By “nature” I mean both first nature (original, prehuman nature) and second nature (the artificial nature that people erect atop first nature). Frazier’s Travels in Siberia abounds with first nature, especially mosquitoes:
With such astronomical numbers, Siberian mosquitoes have learned to diversify. There are the majority, of course, who just bite you anywhere. There are your general practitioner mosquitoes, or GPs. Then you have your specialists – your eyes, ear, nose, and throat mosquitoes. Eye mosquitoes fly directly at the eyeball and crash-land there. The reason for this tactic is a mystery. The ear mosquito goes into the ear canal and then slams itself deafeningly back and forth – part of a larger psyops strategy, maybe. Nose and throat mosquitoes wait for their moment, then surf into those passages as far as they can go on the indrawn breath of air. Even deep inside they keep flying as long as possible and emitting a desperate buzzing, as if radioing for backup.
Also, there are tundra berries, wild mushrooms, seals, salmon, hawks, whales, rivers, trout, pines, birches, swamp-maples, ravens and crows. Of the hooded crow, Frazier writes,
For weeks as we drove, the flocks of ravens and crows remained constant – ubiquitous in western Siberia no less than in St. Petersburg. On the Barabinsk Steppe, collections of all these birds sometimes wheeled in great numbers that vivified the blank sky above the wide-open horizon. Past Novosibirsk, however, it suddenly occurred to me that although I was still seeing black crows and ravens, I hadn’t seen any hooded crows for a while. I began keeping a special watch for hooded crows and did see a few stragglers. But after another hundred miles or so, no more of them appeared. Beyond the city of Krasnoyarsk there were none, though the ravens and other crows continued all the way to the Pacific. As an observer of Siberian fauna I have nothing to add to the tradition of Müller, Pallas, Steller, and others beyond verifying or reverifying the fact that the hooded crow is not to be found in Siberia east of the Yenisei.
Bailey and Sullivan’s descriptions of first nature aren’t as specific as Frazier’s. Their focus is on second nature – the Iron Curtain that the Russians built, artificially dividing East and West Germany (Bailey); the road-related life of the American interstate highway system (Sullivan). When they describe their surroundings, it’s often a mixture of first and second nature. For example, here’s Bailey’s description of the Elbe River:
Just before noon I reached the Elbe River near Lauenburg, crossed it and traveled along its southern bank to the village of Bleckede. The border for some eighty kilometers along here follows the river – though having said that, one has to add that the facts of the matter are a little less precise, this being the last section of the intra-German border that remains in dispute between the Federal Republic and the DDR. The West Germans claim that the border should run along the northeastern bank of the river – where in fact the East Germans have built their fence system – while the East Germans claim, seemingly with greater modesty, that the border should be taken as running down the center line of the river, which here flows from the southeast toward the northwest. The Elbe is broad, the country flat on either side, with extensive water meadows, great areas of marsh, and plump grassy riverbanks to keep floodwaters out of the fields behind. But the deepwater channel of the Elbe does not necessarily run along the middle of the river, and the big barges moving by (mostly West German, East German, Polish and Czech) have to follow a course that winds first near one bank, then the other – and is always changing. Even the shallow-draft East German patrol boats are sometimes forced to come over to where the water is deeper on the West German side to avoid running aground on their own.
And here’s Sullivan’s description of the landscape outside a motel in Cloverdale, Indiana:
I walked through a gravel parking lot where trucks were parked overnight, their engines rumbling, keeping their cabins air-conditioned; walked for a few yards along a drive-through path for a fast-food restaurant (noting all the rat poison dispensers behind the restaurant); crossed a one-way, two-lane street that was carrying traffic off the interstates; crossed another one-way, two-lane street with traffic heading onto the interstate; proceeded up the service road, which took me back toward another fast-food restaurant; headed into the convenience store attached to the gas station, watched people getting in and out of their cars for a minute; then returned following a similar route, avoiding one fast-food restaurant because I couldn’t stomach its smell so early in the morning. At each road crossing, I would pause, waiting for the speeding traffic to pass, to endure the quickly increasing and then decreasing wail of wind and engine sounds. At each road crossing, I would experience the sensation in my knees that marks the presence of fear. The walk was completely car-friendly.
Actually, that’s undiluted second nature. There’s not a shred of first nature in sight. I don’t mind it. In fact, I relish it. In his “Notes,” at the back of the book, Sullivan calls it “the vernacular landscape,” quoting J. B. Jackson. Sullivan is a superb describer of it.
I want to return to Travels in Siberia. Of the three books, it contains the most vivid evocations of first nature. On the Avvakumovo River, Frazier catches a trout. He writes,
I held the fish just above the water on my wet palm. I had never seen such a fish. Its sides were burnished silvery-gold and had big, almost oblong patches of a pale camouflage-olive color, with little black dots along the back. The dots all leaned toward the tail, as if they’d been tilted in that direction by hydrodynamics. The fish’s sides changed color depending on how you looked at them – they appeared platinum-silvery when viewed from above, but greenish-silver when you saw them from below. The forel reminded me of the little optical-square toys that used to come in cereal boxes, those whatnots that showed one picture from one angle and a different picture when turned the other way. With this fish in my hand I felt as if I’d captured an imaginary creature, a living distillation of Siberian forest light. I unhooked it without damage and set it back in the Avvakumovo.
That “living distillation of Siberian forest light” is sublime. The whole passage is sublime – one of my favorites in the book.
Postscript: My next post in this series will be on the use of figuration in these three great books.
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