Welcome to the Wonder of Everyday Nature

I am writing this blog because I am so compelled by the wonder of nature around me.   Many of my favorite books are about people living extraordinary lives of observation. Annie Dillard spent a year in the Wilderness writing A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Thoreau escaped to Walden to live in a cabin. Henry Beston lived in a shack on the beach described in  in The Outermost House, braving the fierce howling winds of winter. One of my new favorites, Elizabeth Tova Bailey wrote The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, while on a sickbed. In Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey escapes civilization to the red canyons and shimmering air of the hot southwest. Some writers like Julie Zwickefoose, who wrote A year in Eden live on farms, or in wild places.  They have pets, and move slowly, and write of homemade bread and jam. Birds flock to their feeders and they know them all.

Well, world- I live here, not there, now, not then. I live on a third of an acre on a busy street, here where the salt from the winter plows kills the edge of my grass. Here in a place of privilege- a larger lot than many in the heart of cities will ever find, and yet an infintesimal plot compared to the great unreached farms of Australia where cattle wander in search of water, small compared to the wild reaches of Appalachia, small compared to the national park where I would want to go- to have a year if I were such  a pilgrim. How vast are the reaches I would hike, how closely I would watch the creeks, how cold and warm and tired and boundlessly energetic I would be were I to take a year to go and be.

The call of my real life, my two sons, my spouse, one pet and two jobs, holds me here with ties I have chosen and love. And so my pilgrimage is broken into a mosaic- a glimpse of the transcendent here and there, the windows into truth and beauty are flashes in the everyday. Heart stopping joy and the crazy fun of curiosity, the morbid fascination of the odd, all here- where I am. And I share it with you now, in the hopes we will travel together, for I suffer an overwhelming love of the fierce and wild, the real, the live and dead the complex and messy world and the One who loves all.

Why Be an Aquatic Ecologist

I met a TV writer at a conference of over the summer. He asked what I did. “I am an aquatic ecologist, ” I answered.

“Why?“ he asked blankly.

In that moment I knew of two answers I could give- one short and one long. In the longer one I could try with words to convey the beauty of a marsh in the sun, the power of water cold and tidal, the depth of rivers, the joy of creeks and crayfish, the smell of rotting vegetation and sound of popping bubbles in drying mud. I could extol the sound of gabbling ducks during their flight overhead, or the raucous call of the red winged blackbird fighting for his territory. I could describe the wonder of a copepod, the rare ephemeral fairy shrimp, the hidden recesses of water lily rhizomes, the pithy length of cattails rising in the breeze.

I could have tried to explain the screaming rapture of green, green, green plants  in rings in a June prairie pothole, or the way you could lose yourself if you stared too long at the cool sage color  of rice cut grass or the profusion of smartweed flowers, or the quick beating breast of a flitting goldfinch.

I could have told of water, the power and imagination of it, the movement and currents, its fast scrabbling gush  over sloping soil, is slow drip into the cool underreaches deep below.

Perhaps I could have told of the joy of science, or learning, the reading and joining and conferring, the questions and tentative answers, the signal arising from the noise. Science is pontillism in action.   But mostly I would have talked about the mystery of watery lands.   I could have told these things and hoped he would understand them.

Or, as I did do  microsecond later, I could give the second much shorter answer. “ Why?” I echoed him equally confused. “ Who wouldn’t? I mean,  if you could?”

He stared at me for a second, and I saw his first uncertain frown turn to easement  as if, in that one short answer my longer answer was transferred as well. A thousand words and pictures, a million moments  impossible to detail, conveyed to another in a simple phrase. ”Well, OK ,“ he said, as,  satisfied, we turned to other topics.