Yesterday I hiked through Forest Park from the West end of the Saint Johns Bridge to the Leif Erikson trailhead on NW Thurman Street.
The day was beautiful. Some lucky mix took place to give me cloud cover during the middle of the day (to avoid burning my Norwegian skin) followed by a clear, dry late afternoon and sunset. I found that trail users were relatively sparse due to the pandemic precautions and the workday.
When the clouds cleared I saw flat-topped Mount Saint Helens to the north and Mount Hood to the east. I saw the invasive ivy expertly poisoned by targeted pesticide applications. I thought about the many missed hours of volunteer invasive plant pulls and native plant plantings that will have to be made up for this summer.
I passed by a duo on one of the narrower trails and noted the way one yakked nonstop about her job while the other listened. I smiled at the quiet second one in understanding. She looked like she was fulfilling her role as a listener and friend, even as her eyes wandered.
I passed by a young couple where the man was a good deal shorter than the woman. She seemed awkward and nervously talkative. I passed an Indian mother telling her adolescent daughter, “All the other girls your age do such and such…” I saw many people on gravel bikes, which are pricey contraptions with a front suspension and drop handlebars that didn’t exist ten years ago.
I snaked along the Ridge Trail, the Leif Erikson Trail, the Wildwood Trail and the Alder Trail and I relished the feeling that in those moments, there was no place I would rather be. I was doing exactly what I intended with my day off.
I encountered large native snails and banana slugs. I saw the even larger invasive banana slugs. A couple of them were everted from their wet translucent casings and turned into a yellowish speckled paste from being run over by bikes.
At one point I halted in my tracks and watched a beautiful woodpecker that was new to me. I observed its plumage (it looked like a sapsucker). And then I was delighted when I noticed it had a flight, foraging and drumming pattern that was distinct from other woodpeckers such as a downy woodpecker or a northern flicker. I think the bird was a red-breasted sapsucker. They must be common because later on I came too close to a nest of theirs and was scolded aggressively by the parents. I heard their chicks peeping while their parents defended them from me, the intruder.
Observing the bird illustrated what I have come to think of as the fractal nature of knowledge: when you look closely at a feature of the natural world, you resolve a thousand further minute but equally significant distinctions. You uncover those ones and then uncover further ones. And at the end of all this you grasp a hint of the pattern repeating in the whole and uniting all those endless details. You start to see unity in the midst of endless diversification.
And isn’t this what Darwin hinted at 161 years ago in On the Origin of Species? He did so in expansive style while also addressing details such as debates over mollusc morphology hashed out in the correspondence of gentleman scientists.
And although I have not read this foundational work in its entirety, I did listen to the audiobook version while delivering pizzas.
pseudoisaac 