Reflections: Field Notes, Journal Entries, Essay, Poems, and Comments
April 22, 2004. Thursday morning. 10, to Personal Plot # 1. Sun! Now the dogwood is in shade. Has almost retracted into the forest, while backlit shoreside alderlings and river chips assume all the borrowed brightness of the sun. I take hydro samples from rhodie boats [sip drops from curled leaves].
Every moment of every reflection is responsive, allusive, and subject to mood and how wet my butt is–just the opposite from long-term ecological observations with numbers. How the cold current persuades that root, already talked out of its bark, to let go; how old trees and rootwads form islands that redirect the pummel for each downstream riffle-making rock. How organisms adapt to all this, and what they look like, doing so. How those things touch on our own sense of fitting, bending, releasing, resisting, hanging on.
A big pollinator visits a garnet vine maple flower; I see it is a red-bummed bumblebee. How many more days of rain would have doomed it? How long will this sustain it? Above it, dogwood flowers and fresh, tender Cornus leaves sunstroke against blue sky: benignity, or my sense of it? A winter wren sings me out the path of the green black old-growth puzzle, where softest chartreuse vine maple and red huckleberry leaflets carve sharp relief against dark and still ancient boles. A piece has just revealed itself with a tiny movement in the sun: rufous hummingbird building a nest on a mossy branch of a large Pacific yew extending into the sun over the stream. What has she been doing, these cold, rainy days, and does she forage upstream all the way to the blood currants? Do the vine maples have nectaries, or is the bumblebee coming solely for pollen? Her spot is between an immense Douglas-fir and a massive western hemlock.
Among the puzzle pieces below, the jigsaw of Trientalis, queen’s cup beadlily, and oxalis, in the matrix of salal. Sword fern, Oregon grape, and roses. Do roses ever bloom in here [in the deep shadows]? 11 a.m.–tumbling rill on the way up FR 1506–What is hard to accept for a writer, but unassailable, is that this needs no words.
Continue reading Robert Michael Pyle’s “Reflections.”
