A few years ago, I was talking with a sculptor well known for his portrayal of the natural world in metal. He had invited me over for dinner to discuss some fieldwork I had recently completed and after we ate, he showed me his studio in the backyard. It was a living and dusty place–where the cast-off projects and references crowded newly cast work. Antlers, assorted bird wings and the tarnished back half of a river otter scattered around eighteen bronze pygmy owls, lined up and shining. It could have easily been the workshop of a field biologist.
I remember him pointing out that both field scientists and artists “are in the same business.” We both go into outside looking for patterns, often with an hypothesis of what we’ll find there. When we do see a pattern, or something worth sharing, we record it and come back to file a report on what we found. Whether we create this report through art or a written paper, we both want to communicate our observations to people in a meaningful way.
...and sometimes, you find something worth sharing by accident.
Last month, as the storms finally swelled the streams and ponds around our valley, I spent an afternoon playing in the rain with my camera. I recently bought a waterproof housing for it and like any kid with a new plastic toy, I wandered about dropping it into any puddle I found. Just downstream from my family’s land on Thompson Creek, there is a pool that has always held lots of juvenile Coho salmon, steelhead, and anything else looking to avoid herons and raccoons. So I set the camera on record and auto-focus, tied it to a rock so the buoyant plastic would sink, and lowered it onto the stream bed.
Like a monkey blindly fishing for hidden ants with a piece of grass, I perched on the exposed roots of a Bigleaf Maple, dropping in the camera, waiting, pulling it up to inspect my footage, changing position slightly, then dropping it back in. Within a half-dozen tries I had a good shot and moved on to film the chorusing tree frogs nearby. Back inside, I uploaded the juvenile Coho footage collected that afternoon to Youtube, and sent it around to the people I work with on riparian restoration projects around the watershed. The email responses were swift and enthusiastic, the video was forwarded on, “liked” and had been viewed over 200 times within the first few days—not to shabby for a fish video.
The comments were heart-felt and sincere. People, with whom I usually correspond only to discuss permits, grant deadlines or regional priorities chimed in to laud the footage and I found myself checking Youtube to watch the video’s “views” rise. What in real life had been 3 minutes squatting in the rain became three days of electronic entertainment. Three days, while the fish went about their own business, as did the rest of the real breathing world.
As I continue to look for patterns in the Outside, struggling to share what I see with others, I will return to my glowing screen at night to load many more such videos–for they are captured glimpses into other worlds... memos from the Outside. But the whole story can only be found for one’s self, playing in the world of mud and living things.