August 8: Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet
By David Abrams (edited for brevity)
NOT SO LONG AGO, almost every stream, river, and rill emptying into the North Pacific—from southern Japan to northern Siberia, around the huge Alaskan land mass and the Pacific coast of Canada all the way to southern California—supported one or more salmon runs, each perfectly adapted to the dynamic ecology of that watershed. The migratory ways of the salmon were likely born in response to the swelling and subsiding ice ages that dominated their range after these fish evolved to their present form in the cold fresh water of the northern latitudes some two million years ago. As those inland waters were subsumed beneath the immense, spreading ice sheets, the fish were driven out into the ocean and forced to adapt, yet somehow they never lost their ancestral tie to the fresh mountain streams. Whenever the ice sheets retreated, salmon would colonize the rivers and tributaries formed by the glacial runoff, slowly establishing new spawning beds in valleys scoured out and scraped by the ice. They brought with them the rich nutrients of the open ocean, and as bear, eagle, and otter feasted upon their spawning or spawned-out bodies, this abundant ocean nourishment was distributed more widely, enriching the soils and enabling the sparse, pioneer woodlands to fill out into dense forests. These forests, in turn, shaded the inland streams, their detritus providing shelter and food for the aquatic insects and small fish upon whom the salmon themselves fed. The thickening woods offered habitat for innumerable other creatures—for raven and coyote, for owl and deer and raccoon. The association between salmon and woodlands was an ancient reciprocity renewed time and again: as the ice retreated, the fish and the forests recolonized the glacier-scoured terrain together.
Upon leaving their rivers, the salmon spread out, spending the largest part of their lives swimming in colossal circles throughout the North Pacific. Their journeys carry them to the remotest regions of the sea, feeding and growing large on the ocean’s abundance—on herring and smelt and other small fish—traveling distances that boggle the human mind. After several years dispersing to all points on the horizon, following their food whence it leads them, the members of a single run unerringly return to the mouth of their natal stream—all converging there, somehow, at precisely the same time.
The only way contemporary science seems able to fathom their uncanny navigational powers is by likening the abilities of these animals to technologies of our own, human invention. We are told, over and again, that these migratory creatures make use of internal maps and inborn compasses, of innate calendars and internal clocks. Clocks, compasses, and calendars, however, are by definition external contrivances, ingeniously built tools that we deploy at will. Metaphorically attributing such instrumentation to other animals has perplexing implications, suggesting a curious doubleness in the other creature—a separated sentience or self that regularly steps back, within its body or brain, to consult the map or the calendar.
Our reliance upon such instrumental metaphors seems to stem from our civilized assumption of a neat distinction between living organisms and the nonliving terrain that they inhabit, an unambiguous divide between animate life and the ostensibly inanimate planet on which life happens to locate itself. As long as the material ground is considered inert—as long as the elemental atmosphere or ocean is viewed as a passive substrate—then the long-range migrations of other animals can only be a conundrum, a puzzle we’ll strive to solve by continually compounding various internal technologies that might somehow, in combination, grant a particular creature the power to grapple its way across the world.
By focusing our questions so intently on the organism, as if it carries all the secrets of this magic hidden within itself, we easily lose sight of the obvious collaboration that’s at play. By adding new gadgets to an animal’s neurological and genetic endowment, we tacitly induce ourselves to focus upon relationships interior to the organism (how, for example, does the animal bring its biological clock and its internal map to bear on its compass readings), deflecting our curiosity and attention from the more mysterious relationship that calls such interactions into being.
What if we were to allow that the animal’s migratory skill arises from a felt rapport between its body and the breathing Earth? That they are riding waves of sensation, responding attentively to allurements and gestures in the topographical manifold, reverberating subtle expressions that reach them from afar. These beings are dancing not with themselves but with the animate rondure of the Earth, their wider Flesh.
Think again of the salmon, this gift born of the rocky gravels and melting glaciers, nurtured by colossal cedars and by tumbled trunks decked with moss, fungi, and ferns—an aquatic, muscled energy strengthening itself in the forested mountains until it’s ready to be released into the broad ocean. Pouring seaward, it adds itself to that voluminous cauldron of currents spiraling in huge gyres, shaded by algal blooms and charged by faint glissandos of whalesong. . . . Until, grown large with the sea’s abundance, this ocean-infused life flows back up the rivers and tributaries and spreads out into the wooded valleys, gifting the hollows and the needled highlands with new minerals and nutrients, feeding bears and osprey and eagles, ensuring that the glinting gift will be reborn afresh from a lump of luminous eggs stashed beneath a layer of pebbles.
This circulation, this systole and diastole, is one of the surest signs that this Earth is alive—a rhythmic pulse of silvery, glacier-fed brilliance pouring through various arteries into the wide body of the ocean, circulating and growing there, only to return by various veins to the beating heart of the forest, gravid with new life.