자연의 지혜 / 애니 딜라드 / 이제 오월이다....

 

 

 

 

Now it is May.   이제 오월이다.

The walrus are migrating;  Diomede Island Eskimos follow them in boats through the Bering Strait.

해마들이 이동하고 있다.  디오메대 섬에 사는 에스키모들은 해마를 쫓느라 배를 타고 베링 해협을 통과한다.

The Netsilik Eskimos hunt seal.  

네트실리크 에스키모들은 물개를 사냥한다.

According to Asen Balikci, a seal basks in the sun all day and slips into the water at midnight, to return at dawn to emerge from the same hole.

아센 발리키에 의하면, 물개들은 하루 종일 햇볕을 쬐고 나서 밤12시쯤 몸을 물에 담근 뒤, 새벽이 되면 같은 구멍에서 다시 모습을 드러낸다고 한다.

In spring the sun, too, slips below the horizon for only a brief period, and the sky still glows.

봄에 태양은 아주 짦은 시간 동안만 수평선 아래로 미끄러지는데, 하늘은 여전히 빛난다.

All the Netsilik hunter has to do in spring is go out at midnight, watch a seal disappear into a given hole, and wait there quietly in the brief twilight, on a spread piece of bearskin.

네트실리크 에스키모들이 봄에 해야 하는 일은 물개가 제 구멍 속에 들어가는 것을 지켜본 뒤 곰 가죽을 펼쳐 놓고 그 위에 앉아 짦은 석양이 이어지는 동안 조용히 기다리는 것이 전부다.

The seal will be up soon, with the sun.

물개는 태양과 함께 곧 나타날 것이다.

The glaciers are calving;  brash ice and grease ice clog the bays.

빙하가 새끼를 낳고 있다.  유빙 조각과 기름 낀 얼음이 만의 입구를 막고 있다.

From land you can see the widening of open leads on the distant pack ice by watching the  "water sky"  ----the dark patches and streaks on the glaring cloud cover that are breaks in the light reflected from the pack.

육지에서 당신은 물에 비친 하늘, 번쩍번쩍 빛나는 구름을 감싸고 있는 어두운 하늘 조각들과 층들이 얼음 덩어리에서 반사된 빛으로 잘게 부서지고 있는 것을 바라본다.  멀리 있는 한 무더기의 얼음 위에서 선두에 있던 것이 점점 넓어지는 것을 볼 수 잇다.

You might think the Eskimos would welcome the spring and the coming of summer;  they did, but they looked forward more to the coming of winter.

에스키모들이 봄과 곧 다가올 여름을 반길 것이라는 생각이 들기도 하리라.  실제로 그렇다.  하지만 그들은 겨울이 다가 오는 것을 더 고대한다.

I'm talking as usual about the various Eskimo cultures as they were before modernization.

나는 여느 때처럼, 현대화를 겪기 이전에 에스키모들이 갖고 있었던 다양한 문화에 대해 이야기하고 있다.

Some Eskimos used to greet the sun on its first appearance at the horizon in stunned silence, and with raised arms.

어떤 에스키모들은 태양이 처음 수평선에 떠오를 때 깜짝 놀라 침묵 속에서 두 팔을 들고 태양을 맞이하곤 했다.

But in summer, they well knew, they would have to eat lean fish and birds.

하지만 여름이 되면 그들은 여윈 물고기와 새를 먹어야 된다는 것을 잘 알고 있었다.

Winter's snow would melt to water and soak the thin thawed ground down to the permafrost;  the water couldn't drain away, and it would turn the earth into a sop of puddles.

겨울의 눈은 녹아서 물이 되고 살짝 녹은 땅을 적시면서 영원히 녹지 않는 동토까지 흘러간다.  물은 마를 수가 없다.  물은 흙을 작은 웅덩이로 만들 것이다.

Then the mosquitoes would come, the mosquitoes that could easily drive migrating caribou to a mad frenzy so that they trampled their newborn calves, the famous arctic mosquitoes of which it is said,  "If there were any more of them, they'd have to be smaller."

In winter the Eskimos could travel with dog sleds and visit;  with the coming of warm weather, their pathways, like mine in Virginia, closed.

그러면 모기들이 온다.  모기들 때문에 이동하는 순록들이 곧장 광란 상태에 빠져서 갓 태어난 자기 새끼들을 짓밟기도 한다.  이 유명한 북극의 모기에 대해 사람들은 이렇게들 얘기한다.  "모기들이 수가 많아야 할 운명이라면 그 크기만은 작아야 한다."  겨울이면 에스키모들은 개가 끄는 썰매를 타고 다니면서 서로를 방문한다.  그러나 따뜻한 계절이 돌아오면 그들이 다니는 길은 마치 버지니아에 있는 내가 다니는 길처럼 폐쇄된다.

In interior Alaska and northern Canada, breakup is the big event.

알래스카와 캐나다 북부에서는 해빙이 큰 행사다.

Old-timers and cheechakos alike lay wagers on the exact day and hour it will occur.

노인들과 알래스카로 갓 이주해 온 사람들은 해빙이 시작되는 정확한 날과 시간을 걸고 내기를 한다.

For the ice on rivers there does not just simply melt;  it rips out in a general holocaust.

강 위의 얼음은 단순히 녹는 것이 아니라 대단원의 결말로서 찢겨 나가는 것이다.

Upstream, thin ice breaks from its banks and races down river.

상류의 얇은 얼음이 강둑에서 부서져 강 아래로 질주한다.

Where it rams solid ice it punches it free and shoots it downstream, buckling and shearing:  ice adds to ice, exploding a Juggernaut into motion.

단단한 얼음과 격돌할 때면 얇은 얼음은 단단한 얼음을 마구 내리쳐 아래로 흘려 보낸다.  얼음이 얼음과 함쳐져서 불가항력적인 힘을 폭발시켜 작동하게 만든다.

A grate and roar blast the air, the ice machine razes bridges and fences and trees, and the whole year's ice rushes out like a train in an hour.

얼음의 세력이 다리와 울타리와 나무를 남김 없이 파괴한다.  한 해를 묵은 얼음이 한 시간 동안 기차처럼 질주한다.

Breakup:  I'd give anything to see it.

어떤 대가를 치르고라도 해빙을 한번 보았으면 좋겠다.

Now for the people in the bush the waterways are open to navigation but closed to snowmobile and snowshoe, and it's harder for them, too, to get around.

이제 오지 사람들에게도 물길이 열려 항해를 할 수 있게 되었다.  하지만 설상차와 눈신은 시효를 다했다.  설상차를 타거나 눈신을 신고 돌아다기가 더 힘들어진 것이다.

Here in the May valley, fullness is at a peak.

5월의 이 계곡에서 개화는 절정에 이르렀다.

All the plants are fully leafed, but intensive insect damage hasn't begun.

모든 식물들이 완전히 잎을 피웠다.  곤충들이 집중적으로 가하는 폐해는 아직 시작되지 않았다.

The leaves are fresh, whole, and perfect.

나뭇잎을은 신선하고 온전하고 완벽하다.

Light in the sky is clear, unfiltered by haze, and the sun hasn't yet withered the grass.

하늘의 빛도 안개의 방해 없이 맑았다.  태양이 풀을 시들게 하려면 아직 멀었다.

Now the plants are closing in on me.

지금 식물들이 내 주위로 우거지고 있다.

The neighborhood children are growing up;  they aren't keeping all the paths open.

이웃 아이들도 자라고 있다.  아이들은 모든 오솔길을 다 개방하지 않았다.

I feel like buying them all motorbikes.

나는 아이들의 모터바이크를 몽땅 사들이고 싶다.

The woods are a clog of green, and I have to follow the manner of the North, or of the past, and take to the waterways to get around.

숲은 녹색의 거대한 뭉텅이다.  나는 북부에서 하는 식에 따라 혹은 과거에 하던 방식대로, 수로를 따라 돌아다녀야 할 것이다. 

But maybe I think things are more difficult than they are, because once, after I had waded and slogged in tennis shoes a quarter of a mile upstream in Tinker Creek, a boy hailed me from the tangled bank.

왜냐하면 언젠가 내가 테니스화를 신고 팅커 냇물의 상류를 400미터 가량 꾸준히 걸어서 건저나, 한 소년이 덤불 우거진 강둑에서 나에게 악담을 퍼부었던 적이 있었기 때문이다. 

He had followed me just to pass the time of day, and he was barefoot.

 그 녀석은 그저 하루 시간을 때우려고 나를 따라왔을 뿐이었고 게다가 맨발이었다.

 

낸시의 죽음을 기억하며

 

 

When I'm up to my knees in honeysuckle, I beat a retreat, and visit the duck pond.

일어날 때 무릎이 인동덩굴에 걸렸지만 얼른 물러나 오리 연못에 가 보았다. 

The duck pond is a small eutrophic pond on cleared land near Carvin's Creek.

오리연못은 카빈 냇물 근처의 개간지에 있는 조그만 연못으로 영양분이 풍부하여 많은 식물들이 자란다.

It is choked with algae and seething with frogs;  when I see it, I always remember Jean White's horse.

그 연못은 조류로 가득 메워져 있었으면 개구리들도 들끓고 있었다.  나는 그 연못을 보면 언제나 진 화이트가 기르던 말이 기억난다.

Several years ago, Jean White's old mare, Nancy, died.

육칠 년 전에 진 화이트가 기르던 늙은 암말 낸시가 죽었다. 

It died on private property where it was pastured, and Jean couldn't get permission to bury the horse there.

낸시는 자신이 풀을 뜯으며 자란 사유지에서 죽었는데 화이트는 말을 그곳에 묻을 수 있는 허락을 받지 못했다.  그곳은 말을 묻기에 적합한 곳이었는데도 말이다.

It was just as well, because we were in the middle of a July drought, and the clay ground was fired hard as rock.

7월의 가뭄이 한창이어서 진흙땅은 바위처럼 단단하게 메말라 있었다.  

Anyway, the problem remained:  What do you do with a dead horse?

어쨋건 문제는 죽은 말을 어떻게 처리할 것인가 하는 것이었다.  죽은 말로 무얼 할 수 있을 것인가?

Another friend once tried to burn a dead horse, an experiment he never repeated.

다른 친구는 한때 죽은 말을 불태우려고 시도했지만 이후 다시는 그 실험을 되풀이하지 않았다.

Jean White made phone calls and enlisted friends who made more phone calls.

진 화이트는 여기저기 전화를 돌렸고, 또 더 많은 전화를 걸어온 친구들의 협력을 얻었다.

All experts offered the same suggestion:  try the fox farm.

모든 전문가들이 한결같은 제안을 해 왔는데, 그것은 여우 농장에 연락해 보라는 것이었다.

The fos farm is south of here;  it raises various animals to make into coats.

여우 농장은 여기에서 남쪽에 있었다.  그곳에서는 모피 코트를 만들 때 쓸 다양한 동물들을 키우고 있었다.

It turned out that the fos farm readily accepts dead horses from far and wide to use as  "fresh"  meat for the foxes.

농장은 여우들에게 먹일 수 있는 신선한 고기로 쓸 요량으로 먼 지역에서 오는 죽은 말들을 즉시 받아주고 있었다. 

But it aoso turned out, oddly enough, that the fox farm was up to its hem in dead horses already, and had room for no more.

그런데 기이하게도 여우 농장이 이미 그 가장자리까지 죽은 말들로 가득 차서 더 이상 받아 줄 공간이 없는 상황이었다.

It was, as I say, July, and the problem of the dead mare's final resting place was gathering urgency.

내가 말했듯이 때는 7월이었으므로, 죽은 암말이 최종적으로 쉴 곳을 찾는 문제는 시급해졌다. 

Finally someone suggested that Jean try the landfill down where the new interstate highway was being built.

마침내 누군가가 진에게 새 고속도로가 건설되고 있는 저 아래의 쓰레기 매립지 이야기를 꺼냈다. 

Certain key phone calls were made, and, to everybody's amazement, government officials accepted the dead horse.

몇 통의 전화가 긴밀하게 오갔고, 놀랍게도 정부 관리는 죽은 말을 받아 주었다. 

They even welcomed the dead horse, needed the dead horse, for its bulk, which, incidentally, was becoming greater each passing hour.

그들은 죽은 말을 환영하기까지 했으며 심지어는 그 크기 때문에 더욱 필요로 하는 것 같았는데, 우연히도 시간이 흐르면서 죽은 말이 점점 더 부풀어로르고 있었다.

A local dairy farmer donated his time;  a crane hauled the dead horse into the farmer's truck, and he drove south.

그 지역에 살던 한 농부가 시간을 내주었다.  크레인이 와서 죽은 말을 그 농부의 트럭 뒤에 실었고, 농부는 남쪽으로 트럭을 몰고갔다.

With precious little ceremony he dumped the mare into the landfill on which the new highway would rest---and that was the end of Jean White's horse.

작지만 소중한 예식을 치른 뒤, 그 농부는 암말을 새 고속도로가 생길 매립지에 던졌다.  그것이 진 화이트의 말이 맞이한 최후였다.

If you ever drive through Virginia on the new interestate highway between Christiansburg and Salem, and you feel a slight dip in the paving under your wheels, then loose thy shoe from off thy foot, for the place whereon thou drivest is Jean White's horse.

만약 크리스천버그와 세일럼 사이에 새로 난 고속도로를 타고 버지니아 주를 통과하다가 혹시 자동차 바퀴 밑 포장도로가 약간 꺼진 것을 느낀다면, 신발을 벗어라.  왜냐하면 당신이 달리고 있는 곳 바로 아래 진 화이트의 말이 묻혀 있으니까

 

 

연못 속의 미물들도 소중히 여기리라

 

All this comes to mind at the duck pond, because the duck pond is rapidly turning into a landfill of its own, a landfill paved in frogs.

There are a million frogs here, bullgrogs hopping all over each other on tangled mats of algae.

Ane the pond is filling up.

Small ponds don't live very long, expecially in the South.

Decaying matter piles up on the bottom, depleting oxygen, and shore plants march to the middle.

In another couple of centuries, if no one interferes, the duck pond will be a hickory forest.

On an evening in late May, a moist wind from Carvin's Cove shoots down the gap between Tinker and Brushy mountains, tears along Carving' Creek valley, and buffets my face as I stand by the duck pond.

The surface of the duck pond doesn't budge.

The algal layer is a rigid plating;  if the wind blew hard enough, I imagine it might audibly creak.

On warm days in February the primitive plants start creeping over the pond, filamentous green and blue-green algae in sopping strands.

From a sunlit shallow edge they green and spread, thickening throughout the water like bright gelatin.

When they smother the whole pond they block sunlight, strangle respiration, and snarl creatures in hopeless tangles.

Dragonfly nymphs, for instance, are easily able to shed a leg or two to escape a tight spot, but even dragonfly nymphs get stuck in the algae strands and starve.

Several times I've seen a frog trapped under the algae.

I would be staring at the pond when the greeen muck by my feet would suddenly leap into the air and then subside.

It looked as thought it had been jabbed from underneath by a broom handle.

Then it would leap again, somewhere else, a jumping green flare, abxolutely silently----this is a very disconcerting way to spend an evening.

The frog would always find an open place at last, and break successfully onto the top of the heap, trailing long green slime from its back, and emitting a hollow sound like a pipe thrown into a cavern.

Tonight I walked around the pond scaring frogs;  a couple of them jamped off, going, in effect, eek, and most grunted, and the pond was still.

But one big frog, bright green like a poster-paint frog, didn't jump, so I waved my arm and stamped to scare it, and it jumped suddenly, and I jumped, and then everything in the pond jumped, and I laughed and laughed.

 

 

 

There is a muscular evergy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual evergy of wind.

On a sunny day, sun's energy on a square acre of land or pond can equal 4500 horsepower.

These  "horses"  heave in every direction, like slaves building pyramids, and fashion, from the bottom up, a new and sturdy world.

The pond is popping with life.

Midges are swarming over the center, and the edges are clotted with the jellied egg masses of snails.

One spring I saw a snapping turtle lumber form the pond to lay her eggs.

Now a green heron picks around in the pond weed and bladderwort;  two muskrats at the shallow end are stockpiling cattails.

Diatoms, which are algae that look under a microscope like crystals, multiply so fast you can practically watch a submersed green leaf transform into a brown fuzz.

In the plankton, single-cell algae, screw fungi, bacteria, and water mold abound.

Insect larvae and nymphs carry on their eating business everywhere in the pond.

Stillwater caddises, alderfly larvae, and damselfly and dragonfly nymphs stalk on the bottom debris;  mayfly nymphs hide in the weeds, mosquito larvae wriggle near the surface, and red-railed maggots stick their breating tubes up from between decayed leaves along the shore.

Also at the pond's muddy edges it is easy to see the tiny red tubifex worms and blood worms; the convulsive jerking of hundreds and hundreds together catches my eye.

Once, when the pond was younger and the algae had not yet taken over, I saw an amazing creature.

At first all I saw was a slender motion.

Then I saw that it was a wormlike creature swimming in the water withe a strong, whiplike thrust, and it was two feet long.

It was also slender as a thread.

It looked like an inked line someone was nervously drawing over and over.

Later I learned that it was a horsehair worm.

The larvae of hoursehair worms live as parasiteds in land insects;  the aquatic adults can get to be a yard long.

I don't know how it gets from the insect to the pond, or from the pond to the insect, for that matter, or why on earth it needs such an extreme shape.

If the one I saw had been so much as an inch longer or a shave thinner, I doubt if I would ever have come back.

The plankton bloom is what interests me.

The plankton animals are all those microscopic drifting animals that so staggeringly outnumber us.

In the spring they are said to "bloom," like so many poppies.

There may be five times as many of these teeming creatures in spring as in summer.

Among them are the protozoans---amoebae and other rhizopods, and millions of various flagellates and ciliates;  gelatinous moss animalcules or byrozoans;  rotifers---which wheel around either free or in colonies;  and all the diverse crustacean minutiae---copepods, ostracods, and cladocerans like the abundant daphnias.

All these drifting animals multiply in sundry bizarre fashions, eat tiny plants or each other, die, and drop to the pond's bottom.

Many of them have quite refined means of locomotion---they whirl, paddle, swim, slog, whip, and sinuate---but since they are so small, they are no match against even the least current in the water.

Even such a sober limnologist as Rober E.  Coker characterizes the movement of plankton as " milling around."

A cup of duci-pond water looks like a seething broth.

If I carry the cup home and let the sludge settle, the animalcules sort themselves out, and I can concentrate them further by dividing them into two clear glass bowls.

One bowl I paint all black except for a single circle where the light shines through;  I leave the other bowl clear except for a single black circle against the light.

Given a few hours, the light-loving creatures make their feeble way to the clear circle, and shade-loving creatures to the black.

Then, if I want to, I can harvest them with a pipette and examine them under a microscope.

There they loom and disappear as I fiddle with the focus.

I run the eyepiece around until I am seeing the drop magnified three hundred times, and I squint at the little rotifer called monostyla.

It zooms around excitedly, crashing into strands of spirogyra alga or zipping around the frayed edge of a clump of debris.

The creature is a flattened oval;  at its  "head"  is a circular fringe of whirling cilia, and at its  "tail"  a single long spike, so that it is shaped roughly like a horseshoe crab.

But it is so incredibly small, as multicelled animals go, that it is translucent, even transparent, and I have a hard time telling if it is above or beneath a similarly transparent alga.

Two monostyla drive into fiew from opposite directions;  they meet, bump, reverse, part.

I keep thinking that if I listen closely I will hear the high whine of tiny engines.

As their drop heats from the light on the mirror, the rorifers skitter more and more franticlly;  as it dries, they pale and begin to stagger, and at last can muster only a halting twitch.

Then I either wash the whole batch down the sink's drain, or in a rush of sentiment walk out to the road by starlight and dump them in a puddly.

Tinker Creek where I live is too fast and rough for most of them.

I don't really look forward to these microscopic forays:  I have been almost knocked off my kitchen chair on several occasions when, as I was following with strained eyes the tiny career of a monostyla rotifer, an enormous red roundworm whipped into the scene, blocking everything, and writhing in huge, flapping convulsions that seemed to sweep my face and fill the kitchen.

I do it as a moral exercise;  the microscope at my forehead is a kind of phylactery, a constant reminder of the facts of creation that I would just as soon forget.

You can buy your child a microscope and say grandly,  "Look, child, at the Jungle in a Little Drop."

The boy looks, plays around with pond water and bread mold and onion sprouts for a month or two, and then starts shooting baskets or racing cars, leaving the microscope on the basement table staring fixedly at its own mirror forever---and you say he's growing up.

But in the puddld or pond, in the city reservoir, ditch, or Atlantic Ocean, the rotifers still spin and munch, the daphnia still filter and are filtered, and the copepods still swarm hanging with clusters of eggs.

These are real creatures with real organs leading real lives, one by one.

I can't pretend they're not there.

If I have life, sense, evergy, will, so does a rotifer.

The monostyla goes to the dark spot on the bowl:  To which circle am I heading?

I can move around right smartly in a calm;  but in a real wind, in a change of weather, in a riptide, am I really moving, or am I  "milling around"?

I was created from a clot and set in proud, free motion:  so were they.

So was this rotifer created, this monostyla with its body like a lightbulb in which pale organs hang in loops;  so was this paramecium created, with a thousand propulsive hairs jerking in unison, whipping it from here to there across a drop and back.

Ad majorem Dei gloriam?

Somewher, and I can't find where, I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest,  "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?"  "No,"  said the priest,  "nor if you did not know."   "Then why,"  asked the Eskimo earnestly,  "did you tell me?" 

If I did not know about the rotifers and paramecia, and all the bloom of plankton clogging the dying pond, fine;  but since I"ve seen it I must somehow deal with it, take it into account.

"Never lose a holy curiosity,"  Einstein said;  and so I lift my microscope down from the shelf, spread a drop of duck pond on a glass slide, and try to look spring in the eye.