Nature Writing

[Sancho]

There’s some great writing about the natural world out there. Danik and I got to talking about it over on another thread, but I think nature writing deserves a thread of its own. So here it is. A place to chat about the works that cover the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky, and the fishes in the sea; as well as the crawling and slimy things, the bumbling and buzzy things, the giant sequoia and the grassy mountain meadow, from the tiniest microorganism right on up to Gaia herself, and beyond - the nature of the universe is open game as well (after all Danik and I started this discussion over on a thread about Mars)

So anyways this is a place to share thoughts about the scribblings of the natural world. Who’s your favorite nature writer? I’ve found that nature writing sneaks up on me when least expect it. It’s often part of a larger work. A couple of years ago I read The History Of Wolves, a first novel by Emily Fridlund. There were a bunch of well-tuned literary devices in the book - you know, writer’s workshop type stuff, but what I remember most were her descriptions of wild Minnesota. Totally freaking awesome. Made me want to go there…in the winter…brrrr.

Alrighty then, prose or verse, fiction or nonfiction, even a particularly artful paragraph in a biology textbook qualifies for this thread. And of course I think we’d all like to read something you’re particularly proud of that you wrote yourself.

[stlukesguild]

Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian contrasted passages of great beauty describing the American west with passages of absolute horror and violence.

[Sancho]

St Luke! Long time, no see (or read as the case may be). I miss all those pics you used to post back in the day. Art, as a visual medium, is something I’ve never quite tuned in to. I sense there’s something there that people are getting that I’m missing. So I enjoyed the stuff you posted and the accompanying explanations. Then at some point, I think, the administrators here put the kibosh on the big visual files and as a consequence those discussions of the visual arts sort of dried up. The thumbnails couldn’t quite cut it.

So anyway, Cormack McCarthy seems to be a writer whose name keeps popping up over here in the “General Literature” section. Blood Meridian is the first book by him I read. I couldn’t put it down. When I finished it I just sat there for a while, stunned. - Holy Sh*t. - Then I had to go back and read Lonesome Dove again. In another of his books, The Crossing, McCarthy’s description of a wolf pack on a snowy New Mexico mountain meadow is amazing. It was unsentimental yet just detailed enough to really get at the nature of the wolf. It also kicked off the whole story. I finished the Border Trilogy not long ago, so it’s still fresh in my mind.

So here’s one from the book I just finished, Waterlog by Roger Deakin. The writer has taken on the task of swimming in just about every open body of water he can find in Great Britain.

At the end of my first two chilly lengths, a frog leapt off the bank almost straight into my face, and others watched me from the water. That they are far outnumbered now by toads is due, I think, to predation of their tadpoles by newts, which much prefer the young of frogs to those of toads. There is no native creature quite so exotic or splendid as the male great crested newt, or eft, as the country people called them, in full display. They are the jesters of the moat, with their bright orange, spotted bellies and outrageous zigzag crests, like something out of a Vivienne Westwood show. I hung submerged in the mask and snorkel, and watched these pond-dragons coming up for air, then slowly sinking back into the deep water, crests waving like seaweed. They are so well adapted to the underwater life, I have to remind myself that they only come to the moat for six or seven months from February to July or August, to reproduce. Then they return to land, where you may not notice them unless you’re a gardener. You dig them up with the potatoes. They hide like bookmarks between old, vertically stacked rooftiles, or entomb themselves in dusty crevices in the brick-pile. Sometimes they even turn up mysteriously in the kitchen in autumn. They look a lot happier in the water.

[Sancho]

A seed knows how to wait. Most seeds wait at least a year before starting to grow; a cherry seed can wait a hundred years no problem. What exactly each seed is waiting for is known only to that seed. Some unique trigger-combination of temperature-moisture-light and many other things is required to convince a seed to jump off the deep end and take its chance—to take its one and only chance to grow.

Hope Jahren, Lab Girl

[Danik 2016]

Hi, Sancho!
Enjoyed the citation.

[Sancho]

Thanks, Danik

That quote reminded me of the Mojave desert, where I used to live. The Mojave is referred to as the “high desert” by the locals because, altitude wise, it’s up there. The Mojave is roughly the area between San Bernardino, California and Las Vegas, Nevada. Anyway every so often it would hit that magic “trigger-combination” and flower seeds that had lain dormant for who knows how long would spring into action and overnight the desert would turn purple, or red, or yellow, or some other color. It was awesome. Locals would say, “yup, hasn’t done that in a while.”

Speaking of the arid desert, here’s Ed Abbey in Desert Solitaire on the subject of the lack of water in the desert southwest:

Water, water, water....There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount , a perfect ratio of water to rock, water to sand, insuring that wide free open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.

[Danik 2016]

A desert, that suddenly gets covered with flowers must be unique!Thanks for the details of the location I never heard about it.

Just finished a book about a very different kind of nature. The blue Fox takes place in a location in Iceland, the name Ill have to look up so as to write it correctly. Same with the author. It is epic in its description of one person's fight against the ice. It also shows the most brutal and the most tender sides of the people in a very poetic prose. A good read specially in the summer when one just shivers at the word ice.

[Sancho]

I’ve heard the arctic is somewhat of a desert. This I think is based on the low level of annual precipitation. It doesn’t seem like a desert because of all the ice, but I guess at arctic temperatures when you get a little snow, it sticks around.

Here’s a quote about the path of the sun in the arctic, at latitude N90:

To grasp the movement of the sun in the Arctic is no simple task. Imagine standing precisely at the North Pole on June 21, the summer solstice. Your feet rest on a crust of snow and windblown ice. If you chip the snow away you find the sea ice, grayish white and opaque. Six or seven feet underneath is the Arctic Ocean, dark, about 29°F and about 13,000 feet deep. You are standing 440 miles from the nearest piece of land, the tiny island of Oodaaq off the coast of northern Greenland. You stand in each of the world’s twenty-four time zones and north of every point on earth. On this day the sun is making a flat 360° orbit exactly 23½° above the horizon.

Barry Lòpez, Arctic Dreams

[Danik 2016]

Impressive!

Yes I think you are right, it is a dessert, a cold dessert covered with ice instead of sans. ONe of the impressive scenes of The Blue Fox by Sjón is when one of the protagonists gets encased by the ice and it works as a sort of sleeping bag, protecting him from the cold. As you know I live in a country where the rare snow that appears in a few places is a luxury for tourist.

[Danik 2016]

No editing possible.

Here is the quote that should complete the answer above:

The rim of daylight was fading.

In the halls of heaven it was now dark enough for the Aurora Borealis sisters to begin their lively dance of the veils. With an enchanting play of colours they flitted light and quick about the great stage of the heavens, in fluttering golden dresses, their tumbling pearl necklaces scattering here and there in their wild caperings. This spectacle is at its brightest shortly after sunset.

Then the curtain falls; night takes over.
Sjón, The Blue Fox

[Sancho]

I must say, that’s a lyrical and whimsical depiction of the aurora borealis. I lived near Fairbanks, Alaska in the 80s and on certain winter nights we’d get spectacular auroras, huge curtains that would cover half the sky. My wife and I (both from places that don't have such a night sky) would stare at it for hours. The northern lights are a difficult thing to put into words, but it seems to me your quote gets at it well.

So in keeping with the north-country theme, and since Manichaean and I were chatting about Canada and Canadians over on his story-sharing thread, here’s a quote from a book I’m reading now about the misty fog in Pacific Northwest forests:

I was alone in grizzly country, freezing in the June snow. Twenty years old and green, I was working a seasonal job for a logging company in the rugged Lillooet Mountain Range of western Canada.

The forest was shadowed and deathly quiet. And from where I stood, full of ghosts. One was floating straight toward me. I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound emerged. My heart lodged in my throat as I tried to summon my rationality—and then I just laughed.

The ghost was just fog rolling through, its tendrils encircling the tree trunks. No apparitions, only the solid Timbers of my industry. The trees were just trees. And yet Canadian forests always felt haunted to me, especially by my ancestors, the ones who’d defended the land or conquered it, who came to cut, burn, and farm the trees.

It seems the forest always remembers.

Even when we’d like to forget our transgressions.

Suzanne Simard, Finding The Mother Tree, Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

[Sancho]

She italicized “just trees” in the quote above, but since the program italicizes the whole quote anyway, it didn’t show up. Anyhow, it seems important to her idea.

[Danik 2016]

THat´s an lovely take quote. Semms you have got round much in the world.

I travelled twice to Canada, but their were very urban trips: Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, Quebec and on the second trip Victoria, on the other side.

Was impressed by the subterranean rather ugly malls and potatoes for breakfast. Enjoyed mostly Quebec. People grinned at my bad French......

[Sancho]

Ha. Montreal has a whole city underground. You don’t even need a sweater there in the winter.

So I got hooked on Tana French’s detective novels a few years ago. And although that particular genre is not known for nature writing, in her latest book she has a running thread about rooks. She uses them as a literary device, but also I think she gets at their character fairly well. We don’t have rooks in North America, but we do have crows and ravens, which are in the same family — splendidly smart birds, also highly social.

This is from the end of the book:

In their tree the rooks are peaceful, tossing scraps of conversation back and forth, occasionally soaring across to a neighboring nest to pay a visit. One skinny young one is hanging upside down from a branch to see what the world looks like that way. Trey mixes stain colors on the plate, paints a neat square of each mixture onto a stray piece of two-by-four and labels it with a pencil, in some code of her own. Cal coaxes splinters of wood into place and clamps them there. After a while he opens the cake, and they break off a chunk each and sit in the grass to eat it, listening to the rooks exchange views and watching the shadows of clouds drift across the mountainsides.

As you probably figured out the case got turned “upside down.”

[Danik 2016]

That´s so true, Sancho! But the underground city I remember is rather ugly and bare.

That´s wonderful citation about rooks you put up there. Right now my observations of nature are limited to the doves and dogs I can spot from my drawing room window. Maybe you know/remember the region around Praça Roosevelt at the heart of the historic downtown of São Paulo. Just now I watched a fat and lustrous doverick doing his mating dance, while the lady of his heart gently turned her back on him.
Well, that is to tell you that, having finished the fox book, I am reading "Petersburg" by Andrej Bieli. I am reading the book slowly because the author delighted more in descriptions than in breathtaking action, but the descriptions of Petersburg are
really stunning, from very early 20th Century. Here a description of the Nesvkii Prospect. I´ve never been to St. Petersburg, but it seems to be one of it´s main avenues.:"

In the evening the Prospect is flooded by a pall of fire. The spheres of electric light in the middle hang evenly on high. At the sides the shifting gleam of signboards plays; here, here and here a flash of ruby lights; over there—a flash of emeralds. One moment—and the ruby lights are over there; and the emeralds are here, here and here.
In the evening the Nevskii is flooded by a pall of fire. And the walls of many buildings burn with gemstone light: words composed of diamonds sparkle brilliantly: ‘Coffee House’, ‘Farce’, ‘Tate Diamonds’, ‘Omega Watches’. A shop window, in daytime greenish, now resplendent, opens wide its fiery maw on to the Nevskii; everywhere are tens, hundreds of hellish fiery maws; these maws disgorge their bright white light tormentingly on to the pavement; they spew out a turbid fluid in fiery rust And the Prospect is chewed to shreds by fire. A white gleam falls on bowler hats, on top hats, plumes; the white gleam surges further, to the middle of the Prospect, shoving the evening darkness off the pavement: and above the Nevskii the evening fluid evaporates as it glistens, to form a dull yellow and blood-red murk mixed from blood and dirt. Thus from the Finnish marshes the city will show you the place of its demented settlement with a red, red spot: and that spot is to be seen in silence from afar against the sombre night. As you wander the length of our far-flung land, you will see from afar a spot of red blood, that stands out against the sombre night; and in consternation you will say: “Is that not the location of the fires of Gehenna?” And having said it—you will trudge off into the distance: you will try to circumvent Gehenna."