for himself and could see immediately that Dark Cliffy Spot #2 absolutely kicked the ass of Dark Cliffy Spot #1. In fact, in a moment of weakness he may even have craned his neck up at the impressive relief of this newly discovered cliff and been chagrined that he had ever used the word “cliffy.” The somewhat rocky creek cutbank at Original Dark Cliffy Spot wasn’t even a cliff — an insecurity his crappy name for it had from the start betrayed. But here at New and Improved Dark Cliffy Spot, calling this impressive vertical rock wall “cliffy” made as much sense as calling Bach and Beethoven “composeryish.” What, then, should Ian do? He could stick to his convictions and continue to celebrate the less dramatic but also lovely Dark Cliffy Spot #1. Or, he could adopt the new and more dramatic spot and rename it in a more descriptive and accurate way — something like “Tall Shady Cliff,” let’s say. Or, he might do something innovative, like link the two spots together into one, as he did at the “Twin Bridges” site. Any of these would have been a logical solution to a very real problem. But what did Ian do instead? He did that thing that humans always do: embraced the better cliff, refused against reason to give up the old name, and just hoped everybody would forget about it. But the LTERP project is about remembering the past and projecting the future, and so as an LTERPreter I have felt compelled to document for posterity how this lame name and its misplaced site came into use. If in the future one of you reading this hikes farther up the creek and finds an even better cliff, I suggest that you name it “Darkest Cliffiest Place.” But if you do, keep watching over your shoulder. Can you be certain there’s not an even darker, cliffier spot yet farther upstream?

Despite the name debacle surrounding it, the Darker Cliffier Spot is remarkably beautiful, and I feel as if I could sit here all day long. The cliff itself (and it is a cliff) is impressive: quite sheer, perhaps forty feet tall, leaning by turns away from and into the creek’s airspace, bearded with moss. It is a legit cliff by any reasonable standard — the El Capitan of Shaver’s Creek! At its base is an artistic jumble of angular stones, especially noticeable because the creek bed immediately upstream and downstream from this spot contains no large rocks at all. The stones in this haphazard pile are not worn to rounded edges, like trundled river cobble, but are instead blockish squares and rectangles that appear to have fallen from the face of the cliff. A number of trees, aspiring to become metaphors for the tenacity of life, grow straight out of the face of the rock. There are maple, beech, and oak saplings, as well as the star of the show, a large hemlock whose curving trunk and roots are grasping the rock and apparently penetrating it as well.

Why are certain landscape features so magnetic? Why, in the vast woods, does this spot hold so much attractive power? Perhaps it is something about diversity in aesthetic perception — the way we welcome change and surprise as we move through a landscape. In the miles of woods I have walked in the past few days, I have seen nothing remotely like this spot, and that in itself gives it monumental status. Others have apparently felt the same attraction. I find a very old fire ring nearby, and then, partially hidden in the leaves, a square of rocks three feet long on each side, a formation whose purpose eludes me.

I sit down on a rotting log facing the cliff. It is damp beneath me, and surprisingly soft. I notice on the log two showy growths — mushrooms, I suppose. One is a shield formation in the shape of a scallop, though with a narrower base than the shell would have, and with a corrugated texture that makes it look a bit like tree bark. It is as large as my hand, and tinted a lovely purplish red. Not far from it is a weird, phallic growth that is bright orange at its base, tapering to yellow as it rises, and creamy white at its flared top.

The name fiasco makes me think about the words we use in association with the LTERP project: Bridge, Spot, Center, Trail, Site, Place. Each is a noun, of course, because it denotes a location, but each is also a verb (or a homophone of one) that implies action. I come to Shaver’s Creek trailing the desert along with me, but while here I try to bridge West and East by becoming centered — by placing a thought or memory, by hoping for the chance to sight or spot that pileated woodpecker. I think, too, of how much of our natural vocabulary emerges from the primacy of the visual sense. While we sometimes express understanding by saying “I hear you,” more commonly we say “I see what you mean.” Darker Cliffier Spot is visually stunning. It makes you want to look and never stop looking. Where exactly did those rock blocks fall from? How did that big hemlock manage to survive in that impossible situation? Is that a shard of sunlight piercing the clouds in the deep forest that floats above the cliff?

I sit long enough to allow my mind to wander toward other ways of knowing place. What if instead of looking at this place I felt or smelled it? I decide to take off my boots and socks and wade through the little stream, which I could easily have rock hopped instead. What is it about having bare feet in cold, running water that clears the mind? I shuffle gingerly through the creek to the cliff, where I run my hands slowly across its face. When I close my eyes I am better able to discern the fine texture of the moss, the hieroglyphic sensation of the rock. I concentrate on how this place feels on my skin: it is dank here, noticeably cooler than it was on the trail. I keep my eyes and mouth closed and breathe in deeply through my nose. I pick up a rich whiff of things growing and rotting, rotting and growing.

Now it is time to experience the soundscape of this interesting place. Of course the creek has been babbling all along (babbling is an insult that might be listed along with cliffy; I suspect we describe brooks as babbling only because we are too ignorant to comprehend what they’re communicating.) But now I want to listen to the creek rather than simply hear it. I rise from the old log, climb over to its forest side, and resume my sitting position, now facing the woods instead of the cliff. I take a last look at the curtain of green before shutting my eyes again. At first I hear nothing more than the same creek I’ve heard since I arrived here. Birdsong echoes in the canopy: the surge and lilt of a cardinal’s call, the quieter notes of the phoebe, several others that I am not yet able to name. Then the creek again, just as before, only now I hear more resonance and sustain and amplification, and I realize how much of the sound of the stream is coming not from water but from rock. The height of the cliff and the curvature of its face functions as a natural amphitheater for the creek’s performance.

I hear the birds again, and now also insects humming in the distance. Is that the soughing of a slight breeze stirring in the treetops? Focusing once again on the sound of water, for the first time I am able to hear what makes this spot so acoustically beautiful. There are two distinct sounds forming a single sound, just as the Twin Bridges might be seen as a single, two-part bridge that crosses Shaver’s Creek. I now hear what I was unable to notice with my eyes: the jumble of rocks is in fact two separate jumbles, close together but absolutely distinct from each other. The upper mass of rocks creates a riffle in which the falling water strikes with a deep sound — not booming, but easily discernable as a base note. The lower riffle has a distinctly higher pitch, as the moving water strikes further up the register in a clear treble note. I focus first on the base, picking out its sound and mixing the treble down on the soundboard of my attention; then I reverse the process, pulling the base down and heightening my awareness of the treble tinkling from of the lower riffle.

Having performed this exercise in selective attention a number of times, I am better able to recognize the strands of sound that are braided together in the creek’s song. To conclude this experiment in perception, I now focus on listening to the two sounds together. When I do, it brings a smile to my face. It is a goofy thing, this grinning alone in nature. I enjoy it whenever it happens. And mine is a smile of recognition, because at last I hear it with perfect clarity: the base and treble riffles are harmonizing! Had I strutted up to the creek, reached for my pens, and blazed away at this place, I might have fired off tropes of harmony, as nature writers so often do. But I am smiling because the harmony I have discovered here is not metaphorical but literal. Come to this place and listen for yourself, and you will hear what I mean. Base and treble, pitched together, harmonized, amplified, the reflected notes blended, shaped, and sustained by the shape of the cliff. This is not a metaphor for music. This is music.

5. Bluebird Meadow: Scouting Ignominy

As a westerner and a desert rat, I’m shocked by the trail to Bluebird Meadow: it is literally a mown path through the woods. Where I’m from you couldn’t make this grass grow; here you can’t get anywhere unless you hack it down. This is not an objection. In fact, I find myself deeply appreciative of whomever rode a giant set of mechanized, rotary scissors through the forest to open the way. As I walk this ribbon of lawn I also think that this mower may have had my dream occupation, and I momentarily fantasize about quitting my day job, putting on headphones cranking out blues tunes, and riding around the mountains, mowing a curving swath for others to follow.

I continue walking the sinuous, green carpet, which is also marked with little bluebird signs mounted on trees here and there — a refreshing change from the old practice of gouging the sap-filled wounds of blazes into the boles. Upon arrival I see that the meadow itself is lovely, but much less open than I had imagined it. Poised at the highest point in the trail, it nevertheless appears artificially hacked out of the forest, which I strongly suspect it is. But it is clear enough that nature abhors a vacuum, and the vacuum that is this meadow is already in the process of being filled with a variety of grasses, weeds, flowers, and seedlings, all of which, hoping for a little more than the usual, filtered ration of dappled sunlight, have taken advantage of this strange break in the forest to race for the sky before the canopy closes in once again. In particular, I notice many apparently fast-growing saplings of a species that looks very like what at home I would call Russian olive. I know this to be a tough tree, one capable of withstanding a range of environmental indignities and still managing to flourish. This tree is a born survivor.

The air in the meadow hangs heavy and still. A tall, dead pine on the far side of the opening is loaded with dark cones, making it appear that a flock of birds has alighted in its branches. This giant tree is the only old growth I see, which makes me suspect that it was already dead last time this hilltop was logged. Skipped by the most recent round of choker-setters and skidders, it has remained here as habitat, as shade-giver to the new nursery of a future forest, as a place for bird-cones to perch, and as an etching into the sky — one established for the pleasure of visiting writers and other eccentrics.

In the middle of the clearing is a double bluebird box, with two nesting boxes perched back-to-back atop a wooden post perhaps five feet in height. It is a handsome structure, a kind of bluebird chateau duplex that in its artificiality also functions as a sign that the meadow itself is a conceit — something also artificially constructed for the very natural bluebirds that will hopefully come to occupy this set of boxes rising from the weeds.

Seeing these boxes also connects me to my home back in the Great Basin, where I too have mounted bluebird boxes (on posts and in the arms of scratchy Utah junipers) — not only around my property, but also in many choice spots on the public lands that surround our home. I don’t know if it is legal for me to put up boxes in those wild desert canyons and hills, and I don’t care. Nailing up a box is a deeply satisfying act, and I suspect that is because, on a very modest scale, it is the act of creating a home. Or, better: creating the possibility of a home. To imagine that a bluebird will inhabit one of my boxes is to have hope — a modest species of hope, but one that is nevertheless energizing.

My boxes offer homes to mountain bluebirds, while those in this meadow, if occupied by bluebirds, will become the home of eastern bluebirds. I understand and appreciate that the restoration of habitat for eastern bluebirds is important, and I support the effort. But it also strikes me as curious that we tend to single out some species for preferential treatment, while leaving most to fend for themselves. Because they are invasive colonizers of disturbed landscapes (sound familiar, humans?), the olive trees are a kind of unhappy accident — a small but unwelcome price we pay for creating a meadow in the forest. But nature is a place of multiple, imbricated, and inextricable valences — a world of unintended consequences where every action of ours has a multitude of effects, both visible and invisible. Here in this created meadow I see no bluebirds but plenty of tenacious olive saplings. It is that kind of world too.

So here’s my proposal: let’s just admit that we love bluebirds and that we’re doing everything we can to help them outcompete both avian rivals and environmental circumstances. There are over 900 species of birds in North America, yet the bluebird is the state bird of four states: New York and Missouri (eastern bluebird), and Idaho and my home state of Nevada (mountain bluebird). The math tells the story. Down with olive trees! Long live bluebirds! (And, while we’re confessing, we really love the cardinal, which is the state bird of seven states: Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia.)

One of Henry Thoreau’s myriad prose lines of pure poetry (his poetry, by contrast, is as prosaic as the side of a milk carton) observes that “the bluebird carries the sky on his back.” It is a line almost as lovely as the bird itself. Let’s face it, nobody is going to write something that inspiring about a nondescript sparrow. We love the bluebird for aesthetic reasons, which is a reminder that even scientifically-informed environmental restoration is guided by emotion and perception — which is another way of saying that beauty is still capable of motivating action. There is hope in this gesture. I do not judge this meadow or its boxes, for I too raise these little possible homes, even in the far reaches of the western desert.

Hiking down the trail from Bluebird Meadow I come upon a sign that is as artificial and hopeful as the bluebird boxes. It informs hikers about the bluebird, its habitat and diet and range. But it also has some fine print at the bottom, and I lean forward, squinting to make it out: “Bluebird Box Restoration Eagle Scout Project 2002, Luke Wrye, Troop 31.” It is this fine print that I find most interesting. First of all, I’m captivated by this kid’s name. As a westerner, I like “Luke.” It just sounds like somebody who’d be fast on the draw but only shoot the truly deserving folks. As a humorist, I’m actively jealous of the surname “Wrye,” which, if pronounced as I assume it must be, has wonderfully positive connotations: not only rye bread and whiskey, but also the wry smile — which is, of course, the very best kind. It has been fourteen years since this kid helped put up these boxes, for which he no doubt received some sort of merit badge. Scouting’s highest honor is named for a bird, and so I hope that helping bluebirds did help to make Luke Wry an Eagle Scout. I also hope that now that he’s 28 or 30 he’s grown tough as an olive tree, and that he’s out there doing something useful. Maybe fighting like hell against the fracking of the Marcellus Shale.

I confess to a mild discomfort when I’m reminded of the Boy Scouts. Just as the bluebird boxes trigger memories of all the boxes I’ve put up in the past, mention of the Scouts brings back scouting memories from my even deeper past. These memories, however, are more of the PTSD Flashback than the Beacon of Hope variety. You see, I was a failure as a Boy Scout. To be more precise, I was formally excommunicated from scouting before I even managed to earn the cultishly named “Arrow of Light,” a rite-of-passage symbol which sounds like a cross between a cheap appropriation of Native American mythology and a thinly veiled secularization of a fundamentally religious ideology. I realize that in saying this kind of thing I’ve stepped over an invisible line in our culture. Who rags on the Boy Scouts? Especially among those of us who deeply respect outdoor experience and wilderness skills — not to mention less important character attributes, like honesty, loyalty, and bravery — there is something sacrosanct about scouting. Still, I’ve made up my mind to get this off my chest. When it comes to the Scouts I’ve got as much nerve as a bad tooth.

Let me back up a bit. To be clear, I was never a Boy Scout. I was, under duress, a Cub Scout, after which I made it (barely) far enough to become a “Webelo,” which is Scouting’s equivalent of a “tween,” a boy somehow no longer a cub but not yet whatever was supposed to come next. A man? A bear? An Eagle? A fake Indian? A whittling preacher? The conceptual problems with “Webelo” are legion. First of all, the Webelos are supposed to be a “tribe,” a designation my Native American friends fail to appreciate. Add to this the more practical problem that, to eleven-year-old boys, “Webelow” sounded hilariously like “We blow,” which, in a way, we did. Then there’s the complication that “Webelos” was given the “backronym” of “WE’ll BE LOyal Scouts,” which served as yet another reminder (as if more were necessary) that the fundamental principle of the organization was unremitting conformity and respect for authority.

I submit as evidence the “Cub Scout Promise,” by which we had to swear allegiance to God and country (an immediate violation of the first Amendment) and also promise to “obey the Law of the Pack,” which sounded a little vicious and scary, as if individuality of any stripe should be checked at the door — or perhaps beneath the Bridge of Light. (Even less subtle is the Girl Scout Oath, which explicitly requires that participants “respect authority”). Perhaps worse is the “Scout’s Law,” which enjoined us to be “trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.” Are you shitting me? Is this a reasonable standard for any kid? All parents will tell you that on any given day they’d settle for one or two entries in that long list of noble qualities. In fact, I suspect most would be satisfied with “Look, you don’t have to be thrifty or clean, but just stop punching your brother.”

As a boy I took seriously the moral imperative to achieve that long, aspirant list of noble traits, which is to say that I was from the beginning doomed to failure. I mean, when was the last time you met somebody who is both “cheerful” and “thrifty”? The rhetoric of scouting invoked a weirdly “courteous” version of self-determination and capability, even as in practice it required utter conformity. Scouting emphasized hierarchy and respect for authority, and it is beyond me how we Americans, who are so justifiably stubborn in our coveted respect for self-reliance and independence, ever fell under its spell. It seems clear enough that profoundly anti-authoritarian nature lovers like Emerson and Thoreau — never mind Thomas Jefferson or Edward Abbey — would have made abominable boy scouts. I take genuine comfort in this.

Back in those days there was a lot of pressure on us little scouts. Lots of performance tests and social comparisons and merit badges earned or, more often, endless strings of minor failures that prevented the earning of badges. In retrospect it all seems sufficiently ridiculous. Let’s be honest here. Who even knows what it would mean to earn a merit badge in “Composite Materials”? Who really gives a shit about getting the “Coin Collecting” badge? Why did we never stop to ask what could possibly be meritorious about collecting coins in the first place? (Better to earn the considerably more useful “Lifesaving” badge, so you can rescue your numismatist friends as they die of boredom). How were we supposed to keep our priorities straight as we aspired to earn more and yet more points in an organization where “Dentistry” and “Nuclear Science” had equal value? How were we to decide between “Insect Study” and “Welding,” between “Truck Transportation” and “Space Exploration” — all of which are actual Merit Badges? What were we supposed to conclude from all this? I can hear it now: “When I grow up I want to be an astronaut and walk on the moon. Either that or pop amphetamines and drive an eighteen-wheeler through the night and then spend the afternoon with a hooker in a cheap hotel.” Seriously? “Wheelie Popping” or “Talking to Girls” or “Not Getting Your Ass Kicked by the Neighborhood Bully” or even “Fart Detection” would have made as much sense as most of these merit badges, and certainly would have been more useful. The entire value system seemed arbitrary and inconsistent. If the camel was made by a committee, scouting seemed to have been created by a committee consisting of a Baptist missionary, an accountant, an unrepentant pedophile, a government bureaucrat, a hippie back-to-the-lander, a marketing agency executive, a cigar store Indian, an undercover cop, a New Age charlatan, and a wino with a recurring delusional belief that he’s Benito Mussolini.

If you are wondering whether the unhealthy energy around my not-so-warm-and-fuzzy memories of scouting may indicate that I’m protesting too much — that I’m trying to cover something up — you are correct. Here is my story.

One lovely June my all-white “tribe” of “We-blows” was on an extended camping trip in the central Appalachians, where we were commanded by Scoutmaster Williams, a man who took the “master” part of his moniker seriously. Master Williams was a “drop and give me twenty” kind of leader, though it was common knowledge among the boys that beneath his silly costume and hyperbolic Davy Crockett rhetoric was a plain old suburban dad, a henpecked, three-martini lunch, lawn-mowing, golf-playing, mid-level sales guy. Here in the woods, though, he could celebrate himself as the undisputed Leader of the Pack. Under his leadership we were required to recite various oaths and promises when we wanted instead to be climbing rocks or fishing or playing hide-and-seek in the forest.

While the woods smelled of pure freedom, being there with Master Williams was a highly regimented and extremely competitive experience. It was, in fact, the opposite of play. I do not exaggerate when I say that we couldn’t dig a hole to take a shit without him turning the occasion into a competition — fastest hole, deepest hole, even roundest hole — and had there been a badge for meritorious dumping he would no doubt have adjudicated that contest as well. By the third night of the campout I had been forced to participate in so many competitions that I felt like an exhausted decathlete, only one whose events included boot waxing, dish washing, and melodic whistling. The only thing that pisses you off more than being forced to compete at whistling or scrubbing dishes is having your ass handed to you time and time again by the other kids, who seemed naturally to possess either the skills necessary to excel at such things, or the sheer drive to humiliate you in head-to-head competition. It may sound silly now, but at age eleven you just don’t want to be a loser every time, even if what you’re losing at is whistling or shithole digging. Why couldn’t I make that damned thing rounder?

Well, that third night Master Williams had arranged yet another competition, in which we were each required to participate, however weary we might have been. This new contest would determine who could build the biggest, best, fastest fire using only a single match. This kind of challenge had everything Master Williams liked best: implied masculine potency, a pretention to survival skills, the drama of a winner-take-all race to the finish, and immense potential for the utter humiliation of the losers. The idea was that we would each gather our own materials — tree bark, twigs, leaves, whatever — to first lay and then ignite a fire that would, if we were truly skilled, be the first to leap high enough to burn through a string that the Master had tied tightly between two trees.

Master Williams blew his whistle to start the first phase of the contest, a mere five minutes in which we fanned out into the woods to collect whatever we judged to be the most flammable and therefore choicest materials from which to build our fires. I headed into a thick stand of brush beyond the muddy spot where my own leaky pup tent was pitched and began to rifle through the duff on the forest floor in search of something so dry that it could bring me victory. But everything I gathered was thoroughly damp, and even things like spruce cones and the cups of acorns felt moist through and through. A feeling of dread began to gather in me, my chest tightening and my breathing speeding up as my time to find something ignitable ticked away.

When Master Williams whistled out the one-minute warning, I felt an utter sense of desperation and panic wash over me. It was in that moment of despair that I made an observation that would forever change the trajectory of my career as a scout. I noticed, sitting near the mouth of my little, green tent, the small, red can of Coleman fuel that we had used to refill one of the troop’s cook stoves. Grabbing the can I stepped behind my tent, squatted to the ground, and sprinkled some white gas — and then a bit more, just to be sure — onto the moist pinecones and twigs I had harvested from the forest floor. In that moment I was not thinking of my loyalty oath; I didn’t have time to meditate on the need to be “trustworthy” or “obedient.” In fact, I didn’t think about what I was doing at all. Something in the reptilian part of my brain just felt — felt that I couldn’t afford to be beaten again after the embarrassing drubbing I had taken in the whistling and poop hole digging trials.

I arrived at the group just seconds in advance of disqualification, and now had five more whistled-off minutes to align and lay a fire consisting of my pathetic little sticks and pinecones. I stooped to one knee and hunched over the spot where I would be tested. But I was more terrified than exhilarated as I tried with trembling hands to set my materials up into the ideal little teepee-shape that was rising in front of the more capable boys working to my left and right. The harder I tried the more my little stick umbrella collapsed, and I could feel Master Williams’s critical glare fall upon me, even as a tidy row of stick wigwams materialized up and down the line. The tension was palpable, the concentration intense. I knew what was at stake. This was the decisive test of who I was and who I would become. To build a fire. It was the ultimate primal challenge, the critical rite of passage into manhood.

At last the final whistle blew, and Master Williams counted down from ten, as if NASA were launching an Apollo rocket right there in those soggy woods. We ten truck driving dentist lifesaving welding coin collecting wood carving astronauts prepared for blast off. Three . . . two . . . one . . . ignition! Up and down the line I could hear the synchronized scratch and pop of ten individual wooden matches as they were simultaneously struck. Each boy remained kneeling over his little stick tepee, cupping his precious flame with both hands and carefully lowering himself to touch the tiny flicker to just the right spot of bark or twig. The material had to be dry, the placement precise. The structure had to be built so as to allow oxygen to nurture the budding flames. That single, tiny, flickering point of sulfurous fire was all that stood between triumph and humiliation, and I guarded mine as a kind of eternal flame, one that would either be extinguished in a moment, or would burn brightly into manhood.

I remained balancing awkwardly on one knee, too afraid to shift position, and bent forward slowly, lowering toward my half-collapsed structure of twigs and cones, trying through sheer concentration to will that tiny flame to remain lit, trying one last time, in my little, collapsing world of inadequate whistling and poorly dug poop holes, to keep my hopes from being extinguished forever. I chose the most promising spot in my stick pile and lowered the match slowly toward it.

I do not remember the exact moment in which the match made contact with my little pile of damp sticks. I do recall that the resulting detonation sounded like a concussion grenade, and that the rising fireball blew me backward onto my shoulder blades. There followed an indeterminate welter of gasping and scurrying, and when I came to awareness I was looking up through a swirl of smoke at the face of Scoutmaster Williams, which wore an expression of genuine concern. I was coughing just a little, and the smell of singed hair was unmistakable.

“Son,” he said at last, “you’ve burned your damned eyebrows off. Are you alright?”

I nodded yes, though I didn’t have the slightest idea.

“You’re disqualified,” he added, flatly.

I don’t recall whether I cried. And that is the unvarnished truth. Kicked-out scout’s honor.

Luke Wrye, if you’re out there, please don’t take any of this personally. I appreciate those bluebird boxes very much. I hope you did become an Eagle Scout, and that you got the Textiles Merit Badge and won the fire-building competition and that you’re a gunslinger against fracking and all that. But, mostly, just thanks for making those boxes. I didn’t see any bluebirds in the meadow, but I believe they’re there. You may not be around to see it when they move in. I won’t either. But that’s what’s going to happen one of these days.

6. Lake Perez: Drawing Down, Singing Out, Filling Up

Part One: Drawing Down

Even before I arrived in Pennsylvania I began receiving apologies about the condition of Lake Perez. Ian’s idea in choosing the lake as an LTERP site is that visiting writers and artists would have an aquatic component to their stay — that they might experience the lake by paddling or fishing it, or, in the case of Ian himself, by skating around it in winter. They could, if they wished, peer down over the gunnels and reflect on reflection itself. This piece of water would add a dimension to our meditations on change over time in this place.

“Here’s the thing,” Ian told me, a little too haltingly. “The dam is being repaired and so the lake doesn’t have anything in it right now.” He laughed nervously, and then paused.

“What does it usually have in it?” I asked in reply.

“Well . . . water.”

“Water? Oh, that’s good.”

“What’s good?” asked Ian. “That the lake has water?”

“No, that it doesn’t,” I said. “There’s no way to really see a lake if it’s full of water. Sounds like my timing is ideal. Besides, I could drown in water. Much safer without it.”

The next day I sent Ian a recent essay of mine in which I extoll the virtues of the endoheiric lake not far from my place out in the remote Great Basin Desert. This is my home lake, and it is incredibly beautiful. It is full of light and rattlers and coyotes and wind, but it has no water, and that’s what I like best about it. When I heard that Lake Perez would be “empty,” I felt more comfortable about my assignment at Shaver’s Creek. However green and wet this place might be, at least I’d have a dry lake to work with, and so I was genuinely enthusiastic. As an environmental writer, absence of water is my professional specialty.-

On my first afternoon at Shaver’s Creek I walked out onto the dry lake bed as I do onto the crust of my dry lake at home. I noticed a little water backed up down at the far end of the lakebed, but speculated that this must be residual rainfall that had back drained against the base of the dam — a structure which is wholly unnatural, and which seemed even more so now that it was more or less covered with pickup trucks and heavy equipment. The creek itself was still running, of course, far over the flats along the other bank. The ground here was weedy and crusty, but still soft in places. In low spots the dry ground was broken by small pools that ranged in size from puddles to modest ponds that were perhaps twenty feet across. It had in fact become a lake of low weeds, punctuated here and there by purple globed clover, or by a splash of white from a daisy-like flower. Mostly, I was awash in the kind of openness that, as a desert rat, makes me feel most at home. The forest is so dense here, the curtain of green so thick, the air so heavy with humidity, the light so filtered and indirect and shifted to the green part of the spectrum, that standing out in the center of the waterless lake was a great relief. Now, with some elbow room and a bigger sky, I felt as if I had finally exhaled after holding my breath while hiking in the dense woods. Long views. Direct light. Openness. A breeze. A good view of a turkey vulture rocking and tipping on the invisible currents above me. Who needs water?

Part Two: Singing Out

It was a good evening around the campfire. The rain and mosquitos held off, and I huddled around with Ian and his family to renew our friendship over Pennsylvania’s own Hop Hog IPAs. There were sausages cooked on sticks and eaten in those crappy, wonderful white bread buns that defined childhood camping. Some stories are told beneath this tall stand of white pines by the cabin where I’m holed up. Silence and laughter take turns. And then, of course, there is music. Ian plays guitar and sings, while I wail along on blues harp. There is a mixture of folk songs and ballads. Mostly songs with stories. Some outlaws, some broken hearts, some saviors, and mountains and rivers without end. The last song of the evening is blind Reverend Gary Davis’s great equalizer: “Death Don’t Have No Mercy in this Land.” It is somehow both a warming song and a chilling one.

It is late now, and Ian’s crew has rolled out. Because the lake is waterless, apparently nobody but me is interested in being here. I am the sole inhabitant of this row of a dozen cabins, and there are no staff folks around either. The campfire is still glowing and smoking as I head out with my flashlight and a fresh Hop Hog to investigate the lake once more.

From the campfire I had heard the singing of frogs and insects coming from the dry lake, but I had little appreciation for what was actually occurring until I tramped down through this stand of white pines and out onto the lakebed. The sheer volume of this frog and insect chorus is astounding! I take out my phone, hold it high in the air, and make a recording that I will later play for my daughters back in the high desert.

Struck at first by the sheer noise of what might be described as a shrill roar of tiny beast music, I now begin to discern individual sounds. I recognize crickets, of course, and the occasional punctuating bellow of what could be a bullfrog. But there are at least three different chirping and peeping sounds, each distinct in tone, pitch, and rhythm, coming from what must be hundreds or even thousands of individuals. And then, every thirty seconds or so, there comes a five-second burst of beast music so incredibly loud, raspy, and constant as to almost drown out the rest of the chorus. What does it sound like? Like a motorcycle at high speed? Like hundred-mile-an-hour wind being filtered through a small chink in a wall? Like a thousand bows being dragged across a thousand violins at once? I have never experienced anything like this in my life. Which are insects, and which are frogs? How many species am I dealing with here? The tapestry of sound is so layered and complex as to be difficult to process. The acoustic environment of this open field is in fact every bit as dense and impenetrable as the emerald forest I hiked through today. (Much later I will have the opportunity to play my recording for the naturalists at Shaver’s Creek, who are able to discern and identify every thread in this sonic tapestry: crickets, spring peeper, grey tree frog. The bellowing is not a bullfrog but a green frog. The shrieking is not a frog but rather the American toad, which I decide to adopt as my eastern forest totem animal. Rest a bit, scream as loud as you can for five seconds, and then repeat the cycle all night long. This is my kind of animal.)

While listening to this amazing riot I decide to have a look around with my small flashlight. In its beam I locate one of the pools I discovered out here this afternoon. The water appears strangely white in the beam of light, which soon falls upon a frog, stretched out underwater, near the center of the pool. I watch him for some time, and he watches me. From his size I suppose he must be a green frog, though he appears ghostly white. Are his bulging eyes turned toward me, or do I simply think they are because my own eyes are on him? What must he think of this IPA-toting, light-wielding maniac out in the middle of a dry lake in the middle of the night? He is laying low for now, but perhaps later he will sing out to his kin in frog language: “You aren’t going to believe what I saw. Some dumb ass biped was hoofing around our lake in the middle of the night!”

I turn the flashlight off again and stand quietly in the noisy meadow. What I tell of next will sound like literary invention. It is not. I looked up to see the clouds part for the first time since my arrival here. In the gap of sky that opened was Ursa Major. From the two stars at the base of its bowl I drew an imaginary line out to find Polaris. From Polaris I knew true North. And that is the first moment since I arrived here that I have had my bearings. Then the clouds buried the stars once again. Why invent epiphanies when we can simply record them?

The lake is empty of water, but it is filled with everything else. Thick darkness. Screaming frogs. Momentary starlight.

Part Three: Filling Up

Something very disturbing has been occurring over the past couple days. My lake is filling up with water. This is unwelcome, since the empty lakebed has already become a kind of home territory for me. The last thing I want is a bunch of damned water here! There is already water everywhere — in the creeks and tributaries, on the leaves and needles — even the air is full of water. It has also been raining during much of the time I’ve been here, and in fact last night the thunderstorms were intense, with lighting flashing and sheets of rain hammering the metal roof of my cabin. And now, for reasons no one seemms quite sure of, the lake is quickly filling with water. The guy at the park office says there must be debris clogging up the drain. The custodian of the cabins instead speculates that this is a test of some part of the dam repair project. I wonder if the spillway is currently under construction, preventing its use. Ian, ever a hopeful person, thinks perhaps the main repair work is done and that the lake is in fact being refilled for good.

One thing is for certain: the lake is filling and this change is not the product of rain. In the three days I’ve been here Lake Perez has gone from being an ocean of well-established weeds and even saplings — which make clear that water hasn’t lived here in years — to being about three quarters full. On day one I took a photograph of a row of forty canoes sitting in a perfect line in front of a waterless meadow. Now I could easily paddle one of those canoes around the growing lake.

It is now said that I may be the last LTERPreter to see this lake without its water. For posterity, then, let me describe the view. This is a lovely, open meadow, shallower on the east and south than on the north and west. As the topography will make clear even once the lake is full, the creek is against the north rim, running beneath the steep relief that descends from the forest. Dotting the meadow are two forms of artificially created fish structures. One type is basically a pile of large granite rocks, and so from a distance the lake appears green and flat but with a few dozen small, grey pyramids rising from it. The other type vaguely resembles a crab trap or lobster pot: it is formed of 2x2s connected to create a makeshift box. For some reason these fish structures in the dry lake cause me to imagine fish swimming through the air, lurking near the structures, then rising to nab a damsel fly. There are many large tree stumps in the lakebed. They have been here for half a century, since the time the lake was created in the late 1950s, and they are an important reminder that this lake was in fact created, in this case by beaver-like humans who desired a place to fish. The lake is like a painting, essay, or song: something produced by human imagination and effort but at the same time deeply natural.

Throughout my reflections I have emphasized the importance and value of imagining this place over time. I have embraced the 100-year timeframe of this experiment as a way to stretch my imagination beyond our own lifespans, and thus to conceive of environmental change on scales that reach beyond our immediate, visceral experience. I have tried to imagine the pasts that are inscribed on this landscape and to discern patterns that might allow me to project possible futures. I have reckoned this incremental change by the single rock or leaf, by the individual sign or ghost. And now, as if to make a mockery of all my fine philosophizing about incremental change over the vastness of time, a whole goddamned lake has appeared overnight. Never mind 100 years, this lake has appeared in less than 100 hours. This, too, provides a useful lesson about environmental change. Sometimes change comes like erosion, sometimes like lightning. I try to adjust the scale of my own perception to accept this change, but as the fish structures disappear beneath the rising lake I feel myself resisting. The one place that felt comfortable to me — the one spot that was dry, open, and light — has been inundated.

So here is what I have to offer you who read this in ten years or in one hundred: beneath all that water is a beautiful flower and frog-filled dry lakebed. It is there right now, in fact. Close your eyes for a moment. Do you see the fish? There they are, finning their way through the bright air around those old tree stumps.

7. Raptor Center: Hope is the Thing with Two Thin Layers of Skin Stretched

Over the Delicate Bones of its Arms and Fingers

Ian and Jacy join me for my visit to the Raptor Center, which we reach after a nice hike through the forest and then around some verdant, low-lying, grassy meadows out beyond the Troll Bridge. As if on cue we discover another large black rat snake climbing up some granite blocks near a small pond that is part of the environmental center’s landscaping. It is a nice reminder that we don’t need to be deep in the forest to witness wildness. Snakes, in particular, seem to retain their wildness however domestic the setting in which we discover them. Their appearance around our homes proves that it is an interstitial world, one full of cracks and gaps through which nature will always find a way to wriggle. Fire will make its way through the forest; water will penetrate the roof; wind will seek out the fissures around the sashes in forest or field; snakes will magically appear inside the shed.

The Raptor Center is easily the most inhabited (by humans) of the sites I’ve visited. While everywhere I’ve walked I’ve felt the presence of ghosts — those previous inhabitants, laborers, hikers, and field scientists whose shadows fall over the spots I’ve contemplated — this is the place that feels most embedded in the present. The presence of children is the defining quality of this site, and I see and hear groups of kids visiting the facility, meeting in groups for lunch, preparing for a natural history tour. It makes me miss my own daughters, who would like it here very much.

We make our way up to the Raptor Center, the part of the facility where various birds — all of which have been somehow or another injured in the wild — live in large, well-maintained cages. Jacy, who is now in college, has been coming to this place since he was a little kid, and I can tell immediately that he feels especially comfortable here. He’s also worked as a volunteer, and it is clear that he has developed a meaningful attachment to individual birds, whose habits he knows and whose meals he once helped to supply. As we wander cage to cage observing hawks, eagles, and owls, Jacy occasionally communicates with one through an impressively accurate tongue cluck or guttural rattle.

As an inhabitant of the high-elevation, western Great Basin Desert, I find many of the bird species here unfamiliar. A short-eared owl is shacked up with a broad-winged hawk. An eastern screech owl, which according to a sign weighs a mere half pound, peeks out from a neatly constructed ground box. And then we reach the domicile of the barred owl, a bird I remember fondly from my youth but haven’t seen in decades. Jacy clucks in greeting. Ian hoots the classic barred owl call, “Who cooks for you?” In this case Ian’s question is answered by a teenaged boy who, working from within the cage, is laying out food for the injured owl. It is clear that the boy is a new volunteer, and his eyes widen in excitement as the owl hops down from its perch to seize the dead mouse that has just been laid out. Like our spotting of the snake, this is a small moment of wildness in the heart of a place that has been domesticated. Whatever the form of our captivity — cage or cubicle or corner office — that spark of the world that lies before and beyond the walls still exists in us, raptors and humans alike.

Soon we wander along to other cages, where the inhabitants are familiar to me from the Great Basin. We see the kestrel, that graceful little falcon which in my home desert strikes kangaroo rats with a fierceness that far exceeds its modest size. Here also is the red-tailed hawk, which sometimes nests in the contorted junipers that grow on our property. The next cage contains a giant turkey vulture, which I know from home and have enjoyed watching this week, as the wild cousins of this caged bird tipped and rocked on the wheels of dihedrals above Lake Perez. And here is the golden eagle, a common neighbor of mine at home. It is humbling to see so large a specimen from so close a distance. This bird’s seven-foot wingspan keeps aloft an animal whose eyes are capable of spotting a cottontail from two miles away — an observation even more humbling for bunnies.

Finally we stand before the cage of the raptor which, in its exquisite savagery, is to me the quintessential expression of desertness: the great horned owl. Set within its twin-lobed facial disc are large, unblinking, yellow eyes — eyes separated by an angular V of mottled brown feathers that appear indistinguishable from the crenelated bark of a hickory. Above that face, of course, are the unmistakable “horns” of the raptor’s ear tufts, which form the silhouette that I have so often seen etched into the evening sky back home. The call of this owl is the ubiquitous sound of the desert night, and because one of the bird’s survival strategies is to appropriate the nests of other birds, they are among the earliest breeders in the Great Basin, sometimes beginning their courtship hooting as early as late January. It is common for them to perform these unforgettable utterances from the peak of our roof, and they have on occasion inhabited formerly used red-tailed hawk nests on our property. We often find owl pellets in the desert, tightly woven cylinders of matted fur, studded gracefully with the undigested bones of mice, packrats, snakes, birds, and just about anything else that walks, crawls, slithers, or flies.

My most indelible memory of this raptor occurred on the morning of the day of our second daughter’s birth. I was out walking through the open desert at dawn when a great horned owl, appearing magically out of a rose-dusted sky, flew by me at startlingly close distance and low elevation. I froze as it passed before me, then banked steeply and flew by me again in the other direction, and finally swooped once more and passed me a third time. That afternoon Caroline Emerson entered this tangled universe of big owls and little girls. The world is so full of signs that even conceiving of the task of reading them strikes me as daunting. Despite the inscrutable patterns that lattice this mysterious existence, for me the news of a blessing will be ever wedded with the visitation of this formidable avian predator.

Our final stop is at a very large cage that is not part of the educational display but is instead well off the beaten path. This is the waystation where recently arrived birds are permitted to adjust to their new surroundings. In this cage we witness a bald eagle, which we’re told was badly injured and was brought to the facility just a few days ago. I am struck by how electric this bird is compared to any I’ve seen today. It hops from one perch to another, flapping its wings in a near-constant, disturbed rustle. The membrane of its eye twitches and blinks. Its massive talons flex, kneading the log perch. Its head snaps back and forth violently, as if the bird is searching in all directions for some unseen threat to its survival. This is a huge raptor, and it is agitated.

What am I actually seeing here? Is the bald eagle’s energy an indication of pain or stress? Is it an exuberance that is natural to the species, or to this individual? Is it a sign of a difficult adjustment, one that perhaps every bird in this facility has lived through? In the absence of better information, I find myself thinking that what I’m seeing through this wire mesh is a still flammable spark of wildness, and the effects of its impending suffocation. At some level I recognize the bird’s distress, its feeling of being trapped, disoriented, afraid. Of course I have no way of knowing what this fellow creature actually thinks or feels, but I am experiencing distress of my own as I watch it. Intellectually, I know this injured bird is fortunate to be here, where it will receive compassion and care. Emotionally, I feel an urge to tear at the cage and free the bird. As I look desperately through the wire grid of the enclosure, I feel almost as if it is me, and not the raptor, that is trapped on the inside of a cage.

It is time to leave, and I’m ready. Our last stop, unplanned, is to pause before impressive bat boxes mounted along the back wall of one of the buildings. Here, I’m told, something on the order of 2,000 little brown bats once lived. However, the ravages of white-nose syndrome have taken such a severe toll on this local population that only a few bats remain. This is not the morale boost I’m seeking after my disconcerting encounter with the bald eagle. It is very clear to me that this environmental center is well-run, effective, ambitious, and guided by intelligent, well-informed, caring people. The work of this place is to build a bridge between people and the land, to give kids the chance for a meaningful interaction with a place or with a bird. I deeply respect the impressive achievement in environmental education that Shaver’s Creek represents. But a writer’s job is honesty, and so I am compelled to record that these eagle and bat contemplations have left me feeling as distraught as the eagle, as empty as the bat boxes.

Emily Dickinson wrote that “hope is the thing with feathers.” One way to understand this memorable line is to see it as an affirmation that our capacity to believe in a better future — for ourselves and our children, for raptors, for the little fellow mammals that are bats — is what enables our imagination to take flight. Maybe. Or maybe imagination itself is the most ancient and indispensable of human survival mechanisms. In any case, it is impossible to visit this place without meditating on hope. How extravagant and unlikely it is. How necessary.

8. The Lake Trail: Place in Motion

Walking is the way I make sense of the world. At home in the desert I walk at least 100 miles each month out in the canyons, hills, and playas near our home, and I have been doing so for almost a decade. Put it this way: I’ve walked enough thousands of miles there to wear out several good dogs. I’ve never done a long through-hike or epic backpacking trip, never experienced a glamorous walking tour in a fabulous exotic location elsewhere on the globe. Mine are small walks, two to five or six miles, around my wild neighborhood. But I do them each day, the way people drink coffee or brush their teeth. The rhythm of a walk calibrates my mind and body, myself and the land. Never mind nature epiphanies. Without these walks I’d be ornery as a cross-eyed mule.

The choice of the Lake Trail as one of the eight “sites” of the LTERP project strikes me as elegant in both its simplicity and its brilliance. I love the way a trail both is and is not a place. We begin by going to a trail (or to its “head,” which is even better), but once moving along it we are instead on the trail. Typically we are at a place rather than on it, but to be on the trail is to be on a trip, a journey, an adventure. One simply can’t be at a journey. To be on the trail necessarily suggests not only movement, but also a concept of futurity in both time and space. Even when walking a trail we’ve walked many times before, we still don’t know what might appear around the next bend. And that’s something we all need in our lives: to both belong somewhere and also to be passing through. Think of it this way. To be at a place is to take a sensory photograph of it, while to be on the trail (or off it, for that matter, so long as you’re on the move) is to create a narrative through the interaction of your body and the world, to participate in the telling of a story whose conclusion you haven’t yet reached.

One of my many bad qualities is that I’m restless and impatient. I hate sitting or standing still, which means that I begin every task of environmental attention with the substantial liability that I can’t hang with it as long as I should. I recognize that rich, detailed, attentive environmental representation most often emerges in the work of people whose sensibility permits sustained acts of close attention. I’m reminded, for example, of an amble I took on my first day here with Doug, one of the lead naturalists. As we moved slowly along the trail, Doug’s unhurried attentiveness and extraordinary ability to read the landscape was so remarkable that I soon began referring to him as “the Buddha of Shaver’s Creek” — a nickname I meant in an entirely complimentary way. To be in the woods with Doug is to be with a person whose capacity for observation and engagement so far exceeds my own that it makes me want to just take off hiking.

I know that remaining in place in order to make close observations is the valorizing image of attentiveness that most of us conjure up when we think of environmental art of any sort. But that doesn’t change the fact that I want constantly to be in motion. If I were a landscape painter I’d have to devise a harness system — imagine a cinematographer hitched up to a Steadicam — so that my easel and palette traveled in front of me as I hiked and painted simultaneously. In fact this is precisely what I do as a writer, often writing or reading for hours while walking at the same time. (I once published an essay about my odd habit; it is called “In Defense of Bibliopedestrianism.”) I am more creative, energized, imaginative, even more observant, when I’m in motion through place.

Pulitzer-prize-winning environmental writer and Beat poet Gary Snyder once wrote literary ecowarrior Edward Abbey a friendly letter in which he complimented Abbey’s work. Cactus Ed replied with a note that read “Dear Gary, I admire your work too, except for all that Zen and Hindu bullshit.” I’m not as cynical as Ed, but I can say honestly that the idea of sitting in one place in order to experience nature strikes me as an unnecessarily limited way to conceive of a mindful interaction with the world. We tend to picture mystics as wise men who retreat to wild nature, where they sit cross-legged on a mountaintop awaiting enlightenment. I even think of Gary himself, meditating in the Ring of Bone zendo up on the San Juan Ridge in the Sierra Nevada not far from where I live. But many cultures practice walking meditations, pilgrimages in which it is the movement of the body and mind through the landscape that is conceived of as the ennobling praxis of attentiveness, or even of spiritual illumination.

One obvious practice of ritual walking is the pilgrimage to a holy site. The scale of the destination is not important. One can walk to Mecca or walk to the spring in the desert canyon above my home — the one near the ridge where the pronghorn antelope gather into harems in the autumn. In other words, the destination of a pilgrimage may be considered holy, or it may instead be made holy by the nature of the pilgrimage itself. To my mind, both occur simultaneously.

Another form of ritual walking, one that interests me far more than pilgrimage, is ritual circumambulation, a practice especially important in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition (the Tibetan word for a circumambulatory pilgrimage is “Kora”). As the word suggests, a circumambulation is a walking around something — usually something that is considered holy, or at least something to which one wishes to pay respects. In the case of a mountain, for example, one would walk completely around the peak rather than attempting to bag its summit, which is the usual, western approach to mountain hiking. Circumambulation is referred to as “opening the mountain,” and in traditional Asian cultures the sacramental walk is always performed in a clockwise direction, “keeping the mountain on your right.” One of the most celebrated American circumambulations is of Mt. Tamalpais, on the Marin peninsula, above Muir Woods, north of San Francisco. There, in October of 1965, Gary Snyder performed a ritual circumambulation of the mountain with fellow poets Allen Ginsberg and Phillip Whalen. It is a walk that thousands of us have repeated since that time, and in fact I have completed the so-called “CircumTam” with my friend Ian Marshall, who helped to found the LTERP program here.

Today I am performing a ritual circumambulation of Lake Perez in the pouring rain. I’d rather be walking across the lake’s bed, but since it has begun to fill with that inconvenience known to easterners as “water,” I’m driven up to the highlands of the Lake Trail. Today the term “trail” is merely conceptual, since these endless sheets of rain have transformed the narrow path into a modest creek. I am splashing along in an honorable direction, paying my respects by keeping the lake on my right.

My speed over ground does not prohibit observation. I see banks of quivering touch-me-not and glistening bowers of wild roses go by, and a reticulated pattern of shavings climbing the columnar bole of a stately shagbark hickory. Purplish black lacewings alight everywhere, and I wonder if their density and beauty might somehow be a product of this weather, a bloom of the storm. The broad, lobed, palmate leaves of mayapple bounce as they’re struck by raindrops. A ridiculously large squirrel hops away through a tangle of downed trees. I pass a dogwood sapling in the understory, a little tree so soaked that it leans heavily into the trail. Beneath it I notice the ovals, mittens, and rounded tridents of sassafras leaves, a sight that triggers in my imagination the warm, rootbeery smell of the plant’s hidden root. A bird I do not recognize arcs up into the canopy. I break through the wet elastic of spider webs, their resilience under these conditions nothing short of a miracle.

As a desert rat, this extremely green week has sometimes been mildly disconcerting. To my eye, trained as it has been on the skeleton of an open landscape, this lovely curtain of green can feel oppressive. Although I find this difference in aesthetic perception difficult to articulate, I occasionally have the feeling that the forest is so full of stuff that I can’t see anything. To riff on an old insight, it is not the trees that prevent me from seeing the forest, but rather the forest itself. Lacking a sightline to the horizon is one thing, but hiking the Lake Trail is more a matter of navigating an emerald tunnel, one in which visibility is so limited as to produce a feeling of disorientation. The trail feels especially closed today, as dark clouds and rain have lowered the sky and shifted the color of the woods even further greenward, into a dark, dappled, glowing jade that glows in all directions. It is amazingly beautiful — so otherworldly as to be possible only on this earth — and yet I crave a longer view, one that might open the land and let my head take a breath.

At last I come to the kind of break I’ve been craving. Parting the curtain of green and stepping out into a weedy clearing, the land suddenly opens before me. The light shifts to a golden grey, and I can see a long way in both directions. The lake stretches out below me, the mountains rise beyond, and banks of silver clouds, those mountains of the sky, roll out in successive ranges above the forested hills. This view that I have been yearning for and am so relieved to have is produced by the fact that I am standing in the artificial clearing beneath a power line. The power poles walk off into the distance like the pickets of a long fence, giving a sense of depth and distance that I find comforting.

I pause long enough to take a single, deep, slow, satisfying breath. Then I continue my circumambulation of the lake in the pouring rain. I am in motion in this place, and this place is still in motion.

Coda: Shaver’s Creek Nocturne

Tunes made by the fire

Dark lake full of frog music

Rain drumming this roof

LTERPreter: Mike Branch, 2014.

Mike Branch is a writer, humorist, environmentalist, father, desert rat, and curmudgeon who lives with his wife and two young daughters at 6,000 feet in the remote western Great Basin Desert, on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Range. Read his essays, view his book publications, and follow his Rants from the Hill, his musings on life in rural Nevada.