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FIVE

Weeds of the West

29 April, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos

Sam’s in New York City for a conference on biodiversity, so I’m riding by myself today. My mood is tending to a not unpleasant melancholy when a skunk (Mephitis mephitis) ambles out from behind some rabbit brush next to the trail. Its small head swings around, its tail swings around, I swing around. The skunk makes its way back into the brush with an undulating gait that makes the white stripes on either side of its fat back ripple like waves.

I ride out of the canyon ahead of a rain squall. The air above the river is alive with swallows. I stand and watch the long forked tails open and shut like scissors as the agile birds fly jagged lines from insect to insect. They are barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) with red-orange chests and dark heads and backs, recently back from Argentina. How is that possible?

I’ve been jealous of Sam’s reference library, so today I bought Weeds of the West, now in its 5th edition. What is a weed? the authors ask. “A plant that interferes with management objectives for a given area of land at a given point in time.” The Mormons who settled the Great Basin believed God wanted them to make “the desert blossom like a rose.” This meant that many native desert plants became weeds. Similarly, Sam and I have become weeds at BYU. My plan to help educate my fellow Mormons hasn’t worked out, I think. Somehow, the expansive theology behind the church university (“the glory of God is intelligence”) has given way to doubts about free inquiry and demands for absolute obedience.

My thought turns to my brother John. He grew up Mormon, went to BYU, served a mission in Italy, trained as a chef, and then came out as gay. Talk about interference with LDS management objectives! He lived in near exile from the family until he died of complications related to AIDS. In 1995, four years after John’s death, the Church released a statement on the family. “Gender,” they proclaimed, “is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.” From this premise, and from the commandment to “multiply and replenish the earth,” they argued that marriage should be heterosexual and that John was thwarting God’s plan. As a professor at BYU, I have been lending my name to a religion that denigrates my brother and others like him. That can’t continue.

1 May, New York City (by email)

Scott—the New York biodiversity conference is good. Plenty of folks who know what they are talking about are discussing worldwide biodiversity loss. On a global basis, habitat loss or damage is the most important factor causing the loss of native species. Second is the invasion of exotic species. These two are related, since exotic species often invade areas with degraded habitat. Global or local, the perturbations are the same.

In Utah, we have had a century and a half of habitat destruction. Livestock overgrazing and mismanagement are among the top causes. Even many years after livestock are removed, their impact remains, including soil erosion by wind and water, stream gullying, degraded water quality in our streams and lakes, the loss of wildlife, and the loss of native plant species. Many of the invasive exotics are well suited for life in disturbed habitats. For example, they often tolerate reduced or periodic moisture, infertile and compacted soils, high soil temperatures, and so forth. Many reproduce rapidly and produce copious seeds. Furthermore, such plants are often more resistant to the various local pathogens and pests that have evolved with native species. All in all, invasive species are scrappy and tolerant of a wide variety of ecological conditions. In undisturbed habitats, exotic species have a harder time. There simply is less room for them, fewer open niches. So, the trick to saving native species is to protect native habitats. And in order to protect habitat, we need to have a close look at grazing management in the West. There are some places, including much of the Colorado Plateau, where livestock should not graze.

2 May, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos

Hoping the trail will have dried off after three days of rain, I head off for a Sunday ride, alone again. Sam’s not back from New York. Low on the mountain, I spot the first paintbrush on the slope this spring—Castilleja miniata. Its muted red-orange bracts cum flowers are the perfect complement to the silver-green, three-toothed leaves of Artemisia tridentata, the sage growing next to it. The paintbrush is semi-parasitic, living in part from water and nutrients it draws from sage roots. Near the paintbrush, the small yellow flowers of another three-toothed plant: bitterbrush, Purshia tridentata.

I think about my family as I ride. They are in church this morning. For more than four decades, I have attended church every Sunday, happy to be there, grateful for the company of people trying to improve themselves and determined to serve one another. I paid a generous tithing. I observed the “Word of Wisdom”: no smoking, no tea or coffee, and no alcoholic drinks. But last year, when the BYU Board of Trustees announced a new policy that required a bishop’s certification that faculty were obeying those commandments, I balked at the requirement. Unless my bishop certifies my worthiness, I’ll lose my job. I know myself well enough to predict I won’t succumb to coercion. What I don’t know is where this will lead. Today it has led me to the mountain.

I climb past bur buttercup, spring parsley, Wasatch bluebells, Oregon grape, storksbill, loco weed, sweet vetch, phlox, leafy spurge, larkspur, Nuttall’s violet, and spring beauty before I see the next new flower: ballhead waterleaf, Hydrophyllum capitatum. The golf-ball-sized sphere of tiny lavender flowers bristles with stamens and stigmas. High on the mountain, my legs showing signs of palsy, I come across some kind of composite, a sunflower-like flower. Its silver-green, arrow-shaped leaves help me identify it as arrowleaf balsamroot, Balsamorhiza sagittata.

Hell, maybe I can do without an accompanying botanist.

5 May, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos

I’ve been off my bike for a week in Mexico and a week in New York. I was nervous about riding with Scott, figuring he’d be poised to demoralize me on the trail. Fortunately for me, Scott is feeling dreamy today. He has just been offered a job at Utah Valley State College and is full of the possibilities.

Sitting in the meadow, Scott wonders aloud what it would be like to teach at a place where you were rewarded, rather than punished, for pushing the limits of the known and accepted, for arguing against the status quo, for questioning political and religious certainties. “What will it be like,” he asks, “to teach at a school that would welcome my gay brother?”

6 May, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos

A plant I have been trying to ignore all spring is abundant along the trail today—cheatgrass, Bromus tectorum. First named by Linnaeus from European specimens and first collected in Utah in 1894, this grass is native to Eurasia but is now widely distributed throughout the Americas. In our foothills and mountains, cheatgrass grows and sets seed early and turns reddish brown as it matures in the late spring and summer. Most hillsides in the west are abundant with cheatgrass, often a result of disturbance from livestock, which prefer native species until they are decimated. Look east to the Wasatch Range this summer, and the reddish cast you’ll notice on the hills is due to senescent cheatgrass. Some argue that it protects disturbed soils from erosion and has forage value for wildlife and livestock. While this is marginally true, cheatgrass is a miserable introduction that represents all that is problematic about exotic invaders.

Scott hears quail (Callipepla gambelii) chattering. Below us, high-pitched motors scream. Motorcycles, we think, or four-wheelers. But it’s worse than that. When we cross the last ditch, we see two men with chainsaws systematically felling the orchard we have ridden through for the past decade. Five rows of trees are already gone.

6 May, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos

Five inches of wet snow yesterday morning, and this afternoon we are riding the Great Western Trail! I spent the morning at Utah Valley State College negotiating the details of a job and am full of the energy that comes from being wooed. Sam is quiet today. As co-founders of the BYU Chapter of the American Association of University Professors and as co-instigators of an AAUP investigation which determined that “at Brigham Young University infringements on academic freedom are distressingly common and the climate for academic freedom is distressingly poor,” we have worked together for over five years on academic freedom issues. It must seem to him like I’m a rat leaving a sinking ship.

“This almost didn’t come off,” I tell Sam. “You know the BYU retirement plan is a disaster unless you put in thirty years. With my eleven years, I’d walk away with nothing. I sat down with the academic vice president and laid out the problem: ‘I have a job offer I’d like to take, but I can’t leave BYU unless you give me a retirement package—a year’s salary added to my TIAA-CREF retirement account.’ He said they could come up with half of that, at most. ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I’ll have to stay here.’ After some overnight calculations, he offered me the whole amount. They’re damned happy to get rid of me.”

“I’m sure the feeling is mutual,” Sam surmises.

Back from the ride, remembering that Carl von Linnaeus first named cheatgrass, I pick up a new book by Linnaeus, edited by Wolf Lepenies. Not only did Linnaeus classify plants, he thought he could discern divinely guided patterns in human tragedy as well. In the collected accounts of what he called Nemesis Divina, he recounts this story:

Jacob of Saanas (community Stenbrohult in Smaland) lived badly with his wife. One Christmas (in my youth) as she wanted to walk over the ice to church, she breaks through the ice, holds on, 1/4 hour, to the edge of the ice with her hands, calls for help. Her husband stands on the bank, for it happened close to the yard, and says he doesn’t dare to venture out on the ice (because he would be happy to lose her). She drowns. Five years later Jacob’s fingers begin to rot, the fingers with which he could have helped his wife; and they continue to rot on both hands. Finally he dies of the disease.

Linnaeus collected hundreds of these stories, proof that GOD is watching you and will avenge. Our human obsession with meaning and order has a productive scientific component, but Linnaeus’s search for cosmic order also resulted in superstitious bullshit that is simply embarrassing. And psychologically unsettling. His Nemesis story feels like a metaphor, of sorts, for my own marriage. It has been a decade since our relationship settled into nothing but a shared concern for our children. We have been drowning one another in icy neglect and soul-rotting anger.

7 May, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos

Today, the first fully open white flowers of death camas. In one inflorescence, we find a large, solid-red ladybird beetle. A scrub jay flashes blue as we ride past, scolding us harshly. These jays form long-term attachments between males and females and they have been observed to share lives with a third adult “helper” that aids in raising and protecting the young against predators. There’s a wide range, we note, of possible “natural” families.

“Let’s issue a ‘Proclamation to the World,’” Scott suggests. “A manifesto to rebut the Mormon one with that title that says the only natural family involves marriage between one heterosexual man and one heterosexual woman. Ours will argue that natural families are evolutionary experiments of the widest imaginable variety. We’ll make our case with science rather than theology.”

Butterflies are abundant again. I mention to Scott that identifying all of them is going to be difficult. “Why do we have to know or identify everything?” he asks. “For everything we know, there are fifty things we don’t.” His suggestion that we don’t have to identify them all is a momentary relief. But backing off that compulsion is not easy for a professor whose role in life is to have the answers.

9 May, Orem

“What a symphony of crickets,” Sam exclaims.

“What crickets?” I ask.

Last summer, Sam stopped suddenly and backed his bike away from a chunk of blue limestone. “What’s up?” I asked. “It’s a rattlesnake!” he said. “It’s buzzing like crazy. Back away.” I stepped off the bike the wrong way—toward the snake—and Sam said nonchalantly, “I’ll take good care of your bike after you die.” I eventually saw the snake, but I never did hear the high-pitched rattling. And now I can’t hear the crickets.

Faced with a steady decline of the various senses, it makes sense to start pairing up. Sam, for example, can protect me from rattlesnakes. And I see better than he does. It’s like the eighty-year-old man who announces his engagement to his friends. “Is she beautiful?” they ask. “No,” he answers. “Is she a good cook?” “Can’t cook a lick,” he says. “Is she nice to you?” “Not especially.” “So why are you getting married?” “She can drive at night,” he explains.