May 2006 | Conscious Reading
The Love of Impermanent Things
By Mary Rose O’Reilley
Our team was scheduled to go into the woods near Kenyon, Minnesota, in the Sogn Valley at noon, precisely when the turkey hunters were required by law to quit shooting.
Had the hunters synchronized their watches?
We wore orange mesh vests, just in case.
About ten of us lined up an arm’s length apart in the pouring rain and began an elaborate line dance through drifts of flowering isopyrum: the Swedes must have fiddle music for an exercise like this. Robin and I usually spend much of our weekends playing Scandinavian duets on our fiddles, which I would rather be doing, to tell the truth, than staring into the wet, green face of this cold woods. Robin has the look of a man who might be composing a piece called “Langdans fran Sogn.”
Our task will be to count dwarf trout lilies for the Nature Conservancy. Trout lilies are about four inches high, the blossom rising on a solitary stem out of two mottled, elliptical leaves. It looks something like a violet, and, in fact, its common name is “dogtooth violet.” But now think of a flower half that size, for it is the rare dwarf trout lily ( Erythronium propullans ) that we are looking for, also called the Minnesota Adder’s Tongue. This ephemeral seems to be found only in Minnesota and Wisconsin, a ghost baby of its larger relative, a slip of thread. In early May, dwarf trout lilies are usually a full-quarter inch of flower; many specimens in this woods are in fact past prime, slipping into their almost invisible dissolve. Some have been nipped by a deer or flooded out — for this land we’re walking was under the Zumbro River a week ago.
Our job is to spot each whisker of flora and mark it with a pink flag. Some old colonies are already marked with orange flags, mapped in a previous season. The number of plants in each colony — an average of six or as many as 125 — is marked on its flag. We have to recount the old colonies and determine if populations are growing or declining, as well as search for new flowering outposts. We also note changes and aberrations — for example, instances of aborted flowering — that may signal something is going on in the ecosystem.
There’s a baby stream to cross, running just above the anklebones. I was having more fun before I sank into that freezing current. Two hours into the task, two hours to go, it’s zero at the bone, as Emily Dickinson would surely say. Then, too, all this davening among the sprouts has ground my hipbones; I’m afraid I will soon have to be airlifted out in a frozen squat. It rains harder and harder.
Nancy Sather, the biologist leading our party, knows how to keep our spirits up. She positions us newcomers in line with a mother colony, so we’ll have some flamboyant success. For my part, I have come upon the body of a newborn fawn, drowned and teeming with maggots, which holds my interest. I peer into its mystery of bone and loops of innards until I almost lose my place in the human whip. Never let it cross your mind what a crazy task we are undertaking. What is the rest of America doing at this moment? Reading John Donne, watching the last episode of Survivor? — whoa! My fingers brush a leaf of bloodroot to the west and catch a spider’s weft of trout lily thread in the middle of Sogn woods, latitude 44 degrees 39 minutes 19 seconds N, longitude 93 degrees 14 minutes 46 seconds W. In the next phase of this project, naturalists with global-positioning equipment will come in and situate these tiny lilies in the starry galaxy, accurate to a meter.
Later, Robin and I get out of our wet socks in the car and drink strong tea with our chocolate-chip pumpkin cake. Sometimes I think we spend exacting days like this just to experience the exhausted clarity of their finish, kind of like an exercise in Rinzai Zen. In Rinzai meditation, monks race around at top speed, then halt abruptly in order to feel the grace of stillness. The tea of our present moment is delicious. In Nova Scotia, I’ve read, there are men who go out in trawlers to harvest the water off icebergs in order to make tea this good. Hot air blows on our feet, and Robin and I remind each other of all the places in the woods near Vasa church where we made love when the spring ephemerals were coming into bloom, how we ate those lemon-ginger cookies. We have been making this trip for fifteen years, since our dogs were young.
Robin says, pulling on his socks, “I wonder why we do this.”
I am lost in the memory of lemon-ginger cookies. “Which?” I ask.
“Why we crazily save things.” He doesn’t mean “we” as individuals, but “we” as a collective of orange-vested hikers, or “we” as members of a subset within a species. He goes on to muse on his own question, “It reminds me of doing wildlife rehabilitation. We line up all those bats in their aquariums, feed them mealworms with tweezers, while all over the city people are hitting them with tennis rackets ….
I say, “My students will never do that, now that they know …”
“I suppose when you know, really know …” he responds.
We have begun one of our duets: “… how everything connects to everything else.”
I hope that Robin will incorporate that theme into his “Langdans fran Sogn.” But all music has that theme. The fear and flight and flooding, the doe giving birth in the rising water, they will run through our dreams and the dreams of our old dogs, who are waking up now in the backseat and wanting their share of pumpkin bread.
Robin looks into the trees, “Those orange and pink flags have plotted out the woods like galaxies.”
The old religions have a phrase, “As above, so below.”
A man named George Divoky — I read in the New York Times — spends every summer on a frozen barrier island in North Alaska charting the movements of guillemots, a husky bird in the alcid family. He lives in a tent, melts snow to drink, and eats Heinz products out of cans. His marriage broke up and he doesn’t get to see his kids, who must be grown now — he has made this passage for more than twenty-five years. He keeps yellow journals of when the birds arrive, where they nest and with whom, the ratios of males to females. Most importantly, he notes the dates they return to roost and the conditions that seem to draw them, the delicate balance of freeze and thaw, the owl action in the vicinity, and so forth.
It seems that at first — for some twenty years, as naturalists keep time — he had no idea why he was giving up his chances in the world for the sake of guillemots. Until suddenly one day his life’s inarticulate longings tied up with a vast current of global history — what does anyone ask of life besides this one incandescent moment? For George Divoky, that moment came when his data sets began to tell him a story about global warming, began to sound an alarm for the human species — as though he were meant to be there in that time and place, uncomfortable, lonely, often feeling (I imagine) half mad, obsessed and faithful, unable to explain to any woman or child why he was wasting his life this way.
The artist Frederick Franck now in old age, says, “When I start drawing I am scared. Drawing from life, which I do at least once a week, I have to prove I can still do it. I did a drawing yesterday on the beach. There are thirty figures in that drawing. I scribbled them down in a kind of ecstasy mixed with despair. I could never do that again. Drawing is a strange process, for even where it succeeds you never do justice to what you see. If you draw well today, you can’t assume that tomorrow you can continue on that, you have to start all over again, from scratch. No guarantee of success, unless you are a hack who uses a routine.”
“Are you able to live according to your own truth?” the interviewer asked.
“No,” Franck replied. “But I am always aware of it when I fall short. I am awake to it — to the existence of my truth. Our own truth is our true selves. It can’t be discovered, but perhaps it can be intuited. You can get in tune with its potentiality. And then you are out of tune again.”
The old man’s words seem to me so important. As the waters rush in to annihilate our civilization, I want to scratch them in the sand. His way is not a better way, or a worse way, than the way of people working late in night in skyscrapers, trading on the Tokyo stock exchange or scrubbing the floors of people who trade. But it’s a hidden, mysterious way — who notices it? — that artists live, and kindergarten teachers, naturalists, and nuns in contemplative convents.
In a few months I will have made a new friend, the young painter Karl Pilato. One day we will be walking along the Salmon River estuary, near the Oregon coast, and he will draw in a breath. Karl is a quiet person, and this breath means, “Kingfisher!” Big tears will pop out of my eyes. Kingfishers are gone from my native lakeshore in Minnesota, though I used to see them every day. “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame.” Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem comes to me, with its ferocious ornithological and artistic assertion: What I do is me! For that I came.
I think of grizzled, old ornithologists who would fall on their knees in their baggy shorts if they heard the tap of an ivory-billed woodpecker deep in the woods, that distinctive double rap.
It would be like finding the blue scrap of a letter floating over a burnt house.
For that I came.
Mary Rose O’Reilley, “Long Dance in the Sogn Valley,” in The Love Of Impermanent Things: A Threshold Ecology (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2006). Copyright © 2006 by Mary Rose O’Reilley. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions, 800-520-6455, milkweed.org.
Mary Rose O’Reilley’s prose works include The Peaceable Classroom, Radical Presence, The Garden at Night (Heinemann) and The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd (Milkweed Editions). O’Reilley’s first book of poetry, Half Wild, was recently announced the winner of the 2005 Walt Whitman Prize of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Mary Oliver. When she is not writing, O’Reilley is a gardener, a Sacred Harp singer, an apprentice wildlife rehabilitator, and certified spiritual director amongst many other things.
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