A Family for Everyone: The Philosophy of Field Guides
by Kathleen Dean Moore

My son reads field guides at the breakfast table, leaning over his bowl and scooping cereal into his mouth while he scans the color plates of banded snakes. He will study the same set of drawings for long minutes, absorbing the differences between stingrays and sharks. Or he will read a field guide late into the night, cover to cover, as if it were a novel--taking sides with the predators, imagining himself part of each small plot, turning pages all the way to the end, then rereading the first page and dropping the book on the floor.

Field guides lie in heaps under his bed: Pacific States Wildflowers, Shells of the Pacific Coast and Hawaii, Guide to Rocky Mountain Wildflowers, The Pacific Coast Fishes, A Desert Manual, and now, The Field Guide to Eastern Birds, a gift for high school graduation.

Most of the field guides are small, cloth-bound books, the color of dried moss. We call the books by their authors' names, as if they were our grandfathers. "Should we bring Peterson?" we ask. "Somebody remember to pick up Murie before we go." The covers are worn, the fabric corners ground down into the cardboard as if someone had taken sandpaper to them. The pages are stiff and wrinkled--The Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals carried ten feet by a flash flood, North American Mammals left on a rock in a snowstorm. In our Field Guide to Western Birds, the pages describing ducks are smudged with black streaks, because when you sit at the edge of a marsh late in the evening while ducks whistle in and drop onto the pond with the sound of a canoe paddle pulling water, midges swarm to the glowing pages of the book, their bodies small and soft as ashes. If you brush them away, they smear across the paper.

Pintail. (Anas acuta) Male pintails are slender white-breasted ducks with slim necks, quite different in cut from other ducks of ponds and marshes. They have long, needle-pointed tails... Habitat: Marshes, prairies, grainfields, fresh ponds, lakes, salt bays. --Roger Tory Peterson, A Field Guide to Western Birds.

Some of the books--the fern book, the lichen book, The Field Book of Ponds and Streams had been my mother's. She was a person who exulted in natural facts, who greeted frogs as old friends and rejoiced to find in the forest something she had known only as a picture in a book. The first mayapple in spring, a glimpse of Scorpio crawling claw over claw into the sky above darkened mountains, her first sighting of a vermillion flycatcher--any of these would fill her with what Joseph Wood Krutch called "the joy we cannot analyze." "Imagine living in the same world as the scissor-tailed flycatcher," she would say. Imagine. The word always sounded as if it were throwing its arms open. A painted bunting. A blue skink. Elephant flowers, with pink elephant heads spiraling up a stalk in a high mountain meadow. Marshes full of skunk cabbage, smelling like lemonade. If these things can exist, then nothing is impossible. "That's the ticket," she would say.

Among my mother's things, I found a bird book that my son had written for her when he was four. On the first page, he had printed, LOVE JON, except that he spelled it NOJ and there was a smiley face cradled in the curve of the J. He had drawn a dozen birds with large-scale swoops of a marking pen that he held in his fist. Then he brought the drawings to me and told me what words to write. The Two-Sets-of-Wings Bird and the Hundred-Sets-of-Wings Bird. The big one is trying to swoop down on the little one and he is trying to sneak away. He has four legs.

Page after page, the birds are lined up: The tufted striped hawk. The sharp-toothed duck. The rocket turkey hawk. The tufted pelican-pelican. The tiny sandpiper. All the water birds stand on sturdy stalk-like legs. But the hawks! Legs shoot out behind diving hawks like exhaust from rockets, or they string out taut as piano wire or trail under the birds like the crumpled legs of a dead crane fly. All the birds look as though they have on yellow boots, and some of the boots seem to be on fire. The joy we cannot analyze.

I asked Jon last week what it is about field guides. "It's like a dream coming true," he said. "You read about a bird, say, and for years you hold it in your mind. It's an image, a drawing, length and wingspan--that's it. A picture in your mind. But all the time, you think, maybe someday I will see that really. The real thing. And then, someday, you do. And what was just an idea, it comes true. Like a wish."

The fern book on my shelf has my mother's signature on the title page and, between pages 109 and 110 (LADY FERN Athyrium filix-femina), the tip of a fern frond, folded back on itself and pressed flat and dry. Her field book of ponds and streams was published in 1930 when she would have been seventeen--Jon's age. I open the book to the first plate, a softly washed watercolor of a stream and its little animals, all overlaid by a piece of tissue paper on which the animals are sketched in black ink and number-coded to a list. Winter life in a brook: a section through swift flowing shallows. 1, stonefly; 2, watercress; 3, alga; 4, sponge gemmules; 5, caddis worm; 6, planarian;...10, dusky salamander.

Every creature in the whole of the natural world, every scaled or furry of slimish, beetle-backed, highflying, zero- to hundred-legged creature of the night skies or ocean or mountain sunlight, can be identified in twenty questions, if you get the question right.

I haven't looked at this plate for--how many?--thirty years, and still I recognize the overhanging willows, the glint on the water, the feathery gills of the salamander. I turn to Figure 18, a diagram of all the things that live on the underside of a lily pad--the eggs of a whirligig beetle, a dragonfly larvae. I remember standing knee-deep in a marsh with my mother, rejoicing to see a dragonfly split up the back and crawl out of its shuck, bent and damp. With a plastic bucket, we had dredged for water-boatmen and fairy shrimp. I leaf on through the book and by the time I get to bryozoans, clustered on the surface of large masses of jelly which...hang from twigs, I have to close the book to keep from being swamped by all the memories I have lost.

Spring peeper (Hyla crucifer). Spring peepers cling to dead grassblades by the pond-side uttering their shrill peeping, one of the earliest calls of spring in the ponds and marshes. They begin to sing in March, when the spotted salamander is laying its eggs, and continue through swamps and meadows and are only occasionally seen. --Ann Morgan, Field Book of Ponds and Streams.

Memories of my father are woven into the dichotomous keys at the beginning of every field guide. He was a taxonomist and had a taxonomist's view of the world. Are the plants free-floating on still water, or are they not? Are the stems jointed and hollow, or are they not? Are the leaves entire, or are they variously divided? And so it goes, in sets of disjunctive syllogisms. Every creature in the whole of the natural world, every scaled or furry or slimish, beetle-backed, highflying, zero- to hundred-legged creature of the night skies or ocean bottoms or mountain sunlight, can be identified in twenty questions, if you get the questions right. One step at a time. Twenty discriminations. "So how many kinds of things are there in the world?" I once asked my father. He pulled his slide rule out of its sheath and computed two to the twentieth power. "1,048,576," he said.

Before my father died, he gave his grandchildren a special legacy--a hand lens on a leather thong and the logic of the dichotomous key. I remember the exact day. Arriving at our house after a

The great miracle is not that conditions on earth permit life to evolve, but that conditions on earth permit field guides.

cross-country flight, he immediately changed into jeans and pulled his Handbook of Northwestern Plants out of his suitcase. He called for his grandchildren. He called for a flower. Step by step, he slowly keyed it out. This or that. This or that. This or that, until everyone was convinced beyond any doubt that this was an Ipomopsis aggregata. Then, reaching out an arm, he pulled his grandchildren close to him and each of them in turn keyed out the flower, then another, until he was sure they knew how to do it.

A gift of rationality. A faith in order. Gratitude for the glory and beauty of a natural world that allows itself to be arranged by reason. A cause for great rejoicing: To wake up every day knowing that whatever you encounter in the natural world will yield to Linnaeus's two-name scheme, genus and species, a scheme based on the premise that order constrains the violent world of natural creation, that everything in the world relates in predictable ways to everything else. There are no freaks. No miracles. A family for everyone, even Ursus horribilis: the terrible bear. A genus, a genesis, a genius. Within that, a specification--a species.

This fact, he said, should make us tremble with wonder every day of our lives. You can't take the planet for granted; it could all be otherwise. There must be worlds spinning on the far side of Jupiter where field guides are futile, where nothing is this or that, but nothing at all or everything at once. Imagine a simple world where everything is one kind of thing, evenly distributed, like red cinders blown out of a cinder cone onto an even plain, so that when the wind blows across the roughness, it plays a single, endless note. Cinders and one sound--nothing more. Imagine a planet where no two things are ever the same and there are infinitely many things, a planet where you could not play twenty questions because there are no dichotomies, no regularities, no repeated patterns: one of each, and nothing like anything else. Or imagine a world where chaos never yielded to creation, a world forever unsorted, spinning in the glare that is all light combined. These are worlds that rationality cannot conquer.

So the great miracle is not that conditions on Earth permit life to evolve, my father told us, but that conditions on Earth permit field guides.

Carry a field guide out of the library, out through the old cross-and-Bible front door, across the mowed lawn and into the field, the open country, to the edge of the marsh and to the edge of the sea, to the edge of the night sky, to the edge, and then into the wilderness, where--even there--a book will tell you how to make sense of what you encounter.

6A. Adults with protruding upper jaw teeth--felt by stroking tip of salamander's snout from below, while holding its mouth closed; toes often with squarish tips. Climbing Salamanders, Pl. 6.

6B. Teeth rarely protrude; toe tips round. Woodland Salamanders, Pl. 5 -- Robert Stebbins, A Field Guide to Western Reptiles and Amphibians.

Most days, I feel safe and comfortable in the rational world my father described, but sometimes it makes me restless, and I turn back toward my mother. When we were growing up, my sisters and I would often come across a flower we didn't know. "What is this?" we would ask. My father would touch the flower gently under its chin. "Some Ranunculus," he would answer. A short pause while he studied the sky over the mountains. "Ranunculus glaberrimus." A chorus of boos from his children. "The real name! What is the real name?" "That is the real name," he would insist, but my mother knew better. "It's a buttercup," she would say, and give my father a dirty look, and we would be satisfied. Buttercup was exactly right. Although we would accuse my father of making up gibberish-ranunculish names to suit himself, we never doubted the names my mother gave, no matter how improbable or flamboyant they were--pussy-toes, morning glories, whimbrels and whippoorwills, farewell-to-spring, love-lies-bleeding, and the fiery searcher.

Does the world match the capacities of our minds, or do our poor minds limit what it's possible for us to know about the world? Maybe our minds do the best they can, capturing what is slow, wounded, common, but missing the best part. The possibility of something beyond human capacity to see makes me wild with frustration, like a dog racing back and forth in front of a closed door, scratching, sniffing air that comes through the crack at the bottom. What is out there that is invisible because it doesn't match our categories? What exists beyond the visible spectrum, beyond the audible range, outside binomial nomenclature, so glorious that it blinds us, blows out our senses, knocks us to the ground?

Fiery searcher "Caterpillar hunter" (Calosoma scrutator). Description: Blackbeetle with dark greenish gold on sides of head and prothorax. Bluish luster on femora. Elytra edged with gold. Reddish hair inside curved middle tibiae. Habitat: Gardens, crop fields, and open woods. --The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders Now that Jon is in college half a continent away, he has become, for me, pure idea--a wish, a dream, pictures pasted in a book, words on paper. "My professor and I went out and checked out some swamps today," he wrote. "We didn't find any of the frogs we were looking for (wood frogs) but we heard spring peepers (a new one to me)."

Kathleen Dean Moore is chair of the philosophy department at Oregon State University. She is the author of Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water, a collection of essays published by The Lyons Press in 1995.