Tag: rain

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On Ancestors, Asparagus, Saints and Independence Rock

Back in my mid-to-late twenties I worked at a feedyard in southern Arizona. Every late winter/early spring, cattle buyers descended from heaven with boxes and boxes of asparagus bartered fresh out of the fields of the Imperial Valley of California. Gifts to us, the working stiffs trapped with a gazillion flies, and miles and miles of cow shit.

Betty and I were talking about that last night, fresh asparagus and those yahoo cattle buyers. I got to yarning about seemingly random thoughts that jutted up into the bottom of my skull. The month after the fresh asparagus arrived, the men who delivered hay from the Wellton-Mohawk Valley just east of Yuma hauled in boxes and boxes of fresh cantaloupe. We owned so much cantaloupe we couldn’t give it away.

I remarked to Betty how I used to take half a case to my father. He relished cantaloupe and would cut one in half and cram each natural bowl with vanilla ice cream. Betty remarked that we should buy a fresh cantaloupe and fill each half with vanilla ice cream in memory of him, and then eat it.

I remarked that, yeah, maybe we should and right now might be a good time because his birthday was somewhere around the 17th of March. She said, “St. Patrick’s Day?” Immediately I knew that wasn’t right because on St. Patrick’s Day, for most of my adult years while my father was alive, I stayed away from him because I usually spent a goodly amount of time at the El Rancho Tavern or Quick Draw’s Saloon or the Western Bar drinking glass after glass of green beer. So if I remember a multitude of cantaloupe and vanilla ice cream birthday bashes, the date must have been other than March 17th.

I told Betty that it couldn’t be the 17th, so I went to look it up and while there discovered the name of one of my mother’s ancestors who was born in England: Abidnigo Clifford (and I don’t know what led me to spend time looking at that), who had a son, Henry Clifford, also born in England, Gloucester to be more exact, where he and his wife Ann (nee Clayfield) begat daughter Mary near Nailsworth, south of Gloucester, and then they immigrated to America. In Utah, Mary Clifford married Merlin Plumb who begat William Lafayette Plumb who married Mary Elsie Riggs who begat Ruth Plumb who married Dale Walter Rodgers who begat me.

In 2009 Betty and I traveled to a Khe Sanh Veterans’ reunion in Denver, Colorado. We drove from Boise and one of the travel nights we spent in Rawlins, Wyoming. After getting settled in at our digs, we drove north towards Independence Rock. Independence Rock was so named because if you were traveling by covered wagon or hand cart west on the Oregon, Mormon or California Trails, you wanted to be at Independence Rock by the Fourth of July or you were headed for weather problems later in the journey.

Independence Rock is a rounded hump that, incidentally, reminds me of the top of my father’s head. He was mostly bald in his later days, and that big rounded-off landmark was reminiscent of Dale Walter’s pate. Maybe at this point in my life I have become sentimental about Dale. We didn’t get along well when I was young. He was mean when he was young, as was his father, and his father’s father, as was I. By the time my father got over being mean, it was late and I was busy and he died.

Maybe I was thinking of his shiny pate as I stood out there in that little valley bounded by humps and bumps of old mountains, not young mountains like Colorado, and Idaho and Utah, or for that matter, some of the ranges in Wyoming. Lightning cracked and a west wind whipped the sage. Mosquitoes attacked my arms and legs. Summer twilight in the north country lasts a long time and we’d arrived at Independence Rock at twilight’s commencement. I stood out on a little bridge that spans the main part of the Oregon, Mormon and California Trails. The literature said you could still see the wagon tracks in parts of the trail and I looked but didn’t see any. Once or twice lightning stabbed close and the thunder rattled off the old mountains and boomed through my bones.

I stood there imagining Henry Clifford and his daughter Mary Clifford in a wagon passing that way towards Salt Lake City sometime in the mid 1850s. They were Mormon folk at that time and would have traveled with lots of other Mormon folk most likely mustered up at Council Bluffs, Iowa for the trip west. I imagined them singing the words from an old Mormon hymn, “Come, come ye saints, no toil or labor fear…”

I imagined all the sour weather, all the toil of just making sure you had something to eat. Out there in that sagebrush plain, what would you burn for cooking fires, and how would you make a new axle for the wagon if the old one broke? How did you fix wheels and keep the supply of water so that everyone had enough for their needs? What about Sioux and Shoshone and Cheyenne warriors? How did you keep the horses, the cattle, the hogs from wandering off? What about wolves? Grizzly bear? What about smallpox and yellow fever?

Lightning cracked and I jumped and it made me laugh at myself for being afraid of the outdoors, but then I thought, I can get in my car, go to a room, sleep out of the rain and the wind. My food comes from the grocery store. There is plenty of that, or so I assume. Not so, 150 years ago on the Mormon Trail.

Looking down the Mormon Trail I thought about all those relatives of mine who made that harsh journey that they thought would lead them to the promised land. I thought about my maternal grandmother, Mary Elsie Riggs, who journeyed from Zion’s Canyon to Mesa , Arizona in a covered wagon in 1882. That lead me to thoughts of my mother and how sometimes I miss her even though she drove me up the wall a lot of the time.

Out there at Independence Rock, tears started to gather at the corners of my eyes. I hate that. I fought it. It didn’t make sense. History is something you cannot control. Neither is the future. Maybe the promised land is whatever stands in front of you right now. Maybe you can control the personal right-now and I did. I stopped that tearing up. As I walked back to the car I mused on my emotions and how my father used to tell me if I needed something to cry about, he’d give it to me.

Nevertheless, on March 13th next, Betty and I are going to buy a cantaloupe and cut it in half and stuff each half full of really good vanilla ice cream.

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Bah Humbug and All Hallows Even

It’s Halloween time around our neighborhood and as you drive down the streets the colors of the aspen and the maples play a nature-coordinated decorative tune with the orange of the pumpkins, real and fake, whose black eyes match the colors of the plastic witches dangling from tree branches and the black of their flimsy, battered capes plays with the gray plastic RIP headstones that appear to rear out of frost-killed yards, and the gravestones’ gray hints enhance the white filaments of faux gossamer dotted with fake black widow spiders.

The air has turned crisp and sharp and hints at direr moments to come like wind and snow and ice. On FaceBook I read “Happy Halloween,” and the next three days, all over town, the church parking lots will be filled with cars and “trunk parties” so that the kiddies don’t stand the chance of being poisoned or molested or…Happy Halloween everybody.

Happy Halloween? The origins of Halloween are somewhat obscure but one of the most prominently espoused origins is that it is Celtic in nature and marks the time between summer and winter, a line in the sand so to speak, between bounty and famine, life and death…and as such, the lines between the world we live in and the world of spirits becomes blurred, where intelligences can go back and forth between what is and what has been but is supposedly dead. Is that something to be happy about?

Originally known as All Hallows Even, the date has become a good one for libation, drunkenness, and spending lots of money which I think is responsible for a lot of the growth in popularity for the day…making money…candy, costumes, stuff to hang around the yard, parties and the concomitant cookies, cupcakes, candied corn and booze.

And yes there has been a massive explosion in the date’s popularity, with the hype often reminding me of the days of my youth when the run-up to Christmas created a fever pitch in us kids. Christmas season has moved on to begin three months early, and now Halloween feels to me like Christmas did when I was a kid.

I may be guilty of being a Halloween humbug because I don’t delight in the thought of it. I often recall my days as a kid when a bar of soap to write on windows of houses and cars was more in line with what we did instead of trick or treating. Marking your territory, so to speak, and when getting older, stealing outhouses from the farmsteads where they were still employed and hauling them down to the high school and putting them up on some porch or portico or piazza for everyone to see. I delighted in that. Most people laughed, or knowingly smiled back then about our shenanigans, all except the farmers who grumbled about lost privies. Now the law would turn their dour jaws on us and investigate.

Oh, back in my day we charcoaled our faces, put on baggy outfits and ostensibly went trick or treating, but we were more intent on mayhem and things that pointed to mischief and not good…won’t give me a treat? I’ll give you a trick.

But now it’s about keeping everyone good, which, in our efforts to get accomplished, seems to fail, as the percentage of hell raisers and mayhem creators remains the same, and always will. But we sure can help those retailers cash in on some miniature boxes of Milk Duds and Whoppers.

As for Betty and I, we will be out on the town, the lights of our house turned off, no gossamer in our aspen or dogwood, nor bowls of candy to rot the teeth of little children. Maybe a movie…maybe two. And just maybe a big box of Whoppers or Milk Duds.

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Leaf Peeping

I am a desert rat and have since childhood mouthed dialogue about the beauty of the mountains vis à vis the desert. The mountains generally have no sand and wind that drives the sand and pits the paint job on your new Mercedes Benz, no short-legged plants, no spiny cacti, but trooping phalanxes of spruce and fir and pine. But here I am after a life lived and I’m still in the desert. The mountains are close, but I still hover around the roots of the big sage, the bitterbrush, the winter fat.

Once it was mesquite and palo verde and saguaro and Indian wheat. The names have changed but the milieu remains the same. Relatively dry, relatively warm. Big open vistas, a certain beauty to the landscape, even if it is harsh, or its ambiance is harsh.

Yet the harsh nature of the desertscape is no more dangerous than what one encounters in the pine-clad high country to the north of Boise, Idaho, where we live. I’d say fifty below is harsh even if it inhabits the pristine beauty of a winterland of ice crystals and frozen mist and miles and miles of spear-point spruce sheathed in an armor of ice. Maybe that is why I stick to the lower extremities of earth.

Regardless of my obvious preference for desert climes, for six years I lived in the high mountains of southern New Mexico and the legacy it left me, among other things, was a love for the turning of the leaves. Once I read an essay in The New Yorker Magazine by Stephen King about “leaf peepers.” When I saw the title I was curious about leaf peepers and what kind of insect they might be that sat on leaves and peeped their lives away in search of sex, breeding and compliance with the ultimate command to all life on earth: survive. When King described the leaf peepers, I was surprised to find out they are the people who come to Maine to watch the colors of the maple trees change from green to red and gold. As I read that article, I knew right then that at heart, I was a leaf peeper. I admit it. I am a tourist of foliage, a consumer of ripe reds, and orange tones that look like phosphorescent tints, and rusty hues that are redolent with memories of old Caterpillar engines left out in the rain for ages.

Two weekends ago, Betty and I, along with friends, ventured to Sun Valley, Idaho for a number of reasons, one being to take part in leaf peeping. We arrived on a Thursday evening and were disappointed with the color, but it was spitting a mixture of rain and snow and there was snow in the high country and I figured as soon as it cleared off, the frost would arrive and then the color change would accelerate.

On a Saturday morning that broke clear and fresh, we pulled out before sunrise and headed north out of the Wood River Valley, over Galena Summit and down into the Stanley Basin. As we broke over the summit, the Sawtooth Mountains on the west of the basin and the Boulder-White Clouds on the east reared up with their high shoulders, their peaks covered with fresh snow. The sunlight was just breaching the dawn and lighted up the peaks of the Sawtooths snaking from south to north. Sawtooth is an apt name for the peaks that remind one of the saws lumberjacks used to employ to knock down the big trees, long before chain saws showed up. Saws with large, sharp teeth that could bite into live wood, or flesh.

Fog and mist and nary a hint of air pollution hung in the air. Pronghorns grazed in the pastures of cow and sheep outfits with names like Busterback Ranch and Stanley Basin Ranch and Sawtooth Mountain Ranch.

I love aspen and learned it I suppose from the huge groves that cape the cold sides of the Sacramento Mountains of southern New Mexico. Aspen grow in huge gangs there, and love places where the snow gets deep and stays deep into the spring. Elk and deer and black bear seem drawn, as do I, to the groves.

When autumn arrives, the trees know (do they know like we do on some epistemological level?) that they need to go into survival mode to make it through winter. The green color in the leaves vacates and leaves the underlying golds and reds behind. The sugar in the leaves gets trapped and the frost, when seared by sunlight, reacts with the sugar and the leaves take on even more brilliant hues. This is what I adore, this chemical reaction turned into art….art….art.

When I was young, I went on camping trips with the Boy Scouts up to Holly Lake in the White Mountains of Arizona. It was usually August, so the leaves had not changed by then, but I still wondered at the way the Rocky Mountain Maple leaves reminded me of Picasso-like hands and how the sunlight caught in the dimples of the aspen leaves and shimmered as they quaked in the alpine breezes. (The locals called them “quakies.”)

One summer as we loaded vehicles to head out of the high country, we discovered a porcupine climbing an aspen. Since porcupines tend to be nocturnal, I suppose it was climbing up to find a notch in the limbs to sleep the day away, or maybe it was headed for an aspen leaf breakfast. I watched with…with…with what….horror? as some of the bigger boys bombarded the creature with stones, then large rocks and big rounds of aspen we had cut down for firewood. I recall the porcupine fell to the ground and I refused to look at it as they laughed and finished it off. I walked away and got in the back seat of an old green Chevy Suburban and we drove out of the mountains, back into the Sonoran Desert.

But on this latest leaf-peeping trip of a couple of weeks ago, the violence of humanity was not so readily apparent. Nestled in the coves, the rincons, the draws of the mountains and foothills lining Stanley Basin were stands of aspen in varying degrees of leaf peeper heaven. Yellow, gold and a red tints that seemed to capture all the glitz of Times Square as they shined at us, neon-like, as we drove the road toward Stanley. And they shined something else at us, a promise…a promise of more color to come.

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Traffic

For twelve days over the last two weeks, Betty and I crisscrossed parts of northern California visiting family, old friends, new friends, birthday partying, reading poems, looking at art and working on our movie. Since we moved from the region in 2005, some things have not changed. One of the most obvious is the traffic.

During rush hours commuter cars jostle and crawl like ancient beetles thronged on a lemming-like quest. Horns honk, brakes squeak, plastic lids to coffee bought at Starbucks fly out windows and careen around like flying saucers. There are cell phones jammed up against ear lobes even though it’s against the law to jabber on those things while driving. People shoot you the finger and stick out their tongues and flap their arms like great speckled birds turned angry at intervening species who alter a migratory flight plan. Ouch, it’s California.

And it’s not just California; it’s Detroit and Denver and Phoenix, oh my, it’s definitely Phoenix, it’s D C. Even little old Boise has its moments acting like its big sisters surrounded by the claws of suburbanism, choking the roads at 7 A M and 4 P M.

But California is like a big winter freeze at those hours, every little bump and grind on the freeway causing people to slam on the brakes in fear? Shock? They gawk and brake lights rule the day the way they blare. Bright red eruptions like the hints of death and maiming that lurk beneath the tires and the hedgerows of nerium oleader that choke the roadsides.

In Sonoma County the roads are either battered like last year’s black-necked stilt nest or are under renovation in a decades late acquiescence that there are more cars than roads. All the 15 years Betty and I domiciled in Sonoma County, we railed about the inadequate roads. My northern California friends cooly reminded me that better roads, more roads, brought more people. I felt as if I was a seer lost in the wilderness as I saw the county grow and swell with folk as the roads stayed static. Like air corridors in the Pacific flyway crammed with geese and passerines, the early morning rides of forty miles often took two hours. Ditto at nightfall and of course all that rapid-fire brake light mania. The roads didn’t grow at all but the population did. Everyone looking for the cheaper, securer nest.

Between the Sierra foothills and Sacramento, four lanes wide, rarely does anyone move along in the HOV lane. Car after car after car with only one occupant. If I had to hazard a thirty-mile drive five days a week into the mouth of that monster, I think I’d find someone who wanted to ride with me. Save money, save time. But we are curious creatures , us Yanks, with our desires…no, our demands…to keep our flimsy independence in tow. As if sitting single behind the wheel of the car is the best way to manifest our independence.

But then again, don’t get me wrong, I love to drive, and will do so even in the teeth of evidence that flight or rail makes more sense. Like my fellow road warriors, don’t tell me what to do.

And driving does have its joys. Discovery, discovery, discovery. Mossy oaks on a spiny ridge, redwoods creating a cathedral over the road, a glimpse of the Pacific behind a spray of mustard colored gorse. A wild, four-wheel-drive slide down the cold side, boring through snow banks. A herd of three hundred elk, thundering across a frost-covered sage brush flat. Spires of Saguaro cacti raised to the sun in supplication. Once, back in 1985, Betty and I were on our way from Sacramento to Salt Lake. At one of the big I-80 bends between Lovelock and Winnemucca, a herd of wild horses  frolicked in the cold eye of a February noon. Black clouds hovered to the north. The herd threw a high column of dust behind that got caught in a southeaster and trailed out behind. They were colored funky, white and brown and black and kicked up their fetlocks as they ran, ran, ran across the sagebrush plain. As I watched them something inside me got up and somersaulted and for just a moment I understood some things about horse, horse and man, and their long and strangled and joyous relationship. But now I cannot articulate what I understood then.

Now back on the road to anywhere from Sacramento at 4 P M, the light rain creates an added hazard and magnifies the eruptions of the brake lights. They remind me of howitzer reports hammering a monsoon afternoon. (Nothing escapes my memories of war, and so my metaphor veers like mourning dove on the first day of hunting season.) Blare, bash, kazoom, crash. Traffic.

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Weather

Last Sunday, hoarfrost painted the tips of the sagebrush on the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Reservation for about one hundred yards on each side of Highway 95. Mist rose off the macadam in wispy breaths that wavered like ghosts from the Greek tragedies. The hoarfrost only lasted for a short space but was a chorus in the morning that sang of the sleet, scant snow and rain that smattered our windshields. Remnants of a late winter storm, wet enough to make the golden eagles on the telephone poles hunch their shoulders. The clouds obscured the Santa Rosa Mountains, whose jagged ridges usually hack up the bright blue sky of northern Nevada. Dry creeks ran muddy and the way the ripples in the water caught the wan light made the surfaces seem like scaly patterns on the sides of sunfishes.

Later in the day, the contrast between the high desert and the low coastal plain hung between Nevada and California, in my mind, like comedy and tragedy penned by Euripides  and Aristophanes. Not that I wept as if I’d just read Medea, or cackled after watching a production of Frogs. Nothing so distinct as sad versus happy, but emotions that were similarly divided and evoked by the harsh and violent beauty that surrounded us. What separates the high dry of Nevada from the low and verdant damp of California are the Sierra, which this year flaunted a mantle of deep snow, and though at this late date looked like soiled white togas, still spoke of the weather that crashed face-first into the coastal headlands and barreled across the Sacramento and San Joaquin river valleys and into the mountains. Outside Reno the snow strangling the sagebrush on the cold slopes owned mule deer and coyote trails stitched into the icy white.  The long cold Washoe valley wore a hopeful look that someday spring would march into view and sing its verdant tunes of crocus buds and passerine birds that love to sit in the tops of conifers and warble their mating messages.

Monday, a stiff breeze changed the weather in northern California, from wet to sunny and dry, back to wet. The yellow blossoms of acacia trees lit up the freeways and the colors of plum and cherry and peach tree blossoms stood out like lost Greek gods calling from a bleak wilderness. The long winter rains made the country green green green and the air clean.

And for some reason it made me laugh and yet it made me sad and I don’t know why but I swelled up inside. Maybe it was nostalgia for something lost, or an appreciation of all that verve, the yellow of mustard blossoms like a billion candles burning in the green after my cold winter of dry bitterbrush and winter fat. Maybe.