Late October, 2015
The year that our sixteen year old Henry David Thoreau entered Harvard College, the German explorer and naturalist Prince Alexander Philipp Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied worked his way to the edge of the American frontier, studying Indians, plants, animals, geology, and just about anything else he came near. Maximilian concluded his American explorations a year later and eventually published the account of his travels (the London edition came out in 1843, two years before Thoreau went to live at Walden Pond).
While Thoreau was still at the Pond, he began studying Indians as, perhaps, a way to connect to his idea of The Wild. This was his primary interest for the rest of his life. And as he poured over the Harvard library’s collection of books on native Americans, Thoreau kept detailed notes (his twelve Indian notebooks run somewhere around 3000 to 4000 pages). One of the books he eventually found was Philipp Maximilian’s. And I can’t help but imagine Thoreau’s heightened interest in this intelligent explorer’s account of all things Indian and all things Nature.
All of this is a dreadfully boring lead-up to our observation last week of what is for us here at The Creek a new flower: Helianthus maximiliani, the Maximilian Sunflower. Right. The idea is that our German friend encountered this native to the Great Plains on his explorations, and so he gets his name attached to the plant’s binomial name (along with several other plants and animals).
A few days back (Oct 21), I squatted near the shallow yet quickly running piece of Creek about 30m upstream of the Pool. There, on a foot-wide stone half-submerged, loads of damselflies were perched or hovering in their famous reproductive posture known at the wheel or the heart. The male has sought out his mate and, perhaps while in-flight, grabbed her thorax right behind her head with the clasping structures of his tail-end. She then swings her tail-end back under herself and forward to a segment of the male’s tail where he has prepared his sperm for her taking. The pair will remain attached as the female deposits her eggs, generally into plant material under water or near the water surface. The whole time, the male (still grabbing her thorax with his tail claspers) is guarding the process from rivals, helping the pair to fly here and there (freeing up female energy so she can focus on egg-laying), and sometimes balancing himself at the water’s edge while his mate remains underwater to deposit eggs.
All of this is a dreadfully boring lead-up to our observation last week of what is for us here at The Creek a new flower: Helianthus maximiliani, the Maximilian Sunflower. Right. The idea is that our German friend encountered this native to the Great Plains on his explorations, and so he gets his name attached to the plant’s binomial name (along with several other plants and animals).
The generous Project Gutenberg has put online some of the writings of Maximilian. For those at all interested in early 19th Century naturalist writing or amazingly detailed firsthand accounts of Indians, these links would be hard to beat:
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| Helianthus maximiliani, Maximilian Sunflower |
Depending on the anthropomorphic bent of the human observer, it’s a process that involves beauty and ugliness. And absurdity. Three days ago, healthy damselfly eggs by the hundreds were inserted into Creek plants with the hope of filling this stream with larvae and other flying generations. But last night the rains began in earnest. When I looked out the windows this morning, I could not even see the Creek, it was still so low from our drought. But no less than ten minutes later, it was churning with white foam and tree limbs, spanning almost a hundred feet in width. Flash. Flood. And all those countless damselfly eggs somewhere down in the Colorado River and on the way to the Gulf. Many of the larvae that have attached themselves to the bottom of larger stones will emerge here again in a few days. Those that attached themselves to stones smaller than a boulder will also find themselves in the bellies of River fish soon.
But when I think of what a single damselfly of a mated pair had to go through just to be washed away, my anthropomorphic mind cannot un-conclude that the whole show is absurd. The female herself had to feed and fight underwater for a year to three years as a nymph. Then she emerged one sunny morning and pulsed fluids through her newly expanding wings, morphing into the flying wonder we associate with these and similar waters. And then the quickly maturing process, the formation of eggs, the mate-clasping, the air-borne copulation, and the final and unlikely placement of tiny eggs into calm waters beneath my gaze. Now, though. The torrential loss just seems absurd.
And other images...
Praise
1
Don't think of it.
Vanity is absence.
Be here. Here
is the root and stem
unappraisable
on whose life
your life depends.
2
Be here
like the water
of the hill
that fills each
opening it
comes to, to leave
with a sound
that is a part
of local speech.
(Wendell Berry, The Country of Marriage)
