Eyes Moving Through the Dark

Contents

A Is for Ark Population

, the Letter Ash

B Is for Boxes

C Is for Cumberland Plateau

D Is for Dominion

, the Letter Edh

E Is for Eve and the Serpent

Fowl Skerries and Funk Island

G Is for Green Children

H Is for Healing Dolls

I’ll Fly Away

J Is for Jewelweed

K Is for Kanawha Valley

L Is for Long Chain

Making a Home

N Is for Nasiriyah

O Is for Origin

, the Grapheme Ethel

P Is for Paradise Garden

Q Is for Quadruped

R Is for Revival Field

Subterranean

, the Long s

T Is for Tributary

Þ, the Letter Thorn

U Is for Ur-Ox

V Is for Viewfinder

W Is for Wet Concrete

, the Letter Wynn

X’d in Pink Thread

Y Is for Yucca

ȝ, the Letter Yogh

Z Is for Zinc Violet

&

Sources

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About Orison Books

A Is for Ark Population

I am at the saltwater aquarium in Chattanooga with my older son, holding his hand as we descend the walkways that zigzag down the Secret Reef. He’s two-and-a-half, might have a language delay, a communication disorder. My wife and I are worried about him. He’s not saying much. Every so often, a word. Or he makes a sound. Today, he reaches his hand toward rippling water, green sea turtle, thousands of bright fish. So much to take in. I can call what I see in him awe. Inside the plastic observation bubble of the Undersea Cavern, we sprawl on our backs, look up at the reef, the bellies of sandbar sharks. Next, we will go searching for the tanks of endangered topminnows and laurel dace, relocated here after severe drought dried up their shoestring creeks on the Barrens Plateau and Cumberland Plateau.

Fish, my son says.

Fish swim, I say, give him an encouraging look, hope he will say more, will go on.

He looks at me, turns his head, peers at something I can’t see.

Reef. Formerly riff. A riff or ridge of rocks, Dampier’s Voyages (1681). Icelandic. rif, a reef in the sea; cf. rifa, a rift, rent, fissure. See Rift, Rive.

Dace, a Dart; also, a Dare fish; so called from its darting motion.

At bedtime, on a night when my wife is at work, I read to both my sons. I read The Underwater Alphabet Book. I say, A is for angelfish. The baby runs his hand over the page, looking for a flap to lift. He loves all things peekaboo. I read, "There are enough different kinds of angelfish for someone to write an Angelfish Alphabet Book."

My older son says, More. Maybe he means that there are more wonders in the world than we know; maybe he’s asking for another book.

I read Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton. He’s fascinated by bulldozers, backhoes, loaders. We call them diggers. I read, Mary Ann could dig as much in a day as a hundred men could in a week. I read, Mary Ann lowered the hills and straightened the curves to make the long highways.

My older son doesn’t say anything.

After I tuck the boys in, I open my laptop, surf the web. I read about excavators and mountaintop removal, marine life and rising ocean temperatures on Wikipedia and Twitter. I read that a successor to the steam shovel was the Marion 5960-M, a multi-ton stripping shovel that tore out veins of coal at the River Queen Surface Mine in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. I scroll until I’m worried, my pulse quickens, something is squeezing my chest. I read until I learn about this: Once, there was an amber forest humming in the Pacific Ocean, teeming with abalones—large snails with flat oval shells, wide mouths, a series of breathing holes. Near rocky reefs and crags, two gold-brown seaweeds, giant Pacific kelp and bull kelp, grew as many as ten inches a day. These kelps rippled from holdfasts that rooted them, rippled up, up, up to canopy-mats floating on gas bladders. Some people called them the sequoias of the sea. The kelp fronds would unfurl, billow out, crease and uncrease, providing habitat for sheepsheads, opal eyes (also called rudderfish), keyhole limpets, sea cucumbers and long-spined purple urchins. Spider crabs grazed there, and turban snails, sea stars, and abalones.

Kelp, n. 1. Large, cold-water seaweed. 2. The ashes left from the burning of seaweed, used for making soap and glass.

Abalone: Rumsen (Southern Ohlone) aūlun n. red abalone, e.g., Harper’s Mag. (1861): the coast Indians carry on a small trade with the Indians of the mountains, dried abalone in exchange for berries and acorns.

Since commercial harvesting began, the abalone have been imperiled. In 1884, the naturalist Ernest Ingersoll observed that for three or four years past the business in these shells has been extensive, but fears are felt that the mollusks may soon become exterminated. In 1913, reporting on the abalone harvest in California, the zoology professor Charles Lincoln Edwards described a diver [sending] the net up, filled with about fifty green and corrugated abalones, every six or seven minutes. In 1914, the historian Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez lamented that abalone shells once covered the beaches of the California coast with a glittering carpet…with our usual easy-going American negligence, we have permitted these creatures of the sea, valuable for their edible meat as well as for their exquisitely colored shells, to be nearly destroyed.

Riff, n. A repeated phrase; an improvisation, variation, or commentary on a theme.

Then there was the Blob—a patch of too-warm water in the Pacific in 2014, stretching, expanding, pushing out, more than two thousand miles long. Although anchovies and krill became scarce, although sea lions, auklets, and many creatures starved, urchins thrived. California’s kelp forest is overrun with urchins now, chewed to nubs, frondless, a ravaged mess. Scaling the urchin-stripped stalks, the few abalones find almost no food.

Leah Mata, a Chumash artist, says, The drought made it hard to locate mallards, and it’s harder to find abalone and clams. The saltmarshes are too dry for wild ducks. Mata makes feather dance belts, fishhooks, and regalia from abalone shells she buys in flea markets.

The laurel dace—olive-green-bodied, yellow-finned, silver-bellied—could have died out when drought thinned and fragmented the six creeks they lived in, stranded the last survivors in puddles clotted with leaves. Conservationists caught eighteen laurel dace with seine nets, transported them to the Chattanooga aquarium, now maintain them as an ark population.

In a glass niche, the rescued Barrens topminnows flash through the strands of yarn mops.

I can keep believing that if he says one word, he will say one more. That his delay will not diminish him. I’m going to stand by a world where one more is possible.

Another name for abalone is sea ear.

Tonight, one son sleeps. One son chatters for a while, and then he sleeps too. My wife is working the night shift at a psychiatric hospital. Our house is moon-silvered, a deep ocean, the holdfast of a dreaming family. My life depends on theirs. We repeat. We are connected. There’s laurel dace in me, abalone in me, amber seaweed. I’m an ear for faint cries, for bits of story.

, the Letter Ash

Once, there was a tree in the English alphabet: the second letter was named ash or sc, meaning ash tree. If you were inking a calfskin, graving a whalebone, noting the medicinal properties of sur pples (crab apples), you would have written ash by uniting a and e in a ligature: . In his book Clash of Symbols: A Ride Through the Riches of Glyphs, Stephen Webb says that the letter ash was one of the few native letters, an Anglo-Saxon rune the scribes carried over while adapting the Roman alphabet that they had learned from Christian missionaries.

The sc (ash) tree was felled for spear handles, tablets, charcoal, bedframes, wagon wheels, oars—perhaps this is why the author of the Old English Rune Poem in the eighth century observes that "the sc is precious, although many men attack it." If you know what to look for, you might see traces of the letter sc in archaeologists, who find lathed ash bowls at Coppergate, or in aeon, a long period of time, or in Caedmon, the cowherd and first named poet in English.

In Appalachia, the emerald ash borer—a metallic green beetle—might kill all the ash trees, endangering bob whites and fox squirrels and other animals who depend on the ash for food and habitat.

Once, there were Yorks on my grandparents’ farm—hard, tart, red apples—on the tree down below the silo, toward the woods. And on the side of the knob, shading another cow meadow, August Sweets—soft and pale gold. Those trees that I loved, grandfather, grandmother, all gone now. If nobody can return them to me, I’ll pull them from the gray air word by word: jagged stumps, now petals in the grass, now yellowjackets working the groundfalls, chewing into splatted apples, into bruise. And I will reach with both hands until I see again his straw hat and mud boots: he’s splashing his pie with cream from the Guernsey, thinking about what he’ll store for winter, the long-lasters, the keepers. And I will dream back her rolling pin and paring knife, peels she dropped in the sink: she’s singing an old friend I happened to see, her hands coring, quartering, now she’s taking the pan from the low blue flame, now pushing the cooked chunks through the ricer. In Old English, ppel screada were apple peels; scread was a shred, scrap, fragment, crumb of holy bread.

Once, the Braun sisters traveled the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee by Model T, on foot, by logging train. Mountain people called them the plant ladies. Lucy drove the car and studied remnants of untouched forests—the hardwoods, shrubs, and fern beds; her sister Annette made sandwiches for their lunches, did her own studies of moth larvae and leaf miners. Wherever Lucy went, Annette went. They lived together all their lives. Annette was five years older, but Lucy was the boss. Lucy wanted to survey, describe, photograph what trees were still standing—as she put it—three hundred years after the white man had started on his era of forest destruction on the Atlantic seaboard. She would call the book she was writing Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America. Sometimes, Lucy and Annette bounced over ruts, drove to the end of a washed-out road, picked their way up a steep trail, at last reached a stand of centuries-old, gloriously tall yellow poplars or beech trees. And then they stood there absorbing the beauty, observing, taking notes—a few weeks or days before the lumber company came in, felled all the trees, laid waste.