hi, sky pilot

Polemonium elegans — Elegant sky pilot, Elegant Jacob’s ladder

Saturday, July 18, 2020. Summer, finally. Play of the light, summit seems so close. We’ve stopped keeping track of how many miles our hikes last. When I ask Alex later he says maybe 12 on the day. A slim majority of hikers are wearing masks. We pull ours over our mouths when passing on the ledges.

Atop Third Burroughs, 7828’, we fill our water bottles with snow and flavor, then shake. Cold hyperconcentrated lemonade. Alex eyes the nearby mountain goat, other hikers talk about someone who works on AI for a Seattle tech company and moved to Cleveland to be rich there instead of average here. Later, Alex will tell me mid-2000s NBA postseason highlights and I’ll get caught up, ten years late, on why so much outrage followed LeBron to Miami. I look at wildflowers.

P. elegans grows right there among the rocks. It’s scientific custom to italicize Latin names; I’m not really sure why. Among regular people, flowers in this genus (Polemonium) are known as Jacob’s ladder or sky pilot. The gorgeously symmetrical leaves look like ladders, or at least did to someone once, because that first common name refers to the ladder Jacob saw in his Biblical dream.

Some are taller, some stinkier, some eaten by moths, but all are in the same family as phlox and create these lovely blue flowers in the spring or summer. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, based in London and perhaps the most important botanic institution in the world, recognizes 37 different Polemonium species.

To ID plants, I use Pojar and MacKinnon’s Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast and Alpine Plants of the Northwest: Wyoming to Alaska, and sometimes the PlantSnap app or the WA Wildflowers app. I like that an AI photo-reading app like PlantSnap gives me a place to start, and it’s especially helpful with the gardens in the city whose ornamental plants I often have no familiarity with, but all apps like that are only semi-accurate. I tend to use their answers as suggestions for names to search online.

P. elegans, perched above goats and glaciers, is most often found in high rocky spots in the Washington Cascades, though it’s been spotted in the Olympics, too, at places like Marmot Pass. It was declared its own species in 1898 in a book by the University of California’s first professor of botany, Edward Lee Greene. In that book, Pittonia, Greene credits two other guys for sending him samples of P. elegans: Charles Vancouver Piper and Wilhelm Suksdorf. Piper, the author of the first comprehensive guide to flora in the northwest, got his sample from Mt. Rainier in August 1889.

Suksdorf, a shy German immigrant, got his from Mt. Adams. In keeping with the tradition of Indigenous people he respected, Suksdorf referred to Mt. Adams as Mt. Paddo. (It’s also called Pahto or Klickitat). The second-tallest volcano in Washington got its present name from a failed mid-1800s PR campaign to rename all the mountains in the Cascade Range after U.S. Presidents. The guy who pushed for this, Hall J. Kelley, had actually wanted to name what’s now Oregon’s Mt. Hood after John Adams, but the mapmaker got confused and gave the name to the mountain 40 miles away. It was convenient enough for the U.S., since that mountain hadn’t been officially named by settlers — so it stuck. Kelley also wanted to call Mt. Shasta Mt. Jackson, after Andrew Jackson. That didn’t take.

I found these stories first by finding the Consortium of Pacific Northwest Herbaria. More than 3 million samples of Pacific Northwest flora have been documented by scientists and uploaded to this online database: here are all the places scientists have seen P. elegans since 1891. Edwin Twitmyer, a school principal from Seattle, collected the earliest samples of P. elegans on that list, but doesn’t seem to have connected with Greene, who had the authority to name and classify them. There’s very little information online about Twitmyer, and his samples all got updated later to reflect Greene’s decision on the name, so maybe he was just an early go-it-alone kind of botanist.

One of the other early collectors of P. elegans was Oscar D. Allen, a professor of botany at Yale who retired and settled in the Nisqually Valley in the 1880s, and began recording plants he saw around Mt. Rainier in 1895. His nearest neighbor was James Kernahan, who now has a road named after him just west of the park entrance. Earlier this year, as I reported my first story as a working journalist, a volunteer firefighter told me that Kernahan Road was the emergency exit for the residents there who had been trapped by a landslide that blocked the road for weeks.

Oscar D. Allen found P. elegans in 1897, before Greene published the book officially naming it. Had Allen published first, would we now contentedly refer to this little guy as P. bicolor instead, the way he did?

Allen’s son Grenville later became the supervisor of the Rainier National Forest and then the first supervisor of the National Park. In 1906, Grenville Allen recommended that cars not be let into the park because “the presence of these contrivances would be a source of great annoyance.” Meanwhile, Grenville’s brother Edward became the region’s forest inspector and worked with Gifford Pinchot to develop the Forest Service.

Oscar D. Allen is buried in the Nisqually Valley, which looks quite a lot different than it did in 1895, and about a decade ago his estate was purchased by The Nisqually Valley Land Trust in order to keep the Californians who by that time owned it from logging the old-growth Douglas fir there.

Did I see the direct descendants of the plants that Allen and Piper saw, the direct descendants of one of the plants that was shipped to California to decide the Latin name for the species that we’ll use in perpetuity? Burroughs Mountain is named for naturalist and essayist John Burroughs, who died in 1931, and I can’t tell if the mountain had yet been given his name when Allen and Piper took their samples. If it had, and that’s where they were, they don’t say. But they were both on Mt. Rainier — maybe there.

What happens if we start where we are and ask about the world around us? What do we as a species know about this flower and how did we come by that knowledge? Just answering those questions takes some digging, but results in learning more about not just the flower, but our past, ourselves: history is a human endeavor. Why P. elegans has the name it does is because of the men who collected and named it, the beliefs they held, and the opportunities available at the time for them and everyone else.

In the 1880s, when Allen the Yale botanist was moving to what was then Washington Territory, Seattle was busy converting much of its tideland to “dry” land that could be sold as property, attempting to bring railroads to town, and polluting the waters of Elliott Bay with sawdust from the shoreside mills. Seattle was founded in 1852, and by 1865, town officials had passed an ordinance to keep Native people out of city limits. The U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which outlawed immigration from China, and anti-Chinese sentiment led to an angry white mob in Tacoma forcing 350 Chinese people onto boats bound for Portland. The same thing happened a few months later in Seattle, as 200 Chinese immigrants were rounded up by a mob and put onto a boat bound for San Francisco.

These policies and the beliefs that they both reflected and reinforced, along with what we all know about the gender roles of that era, can go a long way in explaining why the professional botanists in the late 1880s in the American West weren’t often women, Native people, or people of Asian descent. What the policies alone can’t do is explain the motivations and life stories and love for flora that Greene, Piper, Suksdorf, Twitmyer and all the Allens felt. I’d need to read biographies for that.

I’m craving delicacy, deep breaths, time that unwinds outwards. Lately it’s been too much shallow breathing and fears creeping from the depth of my stomach up into my chest. I’m scared more often than I used to be, and I imagine many of you are, too.

I miss concerts, the centripetal force drawing eyes to the stage. Beers with friends. Turning around alone in the snowcovered Colorado mountains and seeing eleven elk way up there in the basin, silent. Hike on and they’re gone. Earlier I followed their path out of the icy ravine, trusting their millions of years of evolutionary history and innumerable searches here for water and rest to lead me somewhere safe. They did. So many of our highways were built upon paths that Indigenous people shared with the native fauna, so no surprise at how many deer get killed by cars upon the roads their ancestors traveled.

I realize that it’s about feeling. I miss a lot of moods that Zoom can’t recreate. We wouldn’t all still be talking about screen time and whether phones were good for us if we didn’t know on some level they weren’t. How do you want to feel most of the time?

I can’t imagine that anyone would rather stew in anger than watch the bumblebee pollinate the garden. I’ve read James Baldwin. I know that the marginalized formerly known as downtrodden are fighting for liberation. What is liberation but freedom from? It is not freedom to commit violence but freedom to be safe from it in order to flourish without fear. I know that I want my days to be long and largely anonymous communion with friends and the work of my own hands. I’ll do the dishes no complaints in that place of deep-rooted peace.

Who among us does not know that fear and violence go hand in hand forever? Who has not been or known the child of an alcoholic? Who among us does not know that addiction gets its start from a perversion of desire?

What is that desire?

Why do we go to Mt. Rainier, why do we wait together for spring to come, why do we collectively plant more gardens when we’re scared? Don’t you want to let everything move a little more slowly? Don’t you want to sit on the porch in the twilight with fireflies in the air and someone playing fiddle? There’s an opera singer two neighborhoods away who started standing in his front yard and singing to the neighbors when the pandemic began. Is it selection bias, self-preservation, that I still believe in such universal goodness? If so, you’re all to blame. It’s getting to know all of you that’s made me double down.

A few days ago a friend sent me this poem he wrote:

You become a

gardener

when you

trust that

it will grow.

Trust that

you will grow.

Anyway, respond to this email. Tell me about plants you love or the world you want to see or what sucks right now. Send me your favorite essays or songs. What are you curious about?

Here are some things I’ve lately read and loved:

• Where did my ambition go?

• The saddening

• This bot that only tweets out phrases of things that could happen to you in a garden

• ‘Say Thank You Say I’m Sorry’, a poem about people working in grocery stores

• Patricia Lockwood gets coronavirus

• Can genetic engineering bring back the American Chestnut?

Now to head back to the mountains. Thanks for reading and being,

Mandy