Under the Patriarch

After three wet years, he is very much alive, maybe a hundred years old. He's a bitterbrush, Purshia tridentata, a quarter mile south of town, genius of this part of the desert. Easily seven feet tall, he's one unkempt spiky beard of a plant, an explosion of branches bristling with little gray-green three-lobed leaves. Out of this mass poke a few dead boughs, rich mahogany-colored after a rain, each one girdled with a few tattered flags of gray bark. Now, in June, the rest of the branches, the living ones, each bulge with hundreds of tiny nuts resembling miniature chocolate kisses, the entire crop of up to 500 pounds per acre destined to be collected and consumed by rodents, birds, and ants.

At the Patriarch's feet is a skirt of saplings, some of them three feet high, poking from among the drooping lower branches. It's hard to tell where sire ends and offspring begin, for the Patriarch's low branches have taken root where they've touched the ground. Other offspring stand further away in a circle fifty yards around, which is about as far as birds or rodents can carry those chocolate-kiss achenes. These progeny are themselves very respectable bitterbrushes. The Patriarch watches over his seed, but nurture gives he none. It's thought (says Hugh Mozingo in Shrubs of the Great Basin, my source for bitterbrush info) that bitterbrush litter contains a growth inhibitor that renders a plant's immediate vicinity infertile for its seedlings. Once a plant is established, it doesn't want competition, especially from its own kind. Bitterbrush roots go deep: fifteen to twenty feet below the surface, maybe more. They can out-delve sagebrush, but not each other.

What's bitterbrush good for? Native peoples used it for a multitude of ailments. Deer love it (it's often called deerbrush) and if necessary can live for quite a while on nothing else. It's also browsed by pronghorns, bighorns, elk, and even moose. Rabbits—jacks and cottontails—nibble bitterbrush foliage and hide in it. On the north side of the Patriarch is a cavity in the foliage big enough to hide a person from unobservant eyes. Sit down at the feet of this old ancestor, pull on your elven cloak, drop out of sight. There's a jeep track a few yards away where people walk their dogs, and if you sit under the Patriarch for a morning, one or two of these folks will pass by. You'll hear them huffing, coughing, calling to their dogs, long before you see them. And since you're below eye level, peripheral to their tunnel vision, and up to your nose in bitterbrush, they never see you. Even if for some reason they look right at you.

The overhanging foliage is so thick that if you squeezed far enough under you might stay dry for a while in a thunderstorm, though you'd get a bit scratched up. But the Patriarch is more meditation companion than shelter. If you sit with him long enough, maybe a transmission—osmosis, seepage, migration, conduction—will occur between his dark prehensive attention and yours, a bit like how some trees communicate with each other through their root fungi (which bitterbrush also have). Maybe you can to some degree tap a little into how a bitterbrush's primordial nonthinking registers the desert—or even alters it, for he seems a being of sufficient force to bend the local gravity.

If you sit under a bitterbrush, take off your shirt, breathe, and think non-thinking, something might happen.

If not, look around and take your bearings. You should do this every day, regardless. Look east to the Pine Nuts, still in morning shadow. This is the forgotten range, higher than the Sierras directly across the valley, yet mostly unvisited except by hunters. Then look north toward the trees marking the Gardnerville Ranchos, and northwest toward the ranches that may hold on for another decade. West lies the wall of the Sierras, running from Mt. Rose overlooking Reno, south to Snow Valley Peak over Carson City, then Genoa Peak, Monument Peak, Freel Peak, and Job's Peak, all towering over the Carson Valley, and Hawkins Peak further southwest. Due south is Silver Peak, skirted by a series of lower ridges. Behind one of those ridges are Bodie Flat and Vulture's Roost. Another one conceals China Springs Youth Camp, a "correctional facility" with a long winding rutted dirt road into it, which I drove down once, out exploring, to just within sight of the camp.

Following the curve of the Sierras like this may allow something to happen. It may be a bird—a sage sparrow flying into the branches overhead, awkward to observe, tempting you to move your head just a hair, knowing that if you do the bird will be gone, knowing that if you don't it will be gone. Or maybe just a sudden flutter of wings behind, startling you into turning around and, finding nothing, reconstructing the event: something flew in, saw something strange (you) there, and backstroked furiously, pulling up and out.

Maybe it will be the "whink" of a shrike, causing you to scan the sky for a nighthawk before realizing your mistake. Or the rattle of a towhee, whose head then appears poking around a neighbor bush. Or a thrasher that flies into the branches above you so quietly that you only notice it when it flies out. How long was it there?

You don't want to be too busy writing things down or you may miss one of these apparitional half-lives.

There may be a whistle, too full for a little bird, accompanied by a small-bird-sized rustling on the other side of the tree. Is it . . . ? Yes, a chipmunk, the first I've ever seen in this desert.

Perhaps just a few clouds slowly whirling over Job's Peak, blending with the last dust of snow from two nights ago. Or the fog rising from Genoa, drifting up in little puffs. Perhaps a long train of cumulus over the Sierra wall, or thunderhead anvils over the Pine Nuts, or a mackerel sky drifting down from the north, hinting for you to put your shirt back on. Or, in spring and fall, the lenticular clouds—"flying saucer clouds"—stacked five or six high like ghostly bowls over half of the sky, then tugged by the jet stream into leaping lions, horses with flowing manes, giants with clubs.

In spring and fall, there appears a huge black cloud column running north and south the entire length of the Carson Valley—"this Nazi valley," as Max Jones, the Mormon patriarch, reportedly called it during World War Two. People like to watch for it, the malevolent spirit of the place. The artsy folk have tried to give it names—"the Tahoe Wave" was one—but none ever caught on.

In spring come flowers. Long-stemmed purple monkey flower. Paintbrush rainbow running from lemon yellow to flame orange to pink to scarlet. White prickly poppies with their crepe-paper petals. And more: strange little flowers that don't appear in any book. Lastly, birdcage evening primrose, Oenothera deltoides, named for its nighttime blooms that grace the desert dawn and often persist past noon—and for the way its stems, radiating from a basal rosette, curl up when dry to form a skeletal birdcage-looking structure. Before this macabre culmination of its life-cycle, birdcage evening primrose is the jewel of the desert: creamy white petals with a pale yellow center inviting you to stick your nose into its slender filaments, where you meet the loveliest scent imaginable, one that makes lilac or rose scent seem vulgar. Were I to meet a woman capable of wearing that fragrance I might fear for my marriage, but no such woman exists.

There are no birdcage evening primroses this year, and hardly any last year, despite the rain. They scorn nature's over-solicitousness. Two years ago, a wet year after several dry ones, they filled the sandy desert for yards around. It's enough now to sit where they last grew and think fondly of them.

Out here beauty doesn't come without astringency, even a touch of monstrosity. There's something vaguely Egyptian about that duality; the Egyptians were desert people after all. The life-giving Nile, the rich black land of Kemet, a ribbon through the desolate red land of Deshert, abode of the dead. No Nefertiti without the deformed and fanatical Akhenaten. Set versus Horus: who will triumph in the end? Always the opposition. The Patriarch is but a stroll from the quarry, our local Mordor: gray disemboweled earth, rasp of motorbikes, staccato of target practice—and, on weekdays, growl of loaders and gravel trucks, real big rigs, sometimes three trailers apiece. The jeep track that runs by the Patriarch connects up with the main road to the quarry, bringing more people this way than one desires. On the other hand, all this human activity means you're not likely to meet a rattler. I've heard of only one such encounter here over the years—though once, only a few yards into the desert, I met a big gopher snake that hissed like a steam engine and struck out violently when approached.

One Sunday morning as it was getting light, I came out and sat under the Patriarch. It was very quiet and I went far away into what was before my eyes. As I arose to go, at sunup, a pickup came out of the quarry, heading back to town. I sat back down. The pickup stopped, and the guy got out. There was a dog in the back, a mottled border collie. If there's a chance you've been seen, no point in trying to hide, so I got up, but why bother to talk to the guy? Usually they don't mind not talking to you. No one really comes out here to socialize.

"Morning," he said.

"Morning."

"Where are you from?"

Pause. Long pause.

"I live in town."

“And where are you coming from?”

“Where am I coming from?”

"Yes. And what are you doing today?"

Eh? I stepped a little closer to see just who this was. Square jaw, squinty eyes under a baseball cap. Maybe twenty years older than me. The dog in the back shimmied and barked.

"What am I doing here?"

"Yes, what are you doing here?"

"Taking a walk in the desert."

"And where did you say you're coming from?"

"Like I said, I live in town."

"Do you now. Whereabouts in town?"

Named a street in the Ranchos. "Say, what is this?"

"And how long have you lived here?"

"In Gardnerville? About nine years."

A practiced interrogator, and I'm caught with my guard down. I wasn't expecting to have my heart cut out and weighed up this morning. If you're not prepared for it, being interrogated makes you feel a little watery inside, like it did when you were a kid. Your mind jumps in and joins the investigation: "I haven't done anything wrong . . . have I?" But the standard of innocence is no longer in your hands. New criteria have suddenly appeared. You were out here hiding—is that what a decent person would do? What your parents would do? Are you proud that it's not? That's the judgment against you. He doesn't know that, though. What does he know, and what's he up to? And what do you say to get out of this?

Would I say something I couldn't substantiate, contradict my story, break down and hiss back at him, try to run for it? Or desperately reveal some intimate detail he could check out? Was that the game?

"Who are you, and what's all this about?"

"Well, see, I'm an off-duty cop and I keep my eye out for things. For all I know you could be coming over the hill from China Springs."

In my blue work shirt, yes, I see. So just how many grown men have they reported missing from China Springs this morning? And what's your badge number, Mr. Off-Duty-Cop, because my friend Captain Al B. might like to know it.

Didn't think to say any of that.

He let me go. I wonder how things would have gone if I'd been Washoe. Or female. I saw no gun on him or in his truck. If he'd wanted me taken, he'd probably have had to call it in. The whole thing could have gone a lot worse. Nevertheless it was a long time before I came back to sit under the Patriarch. Not that I was afraid to meet the guy again. I just didn’t want to be thinking about him. I wanted to think non-thinking. But sometimes the only way to think non-thinking is by thinking. So here I am today, shirt off in the sun, flipping back and forth between thinking and non-thinking, writing everything down, simmering in amused defiance.

You take what you get in the desert. It never was a garden of Eden, and even there you had a snake. As for that, I'd rather have met a rattler than that off-duty-cop, operating from the old reptilian brain stem, that dark primordial consciousness that drove him to protect his territory. Unauthorized activity is suspicious, hiding is suspect, being in the desert for no apparent reason is subversive. And, generalizing from that: unauthorized beauty is suspicious, anything unknown is suspect, loneliness is subversive. How deeply do these responses underlie the American mind—the human mind universally?

Okay, so that off-duty-cop was just protecting his turf, which happened to coincide with what I'd thought was mine. Who had the better claim? If I did, it was by no recognized law. Does the desert belong to whoever most belongs to it? How do you measure that belonging? Maybe, looking for crime instead of beauty, he was better equipped for the desert, more a creature of the desert than I was. For him the desert was just the desert. I was starting to dream it into something else, something rather different from how the desert seems to understand itself, from how the Patriarch probably understands the desert. Something inauthentic, fantastical? Maybe. Maybe not. And as for dreams, who dreamed up the birdcage evening primrose? That's what I want to know.

Photo: Greatbasinseeds.com