Читать книгу Wild Rides and Wildflowers - Scott Abbott - Страница 20
Оглавление19 July, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
Showy milkweed (Asclepias speciosa) all over the place. The flowers are thick with milkweed bugs (Oncopeltus fasciatus), bright red-orange copulation machines dedicated to turning the world’s biomass into insects. These bugs have few predators, since their diet is comprised entirely of the poisonous milkweed plants. The same holds true for the monarch butterfly, whose larvae feed on milkweed. Oddly enough, this summer’s grasshoppers are eating milkweeds. They seem to avoid the leaves and stems, focusing on the flowers. We suspect this is because the rather meager crop of yellow sweet clover has been eaten to the ground. Sheep, on the other hand, are not so smart and will eat the whole plant. A couple of pounds of showy milkweed will kill a full-sized ewe. Symptoms of milkweed poisoning include wheezing, labored breathing, and “recumbence”—similar to the symptoms induced by riding up Frank.
In Hindu mythology, Soma, one of the most important Vedic gods, is a personification of the soma milkweed. This plant contains a milky sap from which a world-class, euphoria-inducing intoxicant is derived. Indra created the universe under its influence and placed Earth and sky in their proper positions. I gotta say, milkweeds are among my favorite plants. What else do you know that has the potential both to kill sheep and set the world right?
21 July, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
Sitting in my lab thinking about last night’s ride. We snaked through a group of maybe forty riders of all ages waiting at a starting line to race up the lower part of our trail. No kidding—starter’s pistol, entrant numbers, staggered starts, age classes—the whole deal. This spectacle poses at least two dilemmas for me. First, although this is not my trail, as I ride through the sea of expensive bikes and colorful Lycra butts I feel like saying, “Hey, we’ve been riding this trail for many years in all seasons, even in snow over our shoes—long before any of you had the foggiest idea about mountain bikes, let alone about this place. Move the hell over and let two old men pass.”
A second more urgent issue is brought home by the human population counter sitting behind my computer, ticking off the growth of the human race on Planet Earth. I had this two-foot-long electronic counter built a few years ago to remind me of what I think is the central issue of our time. As I sit here, the counter reads 6,047,086,034…6,047,086,035…6,047,086,036—in just over one second. Correcting for death, we add about 2.6 new persons to the Earth each second—relentlessly. That’s about 156 new people per minute, more than 9000 per hour, nearly a quarter of a million per day and more than 80 million per year. Trouble is, all of them want to eat well, enjoy adequate housing, and ride the Great Western Trail.
22 July, Great Western Trail, Timpooneke to Provo Canyon
Just after eight a.m., Nancy drops us off at the Timpooneke Trail high in American Fork Canyon. We’ll ride the section of the Great Western Trail that circles Mount Timpanogos from north to west to south to east. It’s a high alpine singletrack, soft in places with pine needles, rocky in others. The one constant on the ride is the show put on by wildflowers: white Colorado columbine (Aquilegia coerulea), scarlet gilia that gives way to salmon and white, red paintbrush extruding lascivious fruiting tongues, tall green gentian (Frasera speciosa) that’s perennial for some years but dead after once flowering, showy larkspur, wild rose, sunflowers, yellow wallflowers, sego lily, mullein, white and pink geraniums, pale wild hollyhock, blue flax, fields of yellow daisies, masses of blue penstemon, and western coneflowers (Ratibida columnifera).
We have stopped to look more closely at some brilliant penstemons when Sam motions for me to look behind a rock. “Is it a blind snake?” I ask when I see the snake’s smooth reddish skin. “No,” Sam says, “it’s Utah’s only native boa constrictor, a rubber boa.” The boa slowly insinuates itself back into its hole.
“Look at the stump of a tail,” I say.
“They often present their tails as their heads in the face of danger,” Sam says. “Unlike most Utah politicians, this snake knows the difference.”
We’re well aware of the difference in our legs by the time we finish the ride five hours after we began. And the difference in our minds, as well.
27 July, Great Western Trail, 7:00 a.m.
Heading up Provo Canyon, we talk about obsessive-compulsive behavior and anxiety. Sam wrote a book about the subject, which he knows from personal experience, and he once lectured up and down the Wasatch Front to rapt and anxious audiences. Our conversation turns to the embolism in Sam’s rear tire that threatens to end our ride at any moment, to dear friends who are breaking up after long relationships, to the complexities of my own disintegrating marriage.
