Ancient Places (9 page)

The biscuitroots of the Columbia Plateau have been dealing with the challenging environment of their homeland for a very long time. They have adapted to the short and early growing season, the stiff winds, the cold winters, and the long summer droughts that have long limited vegetation across the region. The compact size of many species, such as the salt and peppers, enhances their ability to flower very soon after leafing out in the
spring. Low growth habits and the lack of a central protruding stem protect the delicate leaves from buffeting winds, and keep them close to a relatively warm layer of air near the ground. Narrow leaf segments, often sliced to minute fineness, provide more surface area for photosynthesis in dry conditions. Multiple dense flower heads, with male and female flowers present on the same plant, allow for both outcrossing and self-pollination by insects or wind. The smaller species quickly complete their reproductive cycles before the rocky soils lose their moisture during the inevitable summer drought. Fruits mature rapidly into winged seeds that dry up and sail away on afternoon winds. Finely cut leaves and stout stems desiccate in a matter of days until they too disappear. Underground, many of these
Lomatiums
harbor tuberous roots in a wonderful variety of shapes and sizes. These tubers store nutritious carbohydrates during tough winter conditions, then send that essential energy aboveground in the spring to support flowering and seed production.

Because most
Lomatiums
come and go so quickly, any attempt to understand them must persist through many successive springs. A year after our first salt and pepper excursion, Pam Camp suggested that I travel to the heart of the Columbia Basin, along the base of Saddle Mountain’s long spine. There, amidst an extensive talus slope that tumbled off the central ridge, I would find a most unusual species of biscuitroot. But if I wanted to see it in bloom, she suggested that I get going soon.

A pair of basalt knobs standing as sentinels directed me to the place easily enough. The massive rockfall they guarded looked dauntingly steep, with only an occasional clump of serviceberry or syringa to indicate that there might be any soil to anchor a small plant.

“They’re living right in the rocks,” Camp had told me. “And keep climbing—they’ll be further upslope than you think.”

The boulders at the bottom of the slope were refrigerator-sized, forcing me to keep my eyes squarely on my feet as I spider-walked uphill. The cracks between the big boulders penetrated many layers down. After hopping a hundred yards or more, I crossed a stream of smaller fist-sized rocks that rolled beneath every foothold. I moved on through a wilderness of scree that continued to slip in a slow-motion avalanche. I saw no greenery at all within this constant motion until, only a few inches beyond one of my outstretched hands, a cluster of leaves materialized, tatted into lacework so fine that they looked like fuzzy gray-green kitten paws against the dark basalt.

More of the paws appeared above and below me. Rocks obscured most of their flowers and stems, but I eventually found some purple blooms with yellow anthers—colors that mirrored the crusty lichens washing across the basalt walls on either side of the talus slope. Many of the blossoms were already aging into an even deeper purple, camouflaged as if they meant to sink into the dark shadows of the scree. This was obviously the strange new biscuitroot, Hoover’s desert parsley (
Lomatium tuberosum
), that Pam Camp had sent me in search of.

The fact that any of these plants could keep their heads above the shifting rockslide long enough to send up flowering stems seemed like a miracle, and a look into some of the cracks revealed several kitten paws partially crushed beneath tumbled stones. Gently rolling away rocks, I teased out one swollen potato-shaped tuber, the obvious source for its Latin species name of “knobby.” Its broken tip hinted at a much longer serpentine body that slithered deep into the hidden talus world. This severed portion would remain buried, safe
within the turmoil, ready to send up leaves the next spring. Hoover’s desert parsley has found a way to embrace the chaos around it by developing a specialized ability to retreat and survive. Whenever a shifting stone snaps off part of a root, both remnants have the ability to sprout new growth, doubling the chance of successful blooms in succeeding years.

It is tempting to wonder if Ice Age floodwaters somehow contributed to such deft adaptations. The succession of floods that crashed across the Columbia Basin would have carried innumerable seeds along with the soil that was swept away. Whenever the water slowed, an unpredictable mix of sand, silt, gravel, rocks, and ice-rafted boulders was deposited in its wake. Some of the seeds caught in this detritus would have sprouted, forming new colonies with curious blends of plant species, biscuitroots included.

Only a few miles upstream from my perch on the scree slope, one of those great floods had carved a gigantic amphitheater on a terrace several hundred feet above the Columbia. Its Sahaptin place name could be rendered in English as “Where the Waters Turned”—an apt description of a powerful agitating cycle that tore into cliff faces as it circled and slowed. The amphitheater’s lower level is covered with gravels dropped by the floods and edged by blowing sand dunes. Not surprisingly, hosts of
Lomatiums
thrive across the rough bench.

Although those amphitheater biscuitroots, and the more specialized desert parsley that has burrowed into the scree slopes of Saddle Mountain, are living in habitats created by sudden floods, their lifespan has to be measured on an entirely different scale of time.
Plant systematists who study
Lomatium
pollination leap back at least as far as the late Pliocene and visualize changes in millions, not thousands, of years. Geneticists trace
plant ranges that flow like amoebas across a landscape, developing new species at their extremities. Geologic events might separate closely related clusters. Some of these colonies might survive in isolation, morph into a slightly different form, then be reunited with their ancestors by gradual changes in geology or climate. The movements of the Cordilleran glaciers and the spurt of apocalyptic floods that ended the Pleistocene represent only two of the challenges that these plants have weathered.

Within the Intermountain West, this restless clan includes about three dozen or so different species. For all their abundance, most of these biscuitroots live so inconspicuously that they have never acquired memorable common names. The fact that “cous” is sometimes applied to several different biscuitroots as a general term only adds to the confusion.

Pioneering naturalist David Douglas would have sympathized with this dilemma. When he traversed the northern Plateau in the early spring of 1826, he quickly collected five different kinds of biscuitroots, including two or three with white flowers and purple anthers. None of them had the kind of large, striking flowers that might sell to British gardeners, and none of them displayed any clearly defined characteristics that would allow for field identification on the fly. Douglas entered them in his notebook as Umbellifores and moved on. In the two centuries that have passed since, several taxonomists have devised keys to separate the
Lomatiums,
with words such as “variable” and “overlap” cropping up frequently in their technical descriptions. Field researchers not only continue to describe new species but also consistently manage to find plants that do not fit a prescribed pattern. This is why botanists refer to the genus as “unsettled,” and why, to a novice, the
Lomatium
complex seems
like a wheeling flock of migrant shorebirds that never quite settles to Earth.

As a professional, Pam Camp understands the value of rigorous scientific work, both in the lab and out in the field. Even with modern techniques, she believes it will take geneticists quite a while to sort out exactly what is going on with
Lomatiums.
“No single factor is going to solve the puzzle,” she says. “You have to consider each plant and its makeup. You have to look at how and where it lives. You have to weigh everything else around it.”

From my tenuous foothold about a quarter of the way up that Saddle Mountain talus slope, I tried to relate her words, and a single gray-green Hoover’s desert parsley, to the larger world. It was more than I could manage.

Lomatiums
have provided a key resource for the Plateau tribes with whom they have shared territory since the end of the last ice age. As late as the 1970s,
families living around the Yakama Reservation described uses for no less than fourteen different species of biscuitroots. Although stems, leaves, and seeds all received some mentions, the majority involved the digging and processing of the roots for food.

Two of these tubers are clearly the most utilized: cous (
Lomatium cous
), the one that appears so often in Meriwether Lewis’s journals, and Canby’s biscuitroot (
Lomatium canbyi
), which he never mentions at all. These two biscuitroots are easy to tell apart. The flowers of
cous
are yellow; those of
canbyi
are white.
Cous
tubers vary wildly in shape, like a paper bag blown up and scrunched in every possible way.
Canbyi,
on the other hand, produces perfectly globular spheres that, aside from
depressions caused by rocks or roots, could be mistaken for dirty golf balls. Cous dominates the southern half of the Plateau—southeastern Washington, eastern Oregon, and adjacent areas of western Idaho—while the range of Canby’s biscuitroot extends from central Washington along a westward curve that follows the foothills of the Cascade Range south to the Columbia.

When Lewis and Clark entered that region on their return trip upstream along the Columbia in spring 1806, they found that their visit coincided with the season for digging biscuitroots. At Celilo Falls on April 17, they tried to trade for some packhorses to cross the mountain ranges ahead, but had no luck, because, Clark reported, “The chief informed me that
their horses were all in the plains with their womin gathering roots.” Plateau families, especially the women and children, were flowing across the countryside, branching and turning and joining again: season-dependent, flexible, persistent, hardy, resourceful, skilled, and knowledgeable to a degree that the white visitors could sense but in their short time on the scene could never quite grasp.

A little further upstream, at the confluence of the Palouse and Snake Rivers, Lewis and Clark might have seen the ancestors of Mary Jim setting out with twined root bags and digging sticks. In a 1980 oral account, Jim described her family’s travel routes, which had persisted since the early nineteenth century, and for untold generations before that.

“I am a Palouse Indian from the Snake River, where my people have always lived. God put us there, and we prayed, thanking Him for the river and the salmon and all good things,” Mary Jim began. “My father was Alliyua, Thomas Jim, and his father was Fishhook Jim, Chowatyet. We lived at village Tasawiks. My grandmother was Amtaloot, who was from Priest Rapids.
Grandmother taught me many things about how to live when I grew up.”

A large part of Mary Jim’s education consisted of learning the rounds for gathering roots—where and when her family sought cous and several different biscuitroots, as well as a variety of other tubers.

“We would start to move in March. We would move to Soap Lake, dig certain kinds of roots. They used to dig
skúkul
[
Lomatium canbyi
] and some other roots.”

Mary Jim’s uncle Harry Jim would lead the family to Colfax for still more variety. They also camped on the Waterville Plateau north and west of Soap Lake. From there, they would move up in elevation as the season progressed, arriving on sites at the most favorable moment for gathering certain species. They worked “all over that big hill, Badger Mountain,” Mary Jim said. “We used to stay there. That’s where people used to gather, play stick games, dance the Washat, you know, the Seven Drum Religion. We used to race horses at Badger Mountain.

“When we were done there, we moved back to Snake River, last of May maybe, and then salmon came up the river. In the fall, we went over to Walla Walla to dig cous. That’s where we used to camp and dig.

“Then we went up into the mountains to dig other kinds of roots. You baked some of them. We traveled a lot. You ought to have seen them horses: packin’, packin’, packin’.”

Mary Jim’s relatives, who were affiliated with Palouse, Wanapum, Yakama, and other tribal entities, spoke different Sahaptin tongues. Their names for the roots that fed them varied with place, time, growth stage, preparation technique, and taste. Mary Jim learned these names and places from her grandmother and uncle, who had been going to their special sites
since they were small children, absorbing the knowledge of generations and passing it along.

For people across the northern part of the Plateau—central and northeastern Washington, the Idaho panhandle, and southeastern British Columbia—the white-flowered Canby’s biscuitroot is more accessible than its southern cousin, cous. Elders of the Spokane tribe tell a story that explains how these plants are distributed across their corner of the Columbia Basin. A character they called Doodlebug had just spent a day fishing and decided to conceal a nice salmon he had speared from his hardworking sister, who had spent her day busily digging roots of several kinds. Upon discovering Doodlebug’s deception,
Little Sister was so filled with anger that she clambered up a ridge above the Spokane River with all her roots and walked to the edge of the cliff. There, to spite her deceitful brother, she scattered those roots to the four cardinal directions. The roots flew away to new places—including some especially fine
p’úx
^w
pux
^w
that landed on Ice Age flood-scoured grounds to the south and west, where people still dig them today. The Spokane word for Canby’s biscuitroot is
p’úx
^w
pux
^w
, and when native speakers pronounce it, their mouths and cheeks round out to form perfect globes, just like the roots.