Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the essay “My Life With a Field Guide” by Diana Kapple-Smith (©2002 by PhiBeta Kappa Society).

I was seventeen when it stared. My family was on a vacation, and one day we went on a nature walk led by a young man a few years older than I. Probably I wanted to get his attention—I’m sure I did— so I pointed to a flower and asked, “What’s that? ”

“Hmmm? Oh, just an aster.” he said.

Was there a hint of a sniff as he turned away？There was! It was just an aster and I was just a total ignoramus!

And I remember the aster. Its rays were a brilliant purple, its core a dense coin of yellow velvet. It focused light as a crystal will. It faced the sun; it was the sun’s echo.

Later that day, a book with a green cover lay on the arm of a chair under an apple tree. It was the same volume that our guide had carried as he marched us through he woods. The book had been left there, by itself. It was a thing of power. In the thin summer shadow of the tree, quivering, like a veil, the book was revealed ,and I reached for it. A FIELD GUIDE TO WILD FLOWERS—PETERSON & MCKERNNY, its cover said. Its backside was ruled like a measuring tape, its inside was full of drawings of flowers. By the end of that week I had my copy. I have it still.

Over the next several years this field guide would become my closet companion, a slice of worldview, as indispensable as eyes or hands. I didn’t arrive at this intimacy right away, however. This wasn’t going to be an easy affair for either of us.

I’ll give you an example of how it went. After I’d owned the Peterson’s for about a week, I went on a hike with some friends up a little mountain, taking the book along. Halfway up a little mountain, there by the trailside was a yellow flower, a nice opportunity to take my new guide for a test drive. “Go on ahead!” I said to my hiking companions, “I’ll be a minute...” Famous last words.

I had already figured out the business of the book’s colored tabs. I turned in an authoritative way to the Yellow part and began to flip through. By the time the past of my friends had disappeared up the trail, I’d arrived at a page where things looked right. Five petals? Yes. Pinnate leaves? Whatever. Buttercup？There are, amazingly, eleven buttercups. Who would have thought? However hard I tried to make it so, my item was not one of them. Next page: Aha! this looked more like it. Bushy cinquefoil? Nope, leaves not quiiite right, are they? As the gnats descended, I noticed that there were six more pages ahead, each packed with five-petaled yellow flowers—St. Johnsworts, loosestrifes, puccoons.

Why I persisted in carrying it around and consulting its crowded pages at every opportunity, I have no idea. The book was stubborn; well, I was stubborn, too; that was part of it. And I had no choice, really, not if I wanted to get in. A landscape may be handsome in the aggregate, but this book led to the particulars, and that’s what I wanted. A less complete guide would have been easier to start with, but more frustrating in the end. A more complete book would have been impossible for me to use. So I persisted in wrestling with the Peterson’s, and thus by slow degrees the crowd of plant stuff in the world became composed of individuals. As it did, the book changed: its cover was stained by water and snack, food, the spine grew invitingly lax, and some of the margins sprouted cryptic annotations.

By the time the next summer came, I had fully discovered the joy of the hunt, and every new species bad its trophy of data—name and place and date—to be jotted down. If I’d found a flower before, I was happy to see it again. I often addressed it with enthusiasm: Hi there, Solidago hispida! I discovered early on that a plant’s Latin name is a name of power by which the plant can be uniquely identified among different spoken tongues, across continents, and through time. The genus name lashes it firmly to its closest kin, while its species name describes a personal attribute—rubrum meaning red, offcinale meaning medicinal, odoratus meaning smelly, and so on. It all makes such delightful sense!

My friend Julie and I identified individual plants in our rembles, but from the particulars we began to know wholes. Bogs held one community, montane forests held another, and the plants they held in common were clues to intricate dramas of climate change and continental drift. So from plant communities it followed that the grand schemes of things, when they came our way, arrived rooted in real place and personal experience: quaternary geology, biogeography, evolutionary biology all lay on the road that we had begun to travel.