Barry Lopez in Arctic Dreams;
"The sound of my footfall changes as I step from damp ground to wet, from wet to dry. Microhabitats. I turn the pages of a mental index to plants and try to remember which are the ones to distinguish these borders: which plants separate at a glance mesic from hydric, hydric from xeric? I do not remember. Such generalities, in any case, would only founder on the particulars at my feet. One is better off with a precise and local knowledge, and a wariness of borders. These small habitats, like the larger landscapes, merge imperceptibly with each other. Another, remembered landscape makes this one seem familiar, and the habits of an animal in one region provoke speculation about behavior among its relatives in another region. But no country, finally, is just like another. The generalities are abstractions. And the lines on our topographic maps reveal not only the scale at which we are discerning, but our tolerance for discrepancies in nature.
Scientists say the pattern of coming and going, of feeding and resting, repeats itslef every twenty-four hours. But a description of it becomes more jagged and complex than the experience, like any parsing of a movement in time. "
Richard Manning, in Grassland from the end of chapter 11, "Seeds"
Pauline says her work is not simply an application of her knowledge as a botanist. It is not a prescribing of the known. Rather, it is exploration of the microscopically complex world we do not know and a realization that some of it is not knowable.
"This is a search for the unknown, and the unknown forms the model from which we work," she says. "We as a species are lessened by the loss of unknown places."
We drove all that day on straight gravel roads set in a grid across each other every mile and finally stopped to lok at one of those. Pauline showed me where a bank had been cut and the roadbed built up, forever altering the soil profile below. The soil manifests itself as plants. The refuge will close these roads and bulldoze them back to something resembling the natural contour, but bulldozers cannot re-create the soil profile, and so for the ages, the plants above these buried roads will be different. The soil below will always contain different minerals in different layers, percolate water differently, and the plants will express all of this. Pauline believes the difference in plants may be visible even from aircraft. Someday one may fly above this refuge and still see the Jeffersonian grid sticking through the grass like the bones off a great buried beast.
In that the plants tell the history of a place, I'm not sure I would have it otherwise. One cannot cheat the land's library of its information.
In some real ways, the effort to re-find the landscape, which is the same as the effort to re-attach our lives to the land, is a religious quest, and it makes sense to consider it that way. Western literate culture, with its respect for authority, needed a creator and pursued one, eventually separate from the creation. This separation excused all manners of destruction.
Yet the creation remains, and some of us creatures need to find it. The creator and creation are the same and the unity is evolution. A place possesses a certain set of circumstances, weather, soil, and community, that lead to a certain manifestation of life in a place. Undeniably, the creation evolved certain parts of life to inhabit certain places, to show the nature of a place. [really, you have to look at lichen to know the primary movers]
Certain cultural traditions took great pains to divine the intentions of the creation. They used shamans, who were not so much magicians or priests or herbalists or storytellers as they were seers, those who would travel beyond the veil to read the verities, to divine the creation's intentions. They saw and heard the mysteries that were just beyond every one else's ken.
...I imagine that must be what it is like sometimes to be a botanist. I have been afield with many of them, and they are different, almost invariably quiet, distant. Undeniably, they see something different from what I see, as if the knowledge of the plants lifts a veil. The whole of it is there in the plants to be read, the full soul of a place, its life and the abuses of its life, the creation's intentions and the manifest violations of those intentions. Botanists are our shamans. "
I was just in my backyard, enjoying the magnificense of 10,000 acres and no people.
Not listening tothe pope in a crowded room, or watching other men's lips move in the idiot box or in the shadows above a beer can. How do I come by this good fortune?
My trusty steed, Betelgeuse.
My trash for the week, and mi sombrero.
The scenery, the shocks. Sometimes I wonder what it means to own something, like this van that was given to me, from my parents and society and the earth, and will return to them, or my jacket, that I found and that could be taken or lost or destroyed at any time. Or this cool spot where the yellow flowers bloom in the abandoned ceremonial pits while the sky stretches over an immense landscape laid open bellow me to the horizon in every direction. Or the entire system of public lands that is our birthright and our trust.
The Southwest is so beautiful...I had to start exploring it.
I am a Forest Guardian, I speak for the trees. I am the embodiment of a Lifestyle Organization. Older people give younger people the money they need in order to live the lifestyle "to which they would like to become accustomed". These older people buy, with their tax deductible contribution, an entire world more to their taste and liking. They are not buying a place in heaven. It is a firmly grounded and embodied reality. A place on earth, or rather a whole landscape of places: acreages and access. They buy better Quality of Life (QoL) The product delivered is both short term, specific, and long term, diffuse. It is the way health care should be: both preventative and curative. A positive vision of health. So the more the lifestyle of the younger confirms the choices of the older, the more successful the business. Isn't that how all business operates?
Migratory and Bedouin
Following the changing seasons, subsisting off the land. Local wine and buffalo. Thoreau said simplify, simplify, so I don't bother heating my food: saves on energy and cleaning dishes. Every day there is a new view out the window. Can you feel the language slipping away? There is no written culture on the Prairie.
Constant movement, movement as a morality.
