ROBIN CUSHMAN
The Logic of Wildflowers
Some time ago I was living in Madrid for a year, and about the middle of February I felt an uneasiness, a kind of malaise I couldn’t identify. My work went well, my family was with me, life was a daily adventure—what was wrong? I took a walk on a sunny, cool afternoon in a large park, the Retiro, and found daffodils blooming against a wall where the day heat had seduced these bulbs to be the first bloomers of spring. I looked at more plants and found buds, and suddenly I felt the unease melt away. I realized that on the city streets I had not been able to locate myself in the seasons. I knew it was somewhere in spring, but I was missing all the clues I was used to in Salem—heather, crocus, daffodil, star magnolia, Photinia—each in turn telling me where my days were located in the year. I returned to the park nearly every day for an hour or so to keep my sense of when I was, so I could work on where I was in that foreign land.
Back in Oregon and remembering my Spanish adventure, I began to think about how the wildflowers must have done the same job of locating in time for Native Americans and the early European settlers and how they still locate me now.
Early in my Oregon years, 1973, I traveled over the Cascades out of Eugene in the spring, end of May and early June, and remember seeing for the first time a patch of Central Oregon Clarkia that looked like it had been sewn in one toss of a giant hand, down a small depression and up the other side—one swipe of hot pink in the gray-green high desert. Then came a succession of other wildflowers: buckwheat, mullein, stonecrop, Arnica, cinquefoil, and later (and higher) scarlet Gilia, Penstemon, lupine, columbine, trefoil pea, yarrow, balsamroot, aster, saxifrage, hellebore. And the more names I learned the more I could not only tell when I was but how high, how dry, how north, south, east, west I was. In Madrid, I realized I needed to know all these things flowers tell before I got . . .
what? Comfortable? Acclimated? Located? At home?
Years later, I now live with house plants that I push and shove into bloom—African violets, Cyclamen, a persnickety Phalaenopsis orchid—out of season, out of rotation. They begrudgingly bloom for me (except the African violets, which seem to like being pushed around). I wrench their clocks and calendars around with heat and food like a cranky god amusing himself. But I know outside my door are the wild rhododendrons, bear grass, Penstemon of the high Cascades, the Lewisia and Clarkia—all my Oregon and western guides. They are my parents in the cosmic sense; they explain my location and teach me where I am: they father my moods and mother my yearnings after a place in the world.
Perfectly comfortable within the world’s absurdity, I could find myself homeless without its natural logic. I grew up absurd. To save ourselves in a nuclear attack we were taught in grade school to duck under our desks. Later a dropout from the London School of Economics in a band called the Rolling Stones sang in an American country-and-western twang: “I cain’t get no, satisfaction . . . ” (Did Mick Jagger ever use cain’t in his real life?) We got tomatoes and strawberries in the middle of winter; no fruit or vegetable had its own season, just a price tag. Malls created artificial daylight and artificial nightlife. Some of the drugs in the 1960s proffered variable realities as weird as Mick’s cain’t. The logic of the world was negotiable every day, every hour. My generation’s experiments with drugs had the unsettling effect of suggesting that there were always other realities available. The result was a displacement not entirely unlike the “lost” of the lost generation named by Gertrude Stein in the 1920s. Wildflowers present a location in all this lost, a spiritual GPS to find a steady state among competing forms of real. Wildflowers locate our sensibilities on a grid of necessity and beauty—the protein connection of seed, the allure of color and surprise.
Wildflowers give us their species-memory, their evolutionary clocks: each one calculates the bloom for the year—earlier, later, wetter, dryer—that gives it the best shot at reproducing. The logic of that need is incontrovertible and compelling. And that logic, the pattern of rhythms and interdependencies incumbent on it, is what I think I was missing in Madrid. Part of the logic: in Oregon’s high desert, all the seed protein is available in a very short time span; it moves from flowers to rodents and birds, then up to predators in the quick, passionate logic of hunger.
• • •
The Strawberry Mountains drain south through Eastern Oregon’s Logan Valley at about 5,000 feet, runnel and creek forming the branches of the Malheur river system that flows toward the great Malheur bird refuge. The valley itself is informed by high and low, south slope and north slope, and various microclimes, but the division of wet and dry is most spectacular. At the edges of the valley, one step up puts you in sagebrush dry. One step down and the grassland stretches for miles where cattle, antelope, elk, and deer graze together. The surrounding Strawberries run up to over 9,000 feet, so that walking a switchback trail from valley floor to the talus slopes near the top will take you through the logic of wildflowers. Those flowers that have finished blooming below are just beginning up higher. Lupine has the most obvious logic.
The lupine has become leggy in the lower valley under the trees while stretching for sun. Higher on the trail it has changed color to add more pink at the base of its blue flower and becomes shorter and shorter along with most other plants as it ascends the mountain. Exactly what its logic is—which insects it attracts, stem thickness and length, even adaptations at the cellular level of stomata and chloroplasts—is the stuff of botany. But another logic is apparent, too. The blossom catches the eye, attracts the insect, makes the seed the ground squirrel eats, and then replants the flower. Then a new logic of place kicks in to accommodate the new conditions.
The scarlet Gilia prefers the lower valley and refuses more altitude. The trefoil pea likes the roadside. The mullein wants disturbed ground. I remember learning about the mullein’s preference for disturbed ground and thought immediately of soldiers of fortune moving from one disturbance to another, Kosovo to Sierra Leone to Sudan to Iraq. That’s the other logic of wildflowers: where, like music, they send our imaginations.
I was recently at a concert in Portland’s Rose Garden in which the audience—right at the beginning of the show, in unison—whipped out camera phones and cameras to photograph the giant-screen JumboTron to capture the featured act. Zeroes and ones grabbing at other zeroes and ones while the actual people on stage went unrecorded. Zoo animals on ersatz ice floes and on faux African savannahs. Video games of car heists and wars. Our realities are manifold and legion, our choices are to stay here or go there. The new human brain, craving this muchness of the world, is just waiting to evolve.
And there are the wildflowers of Oregon, with bloom cycles fluctuating less than the peregrinating date of Easter. Sometimes we must choose to locate ourselves with what is alive in the landscape rather that what is dead or false or concocted. Sometimes we need to find the ancient rhythms and cycles that invented us and still inform our being. Sometimes we will reach out to the wildflowers in the preserved wild places of Oregon to remember where we are and who we are.
Michael Strelow, Ph.D. ’79, is a professor of English at Willamette University. He edited Northwest Review from 1973 to 1979. His novel, The Greening of Ben Brown, was a finalist for the Ken Kesey Award in fiction from Oregon Literary Arts in 2005. This essay was written for Citadel of the Spirit: A Literary Compendium Commemorating Oregon’s Sesquicentennial, edited by Matt Love and published on February 14, 2009, the 150th anniversary of Oregon’s statehood.
