Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

Learning to See

Learning to See  7 Learning to See  A fter four hours at 32,000 feet, I’ve finally succumbed to the stupor of a transcontinental flight. Between takeoff and landing, we are each in suspended animation, a pause between chapters of our lives. When we stare out the window into the sun’s glare, the landscape is only a flat projection with mountain ranges reduced to wrinkles in the continental skin. Oblivious to our passage overhead, other stories are unfolding beneath us. Blackberries ripen in the August sun; a woman packs a suitcase and hesitates at her doorway; a letter is opened and the most surprising photograph slides from between the pages. But we are moving too fast and we are too far away; all the stories escape us, except our own. When I turn away from the window, the stories recede into the twodimensional map of green and brown below. Like a trout disappearing into the shadow of an overhanging bank, leaving you staring at the flat surface of the water and wondering if you saw it at all. I put on my newly acquired and still frustrating reading glasses and lament my middle-aged vision. The words on the page float in and out of focus. How is it possible that I can no longer see what was once so plain? My fruitless strain to see what I know is right in front of me reminds me of my first trip into the Amazon rain forest. Our indigenous guides would patiently point out the iguana resting on a branch or the toucan looking down at us through the leaves. What was so obvious to their practiced eyes was nearly invisible to us. Without practice, we simply couldn’t interpret the pattern of light and shadow as “iguana” and so it remained right before our eyes, frustratingly unseen. We poor myopic humans, with neither the raptor’s gift of longdistance acuity, nor the talents of a housefly for panoramic vision. However, with our big brains, we are at least aware of the limits of our vision. With a degree of humility rare in our species, we acknowledge there is much that we can’t see, and so contrive remarkable ways to 8  Gathering Moss observe the world. Infrared satellite imagery, optical telescopes, and the Hubbell space telescope bring vastness within our visual sphere. Electron microscopes let us wander the remote universe of our own cells. But at the middle scale, that of the unaided eye, our senses seem to be strangely dulled. With sophisticated technology, we strive to see what is beyond us, but are often blind to the myriad sparkling facets that lie so close at hand. We think we’re seeing when we’ve only scratched the surface. Our acuity at this middle scale seems diminished, not by any failing of the eyes, but by the willingness of the mind. Has the power of our devices led us to distrust our unaided eyes? Or have we become dismissive of what takes no technology but only time and patience to perceive? Attentiveness alone can rival the most powerful magnifying lens. I remember my first encounter with the North Pacific, at Rialto Beach on the Olympic Peninsula. As a landlocked botanist, I was anticipating my first glimpse of the ocean, craning my neck around every bend in the winding dirt road. We arrived in a dense gray fog that clung to the trees and beaded my hair with moisture. Had the skies been clear we would have seen only what we expected: rocky coast, lush forest, and the broad expanse of the sea. That day, the air was opaque and the backdrop of coastal hills was visible only when the spires of Sitka Spruce briefly emerged from the clouds. We knew the ocean’s presence only by the deep roar of the surf, out beyond the tidepools. Strange, that at the edge of this immensity, the world had become very small, the fog obscuring all but the middle distance. All my pent-up desire to see the panorama of the coast became focussed on the only things that I could see, the beach and the surrounding tidepools. Wandering in the grayness, we quickly lost sight of each other, my friends disappearing like ghosts in just a few steps. Our muffled voices knit us together, calling out the discovery of a perfect pebble, or the intact shell of a razor clam. I knew from poring over field guides in anticipation...