It was a hot July evening about four years ago, and my friend the research librarian was giving me advice about higher education. I was an impressionable 21 and just starting my research career on the Klamath River in Northern California, a region where people are fierce advocates for the place they live. Scientists come in and out of the region to study it, often using the data to advocate for this threatened system, but in the past, there have been instances of scientists just taking the data and leaving. River people, then, turn a wary eye to outsiders descending upon their communities with scientific demands.
Ade looked me right in the eye. “Before you consider graduate study, just remember one thing. Whatever you do, don’t become a biostitute.” She frowned into her G & T, her voice dripping with scorn.
A “biostitute”? I inquired, a little breathless. What did she mean? It sounded bad.
“A biostitute is a big-name, big-time famous scientist who spends the majority of their time squirreled away in their ivory tower somewhere, writing abstract papers about ecological theory that have very little to do with what is actually happening on the ground, in the places they presume to be ‘studying.’ Their famous name and ability to garner funds makes them desirable among agencies, institutions, community resource groups, and tribal governments who want their scientific advice. So they spend their time flying around the country, or the world, on other peoples’ dimes, dispensing ‘wisdom’ from above on subjects and places they were just introduced to yesterday. The people they’re giving the scientific advice to are far more qualified to study their own problems, because they can actually observe their own ecosystems and places up close. The biostitute, instead of becoming familiar with one or a handful of places and focusing on practical study of those places, prostitutes himself or herself out for brief biological missions in places s/he’s never been before and knows nothing about. The result is shoddy, superficial science based on mathematical models that don’t work anything like real life, instead of long-term observations made by locals. The biostitute is focused on his or her academic career and the number of papers published, the number of fancy models created, not on real change, citizen empowerment or effective management of resources.”
Whoa. This was quite the fiery outpouring. I nodded and gulped and took it pretty seriously. My friend Ade is brilliant and usually pragmatic and realistic, not exactly what I’d call an ideologue, so I tend to take what she says to heart, and this, one of her rare diatribes, was no exception. At the time, with little experience of science or scientists, I had nothing to weigh her words against.
The word biostitute stuck in my mind (and my throat) like a thorn, or a fish bone, for years afterward, jabbing painfully and awkwardly at times when I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing next with my life. When I left the Klamath to explore other options and other places, I left with a massive sense of guilt. I’d poured my soul into this landscape, its slopes, streams and springs, and these people, who had in turn invested heavily in me, and now I was uprooting for…..for what? Unemployment. Then short-term employment in one place after another as I tried to convince myself I needed to experience different ecosystems, working with different animals, trying different fields of study and different places. I disliked all of them. Instead of the sense of connection and community I had tapped into on the river, instead of the sense of purpose and cause and love for my work, I encountered only a sense that I was drifting, planktonic and helpless, in a great sea of disconnect and detachment. Was this, I wondered, the first step on the road to biostitution, just selling oneself as a seasonal tech wherever the work happened to be, rather than sticking to one’s guns in a loved place of one’s choosing? This life, it seemed to me, was science without the soul, and that, it seemed, was the foundation upon which one could build a future as a biostitute.
Eventually, when I had had enough, I decided very tentatively it was time to consider graduate study. With a master’s degree or a PhD, I figured, it would be possible for me to earn enough money and have enough ownership over a project or two to be able to afford to stay in, and pay proper attention to, one place, one landscape, and its attendant biological and human communities. As I pored over program websites, emailed dozens of professors and labored worriedly over my application essays, Ade’s advice occasionally popped up and bounced around in my brain. Biostitute. Would 3 or more years spent chest-deep in mathematical analysis of numbers, graphs, charts and models suck the soul out of my science, remove the context (human and landscape) and make me forget why I became interested in fisheries in the first place? Overwhelmed by my options, I drew some lines in the sand. I avoided programs and professors who focused too much on modeling and not enough on fieldwork. I chose only programs located geographically within the historic range of anadromous species of Onchorynchus, and only major professors within those programs who focused on freshwater ecology of some sort, with some relevance to conservation and human dimensions.
About a year later, here I am, the rookie graduate student of a big-name, big-time famous scientist, one of the people on the very cutting edge of aquatic ecology, who often works with mathematical models and has more than a few dozen published papers to his name. Is he a biostitute, and, as his student, am I on my way to becoming one? That’s an easy answer. No, and no. Daniel, although he is a different sort of scientist and a different sort of person than my friends on the river, is no biostitute. He is committed to his work on the Wood River System in Alaska, where he lives for 4 months of the year. Daniel uses computer models to simulate and predict ecological patterns accurately and to great effect, but, born of 15 years of close observation of the lakes and streams he works in, he is also adept at actually seeing patterns in real-time on the landscape. Without the close observations of what’s actually happening out there, he would be unable to write models that work. Without modeling and statistics to help interpret the overwhelming amount of actual field data that is collected, he would be lost in a vast sea of meaningless numbers, out of which one human brain cannot necessarily extract existing patterns. Modeling and real fieldwork go hand-in-hand to achieve a richer, more complex analysis of the subtle changes in the fish populations, zooplankton communities, water temperature and climate that he studies. When modelers lose sight of what it is they’re actually studying, they fall back into a two-dimensional world where the parameters of reality become too simplified and perhaps have little to do with actual fact. When field technicians are unable to interpret the endless counting and measuring they do day after day after day, they can become somewhat disconnected from the sense of story and narrative that mathematical analyses lend to data. Qualitative observations of the landscape are not somehow less valuable than quantitative ones, and vice versa. They are complimentary.
Was my librarian friend correct in her assumptions and warnings about academic scientists, or was she stating things too much in terms of black and white? In the four years since that gin and tonic, I’ve decided that there are many grains of truth in what she said, but that it is a little too stark. The bright line (as she draws it) between the big-name, mathy, modeling University Scientist and the earthy, grassroots Citizen Scientist is a false dichotomy. One needs the other, and they can exist, simultaneously, in the same individual. I can use models, publish many papers, work at an academic university, have a lot of funding, and travel and work in many places and still have integrity in the science that I produce. What I take away from the stern lecture against biostitution is not that I should fear turning into some ivory-tower monster, but rather that it is not enough to simply do the science (especially to puff oneself up), fly around the country talking about yourself, and letting the data sit there. Conservation science, ecology, and related disciplines ought to be performed with a purpose. I don't mean bogus science with foregone conclusions and pre-meditated or falsified results. I mean an ethic, a direction, a whole other layer than the scientific method.
To explain what I mean, let me unfurl another anecdote. Another dear friend of mine, who also happens to be a budding scientist, once said something to me that turned on a whole bunch of lightbulbs over my head at once. We were at a conference and we had just sat through one of the more boring, inaccessible, incomprehensible and generally bad research presentations I’ve ever heard in my life, given (alarmingly) by a seasoned professor and fisheries scientist. Despite his age and experience, the man appeared to have no idea of how to clearly convey research goals, methods, results and overall concepts to an audience. After the presentation, my friend and I were expressing our surprise that such a man, with an important role in research and resource management, would have no communication skills.
“It just makes me think,” said my friend, “that as a scientist, it isn’t enough to do research. We also have responsibilities to be educators about and advocates for the places and organisms we study.”
Now this is more like it. Rather than pursue a scientific career path cowering in fear and loathing of doing the “wrong thing” (or even becoming a biostitute, a creature I’m beginning to believe may be largely mythical), I’d rather try to live in inspiration, attempting to live up to the triple bottom line of good science, good education about that science, and well-founded advocacy. This is how, for me, you avoid becoming a biostitute and start to put the soul back into science.
More about this line of thought very soon.
Friday, August 5, 2011
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Why Field Biology? Part One
I write this listening to the soft sound of waves against the gravel beach of Lake Nerka, and, in the background, a loon calling a long howling call, like a lonesome coyote. Today I watched a pair of loons diving on Hidden Lake. One minute, they were on the surface, paddling silently along; the next minute they had seamlessly disappeared beneath the glassy calm, hardly leaving a ripple. Phantoms.
About nine days ago, I moved from Aleknagik up to a more remote camp on the second lake in the Wood River System, Lake Nerka. This lake, I am happy to report to all the fish geeks out there, is the namesake for one of its most famous and numerous inhabitants, the sockeye salmon, otherwise known as Red Salmon--Onchorhynchus nerka. The camp is the definition of "remote"-- it is an hour and a half by boat from the nearest village, and sits at the base of Church Mountain, one peak among a foreboding wall of mountains that zoom a couple thousand feet up from the lake, transitioning quickly from spruce forest to alder and blueberry scrub to granite scree-fields, spires, and patches of leftover snow. Though there are no glaciers here now, it wasn't so long ago (on a geologic timescale) that glaciers filled each one of the U-shaped valleys that now form the various arms, fjords, and river valleys draining into the lake. A glacier scoured out Lake Nerka itself, along with all the other lakes in the system. It's times like these when I wish I had a pocket-sized geologist I could bring along with me to interpret some of the strange geological patterns I see here, so different than the predictably constant columnar basalt of the Cascades and the Columbia Gorge. Like a total lack of good shale skipping rocks everywhere except for ONE BEACH in one cove in one place on the lake. Or the lens of clay on Hidden Creek. The fact that half the spires of these mountains are granite, and half aren't. The fact that none of the rocks in the streams are very round, as if they hadn't been tumbled for long. This place is a foreign hodgepodge of geologic histories, it seems, but I'd love to be able to read the landscape better to figure out what earthquakes, floods, tectonic collisions, and slow erosions took place here over time.
My advisor Daniel Schindler, his wife Laura, and their eight-year-old daughter Luna live up here every summer; my other camp-mates include a college-age intern, a teenage nanny for Luna, and two other graduate students who've been coming up here for the last several years. Peter and Kale are both extremely smart, good cooks, and fairly handy with an Evinrude motor, a broken water heater or generator, or a homemade solar powered fish-tag reader. Although I've only been here for a little less than two weeks, I've been folded quickly into the family-like atmosphere of the camp, where everyone pulls his or her own weight. There's a small greenhouse, where lettuce, chard and peas grow frantically under the midnight sun; an almost-finished sauna; a bunkhouse, a cookhouse, and several sheds/outbuildings; a small lab where we can process samples; and the "new cabin," where Daniel and his family live. The beach is home to a small herd of 18-foot aluminum boats, our mode of lake transportation. My graduate studies here have so far included learning how to drive these boats in weather conditions ranging from flat calm to 3-foot wind-waves, the use of various power tools, how to survive a bear attack, how to build an outdoor clay pizza oven, generator operation and repair, and so much more that you'd never learn how to do in a classroom, or in a lab.
And then there is the fieldwork itself. Let's talk about why I want to be a field biologist in the first place, and what that even means. Why am I here?
Part of the reason I am drawn to field biology is that fieldwork can be a meditative experience, a state in which you are fully aware and present, focused on nothing but whatever it is you’re trying to observe, count, measure, or find. I’m a person whose mind just won’t shut up, whose panicky, anxious inner dialogue can rarely be hushed without a good hard seven mile run or an all-night study marathon to tire me out. But rather than continue to attempt to exhaust myself constantly in order to achieve temporary peace of mind, I’ve recently been trying another, more energizing route, which is simple and long-lasting but difficult to achieve: mindfulness. I’ve found that recreational activities that require an intense amount of focus, like kayaking, help me quiet my mind. Thus any task or activity that, by its nature, requires mindfulness to achieve any small measure of success, attracts me. As I practice the awareness of body, boat and environment that’s needed to pilot a small plastic watercraft down rapids, all other worries and anxieties fall away. Bank accounts? Househunting? Chores? Future plans? It all fades as I focus on present conditions: the paddle, the eddyline, my posture, what the next bend might hold. I end up feeling refreshed. And I’ve found the same to be true of working in “The Field.”
You cannot go out into the Alaskan bush on autopilot. Just like kayaking, where a moment of non-awareness can result in a capsized craft and a cold swim, if you trundle through the bush on foot or zip across the lake in a boat without mindfulness you might not come back with the data, or you might not come back at all. Besides a sharp awareness of potential dangers—was that rustle a bear?—you must be mindful of the weather, where you’re stepping in the creek, your body (are you hungry or cold?), your field partner, and so many other things besides the fish, or birds, or rocks you’ve come to study. You have to listen and you have to look, or you’ll miss the patterns you’ve come to gather up so that, from thousands and thousands of numbers, you can weave a tapestry that tells a story about a landscape. In listening and in looking, in this pattern-gathering, your mind gets engaged and slows down and stops chewing itself ragged. It just is. You just are. I just am. As I walked up Hidden Creek yesterday, stepping slowly over rocks as I followed behind my field partner snorkeling in the stream, the slow pace didn’t make me anxious or tense. My mind slowed down and switched into a mode of extreme lucidity. I noticed everything: moose and otter tracks in the mud, blooming nagoon berries, the buzzy call of an Arctic warbler. I had a few insights. Sometimes my mind was completely blank. Occasionally, I wrote down a number or two that Peter shouted to me from his face-down snorkeling position. And they call it “fieldwork.” Ha.
Let’s be honest, though. This blissful, meditative state doesn’t occur automatically the moment you step out into “The Field.” In fact, a good portion of your days spent in The Field are going to be spent in brutally hot/cold/muggy/buggy/wet/smoky/windy conditions. You’re going to walk up that stream angry, or crying, or in such a hurry you trip and fill up your waders with cold water. You’re bound to get sweaty, covered in bug bites and poison oak, sunburned or chilled, dampened, hungry, and thirsty. You’ll want to punch your field partner’s lights out at some point, that is, if they don’t punch yours out first. You will break expensive equipment, you will get lost, you will forget your lunch, you will do the protocol wrong and have to repeat it countless times. In a lightning storm in the middle of nowhere on a dirt logging road, your two-way radio will fail to work when your truck has a flat tire and you don’t have a spare. When you spend too many hours underwater in a cold river in a wetsuit, you’ll get hypothermic. Sleeping every night in a tent or an uninsulated shack, you’ll get lonely. After eating too much beef jerky for two months, your digestive system may rebel in ways you wish it wouldn’t.
But all this is just practice, and it’s also worth the rewards. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be back out in The Field after years of being pummeled by the elements, cheap-ass equipment, low pay and incompetent field partners. In kayaking we say “Everyone is between swims.” In Buddhism, the path is the goal, and hardships provide an opportunity to practice the skill of mindfulness. In fieldwork, you might get awful blisters and it might pour for six days, but as you walk up the stream, the sun might come out, and your mind just might stop beating up on itself.
About nine days ago, I moved from Aleknagik up to a more remote camp on the second lake in the Wood River System, Lake Nerka. This lake, I am happy to report to all the fish geeks out there, is the namesake for one of its most famous and numerous inhabitants, the sockeye salmon, otherwise known as Red Salmon--Onchorhynchus nerka. The camp is the definition of "remote"-- it is an hour and a half by boat from the nearest village, and sits at the base of Church Mountain, one peak among a foreboding wall of mountains that zoom a couple thousand feet up from the lake, transitioning quickly from spruce forest to alder and blueberry scrub to granite scree-fields, spires, and patches of leftover snow. Though there are no glaciers here now, it wasn't so long ago (on a geologic timescale) that glaciers filled each one of the U-shaped valleys that now form the various arms, fjords, and river valleys draining into the lake. A glacier scoured out Lake Nerka itself, along with all the other lakes in the system. It's times like these when I wish I had a pocket-sized geologist I could bring along with me to interpret some of the strange geological patterns I see here, so different than the predictably constant columnar basalt of the Cascades and the Columbia Gorge. Like a total lack of good shale skipping rocks everywhere except for ONE BEACH in one cove in one place on the lake. Or the lens of clay on Hidden Creek. The fact that half the spires of these mountains are granite, and half aren't. The fact that none of the rocks in the streams are very round, as if they hadn't been tumbled for long. This place is a foreign hodgepodge of geologic histories, it seems, but I'd love to be able to read the landscape better to figure out what earthquakes, floods, tectonic collisions, and slow erosions took place here over time.
My advisor Daniel Schindler, his wife Laura, and their eight-year-old daughter Luna live up here every summer; my other camp-mates include a college-age intern, a teenage nanny for Luna, and two other graduate students who've been coming up here for the last several years. Peter and Kale are both extremely smart, good cooks, and fairly handy with an Evinrude motor, a broken water heater or generator, or a homemade solar powered fish-tag reader. Although I've only been here for a little less than two weeks, I've been folded quickly into the family-like atmosphere of the camp, where everyone pulls his or her own weight. There's a small greenhouse, where lettuce, chard and peas grow frantically under the midnight sun; an almost-finished sauna; a bunkhouse, a cookhouse, and several sheds/outbuildings; a small lab where we can process samples; and the "new cabin," where Daniel and his family live. The beach is home to a small herd of 18-foot aluminum boats, our mode of lake transportation. My graduate studies here have so far included learning how to drive these boats in weather conditions ranging from flat calm to 3-foot wind-waves, the use of various power tools, how to survive a bear attack, how to build an outdoor clay pizza oven, generator operation and repair, and so much more that you'd never learn how to do in a classroom, or in a lab.
And then there is the fieldwork itself. Let's talk about why I want to be a field biologist in the first place, and what that even means. Why am I here?
Part of the reason I am drawn to field biology is that fieldwork can be a meditative experience, a state in which you are fully aware and present, focused on nothing but whatever it is you’re trying to observe, count, measure, or find. I’m a person whose mind just won’t shut up, whose panicky, anxious inner dialogue can rarely be hushed without a good hard seven mile run or an all-night study marathon to tire me out. But rather than continue to attempt to exhaust myself constantly in order to achieve temporary peace of mind, I’ve recently been trying another, more energizing route, which is simple and long-lasting but difficult to achieve: mindfulness. I’ve found that recreational activities that require an intense amount of focus, like kayaking, help me quiet my mind. Thus any task or activity that, by its nature, requires mindfulness to achieve any small measure of success, attracts me. As I practice the awareness of body, boat and environment that’s needed to pilot a small plastic watercraft down rapids, all other worries and anxieties fall away. Bank accounts? Househunting? Chores? Future plans? It all fades as I focus on present conditions: the paddle, the eddyline, my posture, what the next bend might hold. I end up feeling refreshed. And I’ve found the same to be true of working in “The Field.”
You cannot go out into the Alaskan bush on autopilot. Just like kayaking, where a moment of non-awareness can result in a capsized craft and a cold swim, if you trundle through the bush on foot or zip across the lake in a boat without mindfulness you might not come back with the data, or you might not come back at all. Besides a sharp awareness of potential dangers—was that rustle a bear?—you must be mindful of the weather, where you’re stepping in the creek, your body (are you hungry or cold?), your field partner, and so many other things besides the fish, or birds, or rocks you’ve come to study. You have to listen and you have to look, or you’ll miss the patterns you’ve come to gather up so that, from thousands and thousands of numbers, you can weave a tapestry that tells a story about a landscape. In listening and in looking, in this pattern-gathering, your mind gets engaged and slows down and stops chewing itself ragged. It just is. You just are. I just am. As I walked up Hidden Creek yesterday, stepping slowly over rocks as I followed behind my field partner snorkeling in the stream, the slow pace didn’t make me anxious or tense. My mind slowed down and switched into a mode of extreme lucidity. I noticed everything: moose and otter tracks in the mud, blooming nagoon berries, the buzzy call of an Arctic warbler. I had a few insights. Sometimes my mind was completely blank. Occasionally, I wrote down a number or two that Peter shouted to me from his face-down snorkeling position. And they call it “fieldwork.” Ha.
Let’s be honest, though. This blissful, meditative state doesn’t occur automatically the moment you step out into “The Field.” In fact, a good portion of your days spent in The Field are going to be spent in brutally hot/cold/muggy/buggy/wet/smoky/windy conditions. You’re going to walk up that stream angry, or crying, or in such a hurry you trip and fill up your waders with cold water. You’re bound to get sweaty, covered in bug bites and poison oak, sunburned or chilled, dampened, hungry, and thirsty. You’ll want to punch your field partner’s lights out at some point, that is, if they don’t punch yours out first. You will break expensive equipment, you will get lost, you will forget your lunch, you will do the protocol wrong and have to repeat it countless times. In a lightning storm in the middle of nowhere on a dirt logging road, your two-way radio will fail to work when your truck has a flat tire and you don’t have a spare. When you spend too many hours underwater in a cold river in a wetsuit, you’ll get hypothermic. Sleeping every night in a tent or an uninsulated shack, you’ll get lonely. After eating too much beef jerky for two months, your digestive system may rebel in ways you wish it wouldn’t.
But all this is just practice, and it’s also worth the rewards. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be back out in The Field after years of being pummeled by the elements, cheap-ass equipment, low pay and incompetent field partners. In kayaking we say “Everyone is between swims.” In Buddhism, the path is the goal, and hardships provide an opportunity to practice the skill of mindfulness. In fieldwork, you might get awful blisters and it might pour for six days, but as you walk up the stream, the sun might come out, and your mind just might stop beating up on itself.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Lakes Versus Rivers
I have to admit that this lake throws me for a loop.
Mostly, I understand how rivers work--how, as dynamic systems, they shift and change in character, size, flow, temperature, nutrient content, and inhabitants in space and time, from season to season and from headwaters to estuary. That's what pulls me to rivers: the way they are, by definition, always changing, never static. Whether I am kayaking, pulling online streamflow data off a USGS gauge to make a graph, or diving in my drysuit to count spawners, the river keeps me on my toes, looking for what's around the next bend. Rivers are and will continue to be central features in my life because of the way they serve to engage me, emotionally, intellectually and physically. You can't step in the same river twice, as they say.
But lakes? How the heck does a lake work? To me, a lake looks like a big static puddle-- an unmoving, unchanging, and, the lazy part of my brain would like to label it, boring body of water, good for swimming in and not a lot else. But that's where I'm desperately hoping (and strongly suspecting) I'm wrong. Lake Aleknagik may look like a giant silvery puddle with ripples on it, dark and mysterious and totally unrevealing of its secrets, but that's just because I'm so far part of the uninitiated. While they might not move tons of sediment, undercut their banks in an attempt to shape the landscape, boast dangerous rapids, threaten to flood your neighborhood in the wet season, etc. (you get the idea--rivers are powerful in a way that's obvious on a human timescale), that doesn't mean lakes are wimpy or ecologically unimportant. They're just more subtle about the ways in which they change daily, seasonally, and yearly.
Limnology explores the layers of temperature and nutrients present in a lake and how they appear and disappear with the seasons, the ebb and flow of lake levels, the waxing and waning of algae, plankton, and all the other organisms that form the base of the lake food web, how lake currents work (one word: slowly), and more. I have no prior experience with limnology, so
I am patiently exploring the idea of lakes with an open mind--or trying to, anyway. Part of me relishes the opportunity to study and understand a new kind of aquatic ecosystem. Even the streams draining into Lake Aleknagik are completely unlike any streams I have ever seen before.....low-gradient, very low-energy, clear and oxbowed, sinuously and serenely making their way just a few kilometers from the base of the mountains through wet meadows until they meet the lake. But simultaneously, even while wondering about how the lake works as an ecosystem, part of me screeches Where's the current? This thing isn't moving! What is there to look at? That's where I have to slow down and let go of the ridiculous expectation I have for the lake: that it be a river.
Actually, the Wood River System of four interconnected lakes draining into Bristol Bay sort of is uniquely like a river (of immense pools connected by short sections of flowing current) because it starts at one freshwater end and drains into a saltwater end. It's just unlike any "river" I've ever studied or played in. One other unique thing about the Wood System I haven't mentioned yet is that it forms a significant part of the spawning and rearing grounds for the largest intact, unspoiled sockeye salmon fishery on the planet. No conventional river could support a fishery this huge. It takes several giant lakes, with all their spaciousness, availability of spawning habitat, rearing habitat, nutrients and prey, and relative lack of predators to nurture several tens of millions of sockeye salmon (which, by the way, are a lake-specific species, returning exclusively to lakes at the end of their lives to spawn).
I might miss rivers, but rivers will still be there in the lower 48 when I fly south for the winter. I can't stand here with my arms crossed challenging the lake to prove to me that it is just as ecologically amazing and nuanced as any river. The lake isn't going to make the first move. That's my job.
Mostly, I understand how rivers work--how, as dynamic systems, they shift and change in character, size, flow, temperature, nutrient content, and inhabitants in space and time, from season to season and from headwaters to estuary. That's what pulls me to rivers: the way they are, by definition, always changing, never static. Whether I am kayaking, pulling online streamflow data off a USGS gauge to make a graph, or diving in my drysuit to count spawners, the river keeps me on my toes, looking for what's around the next bend. Rivers are and will continue to be central features in my life because of the way they serve to engage me, emotionally, intellectually and physically. You can't step in the same river twice, as they say.
But lakes? How the heck does a lake work? To me, a lake looks like a big static puddle-- an unmoving, unchanging, and, the lazy part of my brain would like to label it, boring body of water, good for swimming in and not a lot else. But that's where I'm desperately hoping (and strongly suspecting) I'm wrong. Lake Aleknagik may look like a giant silvery puddle with ripples on it, dark and mysterious and totally unrevealing of its secrets, but that's just because I'm so far part of the uninitiated. While they might not move tons of sediment, undercut their banks in an attempt to shape the landscape, boast dangerous rapids, threaten to flood your neighborhood in the wet season, etc. (you get the idea--rivers are powerful in a way that's obvious on a human timescale), that doesn't mean lakes are wimpy or ecologically unimportant. They're just more subtle about the ways in which they change daily, seasonally, and yearly.
Limnology explores the layers of temperature and nutrients present in a lake and how they appear and disappear with the seasons, the ebb and flow of lake levels, the waxing and waning of algae, plankton, and all the other organisms that form the base of the lake food web, how lake currents work (one word: slowly), and more. I have no prior experience with limnology, so
I am patiently exploring the idea of lakes with an open mind--or trying to, anyway. Part of me relishes the opportunity to study and understand a new kind of aquatic ecosystem. Even the streams draining into Lake Aleknagik are completely unlike any streams I have ever seen before.....low-gradient, very low-energy, clear and oxbowed, sinuously and serenely making their way just a few kilometers from the base of the mountains through wet meadows until they meet the lake. But simultaneously, even while wondering about how the lake works as an ecosystem, part of me screeches Where's the current? This thing isn't moving! What is there to look at? That's where I have to slow down and let go of the ridiculous expectation I have for the lake: that it be a river.
Actually, the Wood River System of four interconnected lakes draining into Bristol Bay sort of is uniquely like a river (of immense pools connected by short sections of flowing current) because it starts at one freshwater end and drains into a saltwater end. It's just unlike any "river" I've ever studied or played in. One other unique thing about the Wood System I haven't mentioned yet is that it forms a significant part of the spawning and rearing grounds for the largest intact, unspoiled sockeye salmon fishery on the planet. No conventional river could support a fishery this huge. It takes several giant lakes, with all their spaciousness, availability of spawning habitat, rearing habitat, nutrients and prey, and relative lack of predators to nurture several tens of millions of sockeye salmon (which, by the way, are a lake-specific species, returning exclusively to lakes at the end of their lives to spawn).
I might miss rivers, but rivers will still be there in the lower 48 when I fly south for the winter. I can't stand here with my arms crossed challenging the lake to prove to me that it is just as ecologically amazing and nuanced as any river. The lake isn't going to make the first move. That's my job.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Place
Now that I find myself in a new one, let's talk about the concept of place.
If you were an Environmental Studies major at a liberal-arts school, like me, you were doubtless steeped in many nature-writing, ethnobiology, natural history or literature-of-nature courses which emphasized, above all else, the vital importance of Place. Earning a sense of place. Living "in place." Even if you didn't study under the sainted Donald R. Snow, unless you've been living in a cave you're probably still quite familiar with this concept if you've ever patronized such retailers as Patagonia, New Seasons, or Whole Foods, had any interaction with a local environmental nonprofit, been to an outdoor film festival or lived in Portland, Oregon for more than five minutes. Being a "locavore," having "staycations," being a bioregionalist, practicing "place-based resource management" or "place-based living"--it's all part of the same ideal, which sounds lovely, but can in fact be frustratingly slippery and elusive when actually pursued with vigor by the average non-superhuman. The way I understand it, the idea of gaining a "sense of place" entails being present and paying attention to/getting to know/acting in accordance with what surrounds you--whether that's the inner workings of a city subway, the hatch times of insects, geologic landforms, native delicacies, sports, river flow regimes, etc.
The theme of place in nature writing is a big one, the list of authors and books concentrating on place a long one. In the past seven or eight years, I have unfortunately absorbed these writings in the canon of great and not-so-great nature writers until I now ooze the hunger for "sense-of-place" from every pore, having elevated the concept to a personal deity. I can't even count the number of essays I've read in High Country News or Orion in which the author expounds on the virtues of wandering through his or her local neighborhood, falling slowly in love with it. Over time, via his or her investment of attention and care to the chosen creek, mountain, urban community garden, abandoned field or whatever, the author is rewarded with profound insights, inner peace, and occasionally some rare wildlife sightings. Most writers spend a lot of time learning about a place and its inhabitants, cataloguing its flora, fauna, geology, human denizens, weather patterns, and general aura in detail, and then patting themselves on the back for becoming so integrated, for attaining that Olympic gold medal of any self-respecting naturalist or environmentalist worth her salt: the Sense Of Place (SOP for short). If it’s not Annie Dillard gushing over Tinker Creek, it’s James Galvin contemplating his favorite meadow.
What the self-respecting naturalist and environmentalist is supposed to do when she finds herself in a new place is to take it all in, to begin learning as much as she can about it, and finally, to develop a profound love for the spot (this last is non-optional). This is the classic story of how acquiring that elusive SOP is supposed to go: you arrive somewhere new, say, Alaska. It is strikingly beautiful, but heck, that’s just the surface you’re looking at. You gotta go deeper. You gotta get into the layers. So you stick around, you watch the seasons change, you observe tragedies and joys alike on the landscape. Maybe you put down some tentative roots. You learn the names of all the flowers that bloom in the spring, in sequence. You memorize the names of tributaries up and down the main watercourse. You pay attention to politics, meet your neighbors, and make connections. Finally, you begin to realize that this place is oh so much more than just Scenic. It's full of Meaning. Then you may congratulate yourself, because you have developed SOP. Let the profound insights begin.
Getting to know a place is slow, but I wish it could be faster. Whenever I find myself in a new place, I panic. I'm usually afraid that I will enter and leave without actually making an emotional connection to the landscape or community, and where would that leave me? It would leave me stranded and alone on the surface of somewhere. To truly qualify as the highest-caliber specimen of self-described bioregionalist, I must unlock the secrets of this place as quickly as possible, I murmur feverishly. I buy field guides and maps, attempt to memorize them, and ask as many questions as possible to the poor saps responsible for showing me around until they tire of me and leave me to fend for myself. While I do enjoy the process of becoming familiar with geography and seasons and flora and fauna and tides and weather and stars and customs and language and food and politics and people, it takes a long, long time. I’ve got a despicably modern mindset (the product of access to wireless internet) where intimacy with place is concerned. I want to know everything about this place, I want to know all of its nooks and crannies, I want to feel at home and as if I belong here and I want it NOW. But this is not only impossible. It is completely backwards.
I think it is only by dint of the laborious, gradual work of Paying Attention that we accumulate the many hard-earned small discoveries that eventually add up into a feeling of being at home. Earning your sense of place, to use the ultimate cliched phrase, cannot be anything but slow, and this is good. It keeps out the riff-raff, those who don’t, or won’t, put in the effort. There is no app for this you can purchase from iTunes for your smartphone. Sometimes, though, I wish there was. I am not riff-raff; I am more than willing to Pay Attention and I will happily memorize the names of dozens of plants, birds, and creeks; I will learn when they flock, flower, nest, migrate, and flood. I will do all of this, but I would also like a jump-start on my sense of place, a quick injection of belonging, please. So that, when I strike out for a new horizon, I don’t have this rip-roaring hunger for Home that I carry around with me somewhere just behind my heart.
That’s where a simple $1.99 app from iTunes—let’s call it the Sense of Place app—would come in so handy. Just a click, and a basic data download of local lore, plus an innate feeling of knowing your way around, would instantly appear in your brain. Under this scenario, though, you could know anyplace, everyplace. Places would no longer be special to you. We have to choose our places, have to work for them, and we can only hold a finite amount of information in our brains.
Ironically, though it might give you an enhanced intellectual perspective on what you are seeing and experiencing and help you get your bearings, no amount of frantic memorization can forge an emotional connection to place. That is a mysterious process you can't force, a process, I would venture, almost exactly the same as forging an emotional connection with a person. This might sound strange to some of you, but I firmly believe that the core foundations of love are the same when applied to both people and places. Author and philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore puts it best in "The Pine Island Paradox" when she tries to distinguish between love for a person and love for a place:
"I stretched my back and started two lists. What does it mean to love a person? What does it mean to love a place? Before long, I discovered I had made two copies of the same list. To love--a person and a place-- means at least this:
One. To want to be near it, physically.
Number two. To want to know everything about it--its story, its moods, what it looks like by moonlight.
Number three. To rejoice in the fact of it.
Number four. To fear its loss, and grieve for its injuries.
Five. To protect it--fiercely, mindlessly, futilely, and maybe tragically, but to be helpless to do otherwise.
Six. To be transformed in its presence--lifted, lighter on your feet, transparent, open to everything beautiful and new.
Number seven. To want to be joined with it, taken in by it, lost in it.
Number eight. To want the best for it.
Numbr nine. Desperately.
Love is....not a choice, or a dream, or a romantic novel. It's a fact: an empirical fact about our biological existence. We are born into relationships with people and with places. We are born with the ability to create new relationships and tend to them. And we are born with a powerful longing for these relations. That complex connectedness nourishes and shapes us and gives us joy and purpose.
I knew there was something important missing from my list, but I was struggling to put it into words. Loving isn't just a state of being, it's a way of acting in the world. Love isn't a sort of bliss, it's a kind of work, sometimes hard, spirit-testing work. To love a person is to accept the responsibility to act lovingly toward him, to make his needs my own needs. To love a place is to care for it, to keep it healthy, to attend to its needs as if they were my own, because they are my own. Responsibility grows from love. It is the natural shape of caring.
Number ten, I wrote in my notebook. To love a person or a place is to accept moral responsibility for its well-being."
All of the above applies to what I feel here, now, in Aleknagik. I desperately want to get my bearings, figure out the lay of the land, be able to read the lake and the streams for roiling schools of sockeye, identify merlins and nesting terns, recognize the rustle of a bear in the alders, distinguish a three-spine stickleback from a nine-spine stickleback, learn to love the passing squalls, make connections with my fellow researchers, be able to drive and repair the boats, and most of all feel as if I belong. I want to love Aleknagik in all of the ways KDM describes above, including accepting moral responsibility for its well-being, but then I remember that we've only just shaken hands, and love might not be the logical next step. Based on past field research experiences where place-love actually happened, I have an unhelpful and unrealistic expectation of becoming immediately smitten with any body of water next to which I might pitch my tent. With this attitude, it's helpful to remind myself that, just like with any person, every place is different, and I may not end up feeling the same way about each one. I need to give it time, patience, and extremely lowered expectations. I know that this impatience won't help me get anywhere. I know that I am only here for two months, and that what you can learn and feel in two months may be encyclopedic, but it may also be somewhat limited. I know that there is no formula I can follow or tasks I can perform to gain SOP, and if SOP doesn't present itself to me, that doesn't mean failure.
So, as I gaze out on the Extremely Scenic View from my perch here on the back deck of the kitchen, an Extremely Scenic View which doesn't mean much to me yet, I look forward to the slow absorption of knowledge that will accompany my presence in this place, and, perhaps, if I'm lucky, even the beginnings of a feeling of belonging.
If you were an Environmental Studies major at a liberal-arts school, like me, you were doubtless steeped in many nature-writing, ethnobiology, natural history or literature-of-nature courses which emphasized, above all else, the vital importance of Place. Earning a sense of place. Living "in place." Even if you didn't study under the sainted Donald R. Snow, unless you've been living in a cave you're probably still quite familiar with this concept if you've ever patronized such retailers as Patagonia, New Seasons, or Whole Foods, had any interaction with a local environmental nonprofit, been to an outdoor film festival or lived in Portland, Oregon for more than five minutes. Being a "locavore," having "staycations," being a bioregionalist, practicing "place-based resource management" or "place-based living"--it's all part of the same ideal, which sounds lovely, but can in fact be frustratingly slippery and elusive when actually pursued with vigor by the average non-superhuman. The way I understand it, the idea of gaining a "sense of place" entails being present and paying attention to/getting to know/acting in accordance with what surrounds you--whether that's the inner workings of a city subway, the hatch times of insects, geologic landforms, native delicacies, sports, river flow regimes, etc.
The theme of place in nature writing is a big one, the list of authors and books concentrating on place a long one. In the past seven or eight years, I have unfortunately absorbed these writings in the canon of great and not-so-great nature writers until I now ooze the hunger for "sense-of-place" from every pore, having elevated the concept to a personal deity. I can't even count the number of essays I've read in High Country News or Orion in which the author expounds on the virtues of wandering through his or her local neighborhood, falling slowly in love with it. Over time, via his or her investment of attention and care to the chosen creek, mountain, urban community garden, abandoned field or whatever, the author is rewarded with profound insights, inner peace, and occasionally some rare wildlife sightings. Most writers spend a lot of time learning about a place and its inhabitants, cataloguing its flora, fauna, geology, human denizens, weather patterns, and general aura in detail, and then patting themselves on the back for becoming so integrated, for attaining that Olympic gold medal of any self-respecting naturalist or environmentalist worth her salt: the Sense Of Place (SOP for short). If it’s not Annie Dillard gushing over Tinker Creek, it’s James Galvin contemplating his favorite meadow.
What the self-respecting naturalist and environmentalist is supposed to do when she finds herself in a new place is to take it all in, to begin learning as much as she can about it, and finally, to develop a profound love for the spot (this last is non-optional). This is the classic story of how acquiring that elusive SOP is supposed to go: you arrive somewhere new, say, Alaska. It is strikingly beautiful, but heck, that’s just the surface you’re looking at. You gotta go deeper. You gotta get into the layers. So you stick around, you watch the seasons change, you observe tragedies and joys alike on the landscape. Maybe you put down some tentative roots. You learn the names of all the flowers that bloom in the spring, in sequence. You memorize the names of tributaries up and down the main watercourse. You pay attention to politics, meet your neighbors, and make connections. Finally, you begin to realize that this place is oh so much more than just Scenic. It's full of Meaning. Then you may congratulate yourself, because you have developed SOP. Let the profound insights begin.
Getting to know a place is slow, but I wish it could be faster. Whenever I find myself in a new place, I panic. I'm usually afraid that I will enter and leave without actually making an emotional connection to the landscape or community, and where would that leave me? It would leave me stranded and alone on the surface of somewhere. To truly qualify as the highest-caliber specimen of self-described bioregionalist, I must unlock the secrets of this place as quickly as possible, I murmur feverishly. I buy field guides and maps, attempt to memorize them, and ask as many questions as possible to the poor saps responsible for showing me around until they tire of me and leave me to fend for myself. While I do enjoy the process of becoming familiar with geography and seasons and flora and fauna and tides and weather and stars and customs and language and food and politics and people, it takes a long, long time. I’ve got a despicably modern mindset (the product of access to wireless internet) where intimacy with place is concerned. I want to know everything about this place, I want to know all of its nooks and crannies, I want to feel at home and as if I belong here and I want it NOW. But this is not only impossible. It is completely backwards.
I think it is only by dint of the laborious, gradual work of Paying Attention that we accumulate the many hard-earned small discoveries that eventually add up into a feeling of being at home. Earning your sense of place, to use the ultimate cliched phrase, cannot be anything but slow, and this is good. It keeps out the riff-raff, those who don’t, or won’t, put in the effort. There is no app for this you can purchase from iTunes for your smartphone. Sometimes, though, I wish there was. I am not riff-raff; I am more than willing to Pay Attention and I will happily memorize the names of dozens of plants, birds, and creeks; I will learn when they flock, flower, nest, migrate, and flood. I will do all of this, but I would also like a jump-start on my sense of place, a quick injection of belonging, please. So that, when I strike out for a new horizon, I don’t have this rip-roaring hunger for Home that I carry around with me somewhere just behind my heart.
That’s where a simple $1.99 app from iTunes—let’s call it the Sense of Place app—would come in so handy. Just a click, and a basic data download of local lore, plus an innate feeling of knowing your way around, would instantly appear in your brain. Under this scenario, though, you could know anyplace, everyplace. Places would no longer be special to you. We have to choose our places, have to work for them, and we can only hold a finite amount of information in our brains.
Ironically, though it might give you an enhanced intellectual perspective on what you are seeing and experiencing and help you get your bearings, no amount of frantic memorization can forge an emotional connection to place. That is a mysterious process you can't force, a process, I would venture, almost exactly the same as forging an emotional connection with a person. This might sound strange to some of you, but I firmly believe that the core foundations of love are the same when applied to both people and places. Author and philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore puts it best in "The Pine Island Paradox" when she tries to distinguish between love for a person and love for a place:
"I stretched my back and started two lists. What does it mean to love a person? What does it mean to love a place? Before long, I discovered I had made two copies of the same list. To love--a person and a place-- means at least this:
One. To want to be near it, physically.
Number two. To want to know everything about it--its story, its moods, what it looks like by moonlight.
Number three. To rejoice in the fact of it.
Number four. To fear its loss, and grieve for its injuries.
Five. To protect it--fiercely, mindlessly, futilely, and maybe tragically, but to be helpless to do otherwise.
Six. To be transformed in its presence--lifted, lighter on your feet, transparent, open to everything beautiful and new.
Number seven. To want to be joined with it, taken in by it, lost in it.
Number eight. To want the best for it.
Numbr nine. Desperately.
Love is....not a choice, or a dream, or a romantic novel. It's a fact: an empirical fact about our biological existence. We are born into relationships with people and with places. We are born with the ability to create new relationships and tend to them. And we are born with a powerful longing for these relations. That complex connectedness nourishes and shapes us and gives us joy and purpose.
I knew there was something important missing from my list, but I was struggling to put it into words. Loving isn't just a state of being, it's a way of acting in the world. Love isn't a sort of bliss, it's a kind of work, sometimes hard, spirit-testing work. To love a person is to accept the responsibility to act lovingly toward him, to make his needs my own needs. To love a place is to care for it, to keep it healthy, to attend to its needs as if they were my own, because they are my own. Responsibility grows from love. It is the natural shape of caring.
Number ten, I wrote in my notebook. To love a person or a place is to accept moral responsibility for its well-being."
All of the above applies to what I feel here, now, in Aleknagik. I desperately want to get my bearings, figure out the lay of the land, be able to read the lake and the streams for roiling schools of sockeye, identify merlins and nesting terns, recognize the rustle of a bear in the alders, distinguish a three-spine stickleback from a nine-spine stickleback, learn to love the passing squalls, make connections with my fellow researchers, be able to drive and repair the boats, and most of all feel as if I belong. I want to love Aleknagik in all of the ways KDM describes above, including accepting moral responsibility for its well-being, but then I remember that we've only just shaken hands, and love might not be the logical next step. Based on past field research experiences where place-love actually happened, I have an unhelpful and unrealistic expectation of becoming immediately smitten with any body of water next to which I might pitch my tent. With this attitude, it's helpful to remind myself that, just like with any person, every place is different, and I may not end up feeling the same way about each one. I need to give it time, patience, and extremely lowered expectations. I know that this impatience won't help me get anywhere. I know that I am only here for two months, and that what you can learn and feel in two months may be encyclopedic, but it may also be somewhat limited. I know that there is no formula I can follow or tasks I can perform to gain SOP, and if SOP doesn't present itself to me, that doesn't mean failure.
So, as I gaze out on the Extremely Scenic View from my perch here on the back deck of the kitchen, an Extremely Scenic View which doesn't mean much to me yet, I look forward to the slow absorption of knowledge that will accompany my presence in this place, and, perhaps, if I'm lucky, even the beginnings of a feeling of belonging.
Friday, July 1, 2011
Aleknagik Orientation
I've decided to resurrect this blog from the dead in order to start recording my thoughts, observations, experiences and photos from my initial research season here in Aleknagik. Whether or not I actually get any readers, I haven't written recreationally in quite a while, so this is also an opportunity for me to scrape some of the rust off of my creaky old skills.
My plan is not necessarily to record the events of each day (although sometimes I will do this), but rather to think aloud "on paper" about concepts I find interesting in the natural and political worlds. These will be topics ranging from conservation, ecology, and fisheries management to natural history, local culture, a personal sense of place, "Alaska" as an ideal, and more.
To begin with, let's orient ourselves. Before I left, many people asked me exactly where I would be in Alaska, and I had a difficult time explaining it to them, not least because my own Alaska geography is so fuzzy. Picture the state of Alaska as a clenched fist with the thumb dangling out toward the bottom, like giving the thumbs-down sign. The thumb is the Alaska Peninsula and the Aleutian Islands, the gap between the thumb and the hand is Bristol Bay, and the outward bulge of the forefinger is, roughly, the Yukon Delta. If you follow the curve of the thumb about halfway up between its base and the first knuckle of the forefinger, that's my general location in southwestern Alaska. I am currently in the village of Aleknagik (pop. 250), 20 miles from the "town" of Dillingham (pop. 1500), at the southern end of a chain of glacially-formed lakes connected by short rivers. The lakes are long and narrow, and they zig-zag their way north in a tiger-stripe pattern, ringed by spired peaks. This is the Wood River System, so called because of the southernmost outflow of the chain, the Wood River, which oxbows its silty way through the coastal plain and pours out into Bristol Bay. This lake-river system, plus some other huge lakes, are all part of the Wood-Tikchik State Park, a park larger than the State of Delaware, and the largest in the U.S.
The field camp I am living in at the moment is part of the University of Washington's system of field research stations dotted around SW Alaska, comprising the Alaska Salmon Program, an institution with a sixty-four-year-old history of ecological, evolutionary and economic study of the region's storied fisheries. I'm here both as an hourly wage slave and a new student in Daniel Schindler's lab, slated to work with all the other grad students and investigators on every project for two months so I can absorb lots of information, get the lay of the land and begin cooking up my own ideas for a masters' thesis, which ideally I'll begin working on this school year.
As today is Day Two, I'm still reeling from the transition between urban Portland and the bucolic Willamette Valley, and the muskeg backcountry of Aleknagik. Coffee and wireless Internet are in abundance here in camp as they are in any corner of Portland, but trying to ride a fixed-gear bicycle on the road (singular) would probably land you face-down in the muskeg as you dodged the cow moose and her calf trotting across the pavement. We also have an abundance of float planes, black spruce and mosquitoes, and a giant chest freezer stuffed with 500 pounds of sockeye salmon fillets--the camp's meat supply, caught right off the dock. The fashionable footwear is a calf-high Xtra Tuff rubber boot, and yesterday three orphaned grizzly cubs came gamboling through camp.
There will be more to come, but I am off to prepare for my long afternoon of fieldwork--pit-tagging coho in off-channel habitat (deja vu Klamath, anyone?) on one of the streams that drains into Lake Aleknagik.
My plan is not necessarily to record the events of each day (although sometimes I will do this), but rather to think aloud "on paper" about concepts I find interesting in the natural and political worlds. These will be topics ranging from conservation, ecology, and fisheries management to natural history, local culture, a personal sense of place, "Alaska" as an ideal, and more.
To begin with, let's orient ourselves. Before I left, many people asked me exactly where I would be in Alaska, and I had a difficult time explaining it to them, not least because my own Alaska geography is so fuzzy. Picture the state of Alaska as a clenched fist with the thumb dangling out toward the bottom, like giving the thumbs-down sign. The thumb is the Alaska Peninsula and the Aleutian Islands, the gap between the thumb and the hand is Bristol Bay, and the outward bulge of the forefinger is, roughly, the Yukon Delta. If you follow the curve of the thumb about halfway up between its base and the first knuckle of the forefinger, that's my general location in southwestern Alaska. I am currently in the village of Aleknagik (pop. 250), 20 miles from the "town" of Dillingham (pop. 1500), at the southern end of a chain of glacially-formed lakes connected by short rivers. The lakes are long and narrow, and they zig-zag their way north in a tiger-stripe pattern, ringed by spired peaks. This is the Wood River System, so called because of the southernmost outflow of the chain, the Wood River, which oxbows its silty way through the coastal plain and pours out into Bristol Bay. This lake-river system, plus some other huge lakes, are all part of the Wood-Tikchik State Park, a park larger than the State of Delaware, and the largest in the U.S.
The field camp I am living in at the moment is part of the University of Washington's system of field research stations dotted around SW Alaska, comprising the Alaska Salmon Program, an institution with a sixty-four-year-old history of ecological, evolutionary and economic study of the region's storied fisheries. I'm here both as an hourly wage slave and a new student in Daniel Schindler's lab, slated to work with all the other grad students and investigators on every project for two months so I can absorb lots of information, get the lay of the land and begin cooking up my own ideas for a masters' thesis, which ideally I'll begin working on this school year.
As today is Day Two, I'm still reeling from the transition between urban Portland and the bucolic Willamette Valley, and the muskeg backcountry of Aleknagik. Coffee and wireless Internet are in abundance here in camp as they are in any corner of Portland, but trying to ride a fixed-gear bicycle on the road (singular) would probably land you face-down in the muskeg as you dodged the cow moose and her calf trotting across the pavement. We also have an abundance of float planes, black spruce and mosquitoes, and a giant chest freezer stuffed with 500 pounds of sockeye salmon fillets--the camp's meat supply, caught right off the dock. The fashionable footwear is a calf-high Xtra Tuff rubber boot, and yesterday three orphaned grizzly cubs came gamboling through camp.
There will be more to come, but I am off to prepare for my long afternoon of fieldwork--pit-tagging coho in off-channel habitat (deja vu Klamath, anyone?) on one of the streams that drains into Lake Aleknagik.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
speckled dace and prickly sculpin
Today I sat in the sunshine listening to the tones of creeks and counted thousands of baby salmon. Now I have wriggling, mottled, silvery little Chinooks dancing in front of me when I close my eyes.
Lilac is flowering and so are the Orleans irises.
Lilac is flowering and so are the Orleans irises.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
wanting to blend in with the slate and the serpentine
Here is my problem.
I love this place. And I want to know everything about it. I want to know its geology, its botany, what plants I can find on a walk through the woods that will cure me of nosebleed or headache or flu, how to gather, process and prepare acorns, how to stalk a deer, how to spear a salmon, how to fell a tree and mill it into planks and hammer together a cabin, how to conjugate verbs in a language--Karuk-- that no one speaks anymore, when to look for morels. I want to walk every ridgetop and dive every bend in the river and wade every creek until the geography is under my skin. The amount I want to learn about this place is staggering. Overwhelming.
My problem is that I come from elsewhere and I will always be a transplant. No matter how much I learn, no matter how much I can absorb. I came from the outside and it's probable that I'll return to the outside. No matter how "native" I ever come to feel, I'll never be native--in the sense of ethnicity or of having grown up on the river, or both. So I end up feeling, and not knowing quite how merited this feeling is, that I don't deserve to live here, that I don't deserve to love it, that my desire to learn is just so much eager college-girl idealism, that it's very superficial, that I could move on to another place tomorrow and start feeling the very same way about it, so why bother to learn in the first place? That just knowing a bunch of stuff about a particular place doesn't entitle you in any way to it. And I don't mean entitlement in the sense of owning the land. I mean entitlement in the sense of calling it your home.
Then what does entitle a person to call a place their home, precisely? I was always good at feeling at home anywhere I went, until I arrived here.
And what does "native" mean, anyway? Is it my DNA that makes me inadequate to call myself a river person, my short tenure here, my general lack of place-based knowledge, or all three? And where is my home? And who is my community? Sometimes I think you can claim a home, claim a community; and other times I think that they have to claim you. But this goes back to my general inner debate about life. Lead it, or let it lead you where it will? I don't feel brazen enough yet to choose THIS place as MY place, but if I stand off from it will I be able to fully experience it?
One thing I do know about life on the river is that I am a woman who needs to get out of the canyon sometimes. I need to get into the high country, see some horizon, some perspective. What the river does is it channels your thinking, and mine doesn't need to dig its own channels any deeper. It needs to overflow onto the floodplain and widen itself.
I love this place. And I want to know everything about it. I want to know its geology, its botany, what plants I can find on a walk through the woods that will cure me of nosebleed or headache or flu, how to gather, process and prepare acorns, how to stalk a deer, how to spear a salmon, how to fell a tree and mill it into planks and hammer together a cabin, how to conjugate verbs in a language--Karuk-- that no one speaks anymore, when to look for morels. I want to walk every ridgetop and dive every bend in the river and wade every creek until the geography is under my skin. The amount I want to learn about this place is staggering. Overwhelming.
My problem is that I come from elsewhere and I will always be a transplant. No matter how much I learn, no matter how much I can absorb. I came from the outside and it's probable that I'll return to the outside. No matter how "native" I ever come to feel, I'll never be native--in the sense of ethnicity or of having grown up on the river, or both. So I end up feeling, and not knowing quite how merited this feeling is, that I don't deserve to live here, that I don't deserve to love it, that my desire to learn is just so much eager college-girl idealism, that it's very superficial, that I could move on to another place tomorrow and start feeling the very same way about it, so why bother to learn in the first place? That just knowing a bunch of stuff about a particular place doesn't entitle you in any way to it. And I don't mean entitlement in the sense of owning the land. I mean entitlement in the sense of calling it your home.
Then what does entitle a person to call a place their home, precisely? I was always good at feeling at home anywhere I went, until I arrived here.
And what does "native" mean, anyway? Is it my DNA that makes me inadequate to call myself a river person, my short tenure here, my general lack of place-based knowledge, or all three? And where is my home? And who is my community? Sometimes I think you can claim a home, claim a community; and other times I think that they have to claim you. But this goes back to my general inner debate about life. Lead it, or let it lead you where it will? I don't feel brazen enough yet to choose THIS place as MY place, but if I stand off from it will I be able to fully experience it?
One thing I do know about life on the river is that I am a woman who needs to get out of the canyon sometimes. I need to get into the high country, see some horizon, some perspective. What the river does is it channels your thinking, and mine doesn't need to dig its own channels any deeper. It needs to overflow onto the floodplain and widen itself.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
