1.
The waterfall at Wolf Creek is running. We pass a manzanita on the trail, taller than I am and hung with fruit. Beneath the skin, the seeds are smooth and ridged and I hold them in my mouth, tonguing the texture. I spit one out and it lands beside coyote scat, full of more seeds and bits of fur. I wonder how many manzanitas are sown by coyotes; probably not so many, these days. Manzanitas like fire, and this bit of forest hasn’t seen fire since Smokey moved in about a hundred years ago.
2.
The south face of Mt. Lemmon burned hard three years back; the north face too. I visited there recently with a class, and we walked gingerly through a landscape clearly in recovery. At the bottom of the mountain, scattered husks of saguaros stood like grave markers; at the top, remnant stands of corkbark fir left charcoal smudges on our passing hands. And in between, baby manzanita leaves poked timidly out of the ash. Their seeds had sat waiting for smoke and heat to free them; sclerophyllous leaves burn hot, which triggers germination in manzanitas and kills most competitors. Without fire, the plants grow huge and dense, and as they die the landscape turns slowly to scruboak and juniper. Fire clears space, turns a hundred years of plant-stored minerals back into soil. Seeds open and become food for nervous rabbits, or maybe live to gnarl their way into my memory.
3.
We are crouched over my old copy of Arizona Flora with a handlens and an ovate leaf. I knew it already, but we wanted to be sure: Arctostaphylos pungens, not A. pringlei. The key can’t explain why I know this plant is not its cousin. My fingers know it, the rough edge of leaf, the smooth sheen of bark. My heart knows it.
Manzanita speaks to me. It stands in my mind as brazen synecdoche for an entire biome, the first thing I think of when I remember childhood chaparral hikes. Every place I see one feels like home.
4.
This year’s fires have already started, but many of them in places where the land is not adapted. Here we have taken to lighting them on purpose, and scientists argue over what frequency and intensity would most closely mimic the natural process. Meanwhile, the Mojave burns, and saguaros down south are turned to tombstones.
5.
Bear-berry. Bear-grape, if our translation is to be technical, but I like the alliteration more. The field guide says that the little apples are edible but not tasty; perhaps I have a bear’s palate. Suddenly I imagine myself a sphinx of sorts: a puma heart with raven wings, coyote legs to carry me and an appetite to match.
A bit of a trivial comment on a beautiful post:
I’ve always liked the binomial for the circumboreal manzanita, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi, or “Bear-grape bear-grape.”
My favorite, though, is a subspecies of the desert trumpet, Eriogonum inflatum, a native buckwheat with a grossly inflated stem just below the spot where the pedicels (flower stems) attach to the top of the stem. The subspecies I like lacks the inflated stems, and is thus named Eriogonum inflatum deflatum.
More importantly:
I love that.
I like to verb words!