Spatial Hearing. Column in KompyuterraOnline #60
To feel happy and whole, one must at least occasionally touch one's own origins. A good way to do this is to sleep peacefully in the forest. (A column connected to a trip, the photo report for which is posted here)
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Dmytro Shabanov
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A trip from the Invisible Foot, Volume Listening, Pegasus-bearer Beast
Column in KompyuterraOnline #59, Column in KompyuterraOnline #60, Column in KompyuterraOnline #61
I've wanted to write a column about this for a long time, but I didn't really know how to organize the text. And now I've decided to simply reconstruct the stream of consciousness during an experience that was interesting to me. I'll start from afar. I wrote that I study the hybridization of green frogs, and participated in the description of the North Donets center of their diversity. Our working group systematically works in the Kharkiv region, and the areas downstream of the Northern Donets in the Donetsk, Luhansk, and Rostov regions are studied by occasional visits from Kharkiv, St. Petersburg, or Tambov. The property redistribution happening in Ukraine has enriched the word "Donetsk" with the meaning of "bandits". This does not align with my experience: many "Donetsk" people who end up in our university are intelligent and decent people. One of my diploma students this year, such a brilliant girl, the best in the world, is from a small town in the Slavyansk (stress on the first syllable) district of the Donetsk region. About a year and a half ago, while looking at her native region in Google Earth, I realized that hybrid frogs must live near her house. At the edge of their range, hybrids are tied to their most characteristic habitats – forest lakes.
What I'm talking about happened here. Below, in the satellite photo, is the town where our graduate is from. Nearby is the Slavyansk Power Plant, a former all-Union construction project, and its cooling ponds. The winding Northern Donets forms a bend with old riverbeds among the forest. And almost everywhere around is steppe, dotted with spoil heaps in places. This territory should be an outpost of frog hybrids. Last year, my student and her boyfriend (also our student, but from elsewhere) did everything possible and impossible to catch frogs there. Unfortunately, their sample consisted entirely of lake frogs – representatives of the parental species. I insisted that hybrids must be there, and this year we went to Sloviansk as a strike force. Our driver defended his dissertation on the ecological specifics of different frog forms, and as a field researcher, he has no equal. When he was defending, we calculated that he had driven a distance greater than the Earth's perimeter behind the wheel of a Niva while going out to catch frogs. A significant part of these trips was shared by us. Wouldn't we, armed with boats, lanterns, waders, and most importantly, experience, find hybrids? It's best to catch frogs in the dark; we had two nights and a day between them. If we had caught hybrids immediately, we would have gone to a neighboring district on the second night. Unfortunately, the first night brought deep disappointment. We couldn't drive into the forest via the pontoon bridge, visible even from space – the entrance was blocked by a heavy concrete slab. We left the car, entered the generously rain-soaked forest, and made our way through reed thickets to the forest lakes. Only lake frogs! We collected a small sample, spent the night at the graduate's parents' house, and decided to try again. In the morning, we took a detour through a long route and entered the bend from the north, driving through the wet forest. The forest is unexplored, possibly due to its proximity to the ominous power station. We encountered a roe deer and were amazed by its boldness: after running a short distance, it stopped to look at us and even allowed me to get out of the car with a camera. This roe deer stopped us at the very place we were looking for – near the spawning grounds of hybrid frogs. We found a suitable old riverbed. We got into it... – yes! Young hybrids. They are not easy to catch; we saw and caught almost no adults. We will continue tonight. We roasted meat over a campfire and prepared to return to the town near the power station, where some of our belongings and affairs remained. I was tired from the previous night and decided not to drive, but to rest in the forest. My companions left me a mat, a raincoat, leftover meat with wine, and left; I lay down and fell asleep. Although I travel a lot, the last time I slept outdoors, not in a tent, car, or house, was decades ago. The once familiar feeling became unusual again. While I was sleeping, it started raining; I covered myself with the raincoat and slept some more. The rain stopped. I got up, ate some meat, washed it down with wine, lay down again, and felt with particular sharpness a state that seems much more natural than our everyday life. Perhaps the smell of the wet forest influenced this? Here I lie, covered with a raincoat, on a patch of pine forest on a hill in the middle of a deciduous forest, listening to the birds. A cuckoo is calling overhead. If the omen is true, I should live for another three hundred years. It hasn't finished yet – another joined it, then a third and a fourth joined in. How many lives do I need to live, believing the cuckoos? It's amazing how many different sounds one can perceive separately! A mosquito is buzzing nearby, and some beetle is scratching its legs on my raincoat. Above me are dozens of birds, among which cuckoos, orioles, and song thrushes stand out. The wind is rustling somewhere, woodpeckers are drumming in the distance. From the rustling and the shuffling of the undergrowth, I realize that some small bird has landed behind me. A titmouse? It picked something up and flew up, from where something light fell on me. A male pine cone. Somewhere above the trees, wings are whistling: ducks are flying to the water. I open my eyes and see a multitude of living creatures from under the edge of my raincoat. Aphids are crawling along the edge of the mat, and a microscopic rider is hovering over them. Then there's grass with beetles, ants, a geometrid caterpillar, and a hoverfly flying by. A thrush darted past behind the wall of grass. Further on is a dense bush, through which someone heavy stomped – there we saw a wild boar trail. Countless processes are happening around me! My attention is divided into countless parts, observing what is happening around, and I derive pleasure from it. Our senses and brain turn out to be capable of perceiving all these boundless movements – somehow participating in them. How different this is from the urban state, when there's not enough mental energy to participate in the diverse hustle and bustle. Just this morning (how long ago it was!), I was discussing over the phone the latest demands of some micro-manager who, instead of gracefully asking for help, immediately started threatening those who didn't follow his instructions. And how many such tasks are left unfinished, and how distant and absurd they seem now... The urban environment is more primitive, simpler. No, no, of course, no fewer processes are happening in the city, but they turn out to be alien, not engaging us. And in recent years, a significant part of our environment fits into a few inches of a monitor and chains of binary symbols. Immersed in a state of a thousand tasks, we lose our sense of self. Although we forget about the finitude of our lives, we are not in a state of immortality, but in a state of mindless stupor. However, being in nature, however difficult it may be to explain, is closely linked for me with the feeling of my own mortality. I felt this very acutely a couple of years ago. I had to return to the city in the morning after a night of frog catching in the vicinity of our biological station. One of the simple ways is this: go down from the mountain to the river, swim across it, and walk to the bus stop in the village on the other side. Morning buses run there, taking residents of the region to the largest wholesale market in Eastern Ukraine. I descend to the Don, and see a river of fog flowing over the river water. Undressing, I put my things in a waterproof bag, swam, and the beauty around simply takes my breath away. How wonderful! The following phrase formed in my head on its own: "What beauty! But I will have to die anyway..." Don't rush to twist your finger at your temple; I'm not the only one who has felt such a semantic transition from beauty to the awareness of mortality. This is Bunin: "And flowers, and bumblebees, and grass, and ears of corn, / And azure, and midday heat... / The time will come – the Lord will ask the prodigal son: / "Were you happy in your earthly life?" And what I experienced only between drowsiness and wakefulness, others have experienced before me. In the forest, I easily recalled a poem by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, forgotten in the city. I won't quote the whole text, but I can't help but repeat at least excerpts. It's available in many places, for example, here. "Do not rustle above my head, / The trees flew into the transparent darkness; / The through pattern of their young branches, / Like light smoke, disappeared into the upper distance... <...> But sober reason, and the rapture alien to it, / I knew neither hope nor danger... / Who has so powerfully torn me away from them? / Who has cut me off from the burden of desire? / The shameful trade of the soul from a wicked era / Has become meaningless and insignificant to me... <...> So seize the moment while you are sensitive to it – / A short interval between sleep and wakefulness!" "If I tell you that the jumping and playful cat in the yard is the same one that jumped and played five hundred years ago, you are free to think whatever you want about me, but it is even more absurd to think that it is some other cat" (Arthur Schopenhauer). If I tell you that a person experiencing a return to reality in a half-asleep state in the middle of a spring forest is the same one who... I got up, ran to the campfire. The coals had turned into white ash. I piled up wet branches. At first, they smoked, then they stopped. I didn't feel like starting a fire. And suddenly the heated (and therefore no longer smoking) branches burst into flames simultaneously over the entire surface! Why do we like to watch fire, to "feed" it? The survival of our ancestors for many thousands of generations was linked to their ability to find, preserve, and maintain fire, and we have an innate interest in a burning campfire. What delicious meat it turned out to be! Consuming meat cooked over a fire significantly contributed to the progress of our species' evolution. The age of this adaptation is over two million years. Of course, living naturally, I wouldn't be eating pork brought from afar now, but that roe deer we encountered, or those wild boars that walk on the path nearby. Now I am glad that I don't have to invent ways to kill them. I felt some movement on my skin. I caught it by touch... yes, a tick; it was looking for a place to latch on. I recently read an explanation that I immediately believed to be correct. It links the reduction of our hair cover not only to adaptation to heat loss through sweat evaporation (I wrote about this here). It turns out that skin with sparse, fine hairs is optimal for tactile localization of skin parasites. Whether we were completely hairless or, conversely, covered in thick fur, it would be harder to feel a tick carefully crawling on the skin. ...And then it started to get dark, and my companions arrived. We drove around all the shores, launched the boat, and caught what we wanted. Once again, we were surprised at how well different forms of frogs are segregated. In the shallow forest cove of the reservoir – hybrids everywhere, and in its wider part, which opens to open space on one bank – only lake frogs. I think that in this place for the reproduction of hybrids, unlike the case described in the previous column, crossing with the parental species is not necessary. We caught hybrid frogs here. And this old riverbed stretches further, widening...
...and it turns out to be inhabited only by lake frogs, the parental species. This is a night photo from the boat; the raised fog creates bizarre shapes over the water. We don't yet know how many and which chromosome sets these frogs have, and what gametes they produce; I hope to figure it out by autumn. In any case, we completed the task we set for ourselves this time. Well, that's enough about this trip; if you're interested, look at the photo report on my website. I want the dry conclusion of my column to be the understanding of how cut off we are from the use of ourselves that created us. Frogs "know" their place, are tied to the environment they correspond to. Their ecological niche (lifestyle, nature of ecosystem connections) can be characterized quite specifically. Our niche is unique due to unprecedented plasticity. But I believe that to feel happy and fulfilled, one must at least occasionally touch one's roots. A good way is to sleep peacefully in the forest.
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Dmytro Shabanov
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A trip from the Invisible Foot, Volume Listening, Pegasus-bearer Beast
Column in KompyuterraOnline #59, Column in KompyuterraOnline #60, Column in KompyuterraOnline #61