Something I wrote for my workshop with Ben Percy a few weeks ago, which he really liked. I worked with him to revise it slightly, and then got it put together for submission this week. Thought I'd share...

The Names of Things

I love the way he knows the names of things: he romanced me with words like gneiss, Helianthus, mollisol, and Vermivora chrysoptera. We explore the sun-streaked crevices of northern forest paths. He crouches to the dirt. Hands me smooth acorns with little caps. Holds up crisp yellow leaves. Shows me palms full of soil. Count the number of blades along the leaf, he says, are the edges serrated? A twitter and a rustle from above. He starts. Gropes for the binoculars hanging around his neck. Write this down: bright yellow belly. Necklace of black streaks. Uniform grey above. I think it’s a… We sit on the cool ground and I drink water slowly. He turns the pages of his field guide. Fingers scanning the index. Classifying by characteristics. Confirming the identity. It was a Canadian warbler.

For several years now, I have relied on him to be my scientific index, a walking list of categories carefully recorded, I wish I knew what that red tree was, what kind of bird makes this sound like “sur-ee-sur-ee-sur-eee? He was the map. He knew the lands. He had brought me there. In Montana, he taught me the type of rock that towers as cliffs along the Gallatin River. The colors of the soils. What a bear’s paw print looks like. How to interpret shit. In California, there were lessons in cacti. How to age a brown pelican chick from a mile away. What the dead body of a baby sea lion washed on the beach smells like. He had the facts. He beat me to them. When he didn’t know what kind of flower that was, blooming along the edge of a canyon waterfall, he would pick it. He would bring it to the encyclopedia. He would use the shade of blue, the number of petals, the root structure. He would unlock the codes of science to bring me the answer.

Neurobiologists say that as we age, our brain’s ability to store new information is altered; instead of forging new pathways, we understand by linking new wires to old telephone poles, to the information we already have built. Everything new must be related to something old. I remember the first week I was in California, getting lost intentionally, exploring my new home, driving to the Buenaventura Mission on the hills above Laurel Avenue. I performed a treacherous three-point turn and stopped the car, stunned by the sight of a wide expanse, green as eucalyptus, far below. Utterly mystified, I tried to determine what plant that would be, to cover such an enormous part of Southern California’s pasture. I had seen, in the days I had been there, wet lemon groves, fields of shimmering lettuce, rows of bright strawberries, trees that bore lumpy avocados, but nothing that looked like this. I stood, slowly, up out of the car. The narrow, winding road sloped sharply beneath my feet, and I leaned back against the car, the driver’s side door in front of me, staring, hoping no cars drove by to laugh my tourist gawking. Out on the street, with the haze of the windshield removed, I laughed at myself, at my newcomer’s mistake, at my unfamiliarity, at the way we learn our geography, realizing I was looking straight out over the Pacific Ocean.

When we came to Central Time zone, we were both meandering blindly in a new wilderness; I had brought him here. Neither of us knew how to be Midwestern. We needed to learn what to call this place, to embed words like prairie, like knob-and-kettle, like soybean yields into our heart’s vocabulary. One day, driving back from a state park, from collecting more data, he pointed to the purple-grey clouds of the Sunday twilight, how would you describe that in your writer-ly way, I don’t know what to call that color? Embarrassed, I hedged, it doesn’t work like that, I can’t just pull it out of thin air. But I remembered the black walnut tree he’d recognized in our backyard and how he’d smashed open one of the impossible green shells to show me the staining ink of the nut’s meat and so I gave in. There was a storm coming, I don’t know, I guess…bruised with rain.

He smiled, nodded, a gentle laugh under his breath, I like that, he said, I never would have thought of calling it that.