My son and (now) daughter-in-law got married recently, in the beautiful Bitterroot Valley of Montana. Martin and Bess’s celebration was lovely and joyous, but during the weekend—their weekend—I could never quite shake the terrible knowledge of what had happened one week earlier, when the horrific events in Israel and Gaza began to unfold. A mélange of photographs and videos from this latest Middle Eastern tragedy played like an infinite loop in my brain—so much blood and suffering, another example of seemingly intractable hatred and rage writ large across the face of the world. Although the two events differed tremendously in scale, emotion, and geography, their temporal proximity meant that for a while they were inextricably linked in my mind and heart. I still am haunted by this aching juxtaposition: on one hand a small celebration of love, on the other a huge conflagration of death and despair. Autumnal weather in Montana can be unpredictable and sometimes harsh—snow and freezing rain are not out of the question—but the wedding weekend was perfect, as was the venue, which included a renovated barn and large ranch house with the most spectacular screened-in porch I’ve ever seen. During the wedding ceremony the guests looked west, toward a hayfield graced by Sandhill Cranes earlier in the day. Beyond the fields: a line of cottonwoods tracking the river and then the eastern scarp of the Bitterroot Mountains rising five thousand feet above the valley, with a dusting of fresh snow on the highest peaks, broad swatches of alpine larch burning to gold, and a parallel series of great gray canyons slicing the range, falling into the lush bottomlands. Martin and Bess and the celebrant (Bess’s brother Sam, freshly ordained by the Universal Life Church) stood before us, and the afternoon’s glory: mountain and valley, sunlight and shadow, everything laved by a gentle southerly breeze. Sam read a long, touching, and very funny poem that he’d written about Martin and Bess’s “story.” His delivery was perfect and he had everyone laughing. As he read his poem, the guests passed a small bowl holding the wedding rings from person to person. After Sam finished with his poem Martin and Bess read the vows they’d written for one another, exchanged rings, and kissed. And so, their marriage was blessed—by the ceremony, by the guests, and by the beautiful day. I’ll admit to a few tears of joy. And then the party: tasty hors d'oeuvres, a “beer canoe” and open margarita bar, plus an hour of square dancing with music by the Wood Hogs. Dinner (a delicious taco bar) followed in the large barn, and then dessert and more dancing, this time in the former hayloft of the barn, with music by DJ Chris (Definitely not my gig.) The party lasted until 1:00, although I flamed out at 10:00, done in by a chronic lack of sleep, the pre-wedding setup, a morning run, and one too many trips to the margarita bar. A dangerous business, that. The wedding guests were a mix of family and friends: a few geezers like me, Martin’s mom, and Bess’s parents, plus a smattering of middle-aged folks. Some young children added their entropic energy to the mix, but the crowd was weighted toward folks in their twenties and thirties, mostly Martin’s wildland fire fighting buddies and Bess’s friends from the Missoula area, where she’d grown up. Folks came from as far away as Kenya, Flagstaff, New York, Massachusetts, and Mississippi. It was an eclectic but happy gathering, energized by the music, the beautiful setting, and of course the wedding’s romantic spirit. So much raucous, happy noise. So many shining faces. And yet, beyond Martin and Bess's wedding, the specter of humanity’s grief as it played out in Israel and Gaza. . . But in partial reaction to that tragedy, I'll cling to an idea - a faith - that my friend Ralph Black recently mentioned: that somehow, in some infinitesimally small yet vital way, events like Martin and Bess’s wedding stand as an antidote to the hatred and violence that plague our world. In such celebrations we rise above the worst aspects of our humanness—or rather we express what’s best in our species. I’d like to believe that for one afternoon and evening in the Bitterroot Valley a collection of people—about one hundred and twenty-five of us—put aside our individual failures and frailties, our petty resentments and worries, our collective tendencies toward tribalism and fear. I’d like to believe that for at least for a few short hours everyone at the wedding, whether eating in the barn, dancing in the hayloft, or standing around the fire pit, beneath a huge and glittering night sky, was deeply happy. I’d like to think that for a time we all were infused with optimism and hope (which are not the same thing)—for Martin and Bess, for our poor and not-so-poor selves, for the sum of our precarious futures. I don’t want to attach undue significance (beyond the strictly personal) to one small celebration in the Bitterroot Valley, which felt so far removed from the strife of the world—even if it really wasn’t. Neither do I want to imply that there was some Newtonian-like psychic mechanism at work, a direct, cause-and-effect impact on the world, like a delusion born out of a “Give Peace a Chance” maudlin sentimentality. But this is what I thought at the time, and still do: that in our celebration, we (collectively and individually) embraced the hope inherent in Martin and Bess’s marriage ceremony—their commitment to one another, wherever it might take them. And I imagined that, concurrently with Martin and Bess’s wedding, similar events were occurring all over the world, among all the endless conflicting countries, religions, tribes, political factions—among all those “others,” be they Serbians and Bosnians, Muslims and Hindus, Ukrainians and Russians, Tutsis and Hutus, Israelis and Palestinians, MAGA-types and progressives, on and on and fucking on. In practical terms, perhaps my belief—my hope—may be worth next to nothing. But this is what I imagined on that evening, as people laughed and danced and ate and hugged one another and perhaps drank a bit too much: that the goodness inherent in Martin and Bess’s wedding, its expression of love, radiated out from the Bitterroot Valley like circles on still water, rippling south over Lost Trail Pass and into Idaho, west over the ragged crest of the Bitterroot Mountains, east over the Sapphire Mountains, and north past Missoula, carrying their message of hope into the beautiful and bloody and aching world.
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I grab my binoculars and a small pack, then head west on State Street before turning north on Park. Once across the Erie Canal I track the towpath east, where another five minutes of walking brings me to a vantage point above a small, somewhat shabby-looking wetland. The wetland lies below a berm backing the Erie Canal: a shallow bit of open water covered in pointillist swirls of bright green duckweed, ringed by cattails and a mix of moisture-tolerant trees: willow, black walnut, red maple, and a morgue of dead ash snags, courtesy of the emerald ash-borer. I make my way down the steep canal bank, wade through a thick mix of goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace, ragweed, and reed canary grass, past the small red maple that always burns to scarlet in early autumn. I find my traditional observation spot, unfold a small camp chair, measure the air temperature and wind speed, open my notebook, and settle into a practice that has unfolded, week after week, over the last three years. During the next hour the light builds. The animals come and go and the plants move in time with the winds, which on this bright September morning gently swirl and eddy out of the west. In a few days the meandering stream of my life will take me far from Brockport, where I’ve lived these last thirty years. And on this morning I’ve come to say goodbye to what I think of, possessively and foolishly, as “my” wetland—the one that I adopted in early 2021. My adoption was informal and brought with it no commitments other than a willingness to spend one uninterrupted hour per week sitting quietly amongst the cattails and willows, watching. I desired nothing other than a quiet place to rest and a periodic escape from the intensity that enveloped my professional life, and from the political and social craziness that blossomed during the Trumpian years, fermented in a sour mash of SARS-CoV-2, Fox News, intolerance, grievance, and anti-science rhetoric. As I wrote in an earlier blog post, I wanted my tasks to sleep and my body to still. For a short, blessed while each week, I aimed to cultivate slowness. I wrote those last words six weeks into my wetland watch. Since then, I’ve pursued the project as best I can, given my peripatetic lifestyle, which often has cultivated anything but slowness and stillness. Still, I’ve baked and sweated in the summer sun, drawn a thick down jacket around me on cold and snowy winter days, huddled in vernal rain, lounged in autumnal light. I’ve greeted the great burst of flowering and growth that mostly begins in April, watched the last leaves of October drift through the air. Among the animals, I’ve concentrated on birds, partly because I know them best, but also because on most days they are the most noticeable creatures in the wetland. There also have been mammals (usually gray squirrels, but also a few feral cats, dogs on the canal path, mink tracks in the snow), amphibians (spring peepers, American toads, northern leopard frogs, green frogs and bullfrogs), reptiles (painted turtles and one prehistoric-looking snapping turtle, sunning on a downed willow log). Arthropods have made their appearance, too (brightly jeweled dragonflies and damsel flies; orb-weaving spiders; bald-faced hornets, bumble bees and honeybees; and one monarch butterfly nectaring in a patch of milkweed). But mostly the insects have spun the soundtrack to my warm weather visits―sometimes a full-throttled chorus of cicadas and katydids, at other times little more than a gentle susurrus, verging on subliminal white noise. For me each wetland watch has been a kind of “sit,” as in the Zen notion of “sitting,” but with focused attention and a pair of binoculars around my neck. I’ve not emphasized counting or measuring things, but I scribble observations in a small notebook for later transcription; those field notes now total about sixty single-spaced, typed pages. A typical entry begins like this: May 1, 2021; 15°C (59°F); winds light, W, ± 8 mph, sunny, clear. And suddenly . . . fresh cattail leaves sprouting; willow leaves yellow-green, startling against brilliant blue sky, most trees bare except for swollen buds. Dandelions flowering on green-rich berm, tiny insects over water. Honeysuckle leafing out, wetland pond flush with water. 1330: MYWA [myrtle warbler] and YEWA [yellow warbler] M [males] in willows, YAWA chasing MYWA – several of each. 2 CAGO [Canada goose] at edge of pond when I arrive rise quietly (miracle!), slip into water, paddle off. No goslings. BLJA [blue jay] call, COGR [common grackle], NOFL [northern flicker] in dead ash, HOSP [house sparrow] singing (1st of wetland year?), RWBL [red-winged blackbird] song, MALL [mallard] pair on pond (M’s green sheen shining in sun), F [female] quacking (rheeb-a-rheeb!), NOCA [northern cardinal], RBWO [red-bellied woodpecker] – everyone out and about. 1332: BLJA bothered by COGR; GBHE [great blue heron] lands (!) in top of dead ash – seems awkward up high, branches swaying under its weight, primordial. But settles in. Incessant NOFL [northern flicker] call to W [west]. 1336: Cabbage whites ascend, YEWA forages in shrubby willows to E [east], SOSP [song sparrow] sings to NE [northeast], then SOSP sings to W; 2 territories in wetland. The typed entry for May 1st goes on for several pages, which when added to all my other entries—page after page of lists—raises two related questions. First, why bother sitting by the wetland, doing next to nothing? And second, why write it all down, for page after page? As a partial answer, I’ll channel the ghost of the French writer Georges Perec, as he sits outside a tobacco shop near the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris on the morning of October 18, 1974. Perec stares at the street, strokes his magnificent chin-beard, takes a deep drag from a Gitanes—a heavy smoker, he died of lung cancer at the age of 45. He scribbles hurriedly in his notebook, stopping every now and again to scratch his unruly mop of hair or light another cigarette. Perec was a well-known experimental writer (he once wrote an entire novel using only words without the letter “e’), but on this autumnal day he’s playing the dedicated empiricist—frantically documenting everything that’s happening around him: the coming and going of people, rain, cars, busses, and pigeons. It’s a hopeless task, but Perec is interested in the “simultaneous actions, micro-events, each one of which necessitates postures, movements, specific expenditures of energy” of one Parisian place—what he termed the “infraordinary,” or “what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds.” Perec’s urban fieldwork unspooled over three days in October 1974. In 1975 he published his observations as Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien; an English translation, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, appeared in 2010. Perec’s Attempt is a brief work, comprised of short, staccato-like observations: —Stone: the curbs, a fountain, a church, buildings . . . —Asphalt —Trees (leafy, many yellowing) —A rather big chunk of sky (maybe one-sixth of my field of vision) —A cloud of pigeons that suddenly swoops down on the central plaza, between the church and fountain —Vehicles (their inventory remains to be made) —Human beings —Some sort of basset hound —Bread (baguette) —Lettuce (curly endive?) partially emerging from a shopping bag Colors red (Fiat, dress, St-Raphaël, one-ways) blue bag green shoes green raincoat blue taxi blue 2CV [Citroën automobile, a “deux chevaux”] The 70 [a bus] goes to Place du Dr Hayem, Maison green Mehari [another make of automobile] The narrative runs on like this for 47 pages. When I first read An Attempt, I had little sense of what Perec was up to; the small book felt tedious and repetitive: nothing more than brief observation piled upon brief observation. But after settling into my wetland practice I revisited the book—and during this second reading Perec’s lists became hypnotizing, then oddly touching and compelling: the world passing by; Parisians going about their business, often without any obvious purpose; advertisements; a stream of busses, trucks, and cars on the street; flocks of pigeons exploding off the pavement; marriages and funerals at the church across the street; parents attending to their children, and so on. For all its simplicity and brevity, An Attempt carried a surprising and affecting weight, and I was deeply moved when I reached the abrupt end of the narrative: “Four children. A dog. A little ray of sun. The 96. It is two o’clock.” Life. Like Perec, I aimed to immerse myself in a familiar place and pay close attention to the waiting world—a facility that has withered in this virtual and hyperactive society of ours, where most children’s time outside is measured in minutes rather than hours and the average American spends seven hours or more per day staring at a screen. In a review of the Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat, Nina MacLaughlin wrote that “Our moment of attention is the most precious thing that we have to give.” And so, during my Attempt to Exhaust a Small Place in Brockport, New York, I gave my precious attention to one neglected and slightly forsaken wetland, as a small exercise in personal generosity. That’s what I did, for week after week, as I immersed myself in the infraordinary of one tiny and ramshackle wetland. In doing so I gained more than I ever imagined when I began my quixotic project: a steady measure of peace, a better ability to remain fully present in this sensuous world, and a stronger sense of Brockport’s seasons. I began to breathe more easily. And I’ve recently understood something else—that during the last three years, my wetland practice, along with long solo runs west along the Erie Canal, has made this part of the world feel more like home than it ever did during my first twenty-seven years in Brockport: a chemistry of attention, an alchemy born from focused presence. I made my final notebook entry of my last Brockport wetland watch at 9:50 am on September 18th: 1 EUST [European starling] perched in dead ash to NE. 5 PATU [painted turtles] hauled out on log to NW, shells covered in dried duckweed. Background insect hum building. Warm sun on my back. Goldenrod burning bright yellow. The lone starling flies SE. The stream of Perec’s infraordinary, whether flowing along a Parisian street or through a Brockport wetland, somehow writ large . . . And as I climbed the canal berm for the last time, I sensed the irony that had blossomed in this small (but no longer?) bedraggled place, one cultivated by my continued practice: that although I finally felt like I belonged in Brockport, in a few days I would be moving to Jackson, Mississippi, a place light years away from western New York in temperament and politics, climate and ecology. But once settled in Jackson, I planned on searching out a more southern infraordinary in a nearby Mississippi wetland, with the hope that my new residence might become, well, my home.
Question: what’s the connection between Houghton University, a conservative Christian school in western New York, and female Bobolinks cloaked in male Bobolink plumage? And no, Houghton University’s sports teams are not the Fighting Bobolinks, although that would be an extremely cool name, not to mention much more fearsome than the school’s actual mascot, which is the “Highlander Lion.” Just saying. But on to the link between Bobolinks and Houghton University—followed by Ron DeSantis, Ken Ham, Dylan Mulvaney, European moles, and Modest Mouse, among others. They’re all connected, right? Bobolinks are among the suite of grassland birds that I studied for over two decades. In 1996 one of my former graduate students flushed an oddly plumaged female Bobolink off her nest, which contained a clutch of eggs. She looked more male than female, although she had a fully developed brood patch for incubating eggs (male Bobolinks don’t incubate). Twelve years later, and another breeding-season female Bobolink that resembled a male showed up, this time in the peer-reviewed literature. The author of the paper hypothesized that the female was an older bird, with high levels of androgens and low levels of estrogen, hence the unusual plumage. In both cases, the female’s eggs didn’t hatch. Now to Houghton University, a small school in western New York affiliated with the Wesleyan Church. Houghton recently fired two employees for including personal pronouns in their email signatures. Houghton maintains that it “has never terminated an employment relationship based solely on the use of pronouns in staff email signatures,” although the New York Times makes it clear that’s exactly what happened. I assume that personal pronouns can still be used in Houghton’s English classrooms, even if Thou Shalt Not Use Them in an Email Signature, given the school’s religiously conservative views on sex and gender. “A Wesleyan View of Gender Identity and Expression” explains Houghton’s attitude about all things gendered; it’s a long article, but three statements jumped out at me: 1) “Maleness and femaleness are universal human categories. A Christian perspective begins with the assumption of “divine assignment” at the head of the list of determining factors for one’s gender identity. At the same time, it must be recognized and acknowledged that feelings about gender identity also involve an intricate interplay of physiology, hormones, genetics, psychology, family nurture and the will (one’s own moral choices). The “distortion” (Italics mine) of one’s sense of identity occurs whenever any of these causal factors is abused, ignored or goes awry. 2) “Gender confusion and dysphoria are ultimately the biological, psychological, social and spiritual consequences of the human race’s fallen condition.” 3) “Psychological disorders, genetic defects and social stigmas are all consequences of this fall caused by human sin.” The line of logic engendered here (sorry) seems to be that there are two “divinely assigned” human sexes/genders, male and female. Any “distortions” of this absolute dichotomy due to “biological” factors and “genetic defects” result from human sin and “the fall,” which takes us back to Adam and Eve. The Wesleyan Church doesn’t strictly adhere to an interpretation of Genesis that includes a 6,000-year-old Earth and literal Garden of Eden, as does Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis crew. However, Wesleyans seem to believe, like Ken Ham, that human sin, as first practiced by Adam (he/him) and Eve (she/her), were responsible for the wrath of God (most definitely He/Him), the fall, and all ensuing “genetic defects,” “gender confusion and dysphoria,” and departures from the “universal human categories of maleness and femaleness.” Bummer. Well. If God’s wrath was responsible for the presence of “genetic defects” and “gender confusion and dysphoria” in a perfectly created world, then the same divine rage must have produced divergence from absolute categories of “maleness and femaleness” in other animals. Which brings me to theodicy (explaining the existence of pain and suffering in a world created by an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God) as it applies to non-human animals. I’ve traveled to Theodicy Land before, with white-footed mice and botflies, and Inyo Mountains salamanders and House Sparrows, so why again? Because theodicy and the existence of pain and suffering (and all those “genetic defects” etc.) in animals—human and otherwise—challenge anthropocentric, absolutist world views and is relevant to current attacks on transgender rights. Contrary to Houghton University, Ron DeSantis and at least 19 states, scientific research demonstrates that human sex and gender are complicated phenomena. As a 2015 article in Nature states: “if biologists continue to show that sex is a spectrum, then society and state will have to grapple with the consequences, and work out where and how to draw the line . . . if the law requires that a person is male or female, should that sex be assigned by anatomy, hormones, cells or chromosomes, and what should be done if they clash? ‘My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter . . . gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter,’ says Vilain [clinician and director of the Center for Gender-Based Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles]. In other words, if you want to know whether someone is male or female, it may be best just to ask.” (Of course, in Ron DeSantis land, one is no longer supposed to ask about any of this.) But back to theodicy and non-human animals, sort of. For a millisecond, let’s grant Wesleyans and Ken Ham their beliefs about sex and gender in humans. What about intersexuality and related phenomena in other mammals? Intersexuality has been documented in many domestic mammals and wild species like European roe deer and crab-eating foxes. And then there are four species of moles in which females have ovotestes (gonads with male and female aspects); wood lemmings, in which females can have either XX, X*X, or X*Y sex chromosomes (X* being a “mutant” X chromosome), and spotted hyenas, in which females have an impressive phallic-like clitoris. I could go on, but the bottom line is that it’s a messy, variable sex-determining world in mammal-land, whether we’re talking humans or other species—courtesy either of Adam and Eve and an angry, petulant God willing to punish innocent creatures because humans messed up, or because natural processes (evolution, ecology, physiology, cell division and replication) are inherently variable, imperfect, and subject to the effects of probability and environment. Birds, like mammals, have a primarily genetic system of sex determination, although in birds females are heterogametic (ZW), while males have two Z sex chromosomes. Birds occasionally exhibit an amazing condition called bilateral gynandromorphism, in which half the individual is male and half female—in plumage, gonads, and sex chromosomes. In a well-known Zebra Finch example, the right half of the bird was genetically and anatomically male while the left half was female. The bird behaved as a fully masculinized male and successfully courted a female, although her eggs were, alas, infertile. Which brings me back to that female Bobolink and my own exposure to the “messiness” of sex determination in non-human animals. In the Wesleyan/Houghton University/Ken Ham view of the world, presumably both gynandromorphism and that female Bobolink’s issues with androgen/estrogen balances (those Wesleyan “genetic defects” and “biological consequences”) ultimately lead back to human sin and the fall. Hmm. But there are larger implications here, about a vengeful God (pity the poor animals) and a perversely anthropocentric ideology and world view. Either Ken Ham and his Wesleyan fellow-travelers are right in all of this, or there’s a natural world out there that is built on evolutionary, ecological, and physiological “messiness” and variability. But never mind scientific research on human sex, mole ovotestes, intersex mammals, bilateral gynandromorph birds, or female Bobolinks in feathered drag—let alone statements by thirty professional organizations, including the American Medical Association, supporting gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth. Never mind the actual world. Paranoia about pronouns in email signatures, Bud Lite™ sponsors (Maybe if Dylan Mulvaney had pitched Bell’s Two Hearted IPA, none of that brouhaha would have happened?), bathrooms, and medical care for transgender youth has nothing to do with biology or expert opinion. Instead, DeSantis and his fellow gender-bashers are motivated by political considerations, fear, and rigid belief systems predicated on absolute certainty and invariant dichotomies. Cue Answers in Genesis and the Wesleyan Church. Cue Nikki Haley and her unbelievably stupid comment that the debate over whether transgender women and girls should be allowed to compete on sports teams alongside their cisgender peers is the “women’s issue of our time.” (Conveniently ignoring the epidemic of domestic violence directed at women, failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, the persistent pay gap between men and women, loss of reproductive choice, and inadequate support for childcare, not to mention the intersection of race, sexuality, and women’s issues.) And cue Modest Mouse and the lyrics to “Missed the Boat”: “Our ideas held no water, but we used them like a dam.” But to use a bit of Nikki Haley’s language here, arguments over transgender rights and all they encompass are a proxy for the true “issue for our time,” which has to do with conflicting world views predicated either on nuance, uncertainty, and variability, or on absolute certainty and rigid dichotomies (in other words, ideology). Examples of the corrosive effects of blind and absolute ideology are proliferating, and are the source of so much human folly and anguish: Truth with a capital “T.” Fear of “The Other.” Categories of Us versus Them, based on race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnic group, political belief, citizenship, or economic status. Dismissal of science and expert opinion. An originalist interpretation of the U. S. Constitution. (One of my pet peeves.) Banned books and censorship in our schools. Marry these attitudes to a conviction that the ends justify the means and what you get are a slew of William Butler Yeats’ rough beasts, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born and willing to do or say just about anything in pursuit of their goals. Ron DeSantis (he/him), Ken Ham (he/him), and Nikki Haley (she/her), anyone? And oh yes—Happy Pride Month, y’all. “Missed the Boat” by Modest Mouse: for either Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis, a good campaign theme song, I’d say. Photos via Wikipedia.
Early morning in Clarendon, Texas, ten days after spring equinox. I’m up hours before dawn and thirty minutes later I’m riding US Highway 287 south and east off the Llano Estacado, one of the largest mesas in North America, 38,000 square miles of empty High Plains sky and flat-earth sprawl. The early morning darkness is quiet and soothing, the highway almost deserted. A mug of hot black tea and music made for driving, the rhythms of Portico Quartet keeping time with my cruise control drift: Art in the Age of Automation, Monument, Terrain—electronic instrumentals, jazz-tinged and ambient, alto sax dissolving in the great black void. I’m relaxed and happy but alert for animal eyeshine—a “bright tapestry” that could appear as a deer rises out of the roadside shadow to meet my headlights in an unwelcome way. I keep my speed down. On through those magical, numinous hours that bracket this High Plains sunrise, on through west Texas towns fading into ruin: Memphis and Quanah, both down more than 30% in population since 1980. An occasional flashing yellow traffic light along with ramshackle homes, boarded-up storefronts, quick stop-gas stations, and churches—the latter either newer prefab metal or older, worn brick. But the darkness hides the worst of the human ruin, while cell phone towers flash red and lonely in the last sweet touch of night. The road remains quiet, the tea hot, the music lovely. I’m cradled in solitude, but I’m not lonely. To the east, the horizon breaks into something other than stars. The deep dark transitions to a faint whisper of light, and then to color: black to charcoal gray, on through indigo, purple, and gunmetal blue, the strata flaring orange and red as the sun climbs through civil twilight. The morning blossoms, shards of light cutting through broken clouds. The sky trends azure. Swallows arc and slice into the day, above creek beds running dry. The Llano Estacado was Dust Bowl country and ninety years later another deep drought is only partly disguised by the first green flush of spring. Giant wind farms stalk across the land, and huge blades spin their morning of praise: all the irony of renewable energy in MAGA-country, while scattered heads of pumpjack oil rigs still bow to our Carboniferous dreams. A friend once defined “boring” as “I-80 through western Nebraska,” but I’m drawn to those High Plains spatials, all horizon and distance and sky, fractals of space and desire. I’ll never grow tired of this aching country’s endless dream-vectors, so perfect for long, solo drives—spooling off mile after mile after mile, tires riding smooth and steady over new asphalt, or maybe a rhythmic slap against older concrete seams, as something intoxicating opens up inside me. And after all my decades of cross-country drives (thirty-plus transits and counting) I’m still up for those fourteen- and even sixteen-hour days, movement punctuated only by stops for gas and bathroom breaks, plus (perhaps) a mid-day run and short sleep. And it occurs to me that for whatever reason I’m most often drawn to predawn drives while crossing the High Plains, within a few longitudinal degrees of the 100th meridian, although this calling might also work its way into my heart in the Midwest. O this highway, this movement, this desire—even if there’s almost no shortgrass prairie left in west Texas, even if there are too many agricultural fields in places where they shouldn’t be, center-pivot fantasies draining the Ogallala Aquifer dry. And south and east of the Llano Estacado, great stands of mesquite rise into the light. They serve as both metaphor and witness for what humans have recently done to this part of the world: the bison and prairie dogs almost gone, and wildfires, too. And on the Llano Estacado the Comanches now are mostly a memory. I try to maintain some separation from all that’s gone wrong here, to keep my High Plains roll mostly happy. And yet for all the quiet ecstasy of the morning drive, the wonderful intersection of movement and horizon and space and light, of music and hot tea tannins, I still squirm a bit in my comfortable driver’s seat, which is no easy chair. For although I keep my speed down and try to nurse 33 miles per gallon out of my Subaru Forester, I know that I am part of our hydrocarbon-fueled nightmare, the same one that fuels my drive. It’s easy to channel Greta Thunberg (“The bigger your carbon footprint, the bigger your moral duty.”) and the latest IPCC Climate Change Report, with its conclusion that a human-induced global warming of 1.1°Celsius has propelled “changes to the Earth’s climate that are unprecedented in recent human history.” And then there are those CO2 data from Mauna Loa in Hawaii: atmospheric concentrations up from 316 ppm in 1958 to 420 ppm in 2022. I understand these things, and yet I still drive much more than I should. I don’t have a gas-guzzling pickup or monster motor home, I give to environmental organizations, I try to keep the heat down and the air conditioning up, I recycle plastic, blah, blah, blah— but I love where the driving takes me (to the West, to friends and family, and if I’m fortunate, to the edge of ecstasy). And for me it’s just not practical to go the electric vehicle route, given their reduced range and general inability to get around on rough roads. Thus, my personal contribution to hypocrisy and the human condition: the gap between what I know should be done and what I actually do. I plead guilty, as self-charged.
So many conflicting emotions and ideas swirl round and through me as I drive on. By 8:30 or so, about an hour after sunrise, the most magical part of the new day has passed. The roads are busier, the sky turned dull and dirty-white and laced with high cirrus. Shortly after the morning trends mundane I stop and refuel, then press on toward Dallas-Fort Worth and whatever future Mississippi holds for me. The world is in flames and off I go, feeding the fire. During the last few weeks, I’ve been contemplating my position in the bardo. In Buddhist tradition the term originally referred to the period between one life and the next, but according to Francesca Freemantle, author of Luminous Emptiness: Understanding the Tibetan Book of the Dead, there are at least six bardos out there: life (or birth), dream, meditation, dying, dharmata (reality), and existence (or becoming). Maybe I’m being narrow-minded, but I am not particularly interested in the esoteric characteristics of Tibetan Buddhism and Freemantle’s bardos. However, I am intrigued by the most general and useful sense of the term, which relates to any transitional experience, for the world of change is where we live—and die. My fascination with the bardo relates to several converging factors, including writing about aging and dying, as part of an incipient book project on human senescence (including my own); reading George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, a challenging but moving novel about the shadow-lands between death and rebirth, circa 1862; and a recent cancer scare, which just last week was alleviated by a negative biopsy result. (That wonderful phone call from my doctor: the tone of his voice gave me the welcome news, even before he’d gotten to the punchline: all clear for now, but let’s check things again in six months.) My doctor had recommended a biopsy in mid-August, but I’d had to wait almost two months for a preliminary MRI, another week for the actual procedure, and then eight more days for the pathologist’s report. Plenty of time to generate anxiety, but I figured that I’d handled the interval of doubt well, given the odds: about 25% for a positive cancer diagnosis, and then 60% of that for an “intermediate to severe” form of the disease. Do the math and that’s “only” a 15% probability of some kind of metastatic shit-storm, but 15% is one hell of a lot greater than 0%, the chance of a hole-in-one, or winning big in the next Powerball draw. And a recent dream suggested that some deeply hidden angst about what Siddhartha Mukherjee calls the “emperor of all maladies” had evaded my ineffectual defenses of compartmentalization (stuff any distress into a mental container, like a kind of psychic jack-in-the box) and fatalism (cue Doris Day’s “Que Sera, Sera”). In my dream, metastatic cancer expanded across my chest like a liver-colored amoeba, spreading outward from a huge mole-like growth toward a series of numbered points etched into my skin, those points seemingly representing the winner-take-all end game—and the winner was not me. A dream-bardo between life and rebirth awaited, never mind that I am mostly negative about the possibility of any sort of afterlife and subsequent rebirth. But then came the pathologist’s report and that liberating phone call. I’m very grateful, of course, to have avoided the frightening presence of cancer in my body—at least until my next check-up. At the same time, I understand that I’ve had it very easy, unlike the many people I know (or knew) who have struggled with cancer in one form or another. Still, I’m also thankful for what my tangential brush with cancer has given me: a newly awakened awareness of my position in the bardo of this life, that “rare and precious” transition between birth and death. Small parts of us begin dying as soon as we are born (cell lines flame out, aerobic metabolic processes work their free-radical dark magic, mutations accumulate, developmental genes switch on or off), but for many years our biotic curve is generally positive—until it turns negative, as our bodies and minds begin to wane. At seventy-one I’m near to the end of my trajectory, cancer or no cancer. I know that I should treasure each day more often than I do, and my negative biopsy has been a forceful reminder that I’ve become too habituated to my day-to-day existence. The world (this life!) is lit with infinitely more luminosity than I am accustomed to seeing, even if it also can be a sad and brutal place. Loved ones, books, the blaze of light in an autumnal maple, a cup of hot and bitter black tea in the morning, a new or familiar piece of beautiful music, the purring of a happy cat, the quotidian act of getting out of bed in the morning and shaving, washing the dishes, whatever: all carry such heft and presence, and each one should receive my full attention. These things and an infinity of other experiences populate what I’ve started thing of as the bardo of my existence—that long and intricate life-to-death transition that I’ve been immersed in since September of 1951. A few days ago, I set out on a long canal-side run to celebrate my negative cancer diagnosis. It was a crystalline fall morning—the sun bright, the air still and mild, Canada geese and common mergansers on the mirrored water, scattered maples and sumac glowing. I was ecstatic in the movement, even if my balky right knee and sleep-deprived body began complaining after I’d been out for an hour. And as I ran, I recalled the voice-over narrative from the final scene in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, which I’d memorized back in 2001:
Where was it that we were together? Who were you that I lived with? Walked with? The brother? The friend? Darkness and light, strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind? The features of the same face? Oh my soul, let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made: all things shining. All things shining—the hope is, wherever we might go, whatever we might do. I thought about this as I ran out of Albion and past Eagle Harbor, west into the light of a beautiful autumnal day, my aging body working as best it could, and for a little while sunk deeply and fully and thankfully in the bardo of this world. Why is it that we love the things that we love? And why is it that we sometimes recognize them immediately, as they call out to us with such insistence and power? What’s the alchemy? I’ve struggled with these questions for much of my adult life and this spring I’ve been hauling them around the Inyo Mountains, along with my calipers, spring scale, GPS, and 1.5 ml vials of ethanol – those tiny repositories for Inyo Mountains salamander tail-tips and so much more. Love and obsession, it seems, are only a bush-bash, third-class scramble, or steep and trailless mountain pass away. Along with the equipment necessary for salamandering, I’ve also carried Galatea 2.2 into the Inyos—Richard Powers’ autobiographical take on love, artificial intelligence, and consciousness. It’s been a fortuitous read for me, because partway through I found this description of Powers’ encounter with August Sander’s 1914 photograph, “Three Farmers on Their Way to Dance”: “First image on the left-hand wall, just inside the door. That room’s geometry has fused to the floor plan of my brain. I stood face to faces with three young men who were scrutinizing me. They’d waited two-thirds of a century for me to swing into view, just past the photographer’s shoulder. . . I felt the shock of recognizing a thing I knew I had never seen before.” This was Powers’ epiphany; the following week he quit his technical editing job in Boston and began writing his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance; twelve more novels have followed, along with a MacArthur Fellowship, National Book Award, and Pulitzer Prize. Those three young German men, headed to a dance and soon afterwards to the “Great War”: glancing back at the camera, their lives and deaths before them, pulling Powers into his future. Powers’ chance encounter with Sander’s photograph gave him his calling—an ambush of sympathy and awareness, his world focusing on one utterly compelling thing. It’s as though the connection was predatory, the photograph—those three faces—just waiting for its prey to wander within striking distance, unawares. Symbiosis and sacrament, transcendence and traction, and thus Anna Akhmatova: And the miraculous comes so close to the ruined and dirty houses-- something not known to anyone at all, but wild in our breast for centuries. That aching wildness in our breast: recognizing and giving it voice grants us meaning and comfort, aids our escape from the ruined houses that we all must inhabit at some time, in some place. We never can get away clean, but we can get away—can uncover those precious moments in which the quotidian and sometimes terrible press of the world retreats, thrown back by wonder and love, by mystery and connection. And Akhmatova’s miraculous: when, really, it is easy to understand or predict its closeness? Rarely, I think—perhaps most often in the love of a parent for a child. But the deepest of intimacies between two lovers or friends—how does that recognition rise up and claim us? Or the profound attraction that we feel for particular things or activities, when all our neurons fire and our emotions crest far above flood stage": enzyme and substrate, lock and key, poem and reader, song and listener. Or photograph and viewer. Tinder and a match, flaring. Reductionist that I am, larger issues like emotional and physical resonance inevitably draw me to the particulars. And so, what about those Inyo Mountains salamanders and me? My field notes tell me that since 2009 I’ve spent over 100 days in the Inyo Mountains searching out Batrachoseps campi and trying to understand something of its story. This somewhat (okay, mostly) quixotic obsession has cost me a lot of sweat, a bit of blood, and a fair amount of time and money, all in pursuit of an obscure, non-charismatic “micro-vertebrate” that spends its very slow life in a small set of difficult-to-reach places—an outcome of geological, evolutionary, and ecological events sprawled across millions of years. These processes have left a handful of salamander populations hidden in rough and isolated pockets of the Inyo Mountains and produced a salamander species that is one of only two among over 700 in the world whose range is contained entirely within desert habitat. I’ve found 341 salamanders in the Inyo Mountains and each new one (a rock flipped or log rolled, and a tiny animal, coiled) has been as miraculous and compelling as the last. The only exceptions to the “ordinary” pleasure-tinged awe that accompanies each new salamander discovery have been an increased burst of ecstatic energy on the three occasions when I stumbled on an unknown population—and also my intensely emotional reaction when I confronted my first Inyo Mountains salamander. That experience, an amphibian-charged analog to “Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance,” blind-sided me with Powers’ “shock of recognizing a thing I knew I had never seen before.” Perhaps it’s odd, but outside of witnessing the birth of my two children I can think of only a few first encounters in my life that affected me so instantaneously and profoundly. My road-to-Damascus salamander moment came during a spring vacation trip to the Death Valley region with my (then) eighteen-year-old son, Martin. I’d been scouting out places and ideas for the sabbatical project that would eventually morph into Relicts of a Beautiful Sea. I thought, vaguely, that Batrachoseps campi might find its way into my imagined account, even though I knew almost nothing about the species, other than what I’d gleaned from two scientific articles: a highly restricted and unusual desert distribution; discovery by scientists on September 29, 1973; its closest relative far away, in Oregon; four toes on its hind feet; and deep genetic divisions among its isolated populations. But beyond this collection of facts, the Inyo Mountains salamander had no presence for me—or perhaps essence would be a better word. -All of that changed on March 18, 2009, when Martin and I left our rental car on a heat-blasted alluvial fan below the western edge of the Inyo Mountains and followed a washed-out dirt road towards a locality described in the first paper on the species. No hint of water, temperatures already in the 80s, a thin scrim of cirrus over the highest peaks, scattered barrel cactus and creosote bush: a Mohave desert world already trending towards thermal conflagration, at least to our pasty, winterized brains and bodies. An hour of steady walking brought us into a narrow drainage, a storm of heat and light bouncing off the reddish-brown canyon walls: this was no place for any salamander in its right evolutionary mind. But then a flash of katydid green up-canyon, spring willows ripe with catkins and new leaves, and a small slip of running water, miracle enough in that xeric world. We began searching beneath a clump of willows, below a small waterfall draped in a curtain of fern and moss. Nothing. I worked my way uphill and to the east, flipping rocks and following the water through wild rose thickets (tracks of blood on bare legs), into big, blocky talus. Still nothing. I had no search image, no sense of where a salamander might be; this was not the Bristol Hills south of Rochester, where a good locality might yield ten salamander species during a spring afternoon’s relaxed exploration. I grew discouraged and frustrated: all this way and yet nothing, the Inyo Mountains salamander no more real to me than a salt pan playa mirage. But then: I flipped a rock just a few inches from the water and a small, chocolate-brown creature coiled. ”Martin—come here!” I picked the salamander up and my world suddenly narrowed. I held my breath, felt some inchoate reaction churn in my belly. Tears welled in my eyes. Sucker-punched by emotion, I felt the overwhelming pull of a one-gram animal, one that had waited something on the order of 2.5 million years for me to step into its gravitational field. And in that moment, I was bound in some powerful and fundamental way to the salamander’s scientific and metaphorical story. The why of that sudden valence is another issue, though. Thirteen years later and I’m still trying to answer that question, which is Part 2 of this story.
Sad as it might be, most people will never have the opportunity to hold an Inyo Mountains salamander in their hands and contemplate the kind of salamander-related questions that keep drawing me onto their home ground. And of course, most people just aren’t going to care. I can accept this lack of valence and even (partially at least) understand it. But my prayer is that everyone will discover some analog to the Inyo Mountains salamander out there, something that draws them fully and completely into the world, something that grants them joy and passion, and the strength to deal with life’s inevitable anguish and sorrow—of which there is so much now, strewn in bloody trails from Buffalo to Kyiv, Minneapolis to Orange County. For in the end, it’s as Theodore Roethke wrote: “Beautiful my desire, and the place of my desire.” And oh that beauty, that resonance: as fundamental as oxygen to each of us, as we go on. Ralph Waldo Emerson, I’d like a word—and bring along Henry David, too, because September is National Botfly Month, at least for white-footed mice in the Brockport Woods. Pick up a mature white-footed mouse in September and there’s a decent chance that it will carry one or more botfly larvae nestled in its groin. Each larva chews a breathing hole through the mouse’s skin, and there it lies: softly pulsating, living the good botfly life. A full-grown larva might be three quarters of an inch long and weigh one gram, about five percent of an adult mouse’s weight—equivalent to a 7.5-pound larva in a 150-pound human. Shades of Alien, although there’s no spectacular explosion from the mouse’s chest, just a soft, rhythmic writhing before the mature larva exits the mouse, goes to ground, and pupates. Come spring the surviving pupae metamorphose and emerge as adults who devote their short lives to reproduction. Botfly eggs, which females lay near rodent burrows or runways, will hatch quickly after exposure to the subtle increase in temperature caused by a passing mouse. The tiny larvae latch onto the wandering host, usually near the nose or mouth—openings they’ll use to enter the mouse before migrating to the groin, where they’ll grow fat and happy in their warm and sheltering home. All god’s creatures, great and small. About those botflies. Over the decades I’ve mostly grown inured to the gruesome things that field biologists inevitably encounter, but sometimes my stomach does a small two-step at the sight of a full-grown botfly larva, softly turning beneath its mouse-skin blanket. My digestive distress soon dissipates, but a deeper psychic angst does not. Partly it’s the ghastly physical presence of a full-grown botfly, but there are larger issues here. “There seems to me too much misery in the world,” wrote Darwin, and for me botfly larvae represent this overabundance of suffering and pain. That’s a lot of symbolic weight for a one-gram parasite to bear, but still: that writhing mass, so foreign in its otherness, just beneath the mouse’s skin. (And yes, there also are human botflies, although they are mostly tropical and their life cycle differs from that of a mouse botfly.) And so to Emerson and his declaration: “I will be a naturalist.” Ah, but Ralph Waldo, you were an armchair naturalist, inclined to a warm hearth and your comfortable Concord lodgings. For you an expedition into “Nature” might involve a trek across a snowy village commons— and from that congenial position you could declare, “I am impressed with a singular conviction that not a form so grotesque, so savage, or so beautiful, but is an expression of something in man the observer.” Maybe, but I’d like to drag your ghostly philosophical butt out into the Brockport woods, hand you a white-footed mouse with two or three Boone and Crockett-sized botfly larvae, then ask if “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.” Enlighten me as to what we might confront in the Transcendentalist’s mirror as it reflects the image of a botfly larvae onto our “transparent eyeball(s)”? Perhaps Thoreau would have been better equipped to grapple honestly with issues raised by mouse botflies, whether as metaphor or fact. As his short life progressed Henry David became more and more entranced with details of the natural world, with observation and collecting what we would call data, whether on the depth of Walden Pond or the phenology of plants growing around Concord—a practice that Emerson admonished him for. Thoreau’s field studies must have exposed him to pain and suffering in the natural world and perhaps he could have engaged with the philosophical difficulties raised by botflies, just as he acknowledged the “worms, which even in life and health, occupy our bodies.” Henry David saw the world as “savage and awful, though still beautiful,” which is one powerful way to describe mouse botflies. My white-footed mouse-studies involve weighing, sexing, and marking every individual that I catch. To do so I grasp the mouse behind its ears, much like a kitten, and there’s usually a point when the two of us are face-to-face. And sometimes I wonder: what exactly does the mouse see through those bulging, black-brown eyes? What do I look like, and what exactly is going on in that tiny mouse-brain as it regards me from the far side of a gulf that arose 80 or 90 million years ago, when the paths leading to rodents and primates diverged? In the words of Henry Beston, mice may be “other nations”--yet domestic rats have emotions and there must be some mouse analog to what humans call fear, similar to what I once felt when I jumped a grizzly bear dozing on a caribou carcass, an “I-am-about-to-be-breakfast” jolt of adrenalin-laced panic. Thus my sympathy for the mice, a fondness and concern bred from decades of familiarity, some sense of shared experience, and the string of data that trail across the decades—sex and age ratios, timing of reproduction, survivorship and movements, population fluctuations. Brothers and sisters in placenta and fur, milk and neurons, our worlds—mouse and human—turn. And so those botfly larvae gnaw away at me—figuratively, rather than in the literal way that they do in the mice. Which brings me to theodicy, or the attempt to explain the existence of evil (such as pain and suffering) in a world created by an omnipotent, good, and just god. This is a central conundrum for Christianity. Most folks who have grappled with the issue have focused on human suffering—why do we deserve god’s wrath, and the shit-storm of anguish that haunts human experience? But some people have also thought about theodicy in relation to the suffering and pain endured by non-human animals. It’s a difficult thing to do, though. As C. S. Lewis noted, “the Christian explanation of human pain cannot be extended to animal pain. So far as we know beasts are incapable either of sin or virtue: therefore they cannot be improved by it.” A 2003 discussion of “Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil” discussed several possible ways of dealing with the issue, none of which make much sense to me:
And so theodicy seems to have reached a dead end, at least in regards to non-human animals. There is no sensible cause-and-effect theological explanation for non-human animal pain and suffering, only the obvious Darwinian one: organisms adapt as best they can to their environment, with individuals of each species pursuing their own selfish ends. Selection should favor both hardy white-footed mice that survive invasion by botfly larvae, as unpleasant as it must be, and botfly larvae that do not harm their hosts too much--and this more or less seems to be the case. If this view of life seems bleak, to me it’s far less so than a world view that marries the existence of an omnipotent, good, and just god to any of the explanations for animal pain and suffering that I mentioned above.
But what to take away from the story of the mouse botfly and its long-suffering host, other than a slight queasiness of the stomach and far greater discomfort of the soul? I see no harmony of nature there, no Emersonian “currents of the Universal Being.” But what I do see and feel is the terrible, aching beauty of life going on, of two small creatures (one cute, the other not so much) grappling with one another across the millennia. Twenty-nine years of close familiarity with both species, of weighing and measuring and thinking—science!—has helped me see that much. And this sense of going on—well, we humans do that, too. We struggle with our own botfly analogs—sometimes physical, more often than not spiritual—and mammal-centric being that I am, I take great comfort in the sheer perseverance of those white-footed mice, their battles with “worms” and owl talons, fox teeth and long and bitter winters. And so I’ll give a final nod to Thoreau, coming off Katahdin: “Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?” Thoreau knew, and so he wondered. I first came to the desert in 1969, during my freshman orientation at Prescott College. I felt an immediate and powerful attraction to the arid expanse of the Colorado Plateau and soon widened my explorations (and love) to include the Mojave, Sonoran, and Great Basin deserts. I was drawn—in a primal and innate way—to the calcined playas, the spare and empty lands, the naked rock, the backlit xeric ranges, the fractals of light and space that dominate the arid West. Heat and drought are integral parts of these landscapes and back in the 1970’s there was a point in my aesthetic evolution where I learned to embrace these things, too, as I chased feral burros through what was then Death Valley National Monument. And if anything my more recent obsession with the Inyo Mountains salamander, the many months of fieldwork in a country where water feels like an afterthought, has deepened my connection to the desert world. And yet my travels this summer, through a multitude of heat-blasted, drought-scourged, smoke-choked western landscapes, from mountain and forest to desert, wore me down. I learned a new language of catastrophe and I liked neither its syntax nor its vocabulary: heat domes, pm 2.5 air quality, a Tier 1 water shortage declaration for the Colorado River. I lost nothing along the way and suffered from little except inconvenience, and so my experiences were only the thinnest of notes from a much larger atonal symphony, as if Arnold Schoenberg had risen from the dead and brought his twelve-tone technique to twenty-first century atmospherics: 120° during an afternoon rush hour in Las Vegas; a mid-June absence of snow at 12,000 feet in the High Sierra; the Pioneer Range in Montana, shrouded in wildfire smoke and invisible from only five miles away; week after grinding week of 90°- and 100°-plus temperatures; an August campsite in a grassy meadow below Glacier Peak, where thick ice had lain fifty or sixty years before; and a cultural conflagration of sorts, a field of MAGA flags flapping against a smoke-strangled central Washington sky. No locusts, boils, frogs, or lice, though—just the Four Horsepeople of the Apocalypse riding hard across the American West, savaging the land and its people: heat, drought, and wildfires, plus a pandemic of human cussedness and intransigence. But just the facts, ma’am:
In late August the persistent stress of heat, drought, and wildfire smoke—leavened by the spike in Delta variant Covid-19 infections—helped send me scurrying back to western New York and what I somewhat surprisingly thought of as “home,” having felt like a partial exile for most of my thirty years in the region—never quite settled, always looking West. Yet there was a deeper psychic burden associated with my retreat, as frustrations with the summer’s extreme weather morphed into a more profound and general angst about climate change and the Earth’s slide toward some seemingly inevitable tipping point. But then a perfect late-summer’s day greeted me as I drove the final miles of my traditional I-90/I-80 eastward vector, an afternoon resplendent with brilliant air and the drift of electric-white cumulus clouds, the great blue sweep of Lake Erie to the north and west. And everywhere a rush of green in all its chlorophyll-rich magnificence, a riotous expanse of tree and vine and lush agricultural fields sprung from a fortunate intersection of climate, geography, and glacial history. And a few days later, during a long and lovely run along the Erie Canal, this rich palette of greens and blues welcomed me in an unfamiliar but blessed way. Although a string of gray and dreary weeks will undoubtedly trail through the region from November through March, on that early September day there was this great rising of sunlight and azure sky, plants and wind-chopped water—relief for my parched mind and body, on a morning that triggered more than a small splash of joy. And while most models suggest that in the coming decades the Great Lakes region will experience some effects of climate change, I suspect that western New York will escape the worst damages inflicted by rising temperatures and seas, apocalyptic hurricanes and forest fires, and diminishing air quality and precipitation. In spite of all the bad climate news that just keeps on giving, there’s something comforting about living next to twenty percent of all the fresh surface water in the world, where on a late summer’s day green and blue still feel like the dominant colors of the earth. Perhaps western New York will experience an economic and social renaissance in the coming decades, as climate refuges flock to the region and Rochester again becomes known as the “Flour City.”
Climate change and my associated discontent aside, I’m not sure what retirement and 2022 will bring—but I suspect that next April will find me deep in the Inyo Mountains, probing the dun-colored, arid lands. The salamanders and their desert silence await and sometimes I still imagine a move out West, perhaps to Montana or the far side of the North Cascades. And yet in the long run water and chlorophyll might help hold me here. “Thousands have lived without love,” wrote Auden, “not one without water”—and there is much to be said for a pigment that reflects green light, drives oxygen production and carbon dioxide uptake, and clothes this part of the world in such fecund and emerald beauty. Whatever the reasons—advancing age, the continuing Covid-craziness and political trauma (Marjorie Taylor Greene, anyone?), or the onrushing spring term—I am pulled by what Lisel Mueller calls “The Need to Hold Still.” And in my desire I have adopted a nearby wetland. Fortunately no formalities or approvals are required: no paperwork or financial commitments, no wetland delineation training. The only mandate is that I spend at least one hour a week sitting beside “my” wetland, no matter what the weather or how damned frenetic I feel. And although the project feels quixotic, the first stanza of Wendell Berry’s poem frames my motivation: I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water. My tasks lie in their places where I left them, asleep like cattle. I want my tasks to sleep, my body to still. For a short, blessed while each week, I aim to cultivate slowness. My adoptive wetland lies just east of Park Avenue in Brockport. It’s easily accessed via the tow path that parallels the Barge Canal, and in decent weather you might encounter a few runners, walkers, or cyclists along the way—or on many summer evenings, a small pod of village teens and tweens practicing the poor decisions that will lead some of them into the saddest of lives, their fates cast young and hard. Yet in the harsh weather of winter the towpath is empty, the canal drained and forlorn, pock-marked with rusted shopping carts and shards of broken furniture. But the wetland: small and a bit bedraggled, hard up against the Barge Canal levee, colonized by human spoor and exotic plants. Even during wet springs it’s only a few feet deep and in drought years it trends toward cracked mud—the sort of place no self-respecting Virginia Rail or Pied-bill Grebe would ever frequent. In winter leafless willows line the western, northern, and eastern banks. The attendant green ash are leafless, too—but they’re dead and shedding bark, chewed to ruin by the emerald ash borer. In places a tangle of honeysuckle and brambles; along the south shore a thin line of cattails, dried goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace, and switchgrass stalks, the backing berm planted to clover. Power lines above, one pole rising from the southwestern corner of the wetland, National Grid’s flag of possession. The wetland’s advantages? It’s near my home and unremarkable in all ways, ignored by most everyone. And this neglect is partly the point—for I am after quotidian beauty, the wonder of the ordinary. I finalized my adoption on a mild mid-January day, when the wetland’s banks were snow-free and there was just a thin skim of ice on the shallow water. I brought along rubber boots and prospected for trash, pulling four disintegrating plastic lawn chairs from the muck, filling a 33-gallon trash bag with bottles, cans, and wind-blown debris. My hands froze but the work felt like right practice, a place to begin. Afterwards I opened up a small collapsible chair and sat for an hour, trying to quiet my mind and simply watch the wetland. Temperatures were in the high 30s and comfortable, but I was fidgety and unsettled, like a six-year-old in time out—or a guy with senior-onset attention-deficit disorder. Still: thin pans of rotten ice, permutations of form and color, plates and sheets running from clear to bubble-white, a dark latticework of logs beneath. The wetland’s colors muted and somber beneath the overcast sky, a promise of sleet in the air: black muck, soft grays and browns, the brightest thing a small patch of straw-colored switchgrass. Two abandoned gray squirrel dreys high up in willows, a chickadee calling from the far woods, the quick tsipp of a sparrow, and then all the birds were quiet—but my mind, not so much. A week later, after more typical winter weather had arrived: temperatures in the mid-teens, winds out of the northwest at fifteen miles per hour, the air full of swirling lake effect snow. But I knew enough to dress warmly: insulated boots, three layers below, more above, topped off by my huge red arctic parka—far too warm for walking but perfect for an hour’s sit, out in the elements. The skim of ice that had covered the wetland now was hidden beneath six inches of fresh snow, each tree trunk and branch counter-shaded, white to the windward, gunmetal gray and brownish-black to the leeward. The tawny golds and browns of switchgrass and cattails were mostly gone, too, but the blood-red stems of red osier dogwood were shining. A Cooper’s Hawk landed almost overhead, close enough so that I could watch the blustery winds ruffle its scapulars and breast feathers. Male Northern Cardinals darted out of the tangled brush—brilliant bits of scarlet light headed south, across the canal. Pockets of activity as birds surged and vanished, mixed flocks of Blue Jays, cardinals and House Sparrows, plus a few surprises: a Northern Mockingbird and then a Carolina Wren, fossicking about. A tabby cat (Feral? Domestic?) trotted past, through the snow. ,And so on, into the sixth week as the cold settled in and the snow deepened. With each sitting I’ve become less restive, a bit less conscious of time. Each hour passes quickly and the tension that I carry with me through so many days—tightened jaw muscles and shallow breaths—drops away, if only for a little while. The cold nips at my feet and face, but it’s not been a distraction. Four hundred yards away, a crew has been repairing the Park Avenue liftbridge and on weekdays the drone of generators and pulse of jackhammers vies for my attention, but I’ve noticed that when an animal appears—that cat padding across the snow, the screech of a jay, the focused presence of a hawk—the construction noise vanishes. A stimulus filter in action, my brain sifting out the background noise and allowing me to focus. Sometimes, during quiet periods, I close my eyes and just listen—to the wind threading the leafless branches, the whisper of snow on my jacket, the cries of birds and skirr of squirrels, even the distant hum of traffic.
And in my sitting I keep returning to lines from a prose poem by Campbell McGrath: “Therefore it is only through others that we know ourselves. Therefore the limits of our compassion form the limits of our world.” And as I settle into my chair for each morning’s wetland watch, one thing that I wonder about is what McGrath means by “others,” and how far the boundaries of my compassion might extend—into the tiny wetland, into the widening world. I’ve been thinking a lot about running recently—and doing a fair amount of it along the way. It’s helped keep the Covid-craziness and my restlessness at bay, provided some normalcy and pleasure at a time when I desperately need them. (Electoral angst, anyone?) To paraphrase from a song by Wye Oak: “I have to run / Or else I do not recognize myself.” On most runs I avoid the mean streets of Brockport and head east along the Barge Canal: a route free of vehicles, asphalt and cement, as quiet as I can find by simply stepping out my door. And once a week I’ve been driving south to a county park for longer trail runs, as a substitute for the mountain running that I enjoyed last summer—but with the advent of deer season (rifles, shotguns, AR-15s, whatever) I’ve begun avoiding the local trails, even where hunting is prohibited. Above all else I need to relax, and international orange is not a soothing color for me. I returned to Brockport in early August and since then I’ve followed the seasons from running shorts and not much else to hat, gloves, and multiple layers. Late summer’s lush deciduous foliage has yielded to a tangle of bare branches etched against a lead-gray sky. Drab-plumaged drake mallards have molted into their full mating glory, and the hoarse August calls of local catbirds have been replaced by the ragged, half-assed songs of migrant white-throated sparrows, young-of-the-year headed south: time’s passage writ small over the last four months, but a reminder of a longer movement, my years running on and running down. My runs have given me time and space to think, and one thing that I’ve contemplated is how rapidly my approach to running has evolved during the last six months—changes partly wrought by the mandates of physical decline, partly by my desire for quiet and quietude. I have been running for almost fifty years now—and confronting the realities of aging for at least thirty of them, that inevitable transition from pushing PRs to accepting a growing list of PWs (personal worsts), from running a full marathon at a 6:45-per-mile pace to the impossibility of running even one 6:45 mile. “Mind over matter” no longer works as viable strategy; intellectually I understood this long ago, but only in the last six months have I fully embraced it on a visceral level. As the philosopher (Olivia Newton-John) once sang, I’ve got to hear my body talk, even if I’m not particularly crazy about what it’s been saying lately. I’ve had my come-to-me-Krishna moment and so have stopped running for distance, pace, or on most days even destination. At times I’m envious of runners who fully inhabit the world of GPS watches, interval workouts and Strava—my son Martin is one of them and his mountain runs amaze me—but now I run for nothing more than elapsed time: on most days forty-five minutes to an hour, occasionally two hours or more. I’ve dropped the last tattered shreds of my running ego and no longer care what other people might think about that old guy trotting along the canal path; instead I focus on form and count my breaths, trying for a steady pace and quasi-meditative state. And oddly enough I’ve taken to early morning runs. I’ve never been eager for such things but now I’m happy to set out in the darkness and watch the day come on. I’ve also abandoned my constant running companions of almost twenty years—ear buds and iPod—because I want to be as present as possible with the birds and wildflowers, wind and rain, heat and humidity, tired muscles and sweaty back. My days of long distance running are becoming more and more finite, but I hope to enjoy this sensuous (and sensual) world for as long as I am able, commit it to what’s left of my memory. Cue Kate Bush and her take on the last chapter of Ulysses . I think that I'm no longer training for anything. Most of all I want to be fully present in each day, something that’s never been easy. I want to pay attention: to my body (sometimes aching, sometimes not) and breath; to the head-pump mating displays of male mallards, their seductive oh-baby inflections; to the three northern short-tailed shrews that I found one morning, each one dead and seemingly frozen in motion; to a katydid-green preying praying mantis, hunting the gray canal path gravel; to ragged cloud-shards north of Brockport, drifting clear above Lake Ontario; to the inflections and permutations of light, subtleties of earth and sky. Of course it’s not all harmony and acceptance. On some days, for reasons that remain unclear to me, I struggle physically. And I sometimes think that my longest runs are motivated by an amalgam of conflicting desires: to be fully alive in the world and myself, while at the same time pushing back against the realities of my senescence—and perhaps wanting to momentarily obliterate, through exhaustion, the darker parts of my being. To be washed clean. Something more to consider as I plod along, now most often beneath gray skies. 5:30 a.m., mid-November. I step into the pre-dawn dark, walk for a hundred yards, then switch on my headlamp and begin to jog. The village is still. At first I move at little more than a shuffle, but after I turn onto the canal path my lower back loosens and I speed up a bit, search out my rhythm. Ten minutes later and Brockport’s lights drop away. I count my breaths: up to ten, back to one, up to ten, again and again. My mind wanders and I bring it back to my breaths. Duck-shadows on dark water, a cardinal’s desultory song, up ahead the eye-shine of a white-tailed deer, tapetum lucidum. (Oh bright tapestry!) Dawn blossoms from crepuscular light and I switch off my headlamp, watch morning settle over the land. After forty minutes I turn back into a chilling westerly wind, curse, try to let it go, try to be nowhere else than where I am. Easier now but not easy; I am a poor acolyte. Another thirty minutes or so (I refuse to look at my watch) and I pass a few early-morning walkers and the small wetland where in the right season there are green herons and the bright spring jewels of migrating warblers. Then across the Park Avenue liftbridge and I am home—tired and sweaty, happy. I bow slightly, a bit self-consciously, but I need a physical expression of gratitude, some small gesture of thanks: for this rising day, for the ducks and deer and cardinal song, for the morning light and my aging but not yet aged body. So grateful that I can do this, and that the world awaits.
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AuthorI am a professor emeritus of Environmental Science and Ecology at SUNY Brockport. What began in 2017 as a sabbatical blog continues in a haphazard way, as the spirt moves me and time allows. The focus, though, remains the same - the natural world, in all of its complexity and beauty, and our relation to it. Archives
November 2023
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