Creature of the Shade

consider, with dawkins, the fig

Just finished reading Richard Dawkins's book Climbing Mount Improbable, whose task is to defend evolution from the accusation that certain features of organisms could not possibly have achieved their brilliant design through a continuous series of viable steps, as evolution requires. He tackles several of the hardest cases.  The hardest of all may be the eye, which he argues really was possible as a very long series of minor adjustments to the basic idea of a light-sensitive cell.

But the reason to buy the book is the last chapter, in which he confronts the distressing topic of What Goes On Inside of Figs.  To wildly simplify, fig (Ficus) flowers are inside of the figs.  Each fig species has a corresponding species of wasp that hatches in one fig and, if female, lives to transport pollen to a different fig, lay her eggs there, and die.  But again, that's like saying that Hamlet is about a guy who's mad at his father-in-law; it's the the endless infoldings and recursions and self-references that make the fig-wasp story enthralling and distressing in a way that invites comparison to the literary.

I've tried to explain the fig-wasp mutualism many times, and never have felt I'd grasped it.  Dawkins goes all the way through it in a way that both explains it and acknowledges how astonishing it is, and while much of the book is beside the point for non-creationists, this chapter is worth the price of the book.

A fig is not a fruit but a flower garden turned inside out.  It looks like a fruit.  It tastes like a fruit.  It occupies a fruit-shaped niche in our mental menus and in the deep structures recognized by anthropologists.  Yet it is not a fruit; it is an enclosed garden and one of the wonders of the world.  I am not going to leave this statement dangling as a self-indulgent profundity to be plucked by the 'sensitive' and baffle everyone else.  Here is what it means.

Those last two sentences are classic Dawkins, consciously engaging in "self-indulgent profundity" only to cut off any mythmaking that this might encourage.  Dawkins sometimes sounds like he's training his reader in awe management.  Feel the amazement, he says, then accept that plausible explanation for it all.  Learn to feel awe without needing to make myths.  Other writers, like Stephen Jay Gould, are better than Dawkins at allowing the awe to survive the explanation of science; Dawkins never avoids seeming a bit of a killjoy.  But what he does he does well, and he explains the astonishing story of figs and wasps -- in its several tiers of infolding complexity, very well.  After laying out the many cross-cutting layers of motivation and sabotage in the fig-wasp drama, he concludes:

Figs and fig wasps occupy the high ground of evolutionary achievement ... Their relationship is almost ludicriously tortuous and subtle.  It cries out for interpretation in the language of deliberate, conscious, Machiavellian calculation.  Yet it is achieved ... without brain power or intelligence of any kind.  The players are a tiny wasp with a very tiny brain ... and a tree with no brain at all ... It is all the product of an unconscious Darwinian fine tuning, whose intricate perfection we should not believe if it were not before our eyes. 

.. and which, once grasped, changes our relationship to figs.  To me as an American child, figs meant fig newtons, and sometimes squishy seedy fresh figs, and now and then a houseplant that seemed always to be dropping leaves.  But since getting close to the diversity of figs in Australia, I've learned to feel toward the genus Ficus something that's amounts to admiration, curiosity, horror, and revulsion in roughly equal measures.  

A few months ago, when last in an Australian grocery store, I considered buying a fresh fig, but then looked closely at the hole in the bottom of each fruit, which can bear a distinct resemblence to an anus.  It's not that busy a hole: only female wasps pass through it, and only on entry does its abrasions strip off their wings.  But it's enough to remind me that a fertilized fig would be full of dead wasps, wasp guano, crushed waspy ambitions, and indeed everything else that would accumulate, as karma or compost, in a flower garden.

Not only that, it would have been the site of dramas of Shakespearean subtlety, not the less dramatic because the competing desires lay in the genes of the players rather than their consciousness.  It doesn't matter that this fig I might buy is sterile; it's still a stage set for the same overwrought opera.  It's just rather a lot to just put in your mouth, and chew on.

always touch the water

My job is constant travel, so the question is always: "How do I know where I am?"  

GPS is not the answer, because what I really mean, I think, is:"How do I be with (or in) the fact of where I am?"  How do I escape the erasing effect of travel, the grim sensation of "no matter where you go, there you are"?  How do I arrive in each moment with some joy at new possibilities, new sensations, that couldn't have been gotten where I was? 

One answer is to fixate on people, and on certain pleasures of human contact that technology can't replicate.  Another is to fixate on landscape, which this blog shows me to be doing constantly.  For example, my obsession with botany, and especially plant identification, is simply a way to see immediately how this place is different from that one.  An awareness of evolutionary patterns, manifested in the genetic "closeness" of physically distant plants, fuses the necessary sensation of distinction and uniqueness with the equally necessary awareness of connectedness to forge a felt sense of "here."

Another is to touch the water.

It's been my ritual for many years that when visiting a coastal city, I must touch the water.  I'm not much of a swimmer or beach-lazer, so this contact requres an intentional ritual.  The situation doesn't much matter, though obviously a relatively pristine beach is preferable.

You would think, from all I've said, that the real purpose must be to contact something unique to this location.  But salt water is everywhere, and feels and tastes pretty much the same everywhere.  Indeed, nothing is more homogenizing, more crushing of distinctions that matter to us, than the sea.  It helps that cold saltwater is a clammy, unpleasant sensation; like all metaphorical voids, the sea is not there to please us.

I touch plants, too.  I'm not literally a treehugger but while walking I often reach out to touch leaves, and occasionally pause if that sensation is interesting.  

So why water?  Things present themselves most intensely right at the edge of their absence.   This is the intrinsic drama of the urban waterfront -- so much complexity right up against what reads to us as vast emptiness.  Touching a large body of water is a contact-with-the-infinite that intensifies the richness of the finite.  So, after touching the water, I turn back -- to the city or landscape that was behind me -- and can how feel (not just know) that I'm seeing something that is vulnerable, contingent, even doomed sooner or later, and therefore real.  

It's not just that I'm seeing past what the power of architecture wants me to see.  Touching the vastness of the city's physical edge -- cold saltwater -- is as close as I can come to seeing the city's jagged temporal edges of creation and doom.  I'm seeing the waterfront city superimposed on its ruined (or underwater) condition centuries from now, and on the landscape that was there before it was born.  I can see the city's power and beauty as inseparable from its vulnerability and transiece, as though it were a flower.  

In other words, I can see it.

paying a taxi

Tonight, I hailed a friendly cab in Los Angeles, and as I checked my wallet to be sure I could pay him, I made my usual crack about how it's hard to know how much money you have because US currency all looks the same. Suddenly the driver perked up, interested not so much in where I'd traveled as in what other currencies I'd seen. So we talked about plastic Australian money that never wears out and the vagueness of the Euronotes and the beauty of the portait-format Swiss.

He was Egyptian, he said, but his wife was Mexican, and he held forth about both countries' banknotes. His daughter, he explained, was collecting all the currencies of the world. Or really, it seemed, he was doing it for her. He wanted her to grow up knowing about the size of the world, and to feel the sense of possibility in the idea that someday she might travel to all these places.

He listed some of the currencies he already had, mostly from non-Euro Europe, Japan, a few others. He was just getting started when we reached my hotel.

So I said: hey, just hang on a minute, ok? He did, and I ran up to my room. I happened to have my "international wallet" there -- the one with my passport that I carry overseas -- and I recalled I had some cheap notes there from Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. I ran back down, suffused with a wonderful sense of immediate and unquestionable purpose.

He was waiting in the lobby, smiling. Finally I got a good look at him: 30s, muscular, crucifix pendant, and just unbelievably happy.

I gave him an Australian 5, (small, purple, durable plastic, young Queen Liz on the front but also a sprig of Eucalyptus, and on the back, the fearsome symmetries of the capital, Canberra). I gave him a New Zealand 10 (blue, calm, with Kiwi suffragette Kate Sheppard on the front, mellow ducks reverse). And I gave him Hong Kong 10 and 20 (REALLY big, fierce lions, lots of abstraction, and a premodern pastoral scene). Then I tried to pay him. I owed him $9 and while that was all worth a bit more than that, I knew he couldn't eat it. No no, he would take nothing. He was beaming. His daughter would be overjoyed, and that was what mattered most.

free creek

Seen at Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens, on a bridge.

 

lost in the rainforest: a comedy

Why did I lose the trail?  And why, having lost it, did I not want it back right away?

Disaster narratives always begin with scenes of exaggerated innocence.  On my day off from work on this New Zealand trip, I made a dash for the Coromandel rainforest.  It was a brilliant day, and as the road weaved through the screaming green, every babbling creek and towering rata [pic at right] announced I was in well-earned paradise.  When I stopped quickly at a roadside rest area, I didn’t intend to stay, but then noticed a little path into the woods.

Not a real trail, just a quick trace of brief roadside adventures.  It led quickly up a hill, diminishing as it went.  Men climb hills, so I climbed.  

Finding not much of a view from the top, I started down, and lost the trail at once.  Going up it was one of those not-really-a-trail trails.  Going down it wasn’t there at all.  

Of course I should have been more careful, as trails are harder to see downhill than up.  Surely I could have stopped at once, taken stock, retraced my steps. 

But I was delighted.  How young it made me feel to have made a reckless mistake so characteristic of someone younger – or at least of more reckless men than I.  This was much more fun than the usual pursuits of men in their 40s, like buying ridiculous cars and driving them too fast.  Of course, my delight was reckless too, in the same vein.  Isn’t delight always reckless?  And is self-observed recklessness dumber or smarter than the more innocent kind?

For a few fateful minutes, such thoughts and their echoes bore me downhill.  Feeling sure of the general direction, I let the forest lead me.  I could still hear sounds of the road, and felt briefly sure that any path I struck would return me to it.  

The delight had another source.  To me at least, the New Zealand rainforest feels comfortable and safe.  [Photos here are not from the adventure, as I carried no camera.]  Compared to other temperate rainforests I've known (Oregon, Australia, Chile) New Zealand’s is remarkably free of hazard. No dangerous animals.  No stinging plants.  Ensaring vines, of which more in a moment, but nothing like Australia's Calamus vines, which grab you with small, sharp hooks and don't let go.  (Hence their common name: lawyers.)  The only way you can kill yourself in a New Zealand forest is by exposure to cold or by falling, possibly impaling yourself on a sharp dead branch or going over a cliff.  And lacking other ways to perish, rash adventurers take these options more often than you'd think.  

But it was a sunny day, and why would I fall?  Well, now that you mention it, the downward slope was getting steeper, footing more uncertain.  In this waterlogged, deep-rotted ground, how far would my foot sink?  Is that a solid log I’m stepping on, or a log rotted to the consistency of a sponge?  

For hikers, downhill slips are a koan brought to life: When your foothold betrays you, you can only save yourself by stepping quickly even further down, with even less surety of your footing. In this moment, the universe says: Because I have betrayed you, you must trust me.

The first betrayal came soon enough.  My foothold slipped so completely that I simply slid down the steep hill, feetfirst, through the deep layer of decaying plant matter.  The friction pulled my shirt over my head, so that I slid blind and caressed by warm, wet, sawdusty hands.   I knew I might be impaled at any moment, but the sensation was deeply pleasant, and I was almost sad to come to rest, one leg on each side of a tree fern.

At once, plant-recognition was surety.  With a glance at the tree-fern’s trunk, I thought "Cyathea medullaris!"  At once the fern was a friend, and thus a more reliable support.  But as I got to my feet, leaning hard on my new familiar, I looked up to see the brilliant silver undersides of the fronds.  "No!” I thought.  “Cyathea dealbata!"  The fern that launched 1000 rugby teams! And with that, the fern trunk seemed firmer still, even more ready to be relied on.  This pleasure of recognition shoved aside a less encouraging botanical fact:  Tree fern trunks are not solid structures so much as artfully thatched piles of dead, wet leaves. 

Recognition implies friendship, which implies reliability.  That’s metaphor rather than logic, but doesn’t everyone long for these metaphorical friendships – with cities or landscapes if not with plants?  The thing named is a thing that’s in its place, not likely to surprise you.    

For years I’d studied forest flora on my trips to New Zealand, so this forest felt familiar.  It featured a low canopy not much above the shrub layer, with only isolated trees punching higher.  So between the shadows there was some sun, efficiently recycled on shiny leaves.  About half the plants were known to me, mostly species of Hebe, Coprosma, Leptospermum, Metrosideros, and Phormium as well as the abundant feather-duster shaped Nikau palms.  

Those plants, left to themselves, would have formed a pleasant and manageable forest, like the overgardened “rainforest” of Auckland’s central park, the Domain.  But the true antipodean rainforest begins with vines.  North American rainforests have nothing like the entangling complexity of their southern peers.  Here, two human-scale characters were there to cling and confound. 

Supplejack (Ripogonum scandens) presents endless stiff, black stems, about 2 cm wide with bamboo-like joints every 20 cm or so.  There is no hope of cutting or breaking them.  Supplejack wanders around the forest, growing up, over, and down in no particular pattern, hanging itself casually from trees.  Now and then it branches to construct open framelike structures.  If you move a piece of it out of your way, all the attached pieces move in unison, usually placing another stem in your way or raising a new bar for you to climb over or under.  Moving through supplejack is like bushwhacking while solving a Rubik’s Cube.

A more intimate challenge is bondage fern, my term for Lygodium articulatum.  Imagine a typical fern frond, but with the stalk growing indefinitely.  The result is a vast entanglement of these thin, twisting stalks.   Bondage fern's stalks are barely a millemeter thick but surprisingly tough, capable of taking much of my weight as I tried to break through them.  Over and over I would push forward and suddenly find myself bound, ankles inseparable or a hand held behind my back, always at angles where brute force was hopeless.  There was nothing to do but back up very slowly, as though from a threatening snake, until it released me.

I keep telling myself, and keep forgetting, that on rainforest hikes I should carry small pruning clippers.

All this went on for far too long.  I vaguely sensed that I’d gotten a bit to the left of my original path, and sought to bear right, but the steep slopes confounded my navigational sense.  Almost the whole adventure happened on slopes of 45-70 degrees.  (Adventurers’ tales often exaggerate slopes, so I kept checking:  Yes, the land in front of my eyes is the same distance away as my feet, which means 45 degrees.  Now it’s only half as far, which means close to 70.) 

Finally, I noticed the sun.  For an hour I’d been groping downhill in what felt like a westward direction, encouraged by sounds of the road that seemed to be that way.  But it was midday.  I was in the southern hemisphere.  The sun was on my left.

This was a problem.

What’s fascinating is how early I noticed this, how easy it was to deny at first, and how long it took to truly register, as though I were an oil baron hearing vague reports of climate change.  Alarm grew slowly and distantly, like the input of junior interns, easily brushed aside in the  vigor of my thrashing.  As the alarm grew louder, how easy it was to slide into denial!  Suddenly I was thinking intently about declination, the difference between magnetic and geographic north.  In the North American west, this difference is over 20 degrees, enough to be an issue when navigating by the sun or stars.  Somehow it must be at work here, I thought, because the sounds of the road are in front of me, so this must be the right direction!

Finally there came the tipping point.  Which is more likely to be an illusion: the direction from which the road sounds seem to be coming, or the position of the sun?

In an instant, my thrashing stopped like a shorted-out circuit and I nearly collapsed in a cocoon of green. Taking a deep breath, and aware that technology was best left out of this tale, I sadly pulled out the Blackberry.  Its primitive GPS feature usually works only on hilltops where it’s least needed.  As I’d thrashed, I’d glanced at it now and then, usually to see whether it would say “GPS is temporarily unavailable” or “Waiting for GPS” -- messages of identical meaning that the Blackberry gods vary for our entertainment.  Now it gave me a location, but not a direction. It showed me alarmingly far from the road, but not which way would take me there.

Yes, but I had the sun, saying something I didn’t want to hear.  So I rang a colleague in Auckland, asked him to poke around my environs on Google Earth, verify whether this valley really was leading down eastward, away from the road.  He did, while also reminding me, gently and constructively, that yes, at midday, the sun really must be in the north.  I had descended the wrong side of the hill.

When we don’t like the facts of geometry, we keep collecting data (a common phenomenon in my profession, and one that I’m often commenting on).  There was no need to call my colleague, really no reason to pull out the Blackberry at all.  Midday in New Zealand the sun must be in the north.  Declination might throw it off by 20-some degrees, but that won’t put it on the other side of the sky.

The last hour of thrashing, back up the hill on a new sun-guided vector, was less delightful, more confronting, yet inside those feelings, serene.  The vector’s interface with the topography was appalling: I was told to climb 70-degree slopes (yes, the ground before my eyes was that much closer than my feet) and through ever-thickening tangles of supplejack and bondage fern. 

Several watercourses were to be crossed, including a deep one bridged only by a high, algae-slimed log bathed in continual mist.  This must be a scene of suppressed trauma, as my courage has always cratered in log-over-creek situations.  Partway across, I slipped.  The slip was my reward for not trusting, of course: I’d been unconsciously positioning (i.e. unbalancing) myself so that if I slipped my legs would go down on opposite sides of the log, preventing a total fall.  Sure enough, I ended up not just embracing the log with my legs but sliding partway off on one side, so that I hung from the crook of one knee and some desperate slippery handgrip.  My water bottle fell and tumbled well down the creek, far beyond my reach.  I slid the rest of the way across, a lizard minus the grace, feeling at once humiliated and relieved. 

Eons (20 minutes) later, I approached the road.  It was far above me, and the bank grew steeper as I climbed to it.  The slope was held together by New Zealand Flax, a plant with long, straplike leaves that clings with remarkable firmness to near-vertical earth.  At times my entire weight hung from a single plant as I hauled myself upward.  The leaves were lightly serrated, delivering continuous cat-scratches on my hands.  But I'm used to cats.

It was the very end of the adventure that looked most like an adventure film.  The slope curving upward toward verticality, partly bare rock and partly spiking masses of flax.  The raggedness of my flax-scratched hands.  The grandiose (when not flailing) heroics implied in climbing such a structure.  The certainly that with my water bottle gone, I really must get out soon.   And of course, the sad banality of the road itself, where an adventure film would have cut away to the hero celebrating with friends.

But the story is still a comedy, and not just because it ended well.  In comedy the ridicule of the hero is gentle and continuous, rather than stored up, as in tragedies, to crash down at the end.  I could have gotten killed of course, and the New Zealand Herald (on page 9 below the fold by an ad for panel beaters) would have called it a tragedy.  But a middle-aged guy who perceives his foolishness as evidence of vigor, who lectures professionally about the reliability of geometry yet briefly resists the position of the sun, who constructs counterfactual realities rather than admit that he’s spent a hour in vain, who slides happily out of control down steep slopes yet cowers before a creek-crossing log, this is not, thank God, a tragic figure.

 

Photo credits:
Supplejack: TERRAIN
Lygodium: Uni. of Auckland Dept. of Biological Sciences
Phormium: Van Dusen Botanic Garden

spam poem of the year

Deleted as spam, but maybe worthwhile as literature:

The bigger ones are points of interest, with souvenir-hawkers, entrance charges, and airport-style protection assessments. Thanks to the rickshaw car owner who took me to the incorrect area of the road, I can now prevent them all.

the sensual geographer's problem

Can you conceive of the entire Earth?  If so, can you combine that with an awareness of your own place on it?  It's a spiritual task, a self-stretcher, much like meditation.  The poet Dale Favier writes:

If you want to find me an incipient scientist, find me a child of ten who, with all the force of her imagination, tries to conceive of the Earth, to really conceive of it, to feel it in her bones, as a ball flying through space. She fails, of course, but she tries again, and there's a prickle of euphoria and panic as she gets near it. And then she tries more, conceiving of it as both tiny – as we know it to be, an insignificant planet of an insignificant star – and as vast, as we know it to be, huger than anything our mammalian imaginations were ever designed to hold. Nothing, I would say, is more attractive to the mind that takes up science than this moth-like flutter at the burning light bulb of the inconceivable.

In my forties, I am still at work on this girl's task.  I want to look out the window and see the whole earth. 

The overture of Google Earth, which shows you the Earth-as-ball before it will zoom to "you," dramatizes the goal but can't do the work for me.  To even begin, I must be in the landscape, seeing the cues that my mind can extend to form the larger picture. 

Perhaps I stand on a beach in eastern Australia, and try to perceive the curvature of the earth, sense the locations of the other continents, and thus form an image in which I'm like St Exupéry's Little Prince, standing upright on top of a large ball.  In fact, I can't even sense New Zealand, let alone distant North America.  All I can do is know, from studying the geometry, where these continents are, how many degrees below the horizon and in what direction.  With enough analysis I can point toward the ground and name a place on the far side of the planet that I am literally pointing to.  This dialectic between spherical and Cartesian geometry is as close as a I get to grasping the entire earth together with a sense of "here."  But sometimes it works.

The same obsession causes me to notice features of my location that nobody else finds interesting.  Vancouver, for example, sits on dramatic natural boundaries in both directions.  Obviously there's water to the west and land to the east, but the landscapes north and south are different in a way that helps me see large distances by looking out the window.  South of Vancouver the West Coast is about mountains and large valleys, the latter defined by vast interior rivers like the Fraser, Columbia, and Sacramento.  Look north from Vancouver, though, and everything changes.  A bank of steep mountains comes right out to the coast, and marches along it from here to Alaska.  This is a glacer-and-fjord landscape -- like you'll find in Chile, New Zealand, or Norway -- with virtually no flat land and few opportunites for settlement.  The seam between these great landscapes is right at the city itself.  Vancouver's southern boundary is the northernmost interior river, the Fraser.  It's northern boundary is the southernmost fjord, Burrard Inlet.

This feature makes Vancouver a great vantage point.  I can look either north or south and seem to perceive the full range of that landscape.  I look at the great wall of mountains north of Vancouver and know what's behind them: 1000 miles of similar mountains walling off sea from land, pierced with fjords much like this one, all the way to Glacier Bay in Alaska. If I do this often enough, I can start to feel this reality, despite the limitations of what I can see.

So with this bit of knowledge it's as though I can actually perceive 1000 miles of coast.  It doesn't get me a felt image of the earth; I still get only a corner of North America.  And it's not a direct sensation, of course, like the Little Prince's view of the ball beneath him.  It's knowledge hooked up to sensation, like a trailer to a truck, but in the right light it almost works.  That, after all, is what Favier's little girl is doing: taking something she knows and trying to perceive it.

This, too, is why California will always be a nation to me, unitary and indivisible, regardless of the cultural waves that flow across it.  For years I drove all over California as a consultant, and found myself rejoicing in the simplicity of the Central Valley, the long flat expanses that stretches north-south through the center of the state.  Because the Valley is so easy to grasp as a single place, it gives California the structure of a cathedral: a great central hall with numerous lesser rooms around the edges.  The coastal valleys and mountain passes are so many cloisters, easily sited in the mind with respect to this central immensity.  To a sensual geographer, it's the Valley that makes California perceivable in its vastness from almost anywhere within it, so that the little girl's task, applied just to the state, is almost possible. 

blood for a thimble

Suppose you're walking along a path in a forested city park when you see very tall man walking toward you, seemingly covered in blood.  It's all over his shirt, face, hands.  His intense, stoic gaze is directly on the path in front of him, as though he won't see you even when you pass.

Do you (a) turn and run screaming in the other direction, (b) keep walking but quietly call police on your cellphone, (c) stop and ask "Heavens, are you ok?"  In Vancouver's idyllic Stanley Park, the prevailing response appears to be (c), which is a nice surprise.

In fact, the two ladies had already passed me when they finally turned and asked "are you ok?"  Perhaps they needed to get close enough to verify that the blood was flowing from my own newly-carved wounds, and thus was probably mine.  Still, it was a nice gesture.

Was the blood worthwhile?  To judge, one must know the objective: Rubus parviflorus, the thimbleberry. 

Photo: Northern Bushcraft
 
Though obviously a Rubus, like all raspberries, the thimbleberry is scarcely a food at all.  It comes off as a fragile cap, hollow inside like a raspberry, but barely a millimeter thick.  Connoisseurs place it lightly on the tongue and then press it slowly against the roof of the mouth, letting its sharp taste flow outward like a ravishment.  To me the taste is a mixture of raspberry and rhubarb, but stripped of sweet distractions and ramped up to an ecstatic pitch.  Individual berries can seem as different as sopranos, as though inviting legions of specialized fans.

All this flows from a fruit so thin that it's almost not there.  It yields almost no nutrition, no substance, no energy, nothing but a pure sensation.  It's easy to declare it ethereal, an image of perfection, like the single virgin in a tower whose beauty ennobles a lifetime of knightly gore.  So there's something noble about risking bloodshed for them, something that would be lacking if mere blackberries had been at stake.  (Blackberries, too, would muddy the tale with their own potential for violence.  They have fierce thorns, while the thimbleberry goes, as the botanists say, "unarmed.")

So yes, the gashes in my face, which would have been tough and sexy if it had been a bicycle accident, arose from a berry-picking accident.  The archetypal scene:

Having climbed into the thimbleberries and successfully found bliss there, the time came to get back down.  Most middle aged men will understand the psychology of the moment, when one confronts the need for a 1.5m jump over the ditch to the gravel path.  In short, the required jump looks like something that the man remembers doing many times, and he momentarily forgets that the last of those times was more than a decade ago.

So he crashes.  The front foot hits the far side of the ditch, and as it slides down the man slams headlong onto the path with some forward momentum.  His chin, left temple, and the brow above his left eye all touch reverently to the gravel and slide along it for a few inches, surrendering to its sharpness. 

When he comes to rest, he notices first not the blood, but that his water bottle is lying on the path right in front of him, spilling slowly into the dust.  It feels tragic, a waste, as though the water were blood.  But he can't stop it in time, and when he finally grabs it it's been reduced to a useless husk.  This moment is so poignant that the discovery of real blood, all over his shirt and pouring from his face, feels like tasteless exaggeration, too much literalness spoiling such a lovely metaphor.

But were the thimbleberries worth it?  If I were back in a British-influenced country I'd put cost-benefit analysts the question, as the British can quantify the "welfare value" of a perfect autumn breeze.  But I'm in North America, where cost-benefit analysis is cruder.  So the thimbleberries, like the virgin in a tower, are simply not in the same dimension as the blood and gore, and I can rejoice in the impossibility of comparing them.

Rubus spectabilis: salmonberry spectacles

In this rushed and shriveled Pacific Northwest summer, I race to catch up with the salmonberries.

They're almost gone now.  If you're in the Northwest and haven't stopped for one, you'd best get into the woods or thickets today.

Some botanical names both inform and sing.  I'll never enjoy saying Pseudotsuga menziesii for douglas-fir, but my mouth loves saying Rubus spectabilis almost as much as it loves tasting them.  (Rubus is the genus of raspberries and blackberries, so this is the spectacular Rubus, which it is). 

Flamboyance is rare in the deep, dark woods, but salmonberries are as individual as drag queens.  Each bush produces berries of its own distinct color.  They're all somewhere on a spectrum from yellow to purple, but in any thicket, the sameness of each bush's berries stands out against its neighbors.  It's a nice effect when the bushes are all tangled up in each other, like lovers refusing to dissolve into oneness.  Darker colors develop from a yellow base that remains in the interior, so that darker berries appear to be glowing from within.

Ripeness has nothing to do with color; hikers who don't know this tend to leave the tasty yellow ones.  Instead, ripeness is signalled only by fullness, and a tendency to begin very gradually coming loose, hanging evocatively from the mount, ready to break free.  The sense of availability is almost erotic.

Opinions on taste differ, but I seem to have enough inter-sensory links that I can taste visual beauty up to a point.  The sight of a salmonberry going into my mouth must affect my taste of it.  To me, those little green hairs on each drupe are just a nice bit of fiber, and the taste seems to glow from within, as the berry does.

permanent weather and the civic image

Rain in Seattle.  Sun in Los Angeles.  Fog in San Francisco.  Wind in Chicago.  The endless summer nights of Helsinki or Edinburgh.  How could we navigate without our stereotypes of the urban air and sky?

In his odd novel Voyage to Pagany, the great modernist poet (but not novelist) William Carlos Williams tells of a self-absorbed man riding through Europe by train.  In Chapter XIV (adequate fragments here) he's delayed in the middle of the night in Genoa.

Genoa.  The name sounded hollow, depressing as the coldly sulphurous gallery through which he was passing, baggage in hand ...

The placename is a sponge for first impressions, and never quite shakes them off.  For Williams's hero, "Genoa" means "night, don't know anybody, don't speak the language, poor me."  Or to reduce this (literally) benighted city to one sentence:

I will never see the sun in Genoa.

But here's what's odd.  When I read this chapter in graduate school, the only experience I'd ever had of Genoa was of passing through it at night on the train.  In fact, that remains my only experience of Genoa, so that even now, when someone says "Genoa" I imagine a city at night.  Northwest Italy isn't high on my list of travel destinations, so it's quite likely that I too will never see the sun in Genoa, and hence never dissociate the city from this absurdly accidental recollection.

Professional thinkers-about-cities would never reduce their impression of a city to a story of something that happened to them there.  But everyone else does this quite naturally; when I ask a person on the street what she thinks of a city, she'll often mention some joyous or traumatic recollection, presenting that as her permanent definition of the place.  We urbanists are supposed to take pride in having a larger, grander view.  But I bet most of us carry these silly but useful attitudes, at least when we get fairly far down our personal list of Cities We Want to Think About.

Right now, you see, I don't feel a need to expand my awareness of Genoa, except to the extent that I want to expand my awareness generally.  I wouldn't pass up an expense-paid visit to Genoa in the daytime, and would surrender my prejudice happily if I did.  But failing that, the prejudice is working for me.  It's painting a relatively unfamiliar part of Europe with a few touchstones of mood.  Thanks to these quick associations, my near-total ignorance of northwest Italy, while still near-total, is packaged and marked with a couple of personal baggage tags, so I can haul it around as a familiar without having to look inside.

The baggage tags are personal, but they're also authorized by the Greater Truth of Literature.  Anyone can pass through a city at night, but I passed through Genoa at night just as William Carlos Williams's hero did decades ago.  I have a similar tag stuck on Bologna, where I once had a scare of thinking I had missed a late night train connection and would be spending the night on a station bench.  I'd have forgotten the episode by now had Robert Dessaix's hero not had exactly the same experience, in his fine novel Night Letters.  Nonfiction lies all the time, but fiction makes no truth claims and therefore can never be disproven, so it can sell itself as "Access to Deeper Truth" even when it's just the whining of a man stuck in a train station.  Williams and Dessaix tell me that I wasn't alone in my nocturnal and unwanted visits to Genoa and Bologna, that these experiences actually Resonate with the Human Experience.  So I remember them.

Thus authorized, it feels good, at least to me, to permanently associate cities with atmospheric conditions and their related moods.  Even dealing with cities I know well (Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles) I find a pleasure in wrapping each in the stereotypical weather condition (rain, fog, sun, respectively) and experiencing all variations from that as an engaging nuance.  For cities I don't know it's even easier: for me it's always night in Genoa.   These simplifications are silly but useful in maintaining a firm structure on which more interesting thoughts can sometimes sprout.

Now and then I notice myself consciously choosing a new atmospheric prejudice.  I was in Chicago over Memorial Day weekend 2011, and would like to declare that hereafter, I shall consider Chicago a city where towers loom in ominous chilly fog and thunderstorms. 

On my stay there I had two days of that, followed by two days of hot sun.  The fog and storms, I decided, are the Chicago I want, because they allowed me to experience the downtown skyscrapers as overpowering, exactly as they were intended. Structures vanishing into the clouds are not just tall, but unknowably, maybe infinitely tall.

Chicago was built to turn a vast frontier into commodities and profit.  The dramatic starburst of rail lines emanating from it look like force-lines of a blast, so to be at the center of the blast is, well, like the end of a science fiction film when we finally get inside the Center of Ominous Power.  I wanted it to be grand but in mysterious, overpowering, intimidating way.

My ideal Chicago, in short, is a meteorological projection of a conventional story about what makes Chicago unique.  So I feel briefly wise, though actually just prejudiced, when I look at my images of Chicago in such conditions, as though the city is telling me a story I want to hear ...

In such a perfectly symbolic city, a photo that might otherwise be a joke, "Christ the Steakhouse," isn't funny at all.

Nor can "Time" be just the name of a media corporation.

Then the sun came out, and it was all flatter, more like a city anywhere in the midwest.  On a long hike north from the loop, Michigan Avenue looked like Singapore's Orchard Road, Lincoln Park looked like a number of great midwestern city parks, the Clark Road business districts looked nice or not-nice in familiar ways, and the only glorious uniqueness was that my hike ended at a well-known religous site for green urbanists: Wrigley Field, a Major League Baseball Stadium with Practically No Parking.

By then, it was too dark to photograph, so as I sorted photographs in an about-to-close Starbucks in what would have been the shadow of the stadium walls, I thought "this is nice, Wrigley Field at night," which is perilously close to "Wrigley Field is night."   And indeed, not being much of a baseball fan, I'll be fine if I never see the sun there.