“the astounded soul / Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple / As false dawn.” Richard Wilbur, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” Love may call us to the things of this world, but why are we called to love by such disparate things? Why does one person discover their emotional valence—“the capacity of something to unite, react, or interact with something else”—in the noise-drenched crowd at a NASCAR race, while someone else is summoned, just as profoundly, to the lush green silence of an alpine meadow? Perhaps the lure of particular things (people, places, objects, etc.) is a simply matter of nature and nurture, but I doubt it. Beyond the powerful push of genes and environment—the transformation of DNA and experience into flesh and blood and behavior—there is the profound mystery of recognition, of coming into a place that feels like home. Lock and key, enzyme and substrate: the fit is not always easy to explain. Think of the things that you love: Why? Consider, for example, desert salamanders. I have studied birds for most of my professional life. My first experience with field biology came when I worked as a summer field assistant on a study of how highways impact riparian birds. Over the course of three field seasons I grew to love ornithological research and Southwestern birds, from Vermilion Flycatchers to Summer Tanagers and Painted Redstarts, and the rest followed (if not always easily, at least predictably): master’s and PhD studies on avian ecology, and a research program at Brockport mostly involving birds. So, why switch from birds to Inyo Mountains salamanders? My fascination with salamanders is curious and complicated. I am drawn to them for many reasons—some obvious, others more mysterious and ineffable. One explanation has to do with place. The salamanders live in a spectacular desert mountain range just to the west of Death Valley—country that I came into, and came to love, in the mid-1970s, when I followed feral burros through the spare and spacious beauty of the Panamint Mountains. My fieldwork for Relicts of a Beautiful Sea, circa 2009 – 2013, was an excuse to return to the Death Valley region, and the ideas, questions, and emotions generated by writing Relicts pointed me toward the Inyo Mountains salamander. But I sought out the salamander, among all of the other interesting organisms (many of them birds) that I could have chosen. This was a conscious act, yet one with a murky set of underlying causes, as with so many of our decisions, from the important (marriage, career, children) to the mundane (vacation destination, movie preferences, clothing). Another reason for my project is that teaching Herpetology (a course on reptiles and amphibians) at Brockport forced me to pay attention to salamanders. Herpetology begins in the depth of winter and ends in early May. Fieldwork is impossible until the end of March, and then the main actors are amphibians, among them eleven species of salamanders. Seven of these are in the family Plethodontidae, or lungless salamanders, which also contains the Inyo Mountains salamander. And so my initial field encounters with New York’s salamanders led to fascination, and fascination led to a series of student research projects—and in the process I began thinking about salamanders in a serious way. And then there is the Inyo Mountains salamander’s “islandness”: its only home a fault-block desert mountain range, with a distribution restricted to twenty-two small patches of riparian habitat, each surrounded by a harsh and unforgiving world, and so islands within a larger, montane island. Islands: to use a term coined by E. O. Wilson, I am at heart a “nesiophile,” someone with “an inordinate fondness and hungering for islands.” The islands that excite my imagination include true oceanic islands, like Lord Howe Island and Rarotonga in the South Pacific, as well as habitat islands like the Great Basin mountain ranges—or on a smaller scale the springs and seeps that shelter so many of their creatures. I became conscious of my nesiophilia in 1980, during my first year of graduate school at Washington State University, when I read the Theory of Island Biogeography, by Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson. The ways in which their scientific ideas dovetailed with my imagination soon had me seeing islands everywhere in eastern Washington’s Palouse country, from hedgerows and shelterbelts to isolated stands of ponderosa pine and remnant prairie patches. And then there were memories: of seeking refuge from the summer’s heat among the pine and fir forests of some Arizona “sky island,” after a long day of fieldwork; or of the eleven months that I had spent at Warden’s Grove, a small cabin sheltered by a tiny island of white and black spruce at the farthest edge of the boreal forest, surrounded by an oceanic roll of arctic tundra. . . The islands of my imagination became the islands of my research: bird communities of subalpine forest patches in the Beartooth Mountains; Harris’s Sparrows nesting in wind-flagged spruce stands along the Thelon River in the Northwest Territories; breeding birds in New York’s increasingly rare, island-like grasslands; a species of tiger beetle, restricted to isolated cobble bars along the Genesee River; and pupfishes in slips and springs of desert water. But years before I’d even taken a herpetology course, stalked burros in Death Valley, or recognized my fascination with islands—before I’d even spent much time as a field biologist—an inchoate fascination drew me to western lungless salamanders from isolated mountain ranges. And I recall when I first recognized my attraction: the summer of 1971, when I worked on a fire ecology project on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. One day, while thumbing through Robert Stebbins’s Field Guide to the Amphibians and Reptiles of Western North America, I stumbled across brief descriptions of the Jemez Mountain and Sacramento Mountains salamanders (the Inyo Mountains salamander would not be described for another eight years). These species are isolated endemics restricted to mountain ranges in New Mexico, and I was taken by their presence in what seemed like such incongruous places. Although I never sought them out, the stories of those two species were part of my imagination for thirty-eight years, before I began exploring, deeply, the life of another salamander endemic to western mountains. The Death Valley region, teaching herpetology and developing a passion for salamanders, islands and nesiolphilia, and western mountain endemics: all are ingredients of my obsession with Batrachoseps campi. Yet the sum of these explanations feels insufficient, perhaps because some vital component is missing. It’s as if I have imagined a multivariate equation that includes four or five precisely measured but relatively unimportant variables, and one critical but unknowable one, which renders the equation useless. My search for a clear explanation seems like an alchemist’s fantasy: lead into gold, cold fusion, trickle-down economics.
Ultimately, I sense that my questions about attraction and passion will go unanswered, at least in any clear way. I never will fully understand why, in the presence of an Inyo Mountains salamander, I encounter such joy and excitement. But perhaps I am being too analytical. Perhaps it is more than enough to feel—to have been granted that type of connection that we all wish for, and which gives our life its greatest pleasures: that journey out of the self and into a place where, as the poet writes, “the astounded soul / Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple.”
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As I’ve mentioned, one of the great pleasures of my sabbatical is the opportunity to wander wherever my inclinations might lead me. By grace of academic tradition, the College at Brockport, and the delete button on my email server, I now have more time for thinking. I can pick up an enticing novel or book of poems, get lost surfing the Web, or write long, rambling letters to friends. Conversely, a corresponding danger of my sabbatical is the opportunity to wander wherever my inclinations might lead me, because those mental peregrinations could lead into intellectual displacement activity. Without some discipline my sabbatical could become a dilettante’s playground—and although it’s great fun to swing on monkey bars and dig in a sandbox, at the end of the year all I might have to show for it might be skinned knees and sand in my shorts. I recently felt the seduction of the playground when my brother-in-law showed me a small book, Clarence: The Life of a Sparrow, by Clare Kripps. It’s a quintessentially British work, first published in 1954, which describes the quirky and intelligent behavior of a foundling House (or English) Sparrow. Reading Kripps’s little account makes it difficult to typecast House Sparrows as “pests,” even if they are an exotic species in North America. (Quickly now, the ecological sign of the cross. . .) But what really distracted me from entering salamander data into spreadsheets, editing manuscripts and Master’s theses, and writing grant proposals—what I “should” have been doing—was the epigraph to Clarence, from The Problem of Pain, by C. S. Lewis: “Man was appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts, and everything he does to an animal is either a lawful exercise, or a sacrilegious abuse, of an authority by divine right. The ‘tame’ animal is therefore, in the deepest sense, the only natural one. . . More animals than you might expect are ready to adore man if they are given reasonable opportunity; for man was made to be the priest and even, in one sense, the Christ of the animals—the mediator through whom they apprehend so much of the Divine splendor as their irrational nature allows.” Well. The above passage led me straight toward the displacement rabbit-hole, and so I put aside my spreadsheets and tunneled into The Problem of Pain, Lewis’s attitudes about non-human animals, and theodicy—the effort 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, particularly in regards to non-human animals. One might explain the existence of human pain and suffering as an outcome of the “Fall,” but why should the poor eating habits of Adam and Eve result in an avalanche of collateral damage, the endless agonies that non-human animals endure each day, on this earth: a mired woods bison, alive and conscious, fed upon by wolves; a pregnant muskox, taking a week to die of a breech birth on some cold and lonely arctic hill; or a line of biting ants, marching toward a nest of three-day-old Australasian pipits. . . On and on. This was a vexing problem for Darwin, who wondered why a good and loving deity would create ichneumon wasps, which lay their eggs inside living caterpillars, leaving the wasp larvae to grow and slowly devour their hosts, ignoring the most vital parts until they are large enough to metamorphose. “There seems to me too much misery in the world,” Darwin wrote. The Problem of Pain was Lewis’s exploration of theodicy—mostly in regards to humans, but he devoted more than a chapter to pain in non-human animals. A detailed examination of Lewis’s views would require a book of my own, and a depth of knowledge that would take years to develop. That would be a very deep and winding rabbit-hole, and I will stay out of it. Still, the epigraph to Clarence led me to read much of The Problem of Pain, and sort out Lewis’s views on everything from evolution (rather ambivalent) to the difference between suffering and pain (pain is a simple neurological sensation, while suffering requires consciousness and according to Lewis probably does not occur in most animals). Interesting stuff, but before long I became aware of an uncomfortable sensation, part guilt and part anxiety: I am wasting my time. I should refocus on my sabbatical work, especially those salamanders. . . But not quite yet: Although I disagree with almost everything in the quotation from The Problem of Pain (okay, I am comfortable with the articles and conjunctions), two ideas most irritate me. The first is that notion that, “The ‘tame’ animal is therefore, in the deepest sense, the only natural one.” The second is the proposition that [man] is “the mediator through whom they [the animals] apprehend so much of the Divine splendor as their irrational nature allows.” In Lewis’s supremely anthropocentric view, humans are the conduit through which animals realize their true nature, and Get Right with God; not only do we have “dominion over the beasts,” but we also provide the path to whatever degree of enlightenment they are capable of. Perhaps it’s a simplification, but Lewis seems to be saying that without humans, animals ultimately are lost in the spiritual (and natural) wild. Now C. S. Lewis was kindly and well-disposed toward animals; he believed that humans had a moral responsibility to treat them fairly, and wrote about them with great sympathy. His home was a refuge for cats and dogs, and he reportedly fed the resident house mice, rather than trap them. Yet his portrayal of the relationship between humans and animals seems so wrong-headed as to be ludicrous. Try applying his notions to the Inyo Mountain salamander, a species which has existed for over ten million years—at least one hundred times longer than Homo sapiens, and more than five thousand times longer than the Christian belief system that Lewis channeled in The Problem of Pain. What were those salamanders doing in the 9,998,000 years or so before Christianity came along? Or in the 9,999,950 years or more before 1973, when two biologists stumbled upon them? Will the salamanders forever remain a bit less than fully “natural,” because (let’s face it), they are not particularly well-suited to taming? And given my research focus on Inyo Mountains salamanders, am I somehow responsible for helping them apprehend as “much of the Divine splendor as their irrational nature allows”? That’s a pretty challenging responsibility, given that I do not speak salamander. . . I don’t get it. It’s difficult to consider the natural world as fully subservient to, and incomplete without, humans—discounting the 4.5 billion years of earth’s history prior to the moment when Homo sapiens arrived upon the Pleistocene scene, and ignoring the sheer, beautiful “otherness” of animals. It’s a dangerous and misguided philosophy (or theology).
Instead, I’ll opt for Henry Beston’s view of animals, described so beautifully in The Outermost House: “We need another and a wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals. . . We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken a form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. . . For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of earth.” And so it is Beston’s view of the natural world, rather than C. S. Lewis’s, that I carry with me into the Inyo Mountains. And each time that I flip a rock in some rough canyon and find a small creature coiled there, I sense that I have been offered a momentary and fortunate glimpse of another nation, of a “finished and complete” life, one that has little need of my kind. And yet the beauty of the Inyo Mountains salamander’s sheer otherness draws me into their world, into a visceral and intellectual joy. In thinking about these things, and of my coming field season—of being among the salamanders once again—I realize that reading Clarence: The Life of a Sparrow and The Problem of Pain were not really intellectual displacement activities at all. Sure—they offered up a bit of a detour, but it was one that helped me to more fully consider salamanders, their place in my world, and my place in theirs. Such are the rewards of reading widely, and the value of rabbit-holes. |
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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