BY LESLIE REGO
Barry Lopez (an American author best known for his books on natural history and the environment) writes in The Rediscovery of North America, “I remember a Nunamiut man at Anaktuvuk Pass in the Brooks Range in Alaska named Justus Mekiana… I asked him what he did when he went into a foreign landscape. He said, “I listen.” Barry goes on to write, “To approach the land as we would a person, by opening an intelligent conversation. And to stay in one place, to make of that one, long observation a fully dilated experience. We will always be rewarded if we give the land credit for more that we imagine, and if we imagine it as being more complex even than language.”
I thought of these words as I sat on a log in a sunny meadow brimming with an assortment of wildflowers. I gazed around me and saw penstemon, bog orchid, buttercups, tiny yellow violets, monkshood, and gentians, to name a few. Scattered amongst these were bushes of elderberry, the white blooms transitioning to dark purple berries.
Just with the few flowers I mentioned, several flower families were represented: the orchid family, the buttercup family, the lily, rose and pea family, mint parsley and borage family, figwort and composite family. When I looked up all of the families of flowers, I was astonished by how many were present in just a small meadow. Within all of these families were serrated, lobed, linear, plus many more shapes of leaves. There were diskflowers, rayflowers, racemes, tubular, funnel-form, and umbel-shaped flowers. The roots of every type of plant differed, running the gamut from bulbs to rhizomes to tubers. And this was just the flowers!
I looked around and thought of the complexities of the different types of trees. On the edge of the swaying grass were aspens, western Douglas firs, willows, and lodgepole pines. One great big Douglas fir spread its branches in the center of the meadow. There were sulphur butterflies, swallowtail and checkered butterflies, plus many other insects and bugs. And then there is the teeming underground life!
Language is complex. Nuances abound in speech. There are different interpretations of almost everything we utter. But as I looked around and listened, I realized that nature goes beyond language to a place of extraordinary intricacy.
Leslie Rego is an Idaho Press Club award-winning columnist, artist and Blaine County resident. To view more of Rego’s art, visit leslierego.com.