Field Notes #2

April 13, 2009

Why do I still do this?   Why, at my age, do I follow as if I were nine years old unmarked, unpaved trails away from what I know into the wilds of what I don’t know?     That’s how this striving creation—part light, part water, part air, part earth, and all aspiring flesh—shows itself to me, in the mutual bodying forth between us. It seems an involvement composed of equal slices revelation and formation, since in discovery, everything changes, the New erupts into being, not just in me, the older wide-eyed child, but in this juvenile Creation.

Today, I begin at the Crossfire Canyon’s cliffs, taking inventory of the birds.   A few days earlier I saw cliff swallows flash between the rims, returning or passing through.   Had they stayed or gone?   To find out, I take to the air myself, or at least to the boundary between earth and air, the rimrocks.    

No swallows present themselves, nor white-throated swifts, whom are said to arrive in May but actually begin slicing the wind in Crossfire  in April.   Down in the canyon, the southwestern version of the spotted towhee calls.   Chee-chee-chee-vrrrrrrrr, chee-chee.   In the Sibley Guide to Birds, Sibley remarks that geographic differences in plumage and voice among the towhees  are €œpoorly understood. €

I chuckle.   What understanding doesn’t feel poorly?  

Up-canyon, a raven croaks.  

In the crease below, Crossfire Creek (not its real name) steps down-canyon in a series of beaver dams, built over the last three years.   Evidence of prior beaver occupation exists around the creek—a few weathered tree spikes where beavers harvested the tree’s woody height, trunk damage more fortunate trees recovered from, forming scabs of  new wood and bark  on their wounds.   I’ve heard rumor that a former neighbor trapped out that previous beaver population.  

When I first moved to this area four summers ago, arriving just before the new wave of beavers, the creek was a wiry marathon runner making a tense dash of snow  melt from the Abajo Mountains before summer played it out.   By July, its flow foreshortened to spring-fed stretches and pools formed around the roots of gigantic boulders that had sheared from cliffs and tumbled to the canyon’s lowest points.    When I first arrived here, the creek stopped flowing within view of where I now sit.   Or it pumped flash floods down to the river running twenty-plus miles from here. Under the beaver’s lavish attention, ephemeral Crossfire Creek has grown more stable and Rubenesque.   Now, instead of tenuous and occasional depths, sinuous silver riffles, tight channels and leaf-littered shallows, deepening green pools plump between a growing number of beaver dam belts. Many of these ponds outlast the summer, a little water made much of.

Approximately two miles upstream from here stands one of the county’s twenty-eight human-built dams, 265-acre Crossfire Reservoir, completed in 1984.   At spillway crest, it stores 9,319 acre-feet of water and 16,000 acre-feet at dam crest.   In the summer of 1983, I remember riding with BYU archaeology field school students on the old highway that dipped down into Crossfire’s then narrow canyon and rose again before falling once more through the pine and juniper forest to the cleared outskirts of the town were I now live.   Some of the archaeologists I worked with the summers of ’83- €˜86 conducted the archaeological assessment of Crossfire’s banks in preparation for the dam’s construction.        

The old highway now serves as access to the north and south shores of the lake, its crossing lying below water with a mean depth of 35.2 feet.   A fine new highway of safer design runs  over the reservoir’s south-westernmost end,  across the dam.

I have upon occasion used the beaver dams below to cross the creek.  

No swallow, no swifts.   The ones I saw earlier in the month must have been migrating through.   Except for butterflies flowing down from the mesa behind me, launching themselves over the cliffs and diving for landforms below, and other winged insects recently hatched, the air is unoccupied.

The desert has begun dabbing on perfumes.   In the wind, a dry, clean, sweet odor, light on turpenes from the sun-warmed pinion pines and sage, and maybe something that rises from the dust of ages when spring temperatures loosen the soil.   General notes of reviving vegetation in the fragrance.   The ephedra stands robust, erect bristles losing their wintertime palor, flushing pine green.   Prickly pear cactuses, whose paddles flush purple during winter dormancy, likewise greening up.   Cliffroses fill out their stalks, erupting miniatures of the leaves that will cover their black twigs and brances.   Soon intoxicating  incense  will drop from clouds of pale yellow flowers, forming pools around each plant that will flow out in redolent call to local pollinating insects.   The princess plumes are awakening, green blades rising along tall stems toward the flowerhead, a large, ornate structure of yellow-blond bloom.  

Flicker.
Scrub jay.
Canyon wren: tew-tew-tew-tew-tew-tew-tew, in falling scale.

Raven: Aw-aw-aw-aw.

Today, the canyon is a music box of birdsong.

Lacking swallow- and swift-flight to wonder at, I feel the itch to move.   I pick up book, pen, canteen, and walk south, following the cliffs.   There’s something about keeping to the cliffs, treading the edge of my physical possibilities.   The perspective, for one thing—as close to a bird’s eye view as I get.   But by this deer trail and that flow of gravity, I find myself fifty feet below the canyon rim, then one hundred.   I realize I want to go down into the canyon and begin looking for a way compatible with the truth of my flightless condition.

Threading my way along slopes whose soils hang loose from weeks of freeze-thaw, dancing gingerly across fields of clattering, shifting rocks flowing in stone creeks however slowly toward the canyon floor, I slip, slide, and stumble my way down.   Indian paintbrush  flashes up  in scarlet flames from inside other plants, including a pigmy sage with tiny leaves and delicate stems.   Don’t know its real name.   I pick a couple leaves and breathe in their scent, sweeter and lighter than the much larger sage species growing along leveler ground.    It’s a rock creature, this little sage, up here on the canyon’s steep slopes with other species able to flourish the uneven terrain.   The paintbrushes foretell the arrival of hummingbirds, who follow red flower flames back and forth across hemispheres.

My knee, injured over a year ago, isn’t happy at all with how I’ve gone about this day, so I try to make short work of the descent without doing myself further harm.   I’m now about  a hundred  feet above the canyon bottom, in a bench zone where another spring flows toward the creek.   I have unanswered questions about this area but have already pushed past my time limit and have a couple miles to cross to get from home.  

After resting, I continue flowing down to the streambed and strike a cattle trail, a promising one.   Animals, like deer but especially cattle, prefer following paths of least resistance, so I can depend on the navigability of this trail.   I backtrack it, following the up-going hoof prints down, till I hear—then see—the creek.   As I pause to consider options for passage down the steeply eroded bank, I spot a well-used cattle trail running off in an intriguing direction.   Not the way home, but what’s around that bend?

Standing in quiet consideration, I become conscious of a thick humming noise.   The sound pulls me around abruptly and I look for the source.   Below I see a tree—no, a small thicket of trees—covered in a yellow haze of tiny blossoms.   Hundreds, maybe a thousand or more honeybees and smaller bees and flies work the split buds.   The honeybees’ thighs are bulging with yellow pollen.   Ants carrying objects flow out from the foot of this thicket, whose highest branches reach maybe twenty feet into the air.   Haven’t seen anything like this anywhere else in the canyon.   The trees—whatever they are—might be producing blossoms, but the whole thicket appears to be spreading from subsurface roots.

Worth seeing, this Thicket of Life.

Whatever is going on here, for the local bees this tree grouping is among spring’s earliest and most abundant providers.

I could stay here for a long time, considering this thicket, but I’m out of time. As I walk along the creek here looking once more like that thin marathon runner trying to beat time, thin skin  rippling over sand and pebbles, I think, €œThe beavers have not come this far down the creek. €   Moments later, I discover the most remarkable beaver dam I’ve ever seen, the archetypal beaver dam, the Platonic Ideal.  

Its curved berm, a good fifty feet long, has been stacked up three-to-four feet above the streambed.   Layer upon layer of rough but efficient latticing, woven of cottonwood and willow branches and bits from other trees, maintain its staying power.   Along the dam’s outer edge lie dozens of gnawed-off tree trunks and branches, ranging from three to almost five feet in length and up to fourteen inches in diameter.   None of the upstream dams  have this feature and at first I think this jumble of wood sloppy work or unfinished business.   But then I see that the ends of these branches and logs have been planted in the stream bed and bank at various bracing angles against the dam’s convex surface or laid such that an end presses down  on the dam’s crest, clearly a deliberate engineering choice, though I’ve never seen this kind of fortified damwork.  

A smooth pond of deep, green water—deep for desert—backs up behind the reservoir and curves out of sight, I’m guessing about two hundred feet.   Wow.   Wow.   None of the upstream beaver dams amount to anything like this, having between them walls modest by comparison, no more than twenty feet wide, woven from reeds and much smaller tree parts.    Such water impoundments pale next to the one stretching back from this structure.   Water runs over this dam’s spillway at what I imagine is the stream’s normal flow rate. From the dam the creek slithers south-southeast, running once more flat against its bed.

Talk about intelligent design.   I am in awe of how much beavers can do with so little water, of how much change they have brought to the canyon in the three years they’ve been here.   Depending on what happens during the summer months, I expect to see dry-boned, wry little Crossfire Creek become something of an Eden for the local tight-lipped flora and fauna.  

I follow the trail running along the western edge of the pond to discover I’m wrong about the length of the pool.   The backup runs at least two hundred feet beyond what I guessed, submerging what used to be the trail’s stream crossing beneath water approximately two feet deep for a twenty-foot stretch.  

As I stop to consider my options, I hear a hawk’s scree.  

A mourning dove’s coo-ah, hoo, hoo.  

Can’t cross without getting powerful wet, and I don’t want to get that wet this far from home.   Have to find another way.

Towhee.

Raven.

Dove.

Woodpecker’s duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh as it drums.

Taking de tour, I come across a wood rat’s nest (?), a mound of twisted sagebrush parts standing about eighteen inches high.   Also the odor of cat urine, bobcat probably, though puma is not out of the question.

I follow a cattle trail on an up-and-down byway till I meet up again with the main trail, stitched here with turkey tracks.   Now I’m tired and running out of water.   The rest of the path is familiar, but the next point where it crosses the stream contains the seed of another dam.   Soon this crossing, too,  will lie underwater.

Worn out and sore-kneed, the water in my canteen reduced to a rattling slosh, I work my way home.   As I pass the smaller upstream beaver dams, I think how fortunate I am to have moved to this canyon before the beavers arrived so that I could witness what unfolds from their prowess in hydraulic engineering.   A multiplying of fishes and plants, an arousal  of uncanny green.   A reduction of walkable ground.   The ATV trail, which remains outlawed, submerged and rendered impassable.   Shifts in animal populations as new creatures utilize the abundance of water and old residents undergo population surges.   Almost certainly, a lot more biting gnats and mosquitoes.

Yep, look at me here, in the right place at the right time.     I’m one lucky 53-year-old kid.

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