Phenology

I read this, from Helge Larsen & Froelich Rainey, quoted in a Dan O’Neill book: “No truly primitive group could exist under such conditions. Only by means of a highly complex technology & through a highly developed knowledge of natural phenomena could human beings penetrate the Arctic.” 

Such similitude with what strikes me from Wendell Berry, which boils down to how involved & practiced & nuanced & meticulous an observer of your immediate world you need to be in order to subsist from it, & how the dizzying calculus of that lifeway is so often derided as simple when it demands a degree of commitment & complexity that is largely absent from life away from natural attentions. It comes to this: refrain from the rigors of the former & human life fails, refrain from the rigors of the latter & life goes on. This is not a difficult thing to surmise. But we’ve wearied of dirtying our hands, & our ears are attuned to the clamoring beeps & electronic summons that symphonize the world we’ve made over the one we live upon. We tremble when we hear the human heart beat. 

I am craving today the slow narrative of phenology. The stories that flash across the wings of the migrating birds. The brindling shock of winter’s white fur mottling over the brown in patient erasures. Those first touches of granular snow in the high country that touch upon the soil & dissolve seconds later, a kind of warning volley merging what is with what will come to be. 

Ada asked us today while walking what was on the road underfoot. We told her two answers. In the first, the asphalt was poured over the pit run gravel, itself layed out over typar on compacted soil scraped free of the impediments of root & brush. & then we reminded her that in a temporal sense the street was poured over the banner of the carriage path, itself the exhausted horse trail over the walking path that followed the intentional trajectory of game pursuing its quarry over years & years & years. Somewhere under our feet were epochs, layered one atop the other, life built upon death, the present the budding flower of its past. & in that exercise of imagined regression, the peripheries were populated by tree & brush & grass & sedge, river & cloud & sky. The houses crumbled & were unbuilt, the cars zipped backwards & the asphalt unpeeled. All the while, the vultures in their circling, the ash flycatchers upon the boughs. The fences rolled up & the posts bundled in wagons & were carted away. The prairie restored itself in a beautiful conflagration of color. The pathways threw dirt cloud under the footfall of the people who lived here before our monoculture spat its oildark ink over everything. People who were not in possession of a word for “nature,” because their lives & the life of nature were indistinguishable. Their phenologies were ancient, regenerative, balanced & riddled with complexities rooted in the world’s carriage. They were necessary, & held room for the coupling of beauty & need. 

A phenology is subject to time & time is subject to the sorrows & pains & wonders it elicits in its passage. It renders stark every relief, if the aperture widens enough. Our singularity is divested, then that of our family, then that of our place, our species, our era. & all the while, the birds are singing, the rivers trickling along, the leaves alight on the breeze. 

It must become enough, for me, to strive toward phenology again. The barrier of the wildlands & me, where I wager a tentative step & hear the cavernous refrain of the unsentimental country echo back in waves. Where I lose a notch or two on the food chain & live with the awareness of that breed of fragility. I would take wing. I would lay down on the morain & listen for the calving & feel the fireweed blooming through my skin. Riddle my brain with the whorling intricacy beneath every layer of examination. 

I want the flavor of wildness on my children’s tongues, so they can judge its taste in their years to come, when they, too, reckon with the ambivalence of time, how it exerts such heartrending heft even while it carries off in a thrush’s song & is gone. For them to scan their landscape for whatever it is they come to desire in conjunction, in unison, in opposition to their own bright figures. I don’t know the merit in the rest of it, only the loving & the being in the world, while the passerines dote on jaunty melodies & the sandhill cranes honk & bellow, a dark arrow in loose rank, pointing toward the north.