Stage of Life, Part 3
On Gemlike Oases
(Note to readers: For the best image quality, please go to the website or Substack app version of this post.)
It’s strange how deserts turn us into believers. I believe in walking in a landscape of mirages, because you learn humility.” — Terry Tempest Williams, in an excerpt from Refuge; An Unnatural History of Place [Vintage Books] 1991)
Ruby. The valley’s name is a delusion of wealth to be gleaned from stones found in the surrounding mountains’ creek-beds, but it does serve to evoke the vibrant colors seen on an early morning walk into this valley’s mirage-like wetlands, created and nourished by springs (over 200 of them, by one account), all fed by snow-melt from the Ruby Mountains towering above to the west. We had arrived in late evening the day before, after a long drive from Utah into Nevada, then north through dry valleys on a gravel road also used by ore-hauling truck/trailer rigs that forecast their approaches with towering plumes of dust. Some drivers waved and slowed to cut the cloud as they passed us going south, others rose like frenzied apparitions from their own dry storms, as Nevada’s extraction-dependent economy roaring toward the spectral bust that haunts all fortune-seekers.
After passing through the raw gash of an active surface mine with the dust-obscured Ruby Mountains on its northwestern horizon, we spent the night in a wooded campsite beyond the lights and cacophony of round-the-clock human striving, just above the valley floor.
“Soon all the marsh was suffused with green. It was a green of marsh calla, blended with pink persicaria and the broad flat leaves of reeds. The marsh was filling with the noise of chackering red-winged blackbirds…” Franklin Russell, in an excerpt from Watchers at the Pond [Time-Life Books] 1961
The quote above is from a magnificently—at times darkly—narrated story of life, death and renewal in and around a Canadian pond, and the initial quote relates the surging and ebbing of a lake—and of a family—in Utah. Each quote reflects some of what drew me to come again to northern Nevada, after an absence of several decades. I was seeking quietude and a chance to observe and ponder lives unfazed by my attention and interest. As usual on my excursions in recent years, I was in the company of BDog, who seems at minimum copacetic, and at maximum complicit in my goals. This is some of what we found…
“I’ve always been fascinated by will-o’-the-wisps, luminous clouds of methane sometimes hovering over boggy places on dark nights. It’s appropriate that this ghostly phenomenon should be the exhalation of our most remote ancestors from their burial place in the primordial ooze.” — David Rains Wallace, in an excerpt from The Klamath Knot [Sierra Club Books] 1983.
It’s easy to be absorbed by the beauty and/or uniqueness of individual experience, especially while wielding a camera (witness the selfie-shooting masses flocking to viewpoints, mountain tops and cliff edges around the globe) — but please consider the longer views implied in the above excerpts, and these facts about this gemlike oasis in the Great Basin desert: Ruby Valley receives approximately 14 inches of precipitation in a good year, while the mountains to the west receive twice that amount. The springs that feed these lakes and marshes depend on underground flows from this mountain range. Mountains to the east also contribute to this valley, and the one beyond. All these are vulnerable to, and are experiencing disruption by human-centered industry, agriculture, recreation and climate alterations. Expanding the scope of this thought, the same is true of the place I call home, and of your own home valley, mountain, desert, sea shore. This of course means that what I do and have become, what you do and are becoming, is inextricably linked to the existence of beauty, of uniqueness. The same is true for each act of exploitation, of restraint. These connections and choices are gifts, as is each life in and of itself, and all are worth our attention and respectful consideration.
Across the North American continent, wetlands (marshes, ponds, spring-fed lakes in Great Basin deserts) continue to be ‘reclaimed’ (i. e. - back-filled, paved-over, de-watered, etc.). According to a 2001 Environmental Protection Agency study, over half of the continent’s 220 million acres of wetlands that existed prior to 1600 have been destroyed. The rate of annual losses slowed after the 1970s, a decade which saw the implementation of the Clean Water Act and several other national environmental statutes, but only 47% of wetlands were rated as in ‘good’ condition by 2016. Wetland-dependent bird and insect populations continue to drop nationwide, and a recent U. S. Supreme Court decision has forced the EPA to remove Clean Water Act protections for wetlands that don’t have ‘continuous surface connection’ to federally regulated bodies of water, reverting such wetlands’ regulation to each state, a status similar to previous periods of greatest wetland losses. Returning to Ruby Valley, I note that most of this valley’s lakes, springs and marshes have been part of the National Wildlife Refuge system since 1938, and that they currently host over 220 species of birds plus a myriad of other life forms. I’ll close with links to more information about this valley, mining in Nevada, wetlands nationwide, and an encouragement to consider the inextricable links of our own lives.
“When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in the morning the streams will start once more and branch and branch again into a myriad of others.” — Henry David Thoreau, in an excerpt from Walden; or, Life in the Woods [Tickner and Fields] 1854.
Up next — Jaguars, Dire Wolves & a Firestick Farm of One’s Own. Until then, let’s help each other enjoy the beauty of our home planet. - B.
U. S. Fish & Wildlife’s list of species found at Ruby Lake Wildlife Refuge.
A map of historic and current mining claims in Nevada.
An overview of wetlands — functions, extent, and condition from the EPA.