Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Wildflowers of the Western Chaparral

2011; University of Missouri; Volume: 34; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mis.2011.0086

1548-9930

Christa Fraser,

Botany and Plant Ecology Studies

Wildflowers of the Western Chaparral Christa Fraser (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photos: vultures by Mike Baird, flowery meadow by Brian Michelsen [End Page 150] Mr. Lohnert acts as though he doesn't notice that home or its occupants whenever he passes by now, as though there is nothing there but a giant hole at the end of a short driveway to nowhere, even though they've been neighbors nearly forever. If any of them is outside their old moss-sided white double-wide, especially her, he will cross the terracotta-colored road and then the ditch, walking right through if the water is running high, getting wet to his knees. Sometimes when he's crossing, he feels the way an escaped prisoner from years ago must have, sensing the bloodhounds close behind, knowing he is barely a creek and a hillside scramble away from being apprehended. Mostly, he worries they will try to talk. [End Page 151] There are other things that have changed for Mr. Lohnert in the many months since. For one thing, he's become very jumpy whenever he opens a drawer or a cupboard or a closet, whenever he grabs pieces of manzanita or oak off the woodpile or sees a moving cloud of dust that means a car is coming up the road. Even when cataloging or drawing the low-carpeted fields of blue lupine or the slender stalks of endemic wild irises, he winces as though something might jump out of a blossom and bite him. He tells himself he's simply afraid of rattlers and wood rats, wasps and bees, black widows and brown recluse spiders. But he has lived with those creatures and others his entire life on this road, in this wooden two-story Victorian at the top of this little hill. First with his parents, then with his wife, Gloria, and now alone for the last ten years. The other thing Mr. Lohnert has begun to do is bait the turkey vultures so they gargoyle his picket posts and his greenhouse roof. He uses road kill, usually, but occasionally he'll give them a chicken that has just begun to go bad or leftovers he'll never finish on his own, feeding them by hand. He used to wonder where they alit when they weren't on wing. And he wondered how to trace whatever it was they were looking for when they circled overhead for days on end as though they smelled where trouble or hurt might come through, long before it happened. Mr. Lohnert knows that every strange thing he does must make his neighbors on Washout Road think they were right to accuse him in the first place. Lupine flowers are stacked along a stem like scales on a pinecone. Each flower opens for the insect that weighs exactly the right amount. A no-see-um can't open a lupine flower to get to the pollen, and a beefy black bumblebee collapses the flower's mouth. Last summer, when Melli and Luke first started knocking on his door, Mr. Lohnert taught them to open the flowers by pushing the petal just right so that the pollen-covered anthers popped forward like a child sticking out her tongue. They laughed and made faces at the flowers, talking to the purple-and-yellow blooms as though they were playground adversaries. When the sheriff's officers and the county investigator showed up, they all drove in and out and parked with their wheels partway off the road, almost angling into the ditch, so other vehicles could pass. Nearly all the roadside lupine had been crushed by the time they finally left for good three days later. It took some time, but some of the lupine righted themselves, as though there were an invisible valve that let all the air out of their stems and petals [End Page 152] and then slowly pumped them back up once the police had left. But most of the flowers remained flattened all summer, soon becoming indistinguishable from the sun-bleached and embedded gum wrappers, Mountain Dew bottles and fading sunflower-seed bags that paved the road. The investigator told...