Bodily Memories

9/5  Bodily Memories
     As I drove the car slowly down the gravel road, a small meadow bounded by low sandstone ledges came into view and the memory was sudden and hard, like someone had delivered a punch not so much to my physical body, but perhaps my psychic body: a shock such that I actually cried out in surprise.
     A series of impressions crowded in like flotsam on rising river: grass burning in an advancing line up the low slope, reaching the bases of the juniper trees and after a few minutes when the flames found the current of a tree’s sap, a sudden flaring and the tree became a torch roaring skyward until there was nothing left to burn but a stubborn wood skeleton.  Other impressions: the fire retardant-treated clothing, 2-way radios, helmets, pulaskis and shovels, 25 pounds of water in a backpack with a hose…and the drip torches.  Canisters of gasoline carried by one of the team who lit the nozzle at the end of a short hose and walked wide, carefully designed patterns in the meadow, setting the grass on fire, while the others watched the fire’s progress, scraping away grass to bare earth or wetting the ground if the low flames threatened to leave our carefully designed field of play.  Nearby was a truck with 1000 gallons of water and 100 ft hoses should the fire behave differently than predicted.
     But it was the first, visceral, impression that I pondered.  That this activity of 15 years past appeared to be stored in the cells and tissues of my body…and why was it tinged with an unpleasant perfume?
     There had been another instance of bodily memory during this return. It had a very different feel. Stumbling back through low sagebrush to the cabin at dusk on the first night, I wasn’t sure of the way and the failing light made the details of the small canyon vague.  My mind searched for retrievable data, found none and then played out a couple of scenarios of having a long walk in the dark to the cabin if I missed the path up onto the ledge and went all the way down to the road. It was in the midst of this reverie that I noticed my feet had found a barely distinct path in the sandy soil. “Yes, this way”, my body said. How strange! Something in the body remembers this walk, which I did many times the 2 years I worked at the preserve.  The mind has forgotten, but the body remembers.
     As I thought more about my experiences on the prescribed burn crew, I saw that these 2-3 weeks in September and October when the night time temperatures were low enough that fire was hard to sustain and the moisture content of the vegetation was high enough that the fire would only spread slowly - this time in the Fall was one part of my job I did not like – not because fire can be so dangerous or the work days were especially long, but rather that in my heart, I disagreed with the preserve policy of getting rid of the junipers because they were (and still are) considered to be an invasive species at the preserve and throughout much of the West, living where they shouldn't and competing unfairly with cattle for water and sparse soil nutrients that feed the native grasses.(1)
     The preserve manager was something of a confessed pyromaniac as well as a highly trained, very competent fire technician and ecologist, and you could see that he actually enjoyed watching the junipers burn and took some satisfaction in counting up their destruction, acre by acre, fulfilling the management plan.
     The West lived on: The only good juniper is a dead juniper!  Whatever doesn't fit into our plan for how things ought to be is targeted for extermination.  Old story. (2)
     When I looked at the landscape, though, I just saw trees, with an accompanying sense of their inherent right to be there amongst the grasses, sage and small herbaceous plants.  Why?  Simply because they were there. Trees don’t have motives or plan invasions.  They just grow where small mammals and birds deposit their seeds and the conditions are right for those seed to fulfill their promise.
     Fifteen years ago, it was scientifically arguable exactly why the conditions were right for a juniper invasion of foothills of the West – a slowly-brewing combination of over-grazing, introduction of non-native grass species, higher temperatures and scant precipitation in the last century were among the probable causes making the rounds at academic conferences, as biologists and land managers studied species distributions, tree core samples, pack rat middens (3), and wildlife numbers to find a patterns and explanations and remedies.
    But despite all of this adverse publicity, there they were: stout roughly conical trees of 10-20 feet in height with straggly peeling bark that covered dense, hardwood (good for fence posts because it doesn't rot), scaly foliage and pungent berries (used to make gin).  I liked them, just as I did the other plants that populated what I considered to be a slice of heaven, this beautiful rise of sandstone and limestone with its secretive canyons studded with ponderosa, doug fir, aspen and spruce, meadows where mule deer slept in the shade during the day, red tailed hawks drew slow circles in the sky and elk bugled excitedly in the evenings each September.
     And so there was a part of me that resisted doing what I did, carrying my drip torch and lighting the grass on fire, aiming for the junipers.  I'd carried that memory with me like the 25 pounds of water on my back, and it weighed into the cells of my heart over the years.  Besides the junipers, how many other lives did I extinguish with my fires – the countless mice, voles, insects and other small creatures who live at ground level? Were there birds’ nests in the stout trees?  Maybe the ash returned to the thin soils when the winter snow melted was a measure of reparation. But ultimately I carried the question: Who were we to say that the junipers should go?  Science is a man-made thing, and men are always busy thinking, designing and fixing the world. What if it doesn’t need us to fix it?  What if Nature’s heart and mind are bigger than any of ours, and She is moving in ways we don't comprehend yet?
     I don't know -it's not really something for the mind to grasp, but for the intelligence of the body and the heart to feel.  What I do know is that fifteen years later I see the still-standing gray skeletons among the grasses, persistent bones of an invader army of junipers.  Here and there, new recruits rise a few feet above the grass tops, and I'm still happy to see them.

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(1) Today Wyoming's grasslands are also managed for sage grouse habitat.  The native ground nesting birds are declining in numbers across the West and depend on the mosaic of sagebrush and grass. And to be fair, periodic lightning-caused fires are a natural event, and help sustain species diversity in grasslands.
(2) Coincidentally, the white man who coined the famous injunction I paraphrase here was General Sheridan, for whom the town at the northeastern end of the Bighorns is named. Sheridan and his superior, General Sherman, waged a bloody war of extermination on the "Sioux" and their allies in the land that became northeastern Wyoming.
(3) Bushy tailed wood rats, commonly called pack rats because of their proclivity for collecting things, build up piles of their excreta, generation after generation in the same place.  Some of these middens on the preserve where I worked are 3-4000 years old, and biologists take core samples to see what the seed-eating rodents were gathering, thus telling us what plant species were present.  Interestingly, they provide evidence that junipers were growing on the slopes of the Big Horn Mountains in the 1800's.
(4) Lest this little essay be taken as disparaging in general of science and efforts to sustain native landscapes through the West, I must say that I do have a great deal of respect for the people who do this work, and the land that has been protected and restored from over-use.