Creek Running North

There are places on the smooth red sandstone of the canyonlands where wind, or rain, or fracture planes of rock form small hollows, shallow bowls in the ground. The rains fill them and they dry again.

And on the black lava and red-stained granites of the eastern Mojave, or the Antelope Valley where the wind blows relentless, silty soil will gather, harden into caliche. It is a mineral mortar, calcium from the soil and carbonic acid from the rain. It grows imperceptibly beneath the surface. The soil may run a thousand feet down, a valley buried in two million years of gravel. But let enough caliche form, and it might as well be bedrock. The wind scours hollows here as well.

The white domes and whalebacks of Cima Dome, quartz monzonite exfoliating a sixteenth of an inch at a time, bear dry smooth holes an inch deep and thirty across, or six inches and five feet. The wind will fill these hollows with seeds and grass awns, coyote scat and yucca leaves and sand blown off the dry lakes. The wind will shift and clear them all away. I have seen near-identical scoured basins side by side, one with an inch of decaying humus, the other clean enough to lick.

Junipers grow in all these places.

I hiked one year over a Sierra pass. I had seen no one in a day and a half. The north face of the ridge was cool, and snow lay in the lee of the trail. On the south side, the sun. Red snowplants and columbine gave way to sagebrush. A half mile south of the ridge, a lone juniper stood at trail right. It was twenty feet tall and yellow. It was mostly dead. Contorted leader branches bared naked heartwood to the sky. A skein of deep cracks corkscrewed up the bole. One branch lived. It bore a few blue-green leaves.  It was the only juniper for miles. I considered standing there for a century to see if it moved.

At its base lay an improbable carpet of juniper berries, far more than that one branch could have borne in a decade.

Desert winds blow juniper berries into shallow rock bowls. The berries ferment, form soil. They are, to be precise, fleshy gymnospermic cones: they are not true berries. Once in a while a seed within will sprout, find purchase in the bowl of resinous soil. Once in a while the sprout will split the rock. I have walked off-trail across the Utah slickrock, sat down with my back to the distant road. I have seen a million juniper berries caught in a hundred thousand bowls too shallow for even a thin soil to form. The wind pins them against an edge. I have stuck my knife into the crevassed rock, pried juniper berries a hundred years old from their tombs. Pale yellow and brittle, they turned to dust in my hand.