Why Be an Aquatic Ecologist

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I met a TV writer at a conference of over the summer. He asked what I did. “I am an aquatic ecologist, ” I answered.

“Why?“ he asked blankly.

In that moment I knew of two answers I could give- one short and one long. In the longer one I could try with words to convey the beauty of a marsh in the sun, the power of water cold and tidal, the depth of rivers, the joy of creeks and crayfish, the smell of rotting vegetation and sound of popping bubbles in drying mud. I could extol the sound of gabbling ducks during their flight overhead, or the raucous call of the red winged blackbird fighting for his territory. I could describe the wonder of a copepod, the rare ephemeral fairy shrimp, the hidden recesses of water lily rhizomes, the pithy length of cattails rising in the breeze.

I could have tried to explain the screaming rapture of green, green, green plants  in rings in a June prairie pothole, or the way you could lose yourself if you stared too long at the cool sage color  of rice cut grass or the profusion of smartweed flowers, or the quick beating breast of a flitting goldfinch.

I could have told of water, the power and imagination of it, the movement and currents, its fast scrabbling gush  over sloping soil, is slow drip into the cool underreaches deep below.

Perhaps I could have told of the joy of science, or learning, the reading and joining and conferring, the questions and tentative answers, the signal arising from the noise. Science is pontillism in action.   But mostly I would have talked about the mystery of watery lands.   I could have told these things and hoped he would understand them.

Or, as I did do  microsecond later, I could give the second much shorter answer. “ Why?” I echoed him equally confused. “ Who wouldn’t? I mean,  if you could?”

He stared at me for a second, and I saw his first uncertain frown turn to easement  as if, in that one short answer my longer answer was transferred as well. A thousand words and pictures, a million moments  impossible to detail, conveyed to another in a simple phrase. ”Well, OK ,“ he said, as,  satisfied, we turned to other topics.

Leaves So Beautiful My Heart Stopped

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As I drive in the morning past the industrial park by the highway, past the assisted living center, by the ice cream stand, (the one with rum raisin ice cream in small cones so large you cannot finish them), I see the trees.  Two trees by the road send their flaming yellows and reds skywards. Their maple arms held high,  their jostling  flags flare in the morning sunlight like flaming pentacostal tongues.

They are the bright ones, the counterbalance to the low baritones of the bronze and maroon  oaks of my yard, the yellow and brown platelike elm leaves tattered before they fall, the curling tissues of the grapes where they have overtaken the arbor. My small native garden looks abandoned, leaves gathering at the feet of the seven foot ironweeds, the dried seed cases of evening primrose high above the ground, the soft cotton of milkweed flying and catching on Spirea, falling to the ground to catch wetly on the tumbled remnants of hickory leaves.

Today (I wrote Oct 24, 2012)  I saw a tree so lovely , its yellows, russets,  and salmons so true, my heart stopped.  I cannot think for the orchestra of light the fall colors bring.  I imagine a disease for which the only cure is the collection of fall leaves. My heart will start again as the early fall with its blue skies, turns to the  damp chalky gray of later fall, and I  need this golden  memory to guide me through the dusk.