Recently, my son and I discovered a “new” population of Inyo Mountains salamanders, perhaps the twenty-first documented locality. It was in an unexpected situation—a seep just eighty yards long, which we reached after a long walk up an otherwise waterless drainage. A thin trickle of water slipped through a rank growth of grass and goldenrod, then disappeared into a dry wash. Although the little seep felt good, in an Inyo Mountains salamander sort of way, there did not seem to be enough habitat to support a viable population. As Martin and I began flipping rocks I figured that our hike had been a waste, at least in terms of salamanders, and the Spotted Towhees and Mountain Chickadees complaining from the nearby willow and wild rose seemed to accentuate what I assumed was the futility of our search. But when I lifted a rock a few yards beyond where the small seep trickled from the ground, at the very end of decent habitat, a salamander coiled—and a second salamander lay beneath a rock just a few inches away. Both were large (if an animal roughly three inches from its snout to the tip of its tail can be thought of as “large”), with a dark, chocolate-brown background color and delicate, silver-green speckles along their backs. Beneath the translucent belly skin of one salamander lay a yellowish mass of eggs, a promise for the future. I sat down and took the data that I needed, but after I was done, my world narrowed. The scolding of the birds, the random mental chatter that all too often accompanies my salamander searches, the quiet susurrus of wind in the pinyon pines, even the drift of falling water—they all fell away, and I was left with just those two seemingly fragile creatures, here, in such an unlikely place. The seep lay over a mile from the nearest water and known salamander population. If a restless salamander were to attempt such a journey, it would involve twenty-six hundred feet of elevation gain and loss, across arid, killing ground. It seemed very unlikely that any immigrants could have reached the seep since wetter times ended, some 12,000 years ago. After I released the salamanders and watched them crawl into their refuges, Martin and I packed our gear and headed back to the car. And as we walked I thought about the stories of the population we had just discovered: how and when the salamanders had first arrived in the canyon and how they managed to hang on, through all of the environmental changes that had been visited upon the Inyo Mountains. If the molecular geneticists have it right, the Inyo Mountain salamander lineage is five to ten million years old, meaning that the species would have survived the tectonic upheavals that gave rise to the Inyo Mountains, some three to four million years ago. Then came the waxing and waning pulses of precipitation during the Pleistocene Epoch—and 750,000 years ago, the violent explosion of the Long Valley Caldera, sixty miles to the northwest. Geologists estimate that the eruption was 2,500 times stronger than Mount St. Helens, and blasted out 144 cubic miles of ash and molten rock. Lethal pyroclastic flows of gas, ash, and pumice would have spilled across the land; perhaps this is why there are no salamanders in the White Mountains, just north of the Inyos. And more recently, roughly 7,500 to 4,500 years ago, the climate warmed and dried, and treeline moved far upslope of its current position.
Through all of these changes, the salamanders have persisted—as a species, and presumably in many of the drainages they now occupy, including the tiny bit of habitat where Martin and I had just been. The two individuals that we had found were members of the most recent among thousands of generations of their kind, living out their silent lives in that small place, a population riding the long waves of geological, climatic, and ecological variability into the present, going on and on. And although the details of their story are unknown (intrinsic rate of population increase, reproductive ecology, lifespan, population size, when the population was founded, how often the population has fallen toward a final extinction but then recovered) the theme was clear: endurance, sometimes in the face of great adversity. “Just imagine,” I thought, and then I wondered at it all—for there was something touching, and vitally important, about the lives of those salamanders, and their stories. And so what I considered, as I worked my way through the boulders and brush, were hope and some kind of proper perspective on my own life: here in the Inyo Mountains, but also in the larger world, in this time of grief and angst and anger.
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At most colleges and universities, as at Brockport, tenured faculty are eligible for a sabbatical every seven years. It’s a wonderful privilege, with few analogs for most working Americans. For me, a sabbatical offers the time to put aside my normal duties—which run mostly to administration, teaching, service, and supervision of other people’s research—and immerse myself in the natural world, research, and writing. Hopefully, my sabbaticals have enhanced my “professional development” and benefited the college, through fresh approaches to teaching, enhanced scientific skills, and new research ideas. However, I have been considering another benefit of my sabbaticals: empathy. Why empathy? Because sabbaticals remind me of how challenging it can be to embark upon a new research project. It’s a daunting, visceral feeling that I confronted during my Masters and PhD programs, but the winnowing effects of memory have dimmed my recollections of the challenges those times presented. And so, too often, the empathy that I should feel when helping a student develop a research project has been replaced by an academic advisor’s version of the Nike aphorism, “Just do it.” I need to be reminded that it is not that easy. Take for example my first sabbatical, which I spent studying Australasian pipits in the Australian Alps. When I reached my isolated alpine research site, the ground was snow-covered, the weather “changeable.” Everything was unfamiliar. There were poisonous snakes (a non-issue in the North American alpine) and huge, venomous funnel-web spiders wandering over the snow. Although I’d studied North American pipits, for a while the behavior of Australasian pipits remained mysterious. They were difficult to catch and band, and I had no search image for their nests. And I mostly worked alone—no one to help understand the pipits, no one to commiserate with when the flies and heat got bad, or I stepped on a nest of biting ants, again. Sometimes I wondered why in the hell I was where I was, pursuing those devious birds. But eventually, I learned. I found enough pipit nests, came to treasure my research site—the soft light at the end of a long day, the clatter of the small creek near my tent, the lovely blooms of alpine flowers. With time, the pleasures of fieldwork, of living close to the land, of coming to understand a species, perhaps a system, made my earlier angst much less compelling. I confronted different issues on my second sabbatical, but the feelings of “What am I doing here?” and “How will I ever figure this out?” returned in full force. Instead of pursuing a hard-core scientific research project, I was interested in writing a book of creative nonfiction about rare and endangered species of the Death Valley region. I had ideas, but no clear path. I had few contacts in the region, and for a while I floundered. Again, I worked alone, far from friends and loved ones. On my first night in the field, I sat in a suffocating car, eating a dinner of cheese and crackers as fifty-mile-per-hour winds pummeled me and the vehicle, gritting my teeth and wondering, “Why?” But during the night the winds calmed. And when I stepped into the beautiful wash of a full moon and strolled down to the spring where Owens pupfish hung suspended in the crystalline waters—a species that twice had come within the thinnest breath of extinction—I understood that “things” would be okay. it would take time to find the right direction, but I would get there. Generous people would share their knowledge and friendship, and I would understand what I wanted to say, and how to say it. But most importantly my experiences helped me develop a deep affinity for the beleaguered species that I was studying—and the book that I envisioned would come. And now there are Inyo Mountains salamanders, one of only two desert salamanders in the world. They are restricted to twenty or so rugged and isolated canyons in (go figure) the Inyo Mountains, in the rain shadow of the High Sierra. The species has been petitioned for listing under the Endangered Species Act, and my objectives are to assess its population status, evaluate current and potential threats, and develop a better understanding of its ecology. And although I know something about the salamanders, I have confronted the same types of discomfort that I faced during my earlier sabbaticals: doubt, uncertainty, and the daunting feeling that I lack sufficient energy to do this. It has not been particularly easy, partly because of the Inyo Mountains themselves, which rise 7,000 to 9,000 feet above the Owens and Saline valleys: no maintained trails, rugged topography, many drainages choked with tangled shrubs and blocked by steep cliffs. The salamanders have chosen a great place in which to hide themselves away, and I am often left contemplating the title of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, No Country for Old Men. And as on my other sabbaticals, I often work alone. On my first day of fieldwork, I trudged for two hours up a dry desert wash, found only a thin trickle of water guarded by thickets of flesh-ripping wild rose, got hung up on cliffs way too high above the ground, and saw no salamanders. Damn. From my previous experience I knew that the canyon was a poor site, but my walk back down the wash was still a discouraging one. At my second site I managed to find one salamander, but could not survey the entire drainage because I was unwilling to climb a sixty-foot-high cliff, alone. I carry a personal locator beacon, but that cliff seemed way too steep and high, and too far from home. . . And then there’s the critical issue of developing “a feeling for the organism,” which is how Evelyn Fox Keller described the Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock’s affinity for maize and its genetics. This involves more than developing a simple search image; instead it’s a matter of “thinking like a salamander”—which when considering the evolutionary gulf that separates humans and salamanders, is no easy thing. But I am learning (slowly), and adapting. The approaches seem a bit less steep and long, the cliffs not quite as high, the country not so lonely. In some canyons I have found lots of salamanders. I am not yet thinking like a salamander, but their ways seem a bit less opaque. Sometimes I am lucky enough to have companions, and then the work is easier. And best of all, there are those times when I flip a rock and find a creature coiled in moist soil, a refugee from a wetter time, enigmatic in its history and presence—Here, in the high desert!—and I am taken (again) by the beauty of the world, and its great wonder.
And so, when my sabbatical research is done, I hope that I will return to Brockport with a full cache of data, a better sense of the Inyo Mountains salamander, and a renewed understanding of what it is like to begin—again, or for the first time. Recently, two friends and I hiked into the High Sierra and camped for two nights at a beautiful timberline lake, beneath granite cirques rimmed with last winter’s snow. Along the way we spent a long and delightful day rambling across the broad alpine expanse of Humphreys Basin and scrambling up Four Gables peak. From the summit, the views were intoxicating: to the east, the 9,000-foot-deep gulf of Owens Valley and the 14,000-foot-tall White Mountains; to the south, west, and north, “mountains beyond mountains.” The weather was unusually mild for October, the country washed in lambent light. At night the waning moon was brilliant and crystalline, and a clear peace lay over everything. It was a lovely hike, through spectacular and (using John Muir’s favorite adjective) glorious country. My companions were also wonderful—a couple I’ve known for thirty-eight years, good friends with whom I’ve shared many wilderness adventures. And even though we sometimes were silent, our conversations covered a lot of territory, on topics ranging from contemporary politics to medicine and the Irish poet and philosopher, John O’Donohue, whom I mentioned in an earlier post (“Across the Hundredth Meridian”). Talking about O’Donohue got me wondering, once again, about beauty, its qualities and iterations, the ways in which I am moved by those places where I feel most at home. As we walked I thought about the spectacular qualities of the landscapes that have touched me most deeply, from the Antarctic Peninsula to the Himalayas, Grand Canyon, and High Sierra: massive glaciers plunging into ice-choked seas, and penguin colonies numbering in the tens of thousands. Mountains rising to 29,000 feet, through 11,000 feet of ice and rock and snow. That great gulf of time and space that falls away from the South Rim of the Canyon, to the Colorado River—or the great expanse of alpine tundra and sky that grace Humphrey’s Basin. But I realized that I am equally moved by the details of places, by quiet alcoves and tiny seeps, by intricacy and intimacy, by the whisper of a country as much as by its shout—as was the case at Great Basin National Park. Although I was drawn to the vastness of the evening view across the Snake Valley, the empty spatials along the road to Gandy, and the Basin-and-Range sweep of space from the summit of Wheeler Peak (the North Snake Range, Deep Creeks, Fish Spring Range, Schell Creeks, Confusion Range, on and on), one of my favorite places in the park was the little valley that sheltered Pole Creek. On my many walks there I came to love the way the trail first crossed the rush and clatter of Baker Creek, before it climbed away from water, into a dry canyon filled mostly with juniper and pinyon pine. Then came a thin trickle of water, aspens and water birch, a riparian world made more welcome by its almost tentative presence in the narrow canyon, where the sound of falling water was only a murmur. In late September this section of Pole Creek was filled with the rich texture of autumnal colors: the brilliant reds of skunkbush and Rocky Mountain maple, and the bright golds and yellows of aspen and willow, blending with delicate greens of white fir and pinyon. Above the water, the canyon broadened into a lush valley, where soft swaths of basin wildrye lay among the aspens and ponderosa pine. Although Pole Creek is part of my favorite long trail run in the park (up the creek and over the divide to Timber Creek, then the long downhill fall to Baker Creek, past the Grey Cliffs and back to the trailhead), it is best visited leisurely. Travel slowly, and pay attention—to Pole Creek’s details, to the subtle transitions in vegetation and the essence of the place, to the quiet fall of water. Take a pad and find a place upvalley to sit, among the grasses. Accept what the poet Lisel Mueller describes as, “The Need to Hold Still.” If you are with a companion, stay silent. Remain there for an hour or two, before making your way, slowly, down canyon. Think of your stroll as right practice, as what Zen Buddhists term kinhin, or a walking meditation.
There’s a lesson here, I think. So often we yearn for spectacle, whether in beautiful country, entertainment, or (most importantly) our relationships. We are pulled toward what we hope will be intense experiences. In doing so our attention is drawn away from the “unremarkable” details of our lives, those events that form so much of the warp and weft of memory and desire: a lover’s gentle touch, the scent of baby shampoo in a young child’s hair, the morning’s first sip of great coffee (or in my case, tea), some beautiful line of poetry that hangs with you forever, that lovely moment and movement in a favorite song, the perfect dry fly cast on your favorite river—or the trickle of water in Pole Creek, among the aspens and the stillness, where for a few hours everything in the world fits together, almost perfectly. |
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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