In early May I heard Leslie Jamison read at Brockport’s Writers Forum. Jamison, who has struggled with intoxication, described her addiction as “an attempt to find luminosity in things that refused to yield much glow.” Her words haunt me. I’ve turned them over in my mind and heart, considered where I — and society — “attempt to find luminosity.” I’ve asked myself how I might transcend the quotidian and immerse myself in a world that burns with numinous intensity. Sunk deep in the welter of daily life, in my failings and sorrows, in my anger and frustration with the way things are, a thousand neurotic poodles nipping at my heels, I wonder how to do more than just muddle through. Most of us face much the same problem, although the desire for luminosity takes some into much darker places than others. And sorry, but for me the answer does not seem to lie with Jesus, Allah, Yahweh, the Buddha, Zoroaster, Krishna, or the ten-thousand-and-one other manifestations of the godhead. I’ll admit that Zen Buddhism sometimes feels like a possible path, but even then I am inclined to paraphrase Gary Snyder: “Tried God, but couldn’t make immortal.” Sex and drugs and rock and roll or their many permutations won’t do the job either, as alluring as they may sometimes seem. And our yearnings shall not be satisfied by the “influencers” of Instagram or the infinite manifestations of the American Dream Mall, or the countless incarnations of Mar-a-Lago, Goop, or People Magazine (“'Cause I've flipped through the complicated stars' magazines / And I still feel like shit” — John Doe, “Worldwide Brotherhood.”) Leslie Jamison is right: many of the things that we desire refuse to yield much glow, and whatever luminosity they produce soon flickers and dies, leaving us bereft. Yet we must embrace something. As David Foster Wallace observed in his beautiful Kenyon College commencement address, “In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there actually is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” Another way of saying this might be: the distances between the things of this world — electrons, atoms, people, our desires and our actualities — are terribly vast. And so our most critical practice involves discovering the best ways in which we might dissolve these distances. Anyway, about four weeks ago I carried Jamison’s words along on a research trip into the Inyo Mountains. I was twitchy about leaving Brockport during finals week, as those demented poodles had my scent: stacks of papers to grade, my annual report to write, revisions to the college catalog due to the Dean, the department’s annual report waiting, faculty reports requiring comments, on and on. But some remaining grant funds were approaching their use-by date, the spring weather promised good salamandering, and a friend, SP, had offered to beat up his truck on some rutted and washboarded Inyo Mountains roads. So I flew to Las Vegas, rented a car, and drove to Bishop to rendezvous with SP. A bit more driving and some hiking carried us to Inyo Mountain salamander heaven. Even though there’s just a thin slip of water flowing through one hundred and twenty yards of habitat, the salamanders are happy there — abundant and large, and at the right time of the year the females’ bellies bulge with cream-yellow eggs. Although a flash flood had washed through the canyon since my last visit, the following morning we found eighteen salamanders within a few yards of our camp, including seven under one rock — or rather SP did. I was too busy weighing and measuring, and gathering genetic samples, to do much searching. On the afternoon of our arrival the little drainage felt empty: no trail or footprints pointing the way, no sign of a campsite, just a few scattered chips of worked obsidian. Silence behind a scatter of birdsong, a whisper of wind, high desert light laving the trees, the brilliant red-orange blossoms of a claret cup cactus. . . We pitched our tent on a small spot of flat ground and headed up canyon, searching for salamanders away from permanent water. Back in 1976 Derham Giuliani had found several in pitfall traps set on a dry limestone ridge, but since then nothing — the salamanders seem almost entirely confined to the creeks, springs, and seeps that drain the Inyos. We worked our way up the dry wash, past a twenty-foot barrier falls, flipping a few rocks along the way. Nothing felt right. And then, after skirting a tangle of brush and dropping back into the bottom of the drainage, SP said, very matter-of-factly, “I’ve got one for you.” A kick of adrenalin, laced with euphoria: there, beneath a wedge of rock, sheltered by an overhanging tangle of scrubby willow and wild rose, beneath a steep north-facing slope, was a small coil of a salamander, a constellation of silver iridophores strewn down its chocolate-brown back. We were a quarter-mile from the upper end of salamander heaven and the nearest water. One lap around a regulation track may not sound like much, but given that a large salamander weighs just 1.5 grams, as compared to a 68,000-gram (150-pound) human, that distance is equivalent to something like eleven thousand human miles. Discounting a host of questionable assumptions, such as a linear relationship between body size and relative distance, we’re still talking thousands of salamander-miles. Either the salamander and its neighbor (SP soon dug up a larger one, heavy with eggs) had recently crawled across a several salamander continents’ worth of killing ground, or they and their kin had hung on for countless generations in a tiny pocket of occasionally moist habitat, just getting by. Most likely the latter, but whatever the case, those two salamanders shone with all the lost luminosity that Leslie Jamison and the rest of us desire. Four weeks later, the glow of those salamanders refuses to vanish — lost as they are up some inconsequential desert wash, persevering in the driest and most marginal of habitats, members of a mostly invisible species that has wandered through more than two million years of evolutionary time. Their ancestors would have tracked the post-Pleistocene waters as they retreated into the farthest reaches of the Inyo Mountains, where their descendants survived in solitude, even as other pockets of their kin died away. Such determination, such patience.
Most people will never see an Inyo Mountains salamander, never hold one in their hands. And even if they did, I’d imagine that most would not recognize them for what they are. Most likely they would not see the glow. But perhaps they might understand them as avatars of something far more universal — the world’s stubborn and insistent beauty, persisting in the face of isolation, and the drying and dying of time in Roethke’s “white light of tomorrow.” On most days it feels like all I’ve figured out about satisfying the human hunger for luminosity, and quelling the incessant yapping of those goddamned neurotic poodles, is to search for beauty outside of the self, in the daily tide of the great world, as it rises and falls: to recognize our personal Inyo Mountains salamanders, and seek them out wherever they might live — and if we are fortunate enough to find them, to cup them gently in our hands, and watch them glow. I thought about these things as I headed down canyon, back to camp, the calls of pinyon jays luminous in the early evening air.
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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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