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.
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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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