Adrift in a sagebrush ocean

ONE HOT Saturday morning in early July, my husband, Richard, and I loaded our Great Dane into the van along with a mound of baggage and set off on a two-day, 1,234-mile road trip from Salida, Colo., to Portland, Ore. As Isis settled onto her dog bed, we swung onto Highway 50, headed across the inland West.

A friend had suggested that we check out some books on tape to enliven the “monotonous” drive, but we prefer the quiet, valuing these unplanned cross-country treks as meditations, opportunities to be attentive to what we notice outside the car windows as well as what’s inside our heads and hearts. If we were preoccupied, we had good reason: We were driving to meet our 26-year-old daughter, who was scheduled for surgery to remove a malignant tumor.

The sometimes bleak and lonely expanse of country between south-central Colorado and Portland reminded us of wilderness that pilgrims often turn to for inspiration and renewal, and it offered us a retreat of sorts to settle the fears and uncertainty that had built up during the days leading up to our departure.

This vast reach of territory is wild indeed. Lying in the rain shadow between the Rocky Mountains and the high ridge of the Sierra and Cascade ranges, it is what scientists call a “cold desert,” an unremittingly arid landscape that receives the bulk of its scant moisture as snow.

Largely treeless but for bands of forest lining the up-tilted waves of its mountain ranges, it stretches to the far horizon in dusty foreverness, colored by the rocks that shape its bony contours and by the subtle stippling of sparse vegetation.

Blisteringly hot in summer, icy in winter, parched by glaring sun and ceaseless wind, blessed infrequently with thundershowers or drizzles of snow, this land is hospitable only to drought-hardy shrubs, especially sagebrush. The small felted silvery gray-green leaves and signature turpentine-like fragrance color and perfume mile upon mile of these lightly peopled expanses, giving rise to the province’s other name, “the sagebrush ocean.”

Sagebrush is the very fabric of the Great Basin region; it is so essential that hundreds of species depend on the shrub, from microscopic strings of algae twining between the grains of soil under its wind-sculpted canopy to nomadic pronghorn antelope browsing its pungent foliage.

The gifts of this inland ocean are subtle, demanding concentration and attention to detail. They are visible in the structure of the landscape itself -- the folds and domes heaving up, the faults cleaving level layers of rock, the weirdly eroded badlands, the flat-topped buttes and mesas formed of layers of lava hardened into organ pipe columns, the naked spines of mountain ridges.

And they are visible in its tapestry of sun-faded colors: silver-green sagebrush against rusty soil, gray shadscale dotting ocher badlands, olive-green bitterbrush on gray-purple basalt, bunchgrasses cured to straw by summer’s heat, splotches of wildflowers in sulfur yellow, dusty red, violet blue, ivory, peach and rose pink.

Some of these gifts are as evanescent as the shifts of wind and weather that send a cloud shadow skimming over the surface in a cool, racing blur, or the foliage of sagebrush dancing like sun-spangled ripples. Or the three pronghorn standing still as statues in the shadow of a lone billboard in a sunbaked expanse where the car thermometer reads 104 degrees. Or the golden eagle cruising above a ridge on impossibly long wings, the prairie dogs chattering from bare-earth mounds, the sage thrashers flicking their tails from atop roadside fence posts.

Whole sections of this horizon-spanning sea are being drained however, as humans burn, plow or spray the ubiquitous shrub with herbicides to “improve” grazing, leaving twisted gray skeletons studding sun-baked earth. Then, this desert becomes truly monotonous, desolate of the shrub that nurtures and defines not just an ecosystem, but an entire region.

Sometimes Richard and I drove for many miles without speaking, breaking the silence only to point to the distant shape of a hawk or to speculate about the origin of a rock layer and exclaim over the tangy fragrance of juniper carried on the hot air -- or to reassure each other about Molly’s future.

That desert passage carried us through Molly’s surgery, the four longest hours of my life -- through the time that she spent in the hospital groggy with morphine and pierced with IV needles, through the first week of her gradual recovery and finally, once the immediate crisis had passed, back on the highway with Isis, tacking across the sagebrush ocean on the long journey home.

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Susan J. Tweit is the author of, most recently, “The San Luis Valley: Sand Dunes and Sandhill Cranes.” Her website is susanjtweit.com.