From My Nature Journal: Running with the Bison

Well, ok, they weren’t really bison, just tumbleweeds…

Remember those old movies where a horseman would be galloping alongside a herd of wide-eyed bison as they stampeded across the plains, dust flying amidst thundering hooves? I had my closest experience ever to that interesting feeling today…

On our way to Chicago to visit family for the Thanksgiving holiday, we happened to leave the day following an early and burly winter storm yesterday, a fierce and old-fashioned nor’easter; its blizzard conditions packed some ferocious winds in excess of fifty miles per hour. But the snow had given way by today to a crystal blue Colorado sky, and the roads were clear and dry. We’ve driven that angled stretch of Interstate 76 between Denver and the Nebraska state line many times, always marveling at the piles of tumbleweeds stacked up against the barbwire fences on the east side of the highway. In fact, on the days we’d made a predawn departure, they had often provided quite the curious scene as a colorful morning sky dawned beyond them.

But here’s the thing: yesterday’s storm had moved all the tumbleweeds to the west side of the highway, and, as so typically happens, yesterday’s gale force winds from the east were matched almost completely today by their corresponding counterforce from the west -- all that unstable air had to somehow get back to the place it had occupied the day before! So as we traveled east and northeast along the interstate, hundreds and hundreds, nay, thousands of tumbleweeds had to do the same, all of them being blown back to the east side of the road. The first time we came upon a bunch of them moving east or northeast with our car, I commented to Gail that I felt like we were in one of those old movie scenes surrounded by a stampede! We, of course, traveled ‘with’ the ‘herd,’ inevitably running over many as they exploded in the wind around our car. But what a sight the vehicles were on the opposite side – many of them, cars and trucks alike, completely covered across their grills with growing tumbleweed layers. It made them look like a bunch of thickly bearded goblins running down the road.

Tumbleweeds have always fascinated me. (Apparently they’ve also fascinated my sister Denise – she once asked if we’d bring her one in Chicago, a request we were glad to oblige. But it sure took up a lot of room in the back seat and we still find an occasional poker sticking out of the cloth. Also, I’m not sure what my beloved brother-in-law had to say about it…) As we hike, we see them as small as basketballs and as large as Volkswagen Beetles. The pair shown below to the left were a couple of random ones we saw as we walked along a Las Cruces, New Mexico trail beside the Rio Grande.

In spite of their ubiquity in cheesy western films (picture one now rolling lazily across the dusty ghost-town street), the most common species in the interior west today is actually not even native but invasive. It’s called Russian Thistle, and is reputed to have come over in a shipment of flax seed from Eastern Europe to North Dakota in the 1870’s. Who knew? But there are lots of different kinds, and they vary widely in size and structure. Wikipedia says, “A tumbleweed is a structural part of the above-ground anatomy of a number of species of plants, a diaspore that, once it is mature and dry, detaches from its roots or stem, and tumbles away in the wind... Tumbleweed species occur most commonly in steppe and arid ecologies, where frequent wind and the open environment permit rolling without prohibitive obstruction.”

Beyond their physical fascination, I haven’t taken them particularly seriously over the years except when I try to aim my car at them as they cross a highway. You get points for that, you know, even if it makes your wife nervous. But farmers and agronomists have learned through hard experience to treat them much more seriously. Not only do they crowd out native foliage, but in drier regions they also starve both native plants and dryland crops of much needed moisture, each tumbleweed plant using up to forty gallons or more of water during a growing season. They also can negatively impact soil erosion, and produce fire hazards as they stack up in massive piles against buildings or vehicles. By and large, they are bad dudes.

But back to the ‘diaspore’ thing from the Wikipedia article. Though it’s just one word in the explanatory paragraph, this is the part that has always fascinated me most. Tumbleweeds are made to roll, not to provide forlorn and lonely ambience for old westerns, but in order to disburse their seed. Plants have different methods for seed dispersal – they can explode them, fly them, hitchhike them on animals or humans, or just drop them – but I think tumbleweeds are the only ones where the whole plant becomes the mechanism to deliver its seed wherever the wind rolls it. As it rolls and breaks down, seeds fall, or small pieces of the plant break off with seed attached, finding potential welcome in a harmonious place. They leave a mark of their presence wheresoe’er they roam.

I want to leave seeds of life,

hope and faith wherever I go.

How about you?

Noxiousness aside, of course, I guess in a different way I want to be like that, too. I want to leave seeds of life, hope and faith wherever I go. How about you?

Now thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and reveals through us the sweet aroma of his knowledge in every place… a sweet aroma from life to life.  

(2 Corinthians 2:14-16)

~~ RGM, from a 2014 entry in my nature journal,

adapted for my blog on November 25, 2016

QOTM...*: John Muir's Enthusiasm

(*Quote of the Month)

It’s time again for something from John Muir. Muir, as many of you know, was a naturalist and author of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, a man of Christian faith, and an enthusiastic and effusive observer of the natural world. For me, he embodies some of the best of the etymology of the word ‘enthusiasm’: break the word down and it comes from two Greek words – en, which as you can imagine means ‘in,’ and often finds itself a prefix to a larger word, and theos, the Greek for ‘god.’ To be enthusiastic, therefore, is to be ‘in god,’ or put another way, ‘to be possessed of God.’ I like that, more fun with words! The man Muir was indeed wholeheartedly possessed, so much so that some considered him a kook. But at times I know that feeling…

I wrote on him in one of my very first blogs nearly three years ago and you can learn more about him here, including the fearsome experience that launched his zealous attention upon God’s creation.

Here are the quotes. They have little to do with each other and their sources escape me, yet I include them together here only because they both are found on the interpretive signs (the photos) surrounding the visitor center at White Sands National Monument in southern New Mexico, which we called upon several times during our ministry nearby this past year.

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

This sounds a little C.S. Lewis-y to me. What do you think? Perhaps it is just reminding me of a Lewis quote. But the propensity for the natural world to mingle our out-goings and our in-goings… it’s a lovely thought. God’s presence is like that as well. Even the Psalmist said, The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore (121:8).

The second quote:

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and places to pray in, where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.

I imagine this kind of quote was part of his rhetoric as he stumped for the establishment and extension of the National Park system. Yet it’s true, beauty and bread. It’s what keeps me ‘going out.’ I trust you will be fully blessed by both at some point in the days immediately ahead.

~~ RGM, September 26 2015

POTM...*: White Sands National Monument

(*Photo[s] of the Month)

Gail and I have just completed a wonderful season of ministry among some dear new friends at a church in southern New Mexico. Working alongside the leaders and families of Sonoma Springs Covenant Church of Las Cruces will always be a life highlight for us, and we are deeply grateful for the opportunity to have shared this season with them.

Heading into this ministry experience last year, church life we knew. What we had no knowledge of was the uniqueness of New Mexico. The beauty of the state is an incredible thing but a well-kept secret, likely not a place many of you outside Colorado or Texas have visited. We were not only stunned by the loveliness of its high deserts and high mountains, and by the unique habitats formed by such things as bosques, remote canyon springs and sky islands; but we were also mesmerized by New Mexico’s geology, agriculture and human culture, and by the ways all of the above impact the area’s convergence of diverse histories, among them, archaeological and ancient puebloan histories, native American histories, and the histories of Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the Civil War of the United States, the American west, and the more recent Atomic and Space Ages. I don’t know that I have ever been surrounded by a more diverse conglomeration of habitats and histories.

Of course, while there we did as much hiking as spare time allowed, even encountered our first rattlesnakes and tarantulas while doing so! (We had actually been surprised never to have seen them before, what with all the traipsing we do.) But since our love for the people we worked with there and our delight with the state will not fade, I thought it timely once again to focus my photo(s) of the month on one of New Mexico’s less-known natural lovelies, one of our favorites, White Sands National Monument. Just northeast of Las Cruces, it was established in 1933 by President Herbert Hoover to protect a unique landform created through a coincidental cooperation of wind, precipitation, topography and geology. Not really ‘sand’ in the technical sense (which is made up of quartz-based silica and rock particles), these dunes are made of gypsum particles, a soft, water-soluble sulfate mineral, the main component of plaster and chalkboard chalk.

The dunes form in this way. Area precipitation is impounded in what is called the Tularosa Basin, a 6,500 square mile bowl surrounded by mountains, with no riversheds or outlets to drain it. Dissolved gypsum from the mountains flows with water into the basin, and as that water evaporates or sinks, gypsum selenite crystals are formed on the desert floor. These in turn crumble, and crumbs are picked up by prevailing winds and deposited on the dune field. Now, if it’s water-soluble, I’m not sure why the whole thing doesn’t just melt when it rains, so I’ll have to keep studying that! Suffice it to know, in regards to comfort, that these picturesque white sands remain fairly cool to the feet in the hot sun compared to regular sand, and, in regards to beauty, are especially good at picking up apparently blue shadows in the morning and evening as the sun is low in the sky. It all makes for a fantastical sort of environment to enjoy – hiking, dune running and jumping, unique moonlight concerts, even year-round sledding! And by the way, White Sands National Monument is the largest gypsum dune field in the world, 275 square miles in size.

I love dunes. It not only brings me back to my church youth group days as a teen, and our many trips to sand dune beach parks near Chicago on Lake Michigan. It also reminds me of God’s heart toward you and me expressed by David the Psalmist: “How precious to me are Your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I should count them, 

                                         they would outnumber the grains of sand…” (Psalm 139:17-18)

~~ RGM, June 25 2015

POTM...*: Nacho Typical Spring Flowers!

(*Photo of the Month)

The earth is so full of the glories of God’s creation… Oh, I had been in the desert often and seen its flowering cactus -- the soft pinks and yellows of prickly pear, the even quieter yellows of chollas, the blinding red-oranges of hedgehog claret cups and reds of barrel cactus. What I was not prepared for was my first view last spring of the strange and marvelous sotol.

Gail and I were still new to New Mexico at the time, and we’d gone out on Mothers Day afternoon to hike an area called Aguirre Springs on the eastern slope of the Organ Mountains, We rounded a bend in the access road and came upon an enormous, ten-foot-tall flower just off the roadside, shooting out of what we thought was a yucca. As usual when we don’t know what something is, we snapped a photo to check later and went on. Having showed it around to several people, we even took the photo to a nursery to seek the name, but all we were ever told was, “It’s some kind of yucca.” Some even said the Soap Tree Yucca, which happens to be the state flower. But looking up the various photos online yielded nothing that came close to matching what we saw.

Soap Tree Yucca, the NM state flower

Now, yucca blooms are actually quite stunning in their own right, the New Mexico plants huge compared to those of the knee-high variety that poke us in the knees along Colorado trails. Flower stalks can also be ten to twenty feet tall, especially when the plants start to grow into trees as the photo to the right. The two New Mexico varieties are the Banana Yucca, named for the green banana-looking seedpods that develop when the plant matures; and the Soap Tree, the roots of which were used by ancient peoples to make a kind of frothy soap. Both plants were also extensively utilized as food sources and to make a rough twine that could be formed into all sorts of things – rope, sandals, baskets, mats, etc. California’s Joshua Tree is an additional yucca variety. Another plant with an enormous bloom native to the desert southwest is the agave, one variety of which, the blue, is exclusively patented by Mexico for the distillation of tequila.

But back to sotols. We finally found a friend who could set us straight, the same friend who along with her husband later took us on that wildflower hike I wrote of on Mexican poppies in March. Melanie said, “No, that’s not a yucca, it’s a Desert Spoon Sotol, desylarion wheeleri, not even the same family.” Mystery solved. She also said that last year seemed a banner year for sotol blooms, but we are seeing near as many this year as last.

Unlike the yucca, and besides its very different flower, the sotol has tiny barbed hooks on the edges of its half- to three-quarter-inch wide frond stems, more slender than yucca fronds. The sotol frond cluster can be three to four feet in diameter, and the base of a cooked stem may be eaten as one eats an artichoke leaf. There at the base the stem broadens and cups; in prehistoric times, it was dried and used as a spoon, thus the name. As with yuccas, fibers were stripped from the sotol frond to make the same kind of twine products mentioned above. And the cool bloom? The plant takes up to fifteen years to mature and then can flower every several years. (The agave, on the other hand, matures for years, then blooms once and dies.) Flowers range in color from yellow to orange, rust and

Sotol barbs

burgundy. The bloom stalk can be up to sixteen feet tall, measuring four inches in diameter at its base, and hardens into a tough pole that also had various uses for native people. (I myself have a dandy hiking pole made out of one.) Interestingly, the stalk was commonly used as a fireplow. The plant used to be harvested and made into a beer, but as with the agave, some Mexican companies are distilling it into a mescal spirit called, not too creatively, sotol!

The wilderness and the desert will be glad, and the Arabah will rejoice and blossom; like the crocus It will blossom profusely and rejoice with rejoicing and shout of joy The glory of Lebanon will be given to it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon. They will see the glory of the LORD, the majesty of our God. (Isaiah 35:1-2)

Let my teaching drop as the rain. My speech distil as the dew, as the droplets on the fresh grass and the showers on the herb. (Deuteronomy 32:2)

Get outside!

~~ RGM, May 27, 2015

POTM...*: Mexican Poppies

(*Photo[s] of the Month)

OK, here’s something I’ve never had the delight of seeing before, that I’ve been eager to share with you since taking the photos last week. On our most recent visit to the church we’re serving part-time in New Mexico, we spent an amazing afternoon with a new member of the church and her husband, taking what could only in retrospect be called a ‘wildflower hike’ in the Florida Mountains near Deming. It was in a place called Spring Canyon State Park, a newer unit of nearby Rockhound State Park (where we encountered our first rattlesnake ever while hiking several months ago). We went, having asked this couple if they could simply take us out and share with us some of the things they knew about New Mexico flora (which we had already come to know was exponentially more than us!).

What a time we had! “Here, eat this!” Charles would say. And it would be delicious. “Oh, that’s Gluteus Maximus E Pluribus Unum Veni Vidi Vici,” Melanie would say. (Not really, she and he had all the Latin genera down quite well, as well as the common names, some plants of which had several.) And then we’d be off to the next thing along the trail. Gail and I had picked up a knowledge of a few of the more common things since our work in New Mexico began last spring, but the plethora of specimens here had all of our heads reeling -- none of us had expected such a profusion of wildflowers this early in the season. It was as though spring had broken forth all around us in a moment, an early Easter in the long Lenten season.

It is always a singular delight

to be out in nature with others

who enjoy it as much as you do…

Upon our exit from the park, Charles noticed a skirt of a mountain off to the west that was tinged in yellow orange, so he grabbed a quick left on a gravel road, went a ways and then began to search for an off-road two-track that might get us over that way. “That looks promising,” he deadpanned. Having found an overgrown range lane, we sliced over some low brush for a couple hundred yards and soon found ourselves surrounded by Mexican Poppies. “Charles,” I said, “as long as we’re here, I can’t not get out and take some photos.”

The sun teased us mercilessly over the next half hour, brightening the carpet momentarily and then disappearing behind steely clouds, but we were still able to enjoy it, walking among them nearly loathe to step 
                                          on any, which we found quite impossible.

Poppies with Silver Cholla Cactus

It is always a singular delight to be out in nature with others who enjoy it as much as we do, who think it not strange to pause at a plant and bend over, unmoving for thirty seconds, trying to figure out what something is, or just enjoying it in situ. Jesus contemplated nature, too, and used it to teach important lessons. In fact, he had it more than right when he said, “I tell you, don’t worry about your life… See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor, yet I tell you that not even King Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field… will he not much more take care of you, you of little faith?”

How grateful we were to these new friends for such a wonderful excursion. How grateful we are to God for the splendors of his creativity, and the simple but necessary lessons of which we are constantly reminded.

~~RGM, March 27, 2015