Interlude

I'm going to pause from the project commentary briefly and write about a much earlier influence.

My interest in the natural world dates back to around age five or six, when we moved from the inner city to the suburbs. Suddenly I had a vast new world to explore, one that seemed like a wilderness to a young boy even though today I understand that it was only a succession of old fields and remnant woodlands dominated by weedy species. The prairie and oak savanna was almost gone from that place by that time. Even so, I was fascinated by the larval tiger salamanders I found in a pond next to an old abandoned farmhouse in the path of relentless suburban growth.

By the time I was in second grade I'd devoured every book in the school library that had anything to do with wildlife. One of those books that my parents must have bought for me is in front of me now; a tattered copy of the Golden Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians. The price, $1.00, is in the top right corner of the front cover and I need to handle it carefully to keep the pages from falling out.

The illustrations are crude, yet on page 141 is a drawing that I never forgot. A Pacific giant salamander and an olympic salamander perch atop a flat rock in a habitat very unlike where they actually live. I remember looking at these exotic creatures, at the range map showing a sliver of color on the west coast from northern California into British Columbia, and dreaming of these still unknown (to me) and far away places, 2,000 miles distant which might as well be in another galaxy from the perspective of a nine year old. Of course now I'm sitting within that sliver of color, and have seen lots of these no longer mysterious salamanders. A dream realized, I suppose.

I met many of the authors of those early books once I'd begun my professional career. They were aged gentlemen by then. When I had the opportunity to meet this particular author (the prolific Hobart M. Smith) I'd just found the tattered old book on a visit to my parents house, and tucked it in my pocket. I told Dr. Smith the story above as he smiled and signed the worn old page.

All of this is actually just a way of leading up to my real point. Along with a few illustrations and maps and words, I was drawn to this mysterious amphibious world by even earlier written accounts, authored by a previous generation of gentleman naturalists. They were mostly deceased before I ever read their words, so I never had the opportunity to meet them. Yet I was fascinated by their more flowing and elaborate and less formal writing style, common before the days when every scientific paper became dry and technical and rational and laden with statistical analysis. Those earlier accounts tapped into primal emotions at least as much as they recited scientific fact.

I'll cite two relevant examples. The Handbook of Frogs and Toads, by Albert Hazen Wright and Anna Allen Wright, was first published in 1933. After each species account it included excerpts from field notes. Here I read about pine barrens tree frogs in New Jersey, assorted chorus frogs in the swamps of Florida and Georgia, and leopard frogs in north woods lakes. One day I would have my own journals of notes from road trips; these much earlier ones helped spark that interest. I read them over and over again, and I was not disappointed when I finally was able to visit a few of the same places many years later.

The other example I didn't read til many years later. E. R. Dunn's Salamanders of the Family Plethodontidae has plenty of taxonomic detail in the species accounts. Yet the 1926 original work, and my 1972 reprint not acquired until two decades after that, included many passages like the following one in the forward:

"Yet it is the places that stick in my mind, which I had not seen but for Desmognathus or Oedipus. Cedar Rock in the rain, when the face of it was a waterfall a thousand feet high and a half mile wide, water pouring out from the spruce forest on top, and spreading out over the great dome and down with a mighty roaring to its hidden base. The cliffs of Lost Cove and the escarpment of the Blue Ridge down which we went all one long day, with our senses of direction clean gone, and dark came on, and we followed trails in the woods which ended blindly, until across three ridges we heard a cow bell and the bark of a dog. The silence of the spruce forest on White Top, and the thick moss on the ground there."

It's only three pages in the front of the book, yet it so eloquently captures some of my own feelings while pursuing Aneides or Desmognathus or Plethodon in that same Blue Ridge region more than 60 years after Dunn wrote his words. I doubt I could convey it half as well as he did. Again, he helped inspire new trips out into the wind and the rain and the night for long hikes over rugged terrain.

Those trips still happen. Today we too often take ourselves so seriously or just get too busy and forget to write about those less tangible things which for me at least, are a big part of the reason to undertake such adventures.