Ancient Places

by Jack Nisbet

  Curious about the formal geology that lay beneath these landscapes, he began to correspond with George Beck, a geology professor at Central Washington University in Ellensburg. Beck had begun exploring significant Miocene fossil sites in the Columbia Basin in 1925, and as a classical violinist, he also displayed the kind of artist’s sensibility that appealed to Wehr. In 1934, Beck published the first major paper about a petrified forest exposed above the Columbia River crossing at Vantage. Over the next several years, he played a key role in establishing Gingko Petrified Forest State Park, which interpreted this fifteen-million-year-old environment for the general public. Wehr counted Beck as an important mentor and joined him for digs at Ginkgo and various other Miocene sites in Yakima Canyon.

  Wehr also continued his artistic pursuits, experimenting with melted crayons to produce effects that could be compared to the way hot magma metamorphoses geologic strata. He made friends with Seattle artist Joseph Goldberg, who was advancing his own encaustic techniques. They were both interested in beautiful stones and together made several visits to eastern Washington and Oregon—not digging for fossils, but stopping at rock shops in search of high-grade agates and thunder eggs. The pair would line up all the moss agates in whatever new store they came across, then study the green-chrome or rusty-iron filigree traced across milky quartz fields and judge which one was aesthetically best. It was clear to Goldberg that Wehr had a very pure eye for both art and agates, and that he was a hell of a painter. He was disappointed when Wes began spending less time melting crayons and more time swinging a rock hammer.

  Wehr himself did not see such a clear distinction between art and science. His correspondence with professional paleobotanists carried the same fervor that he applied to his artistic friends, and his sharp eye for detail served him well in his outdoor avocation. In 1976, the Burke Museum named Wes an affiliate curator of paleobotany. The post came without a salary, but it did provide Wehr with a small office space and gained him access to the Burke’s extensive collections and network of researchers.

  Several of those associates recognized the quality of Wehr’s work and always seemed to come up with funds for proposed field trips. His journey to the Okanogan Highland town of Republic with Kirk Johnson was only one of many that bore fruit.

  Environmental Solitude

  In 1985, Wes Wehr dropped by Spokane’s Cheney Cowles Museum to pitch an exhibit on the work of Helmi Juvonen, one of his many west-side artist friends. The response was favorable, and Wehr accepted an offer of modest funds for travel and loan arrangements. After Helmi passed away, Wehr pressed on with the project, procuring all the items for the exhibit. At the opening he gave a talk to patrons, and after the exhibit closed he arranged permanent donations of several of the artist’s pieces to the museum.

  Although Mark Tobey, the acknowledged flag bearer of the Northwest School of art, had died in Switzerland a decade previously, Wehr told the museum’s curator that over the years he had presented Tobey with numerous rocks, fossils, and crystals that had influenced the master’s art. Even now, he suggested, he had access to enough Tobey material to mount a second exhibit. In 1988, Wes arranged for loans of several of Tobey’s minerals and personal effects archived at the Burke Museum, then called on several private collectors to supply a variety of original graphic art for the exhibit. He juxtaposed these framed pieces with the Burke artifacts, set in clear vitrine boxes, in order to highlight their impact on Tobey’s thinking. The artifacts included many of Wehr’s personal favorites, from fine jasper and obsidian to fossil ocean shells to one butter-smooth fragment of a Chinese walnut tree that during the Miocene had flourished in Yakima Canyon.

  A fossilized water fern, genus Azolla, hailed from Republic in the Okanogan Highlands. Azolla’s leafy stems were etched black on a buff-colored mudstone slab that dated back to the Eocene, fifty million years before the show, and somehow seemed to capture the best of Tobey’s intentions. For much of the artist’s career, Tobey would insist that his wildly abstract art dealt with the real world, reflecting his attempt to balance science and spirituality according to his understanding of the Baha’i faith. The comparisons in the exhibit allowed one local reviewer to take the artist’s point to heart. “After viewing the patterns and designs in Tobey’s collection of rocks and fossils,” she wrote, “I can see what he means.”

  When the show closed, Wehr funneled several permanent donations of works by Tobey and associated Northwest School artists to the museum’s nascent collection. A couple of them had been created by Wehr himself, whose own position in the Seattle art scene was based on his small land- and seascapes. As a second signature style, Wehr later executed black spidery figures that reminded some people of dendrites, those branching mineral stains that seep to life inside layers of stone. In keeping with Wehr’s preferred scale, these creatures were the size of postcards.

  In 1991, the Spokane museum premiered another exhibit titled Environmental Solitude, which jointly displayed works by Wes Wehr and encaustic master Joseph Goldberg. At the opening, a reporter described Wehr as dressed like an academic; shy to the point of stammering yet eager to talk about both art and paleobotany; standing alone in a corner but cajoling anyone who entered his orbit to inscribe their contact information into his well-worn address book—Wes always said he’d like to stay in touch. In the interview, Wehr played down his artwork to focus on a fossil project he was involved in three hours north of Spokane. Ancient leaf imprints there had attracted the attention of an eminent British paleobotanist, who, by chance, was on hand to attend the exhibit premier. “The interesting thing for me tonight is that my life is divided between paleontology and painting, and that’s a very good life,” Wehr said. “Have a painting showing, take off tomorrow on a field trip …”

  Even as Wehr was participating in exhibits at the Spokane museum during the 1980s and ’90s, he was running back and forth between a host of isolated fossil sites—always on the move, always with a mission, always displaying an almost desperate need to show off pretty objects and to connect people with each other. The curator grew accustomed to receiving postcards announcing that Wes would arrive the next day on the bus from Republic. On these occasions, he never forgot to bring her a small fossil as a gift. She filed away dozens of his terse postcards and tiny stone imprints, but whenever she asked Wehr exactly what he was digging, he would answer curtly: “We found some stuff,” or “It was very hot out there,” or “I’m completely worn out.” And that was about it.

  “He never really told me much of what was going on up there,” the curator recalled. “It was like a different world.”

  Names

  All of Wes Wehr’s paleontological cohorts acknowledge that his artful eye helped him clearly visualize the tightly compressed and often baffling figures etched into fossil-bearing stones. He had a way of recognizing significant lines, of reconstructing smashed features in his mind. As his interest in the discipline grew, he took the time to learn about analogous living flowers, developing his basic intuitive sense of what looked artistically interesting into an understanding of what, in the botanical scheme of things, might be significant.

  During the 1980s Wehr showed some fossil conifer material to a professor at the University of Montana, and the two started working together, most specifically in Yakima Canyon. One of the slabs Wes passed along contained an undescribed extinct species of fossil fern, and his Montana cohort named it Osmunda wehrii. For the first time, Wes had his own name entered in the precisely ordered address book of life on earth.

  Meanwhile, Wehr and a growing band of professional collectors continued to turn up new Eocene fossils at various locations around Republic. Along with a wide range of community members and a visionary city administrator, they decided they needed to share this bounty with the world, just as George Beck had with the Gingko forest. Their plan called for both a museum and a public digging site on Boot Hill that would be available simultaneously for serious scientific research, public education, and amateur en
thusiasts.

  As the concept took shape, Wes continued to crack fossil slabs at a furious rate. He also, for the first time, began to transform his copious notes into popular articles. One of his earliest publications laid out the promise of fossil plants at Republic and other Okanogan Highland sites. Wehr described how the middle Eocene epoch in these highlands had seen the rapid appearance and diversification of several significant groups of flowering plants, including roses, maples, saxifrages, heaths, and soapberries. “Today, 48–49 million years later,” he wrote, “is a time for the similarly rapid appearance and diversification of many theories about their origins, botanical affinities, and geographical distributions.”

  To demonstrate, Wehr highlighted the Alabama snow-wreath, Neviusia alabamensis—a shrubby member of the rose family that exists today only in the southeastern United States. He noted that a pair of closely related genera grow exclusively in China and Japan, and that recently a new species of Neviusia had been described from California’s Mount Shasta. “Indeed,” Wes remarked, “this is a very strange distribution for a living plant!” The publication announced that a fossil species of the same genus, Neviusia, had been unearthed both at Republic and at a sister Eocene quarry across the border near Princeton, British Columbia. Obviously, untangling Neviusia’s long-term life history would not be a simple task, but just as obviously, the Okanogan Highlands held information about it that was both important and intriguing. “Fossils from the vicinity of Republic, Washington, provide an important window to the Eocene flora and fauna of the Pacific Northwest,” he wrote. “Paleobotanists have already recognized 210 species from these beds. Many of these fossil plants have been found only at Republic and are known from only one or two specimens. Moreover, species new both to the Republic flora and to science are still being discovered.”

  In 1986, Wehr was the second author on the Missoula professor’s description of a new species of fossil fir tree found at Republic. Wehr also shared some of his finds with Jack Wolfe, a US Geological Survey paleobotanist based in Denver who was investigating what leaf patterns and forest diversity might have to say about the larger Eocene climate. Wehr’s name appeared with Wolfe’s on a significant 1987 US Geological Survey paper on the fossil plants of the Republic and Princeton sites. The report described how the outpouring of new fossils must hold clues to the ancient environment and geography, as well as the evolution and distribution, of several modern groups of temperate plants. The accompanying botanical list included more than a dozen new species that the investigators were obligated to name, and Wolfe and Wehr attacked this task with relish, honoring contributors both scientific and personal. The impact of Susanne Langer’s writings and friendship on Wehr was acknowledged in a witch-hazel family relative that he dubbed Langeria magnifica.

  Wolfe and Wehr’s report brought new attention to the richness of the Okanogan Highland sites. Not long afterward, a pair of paleobotanists working at the Princeton quarry found a way to acknowledge that influence when they uncovered a preserved staminate flower that constituted a new genus. Connecting the amateur and professional team to posterity with a timeless pun, they dubbed their new genus Wehrwolfea. Such recognition provided great satisfaction to Wes. “On those gloomy days when I felt wraithlike and doubted that I even existed,” he wrote, “I looked at pictures of Wehrwolfea in textbooks and erudite scientific journals. After that, what else could possibly happen to me in matters of art world ‘recognition’ that would ever be so exuberantly off-the-wall?”

  In 1988, the Stonerose Interpretive Center was launched in Republic. There, exactly as Wehr and others had envisioned, students from local schools could join fossil enthusiasts from all over the world. At a reclaimed house downtown, visitors of every stripe signed in and picked up a basic set of tools. From there they trudged to a Boot Hill roadcut that exposed many layers of Eocene shale. Along this curving face, together they could crack open stone books to their hearts’ content. Each participant was allowed to take home his or her favorite three fossil finds of the day unless local experts on the site determined that the discovery might be new or significant. In that case, the freshly revealed fossil remained at the interpretive center for a more rigorous scientific examination.

  The Flowering

  As most of the professionals who first published on the Okanogan Highlands drifted off to other scientific pursuits—there are always more fossil digs to discover—Wes Wehr continued to visit the Republic and Princeton sites on a regular basis. He was well aware that his instinctive return to the place followed the European Enlightenment tradition of scientific philosophers like Alexander von Humboldt and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who insisted that any understanding of the larger world required not only close examination of its smallest motes but also a steady awareness of their place in time. The seeker should keep detailed records of every movement, and spread them around as much as possible. Wehr learned early on that open distribution of such knowledge, like an ongoing Northwest potlatch, pushed everything forward, and he quoted von Humboldt himself on the subject: “To keep what you already have, you must always be giving it away.”

  Over the next decade, Wehr used his far-flung connections to help expand the potential of the Stonerose Interpretive Center. He produced a stream of academic and popular articles explaining what had been found and what lay on the horizon. These included papers about conifer, hardwood, flower, fruit, seed, bird feather, crayfish, and insect fossils that had emerged from Stonerose. He drew parallels between the ancient and modern landscapes, titling his compendium of the earliest known occurrence of several rose-family flowers and fruit trees “The Eocene Orchards and Gardens of Republic, Washington.” He organized the latest discoveries into neat checklists of fossil plants and insects so that interested visitors could make sense of the imprints that they cracked out of the roadcut.

  At Stonerose, Wehr also came into his own as a natural teacher, presiding over intensive fossil identification workshops through most of the 1990s. Sitting among an ever-increasing pile of split mudstone, he would project his laser gaze through a jeweler’s loupe, grunting and muttering as the object in question unfolded in his mind. A former colleague commented that “Wes had a particular talent for inspiring interested adults and children alike, who would crowd around him at a shale exposure, enthralled by his ability to communicate his excitement for the Eocene world, urging that they, too, might make a contribution to paleontology.” Wehr’s odd charisma helped lure a parade of unlikely characters to the Okanogan Highlands, rock-splitters of every imaginable origin and age. If they were serious, he found some way to encourage each one. Years later, a student from one of those workshops remembered the way Wes had pointed out small details of leaf anatomy as they strolled through the University of Washington’s arboretum. “You’ll never figure this stuff out,” he advised her, “unless you start your own herbarium.” Wehr understood that placing present-day specimens beside their Eocene analogs, then making the comparison available to interested diggers, would elevate everyone’s level of comprehension.

  In many ways, Wehr always maintained the set habits of a slightly obsessive ten-year-old autograph collector. One of his many drivers described their epic road trips as a series of carefully modulated events. “We had to stop at every bakery, because Wes loved pastries, and in every tiny town, because he craved the way each post office would stamp his mail with their own postmark. Then when we got back in the car, Wes would hang his head out the window like a dog and just feel the air. Hang it out so far that you could watch his ears flap.”

  When Washington Geology dedicated its June 1996 issue to the fossil troves around Republic, the contents included, as expected, a pair of new contributions from Wehr. A separate piece by a different author, titled “Volcanic Arcs and Vegetation,” began with a nod to its catalyst: “Many of us who were students of paleobotany during the mid-1980s vividly recall the appearance in 1987 of Wolfe and Wehr’s partial monograph of the middle Eocene Republic flora.” The issue ex
plored the mysterious forces that were revealed when Wehr and Johnson kicked their first dawn redwood in Republic: the tectonic grind that created a vast and varied Eocene Interior Arc along the west front of the Rockies from British Columbia into northern Utah; the subtle interplay between elevation and temperature during the rise of the Okanogan Highland forests; the bursts of diversification visible in the fossil record that echo modern habitats in complex and often deceptive ways; the myriad new and knotty avenues for study presented by the constantly expanding data set rising from the rubble of all these precious outcrops; the irony of a modern world paying attention to an unmistakably warm and entirely vibrant ecosystem from the distant past even as the early twenty-first century hurtles toward its own much warmer future with unsettling speed.

  The river of scientific and popular publications continued to flow, bouncing from Wehr’s contribution in a 1998 Burke Museum report to a 1999 Smithsonian magazine article describing how the institution’s fossil arthropod curator was teaming up with Denver’s Kirk Johnson and a group of experienced field-workers to assess insect damage on fossil plants from Boot Hill. Wes Wehr, naturally, was coordinating the partnership. “Over the past two decades, Wehr has brought legions of other paleontologists to Republic,” the article explained, “and taken pieces of Republic to them.”