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Published: September 23rd 2008
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Horse bits strewn, bones and hair. A skull, a jaw, a tail, etc. scattered along the east bank of Black Bear Lake. The blood crusted in the dirt, entrails long digested. They pack you in; you blow them up. One stick of dynamite carefully placed, carefully lit. Light it up and equestrians be gone...running on foot.
Bobcat tracks in the mud flats, Great Horn calls through the lodgepoles, sleeping by the coals under the icy milky way.
The mule deer were on edge as the hunters gathered around their illegal backcountry fires. We lugged our synthetic fabrics, petroleum products, and processed food into the wilderness, leaving Our white Jeep Cherokee (Forest Service Vehicle # 4433) at Leavitt Lake. East of the crest, glacier blue lakes dotted the gray, pink, and white painted rocks: sandstone, basalt, and sculpted granite The winds screamed at 11,000 feet, rushing the clouds up and down around us and spattering us with the first precipitation I've seen in 3 months. Down again and back up the nasty switch backs over Hollywood
Survey says...
Scientific analysis points to less than 40cm of peat, as illustrated by Steve and Mike. Bowl. Down again into the Emmigrant Plateau to Snow Lake.
The last of three fen surveys was lacking in fens, but packed full of sights to survey for Botrychiums. Fucking Botrychiums! Days were spent crawling around on hands and wet knees, parting the sedges and Salix to scour the microecosytems for the prized microscopic moonworts. I searched in turmoil and found almost nothing. Tired and frustrated, 6 days later, we hiked 15 miles back to Leavitt Lake and ripped through the rocks with internal combustion, 10 miles back to pavement, 2 hours back to civilization.
Somewhere along the way, like my digital camera, I lost my mind in the rocks. Choices were deliberated, options were weighed, the lack of communication, creating a lack of the known, distressed me, wondering at the voicemails building up over 8 days that would determine which of the mental realities that I had built in my mind would be realistic, and which ones I would have to leave behind, solidifying only one into experience,
which could only vaguely resemble my preconception.
When I arrived in a narrow valley of cell phone range, there were four choices laid out in digital format. Four interviews had lead to four job offers.
I had decided days ago. I would continue my habit of pushing toward further and further extremes in brand new environments. I am an isolationist at heart. Routine and rut are inevitable human conditions, one can only choose new ones to sink into. Death Valley National Park has offered me a new rut: a one year Term position with health benefits as a Bio-Tech, doing plant surveys. My initial fear at the idea of being 60 miles from the nearest grocery store and spending a summer in the hottest, driest and lowest place in the Western Hemisphere slowly dissolved over my eight day work trip and somewhere in my moonwort madness I gave up those other mental fabrications of reality that involved living somewhat near an urban area.
Maybe I just don't want to dig through so much else to find the one desired species (finding something within something). Maybe I want to scour the sand and look under rocks, places more stark and empty where life can only barely cling(finding something in nothing). The emptiness of the desert is like some strange mirror that reflects more by not reflecting. I will surely begin to devour myself there; Regurgitating Ouroboros brain, bloody fangs with empty poison sacs. But rather than imploding or entering some spaceless vortex, I will come out exactly the same and leave everything behind again for something new. I know because I've done it before, again and again.
Again,
steve
P.S. All pictures are from the 2nd Fen expedition, before I lost my camera.
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