experiments in latin and layaway

i have been walking the land. it's a new kind of reading and writing; the consonants and vowels looped out with footfalls, the signifiers and the signified bending under rushing water or leaning into the planar mountain wind. language is a suitable animal to study, especially this new dialect of tangled places whose depth and expanse have been underfoot my whole life and i've never made it a point to work on map reading.

iron canyon. toll canyon. three mile canyon. willow draw. dutch draw.

part of this of course is an offering to some close friends as a plea for peace and quiet.

.

i brace myself and open the back door of the Volvo, and they race out in obligatory fury at top speed and disappear into a confusion of chokecherry, mountain mahogany and mud.

it is well worth it. something i am discovering about a daily ritual of disconnecting myself from inside habits is that my mind empties completely and i am immediately in tune with my body. i buzz. the sub-alpine understory buzzes. in some ways it is an experience of deep vulnerability to try to insert yourself into a land unmanaged and unplanned, because you undertake to assimilate into chaos. but for me that chaos is becoming cathartic because it slams me with full force into quiet and i realize how potentially murky my insides may be at present.

it is of course possible that they are literally murky from filling it with things like this

(that, if you are wondering what an antidote for inner purity might be, is a sandwich from a luncheonette counter in New York City. it has three fried eggs and six pieces of bacon swaddling a clutch of french fries and adhered to a crusty torpedo shaped roll by an inordinate amount of gluey, saffron colored american cheese. yes it's real. yes it was mine.)


and frankly, i champion such feats of gastronomy in the underbelly of urban places. you do disservice to yourself and to local cuisine by passing up such a thing as The Curious George in favor of egg whites and cantaloupe. but certainly you wouldn't need to go high up into the mountains and climb down into a ravine to hear your body plea for something powerful and green to cut through the nutritious havoc you've wreaked on your body. i just happened to be in a ravine at the time.

you may recall there was an expedition earlier in search of urtica dioica. it was a lovely gesture to forage and very fruitful. with the bounty from the woods and some from my mother's herb garden i undertook to concoct this

which is a tangle of medicinal herbs especially for lady-insides. in addition to the nettles there is sage and raspberry leaf. once rinsed the above greenery was dried, pulsed in a food processor until uniform and covered with vodka.  now, wrapped in a tea towel in the closet is the suspicious jar of this

which, after shaking daily and keeping out of the sun, will be strained into another jar (blue glass this time, to further filter out the UV rays which will neutralize the medicinal compound and fur the top over with mold) and dosed out in a small silver spoon before the morning coffee.

tinctures are a marvelous kind of alchemy: drawing tonic and plant essences from organic mash and the questionable liquid leftovers from a friend's weekend. they can be taken straight or, for the more faint of heart, hidden in a glass of cloudy apple juice or at the bottom of a strong cup of black tea.

but today's walk wasn't about nettles. today's walk was an immersion program into the range plants of the Wasatch mountains. a desert's biodome is so vastly diverse in terms of its inhabitants that it is a formidable undertaking to attempt to learn the local lexicon. this year especially we are confronted with plants that we rarely see in bloom or plants that only bloom when the water table is high enough. we have whole carpets of blue bells fragrant and top heavy in the drainages and the wild sweet pea has clambered up so rapidly that the quaking aspen saplings are draped in festoons of scarlet and cream.

part of what is so interesting in looking at plants from a botanist's perspective is that there is an entire sub category of language that has been developed to praise and describe it. it is not often a person is entitled to such peppery splashes in their vocabulary as corymb (a flat topped racene in which outer flowers open first), decumbent (the base of the plant resting on the ground with upper part rising), or glabrous (smooth, without hair.)

monocotyledon. panicle. saprophyte. apomixis. pappus. cyme.

i happily went out, sunhat fitted over loose braids, to hunt for names and secrets in Toll canyon, decked modestly in a single sunflower and wielding Japanese pruning shears and a snack.

i am struck, constantly, by the absolute calm born aloft on the leaves of trees and flowers. as we were rained on by a driving, diagonal rain last evening most of the sunflowers that led down into the ravine were tousled, bedraggled and stooped. but they swayed among to their regal, unblemished neighbors, some bearing the paper punched latticework of snails on their leaves, or the sticky honeydew of aphids with grace and a complete lack of self consciousness. in fact, the ugliness of disorder and imperfection was everywhere; willow branches snapped and frayed at their jointery, moose scat in a bed of columbine. even the purity of fecundity seemed a farce when i crouched among a loose leaf fluttering of yellow butterflies,  only to find them sipping daintily from the middle of the path, on a slurry of manure. there were the fine arms of mountain anemone uncurling demurely from the moist belly of a dead wood chuck. for a moment, everything slanted sharply and all my idealizations about the wisdom of the woods rolled and bumped up amongst each other in defeat. it was, again, that underscoring of wild things. John McPhee had mentioned, you remember, in his essay about virgin forests that untidiness, was the cornerstone of a primeval forest; it's lack of pristine wholeness and order in all things is what contributed to its vitality.

anyway. the tired bones of the animals and i, back with a plastic vessel filled with creek run-off and luminous clippings, spent the rest of the afternoon foraging in electronic plant catalogs to learn what the call our bounty.. at least, i foraged the catalogs. the dog bones heaped up into sandy tufts along the cool stonework of the kitchen floor and offered up their end of a quiet sleepy bargain.

there was
Horsetail (equistetum arvense) which contains an abundance of silica and thus can be used as an abrasive for cleaning and polishing
Quaking Aspen (populus tremuloides) which contains salicin, a compound very similar to aspirin
Meadow Rue (thalictrum fendleri)
Thimbleberry (rubus parviflorus) edible, delicious! Like large, sweeter raspberries
Catnip (Nepeta Cataria)

Northern Bedstraw (g. boreale) which can be used to slow bleeding, aid in childbirth, reduce fever and stimulate the appetite

Yarrow (compositae/asteraceae) when, taken as a tea, is used to relieve ear- and head- and toothaches, to reduce swelling, as a remedy for colds, and as a topical antihistamine.

Aster (compositae/asteraceae)
Larkspur (delphinium)

Mountain Bluebells (mertensia ciliatra) which are edible- both leaves and flowers, and the plant is a galactogogue (meaning, it is a substance that promotes lactation in nursing mothers)

Baneberry (ranunculaceae)
Western Wood Anemone (anemone quinquefolia)
Columbine (aquilegia)
Leafy Jacob's Ladder (polemonium foliosissiumum) 
Common Sunflower (helianthus annuus)
Mule Ears (wyethia)


**Most local Universities have extension programs that overview local micro-climates, plant and animal habitats, plant names and identification materials. The above information was sourced from Utah State University's Environmental Studies department which has a host of electronic resources, links and other interesting information:

**plant idenificaiton at:  http://extension.usu.edu/files/publications/publication/HG_506.pdf
**plant catalog at: http://extension.usu.edu/rangeplants/