Fairleads > Jacob's Letter
This issue of Fair Leads has nothing to do with rigging or sailing. Far from it; it is a letter written from and about the desert and the Grand Canyon. It is about birds and invasive species and the Society for Creative Anachronism and it is easily the most lyrically profound letter I’ve ever received. It comes from my friend Jacob, who is still out there, along with his friend Cassidy, counting birds to see how their populations are affected by Salt Cedar. I hope that you will enjoy it as much as I do.
Fair leads,
Brion Toss
June 2009
If life in the Pacific northwest is a watery dream, punctuated by glimmering stars and highlighted by soft silver-pink evenings, a place of cold drifting winter fog, than the apt word for the experience of life in the Mojave can only be described as a hallucination, rather overvivid on the white end of the spectrum. There is a reason that most desert photographs and postcards depict a soft red-orange-tinged evening scene: during the vast proportion of the day images are overexposed, and so is the mind.
Still, heat and light have a scouring effect which fosters its own strange blossoms. In the temperate and moist soft-green colors of Washington a human brain can float several trains of thought at once, the mind meander, muse; here moist thoughts evaporate, the energy required to sustain thought is strictly budgeted, as if perhaps the heat released by the firing of neurons is too much to add to an already overburdened equation. So a new type of mental sensation arises, a kind of parched acceptance of what ever befalls the lens. In a sense you are bombarded, and under fire you hunker down and survive.
What is left then? After all is stripped away. A sense of transparent timelessness. Walking in a tunnel, narrow focus, or flat perception. The shadow is the real form here, the man and the whole of the three-dimensional world the holographic projection - a trick of the light.
I suppose it's a harsh place, but the strange thing is it can feel good. In a sense you feel emptied. As if lifetimes of accumulated moss were sucked from your pores, your body narrowed, flattened and elongated, thermodynamic adaptations of a body to heat. Longing is an elaboration of intense memory often implying action over great distance, and strangely in the desert it seems that the experience of longing can be severely truncated, as if the implications of such an undertaking are deduced by the newly conservative brain and the conclusion is to reduce desire to acceptance of what is, through sheer fact of having no extra energy to put into such an endeavor.
How I spent my days at the Grand Canyon. Late March on the south rim is a cold place. We stopped for provisions in the town of Williams on the drive in, an hour away from the precipice of eroded time. It was a strange scene. Inside the car was a still-contained Mojave microclimate: zero moisture; dry-warm dusty air; arid and scented with the sage end of the spectrum. Upon opening the doors we were greeted to a blast of chilling winter wind, comparatively wet, though perhaps not by Pacific standards. Still, it was a shock. Ponderosa pine smell in the crisp air, snow on the ground and a howling, moist wind. The faces of people hurrying across a Safeway parking lot were wind-burned red, noses and ears bright and inflamed. Clearly half of everyone in town were suffering from some severe lingering bronchial infection. Everyone was coughing thickly. "Plague" town, the place immediately became in my mind. I didn't feel like lingering, and my mind dropped back in time to days of horse travel, and I pictured our short stay resulting in Cassidy dropping my body into the cold rocky ground and erecting a crude and temporary monument before heading on down the trail.
We went when we did because our friend Emily was finishing up a job there, cooking for SCA. The scene when we arrived was, I admit, less than I might have imagined. Perhaps because of having left one season and traveling "back in time" to a colder climate on the rim there was an exaggerated sense of archaic human history. Primitive tent, freezing weather, and a strange 1850's work-camp feel about the place. We ate with the group in the dark, huddled over our food, shifting on our feet in the cold. Talk was truncated the first night, partly by darkness and cold, though more by cultural clash than anything else. The SCA leaders and their flock of youth greatly resembled a kind of religious camp, with self-congratulatory and guilt-ridden environmental themes of salvation and purpose. Strange songs were sung, and conversation was riddled with a discomforting sense of unhumorous fundamentalism. Cassidy and I were as strange as two opposable thumbs. It was a "dry" camp, so we took our bottle of JB to the slightly warmer, tiled floor of the men's room and sang songs of the day's travel.
The wind was altogether more entertaining. A sally to the rim before supper to catch sunset, revealed a blasting updraft ripping through the woods. A conspiracy of ravens performed fantastic arial feats together out in the vast empty space of the canyon. Spiraling downwards, thrown across the sky, traveling hundreds of meters upside-down down and backwards. One can only say laughing, for there really is no other word for what they were saying.
On a whim, Cassidy threw his hat over the cliff and we watched it sail briefly out over the abyss and then shoot upward, lofted by the updraft over our heads and tossed 80 meters behind us into the woods. For half an hour we completely forgot our cold in the manner of entertained children who can endure any temperature provided they are having a good time, and threw everything we could find or break off over the cliff. Enormous pine branches as tall as I were thrown out into space, only to be rejected by the void and against all comprehension fly upward 50 feet into the air and arc over our heads. This game was endlessly iterated until darkness. Naturally my hat ended up high in a tree. Small rocks thrown down into the canyon rose, miraculously, and hilariously, and after stuttering in the wind, were fired back at the thrower.
We spent two days down inside the canyon, where temperatures were much more pleasant and warm. Walking down trails that when seen from below defy reason, and the making of them is very much in question as a logical undertaking. Flowers were blooming, small silvery-green lizards skittering. The alien formations of yucca stalks. Exploration of old mines, we were informed by a small sign, was forbidden due to build up of Radon, a colorless, odorless gas - a natural but radioactive gas formed by the decay of Radium. The ground was littered with strange green and blue and red rocks. Naturally bats lived there, and a song about the restorative properties of Radium Springs was carried down the trail for a ways.
Inside the chasm: Spotted Towhee; flock of bushtits; turkey vultures (wobble hawks); canyon wrens; rock wrens; Say's Phoebes; black-throated sparrows; white-throated swifts; perigrine falcon. On the rim: W. Bluebirds; white-breasted nuthatches foraging like small upside down ninjas; pygmy nuthatches; juniper titmice; gray-backed juncos; mountain chickadees; cayotes; ravens.
We camped on a high plateau about half-way down. Somewhere far above us the origins of mammals, somewhere in the most recent few layers of time high above. Roughly 2 billion years down to the bottom, down past the great unconformity, down past countless layers of silted deposits of ancient oceans and ancient life forms embedded in the rock.
We spent the day together and alone, wandering the rim, forming theories and conclusions, attempting to comprehend, and failing pleasantly each time, staring blankly or sleeping on warm rocks before rising to attempt comprehension again. At perhaps eleven at night, long after a very shadowed moon melded with the rim above us, after glassing the sky's vastness with binoculars for a few hours and watching satellites traverse the cold sky, I wandered alone to the edge and standing in the warm wind thought to call Piper. My cell phone sparked to electronic life. The time was wrong: it read 12:00 a.m. which was unlikely. My eyes glanced over to the date and I was surprised to see that it read Jan. 6, which of course it was not, this being March. But as my eyes slid across the line of text I was still more shocked to encounter a complete reading of Jan 6, 1980 12:00 am. This was I will say, briefly, and staggeringly, weird. On a sunny afternoon, perhaps standing on a sidewalk, surrounded by people and buildings, if a man looks down at his watch and it reads an incorrect time he is not much more than annoyed, and certainly is not thrown into a temporary dislocation of time and space whereby everything he knows suddenly falls away as if the appropriate time were the gravity holding everything together.
However, standing on stone deposited before the birth of mammls is another matter. Suspended, as it were almost floating in darkness, on a precipice of time, surrounded by lethal vertical vastness, and stars, my tender human mind experienced an inexplicable plummet into space, I fell into the stars. For in that moment it was evident first that the person I hoped to call on my phone, by the phone's telling of time, was not even born yet. And I certainly was not even an idea in the minds of parents whose youth and location in the world I could not ascertain; they certainly wouldn't know me yet. In fact, practically everyone I knew didn't exist. "Cassidy," I said, "can I show you something?"
I can tell you that the experience of time-travel is not at all like in the movies. Your first thought is not that you will accrue enormous wealth by betting on all the baseball games which haven't been won yet, or the stocks which haven't yet skyrocketed in value. In fact, money is pretty well a meaningless concept to someone who has just lost all reference points. Perhaps you would become a mystic, or more likely end up institutionalized. Traveling backwards in time to a place before your own birth is probably the closest thing I can think of to experiencing true impermanence and living to tell about it. You are cosmically alone. Free and unformed. A dim cloud of stars on a drifting trajectory, a bubble of spacious laughter and dust, all your friends and loved ones smiling conspiracies of stars themselves, timeless, without trouble. There is nothing to be saved, sadness a misperception of time and space itself.
Next time you see me ask to hear the sounds my phone plays when turned on or off it will seal the story nicely for you (hint: it hums a phosphorescent series of utterly alien alternating harmonic pitch changes and whispers "time, time, time" in a faint breathy female ethereal voice- I shit you not).
As for Overton Nevada and the dreaded area-search spot-mapping endeavor, I have yet to properly develop or discover a vocabulary which accurately describes much if anything at all which goes into trying to move through an environment populated or rather dominated by "Salt-cedar". Salt-cedar ingeniously pushes out all other forms of under-story or competing natives by copiously shedding its salt- laden leaves into a thick litter on the ground which stifles all other seedlings in a kind of toxic blanket. It can grow unspeakably large - as tall as a 30 foot cottonwood, but seems to more commonly top out at about 9 - 12 feet. It is unspeakably difficult to move through. Only Himalayan blackberry would be more horrific. If a fire were to break out while you were in the center of even a smallish stand of Salt-cedar your odds of escaping would not be good; not only is the ground a tinderbox of leaf-litter, and the "forest" thick with dead shoots, but the bare fact is that you cannot move beyond a predictably, though unbelievably, slow speed. You are impeded. You either cannot stand up because it is so thick and so must crawl, or you cannot move forward because it is so thick. It is common to spend an hour and a half traversing 250 linear meters of flat ground. We emerge often looking as though having encountered a mountain lion somewhere in the middle, and filthy, covered in black Tamarisk dust, a glassy-charcoal like substance, that fills the air when thrashing through the thickets much like a cloud of burning pencil graphite.
Claustrophobia is a common and occasionally anxiety-causing sensation. If you have crawled your way into this shit, there are no shortcuts for getting back out. The branches are strong enough that you build upper-body strength pushing against their springy masses, but not so strong as to let you climb very high. Sometimes you can walk suspended above the ground by as much as six feet, but not on what you would think of as limbs, more a chaotic basket of many branches whose overlapping points miraculously though precariously suspend you for a time, on a springy thicket which inevitably collapses, leaving you entangled like a Christmas ornament. Protective glasses are essential as your face is essentially gouged from every sudden and surprising angle at regular intervals of say three stabs to the face per foot shoved through. It is rather like having a tree grab you by the face with its hands as you pass through. If you find yourself in a "clearing" within the horrifying jungle, wherein you find that you have a few inches between your face and some pointy ended branch, you stand (if you can) and survey the strange freedom of your limbs' extension as if this might be a master bedroom, a spacious campsite.
It could be worse, and in fact, it often is. But there is something about enduring these degrading afternoons which sharpens the sense of humor. Performing difficult feats to accomplish pointless tasks seems to be good for humans for some reason.
The people I am working with are generally of a wonderful sort. Birding, as it is called, is an imaginative exercise as much as a taxonomic one. The interpretation of bird song requires imagination in order to distinguish one call from another, a feat which is absolutely essential to identification, both to distinguish visually similar members of different species and because birds are so often heard and not seen. Associations and descriptive analogy are commonplace - as with the virtually unforgettable "quick, three beers" which describes the Olive-sided Flycatcher's song so well, and establishes it firmly in your mind. Working with nerdy musicians means I am privy to a lot of apt musical descriptions and comical associations. Bird songs are described as "the broken robot", or "the ghost call", or "the digital trill", the typewriter "chak, chak chak" call note of Bewick's Wren. It is absolutely essential to find some way for your mind to play this trick, to sort through a cacophony blended species noise, and separate the strands by identifiable monikers. Needless to say many, many, birds sound grossly alike, and only some part of their song stands alone or is unique. Of course the more you listen the more they sound different and the more startlingly the diversity reveals itself. As soon as you have one bird placed in your mind, identifiable by song, then room is made to hear the next baffling call. It is rather like hearing one long garbled call, and then focusing the light, and seeing that in fact fifteen separate birds are singing.
Identifying a bird requires a lot of "detective" work, running a storm of vague signals through the kludge of your mind and trying to come to some conclusion. We listen to a lot of recordings to drill, but local dialect can be surprising. Sonograms are interesting to give you a sense of the rhythm or spacing of notes. Obviously there are the guide books; each has its strengths and weaknesses. In an unexpected way guidebooks can be misleading by being too "perfect." A book filled with coffee-table worthy photographs, of good focus, close-up detail and perfect lighting and contrast may seem like a good choice for getting a sense of what a bird looks like, but in fact I'm starting to suspect that a better -- that is more realistic -- field-readying type would contain only distant images, high-contrast (either too bright or too dark), half-hidden or blurred by movement; that is to say a nebulous cloud of vague clues. A puzzle, requiring imagination.
You gather as many clues as you can, none of which exclusively identifies the bird, and attempt to triangulate certainty, a linked series which together form an image. In a very weird way birding is about your ideas about birds. Flight pattern (flutter, swoop, wobble, dart), location (high, low, mid), prominence or hiddeness, environment. A bird's age, or molting stage, dramatically affects its appearance, and posture can make a bird look remarkably different (if it's hunched or elongated). The good birders look at a swarm of hundreds of ducks of several types, all on a pond together, and swiftly somehow find the few, rare, species. "Lifers" as they rather creepily refer to first sightings.