Coyote Crossing

I’ve posted this photo a few times. I’m posting it again now. What jumps out at you when you look at it? The light? The alpenglow on Clark Mountain in the background? The rocks, the Joshua trees? The blurry cholla?

Right now, for me, it’s the least conspicuous aspect of this photo that’s blazing out at me, and I am staggered.

See the dark gray bushes in the foreground, among the Joshua trees? That’s blackbrush, Coleogyne ramosissima, and I don’t think, after tonight, that I’ll ever look at it — or the Mojave — the same way again.

I’m working on a piece for the Desert Protective Council intended to convey the notion that the desert is not a renewable resource. People call paving desert wildlands for solar “renewable energy.” I’ve become increasingly persuaded that’s deceptive terminology, because while the sun may come up every morning the desert landscape that gets bladed to install industrial facilities that make solar power is actually rather fragile and very slow to grow back. And so I’ve been doing a little background research before drafting. There are certain things I intended to mention. The 12,000-year-old creosote clone in Johnson Valley? Check. Cryptobiotic crusts that grow an inch a century, and without which the desert would blow away? Check. I was working on finding some stats about Yucca schidigera, which grows in clumps that take centuries to form — there are 1,000+-year-old Yucca schidigera clumps all through the Mojave Preserve, and leafing through another few old scientific papers I thought I might want to look at, and then I saw a paper entitled Dynamics of Mojave Desert Shrub Assemblages in the Panamint Mountains, California by Robert H. Webb, John W. Steiger, and Raymond M. Turner which was published in Ecology, June 1987.

It mentioned blackbrush.

Webb, Steiger and Turner did a study of disturbed areas west of Death Valley. Some had been disturbed by human activity in the late 19th century, some by debris flows in the last couple thousand years, and some by debris flows of Pleistocene age. They determined the rate at which desert plants recolonize disturbed areas. They found that Coleogyne is very slow to revegetate areas from which it had been stripped.

Now as it happens, I’ve written about blackbrush recently in this very context, in a new Joshua tree book chapter I took to my writers’ group last week. Here’s what I said:

A stand of native blackbrush will take at least fifty years, and probably far longer, to recover from wildfire. That’s assuming there are no fires afterward, and there will be.

It’s a scary image, one literally seared into my brain. In 1997 I went to Bulldog Canyon, Utah, where a fire had knocked down a thick stand of blackbruush and Joshua trees a decade earlier. The difference between burned and unburned was stark after a decade. Where the land had not burned, blackbrush covered the land in an almost solid carpet. Where the fire had been, there was no blackbrush even after a decade.

This is important for a few reasons,  the nearest to my heart being that blackbrush is the most common nurse plant for Joshua trees, at least in the Mojave. Blackbrush is pesky to hike through, stiff and ornery and scratchy, and Joshua tree seedlings that germinate under a blackbrush canopy stand a good chance of escaping hungry rabbits and ground squirrels until they’re old enough to fend for themselves. Joshua trees also grow in places dominated by other shrubs, creosote probably blackbrush’s main rival in this regard. More often than not, though, a Joshua tree forest is actually a Joshua tree-blackbrush forest.

So what’s the big deal about reading a paper published a quarter century ago? Just this: it turns out I was off in my estimate of how long it takes blackbrush to regenerate. Way off.

Blackbrush can make nearly solid stands across many square miles of desert. The photo above shows one such, mixed in with a dozen or so other shrubs like Menodora and chollas and a few others. Hiking on Cima Dome is an exercise in getting to know blackbrush. There’s a lot of it there, in some places more than half the plant cover.

Webb, Steiger and Turner found that blackbrush took as much as “tens of thousands of years” — their words — to revegetate up to 20 percent cover in the areas they studied.

That’s one study. Something may have happened to the places Webb, Steiger and Turner examined to slow the growth of blackbrush. So I looked elsewhere. I am still collecting citations for the piece I’m writing. It would seem the consensus is that a thick, Cima Dome-style stand of blackbrush probably takes from 5,000-10,000 years to develop.

That unprepossessing, inconspicuous, actually kind of ugly plant in the photo is the base of a very specific ecosystem that may have taken longer to develop than the whole span of human history.

This may be hard to grasp, for for those of us raised on 19th-century ecological notions such as succession and climax forests and such. So let me put it this way:

Find the oldest coast redwood forest on earth, with trees three hundred feet tall and thirty feet thick at the base, some of them 2,000 years old. Then plat out a few square miles of the White Mountains’s bristlecone pine groves, home of the Methuselah tree and its ancient cohort, ranging up to twice as old as the redwoods. Then pick a random piece of Cima Dome, a couple miles in each direction, full of unprepossessing blackbrush.

Chainsaw all three. Bulldoze it all flat. Leave only stumps flush with the ground. Then let them all grow back at their own pace. When the new redwoods and bristlecones are considerably older than the ancient ones we have now, the blackbrush may still not be more than about halfway recovered.

It’s a blackbrush forest out there, and it grows inconsequential, short-lived Joshua trees out of it here and there, ephemeral companions, banacles on a whale. Though individual blackbrush plants in a stand may not be particularly old, a solid stand of blackbrush is an astonishingly ancient community.

This is how Webb, Steiger and Turner said it:

“Time span for [vegetative] recovery may be longer than past periods of climatic and geomorphic stability.”

They’re talking geological epochs here. They’re talking the blackbrush community beginning when there were standing lakes in the Mojave with sabertooth cats and ground sloths drinking out of them.

And we see it as less valuable than a few megawatts of power to run our swimming pool filters.

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Here following, 13 notable leading lines from works of fiction written in English, then fed into the Translation Party engine, chewed up and spit out. See if you can guess the origins of each. If you’re stuck, each result links to the original Translation Party page with the intact untranslated line at the top. If you’re not stuck enough, hover over each link and read my “helpful” “hints” in the ALT text.

Feel free to make astute guesses in comments. If you’re trying to puzzle stuff out, you may want to avoid the comments until you either finish or give up. 

1) If you are a lucky owner and his wife, I know you must be a universal truth for you.

2) All complaints, each member of an unhappy family is in the family, in their own way are satisfied.

3) You are my adventures, I have read that this does not know the name of Tomusoya.

4) Before, the original, in fact, all I Debiddokappafirudo course, children, parents and me, perhaps I might have to consider all of this, I for the first time, I know I’m sick feel that these type of apology. Truth.

5) If you are someone in my life in front of the station, in these pages is to be held to prove to prove my hero. 

6) Between the thickness of the village Bakkumarigan Barerumiraboru Reiautouon stairs.

7) Temporarily, something really bad in the morning, ¶ Joseph, must be bound to honor him.

8) Products - many countries and people, including a diverse group of people. Backup to please.

9) This watch is 13 days, his 4-year-old is a bright cold day.

10) It is desirable that God knows everything.

11) Since then, my father and his young, I was dizzy and vulnerability advice.

12) One person one or two, my assessment at this point in time six years, I have the true story of three patients who have two children one by one in one day a magnificent view of the one in the morning, the jungle I was on there.

13) 1 Shinverona, 2 Ming Ming 1,1,2, in this case, 1111111112, 111111111 number of blood, two or three, or a new 21-1, the dignity of the ancient enemy of domestic violence.

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1. Spend most of your time reading. Start as early in life as you can. Read everything — billboards, cereal boxes, books, letters, instruction manuals, correspondence course texts, magazines and affidavits. Drown yourself in a sea of sentences.

2. Keep track of the reading material that most moves you. Don’t worry if you can’t find commonalities among the various pieces at first. Don’t pick a favorite, or even a top ten. Keep it all in one big category: “stuff I loved reading.” Reread items from this category on a frequent basis.

3. Keep track of the work you least like reading. When you’re about to add a work to this category, spend some time thinking about why you’ve decided not to like it. If it’s simply a matter of the author being boneheaded and wrong, waste no more of your time on the work. But if it’s something else, figure out what that something else is. Pay attention to that. How does the writer fail you as a reader? Are there patterns within the writer’s work — consistently mangled metaphors, illogic, clunky language?

4. Edit other people’s writing. Take a class in editing at your local community college if you have to learn the basics, then volunteer your services at a non-profit or other community organization helping out with their newsletter or paper or magazine or website. Nothing teaches you what you want to avoid in your own writing as quickly as finding and correcting it in others’ writing. Nothing teaches economy of language more quickly than editing a 2,200-word article to fit it into a 600-word hole in a newsletter. As an alternative, take some of the books from step 3 and mark them up. Find the problems that caused you to dislike the work. Underline them. Describe them.

5. Go back to your pile of stuff you loved reading and do the same editing. Make positive comments where you feel moved. Note problems if you find them on rereading.

6. Pay attention to the world. Find something, or many things, that affect your emotions. It doesn’t matter what they are. Birds, stones, music, pastries, books, software, toys, bottle caps, medical procedures, politics, sex, other people’s writing. Whatever. It doesn’t matter except that it should matter to you. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of anyone writing about those things before. Just pay attention to them. Pay attention to how you feel about them. Note the nuances. Learn everything you want to know about them until you run out of time, information or interest. Keep doing this, with one thing or many things, until you die.

7. Eavesdrop. Sit in restaurants by yourself, or with another person who’s quiet. Be non-chalant and non-intrusive. Pretend to read a newspaper. Note the rhythms of conversation, the pauses, the phrasing and repetition.

8. Spend a couple years learning a new language. Nothing makes the inner workings of your native tongue more apparent than learning to think, and write, in a new one. If you already speak more than one language, add another to your repertoire. Pick different language families. If you speak English and Spanish, study Mandarin. If you speak those three, study Euskadi.

9. Start a blog. Commit to yourself to write and post 100 words a day on your blog. Feel free to write more than that if you get momentum going, but give yourself that daily deadline. Don’t edit before publishing, aside from a cursory once-over for embarrassing typoes, spelling and grammatical errors. Don’t worry if you have nothing to say. Don’t worry if you blather. Just: 100 words a day, at least, put up where people can see and respond to them. And replying to comments on your blog doesn’t count toward the 100-word total. Though you should reply to comments. You make friends that way, and writers need friends.

10. You pay attention to getting your spelling right, and to word choice. You pay attention to sentence structure. You need to take that up to the next level. Pay attention to paragraph structure as well. A paragraph is an idea. You’ve heard that said, if you’ve taken composition classes, and it’s basically true. But it’s more than that. A paragraph is not just a string of sentences in a logical order. A paragraph is a stanza in a poem, a verse of a song. It has an internal structure that has nothing to do with the information conveyed by the sentences. If all the sentences in a paragraph are the same length, you have a monotonous paragraph. Sometimes that’s what you want to do. Mostly it won’t be. Vary and balance sentence length within a paragraph. Put a long sentence in the middle of a series of short ones. Put two short sentences after a very long one. Language is music. Pay attention to its rhythm.

11. Read your writing aloud. Even better, have someone else read it aloud. Note where the reader stumbles. If it’s not over a word that’s hard to pronounce, then phrasing or sentence structure is probably the stumbling block. A sentence that’s stumbly when read aloud is a sentence that will distract the silent reader. Note the tripups and fix them. Smooth them flat. Sand them down. At the very least put up some caution tape. This is also a good way to learn about words you use far too often, phrases you’ve done to death, and concepts you haven’t illuminated sufficiently.

12. Write things. Put them away for a week. Don’t even look at them once in that time. Take them out again after a week and edit them. Look for stumbling block sentences, paragraphs that don’t quite follow, ideas that there’s an obvious better way to convey.

13. Remove the first and last paragraphs of each drafted piece altogether and see how the piece works without them. Most writers take a paragraph to crack their knuckles and warm up at the beginning of a draft, and you’ll find a perfectly good and more economical beginning at the start of the second paragraph. Taking a paragraph to wind down at the end is common as well. If, while reading your last para, you can hear the theme music swell in your head and imagine credits rolling, cut it out. There’s almost always a great ending line at the end of the previous para.

14. Explore indecision and doubt where they exist. Don’t try to explain the things you can’t explain. Doubt is way more interesting anyway. Find the weak points in your argument and acknowledge them. Hell, celebrate them.

15. There’s another level of structure above the paragraph. John McPhee once described some of his essays as having a structure like a lowercase “e.” They started out in a direction, made a wide expository loop, then ended up near but not precisely at the starting point, heading in more or less the original direction. Write a 2,000-word essay structured like a lowercase “e.” Then write essays structured like an “O,” an “S,” and a “Z.”

16. Take two wholly unrelated concepts. Write an essay about both of them. Make the transitions seamless. Write so the reader says “I never knew those two things had anything to do with each other, but it’s so obvious now!” Hint: Most of the effort lies in selecting the two things. The writing comes naturally.

17. Above all, enjoy your writing. Go back and reread things you wrote years ago and find joy in them.

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My poetry sucked back then, a sorry mix
of adolescent pain and ignorance,
dormant-tree metaphors, bleak sky and rain,
cold rain — my poems’ rain was always cold —
and I watched, staring out through leaded panes
at winter landscapes, shades of brown and gray
orders of magnitude more colorful
than my heart’s anemic range of hue.
That’s just the way it works, of course. That’s just
the way the adolescent’s heart is wound,
or how mine was at any rate, a wild
indignant void, alone, too smart by half
and less intelligent than the fabled
sack filled with hammers. I wore no scars then
except the loneliness they issued me
at birth, a sick and swelling sense of need
unmet, and here and there a festering
parental accusation of complete
and utter uselessness. No one had cracked
the heart that pined oblique in scattered sheaves
of onionskin, pale lines of type on them,
ten point elite, the Q and upper case
A nearly gone. My poetry sucked back then,
a sheer simplistic longing for a touch
I had not known, indignant that a world
of lovers did not recognize my worth
and come to me. It’s lost, it’s better lost,
all burned one angry night, all left behind.
I have forgotten nearly all of it,
stanza and line, my memory seared
then salted like some Punic battlefield
after a Pyrrhic love had conquered it.

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I got some hate mail today in response to an article I wrote seven years ago.

I have to admit that I was picking a fight with that article, so I deserve every bit of the hate mail I’ve received in response, then and now: every capital letter of it, every misused ‘YOUR” where there should properly have been a “YOU’RE” preceding the phrase “AN IDIOT,” all of it.

The article was written for my erstwhile Contra Costa Times (and nationally syndicated from there) column The Irascible Gardener. Today’s correspondent read it on Counterpunch, which fine ranty website I had forgotten I’d sent it to. In the interest of making my email inbox more engaging, I’m republishing it here once again.

The article is outdated. It concerns the centuries-old quest for a blue rose. Two years ago the Suntory Corporation claimed to have successfully engineered the first blue rose, a picture of which is embedded to the left. This claim was clearly an overreach. There have been plenty of conventionally bred roses that have achieved this shade. This shade is not even remotely blue. How do I know? I admit that color judgments are often subjective, that colors are not particularly amenable to precise definition with simple English words, and that one person’s azure is another person’s bluish teal.

Still, I think it’s clear that Suntory’s 2008 “blue rose” is more properly described as “lilac,” or “light mauve,” or something other than blue. As supporting evidence for my contention I offer this handy and informative chart:

My point being that while the article may be outdated in some specifics, it has held up well in its general point. Here it is. Send hatemail to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Blue’s Clueless

Accuracy and fairness are important tenets of journalism, and so let me start by saying that not all rosarians are insane.

This assertion may be hard for the non-rosarian to believe. Given the thousands of available plants with which a gardener might become obsessed, cacti or begonias or natives or heirloom peppers, why would anyone in his or her right mind choose the hybrid tea rose? This most disease-prone of plants is a pesticide salesman’s dream come true.

That’s not hyperbole. You can trust me: I used to sell pesticides. Were it not for hybrid tea roses, my employers might have gone bankrupt. There were regular applications of systemic insecticides. There were fungicides to control the ubiquitous fungal diseases: black spot, powdery mildew and rust. Occasionally, I’d sell soil fumigants to people replacing their old, ailing hybrid teas with newer, not yet ailing hybrid teas. Our repeat customers would develop whitefly infestations after insecticides had killed all the predatory insects in the garden. We’d sell them stuff to kill the whiteflies, which — as whiteflies only go away if you stop spraying — constituted a job security measure on our part.

And all for what? Rows of thorn-covered sticks poking oddly out of the ground. Sometimes a few leaves adorn the sticks, generally with unsightly spots on them. Why one wouldn’t just plant ocotillos and be done with it is hard to fathom.

“Why, the blooms, of course!” will cry the defensive rosarians in the crowd. And while hybrid tea blossoms pale before the brilliant red trumpets of an ocotillo, they’re lovely flowers. Mostly. If botrytis doesn’t get them, that is, and if black spot hasn’t sapped the plant’s vigor, and if rose decline hasn’t sent the entire garden into a downward spiral. And if you don’t insist all of them smell like roses. Some hybrid teas do carry a faint scent vaguely resembling the heady aroma characteristic of the genus from which they were whelped. There are trade-offs to consider here. With hybrid teas, one must, generally, choose between fragrance and what rosarians refer to as “disease resistance,” which means the variety being discussed will actually have some green leaf surface showing through the black spot.

It gets worse. So monomaniacal are hard-line rosarians that they permit no other plant to contaminate their gardens: not a sprig of alyssum, no turf, no spring crocus or narcissus may defile their rows of thorn sticks, all identical except during that fleeting season of sterile scentless bloom. Such rose gardens seem less garden than farmer’s field, like rows of brussels sprouts with plowed soil between them — except that brussels sprouts farmers plant cover crops, come to think of it.

Still, not all rosarians are insane. Maybe even most of them aren’t. Most that I’ve met lately, for instance, are rethinking that whole sterile soil between the rows thing, interplanting their roses with herbs, or spring bulbs, or even tomatoes. Old rose species are continuing the comeback they started about two decades ago, with vigorous, brilliantly-scented gallicas and dog roses gaining favor as tough, droughty hedges with tasty hips. The Lady Banks rose (Rosa banksiae) has become nearly ubiquitous in the Bay Area, and rightly so: a tough climber covered with long-lasting flowers, which — in the white form — even smells like a rose. In many nurseries, hybrid teas are now outnumbered by floribundas, which bear smaller, generally more fragrant blossoms on “disease-resistant” plants that actually seem to resist disease.

And promising new rose selections are hitting the nurseries as well. A dozen varieties of ground cover rose are for sale nowadays (“Red Ribbons” is a nice one, almost overplanted lately), and then there are such specialties as the deep-shade-tolerant native Rosa californica: light on bloom, but an interesting form in a traditionally hard spot to garden. As rosarians tend toward diversity in their plantings, and a sense of perspective in their garden plans—with even hybrid tea fanciers making room for other living things on their properties — the truly insane rosarian is getting harder and harder to find.

Which is why I was surprised, a few weeks ago, to read an item in the paper describing rosarians working with genetic engineers to create something never before seen in nature: a blue-flowered rose. Vanderbilt University researchers are splicing human liver enzyme genes into roses, hoping that the enzyme will turn the flowers blue. Apparently, black spot isn’t enough: these guys want roses to get liver spots as well.

In the story, San Francisco rosarian James Armstrong was quoted as saying “It would be nice to see a blue rose, and the only way that’s going to happen is through genetic engineering.” I too think it would be nice to see a blue rose, assuming that blue is the variable kind of color naturally produced by most plants, a result of a complex interplay of genetics and cellular chemistry, benign viruses and sun and soil and temperature. (If the white coats succeed in breeding a rose that looks as if it has been dipped in blue dye, then I can suggest an easier way to get there.)

Let’s look at the larger picture. I also think it would be nice to have salad vegetables that fertilize themselves, but I’m not about to ask Burpee to splice horse genes into my tomatoes so that I can plant “Manure Girls.” Part of growing plants—indeed, part of growing UP—is recognizing the limits within which one has to work.

True, gardeners do fight these limits as much as anyone, what with our tarps, mulches and anti-transpirant sprays, our lath houses and protected south-facing walls.

But it’s one thing to try to get your radishes to weather a cold snap. It’s another thing to try to get your radishes to grow peacock plumage.

Despite my radical environmentalism, I am not a knee-jerk “anti” when it comes to genetic engineering. I was excited when I heard of the new Vitamin-A-precursor-enhanced “Golden Rice,” intended to help alleviate nutritional deficiencies in developing countries. (Of course, it turned out a body would need to eat a hundred pounds of the stuff a day to get the beta carotene contained in a medium-sized carrot, but that’s beside the point.) I’m intrigued by thoughts of splicing malaria immunity into Anopheles mosquitos, which might save hundreds of thousands of lives a year. Where a world problem exists that could reasonably be alleviated by genetic research, I’m all for at least considering it.

That said, what, exactly, is wrong with a world that lacks blue roses? There are plenty of blue-flowering plants that do just fine in the same conditions as hybrid tea roses: right off the top of my head there’s ceanothus, bearded irises, lobelia, delphinium. Alyogyne flowers even look more or less like single roses.

The only reason I can think of for having any interest at all in a blue rose is really wanting blue flowers in your garden, but for some reason being utterly, pathologically unwilling to plant anything other than roses. But that would be… what’s the word I’m looking for?

Insane.

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And then when I woke up my pillow was gone.

When he came down to Los Angeles to live he had that head tilt issue, a common symptom of inner ear infections in rabbits. The corresponding dizziness made it hard for him to groom himself in the way he preferred, and it also meant that sometimes he just didn’t feel up to getting all the way to the litter box before taking a leak.

As a result, when Becky dropped him off, though she’d taken very good care of him, his undercarriage was in need of some maintenance. The horrible stuff stuck to his fur only took a couple days to get rid of. That was a priority: matted horrible stuff on rabbit fur can hide fly eggs, the presence of which (and subsequent natural phenomena I will not discuss here) is called fly strike, which is one of the frillion things from which rabbits can drop dead. I would flip him on his back in the crook of my right arm, work cornstarch into various clumps, slowly ease the cornstarch-lubricated clumps off of him, and then boil my hands. Every so often he would keep things lively by trying to escape. Putting rabbits on their back is supposed to “hypnotize” them, and Thistle, to describe whom there really should be a male equivalent for the word “dominatrix” — “carrot top,” maybe — does not submit willingly to such indignities.

Once that urgent issue was addressed, we started to address the more chronic grooming problems. His illness corresponded with a shed, and moving to LA — warmer than Pinole — started another, and so the little incipient mats that he could not curry off himself began to grow. I gave him a week or two to recover from the first round, then started on the mats.

Thistle is of the mini-rex breed. Mini-rexen have very thick, velvety fur. I tried for a while to work with a wire slicker brush like those used on cats, but it just wasn’t equal to the task. Looking online provided me with a bewildering selection of expensive mat cutter blades, bunny afro-picks, clippers and other such arcana, all of them rather pricy. Fortunately, I found a rather specialized tool in our junk drawer that worked perfectly.

The worst of the mats also required I subject Himself to the hated backflip. Eventually we got those worked out, a cubic centimeter of Gordian furball at a time. The trickiest ones were on his chest: he refused to let me in between his forelegs with the comb.

About two weeks ago I realized that I could reach his furry chest just fine with him just sitting on the floor. He even seemed to like it. What’s more, I found he would obligingly arch his back to let me comb his belly.

And so the grooming has changed from rabbit torture and humiliation to a pleasant daily routine for both of us. It’s calming for me to engage my primate need to groom something, it keeps him cleaner, and he gets attended to by a subordinate cringing on hands and knees. We’re all happier.

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Writing proceeds apace on the Joshua tree book. I’ve finished a chapter that introduces the dynamics of the grass-fire cycle, and am getting ready to dive into the next one without stopping for breath.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking spurred by Beth’s post here, on the fate of fine writing and small-house print publishing in the wake of the Internet. (Why yes. Nets can have wakes. I’ve seen them.) In particular, I’ve been thinking about this passage toward the end of her post, where she works toward a Conclusion To Be Expanded Upon Later:

It may be a radical concept, but I think serious poets and writers (especially those emerging from blogging and online grassroots communities, rather than the academia and the traditional literary world) need to gain the self-respect and confidence to refrain from publishing all their work for free online, so that their collected works in print gain in value and desirability.

She has a point. I’ve decided that with perhaps a couple exceptions along the way — work for which I’m soliciting specific feedback, maybe — I’m going to stop putting book chapters up on the site. Of course, if any of you would like to volunteer to edit drafts along the way, let me know.

Beth also says:

Readers need to support these efforts by buying the works of writers they read and admire on the web, perhaps using more of their book-buying dollars for short-run books and chapbooks, and using the library more for mass-market titles.

I couldn’t agree more. Her small press, Phoenicia Publishing, has just released Odes to Tools, a collection of poetry by our friend Dave Bonta. You should pick up a copy. And we still have copies of Walking With Zeke available for sale as well.

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