Number Nine

Last Sat­ur­day morn­ing a few artists went explor­ing off-​road into unknown Tumamoc ter­ri­tory. With Desert Lab sci­en­tist Ray Turner, we were look­ing for Spald­ing Plot Num­ber Nine. As it turned out, we didn’t go very far off the road, which actu­ally cuts off part of teh plot. The loca­tion of plot nine was lost soon after Desert Lab­o­ra­tory botanist Vol­ney Spald­ing first set it up and mapped it along with 18 other long-​term eco­log­i­cal study plots in 1906. With­out real­iz­ing it, the crew who paved the cur­rent Tumamoc road, in the 1940s or 50s, cut off part of the west­ern por­tion of the plot, hence the bor­der with the road. It is duly recorded as part of the long-​term change in plot nine.

Spalding’s idea was to map these plots over time, record­ing changes in plant den­si­ties, species com­po­si­tion, plant life spans, and other data that could be charted numer­i­cally and com­pared. Indi­vid­ual plants would be fol­lowed through­out their mostly unknown lifes­pans. It was a bril­liant idea at an excit­ing time, part of the birth of the new sci­ence of ecol­ogy. Instead of orga­niz­ing dried indi­vid­ual plants inside in stuffy herbar­ium cab­i­nets, (although this is also an excit­ing and worth­while occu­pa­tion) botanists began to be inter­ested in plants as asso­ci­a­tions that adapted to spe­cific habi­tats. They stepped out­doors and looked around. It was a bold move. After Spald­ing had a fence built around the entire Tumamoc prop­erty, about 5 miles worth to keep out graz­ing ani­mals and boon­dock­ing humans, the entire land­scape became an out­door laboratory.

In an address to the Soci­ety for Plant Mor­phol­ogy and Phys­i­ol­ogy in 1902, Spald­ing said, “We need to honor more than we do the man [or woman, since his wife was also a work­ing botanist] who knows how to see liv­ing things with­out com­pli­cated apparatus.”

How about a sim­ple pad of paper and some pen­cils? Tumamoc even­tu­ally became one of the most scru­ti­nized and care­fully observed places on Earth. Spalding’s plots are now the old­est con­tin­u­ously mon­i­tored study plots in the world. That fact should catch the inter­est of artists, I thought.

Spald­ing had put his trust in future researchers, yet unborn, to carry for­ward his work. He had to leave Ari­zona in 1910 due to his advanc­ing arthri­tis, and gave his maps and notes to desert ecol­ogy super­hero For­rest Shreve. They are often called the Spalding-​Shreve plots now. Spalding’s trust in the future was mostly well founded. Although eight of his plots are still lost, Ray Turner redis­cov­ered num­ber nine in 1968 and has mapped it about every decade, the more recent being last Spring.

Although I had watched that last sur­vey, I couldn’t find the plot again. Regard­less, I had to get per­mis­sion to go there again. The mark­ers are kept hard to find for a rea­son – no one wants stray hik­ers to even step within the study areas, they are that highly val­ued by ecol­o­gists. For­rest Shreve real­ized that even the sci­en­tists map­ping the plots were them­selves an out­side intru­sion, and for that rea­son the sur­veys were con­ducted about every 8 – 12 years.

Like the other Spald­ing plots, plot nine is a ten by ten meter quadrat. After some wan­der­ing around, we found the rebar stakes in at least two of the cor­ners, and another out­side the perime­ter that we think is where the pho­to­graph is usu­ally taken at each sur­vey. Smaller nails were dri­ven in at one-​meter inter­vals along the bor­der so a grid of string could be stretched over the whole square. That’s how Ray Turner made this draw­ing that I found in the Tumamoc archives, using a meter stick to esti­mate loca­tions and canopy cover for each plant:

Yes, it’s a field sketch, done on loca­tion, later traced onto a for­mal map in the stu­dio. I quite like it. It inspires me.

Not that the site is a scenic panorama pic­ture spot. It’s no Yosemite Half Dome or Grand Canyon. Artists and pho­tog­ra­phers will not be flock­ing to cap­ture the best view of Plot Num­ber Nine. At first glance, it looks pretty much the same as 10 x 10 chunk of ground next to it, and the one after that. look­ing But that’s the inter­est for me. We are always chas­ing after the more impres­sive scale or sub­lime light­ing and col­ors, fil­ing the older images away as they no longer impress. But where does that end? Every dra­matic pic­ture sat­is­fies for a while, then we seek more and greater.

Our mam­malian brains are hard-​wired that way: to either chase after a reward or run from a threat. We don’t real­ize it, but that’s what we are doing almost all of the time. We don’t spend a lot of time pay­ing atten­tion to what our brains cat­e­go­rize as neu­tral, nei­ther new and there­fore inter­est­ing nor dan­ger­ous. Why should we? After we pass by a cer­tain bush a few times and decide it is nei­ther a threat nor has any par­tic­u­lar value to us, we file it under “back­ground”. Most of the world, maybe 99% of it is back­ground. We don’t even see it any­more. Recent neu­ro­science has found that’s lit­er­ally true – our neural cir­cuits actu­ally fill in those spaces with older, filed away, impres­sions and low-​res images to save pro­cess­ing space. We notice only what is changes or moves, then file it away again into the back­drop of our life dramas.

But those neu­tral areas, things like the tex­ture of a rock, the light on a palo verde branch, the shift­ing shape of a cloud, that are at first unre­mark­able, are win­dows or doors into the unknown. Who knows, these over­looked places may actu­ally con­tain most of the con­tent, maybe even wis­dom, of our world. It’s the proper domain of art: those areas out­side the box our brains want to put every­thing into.

There is an ancient story of a gold nugget dropped by a trav­eler cross­ing a worth­less, rocky vacant lot filled with trash and avoided by all. After some time the nugget becomes bur­ried and encrusted with dirt so it looks like any other val­ue­less peb­ble. The per­son who one day picks it up, maybe cen­turies later, and scrapes away the sur­face cov­er­ing will find a gold nugget. In Bud­dhism this is con­sid­ered a para­ble about achiev­ing insight. It’s already there, you just never noticed. One might find a lit­tle piece of them­selves lying out there out there among those neu­tral details.

Plot Nine is not uncharted ter­ri­tory. It very well known in terms of coor­di­nates, soil, cli­mate, changes in species com­po­si­tion over time, amount of ground cover, ger­mi­na­tion and deaths of plants, etc. Those are the kind of data that sci­en­tists track because they answer par­tic­u­lar questions.

My ques­tions are dif­fer­ent. Actu­ally, I don’t even know what they are yet. So as soon as my appli­ca­tion for off-​road artis­tic research comes through, I’ll be spend­ing some time at Plot Num­ber Nine, observ­ing details the sci­en­tists might have missed, or were not inter­ested in. I’m sure some draw­ings, images, maybe a poem might come out of this explo­ration a few meters off the well-​traveled road, in unknown territory.