knowns and unknowns

 

I. the terrifying

When, last night, we got caught in the clouds on top of the mountain, we began to panic.  Even inside the car, with the windows rolled up, I felt afraid - that the car interior would crossfade into the fog, that the inhabitants within would be swallowed by the mist without.  We're like those ridiculous tourists who come to New York City and think that they're going to get mugged on Broadway in broad daylight, I said.  We're perfectly safe.  Even I didn't believe myself.  One lone car followed us, its headlights bleeding through the thick fog.

A hundred years ago, when I was in college, a professor had us read Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites.   Her thesis - that cultural predilections for violent behavior compensate for an innate fear of predation by beasts - wasn't very convincing.  The idea of an ancient terror, on the other hand, seems entirely plausible every time I find myself someplace remote, unreachable, unsave-able, like when I am  swimming through the murky North Atlantic waiting for the flash of sharp white teeth.  At a family wedding in California wine country several years ago, my parents and I took a shortcut through the mountains, from one busy state thruway to another.  Suddenly we vanished from the known world - our phones didn't work, our GPS didn't work, our field of vision shrank to the sharp turns of a single-lane mountain road.  When the shortcut spat us back out onto the modern highway, I thought that we must be like Rip Van Winkle, that a century must have passed.  We had been gone, I think, just a half an hour.

Maybe it terrifies us city-and-suburban folk because it is so rare that we encounter the unknown Thing That Means Us Harm without the strength of numbers and streetlights.  But nature is still red in tooth and claw.  We moderns are not prepared to meet the vast silence with only ourselves (-self!) to fill it, to encounter the dark night with only ourselves as defense.

II. the tiny
The sunlight rent its way through a few tears in the clouds, so this morning we headed outside.  The leaves glowed more greenly in the low light.  R. snapped off a four-foot-long stretch of rotted branch and I used it as a walking stick.  I could almost have passed for some Appalachian guide except for the plastic garbage bag wrapped around my stability boot.  Bear-bait, everyone agreed.

We headed toward a lake across the field, still deeply furrowed, now overgrown with weeds and wildflowers.  Are those wild strawberries?  (They could be.)  What are those tiny blue flowers?  (I don't know.)  Is that poison ivy?  (I hope not.)

Low fieldstone walls carefully separated fields of weeds from fields of weeds.  Settlers once labored mightily to clear all this land of trees; now saplings spring up, all around my feet, to be mowed to the ground once or twice a year.  Fields are just the space outside the window of your summer house, the land beyond the fire pit; they're not to be monetized, not to be fought, not to be tamed or gardened.

Step by heavy step, I crushed delicate plants under my enormous boot.  Are they fiddlehead ferns?  (They could be.)  But what if they're poisonous?  (They might be.)  I did not know the name of the moss, or the spreading plant with leaves like little kisses, or the lime sea-urchins of the forest floor.

III. the tadpole'd and winged
Just beyond the woods, a round, flat lake looked fake.  I limped over to the water's edge and joined everyone in looking at lizard-like animals.  Some floated on the surface, arms and legs suspended like skydivers, grabbing unwary bugs; others darted through the depths.  Tadpoles, I said.  No, tadpoles are more compacted, someone objected.  Salamanders.  They're having sex, someone else noted.  How can they be having sex?  They've wrapped their tails around one another's necks.

They were definitely having sex.  We left the randy amphibians and climbed back up toward the house.  It began to rain.  Around me, all was green and moss and mud, stone and sky, wood and rotted wood.

- Careful, R. warned me, pointing at the ground.  A large black crow lay dead in the ferns and the weeds.  Its eye was cloudy and open; it hadn't been dead very long.  Where do you think that bird died? I asked.  Did it come down here to die?  Do birds die in the sky?   In Brooklyn, do birds die in the sky would be the name of a band.  

IV. the moderns
I've been thinking a lot lately about time - it's the nature of my training, and my temperament, and my particular job.  A hundred years ago, I said, straining against my walking stick, we'd all know the names of those plants, and the name of the lizards in the lake, even if they were just colloquial or common names.  We'd have some familiar system to explain things.  The natural world - its risks and its pleasures - wouldn't be entirely unknown, something mediated through technology and explained through apps and experienced only on holidays   - A hundred years ago, someone replied, without turning around, we'd all be dead of dysentery; and that's probably true too.