Traverse City Record-Eagle

Dee Blair: The View From Sunnybank

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May 8, 2011

The View From Sunnybank: Twisted silver, gold

By Dee Blair, Local columnist ----

Imagine a fretting Giant -- with world-altering strength -- moving amid Utah's magnificent, wind-carved Arches National Park landscape. Instead of nibbling his fingernails he petulantly grabs the nearest helpless tree and twists it -- as a child might do with licorice -- into fantastic shapes, half-snapping, then shredding the often multiple trunks, to release his angst about -- well, about whatever might niggle a Giant. He never bothers to rip out the wretched plant, but idly tortures it before wandering off. This agony happens constantly to the Utah Juniper.

The Giant, of course, is Old Man Weather.

The juniper doesn't waste energy whining: It's learned to adapt, and can live more than 500 years in practically nonexistent soil, 5,000+ feet above sea level, under intense (115-degree) summer sun, with very little rain, in winter's sub-zero conditions, and oh, yes, battered by excoriating winds that would kill -- quicker than instantly -- every tree or bush that lives practically anywhere else. Seeds that manage to establish a foothold in this environment often mature to over 10 feet high and wide.

When I looked closely at them during our first hike in this splendid park I was open-mouthed with admiration. They were everywhere. One five-foot tall, single-trunk specimen had emerged horizontally from a rock right at the edge of a windy 2,500-foot-high precipice. It then shot straight up, like a finger, unfazed by the ocean of air beneath it. In disbelief, I dared to crawl close enough to touch it while Joe hurriedly took photos. Wind gusts toyed with me, debating whether to blow me into the meandering Colorado River a half-mile below.

Adolescent trees that began their lives a century ago defiantly display battle scars topped off by vivid splashes of greenery, which trumpets their tenacity. It's easy to imagine they'd survive on the moon.

Utah Junipers are achingly beautiful. Scoured, burnished silver trunks glow in shadowed light. Tiny-leaved greenery displays button-sized silvery-blue berries that are appreciated by the hardy animals -- like bighorn sheep and thin-tailed chipmunks -- who share this unspoiled land.

All life here welcomes Southern Utah's infrequent, violent thunderstorms, though most of the rain runs right off this parched landscape and down into the Colorado River. The water blessing, though, presents its own subtle menace. Probing raindrops insinuate themselves between sandstone cliff-cracks to relentlessly erode rock slabs. The earth trembles when weakened chunks eventually disconnect from the mother-cliffs, obliterating centuries-old plants far below. The jaunty juniper isn't intimidated, though, by such a hard world. Freed seeds ride the wind to nestle between other high cliff sandstone cracks, where they'll grow until their roots finally split the target rock away from the wall; plant and slab come thundering down. On the juniper's terms.

Tit-for-tat, eh? There's a certain irony here, I think.

This prolific, shallow-rooted tree is clever. And creative. When drought becomes unbearable it will sacrifice -- permanently shut down -- what can no longer be supported, so the rest of it may live. What a weird sight that is!

Junipers try to keep low -- many look vaguely anaconda-like -- to reduce their profiles. Wind tortures them anyway. I've never seen living things so battered cling so fiercely to life.

Huge, bleached white skeletons -- dead before we were born -- sprawl atop rock slabs, still starkly magnificent.

Their twisted silver and green bodies, set off by the park's towering sandstone cliffs of hammered red and gold, are especially lovely bathed in morning and late afternoon sun. Utah's vast sky and ever-changing light illuminate an unforgettable still-life portrait.

Georgia O'Keefe would have loved capturing on canvas the most astonishing plant survivor I've ever beheld.

Dee Blair's Sunnybank Gardens are closed for the season. Her new book, "The View From Sunnybank," a collection of her columns, is available at Horizon Books, Amazon.com and at www.deeblair.com.

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