Occidental Journey

I didn’t mean to fall in love with plants.

My college plant taxonomy class was interesting, sure, but when city parks’ weedy spring bloomers were the extent of botanical exposure, other pursuits offered greater appeal.

Four years later I found myself in the verdant rolling landscape of the midwest driftless region, on assignment to monitor the delightfully-spiraled and highly-endangered Iowa Pleistocene Snail (Discus macclintocki). A botanically-minded co-worker introduced me to local flora along the winding hikes to field sites. I learned names and stories of plants gracing the algific talus slopes, sand prairies, oak savannas, and wet meadows.

I began to see communities of ecosystems and recognize species by their placement and by their neighbors. I gained a sense of habitat quality, noticing diversity and abundance relative to the unique contours of the landscape, imagining where water flows and pools, observing shade and age of trees. I began to see the abundance of nature with new eyes, realizing there is a lifetime stretching before me in which I will never run short of species to learn or wild places to observe. I was falling sincerely in love: the sort of love you re-prioritize for, you commit to, you cherish with gratitude. I was falling in love with plants.

Fast forward a few months, and I was cruising westward to start a CLM botany internship in Vale, Oregon: a tiny town on the eastern edge of the state, deep in sagebrush country. This is the job I never intended to have, but as the snail position was ending and my appreciation for plants growing, I perused websites for floralistic opportunities and stumbled upon this internship. Lucky in love.

On my journey to Vale, I explored Death Valley’s wildflower bloom, San Francisco, and Salt Point State Park along the California coast. I learned some of my first western birds, including the curious Stellar’s Jay and brilliantly blue Western Scrub Jay. I frolicked among the flowers of Death Valley like a four-limbed solitary bee, nose and cheeks dusted in pollen, brain captivated in woozy ecstasy by the floral fragrance of desert beauties in bloom. Like many romantics, I wrote a poem:

Golden yellow hue flows like rivers down

hillside crevices

to death’s valley floor

where a protesting display

of thousands

millions

of flowers, wild, alive

are blooming.

This is the story of how I arrived. I have much to share from my first month’s adventures as a CLM intern – stories I will save for a new post next week. 🙂