Botanical Companions: A Memoir of Plants and Place

Collecting

Collecting I notice his age first, because he is thirty-six, and so am I. His clothes are formal by my standards—vest, trousers, jacket. Sensible boots laced up above his ankles. He looks midwestern, sturdy and blond, scholarly now, and slight. He seems comfortable here. I won’t disturb him. He is curved over plant specimens under a lamp at a dark desk. Nothing in his office matters outside his gentle attention to his work. He looks like he knows what he is doing, glass in hand, poring over the petiole of a leaf. He will not look up though I watch a long time near him. He can’t talk to me of course. There is only his posture to read, the hour, the crossing and recrossing of knees in coarse wool, the slow circulation of tools in his hand—glass, pen, paper, book, spectacles. I am here to see him work, to see his work, loose mounds of specimens on heavy papers, his summer’s collection dry and flat, turned now this winter to a long season of study. No, he does not know what he is doing; the pen goes down. A small crisis of a private hour. He meets it without disappointment, impassive and quiet. He reopens Gray’s Manual. This isn’t quite his work yet. All his references lie heavy as Bibles around the dim edges of his lamplight. He is sure only about the fact of this plant on his own page, and the day he plucked it whole from the world, but here taped to its paper it is mute. He needs its There is no sense in searching for the secret of what anyone may have known. —Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever name. He is not Adam. Both of us are at a loss. He has to read Gray; I have to touch those plants, the cool gritty soles of those brown boots. I haunt Laramie, a breath I barely recognize as myself, free, lost. He goes about his business in the Rocky Mountain Herbarium, piling specimens into cabinets and new species into botanical science. I can’t leave him alone. I follow him to the vacant lots, through the scrappy pasture now manicured in the middle of campus, up Medicine Bow Peak where the asters bloom improbably late at eleven thousand feet on my birthday in the fall. He doesn’t notice them when he races down the mountain to his dying wife. Though this is a mistake, I try to make him speak from his letters, his articles, his sermons, his lecture notes. Tell me where I am. Tell me how to live here. Brittle history appears on my papers—about Wyoming, about botany—as I sit curved over my own desk. He hasn’t said a word. But he is speaking all the time, through the soles of my own boots, my eyes, my hands full of soil and leaves, the thin air in my lungs in an alpine swale near Brooklyn Lake. What no one can tell me directly I learn by physical poetry in space and time, his loose rhyme cradling the entire Laramie Basin and my life in it. He lived and worked here. His heart and body moved through these campus buildings, and across the basin, where I can also go. A slow alchemy makes me visible. I am lucky; he has left a box of sedges behind in the herbarium, unidentified, for a hundred years. The slender stems are still green when I see them. Touching them my hand becomes real. aven nelson and Celia Alice Calhoun Nelson had been married for forty-five years when Alice died in 1929. At the top of Medicine Bow Peak, the highest rise of the Snowy Range Mountains west of Laramie, Aven received a call at the lookout tower that his wife had fallen seriously ill. He had just led a group of visiting botanists up the rocky scree of the ridge that early August day, from which they would be able to see across the Laramie Basin, the little lakes nestled in its floor, and the bright ranges to the south that include Longs Peak in Colorado and Rocky Mountain National Park. Although Alice enjoyed summer field trips and accompanied Aven and his colleagues often, she had stayed home that day. Aven’s guests had come for a few days’ trip organized by the Botanical Society of America, which Aven arranged to begin...