the cassandra pages

Hermit Diary 46. Missing the Sea

Growing up in central New York State conditioned me to fields, forests, lakes, hills and river valleys. I was five when I had my first glimpse of the ocean, from New York harbor, but I wasn't actually on the ocean until I was 10, when my parents went on a deep-sea fishing trip off the coast of Maine with another couple and their son. We took off in a fishing boat and everything was fine until we anchored far offshore -- you could no longer see land -- and began to fish for cod with heavy-duty rods. I loved to fish and was excited to see dolphins, which we hadn't expected. My father and I hooked one large fish and were trying to reel it in when I began to feel the bobbing boat under my feet, and in just a few more minutes I was heaving my breakfast over the side. It was perhaps 9 in the morning, and I was wretchedly sick for the next six hours; when we finally got back to land I had trouble walking to the car, and vowed I'd never go out on the ocean again.

But some sort of fascination remained, and eventually got the better of me; my husband and I spent two summer vacations in Maine with friends of our own, and I was able to explore tidal pools and beaches on foot, and sheltered coves from a canoe. I've spent time on the Atlantic in South Carolina, Florida, New York and many parts of New England; the Pacific in California; the other side of the Atlantic in Cornwall and Portugal; the cold North Sea in Iceland and the warm Mediterranean in Italy, Sicily, and Greece. Oddly, during the pandemic, my thoughts have turned again and again to the sea. The other day in my studio, I pulled out a box of shells and other beach artifacts, and made these watercolor and ink drawings. All the shells here are from Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island, where generous friends of ours have a house that we've been invited several times to visit. I spent happy hours on a rocky beach picking up odds and ends of seaweed, feathers, shells, crab carcasses, glass, and pebbles, knowing someday I'd want to draw them.

It made me happier to make these pictures, to escape into textures and colors that reminded me of places where I was both tranquil and curious. I know so little about the ocean, really. I'm in awe of its majesty and respect its power, and I'm drawn to its magnetically repetitive waves, its changeability, and the life it holds. As much as I love the calm, pastoral landscapes of my childhood, and find the woods and streams and lakes familiar enough to be unafraid there, day or night -- I know enough woodlore to probably survive quite a while in such an environment, if uninjured and warm enough -- my ignorance and unfamiliarity about the ocean keep me healthily cautious and aware. I like ferry trips, but I'm always a little nervous about getting seasick again, and the idea of an oceanic disaster seems more frightening to me than any air flight. I'd never go on an open-ocean cruise. Nevertheless, on the other side of every ferry trip there's always been something fascinating, and so much to see on the passage between, that I've forgotten my fears.

So why have I been thinking about the sea so much? I'm not sure. Some is wistfulness about not being able to travel, and wondering if I'll ever go back to some of the places I love, but I think it's more elemental than that. Maybe it's just a desire to sit and watch the waves crashing on the rocks, taking away my thoughts as I follow each wave like a breath, and then another: a desire for that renewal coming from somewhere I can't see, imagine, or understand.

Hermit Diary 45. Microcosm

I've made terrariums since I was a little girl. These miniature worlds fascinated me, perhaps because they reflected the natural places where I often played with my dolls: the mossy crevices between tree roots; the lush gardens of moss and lichens and fungi growing on stumps and dead trees in the woods, the little glades of clubmosses, ferns, wildflowers, and tiny tree seedlings in spots that caught a bit more light in the understory. In the fall, my mother and I would go on a gathering walk, collecting these small lifeforms for a terrarium that would stay green through the long winter, often in an old aquarium tank that no longer held water well enough for fish.

My husband and I recently brought all our plants inside for the winter, and, for the first time, set up grow-lights and humidifiers to help them out and increase the range of plants we could maintain during the days of short, dim northern light -- and also to help ourselves endure and enjoy what promises to be our own long winter captivity in a small apartment. We have an area for herbs, we've got orchids and begonias and many houseplants, and another place for cacti and succulents, all of which seem, so far, to be thriving.

The plants in a woodland terrarium are very different from these: mosses and ferns are primitive plants that reproduce by spores rather than flowering; lichens are composite organisms of a fungus living in symbiotic relationship with algae or cyanobacteria. Mosses are non-vascular plants that have been around for 470 million years; ferns, which have a vascular system, first appear in fossils in the Devonian period, 360 million years ago. Today, primitive plants persist in environments on the planet that reflect early conditions on earth: at the volcanic rift valley of Thingvellir, in Iceland, I spent one of the happiest days of my life exploring the riches of that tundra landscape where mosses and a wide variety of lichens thrive on volcanic rock. In geologic history, slow-growing mosses like these absorbed CO2 and dissolved the underlying rock, releasing chemicals into the atmosphere that caused marine die-offs and C02 absorption that ultimately led to the formation of the polar ice caps. Today, the reverse is happening.

Thingvellir, Iceland

My field-biology mentor, Herm Weiskotten, increased my knowledge of these species during the years I worked with him in the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. A botanist by heart, he loved nothing more than primitive plants, and we roamed central New York together in search of rare clubmosses and maidenhair spleenworts and other specialized plants to be grown in terrariums for our educational exhibits, or carefully transplanted into limestone outcrops or acidic woodland environments on our interpretive trails. One of my most precious possessions is a bent and water-damaged Peterson Field Guide to the Ferns and Clubmosses with Herm's name in the front, and several pressed fern fronds between the pages: he gave it to me after a misadventure where we both fell into the water of some remote bog.

I haven't had a terrarium for years, but as the leaves came down and the weather turned colder, I kept thinking about making one. We have a perfect glass bowl that originally held miniature succulents, a gift from our friend Jenny. Last weekend I brought it home from the studio, lined the bottom with stones and charcoal, added a layer of woody soil, and started gathering moss from northern sides of buildings on the city streets. Yesterday I went for a walk up on Mount Royal, the large hill we Montrealers call "the mountain", where I hoped to find a greater variety of potential inhabitants. It was a warm day, and I was happy being in the woods; I left the regular paths and wandered through the blanket of fallen leaves, checking out fallen tree limbs and moss-covered boulders, climbing higher and higher to where I thought I'd be able to find some lichens. After an hour or two, I came back down to my bicycle and the city with my small backpack holding treasures: mosses, a liverwort, grey-green and chartreuse lichens, a tiny shelf fungus, bits of shale and birch bark, a small fern.

This small and symbolic act has a lot to do with the election. As I’ve worried and waited, my thoughts keep returning to two issues in particular: the struggles of blacks, people of color, and migrants, and the peril facing our climate. The damage already done to both by the current administration is incalculable, but four more years could be irreparable.

I’ve lived a long time, and recognize that, like the lichens, my life continues to exist in a delicate balance with the other lives on our planet -- human, animal, plant, single-celled organisms, bacteria, and those, like viruses, that inhabit a shadowy zone between the animate and inanimate.

The terrarium is not a sealed, balanced, self-sufficient and self-perpetuating biodome, but a micro-environment for which I’m responsible: it can succumb easily to mold, drought, or neglect. As such, it’s a microcosm of the responsibility we bear for everything and everyone more vulnerable than we are, and thus subject to our destructiveness, indifference, and self-interest.

In the end, I find I care less about the survival of the human race than about the survival of biodiversity: the extinction of species at our hands has always cut me to the heart. I shudder to imagine a future for human beings that involves artificial environments or other planets where "trees" and "animals" only exist in giant, controlled biodomes isolated from a toxic exterior. The climate crisis will dwarf anything we’ve experienced so far, increasing human migration and threatening every remaining species as well as the air we breathe and the water we drink. The election of an American president who respects science and understands what we’re facing is perhaps one step back from the precipice, but we haven’t a moment to lose. This little world will remind me of that fact every day; unlike the larger one, I can hold it in my hands, admire its fragile beauty, and try to give it what it needs.