What You Lookin' At?

I think about vision more than I used to now that my once keen eyesight has more than lost its edge in middle age. Romantic era poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge spoke frequently of the tyranny or "despotism" of the eye and how the sense of sight dominates us. Coleridge was right, and even so, it is sobering to realize just how sight-dominated many people are. They often value such limited types of sights that they don't really see what the world has to offer.  My own ever-dimming yet still dominant sense of sight prompts me to reflect upon Americans’ oft-declared desire to travel and experience the outdoors.

People expect a lot out of their road trips, vacations, and nature in general, and if nature doesn’t put out they are annoyed. They want non-stop adventure, grand vistas, huge spectacles, and large wild animals. Last year I set up my spotting scope on a marshy lakeside in Yellowstone National Park. There were at least 15 different species of ducks, grebes, herons, cranes, and geese feeding, sleeping, shepherding babies, and otherwise thriving in the protected park environment. I hadn't been there two minutes before several campers and motor homes rattled up behind me. "See any bears?" was the collective query. I replied in the negative and started to list the birds they could see, but before the third species I heard the camper doors slam and engines start.

The little stuff just doesn’t attract so many folks. On days when it rains or snows in the Tetons, Yellowstone, Yosemite, or Glacier – any national park or “destination” site, really -- a chorus of agonized cries about ruined vacations echoes through the nation.  The Going-to-the-Sun road in Glacier is often still closed in July, but people act as if Nature screwed up and didn’t deliver the goods.  However, if you simply look down instead of up (where those horrid clouds are) the world is still full of wonders.

Look right between your feet at the ground. Notice the variety of plant life and the types of soil and rock around you. If it has been raining, you are in for a treat. Rain intensifies hues, and the overcast sky shields small rocks and plants from the sun and its tendency to wash out color.  Look at this salamander, fresh and green in the rain.

Don't discount that apparently brown, empty, or soggy landscape. Odds are it is just teaming with life and variety. 

Keep in mind, too, that you haven't seen it all before.   No matter how many places you’ve been, one patch of green turf or grassy dry hillside is not like another.  For every five hundred of my students who groan that North Dakota, South Dakota, it’s all the same, it’s all boring, I hear from one who says, no, two miles away in any direction the dirt and birds and plants and animals all change in subtle ways.  Bring your focus in close.  The mariposa flower, often called the Sego lily, blooms abundantly over the sites of the fallen dead in the battlefields at Bighorn and nods serenely on dry cliffs in the Black Hills.  It has a cousin in the open grassy areas of the Yaak valley to the northwest. If I had not bent down to take a closer look I would have assumed that it was the same Calochortus nuttallii I had encountered on my other rambles. But while nuttallii’s petals are smooth and silky, Calochortus apiculatus in the Yaak has petals that are covered with what look like fine hairs.

The petals look like furry little cat ears.

What if the same bird lives at home and also in faraway places on a road trip? Many people are bored, and demand that nature be more attentive to their need for new and entertaining sights. Once again, much is missed in adopting this attitude. I have renewed respect for a bird I have seen all my life: the robin. This creature can live anywhere from arid desert to cherry orchard to damp rain forest. Noticing the ubiquitous robin can also teach you about the endless changes in landscape across this country and the conditions under which the robin must feed, find nesting materials, and raise young.

The ruffed grouse, too, is a bird that I have seen so many times in Minnesota and  is also in high mountainous Montana country.

Just as in Minnesota it comes out after a rain to pick at the plants by the road side, but surely it must eat somewhat different things at this elevation?  Surely its nest is made of different materials, and surely its young eat slightly different things.  Montana is not Minnesota is not North Dakota is not Michigan.

Then there is the spruce grouse. I had never seen one before I visited the Yaak valley. Apparently, many people, including avid birders, literally overlook this bird not only because they do not look down but because they look for the bright moving target rather than the quiet motionless one. Here is a female that I saw ambling slowly through the grasses and flowers by the side of a dirt road high in the Yaak.

The male had discovered her, too. Here he is, in full courtship display in the bend of the road near the female. Not at all perturbed by us or the idling car, he ran hither and yon and never deflated. On our way back down the mountain an hour and a half later he was still there.

One of the best ways to truly see the outdoors is to put away the camera. I enjoy taking pictures, but I agree with Barry Lopez when he “feel[s] uncomfortable about the way photographs tend to collapse events into a single moment, about how much they leave out.” Sometimes you just do not observe well when you are snapping pictures. I set aside times to use the camera and times to put it away and rely on my eyesight and memory. Here are two shots that captured images I would rather have observed firsthand than recorded and later perused on a computer screen. The first is of a deer standing in the grass. I did not realize till later that a second deer was there, too.  

Nor did I really notice the grass or the movements of the deer in relation to each other.

I was so intent upon capturing that "good shot" of this next deer in a wooded glade that I did not notice that she was missing half of one ear until I viewed the image on the computer.

What happened to her? Did she get into a fight? Did she have a lucky escape from a predator? I wish that I had put the camera down and simply watched her instead. And remember, sometimes the split second that it takes for you to snap a picture is the same split second that it takes for a bird or animal to run away. Would you rather observe the creature carefully or mess with your camera settings during that brief moment? I often opt for the former.

Last year I went to the Tetons. It rained all day. The clouds hung down heavily on the road. That was ok with me. My vacation wasn't ruined.  

The Home Not Lived In

The first night that I slept in the Yaak valley in northwestern Montana, I closed my eyes and saw the pattern of ferns on the floor of a mixed pine forest. The images were those of an old, smoky, foxed mezzotint, full of grays and browns and coppers. Typically, behind my closed eyelids before the drift into unconsciousness, I see formless granular shifting sands or that odd checkerboard of turquoise and grass green. Only a day into the Yaak and the place was strangely approachable, as if it could be home-like, though I hadn’t been there before. I have seen numerous types of forests in the USA, but not one like this.

Far from the Yaak I am back home in prairie country preparing for storage the fabulous coral mushrooms that we picked with a couple named Ginny and Paul. "Come with us!" they said, and we did. They didn't know us from Adam but wanted to share with us what they thought would be the unique Yaak experience of gathering the forest mushrooms, a regional delicacy. Ginny and Paul live in the Yaak but work on industrial equipment all over the world and in the states. They had just returned from a job in Romania. During the summers and autumns they harvest the bounty of the area: mushrooms, huckleberries, deer, and grouse.

Paul doesn't believe in bear spray, so he strapped to his side a big .460 with a scope on it and dove into the Yaak's dense forest with us in tow. The coral mushroom looks like coral, hence its name. It is also called a brain mushroom. It pushes up through the dark forest floor, and the forest duff of pine needles, lichen hairs, and loam clings to the convolutions of the fungi.

We picked the younger firm ones, the ones with the whiter flesh. The older, browner ones are a bit past their prime. The deer and snowshoe rabbits had gotten to a few of them first, but there seemed plenty to share between animals and humans. The forest smelled good, and here at home the mushrooms smell good, fresh, and clean, too. After sautéing and freezing some mushrooms, and slicing and oven-drying others, I have not washed my hands because I want to relish the smell of the Yaak forest for a little while longer.

The Yaak has the ability to make the well-appointed home in the city seem strange and alien. I am not entirely sure why this is. For many people the Yaak valley would be a disconcerting place. Airplanes seldom fly over that Pacific Northwest forest. People do not walk around with their eyes glued to their cell phones (no service in the Yaak). There is no entertainment industry, there are no billboards, there are no river cruises or water parks, no coffee shops, no McDonald's, no movie theaters. A neighbor often lives ten or fifteen miles away. One would be hard-pressed to find employment, and one rarely sees a policeman or state trooper unless there is a manhunt in the woods. And the woods are dark, dense, damp, and steep. Some people would find them spooky and scary.

But there are other qualities that prevail. The woods are not so much spooky (although it would be unwise to underestimate them) as rich and hypnotic. We spent hours driving on dirt roads at 5 mph, never seeing another soul. The trees themselves are quiet, saturated in green, and mesmerizing, a closely packed variety of pines, firs, cedars, and larches, as well as birches and aspens. Birdsong is loud, fluting, and caroling.

We stopped at snow-fed springs, parked the car smack dab in the middle of blacktops and two tracks that saw no other cars, and walked on the soft ground, listening to the run-off, trailing our fingers in the icy water. In a square foot were a dozen or more types of flowers, mosses, ferns, grasses, and lichens.

After a few days in such a place, the return home is an odd experience. I found myself driving to my local grocery store and feeling disoriented at an intersection I have seen thousands of times. Flashing signs and large billboards seem intrusive, people are preoccupied with their phones, garbage litters the streets, and homes seem to have altogether too many things both inside and out.

I don't mean to romanticize the Yaak or, worse, disparage my town and a Midwestern landscape that I have sunk into wholeheartedly and called home. The prairie is not less diverse or complex or beautiful than the Pacific Northwest forest. Indeed, it may be richer and more diverse in some ways. I mean only to identify differences, contrasts, and affinities, and perhaps to pinpoint a landscape far away that I would like to imagine as a home but that is not and cannot be. Surely, many of us have encountered such places.

Days later, the feeling persists. In the old film "Local Hero," the lead character, a business executive played by Peter Riegert, returns home to Houston, Texas, markedly changed from a business trip to Scotland and the rhythms of village life and ocean tides. From his apartment he makes a call, and the last frames of the film are of an outdoor phone booth, ringing, in the tiny Scottish seaside town.

Minus the story's oil refinery plot, I feel like that.