When Covid-19 Refugees Invade Our Space And Act Recklessly

 In one way the days have been little different than usual as I work at my desk, play in the garden, and hike in the mountains. But fear of the future darkens even the best moments, a fear made worse when I listen to more newscasts.

I feel an obligation to keep up on what is going on in the world, as if I could make a difference by simply being aware. The balance between that sense of obligation and a need to occasionally retreat remains elusive.

Along with climate change, mass extinction, authoritarianism taking over democracy, and novel viruses run amok, I fear that the relationship between people and our home planet is becoming ever-more strained. Will I be part of the last generation of Americans to see a grizzly bear in the wild? The last to drink clean water and breathe relatively untainted air? The worry list goes on. 

Another thing that helps is to get outside and pay attention. You know: be here now. And not just be—be a witness, be observant and open. Wonder and beauty await those who go alone, still their minds, and pay attention.

Even if I don’t leave the yard, I can be assured of some kind of revelation, like spying an insect I’ve never seen before (last night an iridescent turquoise wasp no longer than my little fingernail, glowing like a jewel in the late sun-wow!). Or maybe hearing a high-pitched call from the sky and looking up to see a red-tailed hawk, a juvenile crow, or a lone Canada goose flying who knows where in mid-afternoon. I imagine having such wings, feeling the cold mountain air singing through my feathers. 

After learning I had a case of sleep apnea, I recently tried out a machine designed to provide something called adaptive-servo ventilation. A high-tech gadget sits on my nightstand, meant to help people like me “get the restful nights of sleep their bodies need to not only survive, but also maintain a better quality of life.” I don’t mean to dis the machine that surely helps others, but my first week on ASV wasn’t a pretty picture. After a couple of mostly sleepless nights I took a hike on a cool, stormy, windy day. 

The rain-bloated air carried the scent of millions of bitterbrush flowers. I stood and let it fill my lungs then let my breathe out slowly. Again and again I breathed sweet damp mountain air. That was the kind of therapy I needed.

I’ve been monitoring the local "reopening" as the Covid-19 virus sweeps over and around us like the wind in the mountains. By summer solstice it was hard to tell 2020 from any other year in Jackson Hole. Trailheads and town were crowded and traffic has been snarled with an influx of tourists and snowbirds while half the streets and highways are blocked off for construction. Restaurants are opening with "restrictions" but I see people without masks crowded together at tables that aren’t six feet apart. All of this adds to my fear.

It would seem that Americans value their freedom to do whatever they choose over their health or that of others. "I live in a free country,"  one man was quoted in the news. "And I’m not going to wear a damned mask. "

Shopkeepers in Jackson, well accustomed to the rudeness of some customers, are shocked by the epithets thrown their way when they ask people to wear a mask. I ask: when does freedom include the right to infect others and possibly cause them to die? Rights without responsibilities will be our downfall. 

I’m getting myself wound up again just writing this. Time to head for the hills. 

In addition to recording a chronicle of Covid-19 sequestering since mid-March, I have been keeping track of the local wild and its annual phenological unfurling. This requires relearning the calls and songs of the myriad sparrows that favor the sagebrush-bunchgrass steppe and the names of wildflowers I haven’t seen since last spring.

Yesterday I found a species of hawk’s beard I didn’t recognize, and looked it up in my trusty plant guides and the University of Wyoming’s digital herbarium. One look at a pressed specimen confirmed my new favorite species, limestone hawk’s beard (Crepis intermedia), growing on soil derived from—limestone. 

A veil peeled from my eyes. I have hiked that ridge for years, a dry rocky slope on the western edge of the Gros Ventre Wilderness, and while greeting the usual familiar flowers I have somehow missed this one. It’s quite showy, with intricately incised leaves and equally intricate hairs on its stems and flower bracts. Unique, in other words, and attractive to anyone paying attention.

How was I paying attention differently yesterday, in a place I should have seen this wildflower before? In past years it might not yet have bloomed or it had gone by. I might have been distracted by the dramatic thunderheads forming over the Tetons or whatever my dog was getting into. In any case, I didn’t see, and then I did. This feels like some kind of metaphor for life.

While researching a natural history book about Cache Creek, a local favorite for springtime hiking, I kept track of every flower I could find along the trails. In the 22 miles of the lower trail system I found 263 species of flowering herbs and grasses, 58 shrubs, and 10 trees, along with various mosses, bryophytes, and ferns. While many of them were familiar to me, some were ones I’d seen elsewhere but not in Cache Creek—until I paid attention, with intention. Some were ones I had never seen anywhere before. 

It became a challenge to hike the same trails several times a week between May and August to see what new flowers had appeared since my last trip. I was never disappointed. I added each species to a data table I kept during the four years I indulged in this exercise, and as the list grew, so did my amazement. 

While researching the plants I wasn’t sure of, I came across a few web sites that presented information about changing taxonomy as botanists learn more about genetics and which plants were truly related to one another. For anyone who has read Why Fish Don’t Exist, you will understand: neither do maples. They used to occupy their own large family of species, and are now part of another one—soapberry, whatever that is.

My years of learning the names of wildland plants come crashing down around me like a flimsy scaffold. Who cares what they are called this week; the name is only useful for temporary communication until some more information becomes known. I’ve decided that I know nothing, and that idea somehow frees me to just be present with the plants. I’ll call this delicate-flowered shrub a Rocky Mountain maple for the moment, and when there isn’t such thing as maple anymore, I’ll probably make up my own name for it.

I think, in addition to my own condition of knowing nothing, we as a species are lacking in knowledge—we have information, but that’s not the same as knowing what matters.

What matters, like the taxonomy of plants, is a moving target as well. But for this moment what feels most important is not so much the naming of things, except for those experts who catalogue and preserve their genes, but how to live in this world with humility, reverence, and a comfortable blend of knowing and accepting the mystery of all we don’t know. What matters is kindness, not only for our sad-sack species but for all living things, and all else—including the inanimate. The clean air we breathe, the water we depend on, the ancient rocks our hiking boots kiss with each step, and components of the soil that make plants grow and give us life. 

So as we open up, I hope we can take a moment to reflect on these past months, when we found that staying at home gave us opportunities we usually overlook. We read, we cooked, we zoomed. We shared stories and songs to help each other through with a bit of humor. We got to know our kids instead of parking them in front of a screen while we scrambled to fix a meal after working all day. And for those of us lucky enough to live here in Greater Yellowstone, we walked along rivers and creeks and forests.

The national parks were closed, but in our region the national forests were not. And for many of us the forests were closer to home anyway, our usual stomping grounds: Hyalite Creek near Bozeman, Teton Canyon near Driggs and Victor, Cache Creek in Jackson. The national forests were there for us when we needed them.

We flocked to familiar national forest hot spots for respite and recharge. Still skiing at Teton Pass through May, hiking newly opened trails in wildlife winter ranges, where we could greet returning migrant birds and watch the first flowers unfold.

Perhaps in recognition of our giving forests, the U.S. Senate is considering the Great American Outdoors Act (S. 3422).The bill would permanently fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund and support deferred maintenance in national parks and other federal lands. It’s a start in a much-needed national recognition of how much our parks and forests mean to Americans, but it’s directed at dilapidated facilities, not the land itself, and it goes without saying that the bulk of the funds will go to national parks. Still, it is a bill worth our support.

So what about the forests and that high-acreage, high-value but barely recognized collection of public land managed by the BLM? Fewer high-cost facilities to maintain will mean less funding, but anything is better than nothing. And close to nothing has been what Congress has been willing to let go of for some time.

The Bridger-Teton National Forest near my home has been my salvation these past months. And I’m not the only one—when I meet friends I haven’t seen in weeks at a trailhead we give each other air hugs and say, “Getting out here has kept me sane.”

What are we willing to pay for sanity? For having the kind of wind that feels like therapy and the fields of wildflowers that make your facial muscles sore from too much smiling?

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours as a volunteer for a joint project sponsored by the Bridger-Teton Forest and its non-profit Friends group, helping to dismantle a half-dozen fire rings left by campers and partiers who must now find another spot (of which there are many in that area). This particular site is known as the “Wedding Tree”—actually two trees, a venerable limber pine leaning toward a stout and glorious Douglas-fir. Together they frame the Tetons. Weddings have been held there since the 1930s if not before.

The Forest Service reserves the site for this purpose, but regulations don’t allow it to charge a fee unless there are at least 75 people in attendance. Meanwhile, anyone wanting to marry within Grand Teton National Park must pay $150 for the privilege. Different agencies, different rules. It’s too bad the forest can’t realize a bit of income from this popular site, for in my opinion the national forests are in far worse fiscal straits than the parks. 

It felt good to give back for a couple of hours on one summer afternoon. If everyone found some small but significant way to help a local national forest that gives so much to us, it could become, even more than it already is, the glue that keeps our communities together.

EDITOR'S NOTE: If you're looking for a timeless summer read, pick up Marsh's award-winning memoir, A Hunger for High Country: One Woman's Journey to the Wild in Yellowstone Country available at all good local book sellers.