On Lamprey Bridge
“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation.”
This is no weather for work, no weather at all. The heat would try any flesh; it tries the machinery too. Shears, trimmers, and chainsaws, all of them lie unmanned, abandoned apparently, along the trailside, before the bridge, “a regionally crucial project”, so the interpretive signage says, “in the restoration of our waterways.” The actual lampreys, small fry, are scarce, not to be seen (especially at midday) in this section of stream, though it’s been rerouted for their benefit, so they can breed, can spawn, can die in the shallows here, suck the blood, gnaw the gills, as they do, of salmon and other fish, rasping parasitizers, latch with their jawless suctioning mouths, so-called living fossils, diverged from us—from any other chordate—hundreds of millions of years ago, “a keystone species, with a vital role to play,” despite all that grisly business. “These ancient organisms…” the signage goes on to say, “…a critical food source for…” “…unlike their invasive cousins,” an so on. The lampreys spawn and they breed, supposedly, in this very section of creek, rerouted and regraded at great expense. For the curious, a project budget is available for consultation online.
Meanwhile, a restoration crew rests in the shade of their pickup truck, bright orange hardhats upturned, like so many deshelled tortoises—, “reptiles and amphibians, also facing steep a decline worldwide…”. They drink from their canteens, wipe their brows, adopt all the other usual postures of laboring people at rest, since laborers are what they are, their effort (high) and their pay (low) commensurate to a laboring job. The works themselves are not much—superficially speaking—to look at: specifically, a narrow footbridge across a narrow creek. The water margin is dry and patchy, semi barren, having lately been pasture and then abandoned pasture, brambles cleared and uprooted provisionally, with small restorative tree plantings that wither under the heat: maple and alder, dogwood and elderberry, all presenting their desiccate leaves to the summer sun. In this water somewhere, narrow enough to jump over, the lampreys are supposed to swim. Nothing is to be seen at the moment but that narrow band, flowing sluggish, glassy beneath the sun, algal threads at play in the current. We pass by the truck with the restoration crew, who talk and luncheon silently. One of them points to other sky, faultless except for a slight haze from wildfires, to a raptor, to a pair of ospreys circling there, almost invisible in the blue. Circling for what purpose? Better to say unknown, perhaps feeding or breeding themselves, hard to tell. Our concerns are terrestrial, aquatic.
And here we come to it, the bridge of lampreys—a simple span or wood and iron, unprepossessing. That name, “The Bridge of Lampreys” might have better suited a chapter in a fantasy novel or a videogame, the site of some hostile ichthyoid encounter. But there is only the sun, which halts all activity but ours. The plural possessive is vague but adequate enough. We are speaking about the kingdom of life, you and I; the specifics don’t matter. We walk on two legs, we have these jaws—one each—to masticate our food, which, incidentally, consists of a few sun softened apples. Whatever the differences between us—our ability to pack for a long walk, for instance—these are all local cases, have nothing on gross anatomy. Our skin is dry, for instance, with hairy integument. Our mucus secreted locally, through orifices, and not over the whole of us. Our teeth—some in better condition than others—chew this mushed unpalatable fruit. To find some creature utterly different to us, we don’t have to look far but we do have to look closely, at this narrow stream, fringed by a few sad tree plantings, a pasture once, and see—well, probably not see—the lampreys swimming there. And we would ourselves, if they could see us, would look different, utterly alien, looking down at them. We share much more with the birds, though it’s in our power to destroy the both of them. We have degraded their home through various economical uses, made pasture of that old former pastureland, and then attempted—inconsistent, it’s true—to make the situation right through this or that program, allotted funds and labor pursuant to these projects . Meanwhile, the lampreys, these ancient little freaks, chew and rasp, spawn in the shallows, with only the dimmest intimation of us, strange ourselves, active at midday, voluntarily so.
