Tangled Bank: Writings from Orion

Roll Call

20 Roll Call Haying is going on right now where I live, each farmer with one eye on the rows, one on the clouds. Here in Willapa, people talk a lot about grass—also Douglas-fir, black-tailed deer, and elk; coho salmon, sturgeon, and Dungeness crab; Holsteins, Herefords, and slugs. In the country, many people (though fewer each year) still take their livelihood directly from other forms of life.Townspeople are less likely to connect with nature on a regular basis. Some, such as bird or butterfly watchers, wildflower and mushroom fanciers,organize their free time around nonhuman encounters. But such folk are uncommon overall, and considered strange by many of their neighbors:eccentric,obsessed,if harmless.The majority,in fact,shows little awareness of other life forms beyond cats, dogs, lawns, and fellow humans. To resist this all-too-easy ignorance, I recommend making a written accounting of the many species we brush up against daily. For example, a spate of recent travels,and the face-changes that spring brings,yielded these contacts for me: That damn dog who barked me awake.A Wilson’s warbler incessantly seeking a mate.Two Felis catus patted goodbye, each made (in part) of six or eight species of recycled rainforest rodents. The badly broken coyote limping along the road on my way to the airport, where tall cottonwoods leafed out limbless in the“designated wetland,”survivors of last winter’s ice storm.The sweet balsam scent of their unfurling buds. Then, in Fairbanks, exploding aspen catkins; sweet birch sap flowing from beaver cuts;waffles sweetened with three species of Vaccinium;and last year’s tart lingonberries lingering on the forest floor,sodden with snowmelt. Browsing moose and musk ox cows and calves, nesting tundra swans, and sandhill cranes flying over the muskeg.Early purple pasqueflowers blooming under black spruce on the University of Alaska campus,a benignant brown bear looming behind the museum podium, and taxidermically malevolent polar bears presiding over each Alaskan airport lobby. 21 Roll Call Back home again, violet-green swallows nesting by my study window, tree swallows on the porch, barn swallows in the canoe room. Big bird biomass at smelt by the covered bridge—eagle, osprey, gull, merganser, cormorant,corvids.Cattle in deep green grass,anise swallowtail and mylitta crescent over phlox.Thousands of dispersing Asian ladybirds, one or two of them rounding my computer screen and glasses rims at all times. Rugmunching clothes moths, a red ant biting me where it never should have been, and tiny ants invading the bathroom. A giant carpenter ant on the road with me as horizontal Sitka spruce, western hemlock, and western red cedar pass by on log trucks, while California poppies and Scots broom splash I-5’s shoulders with bright color. Aloft again with Chief FlightAttendant DianeAlder,Pilot Scott Redheifer, and eight recognizable species in the lunch. Life is a litany of other species. So why are we often oblivious to all but our own? Earlier cultures had a basic, intensive, and entirely essential working knowledge of other species in their midst. In my grandmother’s day,the leading of botany and bird walks was a routine part of the grammar school curriculum.Yet in Fairbanks, where many people were studying “nature,” not a single person I met had noticed the outrageous early eruption of purple pasqueflowers. On another recent trip, I traveled by that species of transport named for a fleet grey dog.To escape the clouds of Nicotiana vapor rising from the riders’ spontaneous combustion at each stop, I took short, quick walks to see what I could find behind the run-down depots: milkweed and sweet clover in a vacant lot; Gaillardia and petunia in a planter; hops, yeast, and barley in a pint glass. I never saw another passenger leave the stations. As I stretched my seat-sore muscles, I lamented that what seemed absolutely natural, even essential, to me drew only puzzled glances from my fellow travelers. The species roll call makes an illuminating school assignment or journal exercise—not necessarily going forth to“document biodiversity,”but simply taking into account the other members of what poet Pattiann Rogers calls “the family.” You don’t have to know everyone’s name; you can list “the purple flower with the woolly leaves by the corner,” or “the bird that squeaks like a rusty gate each morning.”Once a neighbor is accounted for, [3.145.88.130] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 07:50...