I'm not even sure what this guy is, but he's lovable too.
When I was a child of maybe ten or eleven, I remember hearing a bunch of teenagers talking about a recent camping trip they had been on. There was a stream by their campsite, and they walked up the stream, catching every frog they could, and then smashing them. “We musta gotten fifty frogs!” they laughed. “It was crazy.”
I can still remember my child’s indignation upon hearing this – the kind of indignation which is holy. It is certain and sure, having all the moral authority of innocence: that protests against the fatuous carelessness of adults, that refuses to give up its sensitivity to what is beautiful and true, that will not trade what it knows for all the horrid conformity that reconciles us to man’s endlessly brutish relations with life. I knew that what those boys had done was desecration. And I knew this despite the fact that I was no saint. I used to pour salt on slugs in the backyard, and go out of my way to stomp ants as I walked on the pavement. But in this instance I knew something terrible had been done. Perhaps it was because it had happened in the Catskills – a place I had seen only a few times but knew that I loved – or, in the terms of childhood, knew was sacred.
Years have only convinced me even more of that childhood intuition. Now, indeed, I try to expand it with principle: I know I am at my best when I catch the moths who fly into my cabin and let them out, even if I do not always feel like going to the effort. I know that we must shape our lives always to nourish and respect and cherish the lives around us. Once I saw a friend working to coax a fly in my cabin toward a hole in my windowscreen, and I saw in an instant how lovely she was. That sense of the sanctity of life is our highest opinion: we do not always live it, but when we do we can feel how the belief elevates us. And we may call in facts to make the case for such a belief: when you think about the fact that you can go not just a million, not just a billion, not just a trillion, but twenty-five trillion miles into space – the distance to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star – and not come upon anything living at all, not so much as a mosquito or a duckweed – and likely you can go not trillions but quadrillions of miles into the lifelessness that surrounds us without coming upon anything alive – is that not scarcity enough to make life precious? Does not that backdrop make every living thing on earth with us valuable? Indeed, apart from life there is no value at all. Is this not completely obvious?
Monarch butterfly, from my garden on Wildcat Mountain.
It is obvious, but it is the obvious things we cannot convince others of. I was speaking of the plight of the monarch butterfly to someone I met on this trip, and he said, “What do you care if ninety-eight percent of these butterflies die off in two years? Why care if they all die off? Man, I’m all about Darwin. If they die off, that’s because they’re being replaced by something better, that’s all.” What can you say to talk like this? Fire is not hot until you are close to it. And when you are in it, that’s all you can think about. Have one of these butterflies land on your hand; you will know it is sacred. You will know it is of far more worth than the majority of the things the majority of people go to work for, the majority of the days of their lives.
And what better thing can I say about our visit to the Smoky Mountains, but to say, that it made me a child again. That place makes me burn with reverence: I go there and everything is so alive, so harmonious, so balanced and beautiful. The first time I ever went there I drove past a large field, and a big mama black bear and her two cubs were grazing at the edge of a field – grazing, like cows, from a distance it looked like they were just eating the grass. I can’t quite explain how it made me feel, to just stop the car there and watch them from the other side of the field. It was holy. Or, in adult terms, I loved it.
The beloved Magnolia fraseri, just beginning to bloom.
So I returned to the Smokies, and was lit on fire again. And I could love the way God asks us to love: not just with all my heart and all my soul, but with all my mind and all my body as well. As we walked along at the top of a ravine, I stopped: across on the other side of a ravine was a magnolia – a MAGNOLIA! Growing on a wild mountaintop! Growing as they have for a hundred million years! I was pretty sure it was Magnolia fraseri, which I had never seen in the wild before, and so I just had to – had to – plunge down the ravine, cross the little brook, and come up the other side to look more closely at this plant. To do so I had to plunge into a tangled thicket of mountain laurel and rhododendron; climb over massive fallen trees that choked the ravine; and put my feet into any number of doubtful places, praying all the while that no copperheads were planning to sink their teeth into the first ankle they had seen in years down there. I sweated and I strained and otherwise showed my love with my body. Like a physical creature – as a physical creature – I had to touch, to see, to feel – that had to be part of my love. And as for my mind, well, I had filled my head with all these plants for years, and now, there in the Smokies, all that training I had given myself was put to use. It was tested and pushed, in fact, as I encountered many many plants I could not identify even to genus.
Why the Smokies should be so different from all the other mountain ranges of the world is not immediately clear. But they are different: they are the most biodiverse temperate area in the world. I have already mentioned the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory, which is attempting to create an inventory of all the species of living things in the park. There are more species of plants found in the park than are found native to the entire European continent, from Sicily to Sweden.
One of the best theories for this biodiversity is that the Southeastern United States was near the center of the supercontinent Pangaea, and all sorts of different plants and animals met in that area. It is certainly the case that a great number of very old forms of life – such as magnolias and their close allies the tulip trees – are found here. Many monospecific genera – meaning genera which remain today only in single species – are here. To use my friend’s language, it is like a place where “Darwinism” (in the limited, dumb, human sense) does not exist: where it is not competition and extinguishment, but preservation and benign neglect, where living things can wander into the mountains and get lost, living changelessly on while the world around them alters.
There are so many beautiful things here: Adiantum pedatum, Trillium flexipes, Maianthemum racemosum, Carex plantaginea, Stylophorum diphyllum... and more too, all in harmony.
Mountain ranges typically are strongholds of biodiversity, as elevation can isolate different populations onto “climate islands,” and speciation occurs more easily in such isolated populations. The Smokies are also one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world, its uplift having occurred in Ordovician days – four hundred fifty million years ago. That is to say that the rock on top of Mt. Mitchell has been six thousand feet in the air for half a billion years (much rock has been eroded from on top of that rock, but it itself has been in its place for that length of time). Before there were dinosaurs, there were the Smoky Mountains.
The area was also never glaciated, which makes it extremely different from the northern parts of North America. From about New York City north there were no plants at all a mere fifteen thousand years ago. Everything we have has been the result of the rush north since the last Ice Age. In the Smokies, however, plant life has gone on uninterrupted in all that time.
All this would be academic if it were not possible to sense the truth of all this when there – but this is entirely possible. Indeed it is obvious. In the Rocky Mountains and in the deserts there are some amazing floral displays because the blooming season is so short: everything has to bloom at once, for the snow-season, or the dry season, is coming within a month or two. The Smokies have floral displays to beat them all, not because of the brevity of the season, but because of the abundance of life. In April the spring ephemerals bloom; in May the trees and shrubs bloom; in June the composites begin in earnest; and it all goes on right until frost. The fact that the place receives so much and such consistent rainfall – 75 inches spread evenly throughout the year – only helps. It is the damp garden of the clouds.
We ended up spending less than twenty hours in the park, but it was still one of my peak experiences. We first drove to the campground and set up our tents in the light rain; we then headed immediately for White Oak Sinks, bringing along a flashlight in case we were caught out in the darkness. But of course it took us awhile to get there, because time and again I had to pull to the side of the road and hop out to inspect some amazing treasure by the side of the road: and this despite the fact that I could not get out of the truck without pain, and I often hobbled to the flowers with back bent, unable to straighten up for at least a minute or two after rising from a sitting position. I still got out to look at these beauties. It really was quite remarkable: along most roadcuts, invasive species come right in and advance along the line of human disturbance. But in the park the ecosystem is so well-knit and robust the human disturbance seems to be only generative: columbines bloomed in the rockcuts, and dense patches of yellow trillium and purple phacelia creeped up right to the roadside. Up the creeks we could see the slender-branched dogwoods blooming silently in the woods. It was all so precious – I felt that if I had had to go twenty-five trillion miles for this experience, I would have considered myself lucky to have gotten there just to see it, just to know it was there.
At the time I had just finished John Muir’s Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, a remarkable book. It does not have developed themes nor is it complete or even clear at times. But it is the transcript of a man who was lit ablaze by the sense that life was holy. Having been infected with some kind of disease of the eye, for which several weeks in darkness was prescribed as treatment, Muir emerged with a fear that the sight of beauty – the nourishment of a certain kind of soul – might be lost to him forever. And so, considering how his light was ill-spent on most of the occupations of men, he set out,
making haste with all my heart to store my mind with the Lord’s beauty, and thus be ready for any fate, light or dark…. I bade adieu to mechanical inventions, determined to devote the rest of my life to the study of the inventions of God.
Along the way he sees many plants which were probably not new to science, but they were new to him, and that was all he needed. You can feel the joyousness springing off his pages:
The sun was gilding the hilltops when I was awakened by the alarm notes of birds whose dwelling in a hazel thicket I had disturbed. They flitted excitedly close to my head, as if scolding or asking angry questions, while several beautiful plants, strangers to me, were looking me full in the face. The first botanical discovery in bed! This was one of the most delightful camp grounds, though groped for in the dark, and I lingered about it enjoying its trees and soft lights and music.
With the Phlox divaricata.
At one point he says that he “met a strange oak with willow-looking leaves.” It is wonderful to read such a thing: I may say that I first really began to be interested in botany, when visiting Chapel Hill of North Carolina. I found there a tree which from its shape I took to be an oak, but as I drew closer I saw it had willow-like, unlobed leaves. “Well, I guess it’s not an oak,” I said. But then I saw acorns on its branches; it was an oak, but unlike any I had seen before. It was a willow-oak, Quercus phellos. This slight change from the flora of New York to North Carolina filled me with interest, and I wanted to know more. That tree had been a discovery to me, and early in his career it was a discovery to the northerner Muir as well. Seeing that – and recognizing his passion on the page – filled me with joy, that there were other existences like mine, that not all were sunken too deep into the apathy to ever get them out: there were brothers out there. Sunt lacrimae rerum, says another one of those kindred spirits, et mentem mortalia tangunt.
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