Even in these spaces/places that seemingly appear unhospitable, there is a way to transcend & break on through and live. Austin's telling of how it,"becomes necessary to keep eggs cool rather than warm", was amazing to picture. How the birds shield their young and become a medium of shade, while there is"...no special preponderance of the self-fertilized or wind-fertilized plants, but everywhere the demand for and evidence of insect life."
Austin seemed to connect respect for the deserts' living inhabitants to their belonging landscape -mirroring the tenacity of those plant relatives. "There are hints to be had here of the way in which a land forces new habits on its dwellers...", it's true, we respond to our environment, to a culture of place. "They trick the sense of time, so that once inhabiting there you always mean to go away without quite realizing that you have not done it." Surely, the land is a witness to our sense (or lack of) of belonging. Fragility of life and its' own self-determination spoke to me in Land of Little Rain,"...so much earth must be preempted to extract so much moisture. The real struggle for existence, the real brain of the plant, is underground; above there is room for a rounded perfect growth. Just picturing an "amaranthus ten ft high and a year later matured at 4 inches" reminds me of the impermanence all sentient beings face.
Yesterday you were in the world alongside your wife of 40+ plus years and today you are telling me about her because she has shape-shifted and you find her presence -out there, in the land dear to you. I stuck around yesterday & got to talking to Larry and had no clue that he had lost his wife 8 months ago.
As a witness, I wonder how the desert receives the bodies of people dying, from the noted perished "coolie" men to those today crossing the border. It's a clenching terrain for how you must persevere in order to not die and when you do, it's the way you go that is most hellish, "Dehydration had reduced all your inner streams to sluggish mudholes. . . . Your sweat runs out. . . . Your temperature redlines -- you hit 105, 106, 108 degrees. . . . Your muscles, lacking water, feed on themselves. They break down and start to rot. . . . The system closes down in a series. Your kidney, your bladder, your heart." - Luis Alberto Urrea, "The Devil's Highway,".
The end of Moths of the Limberlost, made me smile at her highly animated personhood. Potter definitely enjoyed herself and even though I am not about collecting "specimens"in these ways, she conveyed the process of her coming to know, and that's the piece she relished and shaped her. Evidently, she truly lived along side the Cecropia to be in the know of their mating, the intricacies in the laying of eggs, stories of cocoon emergence,"...with Cecropias holding high carnival...from every direction they came floating like birds down the moonbeams.
I imagine the Cecropias came to know a Potterness, that could only come from being gleaned in such close scrutiny.
Katy, thanks for sharing these deep thoughts. I had no idea Larry had lost his wife recently. Have you heard of Edward Abbey? His friends took his dead body (he requested it) to the desert. He wanted to return to the earth. Recycled if you will. This has always fascinated me.
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