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The scientist, I am sure, is wrong about the animal tracks. He is a good man, fun, with sparkling blue eyes and two dimples that force you to smile when you look at him, and he is a man of knowledge too, a salamander biologist who loves his work. He is the one who spotted the wild ducks this morning on Lawson's Fork and the one who identified the cross vine, which is in full bloom now, this April day, cascading in yellow and orange waterfalls through the river birch. The scientist, David, who is the nature photographer in residence for the festival this week, knows a lot more than I do about this alluvial forest and riverine system, this one that we paddled this morning, a two-hour kayak between two old mill dams. He's outside daily, not just out there but catching cottonmouth moccasins to study and looking at tiger salamanders and identifying frogs and such. Mostly I'm at my computer, feeling lucky if a bluebird or a hummingbird lands in the catalpa tree outside my study window. Writing. But I am sure he is wrong about the tracks. |
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John, our river guide, was the first to see them, in the mud at the bottom of a slide obviously made by an animal. The slide dropped from a grassy plain near a set of houses bordering the creek, down to the water. "Look at this!" John yells. He is excited about everything alive we find on Lawson's Fork, because it means life for the creek. Everything -- the mountain laurel on the high Appalachian-like bluff, the galax, the warblers, the purple violets, the mallards -- excites him, as do any signs of life, the past presence of it, he sees. The tracks, the scat, the dropped feather. "What could have done that?" he asks, and we gather around in our bright-colored kayaks, pondering. It was not done by beaver. It is otter, I think. I am sure it is otter. I can't manifest an otter just by looking around, and I don't know the what otter track looks like, but this slide looks as if it were made for joy, for fun, and I have seen otters at play. David thinks a raccoon made it. I'll admit that the tracks do look like a raccoon's, a big raccoon's, but I've never seen a raccoon make a trail worn to a slippery line of red mud, as if smoothed by a soft belly. And there's something odd about the tracks. John thinks so too. All afternoon we have been searching field guides for evidence -- was it a raccoon? Was it an otter? Was it something else, and what? John finds that otters like to leave their scat on promontory rocks in creeks -- the rocks in the area were littered with otter dung. Raccoons, on the other hand, use their offal to mark woodland trails. The field guide says to examine the otter scat for fish scales and small bones, traces of their diet. Raccoon's scat will contain seeds. Alas, we did not think to examine the scat. What a sorry bunch of naturalists we are. A few piles of scat on a couple of rocks is certainly not evidence enough, especially to a scientist, that we truly have an otter living within the city limits of Spartanburg, South Carolina. But I think it is. I am thinking, if there's one otter, certainly there's a pair, and if there's a pair, then maybe there's a family. And if there are otter on Lawson's Fork, maybe there are water snakes and rare turtles and prothonatary warblers and woodpeckers and whatever else is supposed to be there, was there, before the city crowded up to the banks of the stream and robbed the creatures of their territory. There is plenty still there. The water was full of petals today, falled from tulip poplar still with their glorious tulips high in the sky, and the last of the dogwoods, and the fallen racemes of birch flowers, and other things we could not identify. A grackle flies from a hole in a dead pine. Carolina wrens call in the trees. I see the biggest water oak I have ever seen. |
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While we have been hunting for otter information in the field guides, we have been searching the names of the living things we saw on the creek this morning and couldn't identify. We cannot find the purple flower growing on the bank of ferns and moss, where purple violets bloomed and also white ones, although we know the unknown flower to be in the mint family. Its flower looks like a mint's, with a drooping lower lip, and its stem is square besides. This plant is so common -- we see it so many places -- how could we not know its name? How could we not know the names of the two white-flowering trees growing in the alluvial forest of Lawson's Fork, one with a bloom like a teacup hanging upside down and the other with five petals curled back from its gold stamens? How am I to know the bird that keeps flying away ahead of us down the creek? It keeps 100 feet between itself and the bright-colored boats we are paddling, four of us on a morning when the world is at work and yet we hear only birdsong and water? We manage to find it in the guides: least sandpiper. Least sandpiper. Thank heaven for the guides. It is not a real argument we are having, the one between the scientist and the poets, John and me, art versus science. Here on Lawson's Fork, as everywhere, there is room for both and need for both. If the animal is raccoon, I want to know that it is, and David, even as he argues for raccoon, in his heart of hearts wants the evidence to mean otter. He wants one there as much as we do, on this beautiful forgotten creek where branches of trees with their new leaves reach across the watery divide to touch each other. Like we all want the creek honored, want it to be clean and free of refuse, running pure, and we want it enjoyed. If we all want the otter there, if we want it so badly we imagine it, we call its name, and if we see the otter so vividly in our imaginations, see it swimming and dancing and sliding along Lawson's Fork, then might not we be able to cast it there? Look for it. |
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