The Rivanna Rambler

March 21, 2008

[display_podcast]

Photo by Dudley Rochester

Most landscapes are filled with textures, the complex interweaving of habitat edges, vegetative cover, seasonal changes, all illuminated and made unique by the time of day and season, the weather, the degree of human disturbance or succession into its next natural phase.

If you sit for some time observing a landscape, ever if you are a newcomer to a particular spot, or a newcomer to this ecosystem, your eye will eventually start to untangle the thicket, parse the shadows, discern slight movements, see the wildlife, if only the buzzing of insects before you, or the lone warbler, yellow, swooping from branch to bamboo copse across the marsh.

At this stage of looking, it is not necessary to know what’s what – though it can help. It is more about seeing with soft eyes, letting the layers of sounds of the forest behind you emerge so that the patterns start to reveal themselves to your ear, just as our eye starts to discern the patterns emerging before you. As I start the long journey of training to become a naturalist, I realize that I can call on a skill I’d learned a long time ago when I went to sea on a commercial long liner in the 1970s.

Our days were spent setting out and hauling back miles long lines of mainline, interspersed and floated with plastic buoys from 12 to 24 inches in diameter. It was common for segments of line to be torn or cut loose from the whole by a passing ship’s deep propeller, or the jaws of a shark, or the tension from the line weighted down by the fish on the hooks. When this happened, we spent as much time as needed to search for and recover lost sections – all hands aloft, atop the wheelhouse, or in the crow’s nest, to catch a glimpse of the fluorescent orange floats that held our gear adrift and intact.

Now, the open ocean is as rich and varied a landscape as one could ever want. The color of the water changes as wind whips up the foam, or the slant of sun over wave crests illuminates the abundance of plant life that turns the water green. The waves commingle with the swell, creating a complex pattern that s as much visual as felt as one’s body learns the rhythms. You might think it would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack, and more often than not, the captain, who was steering the boat and had a lower horizon to search because of his height near the deck, saw these buoys before the rest of us who, higher up, had a more distant horizon. One day, frustrated by my inability to see, I asked him how he did it.

“Just look for the places that the ocean isn’t,” he said.

Hmm! Looking for the places that I did not see the waves in all their variations and movement, ever changing, sunlit, and foam-filled, varied and changing. Training my eye to see the pattern of the ocean, so my eye would detect the places where something other than the ocean’s patterns revealed itself. Something so seemingly simple but at the same time miraculous as this trick turned into a tool that I cultivated. And it turned out that this worked for seeking out finning fish, or whales spouting in the distance, or dunnage in troughs — everything that was not part of the essential nature of ocean.

I have used this visual tool many times, in many different circumstances, over the years: at the beach looking for certain shells amidst the wrack line’s tumble of seaweed; while sailing, skimming the horizon for buoys or other vessels. Looking for raptors perched in snags along ridge lines. And scanning the mountain ridges for discontinuities in leaf cover and color that might reveal a distant drainage.

Learning the specifics of the landscape – the species of birds and plants, the types of rock – starts with being able to identify what makes each special. Sometimes what must come first is the ability to see what it is – and what it is not. Try it sometime – and I think you will see.