Why is it that we love the things that we love? And why is it that we sometimes recognize them immediately, as they call out to us with such insistence and power? What’s the alchemy? I’ve struggled with these questions for much of my adult life and this spring I’ve been hauling them around the Inyo Mountains, along with my calipers, spring scale, GPS, and 1.5 ml vials of ethanol – those tiny repositories for Inyo Mountains salamander tail-tips and so much more. Love and obsession, it seems, are only a bush-bash, third-class scramble, or steep and trailless mountain pass away. Along with the equipment necessary for salamandering, I’ve also carried Galatea 2.2 into the Inyos—Richard Powers’ autobiographical take on love, artificial intelligence, and consciousness. It’s been a fortuitous read for me, because partway through I found this description of Powers’ encounter with August Sander’s 1914 photograph, “Three Farmers on Their Way to Dance”: “First image on the left-hand wall, just inside the door. That room’s geometry has fused to the floor plan of my brain. I stood face to faces with three young men who were scrutinizing me. They’d waited two-thirds of a century for me to swing into view, just past the photographer’s shoulder. . . I felt the shock of recognizing a thing I knew I had never seen before.” This was Powers’ epiphany; the following week he quit his technical editing job in Boston and began writing his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance; twelve more novels have followed, along with a MacArthur Fellowship, National Book Award, and Pulitzer Prize. Those three young German men, headed to a dance and soon afterwards to the “Great War”: glancing back at the camera, their lives and deaths before them, pulling Powers into his future. Powers’ chance encounter with Sander’s photograph gave him his calling—an ambush of sympathy and awareness, his world focusing on one utterly compelling thing. It’s as though the connection was predatory, the photograph—those three faces—just waiting for its prey to wander within striking distance, unawares. Symbiosis and sacrament, transcendence and traction, and thus Anna Akhmatova: And the miraculous comes so close to the ruined and dirty houses-- something not known to anyone at all, but wild in our breast for centuries. That aching wildness in our breast: recognizing and giving it voice grants us meaning and comfort, aids our escape from the ruined houses that we all must inhabit at some time, in some place. We never can get away clean, but we can get away—can uncover those precious moments in which the quotidian and sometimes terrible press of the world retreats, thrown back by wonder and love, by mystery and connection. And Akhmatova’s miraculous: when, really, it is easy to understand or predict its closeness? Rarely, I think—perhaps most often in the love of a parent for a child. But the deepest of intimacies between two lovers or friends—how does that recognition rise up and claim us? Or the profound attraction that we feel for particular things or activities, when all our neurons fire and our emotions crest far above flood stage": enzyme and substrate, lock and key, poem and reader, song and listener. Or photograph and viewer. Tinder and a match, flaring. Reductionist that I am, larger issues like emotional and physical resonance inevitably draw me to the particulars. And so, what about those Inyo Mountains salamanders and me? My field notes tell me that since 2009 I’ve spent over 100 days in the Inyo Mountains searching out Batrachoseps campi and trying to understand something of its story. This somewhat (okay, mostly) quixotic obsession has cost me a lot of sweat, a bit of blood, and a fair amount of time and money, all in pursuit of an obscure, non-charismatic “micro-vertebrate” that spends its very slow life in a small set of difficult-to-reach places—an outcome of geological, evolutionary, and ecological events sprawled across millions of years. These processes have left a handful of salamander populations hidden in rough and isolated pockets of the Inyo Mountains and produced a salamander species that is one of only two among over 700 in the world whose range is contained entirely within desert habitat. I’ve found 341 salamanders in the Inyo Mountains and each new one (a rock flipped or log rolled, and a tiny animal, coiled) has been as miraculous and compelling as the last. The only exceptions to the “ordinary” pleasure-tinged awe that accompanies each new salamander discovery have been an increased burst of ecstatic energy on the three occasions when I stumbled on an unknown population—and also my intensely emotional reaction when I confronted my first Inyo Mountains salamander. That experience, an amphibian-charged analog to “Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance,” blind-sided me with Powers’ “shock of recognizing a thing I knew I had never seen before.” Perhaps it’s odd, but outside of witnessing the birth of my two children I can think of only a few first encounters in my life that affected me so instantaneously and profoundly. My road-to-Damascus salamander moment came during a spring vacation trip to the Death Valley region with my (then) eighteen-year-old son, Martin. I’d been scouting out places and ideas for the sabbatical project that would eventually morph into Relicts of a Beautiful Sea. I thought, vaguely, that Batrachoseps campi might find its way into my imagined account, even though I knew almost nothing about the species, other than what I’d gleaned from two scientific articles: a highly restricted and unusual desert distribution; discovery by scientists on September 29, 1973; its closest relative far away, in Oregon; four toes on its hind feet; and deep genetic divisions among its isolated populations. But beyond this collection of facts, the Inyo Mountains salamander had no presence for me—or perhaps essence would be a better word. -All of that changed on March 18, 2009, when Martin and I left our rental car on a heat-blasted alluvial fan below the western edge of the Inyo Mountains and followed a washed-out dirt road towards a locality described in the first paper on the species. No hint of water, temperatures already in the 80s, a thin scrim of cirrus over the highest peaks, scattered barrel cactus and creosote bush: a Mohave desert world already trending towards thermal conflagration, at least to our pasty, winterized brains and bodies. An hour of steady walking brought us into a narrow drainage, a storm of heat and light bouncing off the reddish-brown canyon walls: this was no place for any salamander in its right evolutionary mind. But then a flash of katydid green up-canyon, spring willows ripe with catkins and new leaves, and a small slip of running water, miracle enough in that xeric world. We began searching beneath a clump of willows, below a small waterfall draped in a curtain of fern and moss. Nothing. I worked my way uphill and to the east, flipping rocks and following the water through wild rose thickets (tracks of blood on bare legs), into big, blocky talus. Still nothing. I had no search image, no sense of where a salamander might be; this was not the Bristol Hills south of Rochester, where a good locality might yield ten salamander species during a spring afternoon’s relaxed exploration. I grew discouraged and frustrated: all this way and yet nothing, the Inyo Mountains salamander no more real to me than a salt pan playa mirage. But then: I flipped a rock just a few inches from the water and a small, chocolate-brown creature coiled. ”Martin—come here!” I picked the salamander up and my world suddenly narrowed. I held my breath, felt some inchoate reaction churn in my belly. Tears welled in my eyes. Sucker-punched by emotion, I felt the overwhelming pull of a one-gram animal, one that had waited something on the order of 2.5 million years for me to step into its gravitational field. And in that moment, I was bound in some powerful and fundamental way to the salamander’s scientific and metaphorical story. The why of that sudden valence is another issue, though. Thirteen years later and I’m still trying to answer that question, which is Part 2 of this story.
Sad as it might be, most people will never have the opportunity to hold an Inyo Mountains salamander in their hands and contemplate the kind of salamander-related questions that keep drawing me onto their home ground. And of course, most people just aren’t going to care. I can accept this lack of valence and even (partially at least) understand it. But my prayer is that everyone will discover some analog to the Inyo Mountains salamander out there, something that draws them fully and completely into the world, something that grants them joy and passion, and the strength to deal with life’s inevitable anguish and sorrow—of which there is so much now, strewn in bloody trails from Buffalo to Kyiv, Minneapolis to Orange County. For in the end, it’s as Theodore Roethke wrote: “Beautiful my desire, and the place of my desire.” And oh that beauty, that resonance: as fundamental as oxygen to each of us, as we go on.
9 Comments
Crystal
5/20/2022 11:17:20 am
This is one of my very favorite pieces of your writing! I am grateful to have encountered it, like a precious salamander that held on for 2.5 million years (maybe not quite that dramatic) but anyway, it’s a great piece of writing! And it weaves together the past and the present, nature and humankind, meaning and chance; lots of things are brought into connection. I’ll let you say it because you say it better!
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Chris
5/20/2022 11:48:20 am
Thanks, Crystal. I do hope that it resonates with folks, whatever their "Three Farmers on a Way to a Dance" moment might be!
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Lisa Hendricks
5/21/2022 10:13:56 am
Beautifully written. I hope Garth gets a chance to read it. I'm so proud of you and your work, both in the field and written.
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Nicki
5/22/2022 07:05:38 am
A love song to the Inyo salamanders?
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Chris
5/29/2022 03:52:21 pm
Thanks, Nicki! And yes, a love song to the Inyo Mountains salamander, but without music because I cannot carry a tune! But I do feel pretty fortunate to have found these tiny creatures.
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Gina Adams
5/23/2022 10:11:04 pm
Hi Chris (your fellow 1969 LGHS graduate),
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Chris
5/29/2022 04:24:23 pm
Hi Gina - No need for the LGHS identifier! Thanks for your kind words, and I very much regret not making the 40th LGHS reunion. There just was too much going on at the the start of the academic year. Hope all is well!
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Ralph
5/29/2022 08:40:44 am
Chris, old friend, I’m ever grateful for the chance I had 5 or 6 (?) years ago to tag along on one of these salamander missions in the Inyos… Loved clambering up the dry washes and thinking, Ain’t no way salamanders live HERE! And then finding those squirming beauties tucked up tight under a slick rock. It’s always a pleasure going tromping-hiking with you, and not only because of how splendidly you yodel through the Great American Songbook!
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Chris
5/29/2022 04:26:43 pm
Ralph, old friend, that was 11 years ago! Hard to believe. Hopefully (now that you are retired) we can mount another, more ambitious IMS adventure - one that will put 2011 to shame. So get your walker tuned up for 2023!
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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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