“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert.
It is often said that we can’t see the forest for the trees, but that’s not a problem out here in the western Great Basin. In moist slot canyons or riparian areas you’ll find aspen, cottonwood, mountain mahogany, even ponderosa pine, but the open country is sagebrush steppe, largely treeless high desert where the “forest” consists only of widely dispersed Utah Junipers. It is hard for most of us to conceive of a forest in which individual trees may be hundreds or even thousands of yards from each other. Our trees are like distant electrons within the vast, burning nucleus of the desert: this is a forest that consists mainly of space.
“Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite,” wrote Edward Abbey in the introduction to Desert Solitaire. “If a man knew enough he could write a whole book about the juniper tree. Not juniper trees in general but that one particular juniper tree . . .” In the high, open valley west of our home, which is all public lands, there is one particular juniper tree. It is not a very big tree, a young juniper, perhaps 80 or 100 years old. Most remarkable about this tree is its utter isolation, as it stands absolutely alone on the floor of this expansive valley. From any hill or mountain ridge in the basin you can look down and see, in some cases from vast distances, this single juniper, standing solitary, a tiny island of green in a rolling ocean of shimmering silver sage. The wisdom of Cactus Ed notwithstanding, I do not wish to write a book about an individual tree. But this one particular juniper, this lone tree, surviving out on those baked, windy flats, has earned itself a Rant.
The proper way to stalk a tree is to begin from a great distance, uphill and downwind, and then sneak up on it slowly. I began my approach to Lone Tree by climbing what I call Moonrise, Palisades, and Prospect, the three unnamed ridges, each higher than the last, that rise westward into the azure sky above the Ranting Hill. From the crest of Prospect I gaze west over a jumble of boulders and out across the sweeping valley to our imposing home mountain, which rises above it. At this distance Lone Tree is visible only to the eyes of a person who already knows where it stands. Because the tree is more than a mile away and perhaps a thousand feet below, it is indistinguishable from other dots on the landscape, most of which are piles of rocks.
Once I am within a hundred yards of the tree, what appeared to be lichen on the rocky hills behind it emerges instead as ephedra and small bunch grasses growing in open patches in the hill’s broken granite tops. At this distance the shapes of the image strike me as even more important than its colors. This perspective reveals how beautifully the dome shape of the juniper’s crown is repeated in the arched tops of the granite hills behind it, which are themselves reflected in the sinuous rises in the ridgeline of the big mountain that fills the western sky. From here I can see for the first time that the tree has a full crown but a skeletal, open structure beneath, and I’m struck by how this form is mirrored in the brushy tops and dark stems of the big sage filling the foreground of my view. This top-heavy shape shows that the tree has been cropped around its base, probably when it was just a sapling.
Noticing several dark masses hidden within its crown, I make my final advance on this particular juniper. Now standing beneath Lone Tree and looking up inside it, I see cradled in its angular, flaking arms a pair of large, intricately woven stick nests—one about eight feet off the ground, the other higher, about twelve feet. I don’t know who lives in these nests, but I do know why: if you fancy having your home in a tree, this is the only game in town. The avian duplex leads me to the realization that this tree has accomplished something remarkable. It is growing in an exposed and unfavorable spot and has at some point been thoroughly munched. It has allowed many of its limbs to die in a successful attempt to preserve its core vitality. Miraculously, it has even dodged the wildfires that scour this valley ever fifteen or twenty years. Here is no forest. Working entirely alone, this single, gnarled juniper has kept my scorching, windswept home valley from being treeless. I should be fortunate to achieve so much in my own life.
Our way of seeing the world is conditioned not only by experience and belief but also by scale, by the distance, angle, and perspective from which we choose to view things. I find it useful to back up from something I’m concentrating on—a problem, a memory, an essay—until I am so far away from and so high above it that it exists in that liminal zone between the world of granite and the equally beautiful universe of the imagination. I also find it helpful to begin far from and high above something I hope to discover—an idea, a way of understanding the desert, a lone juniper—and stalk it through registers of scale until it becomes solitary, focused, all-consuming. Perhaps the nature of a desert is veiled by its sage-filled valley, and the nature of its valley is hidden within the arms of its solitary juniper tree, and the nature of that unique tree is concealed within its woven nest, and the nature of a nest is a latticed pattern so exquisitely complex, imbricated, and minute that you must begin from a distant ridgetop in order to learn to see it clearly.
Photographs by Michael Branch.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
