Читать книгу Shaped by Snow - Ayja Bounous - Страница 10

II. Season of Changing Colors

Listening

From the valley floor, Rock Canyon appears rugged. The jagged peaks at the canyon’s mouth look like teeth, framing the dramatic V and dropping straight into the valley rather than easing their way lower in elevation through foothills. Beyond this imposing opening, however, are the soft slopes of a basin shaped like a crescent moon, tips close to kissing at the mouth of the canyon. On the backside of the teeth are steep but smooth hillsides, carpeted with pines.

It’s a glacial basin plush with life, and today it’s on fire. Maples, ranging from beige-rouge to brilliant oranges to deep vermillion reds and pinks, grow thick here. While the higher reaches of the Cottonwood Canyons become patchworks of evergreens and golden aspen during the fall, Rock Canyon becomes a rash of ochre and cinnamon from scrub oak and maples.

I stood on the edge of this basin with my grandparents. It was the most delicious of autumn days: warm but with a cooler edge to the air, especially noticeable after an exhaustingly hot and long summer. I had never been here before, though this place is as thick with my family history as it is with maples.

My father grew up on a fruit farm in Provo, Utah, near the mouth of Rock Canyon. The farm was settled by my greatgrandfather’s family at the beginning of the twentieth century when they immigrated from the mountains of Northern Italy to the mountains of the American West, bringing a knowledge of the land and the family name “Bounous” with them. It was a large plot of productive land that fed the surrounding community for decades, until the city of Provo took the land out from underneath our family through the power of eminent domain. They replaced acres of orchards partially with Timpview High School, one of the largest schools in Utah Valley. Most of the fruit trees, however, were ripped out and replaced with grass. Just grass. My sister, cousins, and I used to wander out of our grandparents’ backyard, which still sits on a small corner of the original farm, to go play on this grass. But there’s not much adventure to have out there. A small playground, a running track; not the adventure that we would have had if we’d been able to chase each other through the rows and rows of fruit trees. They named this plot of grass “Timp Kiwanis Bounous Park,” and gave my grandparents what the city considered “just compensation.” But how can you possibly capture the compensation required of robbing an entire community of fresh fruit, stripping multiple generations’ work of tending to the land and almost century-old trees, and erasing the fantasies and wonder of children not yet born?

Seventy years ago, when the gnarled trees were still rooted deep in the soil, a rainstorm halted work on that farm. Rather than waiting idly for the farm to dry, Baqui saddled up his horse and rode up Rock Canyon. It was late afternoon when he began his journey. Leaves, vibrant in the golden sun, contrasted against the dark, wet branches of scrub oaks and cottonwoods. The soothing scent of rain on soil stirred within the sultry air currents of the ravine. Somewhere up the canyon he came upon two pants-less women and their horses. My grandma Maxine and a friend had been caught in the rain while riding, and after the rain subsided they lit a fire and took off their pants to dry, never expecting that they weren’t the only travelers in the canyon that afternoon. It was the first time Grandma and Baqui met.

At my request, my ninety-three-year-old grandparents loaded themselves into their car so I could see one of the most beautiful places to watch summer turn to fall in the Wasatch. My grandpa agreed to the trip so he could cut another branch of crimson maple to brighten his kitchen. My grandma, her dementia keeping a mild smile on her face even through the bumps of the dirt road, came along for the ride.

We’d already stopped a few times during the winding drive, my grandpa pushing his bent body out of the seat each time so he could point out certain features in the landscape and answer any questions that formed in my mind as I scanned the scenery. If my constant flow of queries about everything in sight annoyed him, he didn’t show it.

We summited a crest that would allow us a view into Rock Canyon and the car rumbled to a stop, the tires kicking up dust on a road dried out by the summer. The smell of dirt and earthy rot of fallen leaves wafted through the air as our boots ground the gravel beneath them. The trees seemed to breathe in relief at the upcoming promise of cooler times, the light breezes pulling whispers from their canopies. With the effort of someone experiencing sciatic pain, my grandpa began ambling toward what looked to be the rocky exposure of a little cliff or ridgeline, about fifty feet down a primitive trail.

Pausing, he turned to my grandma and, for the second time that day, advised in his slow voice, “Ah, Maxine, you better stay by the car.” And for the second time that day, she responded by moving forward to take his hand and walk beside him.

I followed the two of them as they navigated around trees that seemed strange in this mountain landscape. Instead of dense maples and scrub oak, this little ridgeline was scattered with flora that looked drier than the rest of the vegetation in the basin. I recognized the soft, peeling bark of junipers, more common in the Utah deserts than in the Wasatch, but couldn’t name the other tree.

“Baqui, what kind of tree is this?”

“Greasewood. Well, that’s what we call them at least. Their bark burns black.”

Dry, golden grass brushed our ankles and calves as we stepped over the crumbling dirt trail. Our destination was an outcrop, a place where bedrock is exposed. Outcrops aren’t covered by soil and vegetation, making them easy features for geologists to examine without having to excavate. When we look at outcrops, we see the bones of a landscape.

This outcrop is where my father’s family had “weenie roasts” every summer and fall. Though he admitted the official name might be something else, my grandpa called it Rattlesnake Ridge.

The name jogged a memory. I already knew this place from a story my mother told me. My dad invited my mother to this place on one of their first dates to join his family for a weenie roast. According to my mom, Baqui, already over fifty years old at the time, started at his house and ran up Rock Canyon to meet them, rather than riding in the car.

I brought up this story and my grandpa chuckled.

“I just dropped your Uncle Barry off here the other day so he could do that run in reverse.”

During the weenie roast, perched on that rocky outcrop, my mother witnessed the underlying bones of my father’s family, what lay beneath, what made their family what it was: a deep and desperate love of the mountains, of the soil and the maples and the dry, oxygen-deprived air. She also glimpsed what her future could be as a part of that family, what a relationship with my father might become.

We emerged on the outcrop and my grandpa made a sweeping motion from the tip of the peak to the east, known controversially as Squaw Peak, tracing its shoulder down as it arced toward us and then south, dropping into the basin. He explained this unseen boundary as the northern edge of what used to be the homestead of a man named Louis Richard. I’d never heard his name before, and was startled when my grandpa said that Louis was his uncle, his mother’s brother, a shepherd who used to bring his flock into Rock Canyon during the summers in the early 1900s.

My grandpa pointed to a part of the hillside across from us that looked a little different than the rest of the basin, like an old scar on a patch of skin. During one particularly violent summer rainstorm, Louis heard a loud rumbling coming from somewhere above his cabin. Trusting his instinct, he jumped on his horse and rode as fast as he could out of the canyon. A landslide followed him all the way out. My grandpa remembers visiting the cabin back before the mudslide destroyed it, when he was only ten years old. Later, Louis had to sell his homestead to the Forest Service, adding another few hundred acres of land to the Wasatch-Cache, adding family lore to the quilted landscape of the mountains.

Listening to my grandpa’s stories, I felt as though a big sewing needle was sewing my body into the fabric of that basin, that a part of me I hadn’t realized existed was being exposed to the mountain air like the bedrock we stood on. Here was another place that made up the landscape of my grandfather’s family. An exposed outcrop where I was able to glimpse the past, the layers that my family and I are composed of.

Author Kathleen Dean Moore says that “we’re born into relationships, not just with human beings, but with the land—the beautiful, complicated web of sustaining connections.” My children will be born into a relationship with this land, just as I was. I imagined bringing my children and grandchildren to this very ridge, pointing out the features, naming the trees, telling them stories of their great-great-grandfather and his uncle who used to have a homestead here, recounting how the first hints of love began between their grandparents during a weenie roast.

And then, the tinge of remorse that comes when thinking about starting a family.

If I have children.

Standing there on Rattlesnake Ridge, I became suddenly aware of my blood moving through my body. It was the same color as the maples and oaks around me. A silent word echoed in my mind, bouncing off the walls of the basin and ringing in my ears as the sound of grasshoppers and finches, filling my nostrils with the scent of dust and leaves.

Home, they said to me. This is your home.

Mobbing

“Oh no.” I take a shaky breath, gripping the wheel. “Oh no oh no oh no.”

“Easy now,” Colin says from the passenger seat. “Just go slow.”

The steep decline had turned to mud. The typical pink sand of southern Utah is a sultry shade of burnt sienna. Heavy rain and hail in the past hour eroded the right side of the road and created gaping cracks, some of them quite large, in what should be a dry dirt road down to the campsite. If the car starts sliding there is a good chance we’ll drift off the side and get stuck. There is little room for error.

We were finishing a hike in Zion National Park when the sunny afternoon turned into a raging hail and lightning storm, leading to flash flood warnings and a mass exodus from the park. As we boarded the bus to leave Zion, three ambulances with their lights on passed us going up the canyon. I fidgeted in my seat nervously, thinking of the riverside campsite we had planned on staying at that night.

I tap on the brakes lightly, and we creep slowly down the hill until it flattens out. We step out of the car, our hiking boots sinking two inches into the mud. I feel as though I’m walking through a marsh, not a desert. Colin starts looking for the highest place in the campsite, where we might be able to set up a tent. I watch the river. We had been looking forward to our first night camping together, but rain in the desert makes me nervous. The slickrock of southern Utah doesn’t absorb water like soil does. Flash floods are frequent here. I pick out a few exposed rocks in the flow of the water and watch them. Within minutes the river rises and the rocks disappear.

I hold the keys out to Colin.

“I don’t want to stay here,” I say, then, after a moment’s hesitation, add, “I’m a little scared.”

“Fine by me,” he says, taking the keys, recognizing that he’ll be responsible for getting us safely out.

“The mud’s too thick to camp in anyway.”

The sun is setting as we climb back out of the campsite. Dark, dense clouds line every horizon, hovering over scarlet cliffs, but there’s a break in the clouds directly above us. The last of the sun’s rays graze the sky, golden and bright.

“Look!” Colin says suddenly, hitting the brakes and pointing to a telephone pole on the side of the road. There is a giant owl on the pole, iconic, tufted horns on its head. Another owl is in flight, enormous wings outstretched, the white plumage golden in the setting sun, wingtips dark. It flies at the one on the pole, extending sharply silhouetted talons. The owl on the pole rises in flight at the threat, great wings lifting the dense body into the air, talons extending in kind. They both disappear over the roof of the car.

“Those were great horned owls!” Colin says, stopping the car completely. He opens the door and steps outside, looking to the sky. I follow, but the owls have already flown into the shadows of nearby trees.

“They were mobbing! I can’t believe it, my dad’s going to die when I tell him,” Colin continues, laughing. “On the fall equinox, too. Wow.” He stares at the trees they had disappeared into.

“You’re into birds?” I ask.

“Yeah, sort of. I mean, my dad is. We once flew in from Washington to do a HawkWatch backpacking trip with my grandma, west of the Great Salt Lake.” He shakes his head as he gets back in the car.

“I’ve only ever seen a few owls in the wild before. To see two great horns, mobbing at sunset? So crazy. Their wingspans must’ve been, what, four, five feet across? Did you see their talons?”

“Yeah,” I say, smiling as the car rumbles back into motion. “I’m kind of surprised, you never seemed that interested when I pointed out birds before.”

“That’s because you only like the little birds,” he teases.

Adapting