Zen of the Plains: Experiencing Wild Western Places

Chapter 1 - Shortgrass /Semi-Desert Shrub-Steppe

Chapter 1 Shortgrass / Semi-Desert Shrub-Steppe 1.1 Terra Incognita Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona Before desire and before knowing, how can I say I am? Consider. Dissolve in the beauty. —The 72nd of Shiva’s 112 ways to open the invisible door of consciousness, trans. by Paul Reps1 The wind was whipping fiercely. Grey clouds hung low over a rugged expanse of scraggly sagebrush, sandy arroyos, and the occasional tumbleweed or dust devil or raven swooping by. Because I didn’t yet have the words for “sagebrush” or “arroyo” or “raven” on that cold November morning, I was left with nothing but an empty horizon and big black birds. I had been driving for hours, following Interstate 40 into northern Arizona, where I was to report for an internship at Petrified Forest National Park. Although I sought a bit of adventure—anything other than 10 Zen of the plaIns another long cold winter at college in New Hampshire—I was beginning to wonder just what I was doing, where I was going, how I could possibly pass the next four months in such a place. (Such a place! Were there any people here? What were those birds?) Having spent my life comfortably surrounded by roads and rivers, trees and buildings, I was both intrigued and terrified by the yawning desolation of the landscape—what was out there but cold, windy, open space? Space. When I finally saw the big brown sign for Exit 311, I pulled off the Interstate and slowed from 70 miles per hour to 30, then 10. The slower I went, the more ragged, dusty, and bleak the place looked. Interpretive displays at the visitor center tried to convince me that the semi-desert shrub-steppe brims with wonders, but a few paragraphs of text and a few minutes’ worth of introductory film hardly gave me time to internalize information. (Antiquities Act? Artemisia? Aur-o-car-i-ox-y-what?) My mind was whirling as I got back into my car and started to drive down the park’s twenty-odd miles of neatly paved road. Then it happened. A half-mile or so later, just before the first scenic overlook, I came around a curve and the earth dropped away or the sky lifted up and I felt the delicious, dizzy onset of agoraphilia. There it was: the Painted Desert. The Painted Desert is a land of rusty clay hills, sharp sandstone ledges, winding washes and pockets of grass that stretches in a polychromatic arc across northeastern Arizona. By formal classification standards, the region is not technically a “desert” but rather a shrub-steppe or shortgrass prairie, marked by an arid climate and predominance of low, woody vegetation. Long before ecological equations and regional maps could inform the public of this fact, Spanish explorers affixed the term “desierto”—“El Desierto Pintado”—to the barren but beautiful land they encountered on their quest to locate the shortgrass / seMI-desert shruB-steppe 11 Seven Cities of Gold for Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives and his Colorado River Exploring Expedition formalized use of the toponym “Painted Desert” in 1858—five years after Lieutenant Amiel Weeks Whipple wrote about “quite a forest of petrified trees” he had discovered while surveying the 35th parallel. By the turn of the twentieth century, these fossil forests had become an attraction for railway travelers. An increasing number of early visitors were so intrigued and delighted by the colorful crystalline wood that they arranged to cart large chunks back home. Afraid that the dwindling deposits might disappear altogether, local enthusiasts—including John Painted Desert Wilderness Area—clay and sage crouching under the silhouette of Pilot Rock 12 Zen of the plaIns Muir, who spent several years in the area—urged President Theodore Roosevelt to exercise the power granted to him by Antiquities Act of 1906 to preserve sites of superlative cultural and/or geologic merit for all present and future generations of American citizens. Thus Petrified Forest National Monument—one of America’s first national monuments—was born. Congress conferred National Park status in 1962, protecting the jumble of geologic curiosities as well as a diverse array of other significant resources: fossils dating to the dawn of the dinosaurs, artifacts from eras of Native American inhabitation, intact tracts of shortgrass-steppe, and, encompassing it all, breathtakingly beautiful scenery. The Painted Desert. To the Diné, or Navajo people, the...