Everyday we walk outside and we are knocked-out, bedazzled. And all this beauty is so wonderfully democratic. You don't have to be rich or famous or lucky. (You don't even have to be a good writer.) It's just there. For all of us. Not one of us is left outside the beauty. Not one of us is left outside the celebration.

(Photo by Elroy Limmer)

Today, as I walk a country road, I’m thinking off and on about two friends who are premier citizen scientists here in southern New Mexico. One is an emergency room physician who builds and operates telescopes accurate enough to send useful information to NASA. The other retired from being a doctor after he performed my first colonoscopy (one did not lead to the other) and is now the expert on the bryophytes (mosses, liverworts, and hornworts) of the Gila National Forest. I’ve been talking with both men and am struck that neither felt transformed by their work as citizen scientists. Instead they pursued longtime interests and built on previous strengths.

My goal, pursuing the Western red-bellied tiger beetle, was more grandiose. At every point in life, and not just the tail end of middle age, there is a long list of what we will not ever be, not a rock star musician, not a lawyer for the United Nations, not a chef for a French restaurant. But in my study of this obscure insect, I didn’t want to be something else so much as someone else. I wanted a window into the Other. I wanted transformation, and I am suddenly wondering: is this a personal theme?

Moreover, is it wrong-headed?  The desire to transform implies that whoever you are to begin with is not good enough. Although that may be true--I can’t help but think--self-doubt doesn’t seem a strong starting point for change. Most citizen scientists, I suspect, are more like my two friends, building on existing strengths rather than creating new ones. At the same time, some citizen scientists do uncover hidden strengths, neglected strengths, and that’s surely a good feeling. They find themselves surprisingly adept at folding amino acids or cataloging galaxies, usefully studying urban squirrels or phytoplankton or monarch butterflies, and their knack for this work can be traced back to childhood. They are just becoming more of who they are.

Where an arroyo meets the dirt road, I stop and look for tracks. A few feet up the streambed are a set of bobcat prints. There’s no mistaking that roundness, the leading toe, and size of the front and back feet. I also see a fox print, or maybe a small coyote. Foxes are on my mind since I saw one earlier in the day, an animal who ran so quickly into the brush I spent a few minutes doubting what I had seen. Foxes are rarer since an outbreak of rabies two years ago. Was that a fox or a wish?

That’s one good thing about tracks. They stay there. You can admire them for long minutes, imagining the animal who passed by, feeling the tangible presence of a bobcat, a wild cat, short-tailed, ear-tufted, delicately spotted, charismatic.

It’s another gift, the world showering us with gifts, the tail of a fox, tracks in the sand, and there

--in the dry streambed, a massive dark rock with white radiating lines, a geometric pattern of dark and light, veins of quartz, cool to the touch. Is this boulder for me?

I feel the need to fall in love with the world, to forge that relationship ever more strongly. But maybe I don’t have to work so hard. Maybe the world is already in love, giving me these gifts all the time, calling out all the time. I have thought nature indifferent to one more human, to any human, but maybe the reverse is true. The world calls out: take this. Take this. And this. And this. Don’t turn away.

And here’s the end of my walk, and once again, no different today, I didn’t discover any hidden or neglected talent. I didn’t transform into someone I am not. But I am building on existing strengths. I’ve always been good at skittering and darting on the surface of things, adding a few animal tracks to the few birds I know and the few butterflies and the few plants. And I’ve always been good at walking on a country road and seeing for a nanosecond something shivery and grand. Requited love. I am the bride of the world, and I am the groom.

Walking along the Gila River, looking down at the ground for larval burrow holes (not likely in the winter, but perhaps, following a rain, in this warmer weather), I find pot sherds, bits of plain brown clay from a group archeologists call the Mogollon culture who lived here from 400 to 1100 A.D. (the start of the Dark Ages in Europe to the first Crusades). Once I see sherds, I want walls, a line of rock barely above the surface of the ground, or the depression of a pithouse fallen in and silted over. At first, people built round enclosures dug three feet down with walls of mud and poles, and a roof covered with grass mats and branches. Women (most likely) made plain and polished red ware, waterproof clay pots superior to woven baskets or gourds. Here was a container that protected food from pests and could be put directly on the fire, reconstituting dry food, boiling together meat and roots and greens and herbs. Eventually these potters started painting their clay vessels with red on brown and then red on white designs. Later pithouses became stone-lined and rectangular. Villages of multiple pithouses also had kivas or ceremonial chambers. Many more smaller settlements grew up, like the one I am exploring now, scattered throughout the area. 

As the labor of women increased—more pots to make, more crops to grow, more food, more people--cradleboards designed to carry a baby on a woman’s back changed to cradleboards that could be set on a surface or hung from a beam. In rock and ceramic art, gendered human forms appeared, with women and men at specific tasks. In architecture, rectangular structures allowed for space that could be set aside for jobs that required extended time or specialized equipment. Pithouses may have been preferred for their warmth and used mainly in winter by groups still mobile and semi-nomadic. But by 1000 A.D. the Mogollon culture had made a shift to multi-room, one-story, stone-masonry structures built above the surface, associated with large rectangular stone-masonry “great kivas.” 

Also from this period, 1000-1150 A.D., the interior of clay pots served as canvases for artists (likely women) inspired by a new cultural renaissance. Narrative and fantastical images, along with geometric patterns, were painted in black on white: a creature half-bighorn, half snake; a wolf slyly wearing a deer mask; a woman giving birth; a man with a penis that had a little face--a little face sticking out its tongue! Today these pots can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. They are money in the bank. As good as gold. For this reason, without doubt, this small site has already been illegally pot-hunted, mostly by shovel but probably with larger equipment since the area is so accessible to a dirt road. Pot-hunters look for marketable artifacts, particularly the pots and funereal goods often buried under the floors of homes, buried with the dead, whom many Native American groups see as journeying until the last bit of bone and pot crumbles. To disturb these graves is to disturb these journeys. To disturb archaeological sites on public land is also illegal, punishable now by fines and imprisonment.

Still some people can hardly resist. A single pot could pay for a car. An arrowhead would look nice on a mantle—although it is more often forgotten in a junk drawer. Archeologists do what they can, with limited resources. I happen to know they have installed motion sensor devices at some of the sites in the Gila River Bird Refuge, which I might well be walking through now, my movements triggering a text message sent to a satellite phone monitored by an archaeologist who will stop by later to see if I have caused any damage. It is not illegal or wrong, of course, for me to be on this river bench on public land as long as I am careful not to dig up the ground with a shovel and careful, as well, to put any artifact I find back in the place I found it.

I pick up sherds, hold them, rub their edges, feel their smooth texture. I admire a bit of burnished red sensuously curved, the lip of a pot. I like quite as much the inch-long square of a corrugated cooking vessel. The thrill never gets old for me, this human making of pots, this life by the river. My own life in the early twenty-first century suddenly seems dreamlike, an amazing, amusing, fantastical dream. I have sometimes stopped in a store, in a restaurant, at a traffic light, confounded by an atavistic awe--both appalled and appreciative. Wow, I think. Who did that? What happened to the trees? I have felt, as I do now, alien to the modern world. A time-traveler not born here, but born there, not at home here, but belonging there.

I never feel this in museums. My connection to this sherd is directly linked to being outside, the sun on my neck, the smell of dust, my heart beating its pulse of blood and like her, like this potter, just another animal in the landscape. Maybe I have children. Certainly I have worries. Certainly there is danger, from injury and accident, from lions and bears and snakes and other humans. I might get an abscess in my tooth. I might have a difficult mother-in-law. I’m working hard to survive, but that’s okay—it’s good work. It feels normal.

We’re so flexible, we humans, with our plastic minds. Almost anything can begin to feel normal from living in a spaceship to looking for larval burrow holes, those tiny almost-perfect circles in the ground. I put the sherds back exactly where I found them and mentally text any archaeologist in range: 2BZ4UQT.

Cranes have always attracted stories. In the Southwest, the Zunis have a Crane clan to which the Creator gave the medicine seed of hail and snow, since cranes come during the first winter storms. The Navajos use a crane effigy to cure illness, and the Hopis place a crane-winged staff at the entrance to the chamber which represents their emergence from the earth. Like the Greek god Hermes, with his staff of snakes topped by crane wings, the crane is linked both to health and the underworld.

In Silver City, the Religious Society of Gila Friends make paper cranes to celebrate Hiroshima Day, a commemoration of the United States’ first use of the nuclear bomb. The Japanese have long revered the crane as a symbol of immortality, and this modern crane story is about a sick little girl named Sakado who wanted to make a thousand origami cranes but died first of radiation poisoning.

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I have no particular story about cranes, although seeing and hearing them makes me happy. That is true for many wild animals. I grew up in apartment buildings with Siamese cats and a highly-chlorinated swimming pool. Cranes are outside my normal experience, outside my personal joys and sorrows, memories, anxieties and confusion. In my world, cranes are not about immortality or disease or death. When I watch them, I am not participating more in being human, I am participating less. Perhaps this is the cause of my happiness.

I am waiting to see a crane dance. First, the bird lowers his head while lifting and spreading his wings. The head rises, the wings stroke down, and the crane jumps up. Sometimes the crane throws a stick into the air. Now another crane may start jumping, too, facing the first crane, or standing side by side. According to ornithologists, this behavior can spread through an entire group of cranes until everyone is dancing, jumping up and down, wings and heads rising and falling. The point of all this is unclear. Synchronous dancing is common among birds forming or having just formed pair bonds. But my husband Peter and our biologist friends Mike and Carol have seen cranes dance here in the Gila Valley during winter--when these cranes are finished with nesting and breeding. Dancing, then, is not just about mating. In a group, dancing can also lead to fighting or flying and seems related to excitement, stimulation, and a release of energy.

A crane dancing alone would seem so intent, like a woman doing yoga or a man performing a ritual to his god. A group of cranes dancing would be a wonderful sight, all that graceful and ungainly movement. A group of cranes dancing would make me feel special, as though handed a gift I didn’t deserve but had always coveted. It’s a good reason to keep my binoculars handy.

A windy day at Bill Evans Lake, New Mexico.

A Day on the Gila River

The path from the dirt road to the river dodges at last through shaded willow, that birth canal entrance into water and sun, the explosion of light. I’m humming along the bank with my long net and collecting boxes, looking for tiger beetles and thinking about my life. About my failures. How I didn’t do this, didn’t do that. I surprise three ducks, gloriously green-headed mallards, and they fly away in a triangle quacking and I feel that giggle like the small child always amused by peek-a-boo, never getting tired of the joke: ducks actually quack, QUAACK, QUAACK, complaining and petulant. The delight of onomatopoeia. The delight of remembering that word. A toad hops from beneath my foot, a little bit of mud suddenly moving. Water rushes over rock. The fruity smell of decay. A butterfly sails past like a hot air balloon. An American Painted Lady.

Every few feet, I spot another Western Red-bellied Tiger Beetle, that pattern of seven blotches with a musical note. Then one of the beetles has a different pattern, four creamy dots, and I’m not only looking at an Ocellated Tiger Beetle, I know I’m looking at an Ocellated Tiger Beetle. David Pearson calls this species the house finch of tiger beetles because it is so common in the Southwest, abundant around water edges, more solitary in the uplands. Sometimes these beetles climb shrubs and plants to roost at night or escape the hot surface soil in mid-day. I watch this particular beetle until it is approached by another beetle, another Ocellated, and when they both fly up, I can see the red-brown ends of their abdomen. The rest of the abdomen is metallic dark-green. 

Pattern recognition. Four creamy dots. Something in the world and something in my brain snap into place like the two ends of a Tinker Toy. Tiger beetle and butterfly enthusiasts share this satisfaction--matching up beauty with order. Chevrons, bands, circles, dots. We can identify some species fairly quickly. The mind has a picture. The picture matches. The square peg goes into the square hole. The round into round. Birders also know that pleasure, a flash of color and form, and they have an answer: scrub jay or vermillion flycatcher. This kind of competence feels completely right. It’s as if we belonged here, as if nature were our real home.

I confess to that Paleolithic nostalgia. We are hard-wired for walking through the woods, along the river, and feeling at home, matching patterns, knowing what we see and what to do next. Willow and bear. Mountain lion and squirrel. They make sense. They may even feel like family—hello, good afternoon, hi-- relatives that are friendly, and relatives that are dangerous, people we have known all our lives. We’ve replaced these competencies with new ones. Books and computers. How to use the remote for a ceiling fan. Perfectly reasonable, I tell myself, as I look for tiger beetles along the river bank. I think of my achievements. The machines I know how to use. The machines I don’t know how to use. The machines I know how to use but don’t know how to fix. It seems to me suddenly that we’ve replaced these competencies with a thousand incompetencies, that I live in a world I understand less every day. 

Something darts by my feet. Another tiger beetle. And I’m focused again. Another Ocellated. 

I eat my peanut butter sandwich on a slab of rock beside the Gila River, birds singly madly in the cottonwood trees, river water rippling, insects humming. Twenty years ago, Peter and I brought our children to this spot when our eight-year-old daughter had a science fair project collecting and pressing plants. Of course, I knew how to love my children. I understood that fierce all-embracing love, and even today I understand that this love means your children will leave you. Toss you aside. Perfectly natural. I remember David and Maria now with a longing that can come on me at any time, an emotion I’ve learned to simply watch, those beautiful children, so happy to be with us, playing in the river. How short a time, how halcyon, that part of my life.

Throughout the day, a long complex afternoon, I can think about my life because I do not have to think about my dinner. I won’t go hungry tonight if I don’t find a deer or catch a fish or dig up some roots. Hunting and gathering, the Paleoterrific, has its pros and cons. I’ll never know what they are since imagining that life is only a dream of received ideas, stories we make up from scanty evidence, dreams built on dreams--a sense of loss, a vague excitement. 

The best part of this day is when I focus on tiger beetles and the insect drama at my feet. But a good part of the day is when I look at my life from a certain distance and feel pleasantly relaxed about all that. A good part of the day is when I think about what it means to be human, 40,000 years ago and right now in the twenty-first century, when I let myself range across time and space, one of the stranger competencies of the human mind.

Collecting the Western Red-bellied Tiger Beetles on the Gila River! This species is the subject of my citizen science project...