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NINE

Murderers, Fornicators, and Coffee Drinkers

June 25, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos

Death close to hand on two fronts today. Someone has driven a blade along our low trail for no reason we can tell, snapping down several large box elders and oaks, leaving their shattered stumps and carcasses along the trail. And a lazuli bunting lies lifeless on the trail. No signs of struggle, no evident wounds. Its head and back still shimmer with turquoise color, and the orange patch burns bright on its throat. We lift the bird off the dusty trail and lay it into a patch of yellow sweet clover. It reminds me of another corpse I saw some years ago on this trail, and when I get home I look up the event in my notebook:

2 September 1993 – On a trail high in the canyon lies a mouse. Stretched taut with the gasses of putrescence, its skin shines with a healthy grey luster. The tail is a thin pole, and the two hind legs poke out stiffly to finish the tripod. There are no front legs. No head. The body has formed a new neck around the wound. Sucking on that tight pucker is a swarm of aggressive yellowjackets, bright yellow, dangerously quick, ominously thirsty.

At the time, BYU was losing its intellectual nerve, and Sam and I and several others were beginning to protest infringements on academic freedom. I saw the corpse as an omen.

26 June, Brighton

Sun setting at the end of a beautiful day. The nearly full moon rises while the sun sets. Standing on Nancy’s and Sam’s balcony, I’m east of the sun, west of the moon. For the first time in my forty-nine years, I understand that the phrase is a reference to evening. Before we go to bed, Nancy reads several of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I’m struck by two lines that remind me of the headless mouse and aggressive, ecclesiastical hornets: “And art made tongue-tied by authority, / And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill…”

It’s an old problem.

27 June, Great Western Trail, Wasatch Crest—west of the sun, east of the moon

This will be our first high-altitude ride this year, much of it above ten thousand feet, a stretch of the Great Western Trail called the Wasatch Crest. We climb from Brighton to Scott’s Pass, where we look down over Park City’s highest slopes. For some reason (it may have something to do with the two athletic young women riding aggressively behind us), Sam doesn’t stop at the pass, although we usually do, nor does he stop at the top after the old mine shaft, although we always have. To take my mind off the pain, I chant lines from a poem by our friend Alex Caldiero:

he wonders if it was worth while making a good impression on the beautiful lifeguard who invited him out to where the waves were tall and the undertow unforgiving.

The red rocks where we finally sit in the sun are accented blue, orange, and yellow by tiny penstemons, a paintbrush and a daisy. Higher on the Wasatch Crest, five or six deep snowbanks cross the trail. Slogging through the last one, knee deep in melting snow on the Park City side, we find glacier lilies (Erythronium grandiflorum) in a small fellfield. A couple of hundred plants, yellow petals turned back on themselves, rise from the wet soil at the edge of the snow.

A young golden eagle lifts off a cliff beneath us and rises to our height. He circles us and stands still in the air, occasionally adjusting a wing. With a quick turn of his body, the eagle becomes a diagonal line against the sky and is instantly a half-mile across the ridge.

Main Street in Park City is surreal after three hours of isolation on the trail. We feel like country boys misplaced to fashion city. We stop in Swede’s Alley for a half-hour of shade and a half-gallon of rehydration. We can’t help but notice the steady flow of folks walking past us into the local liquor store. Thinking about his childhood Sunday school lessons on the evils of alcohol, Sam opines that “they don’t look like murderers, fornicators, and coffee drinkers to me.”

Muddy, bloody, wet and tired, we climb past the silver mine, cross over Guardsman Pass, and drag back to Brighton. Twenty-eight miles round trip, several thousand feet total climb. Nancy has fixed us what Alex calls “food to fit the hunger.”

1 July, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos

Ninety degrees Fahrenheit when we start riding in the late afternoon. This south-facing hillside has changed dramatically in just two weeks. The yellow sweet clover, for instance, bursting with new growth ten days ago, is spindly and shrunken—at least those stems that haven’t been stripped by voracious grasshoppers. The yellow, spurred flowers of the Dalmatian toadflax hang limp and shriveled. The vigorous new penstemons look tired. The grasshoppers don’t have it easy either. We see a big brown hopper, upright and seemingly intact, caught in a web. Beneath the insect, upside down, its bright red hourglass catching the sun, hangs a black widow spider (Latrodectus mactans). Its shiny black abdomen is taut with the grasshopper’s life.

Higher on the hill, with the big green aqueduct acting as a fence on one side, we come face to face with a doe. She wheels around and jumps off the road, straight into a barbed-wire fence. She thrashes, falls onto her back, kicks and pulls, and breaks free. She jumps up and has another go at the fence. Her front legs clear it this time, and her body and hind legs crash over. She disappears into the thick oak brush.

“I was rooting for her,” Sam says. “She would have kicked our heads off if we had had to help her.”

Everything is new and fresh and hopeful and fecund in the spring. By this time of year, everything is simply eating everything else. As if to drive the point home, we find the last row of trees cut down in the orchard.