In the very large, the very small
To a New Englander who is used to modest, glacier-rounded “mountains” and to whom a 100-foot-tall hemlock is “towering,” everything in the Pacific Northwest is out-sized. Rounding a bend of highway, I get a sudden, gasp-inducing revelation of a snow-capped peak, dwarfing hills the size of the east’s highest peaks. I can’t photograph even an adolescent Douglas fir with fewer than three stitched-together frames. “Birdwatching” entails craning my neck to glimpse a moving silhouette in the distant canopy (the bird giving me a raspberry from its safe perch). The honey-crisp apples are melon-sized. Even the splattering raindrops, plopping on my sketchbook, are big. This Oregonian forest is majestic, yes, but a little overwhelming in the sensory department. I am a Lilliputian in a dizzyingly gargantuan world, and I’m feeling ever so slightly seasick.
Time, too, is a rather relative concept here. Some of these big Doug firs are 800 years old, three times older than the oldest of those towering New England hemlocks. Plant a seedling today, and my grandchildren’s grandchildren won’t even call it a sapling.
How can a scientist-artist hybrid like me, accustomed to studying and illustrating organisms the size of my hand and smaller, possibly take all this in? Slowly, quietly, gradually, meditatively, I suppose. But I only have one privileged week, mooching on the hospitality of the Andrews LTER, and I don’t have a lot of time to sit and listen to my brain cells divide. I start by focusing on the living things – or parts of living things – that I perceive within my immediate field of vision. I tell myself to appreciate the wonders I can hold in my hand, and then to place them in the impossibly large context of an immense old-growth forest (or, maybe, the history of the known Universe…okay, my noisy brain cells are still on over-drive).
One slow and quiet afternoon, I take the luxury to sit and sketch near the banks of Lookout Creek on the upper Old-Growth Trail. I sit humbly at the base of a centuries-old cedar, and it’s some minutes before I can stop gaping dumbly at the silent stand of trees, their upper boughs swathed in mist. Feeling somewhat damp and completely inadequate to the task, I rummage through my pack for my sketchbook and pen. “Plop!” goes an errant raindrop. A bird sneers at me unseen from somewhere up there. For my first subject, I choose the butt-snapped fir stump in front of me, rather than attempting a more traditional “landscape” of the tree-clad hillside in the middle distance.
As I draw, I become enchanted with the fairy-tale world that this six-foot-diameter stump encompasses.
Hemlock seedlings have rooted along its “cliffs,”resembling mature palms lining the road to a palace; the central hollow contains its own emergent forest.
Continue reading Elizabeth Farnsworth’s “In the very large, the very small” here.
