Meditation on skunk cabbage
There's no wrong time to see a warm, pungent flower
Before going on
Short newsletter this time. There’s a lot going on in the world, both at large and at my work. Before going on, I wanted to share this list of organizations that the Minnesota Freedom Fund recommends supporting in the wake of the police killing of Daunte Wright. Block Club Chicago put together a list of Black-led organizations to support last summer. It could be a good place to start if you’re looking for groups to support there in the wake of the police killing of 13-year-old Adam Toledo (news story without video.) If you’re able, consider finding a protest near you to participate in this weekend. I’m a skeptical person; I tend towards the most limited phrasing of a statement—at the least we can say this, at least this much. It’s what scientists might call a conservative interpretation of the data. The conservative conclusion I feel pushed to, over and over again, is that American policing is beyond reform and has to be abolished, and that systems that actually care for people need to be built in its place.
Plant of the week: Skunk cabbage
I drove to Mass Audubon’s Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary in Marshfield on a gloomy Sunday afternoon after a Saturday that felt like a glimpse of summer. The sanctuary has grasslands, swampy woods, reedy marshes, and a sinuous river. If any landscape evokes the name Marshfield, it has to be this one. Thin mist made the air part of the marsh, too.
It’s a good place to see skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus), a charmingly named plant that’s one of the first to flower. (The name “Possum Notes” has the same ring, I hope.) Rather than waiting for a thaw, it generates its own heat by breaking down stored starches, allowing it to melt through snow and emerge. After the snow disappears, the heat, along with its flower’s stench, may help attract flies to pollinate the plant—a warm, stinky candle in an otherwise wintery forest.
Early April is a few weeks past the most dramatic time to see skunk cabbage, though: that moment in February or March when a slowly opening flower cuts its way through the ice. I sometimes feel like I’m always just missing the “peak” time to see a flower or a bird, arriving too early or on the tail end of its season. When talking to naturalists, there’s much emphasis on brief windows of opportunity, the importance of getting out for a moment that, once missed, never comes back.
Still, I resolved to take a good look and see what stage skunk cabbage had reached. In the fields, the tree swallows and purple martins that arc through the air in summer here weren’t present in numbers. Most trees other than red maple weren’t showing more than a hint of buds or blooms. The forest floor, where song sparrows rustled through leaf litter like mice, was dark gray and brown: except for skunk cabbage.
The photo I took almost looked as if I’d desaturated the background and saturated the plant to make the leaves pop out—but I didn’t. I had missed the days when skunk cabbage unfurled, but now its mostly-opened leaves stood out like green banners against the gray, dormant woods. It may not be the kind of shot that appears on a magazine cover to illustrate spring, but it did capture something about the in-between period we’re in right now. It’s the season in which snow can and does fall on cherry blossoms.
My timing may rarely be just right, and I might never fully accept that—always itching for just the right encounter with time and place. But inevitably, I end up making do with what experiences I’m able to have around work and personal commitments. Ultimately, what I find most incredible about wildlife isn’t just rare moments of cinematic glamour but the fact that wild species survive the long haul in rough, unglamorous ways: that a chickadee, weighing as much as a triple A battery, finds a path through a Massachusetts winter; that an odd, pungent flower makes its own warmth at the end of winter using energy stored for months in preparation for this moment. In that view, there’s no wrong time to see something, just different parts of a life cycle to admire.
If anything, the lesson from skunk cabbage is that it makes its own time, frosts be damned.
My time anxiety may stem in part from my experiences doing wildlife surveys, in which it was truly important to plan my arrival around the morning bird chorus or to squeeze in floral surveys when the broadest swath of plants were in bloom and identifiable. I needed specific types of data linked to specific windows of time. But now that I’m unbound from those particular goals, I find myself interested in gaining a more holistic view of ecosystems through time and space—similar to what the naturalist Nan Shepherd referred to as “the total mountain.” That view reveals itself through returns to a place rather than single revelatory trips.
I’ve now seen this sanctuary through two complete years and I still don’t feel like I can predict what will happen to me the next time I go there. Still, the idea of the place becomes stronger and more detailed in my mind with each new visit, as one’s understanding of a friend grows over the years.
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Possum Notes is a weekly newsletter about wildlife and landscapes around where I live. It’s produced on occupied Massachusett and Wampanoag land.