There
are not names for many things, perhaps most. I make up names for how things
look, when they change, how they fade, what their connections are to each
other. The names just come to me, mostly, though sometimes I give them thought
and planning. I sometimes consult books too, but mostly to find out what names
have already been used. I have forgotten when I chose to name light that shines
through spiderwebs at night “silklumen.” I think it was two summers ago, when a
big garden spider who had made her web stretch across the eastern corner of my
deck captured an errant flying cicada. I don’t know why the name wasn’t
fiercer, more violent. The event was certainly intense, and the mostly
artificial light I saw it under made it seem sharper and more calculated. Still,
now when I see light through spiderwebs under any conditions the light carries
that name for me.
I
named the suspected but unconfirmed sound of tiny mousefeet in my kitchen on a
winter night “skitterpaws.” I really did not want there to be mice in my
kitchen. There were, though. I tried to make them leave without killing them.
Eventually they did. In the meantime, this name did not make me less anxious
about their presence. In retrospect, I wish I’d chosen something more abstract,
less creaturely.
Last
night I tried to name the recurrent experience of nearly crashing into a
whitetail deer (sometimes a whole bunch of them, together) while I am out for a
run. Nothing seemed to fit. This happens fairly often. I lose myself in my
music or in the way the sky or trees look and suddenly this tawny flank and
flashing banner of white haunch and tail blazes across Old Cove Road in front of me. No matter how
frequently this occurs, the sight of the deer always makes my heart beat faster
with exhilaration and joy. It always feels like a blessing, like a nod from the
holy ancestral body of the forest. I know the deer population is out of control but I still feel called into conspiratorial beauty when I see them.
Mysterious
ripples in ponds, probably caused by jumping frogs or fish, are called
leapshadows.
The noisy,
raucous phenomenon of a redtail hawk being harassed by crows (usually three,
though not always) is called cawclobber. Really.
The
area next to shore where cypress knees push out from under water into air is
called the kneeshallows.
The
phenomenon of dragonflies flying away when I first approach them but then
coming closer and lighting either near me or actually on my body (usually my
feet but once or twice my knee or ankle) is called snakedoctorsettle.
The
mist rising off the headwaters of a busy mountain creek or river is called
streamsoul.
I am
still trying to decide what to name the way a bald eagle looks flying away from
the side of the road as I drive past in my truck. I don’t think there are any
words wild and strange enough for it in the language I know.
The
mysterious grottoes in the forest below my house are called foxhollows. It
sounds a bit too genteel, but I can’t seem to think of them as anything else.
They are deep and green, and they sometimes have running water down in them,
just past seeing. They seem bottomless and tricky. Really they are small caves,
and they do open shyly into the body of the mountainous earth. Roots curl
around and above them but they are not defined by trees. I have the feeling
that if I look at them right they will show me something important, something
mysterious and ineffable. That feeling comes other times too but not often. It
has come when I’ve seen the eerie flicker of foxfire in a swamp and when black
bear raises her snout and snuffs the air that we are both sharing and smelling.
When coyote yips like a petulant child in the hills. It came one night at a
place where two rivers flow together; I was awakened from sleep by the loud
sharp slap of sound on water. Beavers, I was told the next day. The energy of
it had a quality of singular deliberate familiarity. Palpable in the moonlight
of three a.m. The feeling is one that really disavows language as
we know it altogether. It stands aside from that and is more about the way things
smell, the way they might taste if we could know them that way. The colors they
are about to show us but fall just shy of letting us see.
©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved
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