Walk along a ridge line in Summer, and waves of heat contort your view. Distant trees shimmer in the hot air separating you and them. High overhead, a hawk rides the thermals. Below, a silvery strand winds through the valley, large lazy curves of water that have found the path that is easiest, for now. It is hot out here, exposed. Your feet catch on the uneven ground, and you kick up dust. A rock slides out from under your shoe and bounces down, down. Your feet carry you onwards, and you pay good enough attention to them, but more so to the trees, and the river, and the hawks, and, the longer you walk, to the thoughts in your own head.
In reverie, you soon realize that you are cool for the first time in a while. Focusing again on where you are, you find that you are not on the ridge anymore, but in the shadow of the hill, indeed, in the valley. The stark horizon is gone, as are the waves of heat, replaced with a softness, trees muffling noise all around you. Needles are underfoot now, rather than dust. When did hill become valley?
Categories that are precise in space and time are, very often, a human construction, an imperative to impose not just order but permanence on things which may be neither.
As you descend from that ridge down into a river valley, when does one become the other? The lack of precision in the boundaries between things is sometimes imagined to mean that those things were never real in the first place.
If there is no clear transition, is the ridge real? Is the valley? Yes. Boundaries, even between real things, are often not fixed in space or time. Our insistence on rigid, static borders often blinds us to this fact.
Over time, a lake may become more shallow, turning into marsh, and ultimately into meadow. There are so many “Grass Lakes” out there, testament to that liminal existence, neither water nor land, in which much of our earth rests. The fact that you may not be able to pinpoint the moment at which lake becomes meadow, does not put the lie to either concept.
River courses can change suddenly, with a flood, or an earthquake, but usually they change over millennia or centuries or decades even, but subtly, slowly. An oxbow lake is the leftover turn in a river, a crescent of water that became isolated when the river changed its course. The river continues on, and the lake persists, each body of water growing ever more distinct from one another as time passes. And in time, the river may swing back, merging once again with the lake to become one entity again. Was it ever a lake? Or was it always a part of the river, a part that was simply left behind for a time.
Borders between land and water can be hard to pinpoint, so we come up with new words to describe them, their nature which is neither this, nor that. Riparian zone. Intertidal zone.
At a riparian zone, river meets land, and the plants that thrive have their feet wet all the time, so close to the surface is the water. Floods happen, and river courses change, but even when they do not, it is difficult to pinpoint where the river’s effects end. The river can be felt far upslope, far outside of the “zone” that we have labeled and set aside for such purposes. Bears fish for salmon in the river. They gorge themselves, then amble up slope and find a soft spot in which to sleep off their feasts. Later, they excrete fishy remains that have a marine signature, deep in the interior of the forest. There is nitrogen from the ocean in the trees.
And the intertidal zone, that area that is sometimes but not always underwater at the shore, brings change both predictable, and not. Day in, day out, high tides and low ebb and flow. Storm surges and king tides encroach on land not thought reachable by the sea, and after banks crumble, even the most placid high tide can reach farther inland than it did before. There is no stopping the sea, although we have certainly tried.
All of this change, this refusal of nature to abide by static, impermeable rules, is on a frequent collision course with us humans. We would control nature, rule it, tell it what we want and force it to obey. We set up boundaries of our own and are, sometimes, surprised when those boundaries fail us.
The struggle to set limits, to draw lines in nature that serve our own purposes, is by no means new. In the 6thcentury, Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I declared in the second book of The Institutes, a book that would carry the force of law for centuries, “the following things are by natural law common to all—the air, running water, the sea, and consequently the seashore.” The seashore, The Institutes continues, “extends to the limit of the highest tide in time of storm or winter.” Nowadays in the western United States we use a similar metric, although we have made it more complicated.
The boundary between public and private on California coasts, for instance, is the “ordinary high water mark.” This can be determined, as per a 1935 U.S. Supreme Court decision, by averaging all of the high tides occurring over an 18.6-year period. That’s two tides per day, for 365 (and a quarter) days per year, for more than 18 years—13,587 tides in all. Quite the dataset. That many data points is likely to make the people in charge of collecting all that data, or making rulings based on it, feel like they’ve really got a fix on things. This is often the way with data. It can provide a sense of understanding, and of control. And those senses might be very wrong.
It is not uncommon, if you look, to find metal spikes or bits of pink flagging affixed to our shorelines, evidence of surveyors diligently parceling out the land and imposing fixed borders on a nature that is incapable of respecting such things. Private property is a clear illustration of the tension between our need for order and clarity, and the imprecision of natural boundaries. To know what we own we must measure it, but let us not delude ourselves into believing that our measurements are a fixed reality. Nature is fluid in nearly every expression. The mountain and the valley are real, even though the line between them does not exist. While this is true of mountains and valleys, seashore and land, meadow and lake, there is nowhere that the boundaries are more obscure than between organisms themselves.
The species in our ecosystems have fuzzy boundaries, in time and in space. We cannot point to the first of a new species—the first Pacific wren, the first polar bear, the first human. We may be able to get approximately there, but precision will always be lacking. Even with a time machine, which ancestral Pacific wren-ish chick was it, in a continuum of chicks, that finally met the criteria to be called a Pacific wren? Nor do we usually know the edges of a species’ distribution—how far east do Pacific wrens go? At what point are they so far from their center, that we begin to think about calling them a different species? Species can be real, while their borders, both spatial and temporal, can be impossible to fix.
Go far enough down this path and begin to see the fuzziness even in the concept of the individual.
Richard Dawkins wrote, in 1982, of the extended phenotype, recognizing that many among us, and not just humans, have influence far outside of our corporeal existence. Beavers build dams, wasps build nests, men build temples. All are extensions of the individual. So too are love, and grief, and friendship demonstrations of our individuality reaching out, intertwining with others, refusing them a wholly solitary existence. We speak and we sing, we write and we read. In so doing, we extend ourselves into one another.
Where does the sea stop, and the land begin? Where, therefore, does the public commons stop, and private property begin? Where indeed do I stop, and you begin?
This piece was first published late in 2023 in the 3rd issue of County Highway, a truly excellent publication. I write their Field Notes column. If you do not know County Highway, do yourself a favor and become familiar with it. It is likely to be available in an independent book store, or music store, or feed store, near you (and if not—ask them if they’ll carry it—it is a very good deal for the retailers). Then, when you find how remarkable County Highway is, subscribe, and be ready for a delightful read every two months. County Highway is a newspaper that arrives on actual newsprint, ready for you to read it in front of a roaring fire, with a cup of coffee, or a glass of bourbon, or even both at the same time, if that is your jam.
(You must supply the fire, the coffee, and the bourbon.)
What a beautiful piece. Thanks so much for reposting it! I may have to subscribe to that publication. The idea of boundaries being human constructs of dubious application to non-human spaces is strong and long-lived in me. Even as a child wandering the flatwoods of North Florida I had a sense that any place not claimed by someone else was mine. Encountering old fencelines was a secret joy to me to realize that that particular boundary had been erased. I still feel as if a frontier is a special inviting place. The worst part of a boundary is that you know or can guess what is on the other side of it. With a frontier one's heart can fly into it even if one's feet remain earthbound.
Really beautiful break today from the overcast and grey here, thank you!
On another note, WIAA is considering two amendments (7&8) to better define gender identity participation in middle school/high school sports in Washington state. Can we send out a clarion call for people to send in support for either or both of these?