Acts of Discovery: Waves to Shells and Floods to Flowers
The first time I walked a Pacific Ocean beach was as a girl on a trip to Washington. Feeling electrified, I waded among the tumultuous movements and sounds from the waves. As I viewed the horizon, I thought I was on the edge of a big world I wanted to explore.
Parting the sand with a big toe, I made a discovery. I uncovered delicate sand dollars etched with star-shaped flowers. Such unusual shells did not wash up on the beaches of freshwater lakes in Minnesota.
I carried the best specimen in a pocket of my bag and it made the journey with me over 1,600 miles home. I kept it years before it was lost. Now I carry the memory of it and that uplifting feeling from discovery.
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It’s sunny and 90 degrees on an early September day as I hike close to home in a floodplain forest beside the Mississippi River. I hear the calls of robins, nuthatches and woodpeckers. The trail is soft underfoot since it’s covered in several inches of silt and sediment deposited by the spring floods. The gray silt is silky, finer than sand. It’s the result of erosion when water became a source of friction as it moved over the land.
Additional signs from earlier flooding include piles of driftwood and debris left behind on the plain. These ready-made structures are handy perches for birds and shelters for small mammals like the mink that suddenly bounds across the trail and disappears into the forest. Nearby dry wells encircle the bases of cottonwood, boxelder and silver maple trees and low branches stretch far from the bank, extend over the river and hold an unwieldy assemblage of shorn timbers.
Yet, the greatest transformation for this once saturated landscape is an astonishing yield of plants. Hundreds of thousands of asters, cutleaf coneflowers, wild sunflowers, goldenrod and sneezeweed make up a yellow flood of blossoms rising from the plain and climb to eye-level and higher. Everywhere I look bees, bumblebees, and aphids gather their sweet bounties.
Beautiful as these native wildflowers are within the habitat, their profuseness serves a vital function: becoming a groundlayer that helps minimize further erosion of rich soil from seasonal flooding. Additionally, the seeds provide food for mice as well as birds that need to build up stores of energy for the fall migration.
The slim, coneflower petals fan out like rays similar to the formations on the exoskeletons of sand dollars. Suddenly, I’m the girl-explorer on the beach loving my freedom as I wander in the natural world and linger in a spell of wonder. If I’m lucky to have time to explore the wilderness near home and afar, let it be to experience more acts of discovery.
I’m aware of my good fortune to be swept up by real-world enchantments as magical as fairy tales in childhood once were to me. It’s monumental to observe and connect the dots between cause and effect, season to season. Each day I carry a simple intention: to experience the joy from moments being in nature.
© 2023 Melissa Kalinowski. All rights reserved.