the ecology of residency essays from
Castle Valley, Utah June 2005
the ecology of residency essays from Castle Valley, Utah June 2005
Š 2005 All rights reserved. Works within are property of their respective author. Please do not reprint without permission. Thank You. Printed on recycled paper.
For Our Teachers Adele Alsop Jeff Anderson Teresa Cohn Ed Derderian Ron Drake Alice Drogan John Gieger Vijali Hamilton Chloe Hedden Laura Hemker Katherine Howells Laura Kamala David Peterson Robert Ryan Florence Krall Shepard Ken Sleight Hertha Wakefield Mark Webster Brooke Williams Terry Tempest Williams Jen Sadoff Dan Stott Karen Stott The Town of Castle Valley, Utah Red Rock...Blue Skies...and The Colorado River
Table of Contents Foreword
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Terry Tempest Williams
Collaborative Poem
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The Essays 3
Birth of the Real Laura K. Asman
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Depositional Landscapes Brittney Carman
Lost and Found: A Natural Autobiography
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Nicholas Daniels 29
Place and Paradox Kami Day
Map Making in the Desert: Meditations on the Question of Place
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Cecily Ellis
Learning the Language of the West: A Reflection on the Ecology of Residency Summer Seminar
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Brandon Hollingshead
A Natural Autobiography: Inspired by Castle Valley, Utah
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Allison Lisk 74
Arriving at Sitting Patrick Mabey
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In the Shadow of Mountains Bryan Wallis
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The Coyote’s Talent Paul Wilson v
FOREWORD On June 3, 2005, ten remarkable students arrived at the Castle Valley Inn just outside Moab, Utah. They had enrolled in a field course entitled, “The Ecology of Residency,” a twelve day exploration of what it means to live in place. The place was Castle Valley, Utah, a small desert hamlet approximately nine miles long and three miles wide walled in by wilderness. The LaSal Mountains rise to the south; Porcupine Ridge lies to the west; Castleton Tower stands to the east; and the Colorado River holds the boundary to the north. Approximately three hundred individuals live in Castle Valley. Culture and landscape inform one another. This is a community that courts the wild. The essays held between these covers are the expression of this concentrated time in the desert. Call them “Natural Autobiographies.” Each student not only explored the exterior landscape of redrocks and ravens, sandstone and sage, datura, dragonflies, and the Colorado River — they dared to explore their interior landscape as well. Biological literacy opened the door to what it means to be human and how we extend our compassion, our awareness to the larger community of Life. vi
These students made maps of water with water colors. They hiked to Delicate Arch. They learned the names of plants, insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals. They learned to see rocks that tell time differently. They sat in a circle with Ken Sleight at Pack Creek Ranch and listened to stories about Edward Abbey and the Monkey Wrench Gang beneath cottonwood trees. They asked “Seldom Seen Smith” what it means to be an environmentalist. He told them that to be an activist is to be engaged in the preservation of life. And he told them life is most immediate in wilderness. And then he told them stories of floating down Glen Canyon before it was dammed and he exhorted them to help take the dam down with their monkey wrenches. “A monkey wrench is not a symbol of destruction,” Ken said. “Ed told me the monkey wrench is a symbol of restoration.” He looked at these beautiful students directly. “The monkey wrench is your own talent, your gifts, that is how you are going to fix the world.” These students pondered and discussed ideas of destruction and restoration, erosion and deposition, floods and droughts as they walked to Morning Glory Arch in silence, as they floated down the Colorado River at dusk. They were graced by animal mentors: Grey Fox, Collared Lizard, Turkey Vulture, Deer, Rabbit, Mountain Lion watching behind willows. And they mentored each other as the land mentored them. “If we know where we are, we know who we are...” Wendell Berry writes. These students learned where they were through community mentors. Consequently, stories of the wild triggered stories of their own natural histories. These narratives from the heart are raw, open, deep, and true — born out of both vulnerability and strength. This is the power of marrying vii
the humanities with the sciences, of opening the door to not only an environmental ethic that can heal the world, but enhance it’s meaning. We do not live in isolation but in a shimmering web of relationships that asks us to be awake, alive, and engaged. These students are engaged. They are brave. They dared to dig deep. They dared to be open and change. And they did it together. Call them the future. Call them our hope. Call them a people in place with principles emerging. Dragonflies in the desert. Ephemeral beauty. Environmental Humanities opens the conversation to a complete world in all our incompleteness. We engage in dialogue with Other — other disciplines, other species, other options and paradigms of beings. It is allowing ourselves to cross over the threshold of certainty to uncertainty, leaving behind certitude and dogma of fixed points and entering a river of possibilities. Paradox replaces consistency. Verticality bows to circularity. The goal of summiting a mountain is questioned by the beauty of its flanks. We are present. “The most forward looking people see sideways....” The Ecology of Residency was a time for looking sideways. Together. This group of individuals changed my life. It was my great privilege to accompany them.
Terry Tempest Williams
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c
hanging winds a history book in stone the lightning bolts flash and lead us to the cave old ravens perch quickly absorbed in the shadow of a woman’s form when you think you’re sucked dry dragonfly near water words may break my heart and carve a red rock path thunder claps on rock walls high a lifetime in air we watch life always comes back the desert dismembers and remembers observe cosmos and below we honor the scar Collaborative poem, written by students in the Ecology of Residency course on the occasion of desert rain.
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the essays
Birth of the Real Laura K. Asman
Describing Adele Alsop’s painting, “Big Pine Sunset”, Jaime Manrique writes, “It is in this painting that the elements that Alsop has so slyly presented come together for me: the looseness of the brush stroke, the force, and total abandonment with which the paint is applied on the canvas. Alsop is no longer painting the real world, but the birth of the real, that instant when things are half-formed, when anything is possible and the sky could become a pond, water could turn to rock, and a tree into a bolt of lightning. It is up to the viewer as much as to the painter to complete the work. These paintings are an invitation to surrender ourselves to the wonder of creation”(Manrique 2). My experience these past nine days, this portrait of myself I reflect upon, reveals my particular half-formed state: the state of becoming. While this process of becoming, this birth of sorts, creates extreme pain and discomfort, it is also an invitation to the real— to what matters most.
What I have learned this week from Brooke Williams is that my story is significant. Perhaps one day someone will read my words and choose to embrace their own sense of place. I recall reading Edith Hamilton’s book on Greek mythology in school, and loving the stories so much that I stole the book from my classroom. In my young mind, I was sure one would never be able to find another edition full of such amazing ancient characters. I had to have that book because, for me, it was magic. This is the power of story and the need to understand ourselves and the world around us. Imagination is the reality which binds us to place. It is very unfortunate that many residents of this country do not hear the creation stories of their own landscape, those of the Native American Indian. I did not read or hear any of their stories until I was an adult. If we are disconnected from the stories about the landscape, we are spiritually disconnected from the land and ultimately from ourselves. The irony of growing up in a city is that it so very easily becomes one’s natural landscape. Detachment is an accepted practice. My family lived on the banks of the Mississippi River until I was six years old. I remember watching the river from the picture window in our living room; the scene was so beautiful through the window that it is always the portrait I see in my mind. After that time we moved into the city. My visions of the river were then experienced from the window of our Buick station wagon crossing the Government Bridge in order to collect my father from his workplace at the Rock Island Arsenal. The locks and dams under the bridge control the water, basically turning the river into a machine accommodating barge travel. Wallace Stegner wrote, “First, dams do literally kill rivers, which means they kill not only living water and natural scenery but a whole congeries of values associated with them”(Stegner 50). What values perished in my new perception of the river? When David Peterson
spoke of his relentless desire to be in the wild as a boy, I realized that as a young child I had never found that desire inside of myself. Yes, many experiences occurred in the natural world such as camping and watching wild animals, but these excursions were usually driven by the greater desire to socialize with my friends. We did not have any responsibilities or skills in regard to the land. The tents were already set up for us, we did not think about how to eat in the wilderness. We brought our favorite packaged foods from the city. We stayed for a weekend and returned to our comfortable beds without another thought of the natural world. Until this week, I did not realize I was growing further and further away from the wild exterior, while coincidently moving away from my wild interior. After reading the Peter Berg article about Bioregionalism, and listening to Florence Krall Shepard and David Peterson speak about Paul Shepard’s work, I believe I chose a world that seemed natural, but was not, and it created a state of conflict within me. My identity was informed by the images presented on the surface of my television screen without knowing anything about my backyard. My unknown primal self lay deep inside --erupting at times in attempts to reach the surface, but without having any way to connect to the unnatural logic that informed my being. In a sense, as I believe Adele Alsop would say, I was dismembered and the only path to re-member myself was through the act of becoming. Because I was not cognizant of my dismemberment, my act of becoming began unwillingly through crisis. I could, at times, intuit the conflict inside, but it finally took a series of events to forcefully engage me in the act of becoming. I was married at a young age and always wanted to have a child, but was hesitant because my husband and I were starting a business and we were financially unstable. However, I was obsessed by the concept of home birth and began to read voraciously anything I could find
on the subject. Through a food co-op, I met a woman who had delivered her babies at home. She was pregnant at the time and introduced me to her midwife during one of her prenatal visits. After that meeting, I decided I wanted to study to become a midwife. Another pregnant friend invited me to attend the birth of her second child, her first child born at home. On a Sunday morning in November, my friend called to tell me she was in labor. I spent the day with this family, and in the late afternoon my friend delivered a baby girl. I was grateful that I had the opportunity to witness such a beautiful event, but deeply saddened because the time was not right for me to experience my own birth. Although some discord in my relationship prevented me from making the choice to have a child, I also felt I had something else to accomplish. Terry Tempest Williams writes, “Must the act of birth be seen only as a replacement for ourselves? Can we not also conceive of birth as an act of the imagination, giving the body to a new way of seeing? Do children need to be our own to be loved as our own? Perhaps it is time to give birth to a new idea, many new ideas�(Williams 159). I began to think that I was using childbirth as a means to try and fill that conflicted space inside. It was necessary to understand my own state of becoming before I could justify bringing another being into the world for my own selfish purposes. I started nursing school because I understood somewhere deep inside that I was supposed to take care of people. Fortunately and unfortunately, that study took me to the hospital, perhaps one of the most unnatural places on the earth. They play an important role in healing, but I never enjoyed my medical learning experience with the patients in nursing school. However, I did love talking to them. Many of the first patients the instructors allow you to take care of are dying. I recall one woman named Florence who was quite ill with cancer. After getting my assignment, I was very relieved
I would not spend much time practicing medical procedures because the main objective in her plan of care was to keep her comfortable. We sat together all morning, and although she dozed off frequently, she really wanted to talk. Florence told me of her life as a farm wife. Her family was not with her at the time because it was early autumn and the harvest was in full swing. She felt guilty not being at home with her family when she knew they desperately needed her. She spoke of her four children and what they were like as individuals. Sitting and talking to Florence that day was one of the most difficult but also one of my most rewarding experiences. What made it so was the fact that I had to be completely present with her. Our meditation walk this week had a similar effect on me to a lesser degree. Just as I was humbled to be in the presence of that magnificent woman on one of her last days on the earth, I was humbled to walk silently in Negro Bill Canyon, the canyon being a different kind of presence. Both require respect, attentiveness, and the ability to listen to them so we may hear and understand what they want us to know. Crisis will often arise from the lack of attentiveness. I do not mean in carelessness per se, although it surely will occur in those circumstances. I simply mean that if we are not listening to what our wild interior is trying to tell us, eventually it will erupt in some way unexpectedly and force change in order to regain balance. I was beginning nursing school when the hardware store my husband and I owned began to slowly lose money with the arrival of a Wal-Mart store. The selling out of our business would have occurred eventually, but the new store in town definitely accelerated the process. The pressure of having to sell everything we owned and had worked for during the last twelve years became too much and I dropped out of my nursing program.
Anger burned inside of me because I felt abandoned by our community. However, I was also secretly filled with anticipation because I was forced to start a new life. Knowing that I was going to leave my home broke my heart, but now I understand that it was my time to move on. I was still learning the natural cycles, but these beginnings and endings began to make sense: I was half-formed --- like the toad-pole we watched in the pool in Negro Bill Canyon. Its form was shocking at first, because it appeared more toad than tad, but surprise turned into amazement that one can survive in such a state of becoming. Moving to Salt Lake City continued the process.
The beauty and
grandness of the landscape captivated me in our drive across the country with all of our belongings and four of our dogs. We arrived in the middle of the night at the home in Draper that my husband had rented and I had not yet seen. In the morning I walked out the back door and discovered I was standing at the base of a mountain. This is truly an amazing sight for someone from the Midwest who had only seen a miniature mountain built by man for a downhill ski resort in Wisconsin. Making a home in a new place or landscape is another act of becoming and was the most important force in leading me to this seminar in Castle Valley. Reading about Utah and the West inspired me to learn more. However, moving to another city slowed the process once again. Visiting the Wasatch Mountains, Great Salt Lake, and the red rock country of southern Utah provided visions of my wild interior, but I was still hesitant in my act of becoming. My college education in this grand landscape finally gave me the confidence to leave my failing marriage after 17 years. I lived alone without a television, stereo, or a vehicle, the modern conveniences that had always been available to me. Finally, I was beginning to listen to
my heart and make choices that preserved my wild interior. I met a man who wanted to know that part of me and to encourage its growth. I love him because he has always fully embraced his wild self and has taught me how to embrace mine. His fearlessness reminds me not to be afraid. While I watched my father died unexpectedly from complications following surgery, I realized that this life is all I can hope for and I must disregard my fears of becoming and continue on my path to know this place. I took a baby step last year and studied this land with the Red Rock Institute. I was overwhelmed by my love for the people and the landscape I spent time with during those three weeks. Another tiny step was this amazing classroom environment, a once in a lifetime opportunity as far as I am concerned. On one of our last days together, we visited the Birthing Rock. The words of Terry Tempest Williams came to mind again because they were the words she wrote about this place and the message I feel she was trying to invoke during our days together. “We can begin to live differently. We have choices before us, conscious choices, choices of conscience and consequence, not in the name of political correctness, but ecological responsibility and opportunity. We can give birth to creation. To labor in the name of social change. To bear down and push against the constraints of our own self-imposed structures. To sacrifice in the name of an ecological imperative. To be broken open to a new way of being�(Williams 159-60). The conversations in our class remind me there is still much to be done for the different communities that live on this land I love. Action in community does make a difference. I am proud to be a witness to the art of becoming in Castle Valley, Utah. The fine examples presented
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by the residents, teachers, and my fellow students encourage me to take action and paint my own portrait of possibility.
Works Cited Manrique, Jaime. “Essay on the work of Adele Alsop.� Publisher and date of publish unknown. Stegner, Wallace. The American West as Living Space. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1987. Williams, Terry Tempest. Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert. New York:Pantheon Books, 2001.
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Depositional Landscapes Brittney Carman
Ultimately, this is not about nature but redemption, the erosion of landscape, the deposition of place. It’s about reconciliation, renewal, the return. Ultimately, this is about resurrection, and like many before it, my story begins beside a river. When I was sixteen years old my mother packed her five children and a few belongings into a Ford Explorer and, under the guise of visiting our grandparents, she drove sixteen hours east through the night. Somewhere near daybreak in the Nevada desert I understood that we would not go back to California. She was leaving my father. We settled in southern Idaho, in a windy and dilapidated town on the Snake River where we lived for stints in the basements of relatives we only half knew, sometimes sleeping on the couches of old high school
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friends until we could afford a house. Like my mother, I had been born there, yet I did not know the place. I didn’t even recognize the smell. In the evenings, because we had nothing and no one else, my brother and I would make our way to the river to watch the sky as the sun set blue behind the western hills and the high desert sky bloomed with stars, and for the long hours spent there in utter silence it is the rushing of water that I came to reckon as the unspeakable language of loss. Later that year, not twelve hours after I graduated from high school, my brother shaved all but two long forelocks from my head and then waited, watching from the car, as I cut the last locks myself—severing them with a rusty and borrowed pocket knife—and cast them, shining like gold, into the river. We left our family and drove home to California. Looking back I see the folly of the gesture, can see now the impossibility of severance. I didn’t break the tie but bound myself to abide it, offering to the water my only semblance of beauty, the last vestige of grace. Later, I like to think, I upped the ante and made an offering of blood. It must be the sound that I remember most—the cracking, like the hull of a ship through centuries of ice, the breaking of a thousand brittle bones. I remember the moon was not full but almost, that the glacier was in sight, the shrillest call before the piercing crack—avalanche. We had been friends for years. Friends from before. Before the divorce, the move, the madness. I had loved nothing else in Idaho, but I loved the Tetons and I knew that my friends would love them too, of course not in the way that I did, not as a refuge, but perhaps as a sanctuary. We would go back to Idaho braving the heartache of all else—the contempt for my
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mother’s remarriage, the undeniable shattering of my siblings’ lives, the harrowing loneliness of even the wind—all things I had run from, for time together in the Tetons. And we did everything right—signed in at the trailhead, applied in advance for a permit, pushed through the dark the first night to reach the first camp, even remembered Kool-Aid to temper the taste of the iodine we would use to treat the water. We didn’t try to do too much: acclimate the first two days, summit the third. People do it in hours, we had given ourselves days. We roped up in two pairs and spent hours on the glacier practicing how to self-arrest with an ice axe and how to pull your partner from the cold breath of a crevasse. We prepared. And so perhaps our one mistake, the identifiable flaw didn’t come until the third day—the summit attempt—when we should have turned back and didn’t, not out of hubris, but simply because we did not know. We didn’t know. We didn’t know that it had taken us too long to make the half-way mark, did not think to retreat, though the last descending party had passed us hours before. The scrap of paper I keep—a Band Aid wrapper reminder scratched on the 13,000 foot summit of Mt. Owen reads only: Mt. Owen, Grand Teton National Park. 4 August 1994. 4:45 PM. We should have been down. At 10:30 PM a party of climbers, camped on the moraine of the Teton Glacier reported hearing the unmistakable crack and fall of an avalanche on the East Buttress of Mt. Owen. They had passed a party late, they said, on their way down. Two men and two women, and it amazes me that he did not describe us as kids. I was, in fact, only seventeen years old. In his account to the ranger at the Lupine Meadows Ranger Station one of the
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men reported clearly hearing someone scream the word avalanche, looking up to see only one headlamp or flashlight as it was pitched two hundred yards in a fall of rock and ice, and then went out. I never learned his name but I know that he ran nine mountain miles to the ranger station that night, that because of him a helicopter was launched in an unsuccessful attempt to rescue the climbers though they were at that point presumed dead, and that mine was the headlamp he saw. I remember only two things about the fall: the sound of it, the shriek, and that before I was swept down and my light ripped off I saw a boulder the size of a Volkswagen roll over the girl I was tied to, one of the most beautiful and fearless women I have ever known. Much later—hours which seemed like years—in the tent we left set up at our camp on the moraine, sick and shattered, I crawled exhausted and weeping into my sleeping bag, the tent lit only by the moon. I don’t remember that I slept or that I dreamt but somewhere in the space between darkness and dawn Christa whispered prayers in Spanish, her mother’s native tongue, and cradling my bleeding head, kissed my open bleeding mouth. Call it resurrection. Call it return. A child returned. Not dead but alive. At six o’clock the morning of August 5 my mother was awakened by a phone call, a park ranger calling to tell her that her oldest child was lost, perhaps killed, in an avalanche, more a slide of earth and rock on the south face of a mountain in Grand Teton National Park. The helicopter rescue team had been unable to locate the girl. Hiking down I fell twice, flat on my face, the weight of my pack so much, so heavy on top of me that I could not physically lift myself up. Lower on the
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trail, we began to run into people—dayhikers, scout troops—and though I had no mirror, by the gaping mouths, the gasps, the many times that people offered to run for help—mothers, children, an elderly man who certainly could not have run but offered—I understood that I was a sore sight. In a field I saw two bear cubs black and round, and in the shadow where the switchbacks level and drop again into forest I saw my mother coming up the trail. Call it reconciliation. This woman, effeminate, unbothered by hours spent beautifying in hair salons, tanning beds. A model in her twenties and still as self-absorbed, here undone, accompanying the ranger in a search party. I fell covered in dried blood made black by the dirt into her arms and in my memory she carried me lightly home. Years later, not far from another river I was visited by another bear. The Indians called me Weipachi because I had blonde hair and it meant child of the sun. They thought I was magic and in ways I think I believed them. Often I was followed by bands of children, half-naked and carrying sticks, afraid to get too close but curious. I could speak to them in English and send them shrieking home. In the Canaima National Park of Venezuela the Taurepan Indians live on a reservation in the Venezuelan Amazon and for a time I lived with them. Though my duties there were supposed to have been religious I couldn’t help but think that I had been sent there because God had tired of my begging and knew how much my soul needed the land. I could never have imagined its majesty. Limestone mesas and buttes called tepuis created something amazingly similar to Castle Valley. Imagine it in the rainforest. The name of the park, Canaima, is the Indian word for magic and the landscape held me spellbound. Unable to speak the indigenous language, one of a hundred dialects and enamored of that wild place I wasn’t any
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good as a missionary—my companion thought I’d lost my mind—and I was befriended by a group of adolescent Indians, bilingual, and fascinated by my yellow hair. They could speak to me in Spanish and would translate conversations when the oldest tribal member, an ancient and beautiful woman, cared to talk. She took to me, I think, believing that I was in fact, the child of the bright sun. Her name was Clara and she gave me the name by which I was known. For the most part, the children followed me everywhere I went. This area of the Amazon is famous for waterfalls, in fact it is home to the tallest waterfall in the world, and the Indians guard it as sacred ground. I was invited once on a pilgrimage to one of the smaller falls deep in the jungle. The journey took all day. We followed rivers, crossed living bridges in the trees, and I swooned over red howler monkeys which roared in forest like lions, and though the falls were remarkable, almost indescribable in their beauty, it was the walk out of the forest that has stayed these years with me. Near the end of the hike I had fallen to the back of the group. The sun was setting and I was surrounded by a sea of fireflies, which I remember thinking of as angels. The Indians called them my ancestors. I could hear my friends ahead of me on the path talking quickly as though something were amiss and soon one of the group was running silently toward me. He asked me to stop walking and turn around, where to my amazement an anteater with its young on her back stood looking at me. She had been following me across the savannah, they said, for at least a hundred yards. The animal is sacred, often unseen, and rarely with child. They said it was a sign though of what they couldn’t say, but the Spanish word for anteater is ant-eating bear. I took a photograph and watched her disappear into the grass.
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There’s a picture that I keep in my journal, taken the summer before my daughter turned one. She’s on my back in a field full of wild flowers taller than head high. She’s leaning out of the backpack, growling toward the woods that edge the photo. Alaska Basin. Idaho side of the Tetons. The volunteers at the trailhead said a grizzly sow had been spotted near the horse camp, a mile or so from the basin. She was not big, they said, but she had two cubs. Nearly every party coming down the trail had seen her. Be careful, they said. You can never be too careful. We decided to make a ruckus while we hiked, to give the bear some warning. Andy taught Stella how to growl—a little bear cub herself—and she kept it up the whole time. Through the green woods and patches of white granite, through the huckleberries by the streambed, through the towering fields of flowers, through the meadow in the blue shadow of the mountains. We never saw the bear, but in dreams I often meet her—the frost-tipped hair, the hulking weight, the cubs. I imagine coming upon her in the field of lupine just below the horse camp. She stands to warn me. She says, I would kill you if you hurt them—her cubs play like children in the grass. She stands her ground, and I know, because I, too, am a mother. This is the ecology of residence, the protection of place—of each other. It is the most basic of instincts. In the desert I’ve had a different dream. Beside a river I see an old man, stiff walk, bowed legs. I know his name. I recognize his face. He approaches and I see that he is carrying my two year old asleep in his arms. He sits down beside me and asks me to tell him about my child. I begin with this:
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As a baby she got into the soil of a mint plant I was growing in a pot on the living room floor. I took a picture of the dirty face, the muddy smile. I wondered if I should call someone—perhaps poison control. A nurse friend of mine said not to worry, that it was good for her, that it would build immunities. She didn’t show any ill effects, and in the months to come she nearly ate the entire pot. She was so covert and quick that I could hardly stop her. I blamed it on her teething and moved the plant. Later, when she laid on her toddler belly near the lemon grass in our garden, shoveling fistfuls of dirt into an eager mouth, I realized it was nothing so much as love. I’ve heard that pregnant women often crave dirt. I’ve even read about slaves on bygone southern farms who could tell whether or not the ground would yield a healthy crop by the metallic taste of the earth. Maybe Stella can tell me this year, by the taste of the dirt in our garden, what is to become of us. My two year old has a thing for dirt. She loves the taste and feel of it. She returns to it out of instinct, and perhaps in the tactile pleasure of earth she will come to understand something elemental about herself. Perhaps she will find her place. I was born beside a river. My blood flows through its veins, deposited in the landscape that fills me. It is more than sustenance, it is sacred. And call it the rio Colorado, call it Terry Tempest Williams or Brooke. Call it Kami Day, Paul Wilson, Nicholas Daniels, Allison Lisk, Laura Asman. Call it Brandon Hollingshead, Cecily Ellis, Patrick Mabey, Bryan Wallis. Call it the desert, the spirit of place, call it kinship. I am reborn beside this river.
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Holding my child, my hope in his arms, the old man looks me in the eyes. “Beside such a river,” he says, “it is impossible to feel that one will ever be tired or old.” 1
1
Stegner, Wallace. The Sound of Mountain Water. New York: Penguin Books ,1997.
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Lost and Found A Natural Autobiography Nicholas Daniels
To start I have to take you back in time, a time when I was lost. When I was seventeen, my family and I moved away from the east coast. This left me feeling helpless, alone and insecure. I had grown up playing in the mud of the east coast clay, it was part of me and my childhood, but that had faded swiftly in a new world. Not knowing who I was was so overwhelming that I slowly drifted into darkness. I had no community and no one to talk to. I had quickly fallen into a downward spiral of drug use, finding myself using cocaine, LSD, pharmaceuticals, pot, alcohol and the list goes on. For years I lived this that life and continued to fall even deeper. I still had no community and I was still unhuman. Eventually I built the courage to walk away, I knew I was better than this. I sold my cars, my furniture and everything else I had, I was trading my possessions for a soul. My backpack and I walked away. My only companion held my only possessions.
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I wandered the states for three years. Still unsatisfied. My parents and I had not talked for years, not a word. I needed grounding, I needed my family. Reluctantly and humbly I made that phone call. I heard the gentleness of my father’s voice asking me to come home. For years I had been killing myself, dying to hear those words. It was a long time since I was eighteen, when I was told to leave, when I became homeless. Now to bring you to a more recent past, I came back to Utah, to Salt Lake City. In Salt Lake I fell into a community, fell into a better understanding, fell into motivation. The people around me showed me I was capable of living, and in turn they saved my life. I often think of where I would be without them. In jail, on the streets, dead? I wanted more for myself and I first thought to submerge myself in work. I did. It left me hungry for more. My mother used to always put up these little quotes around the house when I was younger, and one specific one came to mind. It reads, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth.” I don’t know where she heard that originally but at that time it hit me like a load of bricks. I wanted to make my family proud, I wanted to make myself proud. I once again felt like I was standing still, I decided that it was time to go to school. I regret nothing in my past because it is now part of who I am, but this was the best decision I had ever made. I felt good, like I finally had some direction. It took years of jumping through hoops and bureaucratic red tape for this to become a reality. In the meantime I had owned a business, found hobbies, found and lost relationships, but the day had finally arrived. I blindly picked my classes and school was underway. As we all know I am a freshman. As I was starting classes last spring I took an Environmental Studies course from Professor Dan McCool. This
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man is an excellent motivator and passionate teacher. With lectures on environmental issues every week from a professor in almost every relevant department, we experienced a full range of professional backgrounds and opinions. Although there were a few lecturers I did not agree with, like the guy from Mining and Engineering, it was nice to see that these people had an unexpected grasp on a wide range of issues. We studied environmental architecture, and how to design with the intention of energy efficiency, by employing ideas like transoms in doorways, adequate insulation, and low-flow water fixtures. Also how to regulate temperature according to occupancy and how to take advantage of biomass energy. We even got into Dendrochronology; this is using tree ring proxy data to reveal past climate and geological conditions. By matching scars and various abnormalities of young and old trees we are able to piece together an idea of the history of specific landscapes. Mostly through fires, floods and drought. Each speaker was followed by a class discussion two days later where shared our opinions and ideas about the topic. We were first asked if we would like to hear from this person again sometime and, of course, we’d raise our hands accordingly. The class reactions were always very unpredictable. This class was based on four categories that we called The Four Imperatives. They were Culture, Nature, Economics, and Justice. We would always analyze the lectures and divide the issues into these categories as well as relate them to our local issues. Anyway, this type of open discussion had, in a way, reawakened my humanself. I had felt sad and a little upset with myself for losing the relationship I once had with nature that was once seemingly unbreakable. This alone
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had revived that passion. I quickly submerged myself in environmental books, newspapers, and documentaries. I attended a discussion group on campus called Gathering of the Tribes. There we discussed a wide range of local issues such as The Legacy Highway, Tree Utah projects, and event planning for the University’s Earth Day celebration. Through all this I became one of the folks on Environmental Studies Advisor Tasha McVaugh’s email list. When I gave her my address I had no idea how many emails she was capable of sending in one day. Although I was very appreciative, there was no way that I could read them all. I would read the title and open or delete. While checking my mail one day I came across one that was titled Ecology of Residency, I opened it. I read about this summer course that would be held in Castle Valley, Utah. Three credits in a week and a half and in the desert, I was in for that! I opened the link to the application page. Everything was cool until I got to the part about the 750-word essay about what the Ecology of Residency meant to me. At the time it meant very little. After a little bit of definition searching I came to the conclusion that it was essentially the relationship between the land and its inhabitants. I wrote the essay based on recreation and tourism referring mostly to the High Country News for ideas. The process was rather painless, I pressed send and away it went. Because of my educational infancy and the tardiness of my application I really didn’t think that I would get in to the program. A day or two was all it took for this to slip into the back of my mind. A couple of weeks went by before I received a response to my application. I got in! WOW! Life was good and everything was going my way. So I would spend the first half of June in the desert, now all I had to do was get the time off work. No problem, or so I thought…
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I approached the director of my department at the University, I told her that I would need some time off to attend a class. I would use the remainder of my vacation days but would still need to take off three additional days unpaid. Saying she wasn’t sure about policy, I was told to wait for a response. Wasn’t sure about policy, what was this all about? Well I got a response, a resounding “NO!” I was shocked, what reason could she possibly give me? I asked her to explain and she said, “policy requires you to work at least eighty hours in a two week period and we can’t give you unpaid time off unless it’s a family emergency.” I didn’t really care to argue about it because I was sure that I would be able to manipulate the schedule to take the time off and remain within policy regulations. I did and presented the idea and once again got a “no”. Now it wasn’t eighty hours in a two-week period, it was forty hours in one week. Seeing how I would be gone for a full week there was no way I could work the schedule in my favor. Sick days! I could just call in sick. That idea didn’t last long because I happen to believe in this thing called karma and that approach would come back to bite me in the butt sooner or later. So I looked through the policy and contacted Employee Relations. Turns out that policy does say no unpaid leave, then talks about the director’s authority to override policy. Great, I thought, she misread and was not aware that this was a possibility. So I set up another meeting and once again presented new information, and yet again another “no”. At this point it was quite clear that this was never about policy. To be honest I’m not sure what sparked this lack of understanding. I work hard, I’m there when they need me and do more than is asked. Over and over I begged for a change of heart, but she didn’t budge an inch.
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Already knowing that I would take the class regardless, I thought about alternatives. First and most obvious: new job. Did I really want to work for someone who cared so little about my educational goals? I didn’t need to answer that question. To put it briefly, the twenty-minute job hunt went well and I would still be employed in the same building. So back to the computer to check my email. This time I was notified about a meeting we would have to coordinate car pools and to know what supplies to bring and books to read. Finally I would meet the other students who would be on this adventure with me. Arriving late, of course, I was surprised to see no familiar faces. Not one. Being a little disappointed at first I reminded myself that these might be the people who would understand a little about my life and thoughts. I had no idea of how they would change my reality. So the car pool plans were made and we would meet at the U of U stadium at noon. After reading a few chapters of Desert Solitaire to pass the time, Brittney, Allison, and Brandon were finally there. Time to hit the road! As soon as we were in the car the conversation started. We talked about books and current events and our homes and families. We anticipated what the week would bring and, unknowingly, that drive was when the foundation of our community was being laid. Conversation on the road continued through Provo, the canyon, and to my parent’s house where we grabbed a quick bite to eat and picked up my Dad’s truck. The visit was short, five o’clock was our planned arrival time, it was approaching quickly and we still had a long road ahead of us. Brandon joined me in the truck and his excitement about the landscape reminded me of how I felt when I drove through for the first time, a feeling I had forgotten. His eyes were wide open and it inspired me to open mine as well. The time went
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by in a flash and before we knew it we were in Castle Valley! There was an undeniable energy that grabbed me within seconds after walking in to the lodge and that feeling only grew with time. Right away was our first “Check In”. An immediate comfort and trust filled me as we took turns introducing ourselves. It came to be my turn and, as I attempted to explain why I was here, the tears rolled down my face in a flash flood of happiness. I couldn’t speak as my emotions overpowered my words. I was surprised to see how each of us felt this and then I knew I was where I was supposed to be. The next day class started and Terry asked us to close our eyes and to focus on that one place where we felt our hearts were and I immediately thought of Diamond Fork Hot Springs in Spanish Fork Canyon. The springs are a favorite place of mine. It’s where I go to be alone and to share my life with those people closest to me. This is the landscape of my life, this was my place. I felt different here and asked myself, “Why?” Terry said it perfectly, “When in the presence of natural order we remember the potentiality of life which has been overgrown by civilization.” Her words spoke to me and reminded me once again that I had lost touch with that profound relationship with nature. It was time to bring it back! So much has happened here in ten days that I couldn’t possibly cover it all. Throughout all the topics we have covered, the topic of community has stuck with me the most. This includes all communities, from local to global, but there is one community that gave me new direction and that community is in this room. The other day Brittney worded it perfectly when she said, “I feel like Stella has a whole new group of aunts and uncles.” I truly believe that my family has been extended as well through
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a common passion, interest and love for each other and the world in which we live. Once again I wonder where I would be without the direction and guidance you all have unknowingly given. Would I just be another student looking for that piece of paper to get a job and a paycheck? Not anymore! I now know who I am and subsequently where I am. I am in my place; I am where I am where I am meant to be. This community drew out of me large parts of myself that were hidden. Thoughts and questions awaiting release. Georgia O’Keefe said: “The only paths were narrow, winding cow paths. There were sharp, high edges between long, soft earth banks so steep that you couldn’t see the bottom. They made the canyon seem very deep. We took different paths from the edge so that we could climb down in different places. We sometimes had to go down together holding to a horizontal stick to keep each other from falling. It was usually very dry and lone place. We never met anyone there. Often as we were leaving we would see a long line of cattle like black lace against the sunset sky.” When I read this I think of the paths I have taken with deep dark chasms, friends and family saving me from suicidal falls and filling my loneliness with love. I owe my life to my community. I will repay my debt through service of love and place.
… Source
Where do we find ourselves? Where are we? Who am I?
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I shut my eyes and pictures flash in my mind. My mind is quiet with no words attached to lingering thoughts. Happy where I am. I am among water in the red rocks where I have made friends, lost friends, lost and found love. Walking along snake-like trails, trees mimicking long legged spiders, water flowing effortlessly down hill. This is not a place to hide; this is a place to shine. To find that light you wish to carry into your routine of daily life. To reestablish your connectivity to you. It is not an easy task to look inside yourself honestly and subjectively. I find insecurities, weaknesses, a very humble pride and empowering strengths. This is part of my place, my vision of myself and my role on earth. It’s quiet here. I talk with the land as if it were a long lost friend. We heal each other with our differences, our similarities and energy we have shared throughout our existence. The clear blue water speaks in bubbles, comforting me and easing my fear. This is where my life began. The plants, animals, minerals and water have come together to create this body and fuel this mind.
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Place and Paradox Kami Day
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. The point is to live everything, live the questions now. Rainer Maria Rilke (qtd. in Palmer 86)
It’s late summer 1993, and I am driving the road between I-70 and Moab, listening to Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry.” I have just emerged from six weeks of debilitating sadness and a crushing sense of failure brought on by the end of my 23-year marriage, and I am hoping a few days of solitude will give me the space to listen to my own voice, to figure out what’s next. I must do this for myself since I have no support, no one else to listen my next self into being. No other cars share the road with me, and with the sense that I am the only person on the planet comes an image so strong I catch my breath: I see myself encased in brown clay from head to toe, and
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I see a hammer striking that clay shell. It breaks off, not slowly like layers of an onion, revealing a little at a time, but in huge chunks, freeing me in a matter of seconds. There I stand, bathed in light and unencumbered. With this image before me, I keep driving, tears running down my face, amazed to feel so good. In the last 13 years or so, the Utah desert has become the place of my heart. But the desert, because it is part of Utah, presents a paradox for me: it is a place of tension as well as peace and solitude. In my search this week for a way to understand this paradox, I found Florence Krall’s work, which has helped me name and understand my ambivalence. In Ecotone, she defines ecotone as a liminal space, a “place of meeting and tension between diverse and sometimes conflicting aspects of our lives. . . . a place of crossing over [which] provides sanctuary, solitude, and peace, growth and transformation, as well as isolation and inner or outer conflict� (6).
I would like to say I have lived the question of where
this tension comes from, as Rilke says we must, but the truth is I was just avoiding it. As I anticipated coming to Utah for this Ecology of Residency seminar, I thought about the fact that I would be the oldest one here, and the only non-student, but I did not think at all about the certainty that active Mormons would be part of the group. In our first meeting, as we introduced ourselves, I began to feel that tension and conflict I always feel when I am in Utah. And, I admit, I felt angry. Why, I thought, do these bright, thoughtful people stay in such an antiintellectual, anti-feminist, homophobic, patriarchal organization? As we began to talk about place that first night, I knew the time had come for me to grapple with the conflict I experience when I think of the desert I love and the belief system that seems to me to lie like a blanket over the entire state. So, I have written what I was afraid to write. On one hand, I did
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not want to threaten the ethos of trust and respect we have nurtured in this community, and I did not want to undermine the risks we have been willing to take. On the other hand, I wanted to honor what we have done by telling my truth, and as I told it, I found I needed to include the voices of this particular place, your voices, and what I have learned here about why place means what it does in my life. I was born in Utah, and I have lived in Utah, California, Arizona, South Carolina, Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Kentucky, Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, Kansas, England, Korea, and Japan. For most of my 55 years of life, whenever anyone asked me where I was from, I answered, “I’m not from anywhere.” Then I went on to explain that I was a bona fide air force brat—daughter of a lieutenant colonel, wife of a colonel. I did not feel particularly connected to anywhere, and whenever we moved, which was about every two to three years, I alighted in our new place and declared, “I belong here.” Even so, I did not feel I was from all or any of those places. I told people I was not from anywhere because I did not think of any one place as home, and I could not even think of one place I would like to go if I could choose anywhere in the world. Lest you who are more rooted feel pity for my unrootedness, let me assure you I did not feel sorry for myself. Being a gypsy made me different from most people I knew, and I liked that.
I was even a little disdainful of
my friends who had never moved from the town of their birth and did not intend to, who felt the need to live close to their mothers, siblings, friends. Some might say my choice to think of myself as untethered was symptomatic of my fear of becoming too attached to a place and the people there. They might say I was afraid of connection, of people knowing me too well and identifying me in certain ways. I’m not saying I didn’t have
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these fears, but I liked the life of a nomad. Wendell Berry says that “most Americans are not placed but displaced persons” (cited in Stegner 21), and while it’s true I could not name a geographical place of my own, I did not think of myself as displaced. Early in our time at Castle Valley, we worked to find words for our conceptions of place. I wish I could remember everyone’s words, but I do remember that for Allison Lisk, place is about being with someone you care about. For Patrick Mabey, it’s where we leave our imprint. Theresa Cohn feels place can, paradoxically, be about motion, and place is presence for Terry Tempest Williams. For Paul Wilson and Brittney Carman, place involves being tried, finding ourselves. Until I began to write this essay, these definitions worked for me because for most of my life, place was not about a specific geographic location. It moved with me. One of the consistent places in my life was the military base, each one amazing in its sameness with other bases. There was the formal, wellkempt front gate, and there was the back gate, reached by driving through a gauntlet of food marts and gas stations and bars. There were the BX and commissary, the theater, the officers and enlisted clubs, the golf course, and the officer and enlisted residential areas with their cookie cutter houses. All of this offered security to those of us who moved so often, and upon entering the front gate for the first time, we sighed with relief. But the place that was an immediate home and community for me in an even more significant way than the base was the LDS church. Before we moved to a new station, we looked up the church, and when we arrived, one of our first acts was to drive by the chapel (if there was one). There we would see a familiar architecture, the familiar crossless spire, and the words The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints mounted on the front of the building in the same kind of letters we had seen on chapels
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everywhere else. We knew that when we went in the glass front doors, we would see a familiar chapel with wooden pews facing a pulpit behind which were seats for the bishopric or branch presidency, the speakers for the meeting, and the choir. We knew the hymns and the meeting format, and we knew our hands would be shaken countless times in welcome. My husband and I would make friends among the priesthood bearers and the women of Relief Society, and our children would hook up with other children in primary or teenagers in mutual. This building and these people would be our home—our place. Over the years though, as my marriage was deteriorating, my ties to the church attenuated, and I finally cut them when my divorce made that severing possible. The shell that encased me was shattered and I was free, but I soon found I was cut loose in a way I had not anticipated. After I met my partner, Michele, in graduate school, I moved to Buffalo to be with her, and I expected to find a close community of women, but that did not happen. I am quite introverted, and after four years there, I still had only a few friends, none of whom I would call close. We moved to Kansas in 1998, and even though we have been there seven years, I cannot say I have a community, and my partner is the only close friend I have there. Only recently have I begun to realize what the church meant in my life in terms of support and friendship I could count on, women I had much in common with and with whom I felt solidarity in being members of a minority group. And while I am at peace with my decision to leave the church, I continue to miss the ease and certitude of acceptance and inclusion in that community. I believe now that my loss of the church as my place made way for my relationship with the Utah desert to begin since those two situations
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coincided. My Mormon beliefs had constituted my spiritual life for many years, and as those beliefs eroded and I ceased to be nourished by the kind of spirituality they engendered, I began to see spirituality in a different way. At first, I did not know what I was experiencing in the desert was spiritual; I just knew I felt good there. In a film about the desecration of Indian sacred places, Vine Deloria, an Indian author, says that we just know some natural places are powerful even if we don’t know why. The closer I got to Moab or Capital Reef or whatever my destination was, the lighter and happier I felt, even when I was reflecting on painful experiences. Often, my eyes filled with tears, and I did not know why. But I knew that I was connecting with a place in a way I never had. I knew happiness was possible for me because I experienced it there. A few years after I began to think of the desert as home, I began reading Parker Palmer’s work and found that he defines spirituality as a longing for connection. He helped me understand that spirituality, for me, was becoming about connection—to human beings, to significant places, to the earth; that the ineffable fullness I felt when I was in the desert was a profound connection to a place; and that such a connection—so new to me—meant I had found something sacred. As I write this essay I see that my sense of feeling fragmented and brittle all my life may have something to do with not being grounded in a physical place. A place that moved—the church—as dependable as it was, was made of different people and a different landscape each time. In each new place, the cryptobiotic soil of my life would just begin to take hold, and I would just begin to take root and grow again, when the soil would be disturbed. I had to start over too many times, and although I know humans are never finished, I have truly felt all my life that I am not whole. As much as I hate to admit it, and at the risk of discounting so many years
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of my life, I see now that all those uprootings left me floating, occasionally touching down, never in a place long enough to know where I was and therefore never really knowing who I was. Wallace Stegner insists that “migrants deprive themselves of the physical and spiritual bonds that develop within a place and a society” (22). I was not a migrant, but I was a nomad, and even though I valued the diversity and uniqueness of that experience, I had never had any solid connection to identify with, to ground me. Then I lost my metaphorical place, the church, and I have yet to shake the sense of not belonging and isolation that loss brought. So, my relationship with the Utah desert is complicated by my relationship with the church. I chose to leave, but I have not only experienced the absence of the church in my life, I have experienced pain as a result of the church’s stand toward me, an apostate and a lesbian. Therein lies the paradox. In one inescapable way, Utah is the church—a source of pain and frustration and anger for me. It is everywhere—there’s even a meeting house just down the road from our inn in Castle Valley. In another way, Utah is the desert I love. It’s “sanctuary, solitude, and peace,” but it’s also “isolation and … conflict.” In 1994, two of my sons decided to go on a mission at the same time, and they invited me to speak at their common farewell along with their father. I accepted the invitation and flew from Buffalo for the event. The day before the farewell, one of those two sons, Jacob, was elected to break the news to me that the bishop would not allow me to sit on the stand or speak to the congregation. I did not want to spoil the occasion for my sons, so I said nothing, but I wore a bright red dress to the farewell and sat in a pew staring defiantly at the bishop while my ex-husband and the bishopric looked down on me from the VIP seats.
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In 1999, my youngest son, Isaac, got married in the Salt Lake temple. I was not allowed to witness that important event in his life, and Michele and I were somehow not notified of the time for the wedding pictures. I weathered that experience with a smile on my face, but in 2000, when my middle son, Jacob, married in the Logan Temple, I had a meltdown. About three hours before we were to be at the temple, I began to cry. I sobbed until my stomach muscles hurt, until I could not stand up. So I lay on the floor and wept until I was finished. Michele stood by helplessly, angry with everyone in the whole state, and when I was spent, I showered and dressed and we went to the temple, where we waited with all the other unworthy family members for Jacob and his new bride to come outside for pictures. In 2001, when my daughter, Meagan, got engaged, I thought surely she and her fiancée would arrange for a civil ceremony in addition to the temple one so I could see her married, but such an arrangement never occurred to them. On the day of the wedding, Michele and I timed our arrival at the temple to coincide with Meagan’s coming out of the temple after the ceremony; I refused to sit again with all the unworthy. I remember hanging back as well-wishers closed around her, and my father, who had been in the temple with her, gave me a little push and said, “Go ahead. You have as much right as anyone.” I did not need to be told that, and I still do not know why he said it since he’d told me being forbidden to witness my children’s marriages was just a consequence of my choices. When all the after-wedding photos had been taken—Michele and I included this time—Meagan’s step-mother went back into the temple with her and I was left outside. It was more than I could stand and we left. Ironically, my Grandma Day, who always accepted me, and whose little house in Kaysville was my safe haven, died the same week my
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daughter was married. I don’t know which is my greatest sin in the eyes of the church—apostatizing or being queer. Every problem my children have is blamed on me; if I admit to being sad or troubled, I am told I must accept the consequences for my choices. At best, I am tolerated, which I find intolerable. Mostly I am demonized as a threat to civilization at large and the church in particular. I am supposed to be reassured when members of the church tell me they don’t judge me because they are sinners too. My letters to the brethren petitioning them for permission to be present for my children’s temple marriages have been answered with letters reminding me that I chose the path that makes me unworthy to enter the temple, but in the past I have attended sealings with people who have not set foot in an LDS chapel for 30 years. So, I am torn between wanting to never enter this state again and wanting to finally claim a place for myself in the Utah desert. In addition to the paradox of feeling both at home and profoundly uncomfortable in the place I want to call mine, I am puzzled about why the desert feels like home. Many of our group at Castle Valley connected place to memories, and Stegner agrees that “place is more than half memory, shared memory” (23), but I have no memories of southern Utah except of driving through it on the way to Salt Lake. I do not have memories of any wild places—my father was always gone and my mother only camps in motel rooms. The desert is not where I go to be with people I care about. In fact, I’ve realized this week that I’m more in tune with my surroundings and with my own voice if I am alone. It’s a relief to be free of the selfconsciousness I feel around other people, free of feeling too visible, or invisible, or inadequate, or awkward. Nor is the desert a place where I have been tried and tested yet. I seem to have no history here, and yet,
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when Brooke Williams asked us to imagine a place and then an ancestor in that place, I imagined a desert. Paul Shepard’s work, illuminated by Dave Peterson and Florence Krall, has helped me understand that my feeling grounded in the desert may have to do with primal, pre-historic memories of a desert ancestor. As I understand Shepard, an ecologist and philosopher, all animate and inanimate things are connected, and with that concept in mind, the number of my ancestors has grown exponentially, and so have the possibilities for their places of origin. I am no doubt related to something that lived here, or in a place like this, eons ago. I agree with Edward Abbey that the Utah desert “is the most beautiful place on earth” (1), but why it is beautiful to me is one question I will have to live, I imagine. The ocean is beautiful, as are forests of pine or redwood, or mountains, or even cities. But, unlike the restless, changing ocean, the desert landscape is still and constant. I cannot feel deep time on the ocean shore the way I feel it in the desert. The rocks are not changing, swelling, retreating as the ocean does. Nor are they waiting, or regretting, or growing, or planning, or expecting—they just are, as I would like to just be. Finding words to articulate why desert beauty is what moves me is like trying to isolate specific brush strokes that make a painting beautiful. I cannot separate it into words, and I’m not sure I want to. In The Desert Year, Joseph Wood Krutch compares his “delighted response to the charms of this great, proud, dry, open land” to a cat’s first experience with catnip: “[The cat] took only the preoccupied, casual, dutiful sniff which was the routine response to any new object presented to his attention before he started to walk away. Then he did what is called in the slang of the theater a “double take.” He stopped dead in his tracks; he turned incredulously back and inhaled a good noseful. Incredulity was
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swallowed up in delight. Can such things be? Indubitably they can. He flung himself down and he wallowed” (6). I can’t say I’ve wallowed, but the desert fills me with wonder. It enchants me. It challenges me. I embrace it whole, and alone in the desert, I feel whole. If to know myself I must know where I am, as Wendell Berry says, what does choosing the Utah desert tell me about who I am? Well, one thing I know about myself is that I did not choose the desert. Abbey believes that “[e]very man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary”(1), but I had never had such a place in mind. I came here for a visit and never left (at least in spirit), and finding that my place was here surprised me. Maybe the desert has some memory of me and was, as the fox in Paul’s story, trying to call me for years before I picked up the phone. The Utah desert is my ecotone, a “dynamic transitional zone that may provide great learning as well as suffering.” It both dismembers and remembers me, and this tension, as much as it hurts and disturbs me sometimes, also gives me joy and creates a rich habitat for my growth (Krall 4). I have much to learn from this dynamic place. I hope to be able to live both the questions and the answers I find here. Rilke says “do not seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.” Maybe the most difficult answer I am ready to live is that those of you who love the church and choose to stay are abiding in an ecotone of your own, your deep faith in conflict with your questions, no doubt complicated even more by your experience in this place. I can no longer allow myself the luxury of simple anger in the face of the complexity of the choices you must make, the edges you must
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walk. And if the desert is about anything, it is about the smallness of such human concerns. I leave the desert this time more humble than I came, and I leave more willing to live the questions. Works Cited Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968. Krall, Florence R. Ecotone: Wayfaring on the Margins. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994. Krutch, Joseph Wood. The Desert Year. New York: The Viking Press, 1975. Palmer, Parker. The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998. Shepard, Paul. The Only World We’ve Got. San Francisco: Sierra Book Club, 1996. Stegner, Wallace. The American West as Living Space. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1987.
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Map Making in the Desert Meditations on the Question of Place Cecily Ellis
“The farther I come the farther I fall Whatever I knew it was nothing at all Nothing at all, just making me small Smaller and smaller I fall back� - Patty Griffin
I am making my own music. A song I’ve never heard, but somehow know the words to. Chisel in left, mallet in right. My hands grasp the notes. A soft resonating ring... up and through and straight to core. This feels familiar. Authentic. I carve deeper. Each tap, each chip. The desert dismembers. Erosion. How thick is this stone? I do not mean inches. Cannot fathom feet. But how thick? How many years would it take to understand this stone?
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Artist Vijali Hamilton tells of sleeping with the stone. Of holding it. Some place beyond the hands…in the heart. The soft spot where the story can seep in. “How much time must you spend with the stone before you begin?,” I ask. She tells me that this intimacy develops slowly…days, weeks, months to get beyond the surface. I continue to chip. Learning the flesh and tracing the hips. I am stunned by its fragility. Stone: hardened earthy matter. Hard, solid, and reduced to red dust in my hands. The desert deceives. Humbled by this stone, twice the size of my hand and three times the secrets, I am frustrated by this trickery of the desert. It is covert. Operating under the pretense of exposure, wearing its blazing badge of heart and hurt on its sleeve, then asking us to roll it up and go deeper. How deep can we go in a lifetime? Says Edward Abbey in his introduction to Desert Solitaire: “The desert is a vast world, an oceanic world, as deep in its way and complex and various as the sea. Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite. If a man knew enough he could write a whole book about the juniper tree. Not juniper trees in general but that one particular juniper tree which grows from a ledge of naked sandstone near the old entrance to Arches National Monument” (xii). With what words would I net my stone? How many nights have I slept with it before beginning to decipher its story? Before scratching its surface. You must live your question, says Rilke.
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To do so, I came to a place short on water, full of stone, and overflowing with question. Two hours to pack, seven sun cycles, a four hour rain storm, and three shooting stars ago, I forged questions I knew no words for, could not net, and have yet to pull in the a full answers to. Where is my place? My stone? My home?
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Teresa Cohntaught us that if you follow the source of water, you come to the place where story begins. The journey to the place where these answers begin to seep from the springs has led me to a home of precarious love. My heart beats in a rhythm, both predictable and preciously chaotic, for the canyons of this country. Desert as paradox. I followed passion to this place, a blind love, and recall well my first lone pilgrimage to this country of high heat and cliff. My heart was at home in this land of extremes. I was quite literally overcome by the power of this place. Draping bandanas, wet and red, around both wrists to stave off heat stroke. Red and heaving, the rocks breathe ghosts I have not had the courage to claim for my own. My memories of this place have never before been forged by my own footsteps. Always someone ahead and I have always followed. Hung on the words of the stories that came before me. Trailing on the tail of someone else’s kite.
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This time I have come to tread my own path. To wonder alone how many hues are hidden under my feet. To learn the names of the plants, turns in the road, songs, and stories of my own creation. To craft memory of my own community. My own tribe. Can one grow to love a place more than a person? Erosion. Deposition. Can this place become mine?
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Survival in the desert requires one thing above all. Equilibrium. That is not to say balance, for the word provokes an equity constructed by machine, not the motion of nature. An unpredictable cycle of rain, heat, wind, and the hope that flies alongside all elements combine to simply sustain some years and flourish the next. Asks Terry Tempest Williams, “Can we too be equitable?” Can we learn not to expect equality, but equity? I have come to believe that we do not yet know how to read this kind of time. How to stand in the river and soak this in through our toes to our soul. Or is it that have we forgotten? What time does the sun set on the last day of June? What does it mean when the bluebirds return? What does it mean when they do not? Erosion. Deposition. A death gives way to birth. The constants that counter the variables of life… and still we resist. Certain equilibrium must exist in this place. To sustain. Of what must I let go? To what will I give life?
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I cannot find the path. Friends have followed, based on my certain memory of this place. Excited feet, eager to follow the path of the many before them who have come to climb the sky. Together we have hoped to watch the sun sink low into these cliffs. Into the country we are learning to call “ours.� But even with help, I cannot find the path. I have read that the wildflowers that bloom in the arid deserts of the Southwest have evolved very savvy methods of seeding. One may wonder how during a year wealthy in water, it seems that there are new species around every bend. Botanists tell us that this phenomenon is a result of a type of hording. These fragile species are known to regularly force their seeds into dormancy, sometimes for years at a time, thereby ensuring their survival during years of drought and preserving their blooms for years that hold more promise for propagation. Do we do the same? Are we so fragile of mind that we must force our memories dormant to persevere through the droughts of life? And if so, will these memories return upon the thumping of raindrops? Sprung up from their place of solace like the toads answering the primal call of percussion? Are memories replaced? Covered up? Built upon? Sediment. Earth as protection.
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What does it mean to reside in motion? I am reminded of Laura Hemker, our scrappy guide who spoke of substituting stride for stature, finesse for fiber of muscle, in navigating the throes of
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river. She asked us to note the way the water moves to fill itself in, using always the path of least resistance. In this way, the river conserves energy, moving most efficiently along its course. Balance, even keel. Equilibrium. “Be mindful of the flex of the boat,” she says. Meanwhile, I am holding to metal. Fingers laced tight around what I perceive to be the only thing that comes between me and a “this one’s for the grandchildren” story of “swimming the rapids.” Using me as an example, Laura tells me to move my hand. In my search for stability, it seems I have sought out a prime place for pinching. As the water lifts I will be held helpless in the in-between of metal and wave, water and rubber. Ebb and flow, high and low. I am reluctant, but I let go. I have spent years teaching my body how to be rigid. What she asks feels foreign. Hand placed on safer ground, I gradually begin to learn the swivel and sway. I dare to dance this water. Ride out the highs. Stare into the holes and train the timing of my joints to be more fluid. Perhaps it is more to move with this motion, to play with wave, wind, tumult and tide. What do we learn when we move rather than stand? Feel this place rather than fight it? How do we teach the soul this dance?
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It has been over 23 years since my mother stood at the base of majesty outside of Hope, British Columbia and heard the call of ancestors. Intuition. She still speaks of the need to share this gift of sight, of sound. Moved so much by the landscape that she knew she could never see it the same alone. The beat of place translated through belly. Birth. We all know this need to create love - to give to the cycle. From cradle to grave. In her book, The Pine Island Paradox, Kathleen Dean Moore tells us that the most intimate position one can hold with another is one of being shoulder to shoulder. Gazing out on the whole of the earth. From this shared perspective grows common admiration. Understanding. Together we feast our eyes on the bounty of this land. This land full of life, full of this love. Together we commune. Rubbing sun-touched shoulder against shoulder, we have birthed what is sacred. In this community we are safe without answers. Holding hallowed ground and circles made sacred by our words. Each bringing our own match to the campfire. Our own monkey wrench brought to stir the flame. How do we protect this place? This space? Ourselves? Hands held as we watch the sun set. Looking forward with our heads turned sideways.
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I came to this place alone, with a head full of questions and a hand empty of answers. The desert reveals. Erosion. Deposition. Seeps into the soul through the
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soles of our shoes as we walk and we walk and we walk to reveal the truths of this land. Songs of each seed. Flight of fair-breasted bird. Reflection. I have touched the texture of this place. Slid along the surface of the slickrock, and dared myself deeper, still I do not know the thickness of this stone. Again, Abbey: “For my own part I am pleased enough with surfaces – in fact they alone seem to me to be of much importance. Such things for example as the grasp of a child’s hand in your own, the flavor of an apple, the embrace of friend or lover, the silk of a girl’s thigh, the sunlight on rock and leaves, the feel of music, the bark of a tree, the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind – what else is there? What else do we need?” (xiii). Can we share Abbey’s sentiment? Is this enough? And so, I step out of our circle with far more questions than I came with and the wisdom that the right question is infinitely more important than the right answer. I resign to the paradox of this place. Find security in uncertainty. And faith that together it is our questions that will forge the future. Stone by stone. Chip by chip. Chisel in left. Mallet in right. Making love through music to the mystery of our desert.
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Works Cited Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968. Moore, Kathleen Dean. The Pine Island Paradox. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2004.
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Learning the Language of the West A Reflection on the Ecology of Residency Summer Seminar
Brandon Hollingshead
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do not know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything else die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life. - Mary Oliver, from The Summer Day
The Environmental Humanities Ecology of Residency seminar has been a high point of my education, a transforming and regenerative process, a reflective time in the desert amidst an extraordinary gathering of minds
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and hearts. Here in the red rock desert of June, in the space, place, and energy of this seminar, I have been granted deep time to study the lessons of The Summer Day: pay attention, fall down, be idle and blessed, plan your one wild and precious life. As a native of the cypress sloughs and beaches of Southwest Florida, a switch to the American West landscape has given me the time and distance necessary to acquaint myself with an equally beautiful but wholly different ecology of residency. This time has allowed me to contemplate and appreciate my self, my home, and the ecology that meshes self and home in the act of residency. I’ve been mindful of hurricanes, Tempests, education, and home. This essay is an attempt to capture my experience in the Ecology of Residency. Here, in the desert, as tropical storms already begin to threaten Florida and the Gulf of Mexico states, my thoughts return to last fall. It was a challenging time for us in Florida. We had just gone through a terrifying hurricane season of four major land falling storms, one a direct hit to Southwest Florida. My state and my community were worn raw. A neighbor lost his business of twenty-five years; friends lost their homes entirely; some in the area are still displaced. Fortunately, I incurred very little damage beyond downed trees and temporary loss of utilities. Immediately following the Friday, August 18, 2004 landfall of Hurricane Charley, I started volunteering on an American Red Cross disaster relief truck, distributing warm meals and cold drinks to those coping with extensive damage in the hardest hit and poorest areas in my community. At that time, the Hurricane Charley disaster relief effort was the largest mobilization of the American Red Cross for a natural disaster, second in size only to the relief efforts following the New York City disaster of September 11, 2001. For me, it was a humbling experience to serve those who needed help so desperately, and humbling to see the wake of one of Mother Nature’s most fearsome storms.
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With the immediacy of Hurricane Charley behind, I resumed my studies at Florida Gulf Coast University with the start of the 2004 fall term. Although the physical structure of the University did not sustain direct damage, our faculty and students were directly impacted by the storm. The subsequent threats of Hurricanes Frances, Jeanne, and Ivan kept us in a fearful emergency-operations mode. Classes were cancelled to prepare for and ride out the storms. We were nervous. We needed time to heal. We needed guidance and wisdom. We needed the voice of reason in such a raw time. The Center for Environmental and Sustainability Education at Florida Gulf Coast University looked forward to the visit of Terry Tempest Williams to deliver the inaugural Freshman Convocation and the fall Rachel Carson Distinguished Lecture on ecological awareness, democratic responsibility, and responsive citizenry. Instead, we got a circus. FGCU President William Merwin and the Board of Trustees cancelled Terry’s keynote address at Convocation and put the Rachel Carson Distinguished Lecture on hold. Merwin and his Board, appointed by Governor Jeb Bush, were fearful that Terry’s message of the Open Space of Democracy would lack balance on the cusp of a national Presidential election. Did Merwin and the Board wish to present a Closed Space of Democracy, a counter-position? Perhaps, as Merwin rented FGCU’s Alico Arena for a Dick Cheney Republican Party pep rally days after he censored Williams’ over his fear of an imbalanced presentation. The cancellation of Terry’s visit and this subsequent mockery was deeply embarrassing to students and faculty. We felt the cancellation of core beliefs held at our institution: the rights of free speech, academic exploration, civic engagement, and ecological literacy.
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Upon learning of the decision to postpone Terry Tempest Williams’ Open Space of Democracy lectures, I enlisted the help of peers and student groups to invite Terry to FGCU, not as a Convocation keynote speaker or Rachel Carson Distinguished Lecturer, but as a champion of open dialogue, open democracy, and open mindedness. Student clubs and organizations representing all aspects of student life and campus community eagerly stepped forward to cosponsor such a dialogue, including the FGCU College Republicans and Young Democrats, and Model United Nations club. We had formed a coalition willing to challenge tradition and question the status quo. A diverse student population embodied an open space of democracy. Terry commended our action on her behalf, and graciously agreed to join the FGCU community in open dialogue. When she flew in to Fort Myers, Terry immediately came to campus to meet representatives of the student coalition. Minutes before she arrived, the meeting room was electric, chaotic. The students gathered there ran a gamut of emotions: we were excited, scared, nervous, humbled, and upset. My stomach was tense. I didn’t know quite what to expect. With the grace of a roseate spoonbill, and the wisdom of Great Blue Heron, in walked a goddess, our goddess. The room fell silent. No one dared to speak. Finally, a hushed whisper announced, “I’m Terry,” and broke the silence. These simple words of introduction opened a space of conversation and healing. It was a sacred space for dialogue in an insecure climate and an insecure landscape. A frog fetish was passed from person to person around the room, and with it in hand we shared our thoughts, hopes, and fears for the coming days, weeks, and years. We allowed ourselves to be vulnerable and vulnerable together.
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At the time of my meeting Terry, I was studying the sin of sloth in a philosophy course on the seven deadly sins. Extending beyond mere laziness, sloth is the mental condition of losing hope, spirituality, and meaning in life. Depression, lack of communion with the natural world, and unhealthy doses of television and the internet left me severed from the things that gave my life meaning. When Terry Tempest Williams spoke at Florida Gulf Coast University, she unknowingly helped me to break away from the sloth that had plagued me. Terry told me, “don’t worry about what you will do next. If you take one step with all the knowledge you have, there is usually just enough light shining to show you the next step” (Williams 6). This offering of guidance lifted a great weight, a great burden, from my soul and presented me with the gift of allowance. The fortuitous occasion of Terry Tempest Williams’ Open Space of Democracy tour events at Florida Gulf Coast University allowed me to demonstrate for the first time the dormant talents I always knew I had, but could never manifest. Terry’s message allowed me to have a new clarity of vision I didn’t know was possible. Terry allowed me to embrace a “more authentic mode of being” (Berry 4) and allowed me the precious gift of seeing the world in a new and engaging way. It’s only been since the Open Space of Democracy tour that I’ve allowed myself simply to be. I’ve only recently allowed myself to come through in ways that I’ve never explored – in reciprocal love, in independent inquiry, in exploration of self in place. The last ten months have put my life in focus. In the last ten months I’ve allowed myself to live with zeal and enthusiasm. For all the toil and tribulation of that uncertain time in October, we all came through and are people transformed.
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I’m pleased to say that my reunion with Terry and Brooke in Castle Valley for the University of Utah College of Humanities course has been under infinitely better circumstances than those that first bought us together in Florida. Since March I’ve been anxiously awaiting this time in the desert for deep thinking and reflection. Like many of my peers in this course, I learned about and applied for the Ecology of Residency seminar after the deadline for applications passed, but Terry and the College of Humanities were gracious in allowing me to submit my essay late. In my application, I looked at the pillars of the modern ecology movement, Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold, and examined their relationships to place. Much of Leopold’s thinking on ecology, conservation, and land ethic grew from his experiences at Round River in the sand pines of Wisconsin. In the same way, Rachel Carson identified with, drew inspiration from, and lovingly examined the rocky coast of New England. My essay explored the way a deep relationship with residency in place informed the thinking of these two ecologists. To quote Leopold, “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect…That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten” (Leopold xviii-xix). My application essay transitioned into the ways Leopold’s ecological model, conscious of love and respect of wildness, has been infused into my education at Florida Gulf Coast University. I am fortunate to have experienced the rigors of a dynamic faculty that inspire student learning and growth; a faculty that sees college education as a way to teach students not how to make a living, but rather, how to make a life.
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The Mission Statement and Learning Goals and Educational Goals and Outcomes at FGCU are committed to environmental sustainability. All students seeking an undergraduate degree are required to take the course “The University Colloquium: A Sustainable Future.” In this class students develop ecological awareness in field-based trips to natural and man-made ecosystems across Southwest Florida, through reflective journaling, and through rigorous class discussions. The reading list includes John Dewey, David Orr, Aldo Leopold, the Earth Charter, Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World, and Wackernagel and Rees’ Our Ecological Footprint. The University Colloquium challenges students to develop, engage, and reflect on an ethic of place and an ethic of sustainability at many different levels – from the personal to the global. As a communication major with special emphasis on environmental communication, my core classes explored the theory and practice of how stories and meaning-making evolve, and how relationships and avenues of communication are opened. I built upon this foundation of communication theory and philosophy by studying environmental rhetoric, environmental persuasion and activism, and environmental philosophy. As an English minor, I happily studied the writings of David Orr, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Thomas Berry, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Janisse Ray, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Terry Tempest Williams, and Peter Matthiessen in Environmental Literature. In Literature of the Sea, I studied Homer, Melville, Charles Johnson, Matthissen again, and others. Faulkner, Race, and Southern Culture presented the important contribution of William Faulkner to literature. As a student in the College of Arts and Sciences, I am required to take a series of interdisciplinary study courses: Issues in Science and Technology, Issues in Environment and Ecology, Feminist Issues in Culture and Society, and Foundations of Civic Engagement.
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These courses demanded participation within the community and all included components of service learning. To round out my 120 credit hours, I have taken ecology and environmental science courses. Working with the international scholar Peter Blaze Corcoran has been my great pleasure. He has opened my eyes to a holistic world view and introduced an ethic of care for the community of life. He has introduced me to the cosmological and deeply spiritual writing of Mary Evelyn Tucker, Thomas Berry, and the Earth Charter. I am quite pleased in my education. I feel that my combination of communication, humanities, and ecological studies is an invaluable interdisciplinary framework. I feel my participation in the Ecology of Residency course in Utah has built upon my experiences in Florida and taken my educational inquiry to a new threshold of rigor. In the few short days of this seminar, we have explored so much and participated in so many important conversations: bioregionalism; desert taxonomy, geology, and geography; a discussion with Ken Sleight on environmental activism; the study of hydrology, maps, and music; art and spirituality; art and peace; the intricacies of water rights and land acquisition; the concept of sustainability as framework, promise and hope for a better future; the critical writings of Paul Shepard; dialogue with professional writers; the restoration and healing of a damaged landscape; and the steeping of deeper appreciation for the circle of life. It has been a thoroughly demanding nine days. Beyond the academic, this desert experience has been an immersion in community building, trust, dream, and the sacred. The course was not easy, but I don’t believe it was designed to be that way. Our first desert lesson was that this landscape is full of paradoxes. As a temporary resident of Castle Valley, I felt the weight of these paradoxes:
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the paradox of deep geologic time and the relative speed in which humans have deeply scarred the land; the paradox of beauty and wildness; the strength of mountains and the fragility of cryptobiotic soil. My great personal challenge has been trying to interpret the external physicality of the jagged west into something my fluid Southeastern mind can understand. I have been learning a new language in the Colorado Plateau, in Red Rock country, in Castle Valley: the language of the West. It was not fluency or mastery of the language that I sought, but simply a familiarity. I had to pause many times during the introduction to the desert at Castleton Tower. The names of plants and animals reminded me so vividly of the plants and animals of my home. For example, the desert blazing star, (Mentzelia multiflora), has a blazing star counterpart in Florida, Liatrus tenuifolia. The pesky, noisy, even gregarious Western Scrub Jay has a corresponding endangered Florida scrub jay, a fascinating, affectionate, and communal bird. The Utahan colors, too, are deceptively similar; the pink sand of red rock canyons mirror the pink limestone marl of costal beaches Everglades sloughs. I am convinced that I have seen the setting sun’s canyon-orange coloring that bounces of Porcupine rim as the Florida sun sinks into my Gulf of Mexico home waters. Even my dreams were attempts to reconcile the differences of my perception of East and West: the East defined by water in the air, water in the land, water on all sides; the West defined by the erosional and elusive characteristics of water. As I slept during the night after a visit to Castleton Tower, I dreamt I was walking through the Six Mile Cypress Slough Preserve in Fort Myers, Florida. The slough came to me in all of its vivacity and brilliance, with one exception: the flowers I had previously
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known to be Floridian were replaced by the prince’s plume, desert mule’s ear, and desert trumpet of the Colorado Plateau. The next night I dreamt the same scene: Western flowers blooming in eastern swamps. As I waded through the chest-deep water of the cypress slough, I came across old-timer of the west Ken Sleight lovingly engaged in conversation with old-timer of Southwest Florida, Bill Hammond. I shared my dream with Terry, and she presented me with the following striking passage from Gerard Manley Hopkins: “If we did not feel the likeness we should not think them so beautiful, or if we did not feel the difference we should not think them so beautiful. The beauty we find is from the comparison we make of the things with themselves, seeing their likeness and difference, is it not?” Two places will always have the connotation of home for me: The PriceSanders Scout Reservation and Six Mile Cypress Slough Preserve. The first, Price-Sanders Scout Reservation, sits on the Babcock-Webb Wildlife Management Area owned by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission. It is the camp I grew up on as a Boy Scout. My earliest memories are of camping with my older brothers at Camp Miles; some of the earliest pictures of me show us playing in the woods. In later years, I lived at Camp Miles for entire summers as a member of the resident summer camp staff. Driving down the camp road will always feel like driving home. In my college years, I’ve come to identify the Six Mile Cypress Slough Preserve as an equally important vestige of home, of place. In the desert, I’ve found that I hunger for Wahkachobee, the great blue heron; I thirst for water that bathes alligators. In the desert, visiting source- water source- at Castleton Tower was a richly symbolic gesture. At the reservoir I baptized myself into red rock country.
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The West has many heroes: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, Ken Sleight, Terry Tempest Williams, and others. As I sat in my cabin or on the lawn at the Castle Valley Inn, I read through Desert Solitaire, The American West as Living Space, and Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, mindful of the their place in the canon of Western writing. Though I ingested the readings with great interest, the words did not ring out to me, did not speak the language of my soul. My mind returned constantly to the hero of my bioregion, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas. I was particularly mindful of Douglas’ words to Everglades: River of Grass which are forever imprinted on my heart. She writes, “There are no other Everglades in the world. They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them: their vast glittering openness, wider than the enormous round of the horizon, the racing free saltness and sweetness of their massive winds, under the dazzling blue heights of space. They are unique also in the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life they enclose. The miracle of the light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slow-moving below, the grass and water that is the central fact of the Everglades of Florida. It is a river of grass” (1). This passage is central to my sense of identity and sense of place as a resident of the Western Everglades. It offers a physical description of land, of water, of “related harmony of the forms of life.” It is a conversation of land, music and maps. The passage establishes fluidity of life in the Everglades. Southwest Florida and the Everglades teach many of the same lessons as the desert and red rock country. In the Everglades, one quickly gains perspective and learns humility in an unending sea of sedges, as in the unending sea of desert. One quickly learns to find protection from the relentless beating of the sun, to seek shade, and to collect fresh water
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wherever possible. Do not be fooled by the immensity of the Everglades’ water: its landscape is every bit as harsh as desert. Either you gain a foothold in the Everglades, or you sink. The Ecology of Residency course began with the introduction that grounding self in place opens the way for deeper understanding of the self. As we immersed ourselves in Castle Valley and the Colorado Plateau, we were charged to take up our monkey wrench in action, to reflect on our talents, to embrace our creativity, and to act on behalf of the land that sustain us. When we came together as a group of strangers these ideas seemed foreign to us. But as we leave Castle Valley, we leave as family. We formed a bond secured to the wings of dragonfly and the back of fox. In closing, I share a passage from Desert Solitaire. Abbey writes, “A weird, lovely, fantastic object out of nature like Delicate Arch has the curious ability to remind us—like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness— that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship. The shock of the real. For a little while we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels. For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous then all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures” (45). As writers, professors, and students we are engaged in the great and noble task of telling a new story, of creating new myth, of synthesizing new thoughts with traditional wisdom. My experience in the Ecology of
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Residency course allowed me to reflect deeply and meaningfully on what it means to live in place, what it means to engage community, and what it means to trust and deeply respect my peers. Having seen the immensity of the West, having tasted the wildness of a different world, having reexamined the ecology of residency, I can return to Utah often when my Floridian body aches for the glare of the desert sun and the immensity of the red rock faces.
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Works Cited Williams, Terry Tempest. (2004). The Open Space of Democracy. Great Barrington, MA: The Orion Society. Berry, Thomas. (1988). The Dream of the Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Leopold, Aldo. (1966). A Sand County Almanac. New York: Ballantine Books. Douglas, Marjorie Stoneman. (1974). The Everglades: River of Grass. St. Simmons Island, GA: Mockingbird Books. Abbey, Edward. (1968). Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. Ballatine Books: New York.
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A Natural Autobiography Inspired by Castle Valley, Utah Allison Lisk
Being bashfully honest, pulling back both scar tissue and most tender layers of my heart, feeling at times, extreme, writhing discomfort, anxiety and vulnerability, praying in earnest, loving out loud, cursing in frustration when the words would not come. Holding both exhaustion and awe in the same brilliant moment, considering (even plotting with Cecily) ultimate change in the wake of social alienation or loneliness, questioning my purpose, talents, direction and circumstance. But, most of all, I step in front of the mirror and see, really see, myself raw.
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It would be a grave mistake to assume that I have any concrete, wellreasoned clue about what I am about to write. It was not reason that led me here, but passion. Passion that gives me butterflies and makes my heart race and passion that recognizes my quiet desperation. It’s wild and unpredictable. I gave myself up to it. This is my story. These are my skeletons- I cannot embellish, nor glamorize the substance of my soul. It is what it is. One week ago, I would not have been able to write this paper. Even still, I squirm as I reach with strain and squint for the right words to communicate my sense of connection, even origin to place. I hold these questions tight in my chest and heavy on my shoulders. They are relentless in their persistence and I have no shame in not knowing the answers. The more I search for answers, the more questions I have. How do I live? How do I belong? What am I supposed to be doing? My views about life were a lot less complicated not too long ago. My relationship and responsibility to place were born from a belief that humans are in need of leading a much simpler life. Consumerism, materialistic greed, wastefulness and egocentrism are elements and acceptable social norms woven into American society. I have longed to live in a manner which embodies simplicity by living mindful of our natural resources. Material goods simply stand in the way of my freedom, closeness to nature and the focus of what I deem of value. The more things I accumulate, the more tied down I feel. This is an artificial world and existence and I want no part of it.
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Simply, this is what drew me into the realm of environmental awareness. I wanted to learn how humans could change their attitudes to live more humble, sustainable lives with increased continuity with the earth. When I moved from Eugene, Oregon to Salt Lake City, Utah in October of 1999, I fell instantly in love with the Wasatch Mountains. I worked there, spent my free time there- countless hours and days hiking, rock climbing and skiing. However, there were a lot of (dare I say prevailing?) behaviors that I didn’t understand. Here was a landscape with unsurpassed beauty, yet I perceived a general lack of interest or regard by many of my neighbors. People in Salt Lake City didn’t seem to care on the whole. I looked around and saw an air of cosmopolitan frenzy so incongruent with the majestic and powerful mountains. How could a place so blessed with natural beauty harbor so many indifferent residents? This became a great paradox in my mind. Why was it so polarized here? Why is there so much competition to use up the land, have the most junk, and surround ourselves with vain man-made marvels? How was this sustaining the human spirit? I have searched for wisdom from the desert. Listening to the landscape, my mentors and most of all, my inner voice. The saying goes that you cannot hide in the desert. Eventually, everything gets exposed. Getting to know the land has been equivalent with getting to know myself. As I have learned how a shrub survives the scorching heat and winds, I also begin to understand how in seasons of struggle and pain, we find the courage to dig our roots in a little deeper and stand a little stronger. I will be able to withstand the next storm a little easier. When the landscape looks barren and brown, a radiant color of bloom appears out of nowhere. We too, can embody hope and optimism in times of grief or unrest.
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… “Where much is given, much is required”... Negro Bill Canyon Walking in silence, softly pressing my feet into the cool pink sand, I heard these words echo in my head. Again, “where much is given, much is required.” Overcome with awesome humility and paralyzing disbelief, I knew I was witnessing one of creation’s finest miracles. Inconceivable time has afforded this gift to us- no, to me. I was alone there that day. Totally unaffected by passersby. As I sat by the stream, I was rendered powerless, speechless, full of joy and plagued with guilt. I had the mind and disposition of a spineless jelly fish- all I could do was stare. I could not, CANNOT, imagine that I deserve to be part of such places. My mind wandered to the generations before me who have suffered unspeakable hardships in barren lands, who never ventured beyond vantage points of prairies or sand dunes, people bound and exploited by slavery or sickness. Though beauty can be found everywhere, I cannot deny that this place is special, even exalted. I feel connection, though never having stepped foot here before. I have strong legs, I am able to walk, I open my eyes and am afforded colors, pattern, beauty. And so I ask again, no, I beg to know how it is on top of everything I have been given, I am able to experience this place. How am I ever (if I live to be 110 years old) able to make it up to the earth, to do my part, to give back in appreciation. I don’t fully comprehend the high standard that we must be held accountable to.
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If we know where we are, we know who we are. It was hot. Scorching in fact. While on a summer vacation a few years ago, my parents arranged for our family to stay at Black Butte Ranch in Central Oregon- my personal place of refuge. It was the high desert in August and fire danger was at an all time high. The forest floor was covered with a thick blanket of dried pine needles and green was a color of the past. Jennifer is my older sister whom I shared a room with for 16 years. These years together were regretfully filled with fighting. We shared no common ground that I could identify and consequently have had almost no contact since I left for college 9 years ago. Usually our conversations are intentionally polite, brief and shallow. We try to avoid playing with the fire that comes from emotions and history. It’s the middle of the afternoon, hotter than all hell, and I’m driving with my sister in her 1992 candy red Acura, the AC blaring and windows down so that she can smoke. In Old English archetype, across the windshield it spells, “Precious” in Spanish. As we turn out of the resort onto the highway, we see a Smokey the Bear figure posting that the fire danger is extremely high. No less than a quarter of a mile down the road my sister carelessly flicks her cigarette out the window. I almost hyperventilated. I just knew that we were going to be responsible for the whole ranch bursting into flames and being charred and leveled because of one tiny cigarette that happened to trigger a bed of dead pine needles accompanied by the desert wind to swiftly burn every flammable object within 20 miles. I reacted in horror to this gesture (previously proven to be ineffective, but I did it anyway). Her callous response was, “Chill out, it’s not a big
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deal.” I am always surprised at how shocked I am by stupidity, no matter how frequent I encounter it. How could anyone have such disregard for our wilderness? It was offensive on so many levels; I didn’t even know where to begin. In fact, it broke my heart to know that there were people, especially members of my own family, believing that the world is there for their recreation and pleasure, and that they were entitled to a freedom of unaccountability on behalf of their behavior. Like so many attitudes in our dominant society, there is total disconnection from the land. Again, if we don’t know where we are, we don’t know who we are. I tell this story not to solely single out my sister, because there are many people who would act in the same manner, but to express how inherently wrong I felt this was. It was as if she had taken her cigarette butt and directly lunged its burning tip into my flesh. I felt that same pain. It is also that same pressure I have felt in the pit of my stomach while exploring the Pacific Northwest. The trees are so dense in areas that getting lost is inevitable due to the limited vision imposed by a thick blanket of greenery and fog. Being fully engulfed in a thick sea of western hemlock, only to step out into an area of mass clear cutting. The contrast is so offensive that you feel in your gut as if a village of your brothers and sisters have been wiped out. It is slaughter and it tears at your heart as you look on helplessly. These are the feelings that I carry; independent of any education or socialization I have been privy to. Once more, if we know where we are, we know who we are. Terry writes as if she is speaking directly to me, “If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide and so we are found.”
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… “We must begin by remembering beyond our history.” - Paul Shepard Brooke Williams, our teacher’s husband of thirty years, spoke to us of creative sustainability. Brooke has the natural ability of not taking himself too seriously. He is jovial, sincere and deceivingly smart and I feel lucky to know him. We were asked to envision a TV screen in our mind. Black rectangle, power off, silence……..1…………….2…………..3- TV is on. “Where are you?” he asks. The image across the screen is Morning Glory Arch. It is a pristine memory still vivid in my mind from our visit there the day before. There are shadows cast from the red rock overhanging sidewalls and a terrific beam of light shines down through the center of the arch until it touches a small pool of water on the canyon floor. I hear Brooke’s voice again, “Now, someone comes into the corner of the screen- they have something for you.” Nothing. A lonely lapse of time passes. Finally, a figure comes into focus. I see a Native American man who I presume to be Cherokee, as one of my distant grandfathers was. I know little about him with the exception of 2 tattered and primitive photographs I have in a book of remembrance. It dawns on me somewhat surprisingly that if I have one Cherokee ancestor, I have many. Again I am taught, in the desert, the hidden is eventually exposed. He holds something small in the palms of his cupped hands, walking slowly, meticulously, as if not to disturb the delicate object. I cannot see what it is, though I perceive that it represents warmth. My mind searches….. a turquoise stone? A handcrafted clay bead? Maybe a soft petal from
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a rare desert flower. I come closer and I hear distinctly, unforgettably, “REMEMBER.” I now believe that remembering where we came from is the catalyst to our reuniting with the land.
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“Find in the past your present, acknowledge how you got here and honor it.” -Florence Krall Shepard While in Castle Valley, Terry requested us to pay close attention to our dreams. I had two distinct dreams that came to me in the stretches of time and space here in the desert. I quote from my journal, June 5, 2005: “I remember that I was going to go see Pavarotti perform in an outdoor amphitheatre and that he was extremely upset because not enough people had bought tickets- usually they would oversell tickets to make sure that the theater was filled to capacity. However, because of this, he refused to go on stage. Somehow, I was coerced into doing it instead. On the woodenplanked stage, Pavarotti would sing a line or scale and then I would repeat after him. I was totally surprised to hear the tone that was coming from my vocal cords. I am not a talented vocalist and am reluctant to sing in the shower, let alone in front of an audience. Despite my insecurity, with Pavarotti there, I could do just as he had done on a smaller scale. And, it sounded good! I really surprised myself. But, when the time came for him to leave me before the show, I realized that even though my voice was good, I had never done this before. I didn’t even know the words to the opera….or even what opera it was that we were supposed to be doing. Someone tried to encourage me that there would be a teleprompter, but I had no faith in that helping me.
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So, I chickened out. I didn’t have enough experience or earned respect to take over for Pavarotti, or do what he is capable of. I think I am feeling the effects of meeting Terry, Alice, Ken, Brooke, and others. I want to walk in their footsteps, but am feeling so very overwhelmed by how big their presences are and how much they have done. How could I ever measure up? I am only at the beginning. It’s scary.” Dream #2: I was in prison. I received a traffic ticket for $92 and decided that it would be better to go to jail for 30 days rather than pay the fine. Ironically, my friend Nancy was going to jail also and she talked me into being cellmates with her. (Apparently I don’t hang with a very good crowd in my dreams) She said it would be fun to do it together. So, we are in jail and once again I chicken out and decide that I can’t do it. I can’t stay there and go through with it (even though I have a friend there with me). I decide that it is too big of a commitment, too scary because I have never done it, and I bail. So, I wake up and wonder, what am I so afraid of?
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Work with what you have got! Unconsciously, I think I have saved the best for last. I had the opportunity to thank Ken Sleight for the example he had been to our generation, and for paving the way for us to continue standing up for the environment. Modestly, he denied any such praise or recognition, but I think if I went back in time and could do it again, I would thank him for being an example of courage and for standing up for what he believed was the right thing to do in times of heated controversy. I asked Mr. Sleight what his vision was for us and what he would like to see us do in order to maintain these beliefs.
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I was empowered to hear him say that we must not compromise. I thought about my recent dreams and my need to move forward trusting in my own talents. Unforgettably, he spoke of the monkey wrench which should be viewed as a symbol of action and our talents: even the catalyst to putting our hearts in gear. I thought about mentioning a lot of things that seem like they would have played a convincingly integral part in cultivating the feeling I have about my personal responsibility to the earth. Logically I could go through experiences that I have had, my education, volunteering I have done, positions I have held, people I have learned from. I do value these lessons. They have been rich and allowed me space to think and practice. But, once again, logic and reason are not why I have come. I have known of the personal calling I have to be a steward of the earth for as long as I can remember. That is why I am here in Castle Valley. I have no alterior motives to grow in my relationship to the land. As Laura Kamala once defended her cause by saying, “I own no land here,” I too can attest that I am not acting in my own profitable interest. I am not fighting to defend connection based on ownership. In fact, I believe that it is individual natural drive to be part of the earth, to reconnect not specifically by locality, but because we are part of creation and long to belong to it again. I have asked myself over and over again if I really belong in Salt Lake City, or any place for that matter, and I have no answer. If I feel disconnected from a place, it has nothing to do with the place. It has to do with me. I don’t know how to end my natural autobiography and I don’t want to end it because I feel as though I am just getting started. So, I will do the only appropriate thing I can think of, which is to take the advice of Terry, who has instructed us howl like a coyote when we know nothing else we can do.
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Arriving at Sitting Patrick Mabey
The morning before I left to come here I read a passage from my carnet de voyage, one of my travel notebooks. St-Jean-Pied-de-Port – a small French town situated at the foot of the Pyrenees Mountains. My wife and I had reservations at a refuge of sorts. Walking up the main street I remarked the waning dates. At last we arrived at a door without date, but rather a seashell. We knocked and a very amiable elderly woman invited us in, showed us our beds, and sat us down for hot chocolate. Her eyes beamed. She spoke of her past, how long she had been there, but soon she began speaking of something altogether foreign to me. Pilgrimage. She spoke of the few times she had undertaken them, and the subsequent transformation in her life. She then asked how ours was going thus far. I was bewildered. We told her we were tourists – there to enjoy the history and Basque tradition, that we had just come from
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Bayonne by train, and that the next day we’d be in Biarritz. She was a little confused, but had no problem with us spending the night. After a Christmas concert sung in Basque and poulet basquaise, we climbed back up the cobblestone. The room was filled with people. There was a young guy from England who had nearly died of malaria who was meeting his friend and beginning their journey together. There was a Spanish girl getting a feel for the first stretch, the rise above the foot of the pass. And there were two German girls, one younger who looked about fifteen, the other in her early twenties. The older overheard my wife and I speaking English and introduced herself. I discovered she was a guide, leading the younger girl on a path of rectitude whether she wanted it or not. Apparently at first she didn’t, and she still seemed contrary but was gradually bending. Partly because her one foot was bloody. They had begun their pilgrimage on the coast, going beyond one of the set chemins. The guide spoke of how difficult it had been, but that slow conversation was happening. That night lying on my bed, I heard the young girl toss about, mumbling, obviously in the midst of a nightmare. I wondered about this girl, about her pilgrimage, about her discoveries, her revelations, her dross, and the seashell she would find on the shores of Compostella. St-Jean-Pied-de-Port for most is the “foot of the pass,” the creamy lip of the “milky way,” where “God-walkers” spiral out toward something better, something worthwhile. Toward the end of our seven month stay in France, Teresa and I thought of making a pilgrimage. We saw it as a personal and marital strength, a quiet time to connect to ourselves, the land, and history. At the same
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time I was reading J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. I remembered a professor’s reflections on Zooey, and how what liberated Franny from stagnation and disillusionment is holiness – every being holy, every place holy. My pilgrimage, our pilgrimage, didn’t need to be there, it would be at home or wherever we found ourselves. The last line I read from my journal was “God’s eye will snatch them (pilgrims) from the sands.” I felt peace again when I read it. I knew something good would come of the Ecology of Residency. In lieu of a pilgrimage I sought out a sitting. I hoped to no longer be a tourist in my hometown. And I hoped to begin a slow communication, like that young German girl, only with the land and with those I love. For the last year I’ve been disconnected. I work in cyberspace all day. I take phone calls from people I’ve never met. I purchase mining equipment I’ve never seen before, that I’ve never handled before. I’ve translated tools into French without knowing the English counterpart. Millions of dollars have passed through my hands with a few keystrokes. Though I work for two provinces in Eastern Canada, I reside in the Southwestern U.S. I’ve never walked through Bucyrus, Minepro, LPS, Hewitt, and other Canadian vendors. I wake up at 4 a.m. to be in at 5 so I can work in the Eastern Time Zone, while my lagging body remains in the mountains. I’ve been told to not tell the truth. I’m kind of glad they never trained me. I’ve learned enough on my own. I have seen the map of this global mining corporation (corps=body), and its outlines, its mineralized veins and arteries are clogged with regional virus and metastasizing stories. It doesn’t care to understand Saguenay’s Kingdom of Legends (Royaume de la Legende), like la Chaisse-Galerie. It doesn’t see the acculturation of its myth – the fact that now the French
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story has a devil taking away souls on a canoe through the night sky. Others like the coureurs de bois (runners of the woods) lived with Natives. They offered tobacco, gave gifts, and even received new names. These are Québec’s stories, and they loosen the grip of political and corporateglobal strong-arm. But now, for my part, I’ll undermine the miners…I’ll restore my tainted rivers. The ranks have collapsed and all are lieutenants (lieu + tenant). Not “place-holders” but “holders of place.” How do I hold my place, keep my ground? At least now there will be no taking off of hats (Whitman), no salutes – rather salutations, and hugs. There is no place for one above you, nor one below you, but it’s limitless beside you. Ezra Pound said, “… Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down./ Learn of the green world what can be thy place/In scaled invention or true artistry,/Pull down thy vanity…”. Companionship (co + bread), not competition. Compagnonnages still exist today, where baguette, sourdough, pita, bagel, and rye are still broken and shared, not taken away. I believe the Environmental Humanities program to be a kind of compagnonnage in the most literal and rooted sense. Bread is more than a study of agriculture; its physical and spiritual nourishment is earthen and environmental. The program, then, in my mind’s eye, is a soiled work. It’s a balance of university and Earth. It’s practical, and its practice is connection. Being interdisciplinary, different studies will connect and overlap, but the connection to and use of the real is what I’m getting at. I need meaningful associates, namely the different species with whom I inhabit the earth, not necessarily associations of textbook trivia. I want to know
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the uses, the abuses, the interdependencies of those things around me. I want to know the issues at hand that I might pen them. The bees are diminishing…how, why, what does this mean as a resident of Bountiful, of Utah, of the United States, of the Earth, of the Universe, and what can I do if anything? Biology – bios + logos (mode of life + word). In the beginning was the Word. In the beginning were the Words. Beings, life processes, forms of life, words. What is my mode de vivre? The Kanji character for “man” is a hand over a rice paddy. Force drawn from landscape, from work. My current employ is power over landscape. Its hand grows large, the rice paddies are becoming depleted. Man, humankind, cannot be without thriving of both wildlife and paddy. The character for “love” and “goodness” is a woman and her child. Without rice, when belly ache consumes, birthing ceases and mode becomes formless – forsaken words on caked blood rock. The roots of words reveal character, intent, and answers. Word and mode of life. How to make them “sincere,” for is not this in Kanji a man + word? What we need then is a sincere biology of man and woman, a loving force engaged in language, craft, and landscape. Come press leaves, press letters, sit and set them in chase. We all need personal abecedariums, constructs, contexts. But we need interplay. I’ll dismember and trade my bear festival for your Interface Carpet. Elemental building blocks. I want my abecedarium to encompass limitless story, this resource has no end. Smithing sentences and questions, drawing from these resources. They continue to grow! There are more than 26 letters in the alphabet – the Renaissance boasted even fewer. I wonder about synthesizing letterpress and Environmental Humanities.
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Maybe I’d call my press remembered fingers. To understand the soy inks and papers, the tactile emotions of touching impression on vegetable matter. An organic press. I’d press the wild words with dingbat and steel. The smithereens I’d recycle into understorey. I want to be intimate with other artists’ words. I’d have a sense of insight, as if I were running Braille under my fingertips. Listening to their voice, hearing those things only the blind hear. Reinstating an artisanal craft, digging up word roots, and disseminating various wordsmiths’ seeds…I would enjoy that. Press as monkey wrench – a tool to connect and sabotage. The pressroom is indeed a chamber in this ecological home. I’ll sleep on this one. I remember the first virtuous (virtue – vertue – vert – green) writing I was exposed to, Thoreau’s “Huckleberries.” Full of fact and natural histories, the work embodies a zest for sacramental “a-berrying” as he called it. Thoreau a-berried, too, in cultural studies, biology, language, spirituality, and many other fields for his presentation. He spoke of Canadian tribal reverence for the huckleberry, of the many fruit we pass over (lying just beneath our feet), and of the magnitude in small things. Huckleberries in Thoreau’s eyes are a paradisiacal fruit. I then read Walden, after having visited Concord. I see the salty “God’s drop” near my home differently. His essay titled “Walking” revealed to me the sacred land we saunter (sainte terre) on. Thoreau’s seeds are good seeds; I believe it because they swell and produce. These and others have been grafted into my heart. What once was at home in me, later became uprooted. I have forsaken my long white robes for leaves and red rock school brick. Melville spoke of bringing God out into the streets, Whitman articulated noble thoughts being born out of doors. But Terry Tempest Williams made the leap to fleshy, spiritual fruit. I remember searching adamantly for a book,
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something of real worth for Teresa and my stay abroad. I recalled the cover, surreal snips from Bosch’s landscape. I had never read anything by Terry, and really only had the story of Teresa in my mind. Only the simple, humble introduction before a worthy reading, “Hi, I’m Terry.” Anyway, I bought the book and packed it away. Halfway through the stay I began reading and found myself in a comfortable place, a reinterpreting of Mormon history. I remember the story of Terry attending a spectacle of sorts at BYU Stadium, I believe. She wrote of her disillusionment, her coming to a feeling of discomfort with her religious surroundings. I discovered a real voice that connected, a disquieting voice in a crowd of certainty. I finished the book quickly, and went down beneath the loft of our apartment and wept. I felt God’s hand in this dissent. I saw the synchronicity in having recently finished an English class on the Earthly Paradise, prior to being an ex-pat and this reading. Terry’s book Leap helped me feel at home with my decision to live in earthly delight; she helped me see that the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil is merely fruit. Merely wondrous fruit. So I will use my monkey wrench, my talent, to help sustain this world. If I sit in this place long enough, I’ll arrive at sitting. That’s all…that’s enough. No more moving from lit room to more lit room. I’m returning to my senses. I’m a convert to the inverted land of arch, to the waves of my iconoclastic wife (wif – to wave, like a veil). Together our place expands. I remember up Farmington Canyon when we were dating. I was reading the mystic Julian of Norwich. Her “shewings” were revelations to me. God shewed her things through nature. A hazelnut. In it, Julian understood God made the earth, kept it, and loved it, in spite of its miniscule size. Moreover, she
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saw herself as that hazelnut. I gave Teresa a hazelnut. She has shewn me my place, she has helped me comprehend my circumstance. She keeps me and loves me. This red cusp, it bottlenecks. It’s an entresort. I remember the traveling British entresort performing A Feu et A Sang. This was an in-between place, a theater-in-the-strait. Literally entresort is “enter leave.” This caravan theater company named Cie Babylone travels from place to place. Upon entering a town it opens its doors to community. Inside the embellished trailer there are slightly higher seats on either side of the thru area. Once all are sat down, acoustic guitar, accordion, and tambourine play. The piece is a mock epic of a love triangle between Napoleon, a rival, and a damsel. Stage props, cinema 8, pandemonium, and artful setting unfold. The acts are a complete refashioning and reinterpretation of history. Napoleon is a miniscule peon, his cannons are bellows and air. After the finale, you pick up your things and exit through the front of the van, as opposed to the rear where you enter. The Ecology of Residency, this red cusp, is an entresort. We entered here in a different state, have been shown other perceptions (including natural histories) and will be soon leaving more aware and responsible. The artists and teachers, rather than merely entertaining in a controlled and manufactured environment, have taken us into wild space. Here, there have been educational (ex + ducere, to lead out) insights leading us out of this trailer box we’ve been put in, and that we put ourselves in. I feel more still now. This in-between space has been one of the most grounded places I’ve ever been in.
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Across the Pyrenees are gîtes d’étape. Literally it means “step hut.” They are stepping stones, shelters to converse and pass the night in. I realize now that I, in part, have to create these stepping stones throughout my life-hike. Gîtes must involve others resting while on their journeys. I want to visit my family more often, even my neighbors. I wonder where Teresa and I will end up, which town or village we will settle down in. I want to get to know people like I have here. I honor all of you. There is such goodness in this circle, such trust in this prayer circle. I know its circumference will ripple outward, that future gîtes and acts will be traced back to here, this happening point, where humility and humus thrived together.
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In the Shadow of Mountains Bryan Wallis
I. River of the Past I was born on a verdant eastern portion of the Uintah Basin, officially, in the city of Vernal, in Uintah County, in the state of Utah. At least that was the official report. I have no way to confirm that, since my memory was sketchy at best; yet I do have a few relatively reliable sources that have corroborated the official account, and I therefore deem it accurate for all intents and purposes. I was raised in an alfalfa producing area of the small town of Maeser, probably best recognized by those passing through as consisting of a 7-11, a saddle shop, a military surplus store, and a business known as “truck skins.�
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However, I consider myself fortunate in that rather than being raised in an x-y’ed gridded hive of cement and siding, my childhood memories flow from an alfalfa farm transected by a small stream known as the Ashley Central Canal, known locally as “Kids’ Canal.” The canal was dug around the turn of the century, partly by my Great-grandfather using only the power of human and horse muscle. From this fertile oasis flanked by rows of towering cottonwoods, box elders, birch and ash, roots sunk deep in the loam and clay, girded by moist banks of willow, cattail, sweet pea, and honeysuckle, I was given the most varied and wonderful playground/ laboratory I could have desired. Many of my first memories of the Ashley Central Canal involved donning my father’s ridiculously oversized rubber irrigation boots, which on him would have come to mid-shin, but were well over my knees—closer to midthigh. Using these rubberized clown shoes, I would begin at the east end of our land, and slowly and methodically trudge upstream, each laborious step providing exercise, as well as a platform for potential discovery and adventure. On one such occasion, I recall spotting a dried husk of a hatched stonefly clinging to a large pink Uintah quartzite cobble. To any not particularly entomologically inclined, a stonefly is a winged aquatic insect varying in size from ½” to up to approximately 2” in length. The stonefly passes through two life states: the nymph and the adult. The nymph somewhat resembles an earwig and is rumored to have the flavor of peanuts (information I gleaned from a reliable source, although I was never able to verify the claim myself). In either stage, the stonefly is as dangerous to humans as a cotton ball; however, this information was unfortunately not revealed to me until years after my encounter with the horrible beast.
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At first sight of what I considered without a doubt the most horrific and probably most dangerous insect then known to man, my body instinctively repulsed in a frantic attempt to place as much distance as possible between me and ‘the bug.’ Unfortunately, the rubber boots I was wearing were sized for someone triple my height and foot size; I stumbled backward, only to feel the shock of High Uintah runoff enveloping my entire body. With an involuntary gasp of air, I realized I was now in the element of ‘the bug,’ and most likely legions of the repulsive creatures were about to swarm my little body, stinging, biting or even laying eggs on my defenseless skin. With primal fear surging through every muscle, I struggled to my feet, scaled the crumbling dirt embankment of the creek and sprinted home. No amount of soap and water seemed sufficient in removing any remnant of that ‘thing’ from my contaminated skin. I later resolved to return to my canal kingdom, but I would have to take care to avoid the likes of the nightmarish creature. With the passage of time, my curiosity increased. Irrational fear born of ignorance gradually began to be replaced by knowledge as I observed the life teeming in my front yard. I discovered caddis flies, whose three-state life cycled moved from larvae, to pupa, to adult. The larvae fascinate me; constructing cylindrical homes for themselves out of materials at hand, and carrying their portable dwellings with them like hermit crabs. The caddis in my stream constructed homes with dark organic materials such as rotting leaves, wood, as well as tiny sparkling particles of quartzite and other minerals.
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I discovered the prolific mayfly. Like the stonefly, the mayflies pass their brief existence in two stages: nymph and adult. Freeing any stone from the streambed I observed countless mayfly nymphs wriggling in an attempt to return to the water and escape the searing sun and overabundance of oxygen. I observed that some nymphs were adapted to swim, others to burrow, others to cling to the slimy undersides of solid quartzite cobbles paving the stream. The adult mayfly lives only a single day, a day of community in living clouds of individuals, rising and falling in a dizzying boil of winged life, long forked tails and shimmering sings reflecting the fading pink of evening light. The mayflies mate, and then lay their eggs in water, sitting delicately on the surface, wings upright like miniature translucent sailboats. Having lived the course of their 24-hour existence, the adults fall to the water as ‘spinners,’ spent wings lying flat on the water, exhausted, with only an occasional twitch giving last impressions of ebbing life. DNA passed on to the next generation, their bodies then return to the natural cycle of aquatic life. Other somewhat homely creatures inhabit the Ashley Central: the common aquatic snail, cleaning the creek of rotting plant life and algae, and the planarian, resembling a flattened slug. The planarian embodies a seemingly miraculous power of regeneration; if cut in half, both halves regenerate into two complete individual planarians. Sifting through sand and moss, I discovered tiny freshwater clams no larger than 2 mm in length. I marveled at the clams, wondering if these were somehow related to the ocean clams I had seen in books. My creek became suddenly connected to a vast oceanic system as I imagined
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clams slowly making their way up my tiny stream from the distant sea. I discovered tiny freshwater shrimp known as “scuds.” Again reminding me of a connection to the ocean, these shrimp, somewhat resembling sow bugs, moved themselves through their watery realm with a dizzying myriad of tiny legs whirling and propelling the tiny crustacean forward. Of course, the creatures first and foremost in my mind were the canal’s brown and rainbow trout, denizens of deep pools, available in abundance. When observed from above, the trout appeared drab and dark, blending with the rocky bottom of the creek, attempting to elude possible predators such as myself. However, one glimpse of the trout’s flanks revealed a dazzling array of colors. The browns painted themselves with yellow borrowed from the sun, adorned with spots resembling red-hot campfire coals ringed with black and gray. The rainbows adorned themselves in mixtures of deep pinks, greens, and silvers, with the metallic sheen of polished steel. Having caught trout in excess of 18”, I considered my front yard a secret blue ribbon trout haven, perhaps a rival to the famed Green River, yet known only to me. In addition to the prolific aquatic life, the stream and its surrounding vegetation sheltered an array of animal life: snakes, skunks, foxes, muskrats, as well as an array of birds such as robins, meadowlarks, yellow finches, red-winged blackbirds, mallards, great blue herons, pheasants, quails, and doves. Even the occasional mule deer made a temporary home in the protection of my section of stream.
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In the creek’s ribbon on life, I learned of systems. I saw life prolific and varied, pulsating in splendid array. I saw death and the agents of decomposition such as mushrooms and lichens. I observed predators and prey, the hunters and the hunted. I found that I could not kill water snakes without causing a population explosion in boxelder bugs; I could not kill songbirds without destroying the river’s song and soul. I followed patterns of stream erosion and deposition. What were islands within the river became connected to the shore, sand ‘beaches’ were washed away and others deposited. I watched the effects of seasonal cycles, rushing spring runoff, and the stream covered in a blanket of ice. Being dismayed at my own random tramping of vegetation caused my time spent in the stream, I created a system of trails, complete with trail maps and trail signs, efficiently transporting any potential visitors from our property line on the east, to that on the west or vice versa. I decidedly proclaimed our land a wildlife sanctuary allowed no hunting or damage to wildlife habitat, although my grandfather’s cows occasionally found their way into my section, lazily loafing, feeding on the abundance of succulent plant life while leaving deep post-hole prints in the muddy banks, as well as giant green cow pies. In an attempt to maintain my blue ribbon trout fishery, I instituted a strict self-regulated catch-andrelease ethic, and labored to create rock dams in an effort to improve trout habitat. The Ashley Central Canal became both a playground and a laboratory. The narrow strip of wildness diving vast acres of alfalfa became a fertile field of stimulation and learning, endowing me with curiosity, wonder, respect, and a desire to protect wild places.
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Neil Evernden’s Natural Alien describes the self as more than merely the organs and tissues comprising the body.
To Evernden, the self
incorporates a “field of care;” people and places inextricably connected to the individual. Thus, if a part of the field of self is damaged or destroyed, that destruction literally affects the well being of the individual. I was profoundly infused with the river. My body was made of the water of the river, fruits and vegetables, as well as meats raised on its banks. The river was my solace as I sat on its damp margins shaded by wise trees and surrounded by delicate white flowers. I constructed primitive dwellings from its wood by day, and lied with my back caressed by cool grass, counting stars between branches by night, taking deep draughts of its oxygen and resting within the sounds of its flow over cobbles. Upon leaving home, I found sleep difficult without the sound of rushing waters. Even now, when the night is deep, and work and light, loves ones and strangers have faded, I sit alone in the darkness. I still hear those waters. Note: Following a government subsidized program in the mid 1990’s encouraging farmers to switch from flood to more efficient sprinkler irrigation, as well as successive years of drought, in the year 2000 the Ashley Central Canal went dry for the first time in its near 100 year existence. I visited the canal in 2001 and found that all aquatic life was gone. Substantial rainfall in 2005 has resumed its flow, yet the current condition and future of the life surrounding the Ashley Central Canal is unknown.
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II. Desert of the Present The tyrant sun beats mercilessly from above—inescapable. The cliffs loom like a council of sages standing shoulder to shoulder to shoulder—whose ancient piercing gaze leaves no stone unturned, no shadow unpenetrated. The desert if the cruelest place—mixing memory and desire. The city kept me warm, with traffic din and urbanglow. I am a Vernalite, a true Utahan. The desert pierces, breaks down and reveals. What was occult, hidden deep within the recesses of the heart opens and allows all to see. Time matters little here, for the desert’s time is not measured in minutes but millennia—the span of a single life a mere shadow of an instant. Yet through forces primeval I am and sing my song. Born in a basin swept smooth by the wanderings of a river—a river made strong my dragging its ancient burden of cobbles to the sea. Born of parents who like their parents and their parents the same were drawn to the shadow of high places—high places that gave power to strong rivers and lift men nearer to the throne of God. In the shadow of mountains I learned the natural ways—the ways of seasons, of ebb and flow, of plant and animal, of stone and water, of life and death. By humble petition to the mountain gods—of air and water life and stone (perhaps I am a pagan a heart) I approach the lofty fields and become a student of the earth. Tamarack, Fish, Burnt Fork, Marsh, Ashley—names given to places which served as vivid memories, buoys in a sea of glass and metal, of
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squares and papers. I received fish from the waters. Cutthroat, Rainbow, and if not recognized simply “natives.” “Today is the 4th of July and this fish is colored like fireworks, is this a 4th of July fish?” “Yes son, it is a 4th of July fish—isn’t it wonderful?” In the shadow of mountains I received blessings by the hands of my father; to be healthy and strong, to act and not simply to be acted upon, to be as a lion, proud and bold and not as a mouse, timid and fearful. In the shadow of mountains I learned respect for animals, to not kill without reason, and to pray for the spirits of the animals I killed for life giving sustenance; to walk lightly and swiftly—leaving no trace of my presence, and to clear the traces left by thoughtless ‘others.’ I have returned to my classrooms over the course of years. I see the living descendants of the animals I saw as a child: moose, chipmunk, camp robber, and cutthroat trout. I see the places still pure and free, old pine forests, dark and full of life and secrets, and open meadows with plants spread out to embrace the life giving sun. These places give power to strong rivers, undefiled by unholy hands. As my father before, I stand on a towering peak, cold wind stinging my eyes and a moose antler held high above my head. I shout a prayer to the four winds, grateful for a safe journey and petitioning them to keep these places safe from the unhallowed hands of greed—of ignorance and selfishness. As time passes I visit other classrooms, near and distant, familiar and strange. As I listen to the teachings of air, of stone, of plant and animal, the lessons learned in the shadow of mountains go with me, for I learn that all place is one place. To defile another is to defile myself—to defile a place is to defile myself.
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In the shadow of cities I encounter other classrooms. In a forest of metal and glass I find new prophets and new lessons. “Trust only in man, for we know all—as for others and place, disregard them for only to thine own self must ye be true.” “Kill and destroy for gain, it is of no consequence—your desires are your only masters.” I gaze over the plains of man, the earth suffocated in hot tar, the air stained by sulfurous smoke, and everywhere the sings of greed and selfishness. I hide in a cement hole devoid of light and scurry back and forth, hoarding and storing when, as a stealthy snake twisting and constricting my heart I feel enveloped in a world of clocks and locks, of speed and greed. The earth, her eyes blackened, her hair shorn, her breasts dry, and her knees bloodied and I am overcome Yet the desert whispers, and the desert invites Come, renew, revive And planes crash and teeth gnash, and I feel the lash! And Come, renew, revive And I go And I feel no pain. The ancient sages gather, red and towering shoulder to shoulder to shoulder. All the class is gathered—lizard, raven, and sky with glowing sun above. The erosional forces of wind, rain, and time begin to wear down the weight in my mind and heart. I feel the desert beginning to wear down all resistance as the gaze of towering red sages pierce my
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heart. Kindred connections are found and visions fill my mind. “The desert reveals all” I am told. I doubt—for I am taught to doubt. Time moves like a stream, often quickly over shallow ripples, yet at times slowly in deep, enchanting pools. I discover that the desert, formed by ancient seas, by wind and waves, forces lifting and wearing away—and time, is endowed with mystical qualities unfathomable to those unprepared or unwilling to plumb its depths—to feel and experience. The images and sensations of the desert flood my senses: cool breezes, rustling cottonwood leaves, crickets slowly chirping, clear sky, warm swellings of the heart, rhythmic pulsations of footsteps, deep dark places, deep draughts of calm, soft milk touch brushing rough stone as dust falls to the earth. All is revealed Scales fall from my eyes as the teachings of greed melt from my heart like snow crystals before the noonday sun. New courage shines forth from within me like pre-dawn light. I remember the blessings and prayers of the four winds. I remember the fish given me, and the desire of my father for me to take upon myself the powers of the lion, with courage to boldly move forward. Palms are pressed together and promises made. I remember the lessons taught me in the shadow of mountains, of love and respect and of listening to the land. And I am a lion.
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The Coyote’s Talent Paul Wilson
Part I: The Desert “Before I met Terry I was just going to be a normal person.” These are the words of Brooke Williams, husband of writer and activist Terry Tempest Williams, but if you substituted the name Terry for the name Shea, they could have easily been my own. Of course I realize I’m taking his comment out of context—the larger picture of Brooke and Terry’s companionship—and besides, regardless of what Brooke was going to do, who knows what he would have done without Terry, or what Terry would have done without Brooke? These questions have no answers. Still, the words resonated with me because I also have a woman who represents a fork in the road, someone who has made it thankfully impossible for me to be a normal person, and yet strangely enough, has helped me to be normal in an abnormal culture. If I begin this natural autobiography with
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Shea, it’s not because nothing led up to the point of our beginning, but because it represents the beginning of two people trying to find a sense of place together, and because at this point I can’t discuss the land or ecology without reference to my greatest teacher and partner in discovery. I have told this story many times—in fact, I told it on our wedding day—but I’ll tell it again. The first time I met Shea Pickelner, she was the student manager of the Sunday Soup Kitchen at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. One day a week she got in a big van, drove around the city picking up discarded food from grocery stores, and returned to the college chapel to help make food for 150 to 200 homeless and hungry people. But I didn’t know these details yet; I just wanted to volunteer, and saw a young, slightly short, olive-skinned woman with a buzz haircut arguing with some of the other volunteers. They wanted to use paper plates: the weather was nice, we were going to eat outside—why not make it easy on ourselves and skip the dishes we would have to do if we used glass plates and metal utensils? Shea said no, that it would be a waste of paper. She eventually went inside and reemerged, carrying a huge stack of glass plates that I would swear reached higher than her head. The sight was so funny, and her attitude so puckishly determined that I knew the discussion was over. She had charmed us into following her path. I have not gotten over this initial charm. A few months later, we were sleeping in the same bed. That year, I spent nearly every Sunday driving the van with Shea, doing mountains of dishes, and laughing with friends as Deep Purple and Michael Jackson blared from the record player in the converted dining room (this was a very loud, unorthodox soup kitchen). It became my church.
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Whenever anyone asked Shea where she was from, she would automatically say, “Utah—the best state out of all 50.” She had grown up culturally, if not religiously, Jewish in a predominantly Mormon city, but where some other non-Mormons often spent their energy resenting their exclusion from what people call euphemistically “the dominant culture,” Shea found friends in her Jewish youth group and fell in love with the desert of Southern Utah. For her it was a place of healing and renewal. Initiated through yearly river trips in beautiful canyons, she found a place for herself at Teton Science School, where she studied ecology and science in a wild environment. By the time I met her, she had flowered into a full-fledged activist. She had lived in a camp at Cove Mallard in Idaho, where she fought against logging. She had spent months camping outside Arches National Park, tabling for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance on behalf of wildness. When I met her, she had recently spent a formative period in San Luis, Colorado, where she lived for a year in beat up trailers, dug ditches with Chicano ranchers, and was arrested after chaining herself to a gate to block loggers from clear-cutting Culebra Peak, a 14,000 foot mountain controlled by Zachary Taylor, the direct descendant of our 12th president, who as a general orchestrated the 1848 war that confiscated Colorado from Mexico in the first place. She tried to stop them, but she didn’t succeed. Needless to say, I was impressed and intimidated. Just as this woman loved Culebra Peak and the homeless people who came into the shelter, she loved me. She loved me for my easy-going personality. Even in our difficult periods, we have almost always been great friends who could laugh with each other. She loved me for my intelligence, my passion for the arts and music, my sense of humor. And to a great extent we shared the same values. But although I supported many of her political ideas, I didn’t entirely
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understand the methods she used. I don’t feel that I need to apologize for my ignorance now; I was being introduced to some very different ideas that challenged what I had thought my path would be. For one thing, although I thought of myself as an environmentalist, I hadn’t yet listened to the land enough to understand its importance. And I associated drastic action with a failure to see the complexity of the issue. I worried that Shea was a fundamentalist. Mostly, though, I wanted to understand her, but I was afraid to jump into her world. After we graduated from college, we went through a drifting time — through Europe and finally to Salt Lake City, wanting to be together, but uncertain about the direction we should take. It was our most difficult time. At this point a job opened up with a group connected to the Bijou Community in Colorado Springs — a group that both of us knew well. Inspired by Gandhi, as well as by Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement and the liberation theology of the 1960s, around 1970 a group of outsiders from various backgrounds came together to resist the Vietnam War, to battle poverty, and to create community. They eventually bought the Bijou House, a hospitality house for people off the street, and organized the Marian House, Colorado Springs’ largest soup kitchen. I had taken a college class taught by one of the community’s founders, a former priest named Steve Handen, so I knew a lot about the place. The community revolved around a core group: a few Mennonites committed to simple living, including “Bicycle Peter” from Saskatchewan who made bicycles out of recycled parts and gave them away for free, several cantankerous nuns (at least one of them smoked pot occasionally; we used to watch “The West Wing” at her house), Steve’s wife Mary Lynn who was the true backbone of the community, a curmudgeony old man named Phil with a long beard and PhD. In Spanish literature, and his
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sister Donna, a clinical psychologist. They had bought up many of the properties immediately surrounding the Bijou House, most of which they rented out to refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala. Nestled among the properties were gardens, a chicken coop, and a study hall for the kids in the neighborhood to do their homework in. Shea and I both applied for the job, and Americorps VISTA position with a related group (how the government got roped into paying for this job I’ll never understand), and Shea was hired, but we both moved back to Colorado Springs and each took a 24 hour shift at the hospitality house answering phones, making dinner, playing cards, and holding the 15 inhabitants of the house—the vast majority of them drug addicts, alcoholics and mentally ill—to the agreements they had made in order to live there. It’s a funny thing to try to explain the Bijou Community to people, although having grown up a liberal Mormon outside of Utah I got used to having to explain myself to people. Bijou means “jewel,” and it sees itself as a refuge in the city, an anarchist village committed to direct social change, a flower of 1960s idealism that avoided naval-gazing selfabsorption and instead embraced voluntary poverty and the frustrations and joys of community life. Mormon by culture, I understand the doubleedged sword of community—the joy of working together, of helping new neighbors carry boxes from the moving van, but also the frustration of abiding by guidelines. While the Mormon community tends toward hierarchy, however, the Bijou Community functioned through consensus, which meant that everyone had a voice. It also meant endless meetings. If you want everyone to have a voice, it means you have to listen to everybody’s voice, even when you don’t want to. Still, the uniqueness of Bijou is not what makes it difficult to talk about. It’s misleading for me to say, “I worked at a homeless shelter for two years,” because it obscures the
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fact that in reality Shea and I were both homeless looking for direction. We needed Bijou’s hospitality as much as the mentally ill, the drug addicted. And this, in a way, is the point of Bijou: that we are all homeless without each other, that our independence is an illusion. We all need each other interdependently. On one of my favorite albums, singer Greg Brown says, “Intentional community is a bunch of baloney. You have to need each other.” He’s absolutely right, but at the Bijou Community, people did need each other. As a result, some of my favorite memories come from this period: spending all day incredulously dealing with what seemed like 17,000 boxes of strawberries that had been thrown out from the grocery store, watching the Patriots win the Super Bowl alongside a Mormon heroin addict from Boston, listening to Phil rhapsodize on Don Quixote. It became a place of growth, challenge, and mysterious discovery. Among my discoveries was a newfound connection to the land I lived on. Like most of the Bijou members, Shea and I got around on bikes made by “Bicycle Peter.” Peter had been on several long bike rides – legend had it that he rode from El Paso to Colorado Springs in one day but had to drink his own urine to avoid dehydration – and when Shea found out that her sister was going to get married, she got it into her head that we should bike from Colorado Springs to Salt Lake City for the wedding. If I haven’t already conveyed this clearly, Shea is prone to wild flights of the imagination. It’s hard to tell sometimes when she’s serious about an idea and when she’s just having fun. The plan to write a screenplay for a movie about the suffragette movement only got so far before someone else made a movie that virtually stole our storyline. And I’m still not sure whether she’s serious about merging our last names together to form “Wickelson.” In any case, I thought this one might blow over like some of the others. It didn’t. She said that she was going to bike to the wedding
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no matter what I did. I couldn’t tell her to go alone, could I? Still trying to gauge her level of seriousness, I began to train with her. I had a job cooking at an Italian restaurant downtown, so I would work on my feet for eight hours, and then come home to go on a long bike ride with Shea up into North Cheyenne Canyon or Garden of the Gods. These places had always been beautiful to me, but we had traveled to them in cars. Now we moved under our own power. North Cheyenne Canyon, especially, with its rolling river, its aspens, and its bridges, pressed its way into my soul as no place ever had. Even when I ached from a hectic day at the restaurant, when I smelled like the onions I had been chopping, I pushed my pedals uphill to reach the mountain heights outside my door. Finally, in order to avoid Interstate 25, we started our trip from Empire, a town outside Denver that launches Highway 40 into the mountains. It was still a five-hundred-mile journey. Pushing up mountain passes to cross the continental divide three times, we eventually descended into the desert. Before the trip, when we had studied the map, we had worried about the mountain climbs. That was dumb. Mountains equal cool air, lush green views, and long slow uphills followed by fast, satisfying downhills. We had a great time in the mountains. Deserts are a different story. It was the month of July, and a dry hot year plagued by fire. We rode by huge patches of charred hillside, the temperature climbing above a hundred degrees. Western Colorado became maddening; we would climb one hill, only to see three or four more in the distance. We climbed up and rode down, with no elevation gain. Whenever we saw a body of water, we would joyfully jump into it with all our clothes on, hop on our bikes, and find ourselves blown dry in ten minutes by the hot air. We were literally biking through a dryer. Despite our almost continual intake of water (and the constant peeing that goes with it) Shea got a serious dehydration headache, and we
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had to stop for her to recover. We started to get up as early as possible to beat the sun, and would need to stop riding during the mid-day heat, when we became vegetative and curled up in a dark restaurant, under the shade of a tree, or in a small-town library. I still respectfully hate Duchesne, Utah, where we couldn’t escape the heat. We ended up watching Looney Tunes in a hotel room with no AC while trading off taking showers with the water knob as cold as it would go. Paradoxically, however, through the searing heat of this dusty inferno, I not only began to sense a profound and humbling respect for the desert’s power, but I began to love it. I loved the feel of the sun on my face, the crumbling, dusty dirt under my feet. I noticed the roadkill along the highway—there was a lot of it—and began to think about the animals that lived in such an environment. I began to feel my body more clearly than I had ever felt it: my sore butt from hours of sitting, my legs, my throat. And there were moments of intense beauty and release: the feeling of tiny fish nibbling at my feet in the Green River near Vernal, the ecstatic downhill outside Dinosaur National Monument with its fields of yellow sunflowers, the smell of sage. Even as I struggled, I wanted to be covered in dust. I wanted to kiss it. I had been transformed. Shea and I became different people temporarily fused together through common experience under the sun. Everything that has happened to us in the years since has grown out of that desert encounter. Entranced by the idea of growing food to offer as gifts, we left Bijou to manage the market garden of an organic farm in Wisconsin. Our love for the desert and mountains, however, brought us back to the West. I wanted to go to graduate school, so we came to a place where we both had roots: Salt Lake City, Utah. We hoped to
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bring the ideas of Bijou—the joy of working together, the blurring of boundaries between urban and rural—with us to Salt Lake. I worked as an Americorps volunteer at an elementary school, where I planted gardens with kids and helped with tutoring programs, and Shea still pushes the social and political envelope as a high school science teacher. We have both had successes, but in other ways we feel something missing: a kind of spiritual grounding, a strong sense of day-to-day community. In many ways, our home is simply a house to which we return from our busy jobs. We have friends, but had not brought people together in the way we had hoped. We missed watching “West Wing” with nuns, turning the compost pile at the Bijou garden, canning tomatoes on the farm. I started a graduate program in American Studies, knowing that my original love had been for literature and the discussion of ideas, but I spent my first year mainly getting myself on the ground. Only now, with the space of reflection, can I see that I still lacked the courage to bring my ideas, the ideas I had embodied and experienced, into the classes I taught or attended. I found myself advocating social and environmental justice in an indirect way while playing the academic game: taking a middle road, analyzing this novel or that theorist, making words like “interesting,” “logical,” and “convincing” my touchstones while avoiding a confrontation with the way I truly felt. Besides, I was too busy to think about these things; I needed to deliver the goods, write the papers, and still have time for Shea. Meanwhile, I tried to ignore the empty feeling in my stomach. I was burying my talents, and my spirit suffered.
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Part II. Coyote The Navajo – or more properly the Dine’ people, since Navajo is Spanish slang for “thief” – know coyote as a trickster, a cunning and wise deceiver who plays with the expectations of others. According to Terry Tempest Williams in Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, coyote helps people realize that “nothing is as it appears.” As she writes, “Just when you believe in your own sense of place, plan on getting lost. It’s not your fault—blame it on the coyote” (24). Not only does coyote disorient visitors to the desert, and in doing so teach them the virtues Terry describes as “humility” and “vulnerability,” but his tricks indicate the lengths to which he will go in order to survive. In the West, coyotes have perservered despite the best efforts of human beings, particularly ranchers who would like to see them destroyed. As Edward Abbey writes in Desert Solitaire, “The livestock interests and their hired mercenaries from the Department of the Interior have pursued all of these animals with unremitting ferocity and astonishing cruelty for nearly a century, utilizing in the campaign of extermination everything from the gun and trap to the airplane and the most ingenious devices of chemical and biological warfare” (36). Nevertheless, despite Abbey’s lament in 1968, coyotes still populate the American West today. As naturalist David Williams points out, their survival is due to their “intelligence” and “resourcefulness.” If they cannot find their usual prey of rabbits and other small mammals, they will “eat domesticated animals, deer, pronghorns, bighorn sheep, and even grasshoppers or fruit” (Williams 94). Their versatile ability to outsmart more powerful humans feeds into their mythical role as folk heroes of trickery and escape.
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I believe that people think in terms of symbols; all of us do. We’re not particularly rational about it either. This is why a story – like Jesus’ parable of the mustard seed or Moby Dick or “Hotel Rwanda” – is so powerful and communicates more deeply than a simple statement. These stories are landscapes full of symbols. These symbols, however, depend upon a context in order to carry meaning. One couldn’t fully understand the parable of the mustard seed without grasping the nature of the tiny kernel, from which grows a hardy and powerful desert plant, or without knowing the paradox of growth in an arid environment. The coyote is a symbol that grows out of such a desert habitat. In his ability to eat a wide variety of foods and adapt to famine conditions, he blurs boundaries. As he crosses fences to steal sheep from ranches, he disrupts the established order. His role is to cause mischief and to challenge authority. In this sense, he is related to the fool figure in Shakespeare. In King Lear, the fool is the only character who stands up to the king by telling him the truth. Sometimes the fool teaches through excess, by making people uncomfortable in an almost violent, wrenching, or terrifying way. In Twelfth Night, the fool torments the priggish and arrogant Malvolio by chaining him up like a dog and dumping food on his head. We feel pity for him even as we laugh nervously at his unfortunate predicament. Despite our discomfort, Malvolio needs the fool to teach him the lesson of humility. The fool, or the trickster, makes us question our values. By challenging boundaries, sometimes through excess, she or he creates a space in which transformation can occur. During the Ecology of Residency class taught by Terry Tempest Williams, I sense the coyote’s presence all around me. It was in the laugh behind
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Terry’s voice, and in the way she subtly toyed with the boundaries between Mormon and shaman, between feminine and masculine, soft and hard. It was in the way women like community organizer Laura Kamala and artist Vijali Hamilton, who originally seemed “airy fairy” and new agey, revealed themselves as powerful and solidly grounded women. It was in the presence of Ken Sleight, the inspiration for the prank-pulling Seldom Seen Smith in Edward Abbey’s wild and human novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. I heard a lonely coyote howl behind his casual substitution of “Lake Foul” for Lake Powell, and in his description of how his horse simply happened to stroll in front of a BLM bulldozer during a protest against the destruction of wildness. Mingled with his western gentlemanliness is a sly grin and an unmistakable fierceness. I saw the trickster raging in artist Adele Alsop, who echoed the metaphorical violence of Twelfth Night in her insistence on the shamanic importance of the dismemberment and reassembly of identity, of how the rearrangement of boundaries creates new contexts that allow us to see in new ways. Perhaps most of all, I felt in the resonating presence of that late coyote lover Edward Abbey, whose spirit haunts the Utah desert. As Abbey wrote in a typical move that frustrates readers’ expectations, “The sheepmen complain, it is true, that the coyote eats some of their lambs. This is true but do they eat enough? I mean, enough to keep the coyotes sleek, healthy and well-fed. That is my concern” (35). I tell these trickster’s stories because they have led me to experience humility, vulnerability, and frustration, but also joy, growth , and the sense that the world is surprising, that anything can happen in it, even the most unexpected transformations of spirit. A toad might lie hidden underground in suspended animation for months until it hears the sound of rain above it. A calm canyon can become a raging flash flood in seconds. So where
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do I fit in here? In light of all these coyotes, fools, tricksters, and shamans, what can I do to confront the ecological, moral, and spiritual questions that we all face? If, as Adele Alsop says, “the solution is creativity,” and “the needed solution is the creative solution,” where can I find the creativity within myself? Where can I find the courage to face down the forces of authority that seem to have such orderly plans for transforming the world into what Greg Brown calls “one bland place,” especially since blandness is only a corollary to further problems: global terrorism, sweatshops, poverty, spiritual malaise, pesticides, and the destruction of the very contexts that make us human? This is an alarming and difficult task. Ken Sleight, in looking back on The Monkey Wrench Gang, insisted that the book is not about destruction, but about restoration, and that the monkey wrench did not represent violence, but our gifts and talents. “We all have our monkey wrench,” he said. Some might view such a statement as a softened, more palatable approach to ethical and environmental problems, a kind of Monkey Wrench lite for the new millennium. Such people would be profoundly mistaken. More exactly, they would be the victims of a sly coyote’s tricks. When the Jack Mormon Sleight invokes the question of talents, he alludes to one of the most haunting and in my mind, terrifying passages in the New Testament: Jesus’ parable of the talents. In this story, from Matthew’s Chapter Five, Jesus describes an employer who gives a kind of coin called talents to three of his employees for safekeeping. To one man he gives five talents, to another two, and to a third man one. The first man puts his talents to work and makes five more talents for a total of ten. The second man also doubles his talents to make four. The third man buries his talent in the ground. When the employer returns, he speaks to each man. He commends the first two, makes them “rulers over many things,” and beckons them into “joy.” The
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third man, however, says, “I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth.” The employer then takes away this man’s single talent and gives it to the man who has ten, ultimately sending the “slothful” servant into “darkness.” This parable is as harsh as a dry desert plain, as darkly revelatory as a Flannery O’Connor story. It’s not nice at all, and abrupt in its lack of forgiveness. The resonating message: if we bury gifts that should be offered to the world, we bury ourselves. We carry the shovel and dig the dirt. Bob Dylan puts the same idea another way: “If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.” No excuse will work. Fear of disagreeing with those in power, fear of looking silly, or pious, or unreasonable; fear of the smirks of those who think they have found certainty. The coyote tells us that we really don’t know anything, that the world will surprise us. He offers his gifts for others to see, to curse at, and ultimately to respect. Last Thursday night I ran further than I have run in a long time. I ran all the way down into the abyss of the canyon to the Colorado River. Looking for an opening in the fence, I accidentally stepped on something at the side of the highway: a dead rabbit. When I realized what it was, I jumped away. There on the ground was a huge feather—probably from a goose, but possibly from an eagle. I picked it up, crawled through the fence, and walked across the field toward the bank. I knew I shouldn’t trample off the trail because I had a difficult time staying off the cryptobiotic soil, but I had no other way to get to the river. Looking down at my feet, I realized that I could not see what might be crawling in the tall grass. I was walking into the unknown. I thought about snakes, that I might step on one as easily as I had stepped on the rabbit corpse. When I got to the river I sat down next to a rock covered in spiders and took off my shoes. Then I took off the rest of my clothes and walked into the water naked. It was cloudy and the water was cold. I counted to three and dunked my entire body into
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the fast-moving water. I immersed myself two more times. Then I spoke to God: “Dear Heavenly Father, I didn’t realize you weren’t alone up there. I assume you won’t mind if I talk to the others too.” God laughed. When I got back to my room, I still felt like I was being born.
…
Epilogue Terry almost certainly doesn’t remember this, but in October of 2001, one month after the attacks on the Twin Towers, she conducted a reading at a bookstore in Colorado Springs. I couldn’t attend because I was singing in a choir concert, but Shea wanted to hear a voice from Utah. She bought me a copy of Red, and Terry signed it this way: 11 Oct. 01 For you Paul In peace In wildness Blessings on your voice— Terry Tempest Williams I believe that when she wrote “blessings on your voice,” she must have been referring to my singing. Now, here in the red rock desert, among an extraordinary group of people (extraordinary not because they are better than other people but because they have been given the space to be), I have listened to the song of the desert, and to the song of beautiful people digging into the dust and mud of their hearts. In listening, and finally in what Terry calls the transformative alchemy of writing, I have found moments of peace. I have marveled at the wildness of the coyote and at the lightning storm that is the human soul. I have discovered that spirit is a substance, like food, and that to bring it into the open—through work, through art, through teaching—is a great thing. This isn’t the end of fear,
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because fear is an essential part of the process. Still, I have discovered talents I didn’t know I had. I have found a voice inside myself that I didn’t know existed. This voice is the voice of a leader: a leader with hairy paws and a tail. Thanks, Terry, for screwing around in the desert with us for a while. The game is afoot. Anyone who wants to cause trouble with me, it’s an open invitation.
Works Cited Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire. New York: Avon Books, 1968. Abbey, Edward. The Monkey Wrench Gang. New York: Avon Books, 1975. Williams, David. A Naturalist’s Guide to Canyon Country. Guilford, Connecticut: Globe Pequot Press, 2000. Williams, Terry Tempest. Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert. New York: Random House, 2001.
Nicholas Daniels, Brandon Hol lingshead, Terry Tempest William s Allison Lisk, Brittney Carman, Paul Wilson Laura Asman, Cecily Ellis, Kam i Day, Bryan Wallis, Patrick Mab ey
special thanks The College of Humanities at the University of Utah University of Utah Printing Services Lindsey Hornkohl, Illustrator