Marster Spring
We are on the third day traveling around a basin once filled by Paleolake Chewaucan. Our group has moved steadily through time, from nearly 15,000 years before present (YBP) at Paisley Caves to 3,000-500 YBP at ancient campsites on Abert Lake. Together we have imagined how humans might have interfaced and integrated with their world in a time when people and nature were not the duality they are today. In our minds we have spent the winter eating dried tui chub, thought through the possibilities for excretion while riding out a storm inside a rock shelter, and wondered about the ancient and present reality of migration enforced by climate.
This morning we focus on the present, a young October day gilded and warm in the way that syrup and butter melt over hotcakes. My butt rests on a small beach of basalt cobbles, the small of my back set against a larger rock smoothed by eons of water tumbling through dry country. The Chewaucan River burbles past my outstretched legs, transecting an island of cottonwood and Ponderosa pine skipped over by the Bootleg Fire of 2021. On the ridge above the river, skeletons of juniper and pine rise black against a mountain bluebird sky. A down-canyon breeze gathers and gentles against my right cheek, carrying the scent of mint sprigs into nostrils searching for the smell of winter. Dragonfly flutters and tips downstream, perhaps hoping for a last mating in this closing window of autumn. To my left lies a deer pelvis, stark against charcoal basalt, its oval cavity pierced by sedges the size of golf pencils. The bones are an outcome of starvation or coyotes or both, a harbinger of a hungry reality looming on the horizon.
Even in the warm wither of mid-October, the stream lacks clarity. I’m not sure why. This morning I’m no more willing to explain this turbidity than I’m willing to think through my own ongoing lack of clarity. Actually, I’m suspicious of clarity. The real world has very little of it. In fact, I became a biologist because of the comforting messiness of living things and their various continua that defy definitions. Definitions are human constructs. They provide a false sense of security in the fuzzy flux and flow of a living world. At worst, misplaced clarity can become the mother of dogma. The splish of a feeding trout in the riffle in front of me means certain death for a floating insect. A subdued roar of ATVs reaches me from across the creek, people probably returning from a morning deer hunt. I find the sound obtrusive, even though my group drove two cars to get here. All of these eaters and eaten seem to affirm my point: reality is messy.
My eyes close into the late-morning sun. For a moment, the swirl of October drifts away on the current. Some find it a conundrum that my favorite month is also the most emotionally taxing. It’s the month before hunker time, the weeks left to gorge on transiency. Vine maple leaves shot through with yellow and red. Chanterelles fresh up from the first rains. Chinook salmon thrashing into coastal streams to perform their life-perpetuating death rite. Our family apple cider day at the Smith River orchard. Mom left us last summer, reminding me that I am now of an age where I can see an end to my own Octobers. I’m not afraid, exactly. Just trying to drink them in as best I can. The breeze picks up, rattling and twirling golden cottonwood leaves still clinging to their branches. I can relate.
Sometimes I ask too much of a place. Often I sit looking for a window into consciousness, as though my attention in any liquid moment isn’t conscious enough, as though somehow the place needs to conform to my human expectations around awareness, as though I need approval from the Transcendentalists. It’s silly, really. Because the very act of trying to “elevate” my thinking is sometimes as much a distraction as wondering what to fix for lunch when I return. This is partly why I hesitated to pull out my journal and begin writing this morning.
Most of my time is spent in a headlong plunge through life that keeps me from thinking too deeply. I’m not a student of mysticism, although the mystics have been there to bail me out when my brain wandered too far afield. Nor am I a student of quantum theory, even though I have sometimes coopted those wriggly, wavy, entangled ways of matter and energy to shore up my intuition. But the physicists have recently grabbed my attention. Using a combination of radiotelescopic technology and astrophysics they have detected an underlying “hum” in the universe caused by low-frequency gravitational waves. This tonal energy is shared by all things, living or not, animal or not, human or other-than-human. Everything. The rock that is becoming uncomfortable against my back, the water whose lack of clarity I have chosen as my own, the insect in the gullet of that trout, and the misguided dragonfly searching for fall sex.
No, the hum does not explain away my tinnitus. The low frequency of human hearing is about 20 hertz, and these instruments are “listening” in the range of a nanohertz, or about one thousand millionth of a hertz. This means I can’t tune directly into this hum without the technology and mathematical whizz-bang that was used to discover it. Nevertheless, I’m ready to go out on a limb. Experiencing the hum will be a matter of intense attention to the comings and goings of the moment coupled with a commitment to the idea of this unifying low-frequency resonance. I can know the hum is here with a brain that is ready to accept that this unifying reality makes sense. Seems a little idiosyncratic, right? Yet it strikes me as more reasonable than trying to overlay my strictly human version of consciousness, all riddled with impatience and ADD and neurological turbidity, onto a given time and place. In reality, all I have to offer is sitting. Attention. Maybe some words. The rest is already here. All this yellow and breezy whirling toward winter needs no help from me whatsoever.
The dragonfly, thorax holding rattling wings, black darning needle abdomen trailing along behind, circles around one more time as if to say “What of it?” I reach to pluck a mint leaf. Crumple it beneath my nose. Have I told you how much I love the music of mint?