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Crusty as the man could be, two charming events bracket the career of Edmund C. Jaeger. The first takes us back to a one-room schoolhouse lost out in the sandy vastness of California's Coachella Valley. Here, early in the century, near what since has become the hyperactive resort of Palm Springs, the young botanist explains the mysteries of local rocks and plants to a handful of students. Lacking books for his mixed audience of whites and Indians, Jaeger buys the texts out of his own pocket. At the end of the school year, his roll has shot up by 300 percent, From five to fifteen. By then, just about every eligible child in the isolated community is answering the school bell. And when that school bell rings at the end of the day, the teacher, suffering from a bum leg as a result of a climbing accident, once again gets on his little burro and jogs off for another night in his desert shack. The second event could be taking place right now, even as you read these words. At a site whose location is passed among the initiated, over a hundred people gather to camp out for a weekend among the cacti and Joshua trees. They take nature walks and hear lectures on natural history. Most of all they reminisce, during what are officially called Palavers among the cognoscente, about their old professor, now long dead. Some of those in attendance never met him. They are the children and, in some cases, the grandchildren, of his former students, now absorbing tales about a man who long ago slipped into the category of legend. Lifetime qualities of generosity, of memorable character, even of quirkiness, may be extracted from such vignettes. However, going beyond personality, we need yet a third scene to glimpse the measure of Jaeger's enduring contribution. Time after time, in dozens of bookstores across the Southwest, travelers with an interest in the outdoors pick up Jaeger's Desert Wild Flowers. They likely know nothing about the author, and yet as they pass through the cash register they're carrying one of the most reliable field guides on the subject. "It's my bible"' exclaims Germaine L. Moon, of Barstow, California, the foremost historical authority on the Mojave Desert and an amateur botanist. Thousands of others also have found this to be true. That would be high praise for any such book, but for one first published in 1941 and enjoying reprint after reprint, the enthusiasm combined with longevity points to an extraordinary accomplishment. So add the talent of enduring writing to a man whom, despite repeated paeans and his passing some fifteen years ago, we're just getting to know and beginning to fully appreciate. After his stint in a rural schoolhouse, Jaeger moved to Riverside, California, and its junior college. For all the good such institutions of Canada and the United States have done, rarely have they been a "home" to a man who gained Jaeger's stature and influence. Perhaps, if we might indulge in a little romance, this has something to do with his name. Jaeger, or more properly Jäger, means "hunter" or "ranger" in German. The man, at once so rigidly traditional as to be irascible, yet so wayward that by all accounts he qualified as an eccentric, surely fit the image of all his name implies. To him, life in the outdoors became not only an obsession but a religion. A "short, energetic, dynamic fellow," Vince Moses of the Riverside Municipal Museum describes Jaeger, he never married and eschewed civilization whenever possible. As to his residence in Riverside, he "deigned to stay in a small house because he had to teach," continues Moses, but balancing that, Jaeger kept various "hideouts," places where he'd camp, absorbing the desert whenever his classroom schedule at Riverside College permitted escapes over the mountains into the spaces beyond. Yet thinking of Jaeger solely as a hermit or curmudgeon would be far from the truth. If he sometimes took trips alone, he also often invited students and close friends to come along. Remembered Randall Henderson, once editor of Desert Magazine, for which Jaeger wrote a series on the pioneer botanists of California, these were outings full of learning as well as hiking. On one occasion the professor took Henderson and other friends into the Jelly-Roll Rocks, a weird geological formation on the heights overlooking bleak Lucerne Valley: He told us about those brawny little workers, the harvester ants, and pointed out the matched which has so much resin in its stems it can be used to start a campfire even when green. When we came to a narrow vertical crevice in the granite he called attention to the carpet of small pebbles just outside the opening--evidence that somewhere back in the depths was a rock wren's nest. Every stone and shrub had a story--and even the holes in the ground have significance to one who knows the answers. In Jaeger's own words, he wanted people to have "direct contact with Nature in the out-of-doors." His excursions had the aura of the happy evangelist leading his disciples on far-flung adventures: "Summers usually found a group of four or five of us living like nomads for five or six weeks in the far-away and strange corners of our country, Canada and Mexico." The outdoor teaching impulse carried over into the classroom. Jaeger turned the lives of many lackluster students around. He did this not only by the force of his charismatic and intense personality. The origin of unofficial scholarships, he also slipped the needy students money under the table. In a way, that, too, was a kind of hunting. Little of this is apparent in a standard rundown of Jaeger's life. He was born in Loup City, Nebraska, in 1887. At the age of nineteen he moved with his family to southern California. There, he enrolled at Loma Linda University, apparently with the intention of becoming a physician. Yet something else was churning inside him besides that ambition. In 1918, he received a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology from Occidental College. For the next few years, he drifted around academia, studying at the Pomona College Marine Laboratory, at the University of California, and at the University of Colorado. Although this post-graduate period of his life is somewhat vague, we can't help but note that by now Jaeger was in his thirties and not yet settled. Like any good hunter, he was exploring on his own, in his free time hiking through the wonderfully varied landscapes of southern California then begging for scientific attention. If his progress was nervous, it was not listless. In 1919 he published his first book, The Mountain Trees of Southern California. That marked the beginning of one main branch of his contribution. The second is his teaching, a career that settled Jaeger in 1921 at Riverside City College. There he stayed for the next thirty-two years, happily swinging between his love of the classroom and his beloved forays into the nearby deserts to the east. When he died, still feisty at the age of ninety-six, he left an enviable record: a string of books and hundreds of mourning students moved by their memories of field trips with their former professor. Despite the personal touches, Jaeger's publications form his most enduring legacy. Articles and books, both technical and popular, poured out of him by the dozens. His Desert Wild Flowers joined other popular works such as The North American Deserts in promoting ecological understanding of the arid lands. Most dramatically, however, was an article about a rare discovery Jaeger made while on a camping trip during Christmas of 1946 into the Chuckwalla Mountains. As the old saw goes, one of the joys of teaching is learning from one's students. On this trip, Jaeger had two young men along who were new to the desert. To them, everything was a surprise in this great mountain mass of deep-red rocks east of the Salton Sea. One of the youngsters was especially taken by a phenomenon hardly of note to old desert hands, the gnarled roots of ironwood trees visible in the eroded banks of dry washes at the bottoms of canyons. BR> Romping ahead, he paused and pointed to an especially curious form. The professor came over for a look. As Jaeger recreated the event: "'No, no, that's no root!' I exclaimed. 'That's a bird' And a Poorwill at that,"' A bird, almost perfectly camouflaged, sat motionless in a cup-like depression of the bank. At first, the three hikers thought the creature was sick or dead. Up until then, scientists generally believed that birds either toughed out winters or flew to warmer climes. In contrast to this long-held assumption, the aging Jaeger and his two students were gazing at the first verified instance of a hibernating bird. A careful researcher, however, over the next few years Jaeger returned again and again to the spot, each winter measuring the poorwill's torpor, weighing the bird, taking its temperature. Yes, indeed, the poorwill Phalaenoptilus nuttallii was hibernating. Jaeger's article in Condor amazed ornithologists, and his lively piece on the discovery in National Geographic brought him international attention. Yet bright as this moment was, focussing on it skews Jaeger's contributions in prose. His publications came just at the right time, at the period of unprecedented population growth in southern California. In the 1930s, the state highway department was finishing up the paving of famed desert-crossing Route 66. By the 1940s and 1950s, winter-weary residents of Minnesota and New York, now buoyed by the prosperity following World War II and the blessings of air conditioning, were pouring into the area. Desert travelogues reciting the horrors of pioneer crossings were easy to come by, but well-written, accurate, and, as we'd say today, "user friendly" books about the unique treasures of the arid sweeps were few and far between-and badly needed if the newcomers were to think of their new home region as more than a piece of real estate with blue skies and year-round swimming. Crusty and withdrawn as Jaeger could be, he filled the need graciously. That grace sprang not from the professional writer's sleight of hand, nudging readers along with humor and literary tricks. The desert was so unique that it didn't need such flummery. To Jaeger's credit he let the desert speak for itself through revelations of the intricate qualities he knew firsthand from decades of living among them. The opening sentences of his North American Deserts shows Jaeger fully aware of his mission: "Each year thousands of persons pass by train, bus or private automobile through our deserts. To the greater number, these arid lands are but places desolate and inhospitable, great expanses of monotony against waterless horizons." In contrast to the perceived monotony, Jaeger would show that "thousands of wonders" awaited in the desert. With this and a companion book, The California Deserts, readers were soon disabused. Or, better put, led to see. As with ennui- plagued students taking fire under Jaeger's tutelage, so with the buyers of his books. Jaeger showed them a place so water-scarce that some mammals never drink but metabolize their own water from the chemicals in their dry foods. Yet arid as the place was, it also supported populations of snails. These could hunker down, waiting for years, if necessary, for a wet season. Then they sallied forth from crevices, eagerly scraping vegetable matter from the crannies of rocks with highly specialized rasping organs in their mouths. And if snails, then seeds, too. Their adaptations went through an incredible gamut. Some of them needed to be tumbled along in desert floods, requiring scarification before they could germinate. Others, almost microscopic, lay for season after season in the dry soil, not springing to life until just the right combination of moisture and temperature offered their best chance for survival. Yet when they did sprout, what a miracle! The desert can be a drear place, but some springs its flowers rage out of the gravel--lilac asters on long stems, lilies with orange-chrome petals--with "such a wealth of blossoms," Jaeger wrote accurately of a phenomenon still astounding visitors, "that almost every foot of sand or rocky soil is hidden beneath a blanket of flowers." And all this, whether the bighorn sheep bounding among airy crags or the "little brocaded jewel" of the velvet mite, Jaeger presents, not as some Disneyesque fantasia, with cymbals crashing and a thrill a minute, but as the wonders awaiting the patient and respectful visitor. In line with this, at his passing in 1983 the Los Angeles Times gave Jaeger a bittersweet good-bye. Gone was "the last of the old-time field scientists who combined botany, zoology and a lifelong fascination with the California desert in an era that preceded the current age of specialization." A great deal of truth lies in the accolade, but, despite their heartfelt qualities, the words miss one of the subtleties in the naturalist's approach. Yes, Jaeger successfully showed the elements of the desert working together in a complex whole, but he did this with a special emphasis gladly acknowledged. Writing his preface for The North American Deserts, he cautioned readers about the method behind what lay ahead: If it should occur to anyone that botanical features have received undue attention, let him remember that the trees, shrubs, and flowering annual plants are the most obvious and perhaps best indicators of the nature of the environment. To each bird, lizard, or insect he notices there are in comparison thousands of plants which pass before his eyes and attract his attention. No one can fully appreciate the desert around him if he does not somewhat intimately know the plants that not only form the ground cover but also furnish food, shelter, and protection from enemies for the desert's numerous animal denizens That is, Jaeger saw wild plants as the key to the whole, intricate pattern. That was the public Jaeger, self-effaced except as the avuncular docent through nature. The results are impossible to measure, but great has been his influence, inspiring appreciation behind the impulse for setting aside desert preserves. What might be unabashedly called his private good deeds also were part of the man, and they, too, live on. They explain far more than do his books why people still gather by the dozens at reunions, the Jaeger Palavers already mentioned. Jaeger did more than discover that poorwills hibernate. He reached into his wallet and purchased 160 acres at the site of his discovery to create a sanctuary for the bird. He not only treated his students, "like nephews," notes one Palaverite. A retired professor remembers how upon his arrival at his institution many years ago, the head of his department cavalierly presented him with a bare office. It was empty except for a chair and a desk. Funds for equipment to begin the semester? He'd have to provide them himself. Someone put the astounded junior professor onto Jaeger, and although this concerned an entirely different field, Jaeger came through, providing money until official funding could be obtained. When the same professor later found his secretary distraught because her husband hadn't the tuition for continuing dental school, the two walked over to the small house surrounded by cacti and went away gladdened. For this, at least as much as for his public accomplishments, the Riverside Municipal Museum recently created a permanent Jaeger display. It contains, a nice touch for the man, the old, cast-iron wood stove from the young teacher's shack in Palm Springs and used throughout his career, perhaps somewhat humorously, as his main source of heat. Literature Edmund C. Jaeger, 96, noted naturalist, dies. Los Angeles Times August 5, 1983. Part 1: 22.Henderson, R. Just between you and me. Desert magazine 19.12:46 Jaeger, E. C. 1933 The California deserts. Stanford, Stanford University Press. ---. 1941 Desert wild flowers. Stanford, Stanford University Press. ---. 1919 The mountain trees of Southern California, a simple guide-book for tree lovers. Pasadena, Pasadena Star-News. ---.1957 The North American deserts. Stanford, Stanford University Press. ---. Outdoor reunion for Jaeger's alumni. Desert Magazine 22.1: 24-5. ---. Poorwill sleeps away the winter. National geographic magazine 103.2: 273-80. Peter Wild is professor of English at the University of Arizona, Tucson. He is the Southwest Field Editor for the Wildflower. |
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