Tracking the Golden Isles by Anthony J. Martin

Author:Anthony J. Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2020-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

17

Tracking That Is Otterly Delightful

Writing about a place, its environments, and the plants and animals of those environments is challenging enough in itself. Yet to write about that place and what lives there, but without actually being there, feels almost fraudulent. Given a specific place, I could certainly read everything ever published about it, watch documentaries or other videos about it, carefully study 3-d virtual-reality images of its landscapes, interview people who have spent much time there, and (most radically of all) read books. This is how most of us learn, particularly in our Internet-dominated world: we gather information vicariously without experiencing it directly. But then does my writing about those topics compare to Plato’s allegory, in which I am reduced to describing shadows cast on the walls of a cave as representing what is actually there? Could I not gain better insights by sliding down its stalagmites or trying to climb up its stalactites?

For instance, if you show someone a photograph of a Georgia coast beach and ask what is there when they have never visited it, it would be all too easy to say, with conviction and finality, “Looks like a beach.” But when standing on that beach, I am much more likely to say that I see fine quartz and heavy-mineral sand that originally composed much larger rocks in the Appalachian Mountains. I see that same sand blowing down a long beach but pausing to form wind ripples or piling onto racks of dead cordgrass washed up by a high tide. I see a river otter (Lutra canadensis) galloping alongside the surf, slowing to a lope, then a trot, then back to a lope and a gallop. I see it enjoying its time on that beach while moving around obstacles large and small, including racks of cordgrass and their protodunes. I see a brief rain shower less than two hours after the otter has left the beach, and the wind gusting afterward. All in all, there is something different about having been in that place that causes me to be a little more observant and philosophical. Then add traces to the mix, and the stories that emerge become more alive and real.

Of course, such ponderings bring us to river otters. In December 2015, while on the third of a four-day nature-infused writing retreat to Sapelo Island, my wife, Ruth, and I spent nearly an hour tracking a river otter along a long stretch of beach there. Had I read about river otters and their tracks before then? Yes. Had I watched video footage of river otters? Yes. Had I seen and identified their tracks before then, written about them, and seen river otters in the wild for myself, including on Sapelo Island? Yes, yes, and yes.

Yet this was different. After spotting the tracks on the south end of a long stretch of Cabretta Beach, I at first thought they would be ordinary. Granted, finding otter tracks is always a joy, especially when they are freshly made on stream banks in the middle of Atlanta, Georgia.

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