Nancy's work at the DNR

"Here's your boat," my father announced early in my 14th summer. I couldn't recall having mentioned any boat, but when Dad decided something was the truth, there was no effective counter. So there it was: 18 feet of heavy rowboat with peeling paint. By decree, its rehabilitation became my summer's task, or, as it developed, my privilege. After hours of scraping and sanding, its warm cedar-strip sides glowed smooth to the touch.

The boat offered interesting possibilities. With it my father had provided a lure to independence I had not thought to seek. A driver's license? Whatever for? To take the boat to Island Lake. An hour of leisure? Whatever for? To explore sinuous shorelines of a whole island, unvisited by boaters who needed amenities, feared mosquitoes, and didn't know the path around the poison ivy on the shore.

Chains of rocks led from the main island to a rocky point. All along these chains the minnows played. Bulrush and horsetail warned away the occasional vagrant motorboat. Yellow bladderwort blossoms punctuated beds of pondweed. Great blue herons fished for frogs. Mine was an uninquisitive appreciation; I was more apt to loll in the boat and watch giant blue Libellulid dragonflies diving for mosquitoes than to consider their numbers or names.

Yet it was probably those explorations, made from that hundred-dollar boat, that launched my career as a biologist. Bur oak, basswood, maple, and elm graced the knolls at the island's heart. Hepaticas and bloodroot opened the seasonal procession, and sweet cicely and lopseed closed it with stickers that clung to my corduroy pants. Without the guidance of a developed trail, my feet followed the easiest paths, those made by deer, or by a long-fallen log that left a path through the hazel.

Ostrich-fern, lady-fern and interrupted fern formed a fragrant glade in the low swale at the island's northeastern shore. They were joined by a profusion of sedges. Oblivious to the distinction between sedges (have edges) and grasses (are round), I noticed the shapes of their heads--slender arching spangles, miniature balloon pods. Plants whose taxonomic distinctions would become my nemesis in later years were then a mere matter of aesthetics.

Years later I remembered that glade when searching for the cryptic goblin fern. And I remembered the day the water witcher came with his forked stick to help us find a place for a well. He handed me the stick, urging me to feel the tug. I felt nothing, but I noted his sense of ease as he wandered, exercising what my mother called a sixth sense, an intuitive knowledge of a place visited by underground water.

Now I search for rare plants. Haunted by a memory of the island, I return as a botanist to nearby forests looking for the cryptic goblin fern. I remember the shade of the maples, how their fallen leaves formed a spongy blanket on the forest floor. I recall the fungi protruding through the duff: dead man's fingers, jelly babies, coral fungus, and earth tongue. I envision the perfect place to find an inch-high, lime green plant, which more closely resembles a club fungus than a fern. And I find it. Just inland from my island, it is half buried in the winter-whitened maple leaves, keeping company with coral fungus in a little swale nearly bare of the forest's prevailing bellwort and lopseed.

Goblin fern isn't the only plant I've found from childhood memory. Ours were the days when a teenage girl could range the country on a bicycle. One of my favorite rides took me past oak and aspen woodlots, cattle lolling in the heat, and ducks at the open edges of cattail ponds to the leech-infested shores of Poplar Lake. I returned to that route 40 years later, seeking Cooper's milk-vetch, one of those plants thought to be extremely rare because they live neither in the forest nor on the prairie. Some vestigial memory drove me to a bank where the winding road overlooks Poplar Lake. Yes, it was there. Was it the plant itself I recalled from my teenage forays, or the ambiance of the place, the way the bank crumbles off in a tangle of sumac and open rocky clay? Was it science that brought me to this place, a professional knowledge of the conditions in which this species often occurs? Or was it intuition?

Since I've started working with Cooper's milk-vetch, I've met many cabin owners, hunters, and farmers who have their own names for the plant with the big black pods. "Yes, I've seen that," they tell me. "I never thought it was anything special. I saw it on a bank by the edge of the pasture." Or best: "When I was a boy, we used those pods as rattles. But when I was grown I hated them. They rattle when you hunt and scare the deer." They are not botanists, yet they know this plant in a vernacular sense. It is an element of the landscape of home. Familiarity.

Now I understand the water witcher's tug on his stick. I like to think there is an element of intuition in searching for rare plants. I like to think that it matters that a landscape on earth is engraved on the landscape of our memories.

We move around in our native landscape often only subliminally conscious of the things we see. Or hear. Or feel. A certain bird call in the wetlands. A certain sponginess of the ground underfoot. We carry in our memories of the landscape a bank of information, both factual and spiritual, we do not know we know.

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