Memories in the Marsh: A Love Letter to Exploring, Studying, and Creating Art in Nature

Slow, sliding, smooth, shimmering, the river flows around my legs. I cross a flooded bridge and splash through the pink Maine dusk. The creek was dry this morning, but now my boots fill with water. In the marsh, tides mark time.

I stumble, catch myself, the air cooling off and water wicking up my pants. All that keeps the ocean from reclaiming the land is the amalgamation of roots and shells that holds it together. Later, when the water returns to its cradle, the grasses will be left coated in white chunks of salt.

Do you know a word for the interior world shared by lovers? A place—a paracosm beyond others’ imaginations. Sustaining love requires continually building that place, living in it, speaking its particular languages. It is a place to approach, but never arrive. Ambiguity, longing, and mystery fuel the approaching.

To love a landscape is no less effort, and no less imagined even in all its obvious palpability. My daily life as a field scientist is the repetitive prayer of muscle memory, the Latin naming system of plants, and the attempt to capture entropy by drawing it on a page. All this, a means to peer outside myself, to slow down, to look back, to wonder. To find wonder.

I learn the marsh by walking it: taste of salt, warm breeze, swollen mosquito bites on my forehead. I battle my way through waist-high grass and undulating mounds in the fresh tidal marsh to where I scan open vistas in the salty lagoons. The grasses leave linear cuts on my skin. The salty air curls my hair.

To love a landscape is no less effort, and no less imagined even in all its obvious palpability.

The river cuts the marsh with streams and creeks, dividing the thick pungent mud alive with mussels, birds, and green vegetation. Spartina grass colonizes the land, locks the horizon in place, domesticates the churning mud and sand. Spartina possesses the magic of aerenchyma tissue that sucks oxygen out of the air and pumps it into the water-saturated ground.

It is then that a neighborhood assembles: crabs scamper anxious to burrow around roots, young fish nestle safe in the flooded grass. Spartina is the continuity, the foundation of existence.

The marsh grass unveils in turn—seasonal cycles overlaid on daily tides. In the middle of July, Puccenillia begins to sing, dangling wheaty, soft, almost translucent flowers into the wind. In late August, it looks as if rice has been scattered over the lower marsh as Spartina flowers. In September, the color drains out from all the grasses except Salicornia. Stringy and segmented, it flushes a last wave of crimson.

I study modern settings where I can learn the landscape and use this language to reconstruct past ecosystems and climates. Episodic events like hurricanes show up in the marsh as thick layers of pebbles and sands. Droughts show up in lake sediments as sandy fingers where hundreds of years might be missing, winnowed away by lapping waves that moved inward as the lake shrank.

*

The repetitive prayer of muscle memory. Movements between lovers forge a bond that if broken would shred identity. In the same way, my body stores sequences of fieldwork and laboratory procedures.

Starting in Minnesota darkness, three of us drive north. By the time the sun is up the bare deciduous trees give way to the dark green of conifers.

The edge of the lake is a boundary with no meaning—the snow thigh deep, the lake ice two-feet thick beneath the snow. I place a rope across my chest and pull the loaded sled behind me. Between us, we pull thirty plastic tubes the width of my upper arm, fifteen metal rods the width of two fingers, measuring tape, sandwiches, chocolate bars, and a roll of duct tape.

We go to the middle of the lake, clear snow from the ice, auger a hole, and assemble our equipment. Five or six or ten hours pass with jokes and periods of silence, and we pull fifteen thousand years of mud from the lake. The time since ice sheets melted in this region.

When I return home from expeditions, I wake in the night thinking I’m in a tent. I free-fall in the stillness of my house, the aloneness of the indoors.

I spend months in the laboratory uncovering the one-and-a-half-meter sections of mud that I keep wrapped in layers of Saran, stored in plastic tubes, sorted on shelves in a walk-in refrigerator. I work through the length of them, sampling mud and extracting the lignin and waxes from fragments of wood and leaves.

My hand squeezes the trigger of a spray bottle over and over. I sieve, search for a seed, a piece of cone, something with carbon that I can use to place the sequence of mud in time. A meter of sediment could contain thousands of years or just one catastrophic moment.

The eyepiece of the microscope barely touches my forehead, like a mother kissing a sleeping child. I draw the spiny monster forms of pollen in a notebook. For weeks, my world becomes a north-south grid viewed through the scope.

Some grains are patterned like the fur of a tiger, others like a tortoise shell. I make notches in my notebook, 5 pine (Pinus), 10 grass (Poaceae), 20 ragweed (Artemisia). Grass pollen are spheres with one hole, the edges raised like big puckering lips saying “O.” Conifer pollen are different variations on Mickey Mouse, with a head and two big ears.

To go back to the lab in the middle of the night, I move the way I learned sneaking out of the house when I was in high school. I crawl down the stairs, skip the squeaky one. Bike in the dark, shivery, my body not fully awake. It’s 2:30 a.m. I must smash together the five days I have on a machine to run samples. It’s taken half a year of laboratory work to reach this point. The work has rhythm and little thought. I bike home for breakfast shaky from sleeplessness. I will do the same at dinner. My samples, ancient soils, tell of the evolution of grasslands and how it weaves into the story of horse evolution.

*

The Latin naming system of plants. To transcend mother tongues and connect scientists across the world there is a code with two parts. First the genus, a tribal name marking ancestry. Second, the species, a specific name that describes simple features, Quercus rubus a red oak, Quercus alba a white oak.

For me, the language of botany transformed the green brushstroke of landscape into distinct stories. Mint has leaves that grow in pairs opposite each other, but at ninety-degree angles from the leaf-set below, opposite decussate. When I learned this term, I saw something new—opposite decussate roadside weeds.

This feature, combined with a square stem and the lips of the flower, gives mint away. I find it in the Rocky Mountain wilderness, a first clue of past disturbance. Only hours later do I find the ruins of a long-ago mining camp.

I go to the public library in Walden, Colorado, to spend an afternoon in the men’s bathroom. Just steps from the urinal is a collection of pressed and cataloged plants stacked in a metal cabinet. When adolescent boys and men in cowboy hats come in, I step into the hallway. I scribble plant names and draw leaves and flowers. I’m voracious. Without names, I don’t know for sure if what I saw yesterday is what I saw today.

I can’t smell the trees or feel the sun, but thousands of years of time flow through my mind and I see the retreating ice sheets, growing and shrinking lakes, the march of deciduous trees northward.

I learn to identify plants by small clues, a piece of a leaf or needle, a grain of pollen, chemical fossils measured in machines. I wake in the night to churn through ideas. I jot notes in a small journal I always keep in my bag. My mind lingers on details. I puzzle. I dream.

I read the landscape. Each plant is a story with a range of conditions it can live in—soil types, temperature extremes, drought tolerance, salt tolerance. The collection of plants holds meaning, tells of the land and climate.

When I braid these together, they build a rich narrative of ice ages, drought, the formation of ecosystems. But these puzzles are missing too many pieces—nothing  is certain. The distance this creates leaves something like the longing of separated lovers.

*

Capturing entropy on the page. All the scientific process, the encyclopedic knowledge, the photographs of mountains and oceans—these mean nothing until translated. The translation of the relentless and indifferent actions of nature is made with equations, diagrams, statistics, graphs. All the dirt and color and wind removed to leave only two dimensions.

My art is to structure that love letter, to turn my rambles through the woods and marsh, my protocols in the laboratory, and my pollen counts into patterns that form a narrative. To be able to share the story I read in the land.

I sit alone at my desk with my field notes from the summer, the pages smudged with dirt or chocolate:

July 5th Hike to Lake Agnus, 3153 meters
Area looks like may have been logged in the past.
Off side of trail still some snow patches.
Visible moose droppings. Forest is pretty dense.

During our courtship, my husband and I lived apart for months at a time. We wrote love letters. He sent a whole page describing me walking across a room, the way he would touch my shoulder first. The details of an old house told of the bigger fantasy we were building—the sun through leaded windows, the smell of bread baking. He conjured an image we both held tight.

He once sent half a loaf of bread by express mail so we could share the same breakfast. I had just started graduate school and lived in a large co-op house with a mound of shoes by the door. I watched from the sidelines as the mound grew, dispersed, and was stacked high again with the coming and going of my five housemates, overnight guests, friends joining for dinner, late-night band practices, and concerts that made the floors bounce as though the wood was elastic.

Alone in my office it is like this: no kiss of the microscope on my face, no razor grass edges, no murmur of mosquitoes, no depth of mud holding me at a frozen lake after dark. I look at my  computer screen and I think of the weeks I lived without electricity. I remember how my body fit into the landscape just so, how I washed myself by swimming in lakes with floating ice. My office furniture is not ergonomic, does not hold me or make me feel alive.

I take the raw data from running samples of mud through instruments in the laboratory, the data ordered by depth, depth converted to time. I can’t smell the trees or feel the sun, but thousands of years of time flow through my mind and I see the retreating ice sheets, growing and shrinking lakes, the march of deciduous trees northward.

I’m no longer held to my dusty university office, not pinned to the present moment. This is time unobserved, the lover baking bread to send in the mail, hands kneading the dough, yeast brewing and pushing the wet mound up and up.