The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature

by DavidGeorge Haskell

  This evening, the coyotes are either hushed or absent, and I watch the changing light without their accompaniment. The forest is not silent, however. Birds are particularly vocal, perhaps enlivened by the day’s temperature, which climbed well above freezing. Now, the wrens and woodpeckers chatter as they go to roost, chipping and scolding as darkness thickens. When the sun has fallen well below the horizon and the fussing birds have quieted, a barred owl yelps from high in a tree just down the slope. The owl repeats its strangled barks a dozen or more times, perhaps calling to a mate in this winter season of owl courtship.

  After the owl falls silent, the forest enters a deeper quiet than I remember experiencing here. No birds or insects call. The wind is still. The sounds of human activity, distant aircraft or roads, fall away. The very soft murmur of a stream to the east is the only detectable sound. Ten minutes pass in this peculiar calm. Then the wind quickens, drawing a hiss from the treetops. A high airplane rumbles, and muffled hammering echoes up the valley from a distant farm. Each sound is made vivid by the surrounding silence.

  The horizon bleeds away its color and luminosity, falling into deep blue. The fat-bellied moon, three-quarters full, shines low in the sky. My eyes lose their power as the forest turns to shadow.

  The stars slowly kindle from the sky’s darkness. The day’s energy ebbs, leaving me at ease. Suddenly—stab!—a blade pierces me. Fear. The coyotes rip open the calm. They are close, much closer than ever before. Their crazed howling comes from just a few meters away. The sound crescendos in squeals and whistles, overlain on deep-throated barking. My mind transforms immediately. The blade focuses all thought: wild dogs will tear you apart. Hell, they are loud.

  All this in just a few seconds. Then my conscious mind reasserts itself, and before the chorus is over I have dislodged the blade. There is no chance that these coyotes will bother me. Rather, I’m lucky that they did not pick up my scent, or they would not have come so near. My fear passes quickly. But, for a moment, my body remembered ancient lessons. The focused memory of hundreds of millions of years of hunted life exploded in my head with utter clarity.

  The coyotes’ chorus carries for miles down the valley, setting off farm dogs in distant barns and fields. Dog minds have also been shaped by years of selection, encouraged by our agrarian ancestors to bark incessantly after hearing the howls of wild relatives. No coyote or wolf would dare penetrate a cacophony of farm dogs, and this fear gives vulnerable livestock an acoustic shield. Humans, wild canids, and domestic dogs therefore live in an evolutionary tangle of sound. Outside the forest, this intertwining is manifest in the sirens of emergency vehicles that call attention to themselves by wailing like über-wolves, tapping humanity’s deep-rooted fears. Our domestic dogs hear the ancient echo also, howling at passing ambulances. The forest therefore follows us into civilization, buried in our psyches.

  The howling stops as abruptly as it started. I am blind in the dark, and the coyotes’ footfalls are silent, so I have no way of knowing whether or how the animals leave. Most likely they will slink away to their night’s work, hunting small animals, guided by their own well-founded fears to circle widely around the human.

  Silence returns to the mandala. I sink into the moment, feeling a familiar sense of arrival. The practice of returning to the mandala and sitting in silence for hundreds of hours has peeled back some of the barriers between the forest and my senses, intellect, and emotions. I can be present in a way that I had not known existed.

  Despite this feeling of belonging, my relationship to this place is not straightforward. I simultaneously feel profound closeness and unutterable distance. As I have come to know the mandala, I have more clearly seen my ecological and evolutionary kinship with the forest. This knowledge feels woven into my body, remaking me or, more precisely, waking in me the ability to see how I was made all along.

  At the same time, an equally powerful sense of otherness has grown. As I have watched, a realization of the enormity of my ignorance has pressed on me. Even simple enumeration and naming of the mandala’s inhabitants lie far beyond my reach. An understanding of their lives and relationships in anything but a fragmentary way is quite impossible. The longer I watch, the more alienated I become from any hope of comprehending the mandala, of grasping its most basic nature.

  Yet the separation that I feel is more than a heightened awareness of my ignorance. I have understood in some deep place that I am unnecessary here, as is all humanity. There is loneliness in this realization, poignancy in my irrelevance.

  But I also feel an ineffable but strong sense of joy in the independence of the mandala’s life. This was brought home to me several weeks ago as I walked into the forest. A hairy woodpecker lighted on a tree trunk and lobbed out its call. I was struck hard by the otherness of this bird. Here was a creature whose kind had chattered woodpecker calls for millions of years before humans came to be. Its daily existence was filled with bark flakes, hidden beetles, and the sounds of its woodpecker neighbors: another world, running parallel to my own. Millions of such parallel worlds exist in one mandala.

  Somehow the shock of separateness flooded me with relief. The world does not center on me or on my species. The causal center of the natural world is a place that humans had no part in making. Life transcends us. It directs our gaze outward. I felt both humbled and uplifted by the woodpecker’s flight.

  So, I continue my watch, both stranger and kin at this mandala. The bright moon lifts the forest in a lambent, silver light. As my eyes adjust to the night, I see my shadow in the moonlight, resting across the circle of leaves.

  Epilogue

  It is commonplace for contemporary naturalists to deplore our culture’s increasing disconnection from the natural world. I can sympathize with this complaint, at least in part. When asked to identify twenty corporate logos and twenty common species from our region, my first-year students can consistently name most of the corporate symbols and almost none of the species. The same would be true for most people in our culture.

  But ours is not a new lament. Carl Linnaeus, one of the founders of modern ecology and taxonomy, wrote of the botanical abilities of his eighteenth-century compatriots, “few eyes see, and few minds understand. Through this want of observation and knowledge the world suffers immense loss.” Much later, Aldo Leopold, reflecting on the state of the world in the 1940s, wrote, “Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen and physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it… Turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a ‘scenic area’, he is bored stiff.” It seems that skilled naturalists have always felt that their culture was perilously close to losing its last scrap of connection to the land.

  Both men’s words resonate with me, but I also feel that in some ways we now live in a better time for naturalists. Interest in the community of life is more widespread and vigorous than it has been for decades, perhaps centuries. Concern for the fate of ecosystems is part of our national and international political discourse. In less than a human lifetime, the fields of environmental activism, education, and science have grown from insignificance to prominence, and the question of how to heal our disconnection from nature has become a popular topic for educational reformers. All this interest is, perhaps, something new and encouraging. In Linnaeus’s and Leopold’s days, neither the popular imagination nor the government was much concerned with the ecology of other species. Of course, our modern interest is necessitated, in part, by the ecological mess that our forebears’ insouciance bequeathed us, but I think it is also motivated by genuine interest in other forms of life and concern for their well-being.

  Our modern world offers the naturalist many distractions and barriers, but it also provides a spectacular range of helpful tools. If Gilbert White, the eighteenth-century author of the classic Natural History of Selborne, had owned a library of accurate field guides, a computer with access to flower photographs and frog songs, and a database of the latest scientific pa
pers, his close observations of nature could have been enriched, lessening his intellectual loneliness and giving him deeper ecological understanding. He could also, of course, have squandered his curiosity in synthetic worlds online, but the point here is that for those with an interest in natural history, we now have vastly more help available to us than at any other time.

  It is with this help that I have explored the forest mandala. I hope this book will encourage others to start their own explorations. I was fortunate to be able to watch a small patch of old-growth forest. This is a rare privilege; old growth covers less than one-half of a percent of the land in the eastern United States. But old forests are not the only windows into the ecology of the world. Indeed, one outcome of my watch at the mandala has been to realize that we create wonderful places by giving them our attention, not by finding “pristine” places that will bring wonder to us. Gardens, urban trees, the sky, fields, young forests, a flock of suburban sparrows: these are all mandalas. Watching them closely is as fruitful as watching an ancient woodland.

  We all differ in our ways of learning, so it is perhaps presumptuous of me to make suggestions for how to observe these mandalas. But two insights from my experience seem worth sharing with those who would like to try. The first is to leave behind expectations. Hoping for excitement, beauty, violence, enlightenment, or sacrament gets in the way of clear observation and will fog the mind with restlessness. Hope only for an enthusiastic openness of the senses.

  The second suggestion is to borrow from the practice of meditation and to repeatedly return the mind’s attention to the present moment. Our attention wanders, relentlessly. Bring it gently back. Over and over, seek out the sensory details: the particularities of sound, the feel and smell of the place, the visual complexities. This practice is not arduous, but it does take deliberate acts of the will.

  The interior quality of our minds is itself a great teacher of natural history. It is here that we learn that “nature” is not a separate place. We too are animals, primates with a rich ecological and evolutionary context. By our paying attention, this inner animal can be watched at any time: our keen interest in fruits, meats, sugar, and salt; our obsession with social hierarchies, clans, and networks; our fascination with the aesthetics of human skin, hair, and bodily shapes; our incessant intellectual curiosity and ambition. Each one of us inhabits a storied mandala with as much complexity and depth as an old-growth forest. Even better, watching ourselves and watching the world are not in opposition; by observing the forest, I have come to see myself more clearly.

  Part of what we discover by observing ourselves is an affinity for the world around us. The desire to name, understand, and enjoy the rest of the community of life is part of our humanity. Quiet observation of living mandalas offers one way to rediscover and develop this inheritance.

  Acknowledgments

  The mandala sits on land owned by the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Without the work of the many generations of people who have cared for this land, this book would not have been possible. My colleagues at the university provide a congenial and stimulating context in which to work. In particular, Nancy Berner, Jon Evans, Ann Fraser, John Fraser, Deborah McGrath, John Palisano, Jim Peters, Bran Potter, George Ramseur, Jean Yeatman, Harry Yeatman, and Kirk Zigler answered my questions about specific topics in this book. Jim Peters also gave me many insights into the nature of science, especially through our team-teaching of ecology and ethics. Conversations with Sid Brown and Tom Ward helped to put my experience of contemplative practice into a wider and more coherent context. DuPont Library’s outstanding staff and excellent collections made research for this book a pleasure. The remarkable students at Sewanee give me inspiration and great hope for the future of biology and the study of natural history.

  Walks in the forest with many local naturalists have also greatly expanded my appreciation of the natural history of our region. In particular, Joseph Bordley, Sanford McGee, and David Withers have shared many insights over the years.

  Bill Hamilton, Stephen Kearsey, Beth Okamura, and Andrew Pomiankowski at the University of Oxford, and Chris Clark, Steve Emlen, Rick Harrison, Robert Johnston, Amy McCune, Carol McFadden, Bobbi Peckarsky, Kern Reeve, Paul Sherman, and David Winkler at Cornell University were particularly generous and important mentors during my years of formal university training.

  My fellow participants in the Wildbranch Writing Workshop at Sterling College helped me to grow as a writer and naturalist. I especially thank Tony Cross, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Jennifer Sahn, and Holly Wren Spaulding for their advice and example.

  Early drafts of the manuscript benefited from editorial suggestions by John Gatta, Jean Haskell, George Haskell, and Jack Macrae. A modified version of the “Medicine” chapter was published by Whole Terrain and was improved by the work of Annie Jacobs and her editorial board. Henry Hamman was generous with his time, insights, and connections at a critical point in the development of the book.

  Alice Martell is an extraordinary agent. Her perspicacious mentorship is a source of much encouragement and her splendid work brought this project to fruition. Kevin Doughten’s insightful editorial direction brought coherence and vigor to the manuscript. His efforts as the book’s shepherd, ambassador, and advocate have been outstanding.

  I owe an immense intellectual debt to the thousands of naturalists whose scientific studies have deepened my understanding of biology. This book, I hope, honors their important work. My discussions necessarily omitted details from many of these studies, focusing on those parts that most directly touched my experience at the mandala or that helped me explain ideas in biology. This winnowing of detail is a dangerous business, especially in science, and so I encourage readers to dig into and beyond my bibliography to explore the richness of the topics that I have discussed here.

  Sarah Vance supported this project with great generosity and insight. Her scientific critiques, editorial advice, and practical assistance with the preparation of the manuscript not only made the book possible but greatly increased its quality.

  This book is a celebration of the life of forests, and so I will donate at least half my author’s proceeds to projects that benefit forest conservation.

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