Utah: putting the AWE back in awesome! I’m absolutely zonkers over Zion National Park! (I know I just said pretty much the same thing last weekend at Great Basin, which was also *top* shelf in totally different ways, and before that I was in love with the limitless horizons around the Steens Mountain Wilderness area…. it may seem fickle, but I’m recalling a period in my early twenties when I was falling in love with the work of a different poet every few days!). First impressions of Zion were glowing and have only grown more luminous. Or is it the light? Each day seems sunnier than the last, with stone walls of brilliant heat-stroke glare and cool green-dark shadows mere inches from each other; the pale green snaking of the Virgin River, the cathedral walls rising in all directions more heavenly than morning light falling from clerestory windows. Breathtaking. Jaw-dropping. Considering that the park is already chock-full of visitors speaking all tongues, as the Memorial Day weekend approaches, I’m amazed by how smoothly visitors are moved through/into the park.

The first step, as Edward Abbey prescribed so many decades ago, is separating us from our vehicles. Except for special exceptions, and those who are guests of the Lodge, deep inside the scenic canyon drive, visitors leave their vehicles back in the town of Springdale, and hop on free shuttles which loop through town to the Visitor Center. This is so much better than the days (I can hardly image when thousands of cars and tour buses and RVs clogged the road! Crossing a symbolic bridge over the Virgin, we become “naturalized” into the Park experience. I suspect there are many who NEED this — it doesn’t come easily for some, parting with their cars and campers. Eavesdropping, I hear comments — a few are inconvenienced, a few are confused or bewildered to be finding their way through paths to the next shuttle bus, which loop from the Visitor Center through the scenic canyon of Zion. Where do we — ? Are is this the –? How do we know –? But soon folks get seated, and I think a general sense of calm and gratitude descends. Some get off, other get on, some take photos, other take rigorous hikes. It becomes liberating, do-able, this divorce from the vehicle.

I began my time in Zion, as I often try to do, by moving around, making short landscape studies. All woefully inadequate!! The uninitiated human eye simply cannot take it all in, one feature carved and tinted more perfectly than the next — solid walls but nothing solid; all fractured, veined, cross-bedded, undercut, drilled, honeycombed, arched, shattered, dripping, stained, burning, mirrored, shadowed. Sunlight bounces from one hot-lit wall to cast warm light against the opposite side, subtly shifting the colors. Walls seep ancient water, rivulets dripping from canyon-tops evaporate in a shower of droplets as they fall thousands of feet, water transmuted into rainbows and moss. The river, the Virgin, has done all this carving work over millions of years.

Giving up on sketching, I spent the next whole day hiking, trails with names like Emerald Pools (upper, middle, lower), Weeping Wall, Riverwalk to the Narrows, Grotto, Kayenta. I slept deeply, dreaming of colors and textures and trails descending through keyholes of stone. Today, still sore from yesterday but inspired, I hiked the trail to Angel’s Landing, a hike rated “strenuous” as it ascends approx 2000 feet from the valley floor (river level) to the top of a high sandstone arrowhead, following heart-pounding and inventive switchbacks chiseled into the sandstone walls, ending in a vertiginous route of chain and metal posts, nailed over the top of a stone precipice, where those braver than me hiked the last 1/3 mile holding onto the chain as they traverse a narrow bridge of rock with sheer drops on either side. I ended the day with a gentle hike to see a few ancient petroglyphs on a rockface near the Visitor Center (a few that looked like bird tracks, and one resembling a bighorn sheep).

Now I’m sore and still amazed by Zion. As the psalm goes: “Sing praises to the Lord who dwelleth in Zion.” Actually I’ve had that line from Handel’s Messiah in my head today: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion.” I’m ready to try a day of sketching again, tho I will select places where hundreds of people won’t stop to watch (as happened three days ago, when I was following on the shuttle bus route).

Postscript: I learned very sad news as I checked email tonight, leaving the park: the sudden death of Gary Erickson, my sister-in-law April’s father. Deepest sympathies go out tonight to April, my brother John, my nephew Henry, and my nieces Maureen and Sarah. As I watch the sunset on the stone walls of Zion, I am remembering my own grandfathers, and wishing for April and her entire family “the peace which surpasses all understanding.” Much love from Zion.

I’ve only been in Utah for less than a day and already found (rather by accident, as it was not listed on my Utah roadmaps) a terrific ancient site. Here’s how I described it last night in a message to my husband:

Earlier today, driving down to Utah from Nevada, I took a back road on the suggestion of a vague sign pointing to “petroglyphs” and found a stunning rock pass full of subtle ancient rock-art. Imagine the ancient natives who chipped the drawings into the black “desert varnish” surface of the ancient rocks! There were more recent traveler’s attempts at mark-making as well — initials and dates from the 1890s to the 1980s. Really awe-inspiring. I’d have stayed around there overnight (considered it!!) but the wind was gusting hard enough to make me want something heavy to hold onto, and snowclouds were descending in the distance once again.

Here are a few photos from Parowan Gap.  For more info, see:  http://www.utah.com/playgrounds/parowan_gap.htm

I spent a very peaceful night camped alone at this Oregon “SnoPark” designed to support “winter fun” activities. Well, it was not very wintry and I had a wonderful fire until it started to sleet.

By comparison, Oregon’s Chickahominy BLM campground had a beautiful setting (aka: horizon-wide space in all directions) but the “sun shelter” by the picnic table was the tallest object around, other than the pit toilet, and it shuddered all night long, as did my entire truck. Vicious winds! Nothing to hide behind!

After scenic sidetracks to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Pete French’s historic Round Barn and the Diamond Craters (another awesome and rather remote volcanic area) I reached the road to Steens Mountain Wilderness, which was closed due to snow. I lucked out, however, in finding the Page Springs BLM Campground, this one sheltered from the wind in a natural rock-sided valley full of trees, where the Blitzen river flows down from Steens Mountain. Far from being “off the map” this campground was nearly full — of avid birders!! Everyone was wandering around in ones and twos, looking in different directions, through binoculars. It would have made a great New Yorker cartoon for the section where readers suggest the captions.

I found a campsite adjacent to the spring itself, and the bird-lovers pointed out many species I wouldn’t have noticed on my own. Page Springs has everything — songbirds, cliff-birds, marsh birds, raptors! In the morning, on leaving, I stopped out at Pete French’s old ranch (where an old fire tower fills with turkey vultures every night), and a birding couple nearby pointed out a great horned owl sitting in an old apple tree! More on Malheur National Wildlife Refuge: http://www.fws.gov/malheur/

Snow-fog obliterated my view of Crater Lake itself (and much of the surrounding terrain) but I simply had to try — the park’s terrain and history are so fascinating!  Imagine a great volcanic mountain building and spewing and erupting —- until it empties itself of magma, and becomes hollow.  The great subsidence that followed propelled the “mountain” deep into the earth!  The collapsed crater now holds the lake, like ice-water in a stone bowl held up for the sky to sip.  I was disappointed by the weather but —- I think it was Confucius who said “Wherever you go, go with all your heart.”

View from the rim (which had been plowed open only for a short distance, to Discovery Point):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newberry_Volcano

http://www.fs.fed.us/r6/centraloregon/newberrynvm/index.shtml

This morning the low rain clouds are snagged like so much cotton batting, fogging the towering snags and old growth on surrounding ridges. Here is a poem perfect for leaving the Andrews Forest, which they’ve included as an epigraph in THE FOREST LOG binder containing work by previous writers-in-residence:

Little Pines
by Ch’i-Chi

Poking up from the ground barely above my knees,
already there’s holiness in their coiled roots.
Though harsh frost has whitened the hundred grasses,
deep in the courtyard, one grove of green!
In the late night long-legged spiders stir;
crickets are calling from empty stairs.
A thousand years from now who will stroll among these trees,
fashioning poems on their ancient dragon shapes?

*
Translated by Burton Watson
From The Clouds Should Know Me by Now
Edited by Red Pine and Mike O’Connor (Wisdom Press, 1998)

Rain: H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest

A few final images from the forest.  The gorgeous weather of the weekend is changing to rain.  A new weather system is coming in…. wind and snow at higher elevations forecast for later in the week.

The promised thunderstorm has finally arrived in the McKenzie District, rattling overhead.  The forest ridge is receding in a blue veil of rain, and the scarlet, thumb-sized hummingbird that thrummed outside my window all day is suddenly nowhere to be seen.  Sleeping dry beneath a maple leave, maybe?   I’m writing in the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest library, watching sudden cascades of rainwater over-shoot gutters, self-sequestered with a big table and a wall of windows, yet easily distracted among dangling tangents of my own scribbled notes.  It’s been an amazing, whirl-wind Writer-in-Residence experience; tonight I’ll sleep in the forest, dreaming of owls and newts and alpine monkeyflowers no larger than my pinky-fingernail, almost ready to flower.  And I’ll tuck these poems away for a few weeks.  Perhaps they’ll germinate like squirrel-buried nuts while my attention is elsewhere.

A few resonant lines from recent readings, as I wrap up loose threads:

Barry Lopez (who has written about the Andrews Forest) from his essay “The American Geographies” in Finding Home: Writing on Nature and Culture from Orion Magazine. Edited by Peter Sauer.  (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992):

… As a boy I felt a hunger to know the American landscape that was extreme; when I was finally able to travel on my own, I did so. Eventually I visited most of the United States, living for brief periods of time in Arizona, Indiana, Alabama, Georgia, Wyoming, New Jersey, and Montana before settling years ago in western Oregon.

The astonishing level of my ignorance confronted me everywhere I went. I knew early on that the country could not be held together in a few phrases, that its geography was magnificent and incomprehensible, that a man or woman could devote a lifetime to its elucidation and still feel in the end that he or she had but sailed many thousands of miles over the surface of the ocean. So I came into the habit of traversing landscapes I wanted to know with local tutors and reading what had previously been written about, and in, those places. I came to value exceedingly novels and essays and works of nonfiction that connected human enterprise to real and specific places, and I grew to be mildly distrustful of work that occurred in no particular place, work so cerebral and detached as to be refutable only in an argument of ideas.

These sojourns in various corners of the country infused me, somewhat to my surprise on thinking about it, with a great sense of hope. Whatever despair I had come to feel at a waning sense of the real land and the emergence of false geographies–elements of the land being manipulated, for example, to create erroneous but useful patterns in advertising–was dispelled by the depth of a single person’s local knowledge, by the serenity that seemed to come with that intelligence. Any harm that might be done by people who cared nothing for the land, to whom it was not innately worthy but only something ultimately for sale, I thought, would one day have to meet this kind of integrity, people with the same dignity and transcendence as the land they occupied. So when I traveled, when I rolled my sleeping bag out on the shores of the Beaufort Sea or in the high pastures of the Absaroka Range in Wyoming, or at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, I absorbed those particular testaments to life, the indigenous color and songbird song, the smell of sun-bleached rock, damp earth, and wild honey, with some crude appreciation of the singular magnificence of each of those places. And the reassurance I felt expanded in the knowledge that there were, and would likely always be, people speaking out whenever they felt the dignity of the earth imperiled in these places.

William R. Jordan III., “Restoration and the Reentry of Nature” also from Finding Home: Writing on Nature and Culture from Orion Magazine. Edited by Peter Sauer.  (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992):

Ecological restoration is in the odd condition of being a practice but still not quite an articulated idea.  Yet, as a response to a problem it is full of promise.  (…….) The plan was to create here on this hillside overlooking Lake Wingra a sample of the great hemlock-hardwood forest that once covered thousands of square miles in the northern part of the state.  By the 1930s that forest had been destroyed, and the resulting slash fires, soil erosion, and economic devastation contributed to the great economic and ecological disasters of that decade.  Here, however, someone decided to try again.  Sugar maples and hemlocks were planted in the light shade under a stand of old oaks.  Today their crowns are beginning to join those of the taller, older trees overhead.  In summer this is now a shady spot under the maples, and the understory is thinning in places, becoming more like proper maple forest understory.  On a bright fall day the place glows in sunlight filtered through a golden crown of maples.

The woods is not natural.  It is not artificial. It simply defies these distinctions; it is both.

“This,” I think, remembering the line from A Winter’s Tale quoted by Frederick Turner in his essay “Cultivating the American Garden,” “is an art / Which does mend Nature, change it rather; but / The art itself is nature.”

Nowhere is this art more evident to me that here on this hillside, walking under the trees of this planted forest.

Margaret Herring and Sarah Greene, from Forest of Time: A Century of Science at Wind River Experimental Forest. (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2007).

The canopy (studied from a gondola, dangling from the jib-arm of a giant crane that brings researchers 250 feet up, into the upper stories of the forest) was no longer seen as just a roof held up by wood. The Wind River canopy crane opened a world that is just beginning to reveal itself to scientists in the 21st century. (….) One of the first lessons scientists learned from their new vantage point was that the forest canopy was much more complex than they had imagined.  It was not just opened or closed.  The deep narrow crowns and undulations in the outer canopy created a complex surface with eight times more leave area than the ground below.  Gaps in that canopy opened to layers of lower canopies, creating stacks of microclimates and microhabitats.  Researchers referred to the layered structure as architecture and found plants and animals using different parts of that architecture for different purposes. (….) A notable characteristic of Douglas fir that caught the attention of researchers throughout the century was that these trees grow to be very big and very old.  What were the secrets to living old and well in the Pacific Northwest forests?

Afterword in Windfall journal’s “Poetry of Witness in the Northwest” issue:

It’s important to draw attention to these areas for a variety of reasons—because we need to express gratitude for the wonderful planet we inhabit, and we need to teach about places that might be damaged if no one is paying attention to them. And, most importantly, an intact natural world is the sine qua non for our very existence. Those of us with the financial resources, good health, free time, and geographic good luck to be able to go into the green world regularly need to continue to write poems of wild nature.

And from Joan Maloof, another previous Writer-in-Residence at the Andrews Forest (included in The Forest Log):

A Short Poem Early on a Fall Morning

The bracken is brown,
the maiden’s hair is turning gray,
you poets, with your list of names,
you will become silent when the snow falls.