Unseen Stories Bind Us Together The Wood Cow Chronicles begin by introducing Helga’s story. Looking back over the course of her astonishing adventures, Helga makes the following observation: Helga paused, looking off into the distance as if again seeing something there. “My story is not my own,” she said. “In my mind I see so many friends who are not here and able to tell the part they had in my adventures. My story is actually many stories. As I tell it, it may sound like one story, but it is really many stories that cross each other. Creatures that I will never know have had a hand in my story and I in theirs. So, you see, you will have to forgive me as I tell my story. . .I don’t know it all myself. Her friend smiled. She bent down and picked up a tuft of grass and some dirt. Giving some to Helga, she put some in her own pocket also. The rest she tossed up in the wind. “That’s the way our stories are, Helga—many people have a piece of it, and the story carries on in directions we never know.” Helga’s comment expresses one of the basic themes that underlies my writing. In the Wood Cow Chronicles, there are many instances in which seemingly unrelated stories become connected or overlap in unseen ways. In some cases, these unseen connections prove to be profoundly important to the story. An experience from my childhood created a sense of wonder about the astonishing connections that bind reality together. This sense of wonderment continues to inspire the stories I tell. During my childhood explorations, I investigated the grass of one of our pastures. I began by looking among the seed crowns and then gradually worked my way down through the lower stems and leaves. When I got to ground level, I kept going, pulling and digging to get to the roots. But what I discovered was that this was an essentially fruitless endeavor! Some of the roots trailed off so far away from the surface part of the plant that it was virtually impossible to find the end of the root. I’ve since learned that the roots of prairie grasses can extend at least 25 feet from the main root, and that grass plants can have billions upon billions of microscopic root hairs in a cubic inch of soil, reaching something like 6000 miles if laid end to end! No wonder I could never seem to pull up all the root! Most of us never imagine the intricate network that underlies mature prairie grass. Where does one plant end? At the visual-macroscopic level, it is impossible to tell. The webbing of infinitely tiny roots in mature prairie grasses is impossible to resolve and differentiate. At the microscopic level, we have even more difficulty. The flux of gasses and chemical interactions in the vicinity of roots is essentially impossible to completely define, so frenzied are the interactions at the microscopic level. Where is the ‘edge’ of the plant? Where does it ‘begin’ and ‘end?’ While we may have an ‘obvious’ common sense response to these questions, careful thought and analysis reveal that the plant has no clear edge, except insofar as we arbitrarily define a boundary. But, ultimately, any boundary we define necessarily ignores some aspects of the interrelationship of the plant with its neighbors and the environment. This suggests the theme that lies behind Helga’s comment.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Jun 2013 03:33:27 +0000
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