As a hunter, I occasionally feel that I’ve got the market cornered on being in touch with nature. You know how this works. You start seeing pieces of the puzzle, how every thing that moves or calls in the woods sends its own particularly shaped ripple. You’d know it was October even if you didn’t have a calendar when you see the bucks that ran together in late summer traveling solo and with a shoulder-rolling gait. You watch a deer that doesn’t know you’re inside its bubble as it swivels its ears like radar dishes to scan what it can’t yet see, and you realize how many different levels of awareness there are. You start to feel like you know something other people don’t.  And you do. But, as I’m discovering, there are other ways to put your finger on nature’s beating heart. 

I spent the better part of a very hot day last week trying to keep up with John Parrish, a National Park Service vegetative naturalist documenting rare plants on a four-mile stretch of the Potomac. He’s about 6’ 3” and 160 lbs. if he happens to have a brick in his pocket. Fiftyish, but looks younger. His parents took him camping a lot as a kid. His father ran a struggling little hardware store in a Maryland suburban strip mall at a time when mom-and-pops were being neutron-bombed by the new wave of superstores. John tried college, but it wasn’t a good fit and he soon left. He cleaned pools and did other odd jobs while educating himself about plants, got on with the Park Service, and as one local naturalist told me, is considered “sort of a genius” by his peers. 

In the midst of a six-hour scramble on a 90-degree day, we tabulated about ten rare plants along the river. Some, like riverbank goldenrod, seldom grow this far south. Another, freshwater cordgrass, is more commonly found only in prairie wetlands. But the sand and gravel left by the Potomac along its banks mimics the glacier- and wind-driven soils of the prairie’s wet places, and this is one of the few places for many miles it can be found.

Parrish clearly vibrates at a different frequency than most people. He carried his water in glass honey jars inside a shoulder bag. His lunch consisted of dry Shredded Wheat cereal, an avocado, and some crackers. While I was soaked in sweat in clothing designed for tropical flats fishing, his body seemed to stay bone dry despite jeans and a long-sleeved medium-weight cotton shirt.

But there was one moment when it felt like we were on exactly the same page. Poking around in some tall grass next to the water for a rare sedge, he suddenly stopped and said, “Look at that!” It was a trickle of water somehow running against the current as it began to fill a series of separate little potholes along the riverbank. It was just ahead of my feet, a dark rivulet moving like a snake, hunting its way through a series of mud craters, from one to another to another. What we were seeing was the beginning of the new tide, the moon’s power made tangible 100 miles from the Chesapeake Bay.  It was subtle until you focused on it, and then it was huge, overwhelming. It was like being inside the deer’s bubble, watching the scout sent ahead of the ocean to prepare the way for its unstoppable advance.

A pretty cool moment on a sweltering summer day.