Selfish Memes (feat. Barrack Obama, Richard Dawkins, G. Evelyn Hutchinson, and The Orange One)5/10/2020 Lately, my mind has been wandering. (Okay, just more than it usually does.) Physically constrained as I’ve been by Covid-19, the restlessness that haunts my every spring trends exponential. On those rare days when the Brockport air is leavened by a gentle southwestern wind and the sky glows blue as robin’s eggs, the urge to drive toward some beautifully open spatials (the High Plains come to mind), to slip on my hiking boots and just move, is almost unbearable. But in this era of N95 face masks and latex gloves, of bizarre virus anti-briefings and an economy gone fallow, I am mostly reduced (perhaps restricted is a better word) to mental journeys—random walks that trail off into one iPhone labyrinth or another. (“All those wasted hours,” as my friend Mac Bates says.) But occasionally those Markov chains lead to a juxtaposition of ideas that dovetail in some satisfying way—rising out of the ether like those weird quirks of the nocturnal atmosphere that delivered 1970s-era AM radio waves from half a continent away (an all-night trucker’s station out of Amarillo, or Motown from Detroit). And so it is with Barrack Obama, Richard Dawkins, and G. Evelyn Hutchinson, whoever he was. And oh, yes—Trump makes the mix, too, but I won’t get around to The Orange One until later. What started me down the path to Obama, Dawkins, and Hutchinson was a question about ideology: what exactly is it, and how is it manifested in the Covid-19 crisis? So out comes the iPhone and this definition, courtesy of Merriam-Webster: “a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture.” Innocuous enough, but then I recalled a quote from Obama’s The Audacity of Hope that captures the inherent dangers of ideology: “values are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question.” Thus ideology—whether nested in Marxism, trickle-down economics, xenophobia, anti-vaccine hysteria, fundamentalist religion, or MAGA—is a lens through which people view the world, or some critical slice of it. These lenses are inherently powerful and selective, but they do more than “override” or distort facts—they destroy them. Nothing new here, I suppose. But the most dangerous aspect of these lenses is that they are more resistant than gold to change. And this idea led me (obviously?) to the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, aka Darwin’s Rottweiler. Back in 1976 Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, a book that had (and continues to have) a major impact on evolutionary thinking. Dawkins’s basic idea was that organisms do what they do not to help themselves, but to promote copies of their genes, which he also called “selfish replicators.” Thus individuals become “ephemeral vehicles for genes” (Matt Ridley). Without delving into the details of Dawkins’s arguments, or debates about the centrality of natural selection as a driver of evolutionary change, what’s important is that in The Selfish Gene Dawkins also developed the concept of the meme, which he defined as a “unit of cultural transmission.” (So thanks, Richard Dawkins, for all those gifs featuring cute kittens, Leonard Nimoy, and characters from Friends). Anyway, Dawkins said this about memes: “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” These memes also are selfish, as Dawkins pointed out in a 1999 essay in Time. But not only are they selfish, they are terribly (and I use that word in its most powerful sense) resistant to change, at least in any direction leading toward moderation. Which called to mind G. Evelyn Hutchinson, the British-American ecologist whom I once mentioned in the context of landscape aesthetics. Hutchinson was a polymath who has been called “the father of modern ecology.” Among his many books is “The Ecological Theater and the Evolutionary Play”—and just as evolution occurs in an ecological context, there is an analogous “ideological theater and cognitive play,” in which selfish memes are selected for and propagate themselves in particular ideological ecologies, often to the detriment of the humans who carry the memes. And ideology is a particularly powerful selective agent because it reinforces the human desire for certainty and belonging. This is how the world or some important portion of it works; I want to share this belief with my brothers and sisters, and nuance, uncertainty, and change frighten me. Thus, any meme-mutation that reduces certainty and threatens membership in a particular social (cognitive) team is rigorously selected against, even if it ultimately reduces the fitness of the “vehicle”—think anti-vaxxers, neo-Nazis, 1930s leftists who embraced Stalin, the poor who vote for trickle-down economic charlatans, or the screaming protesters who refuse to wear facemasks because it “interferes with their freedom.” On and on. A train of thought which then carried me toward Donald Trump and his meme-infested, ideological MAGA world. My choice for the ultimate, most in-your-face MAGA-meme features Trump doing his very best Rambo imitation. I often see one of these meme-banners on my way to work: a physique born from punishing gym workouts (never mind the irony there) and all the steroids a body can handle, headband, a full head of blond hair (ignore that irony, too), armed with a mega- (MAGA?) rocket launcher, loaded and primed to destroy “the swamp,” elitists, purveyors of fake news, immigrants, anyone who thinks differently than him, and most certainly those goddamned facts. Don’t tread on me, don’t tread on him, and don’t tread on his pathological view of the world. And the most dangerous thing about this infinitely selfish meme is that it reflects an ideology (like any other ideology) that refuses to evolve, will never admit to not knowing, will never accept a world view in which inconvenient facts might lead to change of mind and heart. And in this current Covid-19 crisis, which will kill hundreds of thousands of Americans, and has destroyed our economy and savaged the lives of so many people, Trump and his fellow travelers have that ideologically-powered rocket launcher aimed directly at the only things that can rescue us: science, unity of purpose, a clear and sustained and focused governmental effort, and (most critically) empathy and love for one another. Just pull the trigger and all that threatens Team Trump will explode, leaving what?—some Ayn Rand-type of knock-off world in which everyone is free to be exploited by those with the most money and power, and cared for by nothing that resembles a greater empathetic community. Don’t tread on me, but for God’s sake let me tread on others. Throughout human history, ideology has given us ignorance, hubris, hatred, suffering, and the damning identification of “Other.” And so instead of ideologically-powered rocket launchers, what we desperately need now (and always) are values “that are faithfully applied to the facts before us,” values capable of evolving in the theater of fact and reason and empathy. A pox on the ideology of MAGA, a pox on all ideologies, everywhere. If only some miraculous blossoming of human reason and compassion and humility—those forces most lethal to ideology—could rid us of the blind mindsets and selfish memes that plague our species, and the very Earth we all too frequently suffer and die upon. Recently, I had occasion to spend some time at Vicksburg National Military Park in Mississippi. I visited mostly in the early mornings and evenings, to escape the press of sight-seers and the worst of the summer heat. In those quiet and (slightly) cooler hours, I tracked the park’s concrete roadways through the loess hills above the city, past the set-pieces of public history: information-dense metal plaques, red for Confederate and blue for Union; a thick scatter of chiseled stone monuments and bronze statues; and the obligatory cannon and Parrott rifles. There were massive obelisks, magnificent domes, heroic generals on horseback, infantrymen cradling muskets, bronzed female symbols of peace and liberty. If there were names attached to the statues and other monuments, they were those of officers or their units. As individuals, the enlisted men had disappeared, buried in mostly unmarked graves or remembered only by their contribution to summary casualty figures: 66 dead, 339 wounded, 37 missing – on and on and on, those depressing numbers. Mostly I visited the park to run or watch birds, or walk with a friend, but the history of the place was never entirely muted. What occurred at Vicksburg 156 years ago has settled over the land like layers of gauze. Sometimes the layers are thick, at other times thin — but they are always there, reminding me of the ways in which a battle and siege that produced 20,000 casualties trails through time, from the Civil War to Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, and our current state of bitter discontent. As Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It’s a curious thing, though. Given how the dead and wounded of Vicksburg — not to mention the entire skein of history that unraveled over four years, from Fort Sumter to Appomattox — continue to manifest themselves (Charlottesville; the rising fight over reparations; Trayvon Martin; Black Lives Matter; in-your-face Confederate battle flags flapping from front porches and pickup trucks; even POTUS himself), the battlefield remains a topography of the shadow-lands. Its contours and historical reality have been softened by time, manicured lawns, fields of luxuriant grass and dense forests, and by how we commemorate the conflict. The Civil War lives on, but at Vicksburg it does so in a sanitized landscape, one that verges on the pastoral. There are the memorials to the officers and units that served at Vicksburg — in many cases, monuments to carnage — but in the summer mockingbirds, yellow-breasted chats, and indigo buntings sing from nearby thickets, while deer emerge at twilight to feed in empty fields, among the spirits of the dead. Surprisingly, it can be difficult to hear well in that quiet peace. And so what I came to struggle with, as I ran through the park or raised my binoculars to the brilliant flash of a summer tanager, or talked with my friend, were two things. The first was how the voices of dead, and the history of Vicksburg and its consequences, were mostly muffled. But the second thing that I became aware of, and which seems to partially refute what I have just written, was a growing sense of discomfort when I was behind the Confederate lines. I was unable to dismiss what the Confederates (be they wealthy plantation owners and their wealthy sons, or poor dirt farmers and their poor sons) were fighting for, whether consciously or unconsciously: the right of one human being to own another. And in this, I was unsettled. This sense of dislocation and discomfort — of history stifled and dulled — and the question of how to best acknowledge the people who fought at Vicksburg, pursued me one day, as I climbed on to Railroad Redoubt — one of the strongholds that anchored the southern part of the Confederate line. From the redoubt I gazed east over empty fields and ravines, toward the Union positions. Behind me was the Texas Memorial, with its bronze statue of a resolute Confederate soldier, musket at the ready. The air was hot and viscous, thick with humidity and the rasp of cicadas. Here, on May 22, 1863, Union soldiers of the 22nd Iowa Volunteer Infantry Regiment, with close support by regiments from Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa, attacked the Confederate lines. The redoubt was defended by the 46th and 48th Alabama regiments, with Waul’s Texas Legion in reserve. The initial advance occurred over broken but mostly open ground, across a killing field raked by concentrated musket fire and grapeshot. About forty yards from the redoubt, the surviving attackers encountered a thick tangle of felled trees; beyond this obstacle was a deep ditch. Only fifteen to twenty men of the 22nd Iowa crossed the ditch and entered Railroad Redoubt, although members of other regiments reached the edge of the Confederate positions. Volunteers from Waul’s Texas Legion counterattacked and in vicious hand-to-hand fighting drove the Union soldiers from the redoubt. Of the Iowans who entered Railroad Redoubt, two lived. And of the 200 men in the 22nd Iowa who took part in the assault, forty-two were killed or died of their wounds, 128 were wounded, and nineteen were captured — a casualty rate of 85%. Other Union regiments suffered slightly lower but still horrific losses. Waul’s unit lost 245 men killed, wounded, or missing over the course of the battle and siege. It is difficult to countenance these numbers, to fully appreciate what Railroad Redoubt would have looked, felt, and smelled like during the attack. But when I stood at the edge of the parapet and looked down its twenty- to thirty-degree slope, in the direction of the Union advance, I knew that I was standing at the edge of death. There were ghosts in the grass and ghosts in the air, and they spoke in the language of unconscionable pain and suffering. Men defended and stormed Railroad Redoubt, killing one another with Minié balls, canon balls, canister shot, grapeshot, bayonets, knives, and their bare hands. Soldiers were instantaneously obliterated by artillery fire or a musket-shot shot to the head. Others—gut-shot or bayoneted — would have died slowly and horribly, with a maddening thirst, beneath a brutal May sun. What exactly in all of this should I – we — remember, and in doing so, honor? Courage, and the terrible beauty of combat, if that is the right phrase? Duty in the face of death? “Heritage,” be it Union or Confederate? And should Railroad Redoubt (and the entire Vicksburg battlefield) be a place that presents history only in a “this-happened-to-them-here” manner, an approach guaranteed to offend few people, or should the displays directly confront slavery and the forces that generated the Civil War and led men to kill one another, here? I have no ready answers. There is something important to acknowledge about what occurred at Railroad Redoubt on the 22nd of May 1863, although I am uncertain as to what that actually is. And I understand why some people, particularly the descendants of those who fought for the Confederacy, might hope to embrace a “heritage, not hate” or “Lost Cause” narrative, while ignoring the bitter truths about slavery and what their ancestors actually fought for — as exemplified by displays at the Old Warren County Court House Museum in Vicksburg. But whatever we choose to remember about Railroad Redoubt, the Vicksburg Campaign, and the Civil War, it must include an honest reckoning with slavery and its consequences. This is something our country has never done — yet it must, if we are ever to achieve any kind of racial justice and peace. On one of the last evenings of my visit, as my friend and I were walking on an empty road in the park, a sound of singing drifted down upon us. The sound carried through the hot and humid air, which lay like a fog over the land, and its notes were faintly mysterious, almost ethereal. Soon the source became apparent — three adolescent boys, Civil War reenactors, fresh-faced and dressed in Confederate gray, two of them bare-footed. I did not recognize their words, but I took the song for one that would have been popular with Confederate soldiers. And there was something about that moment — the quiet park and silent cannon, those bits of song drifting through time, the uniforms worn by boys no younger than some who fought and died at Vicksburg — that captured the essence of my discomfort, and my question: what is it about Vicksburg that we should remember, and through that remembrance, learn from? The humanity and history carried by those three boys, with their sweet, insouciant voices? The repression and sorrow represented by their Confederate uniforms — fundamentally, the “right” of one human being to own another? Or should it be some complex combination of the ideas and emotions that arise at the intersection between these conflicting views?
In the gathering night, beset by questions about remembrance and history, and as the notes from an old Confederate song died away, I recalled some dialog from the final scene in Terrence Malick’s A Thin Red Line, a movie about another battle in another war: “Darkness and light. Strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind, the features of the same face? Oh my soul. Let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made — all things shining.” Sometimes, though, it is hard to know what should shine, and what should not. 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. It is almost time. My sabbatical year is practically finished. Soon I will resume my “normal” academic life. There will be classes, independent studies, new graduate students, meetings, and a diverse collection of research projects to attend to—plus the responsibilities, minutiae, frustrations, distractions, and pleasures (there are a few of those) associated with my duties as department chair. After a year of less frenetic activity the pace of my life will quickly accelerate: 20 to 100 mph in a day or two. The problem is that over the last year I have grown academically fat and lazy, and it will not be easy to get up off the sabbatical couch. And although I hope to retain some of the equanimity that I’ve gained during my sabbatical, I suspect that this hamster most likely will hop right back on his wheel. It is difficult to cache relaxation, more difficult still to resist the incessant demands of must and should. But I am not complaining (well, not too much), for I appreciate my good fortune. By virtue of education, career, and economic status, I’ve had the opportunity to take a year off from my regular work and devote myself to research and creative activities. Although opting for a year-long sabbatical has meant a fifty percent reduction in pay, I have been able to cover the loss in income, which has been more than offset by a reciprocal increase in another, more precious form of compensation: time. My sabbatical has not been a vacation, even if it sometimes resembled one, as I ignored most requirements of my regular job and slipped into a slower pace of life. And because my creative and scientific projects required immersion in the natural world, and being in wild and lovely places is what I do for recreation, the last year just has not felt much like work. So—I am very grateful for my sabbatical, which is the sort of privilege afforded to very few working people in this world. And when I think back on this last year, I recall many experiences that touched me deeply, and which for one reason or another will remain with me for years to come:
Many of these experiences, and their rewards, are personal. But what about professional benefits, particularly those that accrue to the College at Brockport, and justify any costs it incurred due to my sabbatical leave? My sabbatical allowed me to develop new professional relationships, particularly with researchers who study salamander ecology and evolution. These collaborations resulted in two new grant applications, which if funded will support a molecular genetic study on the evolution and population structure of the Inyo Mountains salamander. I (and several coauthors) also completed a scientific manuscript based in part on my salamander research, as well as another long-overdue one on grassland bird ecology and management. I picked up a few new research skills along the way, and did some reading and thinking that will affect how and what I teach in several courses, including Wildlife Ecology, Herpetology, and Environmental Literature. Hopefully, these things will benefit Brockport students, via stronger classes and increased opportunities for gaining research experience.
But above all else, I am happiest and most satisfied about getting to know the Inyo Mountains salamander and its home country in a more intimate and intense way. The salamander’s story, and the beauty that I encountered during my explorations, have given me great pleasure, hope, and inspiration. --- Finally, thanks to all who helped out along the way, including: The College at Brockport, for supporting my sabbatical; colleagues in the Department of Environmental Science and Ecology, who picked up the slack created by my absence; many dedicated field companions; agencies and individuals who facilitated my research and creative residencies (particularly the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Great Basin National Park, and North Cascades Institute); and friends and family. My biggest debt, though, is to Ceal Klingler and Stacey Brown of Bishop, who gave me a place to live while I worked on the salamanders. Without their generosity and friendship, my salamander project would have been much more challenging, if not impossible, to carry out. After taking what I need (length and weight measurements, photographs, a fungal swab, and a tiny bit of tail for genetic analysis), I release the salamander and watch it crawl beneath the rock where I found it, just ten minutes ago: a female, salamander number FR-25, 39.6 millimeters snout-vent length, 1.25 grams in weight, chytrid sample 0033. Her back is dark chocolate brown, stippled with scattered flecks of iridescent, greenish silver, the eggs beneath her translucent belly skin a creamy yellow. She disappears into the damp and sheltered darkness beneath the rock, vanishing into a world that I might quantify (30 % soil moisture, 6.53 pH, 30 centimeters to the nearest running water), but will never know. My season’s field work is almost done, and F-25 is one of the last Inyo Mountains salamanders that I will handle this spring. Soon I will leave this canyon, move away from the tangle of willow and wild rose and talus, onto the blinding light of a desert bajada. I will wind my way through barrel cactus and creosote bush, fall out of the Inyos and into a more scattered life. At times I think that I have been too busy with my research, too focused on data, too insistent on hustling from one salamander locality to the next. I have traveled through beautiful and broken country, but I have not held still for long enough, or often enough. And so I rest for a while on a large block of gray-white granite. The outside world falls away—my worries and plans for the future, this research project, the incessant stream of “current events” that crawls across the screen of my iPhone and pulverizes my life—and for a few minutes there is only the drifting whisper of a breeze, the white-noise song of falling water tumbling through wild rose and boulders, the chatter of white-throated swifts, wheeling through the air above my perch. I think about F-25, and imagine her life: those slow salamander years, nocturnal forays into the surface world, long winters spent in some cliffside crevice or deep in the soil, waiting. I think of her eggs and what they imply but do not promise, of infinite patience, of her lineage and the winding, contingent history of the genus Batrachoseps, species campi: five million years or so of stasis and upheaval and isolation, the fault-block thrust of the Inyo Mountains, the waxing and waning of Pleistocene waters, the explosion of the Long Valley Caldera and blanket of smothering ash, the great drying of the Holocene and (now) the Anthropocene. A species whose range has been fractured and cauterized by droughts and flash floods, leaving behind isolated pockets of salamanders, hanging on—an archipelago of scattered springs and seeps, one hundred yards of habitat here, three hundred yards there, each one a lifetime or more apart as the salamander might crawl. And perhaps for a few rare travelers, successful journeys through a killing desert world, miraculous marches from one pocket of water to another—somehow.
The actuality of the salamander's history and ecology is more than enough, but there also is the beauty of metaphor, my desire for something beyond the data and hypotheses. And so my supplication to F-25 and all that her species represents: that she and her kin will endure, that the seeps and springs will remain, that a rising tide of flash floods will not scour every canyon and eviscerate every population. That chytrid fungus and our carbon dioxide spoor will not ravage the Southwest. That the Inyo Mountains Wilderness and whatever protection it offers the salamanders will remain. That unbelievably, the march of human folly will be countered by a more powerful march of human wisdom. For although these salamanders have endured for much longer than there have been human beings—and there is some comfort in that—the past does not guarantee the future. The world will change, perhaps more than we might hope. So, please: go on and on and on. Find shelter in your lonely canyons. Live your lives beyond the realm of human history and concern—but at the same time, offer us a few slivers of hope and longing and mystery, and even the possibility of love. I hoist my pack and start the descent, picking my way through a jumble of talus and onto easier ground, walking out of the canyon, away from the salamanders and into the waiting world. During the Antarctic winter of 1911, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Dr. “Bill” Wilson, and “Birdie” Bowers embarked on what Cherry-Garrard described—without hyperbole—as “The Worst Journey in the World.” For thirty-five days they traveled under horrific conditions, hauling their sleds across the Ross Ice Shelf, enduring almost complete darkness, temperatures that plunged to -60°C, and ferocious blizzards. It was so cold that no lubricating layer of water formed between the sled runners and snow; the frictional resistance made traveling exhausting, and on some days they covered less than three miles. Their reindeer-hide sleeping bags froze during the “day,” and each night they thawed them with their body heat. The journey was simply awful. The objective of “The Worst Journey in the World” was the Emperor Penguin rookery at Cape Crozier. The three men probed the limits of human suffering because Emperor Penguins nest during the Antarctic winter, and Wilson hoped that a study of developing penguin eggs would illuminate the relationship between birds and reptiles, given the theory that “ontogeny (development) recapitulates phylogeny (evolutionary history).” And so Cherry Garrard and his companions man-hauled their sleds to the very edge of death, before staggering back to their base camp—with three penguin eggs. The eggs eventually made their way back to England, as did Cherry-Garrard. But Wilson and Bowers did not. They perished eight months later, on the return march from the South Pole with Robert Falcon Scott, “Titus” Oates, and Edgar Evans. The winter journey and the deaths of Scott and his men haunted Cherry-Garrard for the rest of his life. As a way to make sense of his experiences, he wrote one of the classic accounts of polar exploration, The Worst Journey in the World, which concludes with the following passage: “Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, ‘What is the use?’ For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which will not promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin egg.” I’ve thought about this passage many times, most recently on a four-day, west-to-east crossing of the Inyo Mountains. I was after salamanders rather than penguin eggs, and although I claim absolutely no comparison between my sliver of a trip and Cherry-Garrard, Wilson, and Bowers' ordeal, my journey still led me to consider experiences that challenge our minds and bodies. I undertook the Inyo traverse for two main reasons. First, I hoped to access two isolated salamander localities that had not been visited since 1976. Second, in 2012 the canyon that I planned to descend had been pummeled by a hundred-year (or millennial) flash flood, and I wanted to understand how such an event might impact Inyo Mountains salamander populations. And oh yes—a bit of adventure would be nice, too. And so off SP Parker, Marty Hornick, and I went: up a 5,000-foot-plus climb from Owens Valley to the crest of the Inyos, some of it on an abandoned miner’s trail, then a steep, cross-country descent through McElvoy Canyon, which falls 8,000 feet into Saline Valley. (Two local climbers helped us carry water and rappel gear to our first camp.) In the lower part of McElvoy we rappelled past and through nine waterfalls, which varied from about 30 to 170 feet high. There were fields of broken talus, thickets of willow and wild rose, and challenging route-finding. And I will confess to several moments of fear: rappelling into the void on ropes secured to anchors with a single piece of 1/2-inch webbing, and the knowledge that once we began the rappels, we were absolutely committed to the descent, for there was no obvious escape path from the lower canyon. I’d never done any technical canyoneering before, and without the expertise of SP and Marty, I would have been lost. We traveled through rugged and isolated country. And although in the past parts of the Inyos had been the scene of intense mining activity, the mills and tunnels were abandoned, the trails mostly faded into the desert. It’s likely that no one had descended lower McElvoy Canyon since the 2012 flood; our camps were quiet, peaceful, and lovely. And the salamanders? We found only one—below a north-facing cliff, just beyond the reach of the 2012 flood. Raging down from above McElvoy’s highest springs, the waters had annihilated the canyon’s riparian habitat, moving boulders the size of large trucks and depositing huge fields of mud-and-rock slurry. There were places where the streambed was forty feet or more below the highest flood debris, and the waters had obliterated the two documented salamander localities in the lower canyon. The riparian vegetation was regenerating, but the habitat remained no place for salamanders—even if the few survivors and their offspring could have moved out of flood-safe refuges and into their former homes. Which brings me to the moral of my story. Three people, four days, one salamander, and a single row of data entered into spreadsheet: an ironically small yield for a fair amount of human effort. For me the traverse was arduous, although in absolutely no way was it a “Winter Journey” (my trip is to “The Worst Journey” as the national debt of Liechtenstein [US$ 0] is to the national debt of the United States [US$19 trillion and counting]). Yet it was the most rewarding and demanding experience of my project, the one that I most often will recall in my dotage. For I made two friends along the way, learned something important about the ecology of Inyo Mountains salamanders, and felt a breath stir inside me—perhaps Wordsworth’s “motion and a spirit,” a sense that the Inyo Mountains and what they represent offer many rewards, if all I am after is a salamander.
And so I am reminded that Cherry-Garrard’s last insight is true for all of us, no matter the course and substance of our lives—for there are penguin eggs everywhere in the world, if only we have the imagination and desire to go forth on our journeys, and find them. I returned to California in mid-March, after another pedal-to-the-floor cross-country drive—from Brockport to Bishop in less than three days, my route and timing fortunate enough to avoid the worst of late winter’s weather. My only stop along the way (other than for a short sleep in an Illinois motel, and a scenic nap in a Walmart parking lot in eastern Wyoming) was to watch the migrating Sandhill Cranes along the North Platte River, a lovely spectacle that I’d read about, but never seen. Two days after reaching Bishop I was back in the Inyo Mountains, working my way up a heat-soaked alluvial fan and through a bit of “habitat lag” (from cold and soggy western New York to sunny Mojave Desert scrub in less than a week). I wandered among barrel cactus and creosote bush, toward the place where I first found Inyo Mountains salamanders during last fall’s fieldwork—and where in 2009 I first encountered the species. A creature of habit, I suppose (me, but also the salamanders), although the emotions I carried with me in March of 2018 mostly were different from those that accompanied me in early October of 2017. The uncertainty and hesitation that that nagged me at the start of the project were mostly gone, replaced by an eagerness to be back at it, leavened by the confidence that I more or less understood my study system and understood what I needed to do. Although my pack was laden with research equipment and water, my psychic burden was much lighter. Still, I had (and have) my residual worries. Would there be salamanders, and would I find them? How easy would it be for me to master two new skills, along with all of the other tasks that I needed to accomplish: collecting tissue samples for a study of the evolutionary relationships among Inyo Mountains salamander populations, and swabbing salamanders for chytrid fungus, killer of frogs (and potentially salamanders)? And how would I adapt to working alone, in isolated and often challenging terrain? Well. There have been salamanders, and in some places, many of them: seven under one rock (a record), two in a marginal locality where I had been skunked twice before, seventeen at a site where I had never found more than two. And with the help of a local climber, I managed to make it into the canyon where last fall my companions and I were turned back by a rock fall “incident.” And although at first my technique for collecting tissue and chytrid samples were at best inept, I soon learned how to integrate those tasks with everything else that I needed to do, from photographing, weighing, and measuring the length of each salamander, to measuring soil pH and temperature, and estimating plant cover. There is a quiet satisfaction comes from this kind of adaptation, in science as well as most any human endeavor that demands even a basic skill set. Mostly, the salamanders are behaving in predictable ways, similar to what I came to expect during last fall’s fieldwork. Still, I have noticed some differences—more small individuals (young that hatched out late last fall?), fewer gravid females, and occasionally salamanders in drier places, under cover objects relatively far from water or on warmer, south-facing slopes. And one locality, which in past visits produced good numbers of salamanders, seems to have far fewer of them now, most likely due to a recent flash flood that removed much of the vegetation and organic soil that the salamanders prefer. These differences are valuable from a scientific standpoint, for they hint at seasonal patterns—but they also warn me of how blinding it can be to assume too much about the salamanders, based on past experience.
Even so, one of the great pleasures of ecological research and natural history work is that of recognition: of comforting encounters with familiar organisms, in their accustomed places. And even if there are differences of the sort that I describe above—for the world is a variable and constantly changing place, which is one of its seductive joys—there is an underlying constancy present, a sense of continuity in the lives of animals and plants. Life goes on, often in the face of intimidating forces. I even felt some sense of this continuity in the canyon where flash flooding had cleared it of soil, vegetation, and (presumably) most of its salamanders—for I discovered one young salamander there (and where there are young, there must be parents), and trusted that, given enough time and sufficient benign human neglect, the canyon and its salamanders would recover. The salamanders shall endure, just as they have done over the countless millennia, and just as we shall endure, in our own fashion. This notion is something that I have written about before, and I take more than a little solace in this belief. But I know that there is an abstract quality to my insistence on the restorative power of salamanders and their ilk. It’s something I have been thinking about as I write this, because just this morning I learned that a sister of a good friend has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Would the endurance of the natural world be of any comfort to her, and to her friends and family? And how would my beliefs be tested by fire—by my own suffering, or that of a loved one? I have no solid answer these questions, but I know that I will be thinking of them in the weeks ahead, as I probe the canyons of the Inyo Mountains, and the lives of their creatures. “the astounded soul / Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple / As false dawn.” Richard Wilbur, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” Love may call us to the things of this world, but why are we called to love by such disparate things? Why does one person discover their emotional valence—“the capacity of something to unite, react, or interact with something else”—in the noise-drenched crowd at a NASCAR race, while someone else is summoned, just as profoundly, to the lush green silence of an alpine meadow? Perhaps the lure of particular things (people, places, objects, etc.) is a simply matter of nature and nurture, but I doubt it. Beyond the powerful push of genes and environment—the transformation of DNA and experience into flesh and blood and behavior—there is the profound mystery of recognition, of coming into a place that feels like home. Lock and key, enzyme and substrate: the fit is not always easy to explain. Think of the things that you love: Why? Consider, for example, desert salamanders. I have studied birds for most of my professional life. My first experience with field biology came when I worked as a summer field assistant on a study of how highways impact riparian birds. Over the course of three field seasons I grew to love ornithological research and Southwestern birds, from Vermilion Flycatchers to Summer Tanagers and Painted Redstarts, and the rest followed (if not always easily, at least predictably): master’s and PhD studies on avian ecology, and a research program at Brockport mostly involving birds. So, why switch from birds to Inyo Mountains salamanders? My fascination with salamanders is curious and complicated. I am drawn to them for many reasons—some obvious, others more mysterious and ineffable. One explanation has to do with place. The salamanders live in a spectacular desert mountain range just to the west of Death Valley—country that I came into, and came to love, in the mid-1970s, when I followed feral burros through the spare and spacious beauty of the Panamint Mountains. My fieldwork for Relicts of a Beautiful Sea, circa 2009 – 2013, was an excuse to return to the Death Valley region, and the ideas, questions, and emotions generated by writing Relicts pointed me toward the Inyo Mountains salamander. But I sought out the salamander, among all of the other interesting organisms (many of them birds) that I could have chosen. This was a conscious act, yet one with a murky set of underlying causes, as with so many of our decisions, from the important (marriage, career, children) to the mundane (vacation destination, movie preferences, clothing). Another reason for my project is that teaching Herpetology (a course on reptiles and amphibians) at Brockport forced me to pay attention to salamanders. Herpetology begins in the depth of winter and ends in early May. Fieldwork is impossible until the end of March, and then the main actors are amphibians, among them eleven species of salamanders. Seven of these are in the family Plethodontidae, or lungless salamanders, which also contains the Inyo Mountains salamander. And so my initial field encounters with New York’s salamanders led to fascination, and fascination led to a series of student research projects—and in the process I began thinking about salamanders in a serious way. And then there is the Inyo Mountains salamander’s “islandness”: its only home a fault-block desert mountain range, with a distribution restricted to twenty-two small patches of riparian habitat, each surrounded by a harsh and unforgiving world, and so islands within a larger, montane island. Islands: to use a term coined by E. O. Wilson, I am at heart a “nesiophile,” someone with “an inordinate fondness and hungering for islands.” The islands that excite my imagination include true oceanic islands, like Lord Howe Island and Rarotonga in the South Pacific, as well as habitat islands like the Great Basin mountain ranges—or on a smaller scale the springs and seeps that shelter so many of their creatures. I became conscious of my nesiophilia in 1980, during my first year of graduate school at Washington State University, when I read the Theory of Island Biogeography, by Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson. The ways in which their scientific ideas dovetailed with my imagination soon had me seeing islands everywhere in eastern Washington’s Palouse country, from hedgerows and shelterbelts to isolated stands of ponderosa pine and remnant prairie patches. And then there were memories: of seeking refuge from the summer’s heat among the pine and fir forests of some Arizona “sky island,” after a long day of fieldwork; or of the eleven months that I had spent at Warden’s Grove, a small cabin sheltered by a tiny island of white and black spruce at the farthest edge of the boreal forest, surrounded by an oceanic roll of arctic tundra. . . The islands of my imagination became the islands of my research: bird communities of subalpine forest patches in the Beartooth Mountains; Harris’s Sparrows nesting in wind-flagged spruce stands along the Thelon River in the Northwest Territories; breeding birds in New York’s increasingly rare, island-like grasslands; a species of tiger beetle, restricted to isolated cobble bars along the Genesee River; and pupfishes in slips and springs of desert water. But years before I’d even taken a herpetology course, stalked burros in Death Valley, or recognized my fascination with islands—before I’d even spent much time as a field biologist—an inchoate fascination drew me to western lungless salamanders from isolated mountain ranges. And I recall when I first recognized my attraction: the summer of 1971, when I worked on a fire ecology project on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. One day, while thumbing through Robert Stebbins’s Field Guide to the Amphibians and Reptiles of Western North America, I stumbled across brief descriptions of the Jemez Mountain and Sacramento Mountains salamanders (the Inyo Mountains salamander would not be described for another eight years). These species are isolated endemics restricted to mountain ranges in New Mexico, and I was taken by their presence in what seemed like such incongruous places. Although I never sought them out, the stories of those two species were part of my imagination for thirty-eight years, before I began exploring, deeply, the life of another salamander endemic to western mountains. The Death Valley region, teaching herpetology and developing a passion for salamanders, islands and nesiolphilia, and western mountain endemics: all are ingredients of my obsession with Batrachoseps campi. Yet the sum of these explanations feels insufficient, perhaps because some vital component is missing. It’s as if I have imagined a multivariate equation that includes four or five precisely measured but relatively unimportant variables, and one critical but unknowable one, which renders the equation useless. My search for a clear explanation seems like an alchemist’s fantasy: lead into gold, cold fusion, trickle-down economics.
Ultimately, I sense that my questions about attraction and passion will go unanswered, at least in any clear way. I never will fully understand why, in the presence of an Inyo Mountains salamander, I encounter such joy and excitement. But perhaps I am being too analytical. Perhaps it is more than enough to feel—to have been granted that type of connection that we all wish for, and which gives our life its greatest pleasures: that journey out of the self and into a place where, as the poet writes, “the astounded soul / Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple.” As I’ve mentioned, one of the great pleasures of my sabbatical is the opportunity to wander wherever my inclinations might lead me. By grace of academic tradition, the College at Brockport, and the delete button on my email server, I now have more time for thinking. I can pick up an enticing novel or book of poems, get lost surfing the Web, or write long, rambling letters to friends. Conversely, a corresponding danger of my sabbatical is the opportunity to wander wherever my inclinations might lead me, because those mental peregrinations could lead into intellectual displacement activity. Without some discipline my sabbatical could become a dilettante’s playground—and although it’s great fun to swing on monkey bars and dig in a sandbox, at the end of the year all I might have to show for it might be skinned knees and sand in my shorts. I recently felt the seduction of the playground when my brother-in-law showed me a small book, Clarence: The Life of a Sparrow, by Clare Kripps. It’s a quintessentially British work, first published in 1954, which describes the quirky and intelligent behavior of a foundling House (or English) Sparrow. Reading Kripps’s little account makes it difficult to typecast House Sparrows as “pests,” even if they are an exotic species in North America. (Quickly now, the ecological sign of the cross. . .) But what really distracted me from entering salamander data into spreadsheets, editing manuscripts and Master’s theses, and writing grant proposals—what I “should” have been doing—was the epigraph to Clarence, from The Problem of Pain, by C. S. Lewis: “Man was appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts, and everything he does to an animal is either a lawful exercise, or a sacrilegious abuse, of an authority by divine right. The ‘tame’ animal is therefore, in the deepest sense, the only natural one. . . More animals than you might expect are ready to adore man if they are given reasonable opportunity; for man was made to be the priest and even, in one sense, the Christ of the animals—the mediator through whom they apprehend so much of the Divine splendor as their irrational nature allows.” Well. The above passage led me straight toward the displacement rabbit-hole, and so I put aside my spreadsheets and tunneled into The Problem of Pain, Lewis’s attitudes about non-human animals, and theodicy—the effort to explain the existence of evil (such as pain and suffering) in a world created by an omnipotent, good, and just god. This is a central conundrum for Christianity, particularly in regards to non-human animals. One might explain the existence of human pain and suffering as an outcome of the “Fall,” but why should the poor eating habits of Adam and Eve result in an avalanche of collateral damage, the endless agonies that non-human animals endure each day, on this earth: a mired woods bison, alive and conscious, fed upon by wolves; a pregnant muskox, taking a week to die of a breech birth on some cold and lonely arctic hill; or a line of biting ants, marching toward a nest of three-day-old Australasian pipits. . . On and on. This was a vexing problem for Darwin, who wondered why a good and loving deity would create ichneumon wasps, which lay their eggs inside living caterpillars, leaving the wasp larvae to grow and slowly devour their hosts, ignoring the most vital parts until they are large enough to metamorphose. “There seems to me too much misery in the world,” Darwin wrote. The Problem of Pain was Lewis’s exploration of theodicy—mostly in regards to humans, but he devoted more than a chapter to pain in non-human animals. A detailed examination of Lewis’s views would require a book of my own, and a depth of knowledge that would take years to develop. That would be a very deep and winding rabbit-hole, and I will stay out of it. Still, the epigraph to Clarence led me to read much of The Problem of Pain, and sort out Lewis’s views on everything from evolution (rather ambivalent) to the difference between suffering and pain (pain is a simple neurological sensation, while suffering requires consciousness and according to Lewis probably does not occur in most animals). Interesting stuff, but before long I became aware of an uncomfortable sensation, part guilt and part anxiety: I am wasting my time. I should refocus on my sabbatical work, especially those salamanders. . . But not quite yet: Although I disagree with almost everything in the quotation from The Problem of Pain (okay, I am comfortable with the articles and conjunctions), two ideas most irritate me. The first is that notion that, “The ‘tame’ animal is therefore, in the deepest sense, the only natural one.” The second is the proposition that [man] is “the mediator through whom they [the animals] apprehend so much of the Divine splendor as their irrational nature allows.” In Lewis’s supremely anthropocentric view, humans are the conduit through which animals realize their true nature, and Get Right with God; not only do we have “dominion over the beasts,” but we also provide the path to whatever degree of enlightenment they are capable of. Perhaps it’s a simplification, but Lewis seems to be saying that without humans, animals ultimately are lost in the spiritual (and natural) wild. Now C. S. Lewis was kindly and well-disposed toward animals; he believed that humans had a moral responsibility to treat them fairly, and wrote about them with great sympathy. His home was a refuge for cats and dogs, and he reportedly fed the resident house mice, rather than trap them. Yet his portrayal of the relationship between humans and animals seems so wrong-headed as to be ludicrous. Try applying his notions to the Inyo Mountain salamander, a species which has existed for over ten million years—at least one hundred times longer than Homo sapiens, and more than five thousand times longer than the Christian belief system that Lewis channeled in The Problem of Pain. What were those salamanders doing in the 9,998,000 years or so before Christianity came along? Or in the 9,999,950 years or more before 1973, when two biologists stumbled upon them? Will the salamanders forever remain a bit less than fully “natural,” because (let’s face it), they are not particularly well-suited to taming? And given my research focus on Inyo Mountains salamanders, am I somehow responsible for helping them apprehend as “much of the Divine splendor as their irrational nature allows”? That’s a pretty challenging responsibility, given that I do not speak salamander. . . I don’t get it. It’s difficult to consider the natural world as fully subservient to, and incomplete without, humans—discounting the 4.5 billion years of earth’s history prior to the moment when Homo sapiens arrived upon the Pleistocene scene, and ignoring the sheer, beautiful “otherness” of animals. It’s a dangerous and misguided philosophy (or theology).
Instead, I’ll opt for Henry Beston’s view of animals, described so beautifully in The Outermost House: “We need another and a wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals. . . We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken a form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. . . For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of earth.” And so it is Beston’s view of the natural world, rather than C. S. Lewis’s, that I carry with me into the Inyo Mountains. And each time that I flip a rock in some rough canyon and find a small creature coiled there, I sense that I have been offered a momentary and fortunate glimpse of another nation, of a “finished and complete” life, one that has little need of my kind. And yet the beauty of the Inyo Mountains salamander’s sheer otherness draws me into their world, into a visceral and intellectual joy. In thinking about these things, and of my coming field season—of being among the salamanders once again—I realize that reading Clarence: The Life of a Sparrow and The Problem of Pain were not really intellectual displacement activities at all. Sure—they offered up a bit of a detour, but it was one that helped me to more fully consider salamanders, their place in my world, and my place in theirs. Such are the rewards of reading widely, and the value of rabbit-holes. |
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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