In early 1999, Sam and I began writing a column called “Wild Rides, Wildflowers” for the Salt Lake Observer. I told the paper’s editor, Brooke Adams, that she had been ignoring gardening and sports: “Sam and I can fill that niche with a single column.” Brooke was skeptical, but finally agreed. Sam was harder to convince. “I’m no writer. There are too many words already in print. Count me out.” He relented only when he read my first piece. “That’s mostly horseshit you’ve written. If you’re going to write about me with your misbegotten talent, I’ll have to step in to protect myself.”
Five months later, when the bi-monthly paper went under (not our fault), we were picked up by Salt Lake’s monthly Catalyst Magazine, where Greta deJong published the column for more than three years.
Our intent was to ride a single portion of the Great Western Trail on the foothills of Mount Timpanogos again and again and again until we had seen its flora and fauna in every variation over the course of several years. We were looking for patterns, for meaning found only in repetition. We set out to catalogue our experiences with flora, fauna, weather, and geology, to see and hear and smell and taste everything along this trail so minutely, so sensitively, that our readers would be astonished. Unfortunately, we are aging men with tics and foibles that preclude much sensitivity. So we wrote about what we knew: fear of aging, male behavior patterns left over from junior high, anguish at the relentless “development” of wild lands in the West, and about what Thoreau described as “wild and noble sights…such as they who sit in parlors never dream of.”
Whether our story is read as a cautionary tale or an account of liberation will depend on whether the reader sees the authors as tenuous fathers, as inadequate husbands, as old and crotchety friends, as cantankerous Jack Mormons, as dedicated environmental activists, as heroic mountain bikers, or simply as that odd species called Masculinus americanus.
Scott Abbott
NOTE ON THE DIATOM IMAGES
While Scott and I were riding below magnificently bowed blue limestone cliffs and over quartzite outcroppings and through tenacious groves of scrub oak and past wildflowers beyond imagination, the beautiful Provo River was often in sight in the canyon below. In that swift water, a rarely witnessed botanical and geological drama was unfolding. I have spent my life studying that complex and shifting story, many of whose main characters are diatoms.
With a top-of-the-line Olympus microscope and a fine Nikon image capturing system, I took several hundred photographs of the organisms that exist and flourish in the river and nearby ecosystems. Each of the chapters of this book features a photograph of one such diatom (1/10 the diameter of a human hair).
Sam Rushforth
Here the land always makes promises of aching beauty and the people always fail the land.
Charles Bowden, Blue Desert
Art, science: to invent connections, matrices, balances, measurements, instruments of repetition, to give meaning. To fill the horrible void.
Jean Frémon, The Botanical Garden (translation by Brian Evenson)
26 February, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
On the foothills of Mount Timpanogos, in late February, it’s rare to find a dry and rideable trail. This winter, however, has been sudden, short, and moody. The jeep road at the mouth of Provo Canyon, climbing through dormant cliff rose and sage, skirting cliffs of muscular blue limestone, is passable today. Unfortunately, after three months of freezing and thawing the switchbacking trail is as soft as our bellies. Tough going for the first ride of the year.
Where the trail levels off, Sam drops his black carbon-fiber Trek to the ground and leans over to hide the fact that he’s sucking air. Even in extremis, he can’t take his eyes off the view. Utah Lake’s slate-grey waters slice the valley from north to south. The Oquirrh and Lake Mountains form the western horizon. Santaquin Peak and Mount Nebo dominate the southern end of the valley. Cascade Mountain is a massive snowy presence to the southeast. Provo Canyon cuts through the folded limestone to the east. The snow-covered escarpments of Mount Timpanogos, 11,749-feet high at the peak, rise abruptly above us.
I lay down my red Specialized Stumpjumper M2, a bike much heavier than Sam’s (as I often point out), and take in the view myself.
“Damn!” Sam exclaims.
“Damn!” I wheeze.
A flock of mountain bluebirds (Sialia currucoides), their color an exact match of the sky, bursts out of the sage. The birds call to one another as they sweep across the gibbous moon hanging heavy over the canyon.
“Gibbous,” Sam says. “I love that word. It means swollen or humped.”
“Etymology from a botanist!” I exclaim.
Sam replies with wounded dignity: “You have forgotten, Scott, that I am a professional botanist. I studied Latin for a full year. ‘Gibbous’ is from the late Latin through Middle English and is often used in plant and animal formal species definitions.”
Overlooking the final hills above the city of Orem’s last orchard, we hear and then see a motorcycle and a four-wheeler screaming across the rocky terrain. Dozens of mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) break in waves before the maniacs, retreating, splitting into smaller groups, rejoining, bouncing up hills, breaking through oak brush.
“You bastards!” Sam yells, and speeds down the hill. I join the breakneck descent, ready to protect Sam or the maniacs, whoever needs it most. The infernal combustionists see us coming and disappear around a switchback. On the flat, the two man-boys (Homo erectus, obviously not yet Homo sapiens) are waiting for us.
“What the hell are you doing?” I shout.
“It’s a misdemeanor to harass wildlife,” Sam bellows. “We’ll have you sons of bitches hauled into court.”
“We weren’t hurting them,” the four-wheeled maniac says flatly.
“The hell you weren’t,” Sam blusters. “It’s the end of the winter and they’re in compromised condition. The stress you’re causing will kill them. You understand the word compromised, dipshit?”
The steely eyes of the motorcycle rider reveal only disdain. His bike spits dirt as he leaves us standing. His buddy follows, blatting a foul exhaust.
We head home through an apple orchard, then cross 8th North into the Orem neighborhood where we both live.
“Those boys will find it hard to discount our well-reasoned arguments,” Sam deadpans.
“As do our children,” I add.
2 March, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
Sam has a rough ride up the steep track near the mouth of the canyon. In the early going, he falls twice, both times into oak brush (Quercus gambelii) that embraces him with a brittle crackling. At the top, mounting his bike after standing for a while on winter-matted grass to admire the view, he falls again. “That ties our record,” I tell him. “Three falls in a single ride. But neither of us has done it in a hundred yards before.”
“You know,” Sam says from the ground, “I think I fell that last time out of pure wonder. Who gets to witness this glorious landscape again and again and again?”
I point to green tips of new grass, drawn out of the earth by lengthening days,