I think most of you probably read about the Cedric Dempsey
cancer run, and I have found out that if organizations
participate in the run, the non-profit organization
will get 25% of the money they raise.
So the Poetry Center staff is going to participate.
And we're asking if some of you will sign up
to also participate for the Poetry Center and/or sign
up or sign up to make pledges.
There's a sheet that's going to be out on the refreshment table
tonight.
There's a 10K run.
That's not for me, though.
And then there's what they call the three mile Fun Run.
And it says that you can walk or skate,
so I'm planning to stroll.
And I hope some of you will want to participate.
Ila says we will run in traditional meters.
[LAUGHTER]
The student organization called among other things
is continuing its series that it began last year.
And their first reading will be Saturday night,
November 7 with fiction and poetry readings
by Karen Brennan and Tenney Nathanson.
That will be at the Central Arts Collective, 250 East Congress
Street, 8 o'clock.
They'll have refreshments, and they will ask
for donations but not a fee.
It's come to my attention that the new Poetry Center
hours are a well kept secret.
I'd like to share it with you.
We are open now on Mondays through Thursday evenings
until 9 o'clock.
So from 9:00 in the morning until 9 o'clock
except of course when there's a reading on Wednesday.
We'll close at 7:00 then.
So if you want a quiet time to read,
come to the Poetry Center in the evenings.
We've had a lot of people requesting
to listen to the tapes from the early readings from this term.
And they're all ready now if you want
to come in to listen to tapes.
Our next reading will be one week from tonight, November 11.
That's a university holiday, but we're having reading anyway.
And the reader is the novelist Harriet Doerr.
She's written a beautiful novel called
Stones for Ibarra, which is being made into a Hallmark
Hall of Fame television film at Old Tucson right now.
So we're very lucky to get Mrs. Doerr to come over and read
for us.
And then our last regular reading for the season
will be two weeks from tonight.
Six undergraduate students are reading in the University Art
museum, Lolly Butler, Anne Heed, Harry Kressler, Kim Kuykendall,
Kevin Lanoue, and Holly Welker.
And we added another reading in cooperation
with Women's Studies, the Southwest Center,
and the American Indian Studies, and that's by the Navajo poet
Luci Tapahonso.
So that will be Friday afternoon,
November 20th at 4 o'clock.
If you got a newsletter, the announcement
of Mrs. Tapahonso's reading is in there.
Tonight's reading is made possible by a grant
from the National Endowment for the Arts and from a grant
from the University of Arizona's Southwest Center.
Mrs. Zwinger will be at Rincon High School tomorrow afternoon
at 3:30 in the library talking with students and teachers.
And she will be at the Wilmot Public Library tomorrow
night at 7:00 giving a general talk on writing
entertaining questions.
Both of those sessions are free open to the public.
When we first contacted Ann Zwinger,
she said, "Why are you inviting me?
I'm not a poet."
And we said, "Because you're fine writer, and that's
why we want to hear you read from your work."
Her books are A Desert Country Near the Sea,
which is a natural history of the Cape region of Baja
California with Edwin Teale, A Conscious Stillness, Wind
in the Rock, which is the Canyon lands of southeastern Utah,
Run River Run: A Naturalist's Journey Down One of the Great
Rivers of the American West, and Land Above the Trees
with Dr. Beatrice Willard.
She's an illustrator as well as a writer.
She holds degrees in art history,
has served in naturalist in residence at Carleton College,
and since 1982 has been lecturing at Colorado College.
She comes to us from Colorado Springs.
I hope you'll stay after the reading to meet Ann Zwinger
and have some punch and cookies with us.
Ann Zwinger.
[APPLAUSE]
I love the sound effects.
Thank you for coming.
When Lois said I was doing a reading tonight,
I said, "What does that mean?"
I have never done a reading before.
And I must say, I'm leaning very heavily on Lois's advice
and anything that goes wrong, you may blame her.
Anything that goes right, you may thank me.
[LAUGH]
The only reading out loud of my own work that I've done
is not my reading.
When I wrote a book with Edwin Way Teale,
he told me that Nellie, his wife of 60 some years,
had read out loud every book he had written.
And that's 30 some books.
After he died, I went back and still go back to see Nellie,
and she reads large sections or as much as
is possible of what I've written for publication.
And it has proved to be one of the happiest of relationships
because hearing somebody else read what you've written,
you hear all the burbles.
You hear the things that flow easily.
And if something flows easily verbally out loud
it's easy to read.
You can't do it yourself.
It helps to hear somebody else do it.
Anybody who wants criticism, get a warm body
to read your work to you.
All of a sudden, you see things that you hadn't seen before.
You discover things that you wish you'd said,
and you discover a lot of things you wish you hadn't said.
In going over the books that I have with me tonight to read,
I felt like that old show on television:
will the real Ann Zwinger please stand up?
It was a pleasure to read things I wouldn't change.
It was unsettling to read things that I would like
to have changed, still would.
It was difficult to go back in time.
I'm a child of the present and the future.
In reading Beyond the Aspen Grove,
which was my first book, as I said to Lois,
I try to be courteous.
But there is a whole gaggle of for lack of a better
word, the little old ladies in tennis shoes who say to me,
"We wish you would write another Beyond the Aspen Grove."
I don't know the answer.
It's impossible.
You can never go back again.
My children were that age.
The place was the place it was.
I knew nothing about writing.
I was fortunate in having an agent who
was an editor, fortunate in having an editor who was a city
girl, as I said this afternoon, whose idea of wildlife
was the pigeon on the windowsill at Random House.
If I could explain something to her,
I could explain it to anybody.
The passages that I'm going to read you from Beyond the Aspen
Grove, one is the opening paragraph, which
is what the agent read whom I think
was interested in my doing the book.
And it was we had owned the land for a couple of years.
It demanded that I keep a journal,
and I'd never kept a journal in my life.
I have to say I had not written.
I'd done editing, but I had not written.
And it's odd that this place in the mountains, this
40 acres northwest of Colorado Springs
evoked some unknown, something that
said, "This is a time that's precious and special."
In fact, Edwin Way Teale wrote that nature writing
is like preserving a fly in amber, and it's a lovely quote.
And I will come to that in A Desert Country.
But Beyond the Aspen Grove opens:
As many times as I have opened this gate,
there is always the sense of coming home,
a feeling of belonging.
No matter that we spend only part of our year here,
this wild mountain land is home in a way
that no city house could ever be.
The familiar vistas are framed through the gate, always
constant, yet always changing.
The gate creaks as I walk it open,
and I unconsciously note the progress of the season.
The rough notched curve of the meadow, the sentinel Ponderosa
pines and Douglas firs, the vast stretch of sky
are always there.
But where there was snow last week,
there is today a delicate pasque flower so pale
as to seem formed of snow crystals.
Where the meadow was sere and bleak,
bearded with dry grasses, today wild candy tuft and early
daisy sprig the returning green.
Or in the warming sunshine of summer,
the magenta and silver green Colorado local wheat
is in full bloom in the middle of the road
like Thoreau's flower between the wagon tracks.
Or where there was a meadow ablaze with purple asters,
there's now snow a foot deep.
This land is a place of all seasons.
For even in winter, there is a promise of spring and in spring
the foretaste of summer.
The white of snow becomes the white of summer clouds.
The resonant green of spruce becomes the green head
of drake mallard.
The gray of rock and lichen endures in the gray
of lowering winter skies.
The same orange red of Indian paintbrush
borrows the blackbird's wings and stains
the western tanager's head.
Here, part of each season is contained in every other.
The tight woven knowledge from all our yesterdays at this land
is held in the stern simplicity of tree and sky
and flower and rock, a certainty of tomorrow.
The theme of home is one that I discover
today runs through my work.
One of the things that I learned in writing this book
was about the small creatures having grown up
as a kid who hated camp, I did really some fantastic creative
writing at the ages of eight through 15
trying to persuade my mother of the numerous ails and ailments
that I'd come up with so I could go home from camp.
One of the things I hated particularly was insects.
That I have since become an amateur entomologist
may say something for early upbringing.
Although I may have started out early in the morning
with definite plans to go further afield,
it is simply too much of a temptation
to stop and watch the ants.
They cope with such tremendous burdens dragging pieces of food
as large as they are over log sized pine needles and around
skyscraper mushrooms poking and pushing
with such dedicated persistence that I,
who complain about carrying wood for the stoves,
feel like a sluggard.
Often, the ant I watch is yards from home.
At leaving the nest, the ant receives
the image of the sun at a point on its retina.
By keeping the image in the same place as it travels,
it manages a straight line.
Like Hansel and Gretel, it lays down
a trail for the return journey, a path of formic acid, which it
can smell through its antennae.
I draw a finger across the soil in front
of the ant destroying the continuity of the smell path.
The ant pokes about probing with its antenna
until it stumbles on the homeward way.
Some hills are almost a yard across and half a yard wide.
Pellets of excavated earth formed cone-shaped mounds
surrounding the nest entrance.
These hills are inhabited by members of a species of formica
who make their passageways near the surface burrowing
deeper in winter to cluster in a compact, heat conserving ball.
Mound building is typical of western ants.
The orienting of the hill entrance toward the greatest
amount of instant sunlight utilizes all
the available solar heating.
A glance shows that none are built on the opposite heavily
shaded slope.
Banding together as a colony helps
to assure sufficient food since all members contribute
to the food supply.
The social organization of a colony
gives ants greater efficiency and even control
over other insects or situations which
might otherwise destroy them.
In each colony there are several egg laying females.
The first eggs hatch into sterile workers
fed on the saliva of the queen.
The worker caste as with bees seems
to result from an inadequacy of protein during larval life.
The stratification of a caste system
engenders a high degree of sterility.
While watching the ants clambering around the hill out
of the corner of my eye, I see a tiny drift of sawdust
falling out of the bottom of a large log.
That needed a comma.
That should have been: while watching the ants climb
clambering around the hill, comma,
out of the corner of my eye.
The mound is only an inch or so high but tiny
fragments of wood drop with hourglass persistency
on the ground.
The large black carpenter ants are also
at work in the early morning warmth.
They operate on old logs on which the bark is loosened
but the wood still fairly firm.
Unlike termites, they do not eat the wood,
they excavate for living quarters,
but carry each bit out to the entry,
dropping it on the ground.
They feed on nectar and must find a heady harvest
in this small valley.
Watching the peregrinations and excavations of the ants
reminds me of André Fabre, an 18th century
French entomologist and teacher whose fondest hope
was to own a parcel of land where
he could observe his insects.
He made up for his terrible personal poverty
with richness of observation and insight.
He wrote a delightful account of ants over a century ago.
And the tiny tireless foragers of the forest
have meaning for me because of what he wrote.
Beginnings are important, but perhaps endings are more so.
It's a tying up, a tying off, and a tithing.
Trying to write an ending is the easiest part
of the book and the hardest.
I took a rock that was out from shore in the lake as a place
to sit and see what went on all around that
summed up this land as I had come to know it.
We have tried to understand the patterns of the land
at constant friendship.
We have hoped to change it as little as possible.
After all, we are only visitors to this mountain land.
But to keep this mountain land untouched
has meant that we have had to partially fence it
with a fence almost as much psychological as physically.
And this seems incongruous.
Seems to be the only way in which wilderness lands can
be saved.
Only within the periphery of the fence
is there time to learn, to understand, and to cherish.
My interest in this vast world of nature
began when we came to this land with the finding
of a new world, a sense of discovery, a sharing.
But somewhere in the learning came commitment.
The realization that in the understanding
of this natural world comes the maintenance of it,
that with knowledge comes responsibility.
The late asters and the wild chrysanthemums
bend and twist in the sharp freshening wind.
Fire weeds' cottony seeds skitter
across the lake's surface, diagramming the darting gusts.
The chilliness of the wind stiffens my hands and tugs
at the pages of the paper so I cannot draw.
An aster seed blows into the lake joining a fleet of aspen
leaves.
Cinquefoil, geranium, and strawberry leaves
are burnished bronze red.
On the south shore, a few aspens hold the last golden leaves.
The rhythm of their quavering is doubled to semi quavers
by the lake's reflections.
The year is on its way to ending.
It is time to go back, light the wood stove, and begin supper.
When Beyond the Aspen Grove first came,
two books are published.
One goes to-- your editor gets both of them
and being kindhearted, he puts you out of your misery
and sends you the second one.
It came in the afternoon mail.
My youngest daughter had just come home from school.
The telephone rang.
I answered it-- she answered it, and she came back
and said it's for you mom.
I had set the book down on the table.
She had a glass of grape juice, and she put it on the book.
I came out and I said, "Oh!"
And she looked at it, and she said, "Oh Mom, I'm sorry.
I was afraid it would leave a mark on the table."
[LAUGH]
That jacket is my most, which incidentally,
was drawn at 3:00 AM in a New York hotel room,
that jacket is my most prized possession.
It says where my priorities are.
The next book was a book on the alpine tundra of the United
States.
The third book, you're not supposed to have favorites,
but this I think probably is mine.
There is a family feeling still in it, but it's a difference.
My family changed.
My children were growing up, going away from home.
I had time to do things that I had not had before.
The children were there but in a different way,
and they weren't long and were no longer children.
And this book marks my growing up in a way,
and perhaps that's what people don't like,
that there is life after Tuesday's bridge club,
and it's more fearsome than a four no-trump doubled redoubled
and not made.
Run River Run made me conversant with living out of doors.
One week, I had three weeks on the river.
When I wasn't ready to get off, I
knew that something had happened.
This book also has back notes, documentation,
and a seriousness of purpose, which I don't think
was there in Beyond the Aspen Grove.
I don't know what the change was, why it was,
and frankly, I'm not sure I will ever
know because I haven't really taken time to think it through.
I'm not sure I really care or want to know.
What's important to me is to keep on working,
to stretch and to learn and to grow.
And Run River Run taught me that.
And that's how I tend to live my life.
Spare me the self-examination and the introspection.
That's what makes writing a lousy business.
I picked a couple selections from the upper river
and a couple from the lower river
because the river is so different.
The upper river is a clear running trout stream.
The lower river is a wide, brown silt laden smooth river.
This is up north of Pinedale, Wyoming.
In smooth water, the bowman is no more than a galley slave.
This is a canoe, but in rapids to be in the bows,
to be dripping wet, involved in more action
than there is time to react to.
In running rapids, the object is to keep
the boat parallel with whatever current it runs in.
And the only way to maintain control
is to go faster or slower than the current.
The first stroke not to learn for river rapids
is the forward stroke.
For this only impels the canoe into bigger trouble quicker.
The rush of the current itself adding enough acceleration
into disaster without helping it along.
The most important strokes are the backstroke
and two sideways ones called a draw and a pry.
With a draw, the paddle is put out directly
to the side of the boat, blade parallel to the gunwales,
and drawn in flat toward the canoe.
It pulls water beneath the canoe,
and the bow slips toward the side
upon which the draw is made.
A pry accomplishes the opposite.
Neither is natural movement, and in practice, I
add more water to the canoe than I do direction.
In a rock garden rapids such as we prefer to prepare to run,
ideally the bow spots the rocks.
The stern often cannot see.
Draws or prys to avoid them with a nicety of judgment.
For a vast displacement skews the canoe about,
making it vulnerable to being caught sideways
in the current, at which point the river makes a decision.
At this moment, the canoe looks very frangible.
And I wish I were back upstream reading
about running rapids in a book.
The penalty for hanging up on one of these rocks
is a capsize.
There have been times on the river when I have thought
a good capsize was quote, "writer's experience."
But when I actually confront this whitewater,
self-preservation comes first.
These rocks look like bone breakers.
I don't want to lose my duffel or my drawing
pads or my notebook or see the paddle
splinter or the canoe smashed.
There are whitewater canoes with watertight aprons,
but we are running in a standard open canoe that
can ship large amounts of water, immediately rendering
it cumbersome and maneuverable.
Mathematically, in a 10-mile-per-hour current,
which is a good fast rapid, the force broadside on a canoe hung
up on a rock can be up to 10,000 pounds.
The swiftness of a flip is incredible, quicker
than one's mind can react.
No amount of intellectual awe at big figures
prepares me for the emotional instantaneous
of that force in its power.
More apprehensive than experienced,
more over-reactive than precise, I miscalculate.
The bow barely ticks a monster rock, monstrous rock
but sufficient to break our controlled forward motion,
and the canoe swings broadside against it
with a ferocity that nearly throws me out of the boat.
Water piles up against the boat from upstream.
Pressure surges against the hull.
The canoe hangs there tilted, alternate wedging tighter
and rocking loose, water rushing too fast and too deep for me
to be able to step out into the stream.
Why we do not capsize I will never know.
Perhaps it is because the canoe is
loaded, giving it a stability that the lighter one does not
have.
But mostly it's because of Perry who keeps his head
and does precisely the right thing at precisely
the right moment.
He pivots the boat.
We slip free and ferry it ashore.
I'm trembling so hard I can barely crawl out of the canoe.
But running whitewater is like riding a horse.
If you fall off, you better get right back on.
The water for the rest of the morning is fast moving,
but the rocks are neither so large nor so close together.
The slope of the channel not so steep
and the water not too deep to stand in if need be.
It's good running, great for confidence.
I can see the rocks pillowing up in front
of bouncing back waves.
The rhythm of manipulating the bow
becomes an elation as the canoe skims by easily
and safely, rock after rock.
As we swing close to the bank, a mallard hen
springs out followed by three golden tan ducklings that
rock and lurch downstream in an effort
to keep up with their mother.
And I don't know whether I'm laughing at them or just
for the relief of not having capsized
or the joy of being on this river,
this glorious beautiful river.
But all is not fun and games.
Then the wind hits.
Late afternoon sunlight glares off the water.
The flat surface seems to form a suction
on the bottom of the canoe and it's difficult to paddle.
Not only does the wind catch the canoe,
but when the wind is against the current,
the main velocity of the river is deeper beneath the surface
and therefore of less help just when needed most.
My eyes feel like two burnt holes in a blanket.
It's an old expression of my mother's.
I wear my hat at an angle Maurice Chevalier would have
envied in order to block the low slanting sun rays,
but I cannot keep the sun off my face,
which is beginning to feel like raw hamburger.
My hat keeps blowing off in spite of being tied on as tight
as a garrote.
In the shade of the overhanging willows under which we take
shelter are mosquitoes.
Disturbed from virtuous rest, they
emerge screaming like viragos and take immediate vengeance.
They infiltrate sleeve plackets, bite through my shirt,
get under my jacket where I can neither swat nor scratch.
The life jacket binds across the back of my neck.
The muscles across my shoulders burn with fatigue.
The river swings right to flow beneath a 30 foot high
sandstone cliff.
On the cliff's shaded face are hundreds of cliff
swallow nests looking like short-necked jugs pointing down
at an angle, all full of young.
Along this bluff on the outer curve of the meander,
the water is light and golden green.
The suction on the hull breaks.
The bow springs up, and in the cool shadow,
it could be the beginning of morning.
Anyway, I think I love that river.
Browns Park was a fascinating part
of the river because of so much history.
It was one of the places where Butch Cassidy used to hang out.
And it was protected.
The posses couldn't come in there
because it was ringed with mountains, and if anybody came,
everybody knew nobody told.
It was the real Wild West.
Weather is blowing in from the west,
thickening clouds tarnishing the silvered river.
The vertical knife edge bays of the Gates of Lodore
now loom on the horizon, raw and treeless, brighter
than the olive green mountains.
To the north, a single building stands on a low river terrace,
Lodore Schoolhouse.
A rough road leads through a leggy cottonwood grove
to the school and the graveyard beside it.
A large marble headstone marks the grave
of Harry Hoy and others.
The graves are heaped with big river stones grown over
with cheatgrass and evening primrose, some fenced,
some not.
Some are identified with simple metal markers
from the mortuary in Craig, Colorado.
A metal frame with a stamped metal plaque fitted in
or a cracked glass over a slip of paper.
Wind worries the grass.
A once vivid fuchsia plastic rose
now faded nearly white pitches across the ground, revolving
to show its original color.
There is a constant, restless whispering,
a snatching sound in the wind.
The soil is pale and rocky and hard,
laid under a wide sky and an unquiet wind.
The building is not the original schoolhouse
where Speck Wellhouse presided over the bar at dances,
and Herbert Bassett collected guns at the door.
Browns Park children now go to a newer school
on Vermillion Creek.
Although this building is still used for hoedowns and meetings.
Today, it stands empty.
Inside, a forlorn still life of pot-bellied stove, metal card
table, and plastic spoons.
Outside, a white plastic cup over
ends across the ground with a scrabbling sound.
The hitching rack stands in front, weathered gray,
where reluctant children no doubt
left their transportation.
I stand on the porch facing out to the southwest.
The river shimmers below.
The cottonwoods rustle.
The Gates of Lodore stand sharp and forbidding but enticing.
The river dominates the landscape
fluid, evocative, animated.
How any child could repeat multiplication tables
with this Pied Piper view is beyond me.
The lower part of the river is quiet and lazy.
Lots of Fremont Indian ruins, lots of time
to get off and walk.
One of the delights of a river evening,
especially after churning up sandstone and shale ledges
and poking around dry silt terraces,
is a rinse in the river.
There is a place below Turks Head which at high water
fulfills the requirements of privacy
and a safe place out of the current.
The water temperature in May is hardly tepid at 62 degrees.
But the air is warm.
There are two table rocks, firm sandstones
upon which I can stand and safely submerge letting
the water swirl around me.
In water that is so opaque, it is a matter
of some faith to sit down.
The current nudges but little in this back eddy
yet it is still easy to feel the erosive power
of a big springtime river.
The river sounds ear close, seated eye level
with the surface, I feel like an apprentice lorelei,
learning the siren sounds of the river.
The silt wells and fumes, voluminous and soft,
just beneath the surface.
It's fascinating to discover that by moving a hand just
under the water, I can evoke all kinds
of kaleidoscopic patterns.
This silt settles out of a container
of river water within 24 hours.
But the remaining water looks like clam juice colored
by finer particles that do not precipitate as
quickly in response to gravity.
These extremely small particles are
colloidal since they have more surface compared
to their volume and so a specific gravity less
than water.
They remain in suspension almost indefinitely,
settling out only if they cluster together
to form larger particles.
Gravels in a stream may fall out in less than a second
when the velocity drops.
Colloidal particles may remain for decades.
The Green River at this time of moderately heavy runoff
is probably carrying more than half its silt load
for the year.
The average load held in suspension by the river
is estimated at 19 tons a year plus 2.5 million tons
dissolved.
The silt content near the mouth of the Green by volume
was once estimated at 5%.
It seems a minute amount, but evenly distributed
by the current, it forms an effective screen,
creating the year round turbidity
in the river from the Gates of Lodore south.
The sandpaper surface of the rock beneath my feet un-slicked
by algae provides a sense of stability
and a flowy swirling moving world.
How to explain the pure delight of being here?
Some of it no doubt stems from the fact
that after a day of unrelenting sunshine,
almost any kind of ablution feels welcome.
But there is an ineffable sybaritic pleasure
beyond the necessity.
The cool slide of water slips down the back of my neck,
down my arm, drips off my elbow, picks patterns
on the river's surface.
The water that tugs around my ankles
is pure hedonistic enticement, issuing
a reminder of down river delights
in a branch that bobs by on its way to other appointments.
After seeing ruins all day, I'm extremely conscious of those
who came here before me.
So too, on a warm spring evening 1,000 years ago,
someone must have stood like this, soothing calloused feet,
cactus scratched legs.
I feel no time interval, no difference
in flesh between those who stood here then
and who stand here now.
The same needs exists for the essentials of food and shelter.
The same need to communicate, to put down symbols for someone
else to see, and so I cannot help but believe the same
response to cool water and warm sun and heated rock
and sandstone on bare feet.
The last rays of the sun keep it warm enough to air dry.
The sun hangs for a moment above the cliff.
As it disappears behind the rim, the air cools,
and yet it is not cold.
Maybe time to robe and leave, but not yet, not cold yet.
As long as I can I stand ankle deep, without civilization,
without defense, going back to self,
as long as there is yet enough warmth in the air
to respect needful body temperature.
So long as possible, I stand here submerged, physically only
to the ankles, psychologically to the base of being.
Widening Circles, my next book, was
a book about the canyons of southeastern Utah.
When in the Rock: a funny book.
Either you like it or you don't.
The organization isn't what I would have preferred.
There were five canyons and it's bing, bing, bing, five canyons.
I would have done it east to west.
My editor chose to begin with Grand Gulch, which
is the Big Bang.
It's a big canyon, well known.
I would have preferred to have it in sequence
next to the last as the climax of these canyons
and to end with the personal unknown canyons, the two
little ones, Whirlwind Draw and Steer Gulch.
I still go yearly as a consultant on Sportyak trips
with wild and scenic expeditions.
Sportyaks for those of you who don't know,
it's a double shell plastic bathtub.
They are homely, look awkward.
But once you have done a river in a Sportyak,
you'll never go back to a raft.
It's your own boat.
You carry your own equipment.
You are on your own.
You read the rapids.
You run the rapids.
If you flip, you flip.
It makes you very close to what's going on with the river.
And each year as we go by, and I see the mouth of the canyon
up there, it is just pure nostalgia.
My life's blood is back there where my being became sandstone
and where the sandstone has a persona, and that's weird.
I'm going to edit read from the last chapter.
One thing that Lois told me was that I wasn't supposed
to read longer than five hours, and I'm
going to try and respect that.
[LAUGH]
And so I'm going to have to do some quick editing.
Now that I've marked up the book.
This was my first solo.
I have wanted to make one last trip back to these canyons
by myself, but in this drought year
it is not wise to go alone.
However, there's plenty of water at the foot of the hot Honaker
trail, the whole San Juan River.
And the trail itself is just around the corner
and upstream from the mouth of John's Canyon.
While I've walked the Honaker trail several times
during other explorations of the canyons from plateau
to river and river to plateau, this
is the first time I've gone it alone
to camp down by the river.
I've looked forward to this time,
and yet as I sit here at the top I know a tinge of apprehension.
I'm not quite sure what I expect.
And now that my ride is long gone and it's too late,
and I'm committed, even why I wanted to do this.
But here I am quite alone, and I should
start before the sun bathes the whole slope,
and I have to cope with heat along with everything else.
Yet I sit a moment longer because the view
is so glorious.
It looks down the throat of Monument Valley from up there.
The Honaker trail runs down the north cliff of San Juan.
The two inches worth of river that I can glimpse from up here
are just about the proportion of water to land in this country.
Across the river are tiered cliffs, mirror images
of what I shall be walking down.
Passage looks absolutely impossible.
In 1904, Henry Honaker bossed the building
of this trail down to the river.
He'd gotten a permit from San Juan County
to do some 11 years-- to do so some 11 years previous in 1893.
Prior to that, he and his brothers
had run a daily stage between Cortez, Colorado and Bluff,
Utah.
And before that, he lived in the Mancos area
and helped the Wetherills run their cattle.
Gold fever was in full swing on the San Juan
when Honaker envisioned an access road from the river
to the canyon rim that would aid in transporting
all that heavy placer gold he was going to find.
The first horse taken down the trail fell off the narrow path.
And after that, supplies were lowered over impassable cliffs
by rope.
The anticipated gold boom came to naught.
Only some $3,000 was ever recovered, the flower gold
that was more trouble to sift out than it was worth.
The trail is-- the trail as a formidable piece
of rough engineering and cuts through tight strata
that are the type section for the Honaker trail
formation surely a kind of immortality
undreamed of by a hardworking businessman
with his eye on the dollar.
I checked my gear one last time, a useless gesture since what
I don't have I don't have.
And one thing I've forgotten is halazone tablets.
So I'll have to boil drinking water.
But at least the river will provide plenty of that.
I have full water bottles for going down,
and I plan to eat lunch halfway down Horn Point,
a sharp promontory that juts out 30 feet or so toward the river
with a precipitous drop on either side.
The view there is unparalleled and the next best
thing to hang gliding without the worry of landing.
I have enough food to last a week if need be
and the usual gear of sleeping bag mattress et cetera.
And it strikes me as grossly unfair
that no matter what my size, I still
have the same amount of basic gear
as someone a foot taller and 60 pounds heavier.
I reach Horn Point, first thing I do just
get lost and miss the trail.
And then I build cairns.
I build cairns, cairns so I can find my way back.
I reach Horn Point where I intended to have lunch
sitting out on the exposed promontory,
but the wind is gusting so fiercely
that I think perhaps wisdom is the better part of valor.
I am suddenly extremely conservative about reaching
the end of the promontory.
To get there, I must leap over a three foot
wide crevice that looks if it goes clear through to China.
So instead, I moved to the dugway
on the north side of Horn Point, a formidable job of road
building.
Honaker constructed a ramp a precipitous 100 yards long
by blasting out rock above and using it as fill material
below.
Near the top of the dugway, I sit
on the limestone steppe near the top
and without taking my pack off, fish in the side pocket
for a can of vegetable juice.
Somehow, I'm more thirsty than hungry,
but the warm juice isn't very good.
Thinking to be protected here, I find
it unpleasant to have the wind still
swirling dust and sand which unerringly stings me
in the face.
The long Horn Point is a near mile long traverse
going due north along a narrow, narrow ledge that drops off
sharply rimmed by a sheer cliff 50 feet below
and then who knows how many feet below to the river.
I keep my eye on the path and ignore the drop to my left.
Suddenly, a wave of nausea makes me stop jolted.
I turn to press the wall, press my hands firmly on the rock
and close my eyes until the nausea subsides.
When I open my eyes, I get another shock.
I can't believe those are my hands in front of my nose
splayed out, clawed into the rock,
tendons rigid, fingernails broken to the quick,
scraped, a fresh scratch beaded with tiny drops of blood
swollen from cut off circulation from the pack straps.
I recognize the hand shape but not the dirt under the nails
or packed in the cuticle.
I read them --not from the palms pressed so close against
the rock upon which my life seems to depend at the moment,
observing heart and lifelines and stars of fate--
but from the scruffy backs, abraded, unladylike,
rough as the rock they cling to, sunburned, calloused,
and in them, I recognize a different reality.
I can go home, clean up, buff the nails, repair the damage,
put on the lotion, make them look better.
But these ill used hands clutched into the abrasive wall
belong to another place I live where I am also
at home, another way of life whose isolation and quiet
have become a necessity.
That's a long way and Beyond the Aspen Grove.
Become re-arranged very quickly down here.
The most important thing still is setting up camp
and making certain that I have drinking and cooking water,
things one rarely thinks about in the city.
Since I have but one pot to cook in,
the logistics of boiling water and cooking
have to be worked out in orderly fashion.
I fill the cooking pot with water for dinner.
The contents look like coffee with too much cream in it.
Still, I'm no worse off than the Mormon settlers
who remained in Bluff in 1885.
When they carried water from the river,
they had to settle the silt overnight
with cottonwood ashes.
While I wait for the river to settle, I begin to sketch,
even though sand occasionally drifts across the page.
More than anything else, drawing sets me
at peace with the world.
Perhaps it is the intense focusing outside oneself.
There are handsome things to draw here,
such as the saltbush with interesting spin patterns
and wide papery bracts ruffled around the seeds
and all the things I never seem to have time
for on a long trip.
While dinner cooks-- no, nearby is a large boulder just
the right slant for a backrest against which I lean.
As I take notes, a faint scribbling sound
just louder than my pen makes me look around.
A collared lizard about 10 inches long appears
at the top of the rock, head washed with orange, black,
and white--
head washed with orange comma black and white tan collar
comma brownish gray back tail about one fourth
of its total length, a striking creature.
It perches on the rock just above my head,
remaining there as long as I write,
lunging and grabbing tidbits out of the air, head gleaming
as if gilded, red line to mouth opening and snapping shut,
showing formidable teeth.
Collared lizards are pugnacious and have teeth
big enough to inflict a painful bite if caught
and handled uncautiously.
And those teeth are generally in good
fighting trim since new teeth are
produced throughout its life.
Old teeth are shed in sequence in
a complicated but discernible order
so that every other tooth is a strong new one.
Because it is a relatively large lizard,
it requires more time to warm up than tiny ones and risks
a longer period of vulnerability before it's completely agile.
It likely had a period of feeding this morning,
shuttled about to keep its body temperature
at the optimum in the heat of the day,
and now feeds again in the warm of the evening
before going down for the night.
I have a whole list of things I'm
going to do when I'm confined to my wheelchair,
and this is one I'm not going to be able to do,
but I heartily recommend it to everybody.
Where the shoreline is webbed with tamarisk roots
I do not enjoy the flora.
When I am an old lady and have nothing else to do,
I am going to walk every river in the Southwest
and uproot all the upstart tamarisks
and let them float down to Lake Powell.
To get in practice, I pull out 72
and cast them down the river.
A useless gesture since they will
be replaced by 20 times 72.
They are weedy, grasping trees that form ugly thickets and are
fire hazards and introduce pests that adds nothing
to the beauty of the river.
Eight species were brought in by the US Department
of Agriculture between 1899 and 1915.
And now they choke small watercourses
in their greedy shallow roots.
And the dense shade of their thickets
makes it impossible for native plants to get started.
They have vapid blooms that non Westerners are always
oohing and ahing about, blossoms that ripen into thousands
of tufted seeds with a vicious viability
so that they quickly clutter up the landscape.
No apologies to any tamarisk lovers, sorry about that.
Sitting here in the darkening evening,
I feel a sadness that perhaps the time I have walked here
has been a golden time of wilderness enjoyment
before there were too many people, a time
of freedom, joy and living in a simpler way that
gives meaning to all living.
Will those who come after me know what it's like to wake
up in one of these canyons?
Hear the tentative murmurs and scratchings,
feel the sixth singing sense of quickening heartbeat,
of hunted and hunting, of life that shuttles and scuttles
and plods and leaps, leaving tracks to tell who went here
and sometimes why.
And the wind erasing them so that it is only the cool sand
that one ever remembers.
Darkness comes so softly now.
The cliffs seem to retain the last light of day
as they retain the heat of the sun and give it back at night.
The willows are in silhouette, but rose and tan and gray still
glow on the cliffs.
Silver still shimmers on the river.
Stars appear slowly, only the bright ones,
and then galaxies of lights flood this clamshell horizon
sky.
I don't think I've ever sat and watched
for so long, hypnotized with the splendor of this time,
this place, this sense of being.
It is enough to know why I came here,
to breathe in the solitude and the silence.
I simply accept what I've been learning in these canyons,
finding resources I didn't know I had,
stretching, accepting that there are times
when one has no options.
And I sit here in peace because of that.
I know that I will never be content
without risk and challenge and the opportunity to fail,
to know pain, the chance to test my endurance, un-warp my
horizons, know physical stress and the blinding
satisfaction of coming through.
If the cost is great, the rewards are greater.
And I sit here in peace because of that.
And then in the star dark lightness,
I shake open my sleeping bag and stretch out to watch the stars.
A parure of 10 stars lies in precise alignment
against the eggshell curve of the canyon wall.
They stand time still in poised perfection before wheeling
on to other appointments.
In the quiet, the air is singing.
Widening Circles, the name for a desert country near the sea
came from Shakespeare.
It's the name of the play within the play in As You Like It,
and it's described as a faraway fanciful place,
and it seemed to me a very appropriate title
for a book about the cape region of Baja, California,
which is kind of a fanciful faraway place
that nobody knows.
We had been going there since 1969.
I'd been going there about 15 years when I wrote the book.
In a sense, I suppose I was writing it for 15 years.
My kids kind of grew up there in the winter at Christmas.
We started going there because we got fed up
with the saturnalia of Christmas,
and I didn't like the commercialism, the stress.
And so we just went to a place that was quiet
where the kids could have a kind of family together happy time.
And I didn't have to keep saying pick up your room.
After dinner, I gazed at a beautiful--
this is a fishing camp, a, strictly male fishing camp--
after dinner, I gazed at a beautiful Sphinx
moth splayed on the pillar in front of the dining room.
Behind me, I hear the voice of one of the fishermen.
"You like moths, little lady?
This is no place to see them.
They spray with pyrethrin down here
to keep down the cockroach population.
If you want moths, you go up to the second story
of the next building."
And there they are, composed on the wall like one
of those composite pictures of all the colorful moths
or butterflies or beetles in the frontispiece of books
about moths or butterflies or beetles,
all the most gorgeous species on one page.
There are more than a dozen Sphinx moths
although varied in color and marking,
all are easily recognizable, medium to large moths
with heavy torpedo shaped bodies.
One, three inches long, is rose and gray, with barred wings.
A bigger one flares its gray flannel wings
to reveal under wing salmon pink of a small mammal's mouth
agape, deep yellow spotlight the length of another's abdomen.
And it has a tongue at least as long as its body and comb
like bristles on its legs.
One is a striped morning Sphinx common throughout North
America, a male with extravagantly feathered
antennae full of sensors which pick up
the scent of the females.
All are swift fliers that can reach 34 miles per hour,
even faster with the help of a tailwind,
in contrast to butterflies, which tilt frivolously
through the air between six and nine miles per hour.
Some Sphinx moths beat their wings so quickly
that they blur, their fast flight and high maneuverability
necessities for those that feed only in the brief half
light between day and night, just when bats come out
to hunt.
Since they fly in the cool of the day,
they cannot use sunlight to heat up their flight muscles.
Instead, they vibrate their wings
so rapidly that approximately the same amount
of heat increase is generated as if they were in the sun.
We were talking this afternoon about natural history
writing and the fact that it is factual nonfiction.
And somebody was saying how do you
get people to follow you along?
I mean, did you really want to know how many tons of silt
are in the Green River?
I didn't want to know.
But if you're there watching it move under the surface,
it becomes a matter of great interest.
And seeing all these moths together,
it was absolutely just blew me away.
The aftermath of that story is that after I had captured
and spread them, I was out camping on the beach
and woke up with a heavy duty pain.
Everything said heart attack, and it's ridiculous.
I'm not going to have a heart attack, but it got worse.
And finally, the people I was with took me the doctor,
and I finally ended up in the hospital at La Paz
with pericarditis which is a rather rare and peculiar thing
which is all the symptoms of a heart attack.
But it's an inflammation of the not lining.
What's the word I want Lois, what's around your heart?
Anyhow, it's an inflammation.
And I had a perfectly marvelous week in a La Paz hospital.
The nurses work 12 hour days.
They're 14, 15 years old.
They were absolutely enthralled to have an outlander
because they could practice their English on me.
And I was thrilled because I could practice
my simple Spanish on them.
And Baja Spanish is like if you were a Castilian
Spaniard dropped in Louisiana, honey,
and tried to speak English.
It's Baja Spanish is that much of a dialect.
I discovered the second day when my stomach began
to growl that everybody in Mexican hospitals
is supplied with food by their family
and since I didn't have any family to supply me with food,
they all kind of took turns.
And for breakfast, I would have Jell-o, cornflakes, oatmeal,
Fruit Loops, and there was something else interesting.
It was all in cups, and you know how
when you're in the hospital, the nurse comes
in with your pill and a little white paper cup
and she says hold out your hand.
And you hold out your hand dutifully,
and she puts the pill in, and she gives you a glass of water,
and she watches while you take your pill just to be sure.
The nurse would come in and she'd feel in one pocket,
and then she'd feel in the other.
And she'd come out with this handful of pills,
and she'd put them down on the tray,
and she kind sort through them, and she'd
take out the brown ones and the green ones,
and she'd put a couple of white ones over to the side for me,
pick them all back up, put them in her pocket
and walk out of the room.
That made sense to me.
I didn't have any trouble with that.
The sea was a new place for me.
I grew up in the Midwest, and I'm essentially a city girl.
And a lot of time was spent in the tidal pools.
And that was what my kids and I used to do,
and we just must have really driven the tidal pool
animals crazy.
Highest up in the cracks of the periwinkles,
neat little shells, pale gray crosshatch
with darker gray lines, the color
added in pulses of growth that give each
its distinctive pattern.
Many are only a couple of millimeters
long, the largest not over a centimeter.
Several dozen, make that several hundred very tiny ones
waddle across the rock, spires ticking back and forth
like miniature metronomes as they also
feed upon algae in the cracks.
Periwinkles inhabit intertidal zones the world over,
receiving no more wetting than comes from splashing waves.
Their operculum closes so quickly to minimize water loss
and can be held tight for long periods of time.
It is thought that periwinkles may be the ancestors of today's
land snails and may be on their own tenuous trail
to a fully land existence.
Considering the problems a shell presents to a gastropod--
difficulties in breathing, reproduction,
getting rid of wastes and hindering quick action--
the protection it provides evidently
far outweighs its disadvantages.
The ancestral spiral shell was formed in one plane
like a cinnamon roll.
It was neither very compact since each coil lay completely
outside the preceding one, nor easy to carry
because all the shells weight hung on one side of the body.
Evolution solved this problem by coiling the shell
around a central axis so that each coil was larger
and lay beneath the preceding one.
The spiral begins at the top, winding
as it goes, producing a much stronger structure
than a simple cone.
The axis of the shell slants upward and somewhat back.
And each of these old periwinkles
cants at the same angle as it trundles across the rock.
Oh, and then there's somebody said
about the scientific background.
I don't have a scientific background,
and I remember the passage of trying
to explain about internal torsion of sweating blood
over that.
I'll spare you that.
Small hollows in the sand where the surf swirled around a rock
as the tide went out are now filled
with water, the most evanescent of habitats warming
in the sun, subject to surf on the return of the sea,
never staying the same, coming and going
with the vagaries of the waves, these pools
are nevertheless occupied by a dozen small sea hares, which
graze and lay their eggs here.
The little sea hares are tan streaked with brown,
given a ragged untidy aspect by their ruffled mantle.
In sea hares, shell is internal and completely covered
by the mantle.
And this lack of confining shell allows them to curl themselves
along the sand in a graceful manner
tugging systematically at each sprig of algae
and then moving on.
Their eggs float on the surface like frayed snippets
of tan yarn.
Even though they are exposed, they are little preyed upon,
for they exude a chemical substance that causes
other animals to avoid them.
In the midst of these conservatively colored
businessmen, there is one flower child nudibranch, a shell,
a snail in bright dark blue with yellow and iridescent
blue stripes.
It grazes along the side of a pool very close to the surface
of the water.
On its back are two great triangles
like a bow tie through which its heartbeats pulsate.
Having no external shell for protection,
they have developed other means.
Interesting.
There are so often things to be found on the beach.
When they're in tidal pools, they're alive and wiggling.
If you find them dead on the beach,
you can really get to look at them.
And one of the things that I never seen was a brittle star.
And they're starfish, but instead of the familiar star
it's a center with very linear arms
and they drop them at an instant.
So the minute you pick one up, you got an arm going.
I scuff a small bit-- a dead one--
a small brittle star out of the sand.
It's the first time I've ever seen one both whole and quiet.
A live brittle star is so slithery that examining it
is out of the question.
One often ends up with a couple of detached legs
since they are autotomize so easily.
I take it back up to my beach towel and fish out my hand lens
to enjoy it properly.
They differ from the familiar sea stars
by having a differentiated central disk
to which long flexible arms are attached.
Rather than being all of a piece as sea stars are,
the mouth on the underside of the body
is a little star set in a tiny granulated disk,
now gray instead of pale green or brown in life.
The arms are about two inches long and tapered
from a quarter inch at the body to a sixteenth inch at the tip.
On top, the plates of the arms alternate
between dark gray and pale gray, three dark, one light three
dark, three light, two dark, five light,
light dominating toward the tip, dark toward the disk.
The dark plates bear pale gray Chinese characters
as if the creature were bearer of ancient legend.
Toward the tip end, all the plates
are lighter with a darker pattern.
The light gray undersides of the arms
bear smaller plates with darker gray stripes
running the length of the arm.
On either side of the arms or spines, a little longer
than the plate they lie beside, groups of five
toward the disk down to three at the lower edge.
In death, the spines are pale gray
with a white spot at the base tipped with salmon.
As I hold the little brittle star in hand and take notes,
it occurs to me that I can always come back to this time,
these smells, these sounds on this page.
I remember the reason Edwin Way Teale gave
for writing natural history.
And quote, "I suppose if I answer truthfully,
I would have to say that the first purpose was to preserve,
as insects are sometimes preserved,
with every wing venation intact, in pieces of transparent amber
portions of our lives that seem especially precious to us."
One of the things in the tide pools
are Sally Lightfoot crabs, which John Steinbeck
in the Sea of Cortez, which is a wonderful book to read,
said that they seem to be running any four directions,
but more than this perhaps because of their rapid reaction
time, they appear to read the mind of their hunter.
They escape the long handled net,
anticipating from what direction it is coming.
If you walk slowly, they move slowly ahead of you in droves.
If you hurry, they hurry.
When you plunge at them, they seem
to disappear in little puffs of blue smoke.
It is impossible to creep up on them.
Man reacts peculiarly but consistently in his relation
with Sally Lightfoot.
His tendency eventually is to scream curses,
to hurl himself at them, and to come up foaming with rage
and bruised all over his chest.
Well, Sara's husband picked one up.
While he held her, I had my first chance to see up close
the almost square shape and vertical front of the carapace,
the triangular shape of the plaster on beneath
showed it to be a female.
The smoky dark blue carapace was dotted with white,
circled and splashed with pale blue
a lovely milky blue under the head.
But she was not to be held for long.
One claw made a triangle cut in Kent's thumb,
and he dropped her with the appropriate comment.
He said that the claw itself felt dull,
but when turned at the right angle
and clamped with the force of the muscle, it cut sharply.
That day, Sara sat on a knob of rock.
My [INAUDIBLE]---- Sara's my youngest daughter.
She's the one who takes a sip of cerveza,
breathes deeply and says, "That's fresh squeezed."
That day, Sara sat on a knob of rock,
my textbook of invertebrate zoology on her knees,
and read me the identification key.
The night before, Sara, who played Scrabble
every day at lunch hour, had snookered me 150 points
and departed triumphant.
As she flounced out she'd said, "All these years."
How could she know it gave me vastly more satisfaction
than she gave her.
And somehow, that added enjoyment
to my saying yes, no yes, yes as she read the key.
What pleasure that minute colony of humans, the only species
to give and record names sharing the accumulated
knowledge of centuries, the sentience of sea and sun,
water gurgling around our feet as the tide
came back in, an irrevocable part
of this time, this place, this affection.
As I climb up from the tide pool,
the slope above lies in shadow, but a shaft of sun
still lights the hummingbird nest.
It was a hummingbird nest in a crook of a pitaya,
and it was a distorted-- the arm of the just
came around like this, and she had built her nest right here
about that height from the ground.
She is gone when I arrive.
But when she returns, there are no more feeding forays.
She sits facing the ocean 60 feet below.
The pools on the rock shelf below
reflect like steel mirrors and the ocean filters
in around the rocks between.
She's nicely settled in.
It's dusk, and I beam her my protective maternal thoughts
and go up to dinner having been reminded of how much I
miss my daughters.
When I check the nest the next morning, it hangs in tatters.
Something got to it in the night.
The black jelly bean babies lie on the ground wizened and dead.
I pick up a piece of the nest, so soft, so gossamer, fashioned
of bits of leaf, feathery seed heads, fuzzy wild lavender,
calluses, lichen bits, all well shredded
before being woven together.
I know it's foolish and sentimental,
but I hold that poor scrap of a nest in my hands and tears
blur my eyes.
I wonder if she is still alive, still hovering somewhere,
if she will nest next spring, will haunt the San Miguel vine,
will lay pea sized eggs, if she will
guard the air with her flight and remind me
of the tenuousness of motherhood.
The book begins in the mountains,
and it ends in the sea.
On October 25 1764, Miguel Del Barco, Jesuit missionary,
wrote to his father procurator saying,
"My natural inclination leads me completely away from the sea."
Yes, watch my lips.
Fresh water child raised on a river, summered
on a lake in Michigan, I am firmly
bonded to the freshwater heritage imprinted
on me since birth.
In addition, I inherited a predisposition
towards seasickness.
It is my further opinion that salt water tastes terrible
and waves make swimming a lot of unnecessary effort.
I know exactly what the first fish that scooped itself out
of the sea and up onto dry land and decided to stay
thought as it slithered from the murky shallows
on its tender finny feet and felt the whispery air.
Enough of this vertiginous slosh,
enough of this flowing and ebbing, enough of this salt
water in my eyes, give me a stable base
from which to operate and a firm horizon on which to lock.
Therefore, not until a few years ago
could I be talked into snorkeling.
Herman smeared my face mask with something
he called whale spit to keep my mask from fogging.
Jonah didn't like it, and neither
did I. It made my eyes smart, and I
had to wipe it out and find something less irritating.
Finally Susan, my water child, took me firmly by the hand
saying kindly, "Come on, Mom."
In that tone of voice one assumes
with a recalcitrant child and trapped me with her patience.
Because the water was not terribly warm,
I borrowed Susan's wet suit.
Susan is taller than I, and her wetsuit
fit me like Dolly Parton's would fit Olive Oyl.
I was so buoyant, I bobbed like a cork.
Once in, I had trouble keeping my flippers on.
The foot extension necessary for flippers gave me foot cramps.
A grain of sand lodged in one flipper.
It stuck at a bony place.
And as I worked it out with my fingers,
I let the snorkel tube dip below the surface.
Even worse, beneath me was a whole moving world vertiginous
flickering light jiggling on wave rippled sands
while rocks wavering uncertainly, tufts
of algae wafting about without apparent direction, the water
went up and down.
The patterns on the bottom swayed back and forth.
And the fish rotated at cross-purposes to it all.
When I finally dragged myself out,
my stomach and head were so seriously uncoupled,
my eye and ear so disoriented, I seriously
considered taking Dramamine the next time I
tried this, which I trusted would not be again soon.
Summer passed, time in which to forget.
Once again, I set out this time with my own wetsuit.
Visibility was excellent.
Interlocking lozenges of light scampered up the rocks,
fell off, coalesced, shredded in a scintillating display
of northern lights and an aqueous sky.
A thin line turned, flashed into a fish.
A foreshortened view slewed into profile.
Tail gleamed, flank pressed against water, head turned,
gilled layered fish swam, swift play of light quick intensity
of color, shine of scales and glow of iridescence,
the curved flanks of silvery slivers
constantly turning and tumbling re-arranging
like a pastel kaleidoscope.
The interface of water and air, a boundary
I'd only seen from above, was a silken tent
undulating in the underwater wind, gray blue
with moving ovals, a scrim through which light billowed
of a small fish shinning up to the surface, pop the film,
and slid back down again all in silence.
I was hooked.
Now, one of the things I learned from teaching my students
at Colorado College in natural history class
was that you often bury your beginnings
and ends in odd places.
I have known for a long time that when I write a paragraph,
I have one throwaway sentence, and I begin the paragraph
with a second sentence.
So it's just a matter of going through and editing.
So it should not have come as a surprise
that the real ending not only to Run River Run
but to anything I have ever written
comes not at the end of the book but at the end of a chapter 13
in Run River Run.
And it's a better ending than what the book ends with.
Remember, you heard it here first.
When I read it again this morning,
I had a seldom felt sense of I wish I'd written that.
I walk away from the lookout and face upriver.
Even with a group, it's possible to have a great deal of time
alone with the river.
I sit on the edge of the Chinle parapet
and dangle my feet over the side.
It occurs to me somewhat vaguely that I who am normally
afraid of heights am sitting comfortably
above a large segment of empty space.
The cottonwoods below follow the river's curve
in an esker of green.
The river is brown, and the clanking hot shale
beneath my hand is gray-green.
I should be writing or drawing, recording.
But I can only ponder, feeling immobilized by the weight
of the sunlight on my back, rock, tree, sky,
a hand shadow on the page, a morning breeze, a sunlight
webbed river.
I suppose it is the proportions that count, how much is stone,
strong, how much is green, yielding,
and how much is river going on and never coming back.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]