botanizing

Snow/cloud

As I drove east this morning and rose into the western margin of the Rockies, I could see behind me a broad sea of cloud coming across the Palouse hills.  The distant cloud front was hummocked, a rolling band of white that extended as far as I could see on the western horizon from south to north. 

I walked into the mountains in a forest of pine and Douglas fir.  The snow beneath the trees was contoured, rolling over downed logs and mounds of small shrubs, around the edges and hollows of soil.  The glare on the snow made me think of flying over clouds. The temperatures have been high enough for the snow to melt and crust, which offered ice glints.  This snow was more embodied than clouds; at least its shadows accentuated the curves that made me think of torsos and thighs.  There were tracks, too—too many deer, a rodent that dragged its tail, and birds.  Mine were the largest of the tracks, although the stiff snow largely held my steps while crunching under them.  When I fly, I often think of walking on clouds, especially on early morning flights when the sun is sharp on the billows.  That thought of stepping onto cloud, tapping with my toe for footing, takes my breath away.

When I returned in the afternoon, the clouds were nearer.  The leading edge stood like iced waves caught breaking.  When I was within a mile of the front, I could resolve movement in the upturned waves of the cloud as it moved across the landscape.  Its frayed edge crept— glacially, it seemed as I drove—over the snow-covered hills.  As I entered town, I entered a wave, although where water would have had bow-like strands of white froth, the cloud had brown fibers.  The edge was a textured matrix with pockets of yellow light.  My house was deep beneath the cloud, where there were no shadows, just an even gray grain—I could have been in the crystalline interior of a snow bank, where the crust reflected nearly all light, leaving only shadow.

The Impaler

There was a pounding on the house today.  It was close to the connection of electrical wires to the house, which can be a sidetrack for the coven of squirrels that prowl and plot among the surrounding trees.  The sound was too insistent, too solid and focused for a squirrel. Flicker, I thought, or perhaps one of the magpies that can create nearly any annoying sound or distracting havoc.  I opened the door slowly, hoping not to scare the culprit, hoping for a look.  Nothing moved.  The pounding continued.  I stepped slowly toward the pounding.  When I had nearly reached the pounding, it flipped and flew toward me—I ducked back to avoid being impaled by a Red-Breasted Nuthatch.  The nuthatch stopped in the small maple by the house to take a good look at me.  “You incredible fool!” I could hear him mutter.  I had dared to distract the bird while he was thoroughly engaged in excavating my wall.

Wind in the trees

Fog descended this morning, turning cold air to fresh hoar on the trees.  Snow, too, came with the fog and continued as the clouds lifted.  That thinning of cloud was accompanied by wind.  I went out to the wind to watch.  The conifers twisted but did not shout, instead they whirred as the branches rolled about.  Even the snow, coming at a western slant, was caught-up in the wind, circling around the waving branches.

Photograph Albums

“Do you want to work on the photographs?” my mother would say when I visited.  In the last decade of her life, we sorted through the loose photographs of our extended family and arranged them in albums.  There were photographs that my mother had accumulated over many years as well as those that came from her sister Hazel and a few from her mother.  The more recent photographs were often still in the packages received from the printer.  We began by sorting the photographs into the various families of my aunts and uncles, and those of older generations were simply gathered in my mother and father’s lineages.  Each lineage went into its own envelope for storage in a large cardboard box.

We worked over the years at the kitchen table in mother’s house and later at a smaller table in the apartment she had in a senior citizens’ complex. We would spread the photographs of a family over the table, then begin to arrange them chronologically, gauging the age of individuals by changes in their faces and by the appearance of children and grandchildren. I would ask mother who was in a photograph and what year it might have been taken.  She would say something like, “well that was taken in Moulton”—or some other small town in southern Iowa or northern Missouri—“and it must be . . .”  I would check her identifications and guesses at dates against other photographs, then write the year and names of people on the page of the album and mother would put adhesive ‘art corners’ on the photograph, lick the corners, and adhere the photograph to the album page.

My mother was not a storyteller but seeing faces of family from decades past provoked her thoughts of relationship and sometimes a vignette.  She would pick-up photographs here and there and laugh.  “What?” I would say, and she would recall an event or something she had been told. Later at night, after we had finished and replaced the envelopes of families in the cardboard box, I would try to recall what she had told me.  I would write a few notes from her memories.

My mother enjoyed looking through the photograph albums.  When she thought about a relative, she would pull the albums from the closet where they were stored to find a photograph of the person.  I think of her rubbing the fingers of her left hand over those photographs and, nearer the end of her life, when her vision had weakened badly, she used a rectangular magnifier that had a handle like a hairbrush to search for the memories she sought in the pictures.

She wanted the photograph albums one morning.  Relatives from Ohio were coming later to visit, and she wanted to show them a photograph.  My sister, J___, had stopped-by mother’s apartment, which she often did in the mornings and mother, who could then not quite reach the stack of photograph albums from her wheelchair, asked J___ for help.  Mother wheeled her chair around to the closet where the albums were stored. My sister took one and then another album from the shelf for mother to check.  They weren’t finding the photograph she wanted.  Mother leaned forward, reaching toward the album she thought was right, but sat back heavily in her wheelchair.  “Dizzy,” she said, “I’m going to faint.”  Mother’s head lolled, and my sister reached to hold it.  With her other hand, J___ reached for mother’s wrist, where she felt her pulse, which was still alive. J___ reached then for the telephone to push the button that mother had marked for emergencies.

That image of my mother and sister lies like a photograph in my memory, although I was in London.  It was evening in London, and I was planning to go to a party and had a ticket to leave for Paris the next morning.  Still, the memory of my mother’s chin sinking against my sister’s hand lies photographically—sharply shadowed by a point-and-shoot flash—on a page of sorts in which it is juxtaposed against Paris.  I wonder what will happen to this memory over time and whether the juxtaposition of my mother’s fallen head and Paris will get mixed around in some absurd way.  Of course, I have neither a memory nor a photograph of that day in my mother’s apartment—I have the story.  I wrote it after my sister and I talked on the phone, and, when I was back in my mother’s apartment a few days later, it was again the first thing that J___ told me.

The photographs of albums are episodic, much like stories; but the photograph albums are incomplete narratives. I look for their dramatic arc, but it’s unclear.  There is more randomness to a photograph album than there is in stories, and albums are more fragmentary. Like memories, I think. Our memories are drawn, kin-like, to these aspects of photograph albums.  I wonder about the relationship between memory and photographs, especially whether our memories bond to photographs, whether time turns photographs to memories in some alchemy story and age.

I have been looking at the photograph albums that my mother and I made, and, without new photographs, I have been sorting through memories. It’s hop scotch.  My memories bound one leg, then two, across the photographs, landing often between the pictures.  Those interstices intrigue me.  I am tempted to write between the pictures—with a fine-pointed roller ball, I want to bridge the fragments, making stories, false photographs made of words.

This is a false photograph, but a real memory:  it’s April 2000, and I have returned to Iowa to visit my mother, who has just been diagnosed with an untreatable cancer.  She will live nine months, perhaps a year, according to her physician.  At the end of my visit, we are in the Cedar Rapids airport.  We say our goodbyes.  My brother-in-law pushes my mother’s wheelchair into the elevator.  They turn to face me.  My mother gives me half a wave with her curled palm.  “I love you,” she says.  I am a forty-something man with graying hair, and I am crying.  “She’ll be here when you get back,” my sister says. In the bright light of the elevator, my sister and her husband stand beside my mother in her wheelchair.  My mother’s shoulders slump slightly.  The elevator’s doors slide shut.  Like a camera’s shutter.

In the last photograph album, which my mother assembled while I was away, she included photographs of herself.  They were taken with an inexpensive Polaroid camera that produced only fuzzy images in cool colors.  She sits in the photographs at the table in her apartment, where she has spread the afghans that she has recently crocheted.  She had spent much of her last two decades crocheting afghans, at which she had great skill, making them tight and thick and winning regularly prizes for them at local crafts shows.  She asked to be buried with her crochet needles.  She asked also to have her arms covered by a small afghan that she had made.  “I don’t want to be cold,” mother said, “I want something on my arms.”

Snow rains

Snow, melting in the treetops, is raining.  The snow on the ground is perforated, like worm holes in old wood, by the falling drops.  When I look up, my glasses are splattered.

Split Trunk

After the snow a few weeks ago (posted on 26 November), I photographed a Douglas fir bent to an arc by the weight of snow.  I wondered then how long the tree would stand and found last weekend that it had been snapped by our recent windstorms.  The long body of the tree lies now in the snow; its bow is gone.  Some trunk of the Douglas fir still stands.  It’s ten feet tall and split for its entire length. 

Smooth planes of wood at the core of the split trunk are dimpled.  These are the puckers of wood that embed the bases of the tree’s early branches.  The dimples are less than a pencil’s width in thickness.  Those thin branches made when the was tree less than a head high have been long gone from the surface of the tree, but they remain like wishful relicts of youth held deep in the wood.

The wind to sleep

The wind is again rising.  I am thinking of sleep.  We had a rough windstorm on Monday night.  Each stiff gust would lift my roof and creaks would roll across the walls and floors.  A juniper, grown against the house, slapped my bedroom wall.  The roof was pelted with sticks and fruits.  I didn’t sleep that night until nearly five in the morning. 

Last night there was first a boom of thunder and flash of lightning.  Both are so rare here that I thought it was an airplane—the 11.00 p.m. flights will sometimes wheel on the landing path to the airport and send a beam of light into my bedroom.  The boom and flash was not a plane, it was the arrival of the next front.  Hard wind followed. As I lay in bed, I wondered whether my broad-eaved roof would hold.  I could hear the gusts come over the hill of the neighborhood, passing roughly around the houses, whirring in the twisting trees, and then slamming my west wall.  I felt the force.  The shivering juniper shimmied against my wall and windows.  Some dead leg thumped against the basement wall.  Detritus slammed the roof.  Tiny crab apples hit like bullets.  I jerked when the shadows disappeared.  The streetlights had gone out.  It was a little later, perhaps near 1.00 a.m. when I heard a crash of branches.  I rose from bed to look out the windows but couldn’t see any branches fallen near the house.  Perhaps I slept finally about 3.00 and then was stiff and worn when I woke this morning.

I discovered this morning the top of my backyard spruce lying across the driveway.  It was about 20 feet behind my truck, and its fall had also missed all of the electrical wires, although it appears to have taken out the neighbor’s telephone and television cables.

The spruce had split about 50 feet above the ground where two branches had long diverged to serve as equal leaders.  There must have been some weakness at that node. One of my students offered to bring over her chainsaw this afternoon to help me clear the treetop from the driveway.  It took only an hour to trim branches from the paired fallen leaders and then cut the wood into fireplace lengths.  The trunk pieces will eventually burn for more than an hour each.  When those resinous logs pop and crack in the fireplace, I will think of these windy nights.  I think now of a night of sleep, a night without wind.

Botanizing the Nelsons

Aven Nelson’s childhood and mine were separated by little more than ten miles and 100 years.  Our childhood’s were played-out on the agricultural plains and in the wooded ravines where the acute angle made by the Mississippi and Des Moines rivers comes to a point in southeastern Iowa.  My ancestors had moved west from Ohio, settling in the vicinity of the Nelson’s farm, and later moved the ten miles to Farmington, where I was reared. Aven Nelson was born in 1859, and I in 1958.  We both became botanists interested in the plant diversity of the American West.

I’ve been thinking about Aven Nelson because of Frieda Knobloch’s book Botanical Companions.  While in the library last week to get a volume on the life and letters of a 19th century botanist, I noticed on the shelf the slim, black Botanical Companions.  I hadn’t seen it before, and it looked new.  What I found in Botanical Companions was wonderful.  Knobloch has explored many of the same ideas of botanical travel, collection, and memory through which I’ve been treading.  She explores these ideas in regard to Aven and Ruth Ashton Nelson.

The marriage of Ruth Ashton to Aven Nelson is one of Knobloch’s major themes.  They married in 1931, following the death of Aven Nelson’s first wife in 1929.  Ruth Ashton and Aven Nelson were married on her 35th birthday; Aven was 72.  The disparity in their ages is always a curiosity and Knobloch tries to explore it, although little material appears to remain that could inform us of their married life or even the botanical experiences they shared.  In the few photographs of the couple in Knobloch’s book, they are always apart, never touching, but they share broad smiles.

My first sense of Ruth Ashton Nelson was that she provided late in the 20th century a link to the frontier botany of the American West, in which Aven Nelson was an important player.  It was that link that was on my mind when I met Ruth.

The pasque flowers had recently turned to fruit in the spring of 1984.  Ruth Ashton Nelson was 88 and might have suffered a minor stroke the year before.  Through mutual acquaintances, I was invited to meet her at Skyland Ranch, her property in the hills above Estes Park, Colorado. Ruth wore a pale, weathered yellow sweater in the log house that was heated by a fire in a wood stove.  She moved well but with a slight stoop and lowered herself into a comfortable chair.  Her chair faced a broad window that framed a view of the peaks of the Front Range.  Those peaks—Powell, Otis, Hallet’s and Taylor—had fresh snow from earlier in the day, and they were shaded by low clouds. 

I asked Ruth about the early days of collecting in the Rocky Mountains, and she told me the already well known story of Aven Nelson’s appointment at the University of Wyoming and how he began to collect plants.  Ruth spoke only generally about the numerous trips she and Aven Nelson had made throughout the Rocky Mountains to collect.  As we talked, her eyes were still; her arms on the chair’s arms lay unmoved.  It was only when she began to talk about Alaska that her eyes seemed to focus, to shine more.  She and Aven were at Denali in 1936 to make a plant collection for the National Park Service.  The park superintendent drove them each day in his passenger car to collection sites until the car broke-down on the rough roads.  After that, Ruth and Aven took whatever service truck went out to get into the field to collect.  She smiled at the fond memory.  Ruth and Aven prepared a manuscript on the flora of the park and left it with the Park Service to publish, which they never did, Ruth recalled with frustration.  Although Ruth answered my questions, she seemed to have little interest in or energy for telling stories.  I wasn’t sure of her reticence but respected her short answers by not probing too deeply or for too long.

Ruth Ashton Nelson had died by the time that Frieda Knobloch began Botanical Companions, but Knobloch includes in the center of the book a set of letters to the late Ruth.  They are the letters of inquiry a scholar would send to an important informant.  The letters, I found, were the critical part of the book.  They present the dilemma of understanding—the sparseness of relicts, the absence of telling details, and the manner in which we project from ourselves to the things we want to understand.  Later in the book, Knobloch tells us that when she looks in the direction of Ruth Ashton Nelson, she recognizes “that I cannot look directly at her, a very complicated amalgam of her and me looks back.”  What Knobloch finds is a relationship, although certainly a one-sided affair, with the late Ruth. Knobloch suggests the point is to “understand some of the texture of relationship” through a sort of scholarly empathy enacted by creating her own personal narrative that interacts with the botanical experience and marriage of Aven and Ruth Nelson.

Frieda Knobloch tells us what she does as a scholar of the Nelsons.  It is the kind of narrative, informing us of how and why, that she would like to have had from the Nelsons.  When the facts of Ruth Ashton Nelson’s life and marriage become too tenuous for scholarship, Knobloch turns to a parallel story of her grandmother and mother. There is the sense that we reach for what is available when we can’t have what is wanted—if Ruth Nelson’s history is unavailable, then other histories will need to substitute.  What may be most tangible is the sense of the unknowable as well as will to handle the few relicts, to make new collections, and to tell a story.

Virginia Woolf on Emily Brontë

Virginia Woolf on Emily Brontë:  “It is as if she could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.  Hers, then, is the rarest of all powers.  She could free life from its dependence on facts, with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.” 

From “‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’” in The Common Reader

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The photograph was a breakfast view from my big back windows of the first sun on a tree's snowy upper branches.

Rattling Kettle

The teakettle has swallowed its whistle.  It’s become a rattling kettle.  This started about a year ago, and for several months I replaced the metal half of the whistle, pushing it back into the tenuous hold of the holed, plastic spout lid, each time it fell. Several weeks ago I accepted the ruin of the whistle but began to like better the kettle for its change.  In my aesthetic, ruins have many appeals.  The half-ruined kettle functions well, and, while less insistent without a whistle, it still sounds the boil.  The swallowed whistle rattles.  The whistle rattle grows from a few pings at the first bubbles to a bumptious banging when roiling.  When the rattling is steady, the banging strong, I walk to the kitchen to make tea.