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Trail Talk

At the Halloween Safari this year, I pretended to be an opossum. I had my costume and I was down on all fours, near the Chapman Cemetery. My wife brought our children to see my little number.

As it was dark and the people in the group had flashlights, I couldn't see who was standing and watching. I had just started my spiel when Eli, age 3, said, "Hi, Dada."

"Hi, Eli," said the 'possum.

"Look, Gussie," said Eli to his two-year-old sister. "Dada is a possum." I think he was a little confused and was trying to reassure himself by reassuring her, though she didn't give much sign of needing reassurance.

"Dog," Gussie said.

"Not dog, Gussie," Eli said. "Dada is a possum!"

They went back and forth a few times while I attempted to portray 'possum. They were more entertaining than I was, to my mind at least. And it occurred to me a few weeks later, walking in the woods near the same spot, that neither one of them has been wrong. Eli had seen an opossum once or twice, and he had been told that that was what Dada was just then. Gus had been told too, but it didn't make sense. Dada was on his hands and knees, covered in fur, and bigger than a cat: Dada is a dog. Is this how Dadaism got started?

None of us sees what is there, all the time. Instead we notice what we know. When we walk through the woods, we all see generally that the trees have leaves, that they are more dense in some places, less so in others. What we are able to name depends on what we know. I, no great naturalist, might see a birch (based on its bark) or an oak (based only on its leaves) with a hairy vine growing around it (poison ivy, based on experience). The naturalists at FoBR, when they walk through the woods, probably see an entirely different environment, more full: they may see the fiddlehead fern, know how it germinated, what stage of life it is in, what is likely to grow around it, where it gets its nutrients, and why it grows where it grows. Whereas I see a fern, and guess at the kind.

Certainly, I don't have to know the natural history of ferns to appreciate one, to find it beautiful, to know that a bank of them is calming, lovely. But the fact remains that you won't see what you aren't, one way or another, aware of. I see what my eyes show me, but understand and can convey only as much as I know. I'd like to learn more, lest every one of those plants becomes just a tree.