Wind blusters Page Two

The wind blusters through the juniper bushes on the high plateau. The ground is rough with small blackened ridges. I am careful not to step on the blackened soil because it is alive. It is one of the oldest living things in the world, cyanobacteria or blue-green algae. Its ancestors’ fossils date back over 3.5 billion years. The ridges are formed by the sticky, mucilaginous sheaths of the bacterial filaments. The soil is commonly called crypto (from the Greek word for hidden) and gamic (marriage or to marry). There are a number of names for the soil. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_crust and http://www.xmlgadgets.com/home.pl?site=mwikt&query=cryptogamic

One step can destroy a crust that may take hundreds of years to rebuild. The fragile nature of the soil crust reminds me of a story, now folklore, about a scientist who cut down a bristlecone pine tree (Pinaceae Pinus Balfourianae) to find out how old it was. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1998/08/23/SC72173.DTL Some of these trees may have been alive for 5000 years and are considered the oldest single living organism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristlecone_pine The operative word here is single. It seems that the age of these trees is emphasized by the record they keep. They are old, but they are only recognized as old because they keep a record. It may be that the cryptogamic soils or creosote bushes (Larrea tridentataor) aspen trees (Populus tremuloides) are older, but it is only the methodical yearly tree rings that can prove the age of the bristlecone pines. Walking through stands of creosote you can speculate on its age, http://www.lucernevalley.net/creosote/photo_tour.htm but I wonder how many other, less attractive and less obvious plants there are in the world that may be older? http://waynesword.palomar.edu/ww0601.htm#oldest Maybe the bristlecone pines only have the best publicity agents? Maybe, on the other hand, we should all walk a little more carefully and respect our elders?

Now, the trail leads upward like a snake coiling around a staff, winding up through the rocks and trees until the trees lose to the trail and the rocks win. At the edge of the tree line, the ancient bristlecone pines stand like solitary picket soldiers. The view is worth the climb and the trees have always had the view. If we sit and listen, we can hear their story.

I always carry more food than I need. The first days of walking kill my appetite to the same degree that they increases my thirst. Juice, soup, anything with water, anything with salt. Walking from water to sand, from sand to rock, from rock to water or sand, the first days are like battling upstream, pushing against the current. The sun stands still overhead. Slowly, as the hours pass, I focus on my feet, on the creaking of my pack and the rocks, sand and water start to flow around me. I feel like I am swept along in the stream. The rocks begin to live. They bend and sway with each step as the world collapses into the next step and the next. The whole world is nothing more than one more step on the trail of existence. Time is no more and eternity stretches from one bend of the stream to the next, and the next.

I try to imagine how long it took the stream to cut through all that rock. Why do the rocks remain? Is this big rock in the trail more resilient than its brothers and sisters? Why did the trailmakers go straight to the rock, just so the trail could wind around and break my pace? I think about the difference between sandstone and granite, between rhyolite and tuff, between basalt and conglomerate. I walk without hope towards the sand hill, repeating over and over, it can’t be that high, it can’t be that high. Halfway up, I wish for granite, for sandstone, for anything other than sand. Maybe, the trail doesn’t really go up here through the sand, maybe we missed the trail and we will have walk all the way back. How long does it take to turn sandstone into sand and back into sandstone?