Overburdened

I’ve seen this before, deer flies bold enough and brazen. You hear them, pounding themselves on the windshield and against the door and laying siege to the morning, now growing hot and sticky again.

This little landscape, the two-track along the berm, a curious state of unnatural nature. Knapweed in every drier place, weathered cement pieces, raspberry thickets and big open-grown trees in a curious arrangement. Scots pines, big and crooked and alien like they they’ve been there forever but don’t belong, slouch in the shadows and try not to draw attention. A giant willow ringed with cedars who started their lives with their feet wet. All of it. All of it, thick and green. Slick with moss and blooming lichens. All of it a high-summer apogee of chloroplasts pumping furiously and millions upon millions of stomata gassing out oxygen and water vapor that hangs in the already overly burdened wet air. 

This disturbed remnant, already prematurely old on poor sandy soils. A water table just below to offset the tendency toward drought. It rained three inches overnight. Nobody remembers anything like it. The name on the map evokes flowing and fresh but the water I see first is slow, like me, indolent during high summer. 

Some forgotten history, some vague story about a fish hatchery in the fifties. The two-track pitched into a deep hole so I stopped the van. There, a raceway of sorts, and a hidden little pond lined with cement and frogs, and a bottomless hole in a perfect cylinder bubbling up groundwater cold, ringed in rust-colored algae. 

We walked in adjacent to the supposed waterway looking for beavers. My colleague teaches stream ecology and needed a beaver example to show her students. I am a beaver guy from way back, having chased them through the steep-sided drainages of the Northern Rockies as a young man.

Here, on a morning feeling nothing but heavy I was helping her assess reports of a potential beaver place. I saw a weathered-stick lodge with a green willow leaf sticking up from remnants of the winter food cache anchored in the mud. I saw a single peeled twig on the far bank. The water was still and filmy with pollen, thick with blooms of filamentous algae, and ringed with sedge hummocks and a scattered alders.

The sort-of road ended in a raspberry thicket, so I sprayed my cap with repellant and we walked in. Too hot for waders (or long pants for that matter), my legs were going to get scratched up.

Beavers live in family groups building lodges and dams that back up the water to thwart predators and provide access to a ready food source. Colonies only last so long depending on site productivity. Beavers eat cambium and buds of favored food trees during winter. Eventually winter food runs out and dams either blow out in a flood or, more commonly, silt themselves in – forming wet meadows where willows, aspens, and dogwoods regrow, and the creek again cuts itself a channel and waits for the next beaver family to move in. This renewal takes decades, even centuries, but it used to be a baseline process in the forested parts of North America. Used to be, beavers were nearly everywhere, in abundance.

My good friend reads my noodlings on Facebook, writing about my Midwest as the spirit moves me. She is kind and tells me she likes them but doesn’t really identify. She misses her western mountains.

I get it. Something understands and there’s no denying the great spiritual gravity of her Colorado and in truth, I loved living in Montana. Loved field work in the mountain drainages. When we drove away 30 years ago, I consoled myself with the confidence that we would return. 

We never did.

At the back of the raspberries, elevation pitched a few inches lower and we were now picking through an old tag-alder thicket with hummocks and tangles of dead alder stems canting away from the basal bunches. I’ve never liked these places. “Are these beaver cuttings?” She asked. Some were. Most were not. Most were dead stems senescent and softened to breaking by time and fungi. One had the characteristic domed shape of a beaver cutting but it was almost unrecognizable under the green moss. Beavers don’t eat alder. The cambium is too thin and tough. They cut it for building material though.

This is an Anthropocene locus, a distillation dropped at a point. These inter-twined legacies of humans and beavers. This sodden Midwestern jumble. There is no clear historical ideal to aim for and even if there were, the current is too strong and our rudder is damaged. That’s the dilemma. We hold on to the principles of keeping all the pieces as the whole enterprise seems to be breaking down. We navigate only partially among the invasives and the altered ecologies and the building waves of climate chaos. And I don’t know what’s got me so cross – beyond the heat and the bugs. 

Pressing on to the edge, we found the dam and I walked out on it. There was fresh mud and smallish tracks on the very old dam. Likely, a disperser. Likely a juvenile beaver out on its own for the first time in its life and taking refuge in an empty colony like a runaway squatting in a deserted home. The surge of rainwater last night likely triggered the dam-building impulse. The old dam contained chunks of concrete debris and a bench that someone had made by chain-sawing a log in half.

The whole point of this little exploration is to teach something to the undergrads. And when we’re good at it, we can assemble the just-so stories into something coherent from the little bits we think we know. We want them to be conservationists, or earth-keepers to use a favored term among those of us that add our Christianity to the mix. We hope that a wisdom emerges.

And I can’t help thinking about that young beaver answering something instinctual, here too late. The next chapter, opening in a biological decadence of erstwhile minor players, the slimy, the small, the stickery, the things that we mostly don’t recognize but who advance the story all out of proportion to their star-power. 

No western mountains, but I am here for the moment maybe answering something instinctual of my own. Here in this humble midsummer haze of mud and bugs and doddering old trees layering themselves over the abandonments.