Tag: Gary Snyder

they dematerialize

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I’m reading the wonderful new issue of Manoa, Cascadia: The Life and Breath of the World. So much to admire — Tom Jay’s “The Salmon of the Heart”, John Schreiber’s “Walking Ts’yl-os, Mt. Tatlow”, Eden Robinson’s “The Sasquatch at Home”, and Gary Snyder’s “Reinhabitation”. And I had to smile as I read Barry Lopez’s story, “In the Great Bend of the Souris River” for this small perfect phrase in the first paragraph: “…an image of coyotes evaporating in a draw.” Yes, yes, that’s exactly what they do.  (I’ve always called it “dematerializing”.) So often you come upon one in the wild and one moment you see it, the next it’s gone. Disappeared, into thin air, right before your eyes. An enviable ability. Not long ago, I saw one cross the trail in front of me and then it wasn’t there. It hadn’t raced away but simply dematerialized. Or evaporated. This is the young one who visited several mornings in a row a few summers ago, walking casually past us where we drank coffee on our deck, and pausing to eat salal berries before vanishing — it had learned the trick!

morning visitor

Look up

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The other day, we headed out between showers, walking over to Sakinaw Lake to see if the coho were in Haskins Creek. They weren’t; it’s still a bit early. But we wandered over anyway, into the low marshy area between the road and the creek, and looked up at this bigleaf maple with its little forest of ferns.

These ferns are Polypodium glycyrrhiza, or licorice ferns, and occur in epiphytic colonies on the trunks of trees. Here’s a (blurry) close-up of the ferns:

There’s a branch of biology devoted to arboreal canopies, focussing on the organisms which thrive in these elevated ecosytems. Gastropods, insects, amphibians, epiphytes, and even small trees! Think of it happening over our heads while we walk, talking of this and that, while whole worlds establish themselves in moss.

There was elk scat in the marshy area, the sound of mergansers out on the lake, and the silvery gabble of water in Haskins Creek, running clear over sand and stones, waiting for the salmon, as we are.  I thought of Gary Snyder, “Nature not a book, but a performance, a/high old culture…”