Things Fall Into Place

[An essay for you... ]

Tonight I will sleep in the White Mountains of east-central California at a high, lonely place aptly called Grand View Campground. At 8000 feet on the western flank of the range, it provides an overview of Owens Valley, and an awesome panorama of the Range of Light, the High Sierra. A small dirt track leads west from the campground through the sage and Piñon Pine to some craggy outcrops distinctly uncomfortable for sitting. I know I will stop there, facing this awesome sweep of altitude, granite and ice … and of time.

I have visited these mountains since I was a little kid. Dad was a geologist, a teacher at the university, and for many summers conducted field camps in this area for his students. Visiting him during those summers introduced me to this country. In 1971, years after dad’s involvement in the geology camps, I returned. I wrote a line of poetry so foreign to my life at that time that I have not forgotten: “If God is anywhere, this is the place.”

I’m not a religious man, though I had my share of it in my twenties through forties. Those decades of experience are probably why I’m not a religious man today. Back in 1971, in the high Whites, religion wasn’t present in that line of poetry.

Poet David Whyte once said, “Sometimes everything has to be enscribed across the heavens for you to find the one line already written inside you.” I found my “one line” sitting among the ancient Bristlecone Pines, native to the high reaches of this desert range. These trees are wind swept, sand blasted, living beings of immense age. They were both the inspiration and the only audience for the words I wrote that day. It took the harshness of this place and the almost inconceivable stretch of time these trees have lived to nurse open a broken spot in the hardness of my young life. And God showed up. I remember that feeling, that initial breath of spirit coming to consciousness.

Tonight I will be there again.

The road up Westgard Pass is steep and serpentine. This is sun broiled country, and the sand and the rock radiate heat back upward. The canyon narrows, and around a northern bend, an incongruous eruption of green appears. As we approach the spring, the memories come to me. In the early evening, after a day in the field and a good camp meal with his colleagues and students, Dad and I would walk up the hill to the old flat-bed Ford. On the bed of the truck, like a blob of melted tar, was a great rubber bladder, an Army surplus relic. This held the water supply for the geology camp, the headwaters of a system of pipes that fed two outdoor showers among the Piñon Pines. Each afternoon there was a silent competition for the first water out of those pipes, which had heated during the day. The bladder needed re-filling every three days or so. Dad liked that duty, and when I was in camp, it was my job, too.

After unfastening the fittings, we climbed into the cab of the truck. It seemed an enormous vehicle to me. My chin could rest on the sill of the open passenger window. Dad put it in first gear, and we moved slowly down the sage covered hill to the dirt ruts leading out of camp and onto the Westgard road. The trip to the spring took about 30 minutes. I can’t remember what Dad and I talked about, but it is a sweet memory for me, knowing that it was just him and me. I imagine he had plenty to think about after a day in the field with his students. But maybe that’s why he liked this particular errand. There is something settling and simple about the high desert; perhaps Dad and I didn’t talk much. Perhaps silence was Dad’s way of courting solitude and teaching his young son to do the same.

The water from the spring up on the hill was captured and guided into a pipe that brought it down near the road. We would park the truck next to the stone and mortar trough holding the water that bubbled out of the pipe. Dad would tap into the supply higher up the hill so the bladder would fill by gravity. I always liked to sit on the bladder where the hose attached. I could feel the bladder gently swell as it filled with the cool water. It took about two hours.

In the mild cool of the evening, as the light lowered in the canyon, bats would rise from the dense Cottonwood foliage. They were silent soaring shadows creating amazing designs in the sky. Dad said they were eating mosquitoes, and that he was glad there was something that liked eating mosquitoes before the mosquitoes would eat us. He found a joy in that little joke. He said it every time we came to the spring for water.

I liked trying to hit the bats with rocks. This was far less possible than I liked to think. But I remember Dad encouraging me as one of my tosses came close, and laughing at the futility of the effort. In these simple things, I remember a childlike joy in my father. He loved the natural world; he loved unfolding it in knowledge for others, and there at the spring, his joy, and his love for the natural world were planted in me.

On this trip to the White Mountains, I travel with my cousin, Dave. He and I have become close over the past several months. Dave is a landscape photographer. His love for wilderness beauty and his quality of seeing draws me to him. This was the first time he has come to this area, although he knows of it through family stories and friends. He is planning on photographing the Bristlecone Pines for the first time.

In the morning, Dave and I drive out from Grand View Campground, and head up hill. The first access to the Bristlecones is at Schulman Grove, at about 10,000 feet, but we opt to go higher. The pavement ends at Schulman Grove; twelve miles along the dirt road we come to Patriarch Grove, at just over 11,000 feet.

Foliage at this altitude is small and low-growing: a few clumps of sage, mostly lichen and tiny, brilliant wildflowers. From a distance these little flowers give the white dolomitic soil and rock a dusting of pastel color: pink, blue, yellow. The only other foliage are the Bristlecone Pines. Though they are not tall as trees go, they dominate my attention.

Neither Dave nor I speak much as we drive down the rough spur leading to the Patriarch Grove. These trees have a presence much larger than their physical being. Words almost seem inappropriate. I sense in their presence a patience, an acceptance, and a wisdom that is as tangible as the rarefied air the trees grow in.

Dave and I walk down a trail to the tree after which the grove is named: The Patriarch. It is the largest of the Bristlecone Pines, with a trunk circumference of about 37 feet. I estimate its height to be about the same. As we approach The Patriarch, I notice how it has grown. The highest reach of this magnificent tree is formed from long-dead trunk and limbs. They are beautiful tan, brown and wine-colored spears pointing into the depth of space. Out from the center horizontally and below the vertical rise of the old, dead trunk, the branches, needles and cones form a lush doughnut of living tree.

I walk up to the tree. I’m breathing deeply with the altitude. I gently touch one of the needled boughs above my head. I walk beneath the tree, into its space, into its embrace. Emotion rises freely. I am greeting an understanding, compassionate seer. I touch the living trunk. I feel its rough texture. I say “Thank you.”

Dave has thoughtfully given me space for my experience, but I walk around the huge trunk and see that he is having his own moment of greeting with the tree. I can see Dave’s eyes see — not what he sees, but his intense focus, his noticing of detail, his connected heart, his love. He moves slowly, looking at all angles; then he moves quickly with some silent intuition of another image that captures a small slice of soul of The Patriarch.

Dave and I walk out across a large flat meadow of white rock and lichen, and ascend a hill south and east of The Patriarch. We slow our pace as we move up the slope allowing our lungs to keep up with us. From the top of the hill we look directly east and down to Cottonwood Basin, a lush oasis of granite, aspen, grass and sun. The eastern horizon draws our sight across the vast Great Basin. John Muir described this view as “ridge upon ridge, as great layers of ash dropped from a burning sky.” To the north, White Mountain itself glances over the intervening ridges. It stands as high as the highest of Sierra Peaks.

How can anything grow here? Let alone survive for almost 5000 years. These trees do. It is the unique qualities of the Bristlecone Pine in concert with the harshness and difficulty of this place that actually contribute to such longevity. Dr. Edmund Schulman, after whom the Schulman Grove is named, wrote, “…on the driest and most adverse sites it is easier to find a very old tree than a very young one.”

I enjoy picturing Schulman who, in the mid-1950’s came here on a whim and a rumor, and he found the culminating discovery of his life’s work: the world’s oldest known living thing. His love and wonder for these trees is palpable when he writes: “There is something a little fantastic in the persistent ability of a 4,000-year old tree to shut up shop almost everywhere through its stem in a very dry year, and faithfully to reawaken to add many new cells in a favorable year.”

I imagine him walking among these trees over forty years ago. I like to think that the trees drew out his heart the way they do mine. I see him asking permission of the tree to take a core sample, and the gentleness of his intrusion. And I see him in his small lit trailer, late in the evening, counting dense rings under a microscope. I feel his excitement and awe as it begins to dawn on him: “That evening I had our long cores…under the lens, and as I dated the outer centuries of rings and then went on to a quick count of the earlier rings, unusually crowded even for Bristlecone, I felt excitement rise, for we were rapidly piling up the centuries. And when I got to within one inch of the inner end of our cores, I fairly shouted at my colleague working across the table.”

I have already lived more years than Edmund Schulman. He died early, at 49, which I find an irony in light of his work with the Bristlecones. Many times in my life I have questioned my own purpose and work: what my life means. At times this questioning has seemed as intrusive as a core sample must be to a tree. I feel as if I have counted the rings of my life, identifying the growth, the hard and lean years, the times I shut down.

Dave and I spend the evening atop a wide ridge watching the sun drop and the full moon rise. He is absorbed in his art; I allow my thoughts to move. It occurs to me that personal meaning is a very present experience. Meaning draws on history, but doesn’t live there. We bring meaning to this moment alone.

Edmund Schulman’s work and love for these trees. Dad and me at the spring on Westgard Pass over forty years ago. That one line of poetry that came to me as an opening to something greater in life. Being with the ancient Patriarch today. Dave’s passion, focus and engagement in wanting the world to see what he sees. All these bring meaning to this moment, and I sense, in the presence of all that has come before, a grand design complete now, but still forming. From this vantage point in the high Whites, among the ancient ones, I know that things fall into place.

[May you be well. Stephen]