Creek Running North

Gary Nabhan has a blog, it turns out, and though he hasn’t written anything there for a couple months it won’t cost me a huge amount of effort to subscribe to his rss feed so that I won’t miss anything. He’s pretty busy. He writes a lot of books.

There were a lot of events that nudged me in the direction my life has taken, what with the desert and the plants and the writing, but it was one particular event that made me think, for the first time, that I’d like to combine the three. That event: sitting in a drafty, frost-rimed cinder-block house in Arlington, Virginia in 1986, reading Nabhan’s Gathering the Desert. It was half ethnobotany, half lyricism, and I was transfixed.  When I found the new paperback release of his The Desert Smells Like Rain the next year, I bought it, and lost a day’s worth of minimum wage calling in sick to read it.

I had a chance to interview Nabhan about ten years ago for Terrain, on the topic of ironwood conservation. He brought a gift to my office: a signed broadsheet with a passage from the mesquite chapter of Gathering The Desert, an encounter with a pack rat midden. It is packed away here, and when I get the writing shed fitted out it will go on the wall, a premonitory gift given my subsequent affection for packrat middens.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up, aside from mentioning his blog, which I’ve been meaning to do for a few days, is that I was grabbing for something to read at the allergist’s office yesterday during the 20 minutes they make me wait just in case I go into anaphylaxis, and picked up Nabhan’s book Cross-Pollinations: The Marriage of Science and Poetry, and about two or three minutes into reading post-injection I came across this passage describing Nabhan’s academic experience in the 1960s, as he tried to meld the worlds of writing and science:

As I reflect back on the course of my formal education, it is amusing to recall how many teachers admonished me to avoid such interdisciplinary pursuits:

“Stick to one subject,” they said.

“Ground yourself deeply in the skills of one discipline,” they warned, “or else your intellect will be frittered away. You may think you’re a jack of all trades, but you’ll be the master of none.”

“If you squander all your time reading poetry and novels,” One mathematics teacher admonished me, “you’ll never be able to master the rigors of science and math, which are the most precise ways of understanding how the world works.”

I heard it coming from the other direction as well. “Your poetry will become even more unintelligible if you continue to burden your free verse with the weight of scientific terms.”

Melding art and science raises fewer eyebrows these days. Still, this resonated. More to come, possibly to include ruminations on my spell-checker’s suggestion that I replace the burdensome scientific term “anaphylaxis” with the far more literary “anthologizes.”