Creek Running North

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Island biogeography

Out there, the void and wind-whipped, seething. Why leave safe harbor? Even if we dared, we could not venture out among the waves. Our minds are solitary, deducing other islands from the patterns in the waves that they reflect.

Now and then a seed washes up on shore, arrives in the stomach of a raven. Its mother plant evolved somewhere unknown, an environment perhaps entirely different. It may sprout to die on land not suited to it. It may sprout and flourish. It may live on the lacerate edge. In time its descendants little resemble the founder. Taxonomists argue over their origins.

Some things arrive by virtue of great size, the strength to swim broad distances unaided, and are whittled down on landing. Some things are small, and drift on wind or stuck to floating logs. That which foreign harms had made minute expands where favor allows it. Defenses are lowered, armor shed. Wings are soon good for shade but nothing more.

In changing, they are trapped. The pygmy mammoth could not brave the California surf. The pigeon that shed flight begins the litany of creatures lost, synecdoche of failure. They dwindle or they thrive, but no other lands will feel their weight.

Still, some thoughts are finches. The insular internal landscape changes them, but they keep wings. A word lands, takes root. It is small, one syllable, to drift on wind or hide in Raven’s belly. In my heart it sprouts seeps of moss and maidenhair, Diplacus against red rock and canyon wren echoes, smooth slot canyons slicing through the juniper-clad plain. Thin, blood-warm water flows around my ankles.

Crests and troughs reflect, refract off other shores. I crane my neck and smile. Above my head the wrack, lodged far above: the leavings of a flash flood, loosed when that word sent tendrils into some distant soil.

I love reading those papers on the insect and plant life that migrates and takes hold on newly formed volcanic islands.  I was laughing about something on a sci-fi tv show just last night in this regard: where would the spider-like creatures come from that inhabited the little asteroid and invaded the ship???  Would spiders live in space, on ships? Are there spiders up on the international space station, rummaging around with cockroaches in the wiring and circuits behind the panels????