Lately I have been thinking about the opening stanza from a poem by Emily Dickinson: Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all. . . Dickinson was right. “Hope is the thing with feathers”—for who hasn’t been stirred out of darkness by a bright pulse of northern cardinal song on a bitter February day, or lifted into light by the explosion of a dawn chorus on some transcendent May morning? But for me hope also has become “the thing with permeable skin, four toes on its hind feet, no lungs, and a distribution restricted to a desert mountain range in eastern California”—in other words, the Inyo Mountains salamander. Not a lovely title, that, and never destined for a poem or book jacket, unlike Christopher Cokinos’s 2000 book, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds. Yet the salamanders have found a perch in my soul and I hear them sing, in their own silent, improbable, beautiful, and hopeful way. And so what I want to consider here—what I feel every time that I flip a rock somewhere in the Inyos and discover a small salamander coiled there, perhaps only a few inches from a killing desert world—is the question of value. Just what are these salamanders worth to a human world that has almost entirely ignored them? Why should anyone study them, or treasure their existence? Why should the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service spend even a few thousand dollars to subsidize my research (mostly to cover some of my driving expenses, purchase a few small items of equipment, and keep me supplied with almond butter and jam sandwiches while in the field)? Rough calculations suggest that the cost to the federal government for my fieldwork is equal to approximately 4 minutes of flight time for a B-2 bomber, or between 9 and 27 minutes of one of President Trump’s golfing weekends at Mar-a-Lago, assuming that it lasts forty-eight hours. (The numbers for the latter item are very murky, but the concept is not.) Wouldn’t the money allocated for my salamander research be better used to fly a B-2 bomber for 4 minutes, fund 9 minutes of the President’s golfing weekend, or help reduce the tax burden on our country’s billionaires? I'll ignore the societal costs of B-2 bombers or Trump’s golf game, but I do believe that there are many reasons why the Inyo Mountains salamander is worth the minor expense necessary to study and protect it: how understanding the history of the species would help elucidate evolutionary processes; the way its populations could act as sentinels, relative to climate change, disease, and other environmental threats; and even what environmental economists call its option value—how undiscovered Inyo Mountains salamander biomolecules might someday benefit humans. (One never knows, as research on East Africa’s naked mole rat has demonstrated.) And then there is the species’ intrinsic value, its right to exist, independent of human concerns. Finally, its beauty and stunning presence in a desert world offer us a story of great importance. But as much as I passionately believe in “all of the above,” I will leave them aside for now. Instead, I want to consider the view of the Inyo Mountains, and several canyons that support salamanders, from the Manzanar National Historic Site, which is located a few miles north of the small town of Lone Pine in the Owens Valley. The site commemorates the experiences of the ten thousand Japanese Americans who were “interred” there during World War II, as well as the more than 100,000 other internees who were imprisoned in other camps throughout the American West and Midwest. As such Manzanar is a powerful reminder of how racism, fear, and ignorance can poison the spirit of a country—and thus a potent lesson for our times. I have visited Manzanar often, most recently with a friend a few weeks ago, and although the armed soldiers, guard towers, and rows of barracks are more than seventy years gone, it remains a place where the past is always with you; there are ghosts, and a visceral sense of suffering, anger, and injustice. To wander among the reconstructed barracks and mess hall, to visit the cemetery on the western edge of camp, or to see a garland of “peace cranes” draped around a wooden post, is to walk with the spirits of the dead, and touch upon a profound and bitter sadness. I do not pretend to understand much of anything about the experiences of the Japanese Americans who were imprisoned at Manzanar. I do not know how they and their descendants have managed to transcend bitterness and forgive our country, despite the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, which granted a payment of $20,000 and an apology to former prisoners of the war relocation camps. I wonder if I would be capable of such forgiveness if I were subjected to a similar experience. But I do know this: that all of us have suffered through our own tiny Manzanars, our large and small imprisonments. And for me the view from Manzanar, of the Inyo Mountains and the salamander habitat they contain, is of some consolation—both for the history of the place, and for the difficult experiences that have come to my life, my personal incarcerations.
For there is comfort in understanding that, beyond the reach of human folly and stupidity--beyond all of our concerns, petty and important--Inyo Mountains salamanders have crawled and drowsed their way through the millennia. Wonderful travelers of time, they have survived the uplift of the Inyo Mountains, the explosion of the Long Valley Caldera, the waxing and waning of the waters, the repeated drying of their mountains. They were present millions of years ago, in the ancestral Inyo Mountains—long before there was such a species as Homo sapiens—and they were present when loyal and law-abiding citizens of the United States were imprisoned at Manzanar. The Inyo Mountains salamanders have endured, and one of their gifts to us is the understanding that we also can endure, in our haphazard and imperfect ways. This wisdom—the wisdom of the salamanders—is the primary reason why I am here. It explains why I care for the Inyo Mountains salamanders as much as I do, and why they offer up the promise of hope in a world that too often teeters on the edge of hopelessness. Note: Portions of this post are adapted from a chapter in Relicts of a Beautiful Sea.
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Recently, I had a week of fieldwork that illustrates the highs, lows, and in-betweens that comprise most scientific projects. Research proceeds in fits and starts, whether we’re talking high-energy particle physics, molecular genetics, or (most critically) Inyo Mountains salamanders, as during my week of contrasts: Day 1—My goal was to investigate a possible salamander locality on the west side of the Inyos, which took two hours of walking and 1500 feet of elevation gain to reach. Although the locality looked promising, there were only about 60 meters of decent habitat, few flippable rocks, and no salamanders lounging about. Salamanders may occur in the canyon (it is difficult to conclusively demonstrate that a small, cryptic species is not present in a place with appropriate habitat), but the chances of this seem slim. Yet even though I did not use my SED (Salamander Entrapment Device) to good effect, the trip was moderately successful because I gathered some useful observations about factors affecting Inyo Mountains salamander distribution. Rating for the day: +. Day 2—Downhill plummet. . . My plan was to investigate a documented west-side locality that I had not visited before. Because access to salamander habitat in the canyon is blocked by a sixty-foot-high dry falls and I did not want to tackle the barrier on my own, I took along my local friends and hosts, Stacey and Ceal, plus a rope and some climbing gear for safety. Hah. At the base of the falls we found a class 4 route that looked passable without a rope. We started up a series of ledges and cracks, with Stacey in the lead, me in the middle, and Ceal in the rear. When we were about halfway up, I heard Stacey remark, “This block feels loose.” I glanced up, just as a piece of rock perhaps one foot by two feet came hurtling free. I was about eight feet below Stacey and only had a moment to flinch before being enveloped in noise from shattering rock, dust, and pain, and then hearing Ceal cry out from below. I was hit in the head and left hand, but was more worried about Ceal—who fortunately avoided getting whacked in the head, although large rocks hit her calf and foot. We were able to down-climb our route, and once in a safe spot determined that we had avoided serious injury—a lucky thing because “it” could have been very bad. For me, a thick hat (and hard head?) prevented a scalp wound or concussion, and although my left hand was swollen and bleeding, nothing felt broken. Ceal also was free of any broken bones, although her calf soon swelled to the size of her thigh and an orthopedist eventually diagnosed temporary nerve damage to her leg. We retreated to the car—enough high-angle salamandering for one day—and hobbled into a more accessible site. We managed to uncover a few beasts there, but the day was still demoralizing, especially in the after-wash of my rockfall-induced adrenaline rush. There were several ironies about the accident. First, in all my years of mountaineering, I’d never been involved in a rockfall accident, although I’d had several close calls along the way. Second, I am more nervous about working alone in difficult terrain, and yet the accident occurred in the company of friends. Even though no one was seriously hurt, the day was hard going and its rating had to be at least: ———. Day 3—Not much to say about day 3, except that it involved 3,000 feet of tough elevation gain up a very steep trail (followed by the subsequent, equal loss), only to find a site completely unsuitable for Inyo Mountain salamanders. Crap. (Actually, my language at the time was a bit more colorful.) My head and hand still hurt badly; I was tired and generally pissed off about the whole business, but at least I did not get assaulted by flying rocks. Rating for the day: ——.
Day 4—My best Inyo Mountains salamander day, ever. I found twenty (large and small, gravid and non-gravid) in two hours of searching. It was a lovely day for fieldwork, with mild temperatures, plenty of sun, and a beautiful autumnal desert sky. The High Sierra stood clear to the west, I was working amidst small waterfalls and tiny alcoves of maidenhair fern and columbine, and although my head and hand still throbbed, the abundance of salamanders and the canyon’s magic graced my entire project, rockfall and all. Lots of excellent data, and a rating for the day of: + + +. Day 5—I returned to a site that I had visited three times before, over the course of several years. During the hour-long hike in I pledged to slow down, relax, look, and ask more questions about the whys of salamander presence and absence. I worked slowly and deliberately, and found twice as many salamanders as during my previous visits to the canyon. My hand and hand felt a bit better, and I was happy and content in the presence of Batrachoseps campi, enveloped in silence and the pleasures of good work. Rating for the day: ++. So it went during my up-and-down research week: two excellent days, one mildly decent day, one bad day, and one awful day. Two weeks later, I am reminded of the rockfall accident whenever I flex my left hand, accidentally bump my bruised bone, or see Ceal limp by. But I recollect, even more powerfully, the pleasures of day 4, when there were salamanders everywhere and I was taken, fully, by my good fortune: to work in such beautiful and challenging country, with an even more amazing creature. |
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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