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.