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.
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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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