Writing by Rosa Brey
Epiphany 2: I Wonder
Epiphany 3: Climate Change: Looking Inward, Thinking Small
Other Writing:
» Desert Morning
» Owen’s Valley
» The Last, Best Place
» The Geology of Loss
» The Sandstone and Me
» These Sandstone Walls
» Weather Report, October 9, 2008
» Weather Report, October 11, 2008
» Untitled
Epiphany 1: Blueprint
We are attracted to topography. Dramatic peaks and vast canyons steal our gaze and direct our cameras as we drive or hike throughout the West. Perhaps this attraction lies in our inability to see the effect of our own hand on these landscapes. It is the level lands we have tried to master. On these desolate flatlands of the arid West we try to mimic the creations of the earth – building infrastructure where we perceive none, chasing our surveyors scopes with asphalt trucks and backhoes.
I sit on a ledge above a lake high up in the Sierra-Nevada of Southern California. My feet hang over thirty feet of empty air and my heart races as I survey the landscape below me. From this vantage point I can see for miles, I can hear the quiet. Dropping away below me are scree-laden slopes, lake basins and trees. Above me, ridgeline, avalanche chutes, the sky. My lungs feel tight both from the altitude and the knowledge that one false step will send me careening down to meet the boulders hundreds of feet below. I slowly become accustomed to the sight and my eye is drawn up, from where each throaty gully deposits her mouthful of gravel and dirt, to the sky. I follow the jagged serration of the ridgeline until it becomes imperceptible in the blue depths beyond. These lines for the architecture of this place – the sand and rock an eternal foundation on which trees and the trail of a falcons flight act as scaffolding to the ceiling of blue. These lines for my understanding of this place – the contours of the skyline, my rooftops and chimneys decorated by a wallpaper of rock columns. These lines converge to create a topography unknowable to the cement and steel of man.
Half a state away, the landscape tells a different story. A map of Reno and the surrounding area reveals a peculiar spectacle. A checkerboard overlays the city and nearby countryside. Little quarter mile squares dot the page like tiles on a kitchen floor. Over the checkerboard lies a spider web of crisscrossing, zigzagging lines. But as I walk away from Reno, these squares and cobwebs do not appear to me on the land. It stretches out in front of me as far as the eye can see, and obstacles only arise in the form of mountains or the blazing afternoon sun that burns my skin and forces an averted gaze. My only clue as to another hand at work is precisely that which keeps me moving – the road. It cuts like a scar across the great basin. A map of Reno is dominated by lines of our own fabrication. The checkerboard – an alternation between private and public land ownership, imaginary lines that cannot be seen on the land itself. The web of interwoven lines that tightens and multiplies to a point of confusion as it nears Reno – the system of roads and highways we’ve built to facilitate our movement between and beyond our life-sized board game. Even the few naturally occurring lines we’ve left compelled to claim, so put hash marks and unnaturally arranged arms across rivers to denote our dams and irrigation canals, then run lines parallel to them which serve as the railroad. Our townships and allotments divide the landscape, and we place our state lines across countryside that sometimes follows geographic features, but often doesn’t. Rather than a blueprint of connected, interdependent lines and systems, our map looks like an etch-a-sketch left in a little boy’s backpack as he scampers, pauses, winds and cartwheels his way home from school. Not so for Mother Nature, earth’s grand engineer. Her lines follow and build upon one another.
From high up on my vantage point in the Eastern Sierra, the distant layers of mountain ranges give contour and dimension to the landscape. Time and again, we try to manipulate this masterpiece to fit our model of efficiency, order and ownership. But Mother Nature is a force to be reckoned with. Each landslide, earthquake and flood is not a natural disaster but a natural renovation, a remodeling of an already well-crafted landscape. Typically a generous landlord, the problems arise when we try to manipulate nature. When we overuse a resource, Mother Nature grounds us. When we become overconfident in our design, she strips us of our privileges and reminds us that her hand, not ours, put this world together. Each ridgeline, creek bed and hilltop was placed deliberately.
Our maps help us move from one place to another in this geometric, parceled existence we’ve carved out for ourselves. But these maps don’t tell the whole story. They reflect only the two-dimensionality of a world that daily confounds us with its three dimensions. Hold a map flat and you strip the world of the character bestowed by a force more creative, more meticulous than man. Instead, climb a mountain, a high one so that man’s lines blend imperceptibly and irrelevantly against those crafted so studiously by Mother Nature.
Atop my vantage point, I inspect the convergence and divergence she has made and realize that each line does not lead to a destination, but to another line, another drainage, another mountain range until my gaze is lost in the infinite blue beyond the horizon. Standing up, I briefly let my eyes drift once more, then follow the trail down.
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Epiphany 2: I Wonder
I’m worried that I’m losing my ability to look with wonder at the natural world. After weeks of movement throughout some of the West’s most damaged landscapes, I look around and see invasive plants, incised streams and a general lack of biodiversity. Standing here on the caked brown soil of the Salmon River Allotment, I look with sadness at the juvenile owl floating dead in the water trough. “Ranching is about killing other things,” we are told. “Who is going to pay for this bad behavior?”
We visited this place with Jon Marvel, executive director of the Western Watersheds Project who showed us, over the course of one day, many different ways that cattle and grazing degrade a landscape. A tour with Jon highlights cracking mudflats that used to hold water, carpets of compacted dirt that used to support sage brush and bunch grasses, and stream beds widened and eroded away by years of grazing on riparian plants. Jon describes his years of litigation against the Bureau of Land Management in order to produce some sort of regulation on our nation’s public lands, and I slowly find myself losing interest in his litany against ranchers, cattle and federal agents. However, Jon plays an undeniably important role in the health and maintenance of our public lands.
The history of cattle on public lands boils down to one piece of historic legislation, the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934. This act legalized the permit and allotment system under which the millions of acres of public land still function today. The primary purpose of this act was to ensure systematic use, management and improvement of public grazing lands in the western United States. It was formulated, debated, and eventually agreed upon by representatives who spoke for the cattle industry, those interested in greater stability of the use of land open to grazing during the early twentieth century. Even though this legislation cemented the fate of our nation’s public lands, effectively marking the end of homesteading, and took more than thirty years to pass both House and Congress, the only participants were those who represented cattlemen. No preservationists or conservationists entered the discussion of public lands grazing because it took place during a time when these interests were focused on the protection of lands valued for scenic, recreational or spiritual use. Rather, the negotiations were over allotment boundaries, rights and fees ironing out public land use for grazing instead of whether and where grazing should be allowed.
I find it difficult not to be drawn by the mystique of cowboys and ranching. Our time on the Cottonwood and Boies Ranches in Northeastern Nevada reaffirmed this appeal, and after two days of tours with representatives from these ranches along with state agency officials, I found myself increasingly sympathetic to their argument. After touring a fire sight and looking with awe at the way the aspens acted as a firebreak, then looking at a riparian system that is slowly recovering while still in use, I want to believe in the prospect of holistic management. ‘Look how hard they’re trying,’ I find myself thinking. ‘They’re working to change the harmful system that they’ve been born into.’ Regardless, I must keep reminding myself that cattle are detrimental to a landscape and continue to degrade our public lands, yet the laws and regulators continue to side with ranchers.
To me, Jon Marvel represents the preservationist argument missing from the construction and ensuing deliberations of the Taylor Grazing Act. And I think it is important that someone plays this role. Marvel fights for our land after the passage of this policy because no one was there to do so when the discussion was going on. His use of litigation works to enforce the regulation set up within the legislation. While I cannot relate to methods he employs in his defense, the fact remains: he is successful.
I think, in order to make a positive difference in the ecological health of our public lands, we need to maintain our sense of wonder. But with this wonder comes responsibility. I respect Jon for the work he does, and it took me a while to realize the marvel with which he looks at the land. He dreams of a day when birds need not fear cattle troughs, when streams are no longer deeply incised, and when antelope can run for three days without meeting a fence. He is willing to take on the responsibility that comes with a preservationist attitude, and combat the entrenched practices of ranching. For this, I cannot fault him, but rather would do well to re-evaluate the manifestation of my own wonder.
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Epiphany 3: Climate Change: Looking Inward, Thinking Small
Climate change is a nebulous, overwhelming concept because of its global, overarching and sometimes invisible effects. Much of today’s apocalyptic rhetoric makes it difficult to imagine what, in the face of such an extensive, intangible issue, one or two people can do. International conferences have formulated protocols for the regulation of emissions in hopes of slowing the process of climate change and even our coal-happy country has haltingly begun to accept alternative energy sources. But the most effective action, I believe, will take place outside backdoors, in city parks, on local ranchlands where people are invested in and can see our direct effect on the land. Wendell Berry encourages us to “think little,” to realize that no public issue is without its roots in the private sphere and the tangible solutions are those which people can grab hold of and invest themselves in.
Joseph, Oregon is a small community nestled against the dramatic peaks and spires of the Wallowa Mountains. Ranch and farmland fills the valley, turning the historic Zumwalt Prairie into a patchwork of different colored grasses, alfalfas and other crops. This place is the quintessential western ranch town with its lazy Main Street and large diesel farm trucks parked outside the tiny Safeway. Only the lake, tram and access to the Wallowas have brought tourists and new faces. Many ranchers here are second and third generation, grew up on the ranch, and never plan to leave. They do things the way their father did things, and probably their fathers before them. Their primary concern is the success of their crops or their cattle on the land, and changes in the climate serve only as another daily challenge.
Janie Tippet is an exception to this rule. A first generation Wallowa county resident, this soft spoken, unassuming rancher’s wife has the unique ability to see the bigger picture, to see the landscape whole. And what she sees is a lack of water, a necessary lifeblood in the success of farming and ranching in this valley, and a problem that, in her mind, is fixable.
We stand on the road above a creek running through the Zumwalt Prairie. Below, a ramshackle homestead slouches to the ground which, several hundred yards later, crumbles into the creek. This place is peaceful, and I understand what Janie means when she asks us to listen to the silence. Janie stands with us, her wispy gray hair tucked under a faded denim cap, and looks out on the prairie she calls home. After a moment, she begins to describe her vision for beavers on this landscape.
Janie comes from a community that doesn’t believe in global warming, and only now after seven years of drought is warming up to the idea of climate change. She has written about her life as a rural ranchers wife for the last twenty-five years in “Janie’s Journal: Life on a Ranch,” a column in the Pendleton weekly paper where she includes details such as Christmas cookie recipes or highlights from annual calf branding. In this environment, she must approach her argument of water stocking from a quietly conservative perspective. According to Janie, the mindset that man dominates the land is difficult to change in this valley. But the way she sees it, every indigenous species has a place. As global warming continues to increase the aridity of an already dry West, the beavers place is to revitalize riparian systems, to increase the capacity of these systems to hold water. Janie thinks this will help, not harm, the livelihoods of her family and other ranchers here.
Talk of beavers is dangerous in conservative Wallowa County. They carry with them a historic black cloud, and to ranchers they represent flooding and a waste of good farm land. But Janie has taken on their reintroduction as her mission, arguing that, “If you want to live in a place that grabs your heart, there’s always a way to make a living and effect change if you’re brave enough.” And Janie is brave. She recently went public with her vision and published a journal article on the role beavers play in a healthy riparian ecosystem, how they allow the land to act as a sponge, soaking up extra water during high runoff and storing it for drier days.
Different approaches to the discussion of global warming are imperative to reaching different kinds of people. Janie Tippet plays an important role in the diversification of this discussion. She has taken an issue that is close to her heart, the health of stream systems in her rural, agricultural county, and taken a stand. Though perhaps not the highly sought after “solution to global warming,” her courage to begin a dialogue about a controversial issue in a conservative ranching community is a small step in the direction of local action towards such issues. Wendell Berry places the brunt of the problem, and the blame, on all of us every day. He says, “Nearly every one of us, nearly every day of his life, is contributing directly to the ruin of this planet.” Though not an inspiring message, it is a message we need to be reminded of. Increasingly, science tells us that the dramatic warming of the globe is almost entirely the fault of man. However, the example of Janie Tippet encourages us to look inward, to find a place that grabs our heart, and to take a stand. We seldom save anything we haven’t yet learned to love.
To this I’d like to add a brief history of beavers in the West – how they were hunted out as a result of fear and historic ranching beliefs, and how Janie represents a new wave of ranching theology that understands the role individual species play in maintaining an environment – particularly when it is being degraded by cattle.
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Desert Morning
I wake, the scent of the desert fills my nostrils.
Open my eyes, my face seven inches from a sage brush.
Wind rushes through the pinions and plays with my still waking mind.
In my near conscious state, I think I hear water.
Sitting up, I look down on the valley below.
It’s not water I hear, but the memory of water –
The memory of a time when the Owens Valley held a lake,
Not a dried up bed of toxic dust.
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Owen's Valley
The valley floor, through grassy colored sunglasses, looks ripe for agriculture. The sprinkling system South of Lone Pine irrigates land into perfectly parceled sections that look primed for wheat, corn or alfalfa. From halfway up Granite View Drive, this land looks lush, ripe and fertile. Stop for a moment and you may even hear the water rushing by on its way to fill the hoses of the prosperous farmers in the valley below. Now close your eyes, remove your glasses, and look again. Instead of green, the valley floor is covered by small, dry bushes – sage brush and rabbit brush, cactus and small pinion pines. Look Southeast at the agricultural fields and see a patchwork of murky, brown-red colored pools of water, filled to stifle the toxic dust that arises from the dry lake bed. The ground crackles and snaps under the constant motion of big trucks moving pipes, gravel, machinery and, most importantly, water, from one place to another on roads that, one hundred years ago, would have been submerged. Look around, and see that the sound you hear is not water at all, but wind gently whispering through the dry branches of the sage and pinion. In fact, this place cannot remember the last time it heard water. Before the miners, before the Japanese, before the city of Los Angeles so far outgrew itself that even a small valley over two hundred miles away is not exempt.
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This land is your land, that famous mantra,
Unblinking as we run it into dust
A mass migration
Estranged brothers and foreign cousins
Supported by a selfish steward
Pioneers that once filled the west
Are now relegated to small corners of generations old graveyards
The only place I let you live
I come to die.
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The Geology of Loss
The faulting was mine. What once was uplift became subduction and pressure too quickly. “A’a,” you’d say, “I don’t want us to drift apart. Better that our orogeny bring us together and build us up.” But the anticline was inevitable. Igneous that we are, we reached our angle of repose facing downhill and away from one another.
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The Sandstone and Me
Sandstone crumbles and dissolves Behind and beneath my journeying toes. I avoid the delicate armor of desert plants The stinging bites of red ands And places too exposed to sun and wind. Ridges and impressions embrace my curves Tiny grains of sand coat my skin The desert covers me.
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These Sandstone Walls
There are wings in these walls
Fractured wings that urge this ancient mass of sandstone up and away.
There are streaks in these walls
Streaks that alternate – red, white, back to red and remind me of Indian bloodshed.
There are cracks in these walls
Cracks that, like wrinkles on an old woman’s face, tell the story of this land.
There are impressions in these walls
Impressions that are my own,
Impression with no basis in fact,
Impressions that, when I run my fingers over this sandstone, tell a story of a culture of broken pots, discarded tools and painted figures not unlike myself.
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Weather Report, October 9, 2008
In the morning, I’m beginning to learn the way the light hits the slickrock, the way the sun works its way through the bush to hit my face. I know the jut of red rock cliffs across the wash, first simple outlines in the dark morning sky, then pink as sun breaks over the horizon, then red as it comes fully into the sky. Today is a day to see this place whole – rocks, sky, myself in between.
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Weather Report, October 11, 2008
Stars still pierce the sky this morning, a chilly reminder that I arise before the sun. The clear blue sky after a night veiled with wispy clouds promises good weather. Sun looms nearer and the sky brightens – shade of blue by shade of blue. Blue because, like me, the sky despairs our leaving of this place.
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Untitled
I splash cool water over my face, a soothing change from the baking sun and abrading wind. Lying face down on the contoured sandstone, I stare at my reflection in this pothole, surprised at how little has changed. Days in the desert, this land of rolling rocks and shifting sand, has left me raw - burned from the sun, cracked and scratched from the land, and exposed – as though my secrets are uncovered for all to see. I am surprised that this desert capsule has not swallowed me up with its vast canyons and raging winds. No, this desert leaves me solitary, alone in my unease. And so I search for a place here that I can call my own, a home where questions have answers and I am sheltered from the elemental force of this land.
Terry Tempest Williams tells us, “If a 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,” and, on occasion, I agree with her. Standing on top of Comb Ridge for the first time, we watched a storm descend on us from farther North. A curtain of water engulfed us, washed us clean of our preconceptions and inhibitions about this place and left us bare, exposed to one another, to the landscape and to ourselves. I watched rivulets of water stream between my toes and felt a strange communion with this desert, a communion that quickly dried the following morning with the last sodden remnants of the storm. But those moments have come only occasionally for me and this exposure I feel brings with it a discomfort that characterizes a foreign place.
For days here I struggled to find meaning, to create a deep map that portrayed my own feelings and understandings of a place that isn’t mine. I find myself falling too easily into cliché and don’t know how to add meaning, add newness and shine to a landscape I do not know. Rather, I begin to depend on the words of others to conceptualize the desert. I can feel the sandstone beneath my feet, but don’t have the words to describe the way it confounds my toes into thinking I walk on crushed velvet, not rock. I admire the vistas, but see these mesas and canyons as static landmarks to help me get my bearings rather than stops along the crawling geologic process of time. I need the words of others because I do not possess the words to write the desert, to unearth, within myself, a sense of place here.
This time in the desert has left my feeling lost. My compass still points North, but learning the landscape so I can get my bearings is a slower process among landforms that look to me like one continuation of the same grand idea and leave me turning circles. I stand alone here, between sand and sky, and think about home. Home is a place I haven’t been for awhile, but the more I move the easier it is to find. And so I take this idea of home and translate it here onto the desert.
After days of wandering on this slickrock slope, I came to a place yesterday I can point to and say, “This place, this place I understand.” Ancient grey-green juniper trees and overgrown, snarled shrubs shade two pools – one large and one small – that probably see no more than three hours of sunlight each day. Two stones configure into stairs, complete with juniper handholds, and lead down to the larger pool. On one side, a private changing room for the shy guest, on the other a perfect shelf on which to re-warm stiff muscles after an icy dip. In a desert, famous for its absence of hiding places, this spot is sheltered, overhung and obscured from the passerby. And so, I’ve found my home here in a little alcove completely uncharacteristic of this land. The water is chilly, and moss stays green for days after rain in the shade of a thick slab of sandstone. Rather than exposure, I feel a deep sense of secrecy, of comfort, of conspiracy as though this place and I plot our clandestine enjoyment hidden from the rest of the land. It’s not rawness, but refreshment that brings a tingle to my skin as I slide my naked body into the frigid water of this desert pot-hole. Refreshment and relaxation, relief to have finally found a retreat for myself. Though this haven is not the quintessential desert written about by Mary Austin, Ellen Meloy or Terry Tempest Williams, this is the desert for which my words convene. We are told that deserts are a sacred journey to the self found only because there are no places to hide. But for me, I’ve found my hiding place here, my blue amidst a sea of red, and so I am home.
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