Yesterday Jerry and his daughter Amy and I walked the Loop at Grass River Natural Area. It’s a bit much for Jerry, with his walker, but he wanted to do it. It’s all boardwalk, and except for a few uneven places, it’s comfortably accessible. I’m grateful for the people who worked for years to preserve the sensitive wetland, starting back in 1969. The natural area borders all 2.5 miles of the Grass River and over 6 miles of shoreline.
Turtlehead
There’s nothing to see, nothing much. Not even identifying markers for ferns and trees. You’re on your own. You walk through the dense cedar marsh to the observation deck that looks toward the meandering waterway that leads into Clam Lake. Nothing to see until you look. I have an app, Picture This, that I use to identify ferns and flowering plants. Jack in the Pulpit’s bright red berries this time of year, silky dogwood, boneset, panicled aster, cinquefoil, cudweed, white turtlehead (one of my favorites), sensitive fern, royal fern. Someone once named them.
Here's a question—Do we obscure the reality of a plant by slapping a name on it? Would we see it in its purer self without a name? Downside of naming: the mind and imagination of the namer is projected on the plant. Now you see a turtle’s head as well as the white, delicate bloom. Or you might see it as shellflower, snakehead, snakemouth, cod head, fish mouth, balmony, and bitter herb, each name a specific an angle of someone’s imagination.
Or there’s Boneset. You can see all the way back, Native Americans treating what they called bone fever, an ague that caused bone pain. So much pulled into a name.
Is it possible to see the plant ever again without its name (unless you forget it, which I am likely to do)? Is it possible to see a person without her name? If you forget it, doesn’t your mind dip and turn into every crevice, trying to find it? If I weren’t Fleda, would I lose something of myself?
Maidenhair fern, plus my shoe
I can crouch by the maidenhair ferns sprung from the few my grandmother transplanted to the south side of our cottage many years ago. I can run my finger gently along the delicate fronds, and feel a profound intimacy with the plant itself, even before its history. Maybe. It’s all entangled.
Can name and being be unentangled? Probably not. We see with our minds, not our eyes. The eye is just a transfer vehicle to the mind. Once there, the image explodes with associations, memories, stories, names. Nothing is pure anything.
It seems to me, though, there’s something to be gained by seeing, by being aware of, what we’ve added to the primary image. As if the image were layers, the longer we look, the closer we get to the core image. And if we look with a microscope, even the core image breaks up.
All true, but you can’t hug a molecule. You hug a person with a name. “Come here, my beloved what’s-your-name”? Nope.
We sit on the deck of the little cottage to eat lunch. A single ant crosses the railing every day with great determination, one end to the other, while we’re eating. Ellsworth, we call him. We aren’t sure if he’s always the same one, but in our eyes, he’s always Ellsworth. He turns around at the end and scurries along back. Where is he going, and why? We have stories. He has become our friend, linked to us by repetition and by name.
How do you feel when people don’t use your name? “Hey you.” Your name pulls you into the light. Your name may be associated with all sorts of random and possibly inaccurate thoughts, but it’s yours. You’re seen. When I name the fern, I pull it more brightly into consciousness.
I vote for naming things. Humans would name them with or without my vote. My former husband had a Maverick he named Leroy. Leroy wasn’t just a car. He was Leroy. I definitely wasn’t fond of Leroy, but I had to admit, he had personality.
The P.S. . . .
My two new books, Mortality, with Friends, and Flying Through a Hole in the Storm, have each won prizes. I’ll be celebrating those books and reading new poems at Brilliant Books in Traverse City on Oct 1 at 7:00. Please come! It’ll be much more fun if you’re there.