By Don Noel
Thanks in part to an El Ninõ year that typically has the Pacific Ocean generate abnormal rainfall—and perhaps due also to global climate change—California has had an extraordinary assault of weather this year; television forecasters invented phrases like “rivers of rain.”
It’s been enough precipitation to reach into the high desert east of the Sierras. Death Valley for a time had a shallow lake wide enough to invite kayaking. Seventy miles north, where a Paiute cowboy taught me to work cattle, ancient bristlecone pines thirsting on less than a foot of rain a year have had long drinks. The High Sierra itself has been buried in snow.
A constant of the California climate is that year-round Pacific winds, warm and wet, offer constant libation to vineyards, almond groves, strawberries, artichokes, celery and garlic in the San Joaquin and other agricultural valleys. Still damp, that ocean-fed air mass is driven up the flanks and finally to the spine of the Sierra Nevada, fourteen thousand frigid feet high, where the remaining moisture is wrung out into permanent snowfields and glaciers.
To the east of that lofty granite barrier is an entirely different climate: the high desert of eastern California and Nevada, where rain and snow are negligible. Instead of intensive acres of fruits, vegetables, nuts and grapes, it is thinly populated by Joshua trees, sagebrush, mesquite, creosote and yucca, all acclimated to thirsty survival.
To the west where snows accumulate, glaciers and ice sheets have chiseled and gouged out steep canyons and perched lakes that cry to be photographed. Over here are no sharply-etched crevasses and peaks, no lakes. Even though the range’s peak, White Mountain, is a piddling 253 feet less lofty than Mount Whitney—and is third-tallest in the state—the entire range is almost as rounded and lumpy as the East’s Appalachians. And dry.
The champions at eking life out of penurious precipitation are the bristlecones, which may cling to life for four or five thousand years, some with misshapen trunks so huge it takes two men with long arms to embrace them. Shallow roots sprawl far out for faint moisture; they feed a cambium layer that may shrivel to the width of a thumb, an evanescent, fragile conduit that nourishes one narrow section at a time, snaking around the tree in a centuries-long, life-sustaining peregrination.
As a young man, I worked cattle on a ranch in that arid country. We looked through a notch in our own mountain rim to the North Palisade of the Sierra. In summer, when our valley became so sere that a new crop of calves could find little sustenance, we drove them up to the (hardly-lush) rills and glens of the Inyo-White range. Parallel to the High Sierra, geologically almost identical and nearly as high, that is the home of the bristlecones.
My companion and tutor was Eddie Shaw, whose Southern Paiute forbears probably settled 4000 years ago in the Owens Valley between the two ranges. Some farmed; others were nomads. They ventured into the mountains to hunt deer and bighorn sheep, and to gather pine nuts. By one account, they returned telling of strangely shaped trees whose wood could be used to build a shelter but was too hard to burn. They hunted on foot until decades after Hernán Cortés had brought horses to the continent in 1519.
Eddie didn’t cowboy full-time. He had a tungsten claim up there, and an Army surplus truck to haul the ore out. Tungsten, in demand for the war then raging in Korea, brought prices that fattened his savings better than working cattle. He and his wife planned to send their kids for a college education they hadn’t known; he took a deer now and then to provide her leather for gloves that she sold to a fancy Texas shop. But when the ranch needed someone who could discern a hoofprint on stony ground—and would pay for that skill—Eddie was available.
His jet-black hair, knotted into a ponytail, framed a craggy face darker than suntan, with piercing black eyes. Hard-muscle big, he wore a deerskin shirt—also his wife’s handiwork, with leather fringes at the yokes—and sat Ginger, his tall mare, as though he’d grown there. He regularly took home prize money for calf-roping and bronc-riding at the Bishop rodeo.
“My real name,” he told me one day as we rode around the bristlecones looking for a pair of wandering Brahman bulls, “is Numaga Half Moon.”
“Numaga?”
“Aya. A hero of my people a century ago. Resisted the white invasion.”
I hadn’t until then thought of settling the West as an invasion. “Sounds like a proud name,” I managed. “You don’t use it?”
“Kid, it isn’t smart to remind the white man that the land wasn’t always his.”
True enough, but in a sense that lofty mountain chain was more his than anyone else’s. He knew where to look for deer when his wife needed more leather. He more than anybody hunted down predatory mountain lions to claim bounties from the cattlemen’s association. And he could claim that centuries before Cortés and others set out to conquer a continent, his ancestors knew the ancient bristlecones.
Retired after four decades’ prizewinning print and broadcast journalism in Hartford, CT, Don Noel received his MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University in 2013. He has since published more than 100 short stories and essays. https://dononoel.com