Quotes by Ann Zwinger
"Looking out over the pure sweep of seamless desert, I am surprised to realize that the easy landscapes stifle me - closed walls of forests, ceilings of boughs, neat-trimmed lawns, and ruffled curtains of trees hide the soft horizons. I prefer the absences and the big empties, where wind ricochets from sand grain to mountain. I prefer the crystalline dryness and the unadulterated sky strewn from horizon to horizon with stars. I prefer the raw edges and the unfinished hems of the desert landscape.
Desert is where I want to be when there are no more questions to ask."
- from the Mysterious Lands: An Award-Winning Naturalist Explores the Four Great Deserts of the Southwest
"My cultural belief that fires are one of the evils of nature has required some massive rethinking on my part to discard, in order to accept that fire has always been a natural part of certain of the North American biomes, even a necessary part. The burning of the prairies fertilized and kept the tall grasses vigorous. The Indians who lived near the palm oases - and each oasis had its own group - often fired them to promote new growth. Plant and animal populations are adjusted to fire. Man is not, and has contrived to remove fire as much as possible from the ecosystem, frequently to its detriment.
But before there were careless campers there were, and still are, careless storms with careless lightning. Nature has its own cadence, in which there is little tolerance for houses built in floodplains or flammable chaparral, little consideration for cities built on fault zones, or irrigation works that turn the desert green. Nature acts without calling in a consultant or submitting an environmental impact statement."
- from The Mysterious Lands: An Award-Winning Naturalist Explores the Four Great Deserts of the Southwest.
"The quiet going of the river permeates the beginning, tentative night sounds; when fading light limits vision, small sounds become magnified, ears become more sensitive. During the day I do not hear the river as much because I am absorbed in the visual - the slotted reflections, the spinning vortices, light on the cliffs, the cast of new leaves and the hues of early flowers. Now, in the dusk, the river muses, as if to itself. The fire dies down and out. The wrens sleep. I fall asleep listening to moonlight and the old cottonwoods leafing out."
- from Run, River, Run: A Naturalist's Journey Down One of the Great Rivers of the American West
(This book received the John Burroughs Memorial Association Gold Medal for a distinguished contribution in natural history and the Friends of American Writers Award for non-fiction.)
"Looking out over the pure sweep of seamless desert, I am surprised to realize that the easy landscapes stifle me - closed walls of forests, ceilings of boughs, neat-trimmed lawns, and ruffled curtains of trees hide the soft horizons. I prefer the absences and the big empties, where wind ricochets from sand grain to mountain. I prefer the crystalline dryness and the unadulterated sky strewn from horizon to horizon with stars. I prefer the raw edges and the unfinished hems of the desert landscape.
Desert is where I want to be when there are no more questions to ask."
- from the Mysterious Lands: An Award-Winning Naturalist Explores the Four Great Deserts of the Southwest
"My cultural belief that fires are one of the evils of nature has required some massive rethinking on my part to discard, in order to accept that fire has always been a natural part of certain of the North American biomes, even a necessary part. The burning of the prairies fertilized and kept the tall grasses vigorous. The Indians who lived near the palm oases - and each oasis had its own group - often fired them to promote new growth. Plant and animal populations are adjusted to fire. Man is not, and has contrived to remove fire as much as possible from the ecosystem, frequently to its detriment.
But before there were careless campers there were, and still are, careless storms with careless lightning. Nature has its own cadence, in which there is little tolerance for houses built in floodplains or flammable chaparral, little consideration for cities built on fault zones, or irrigation works that turn the desert green. Nature acts without calling in a consultant or submitting an environmental impact statement."
- from The Mysterious Lands: An Award-Winning Naturalist Explores the Four Great Deserts of the Southwest.
"The quiet going of the river permeates the beginning, tentative night sounds; when fading light limits vision, small sounds become magnified, ears become more sensitive. During the day I do not hear the river as much because I am absorbed in the visual - the slotted reflections, the spinning vortices, light on the cliffs, the cast of new leaves and the hues of early flowers. Now, in the dusk, the river muses, as if to itself. The fire dies down and out. The wrens sleep. I fall asleep listening to moonlight and the old cottonwoods leafing out."
- from Run, River, Run: A Naturalist's Journey Down One of the Great Rivers of the American West
(This book received the John Burroughs Memorial Association Gold Medal for a distinguished contribution in natural history and the Friends of American Writers Award for non-fiction.)
I pace the shallow sea, walking the time between, reflecting on the type of fossil I'd like to be. I guess I'd like my bones to be replaced by some vivid chert, a red ulna or radius, or maybe preserved as the track of some lug-soled creature locked in the sandstone - how did it walk, what did it eat, and did it love sunshine?
"In spite of this, after walking there for days, coming home bug-bitten, shins bruised, nose peeling, feet and hands swollen, I feel ablaze with life. I suspect that the canyons give me an intensified sense of living partly because I not only face the basics of living and survival, but carry them on my back. And in my head. And this intense personal responsibility gives me an overwhelming sense of freedom I know nowhere else."
- from Wind in the Rock: The Canyonlands of Southeastern Utah
- from Wind in the Rock: The Canyonlands of Southeastern Utah
"It is enough to know why I came here: to breathe in the solitude and the silence."
- from Wind in the Rock: The Canyonlands of Southeastern Utah
- from Wind in the Rock: The Canyonlands of Southeastern Utah
"I am amazed to discover how quickly reactions have become ingrained, recognition of rock and response the same, mind and arm and canoe one movement, the feel of current penetrating through paddle and spine. And there is the pleasure of a good canoe that responds, that, given its head and managed properly, seems to go of itself and fly over the water. It is heady business, to anticipate the marginal inch necessary to miss a rock, to feel rather than to think of how to go with the current, to feel that it is your understanding that locks the canoe in the river's running, but that it is pure river that guides you through, pure beautiful river."
- from Run, River, Run: A Naturalist's Journey Down One of the Great Rivers of the American West
- from Run, River, Run: A Naturalist's Journey Down One of the Great Rivers of the American West
From The Art of Wandering in The Nearsighted Naturalist
"Wandering is an inexpensive ticket to another level of being..."
". . . wandering is as much in the slant of attitude as in the shift of the metatarsal."
"In wandering there is great reassurance, for it is then one fits into the continuum of a larger world, a world for which for the naturalist has no beginning and no end. We all need to know that there is purpose and worth and reason in living. A naturalist finds these in the sibilant logic of saltating sand grains spinning into a dune, in the spoked spine patterns of a cactus, and the hexagonal mud cracks in a dry arroyo, in bee-beset willow catkins, and in clouds that curtain a western summer sky with virga."
"Nature, time, and patience are the three best physicians."
"Wandering is an inexpensive ticket to another level of being..."
". . . wandering is as much in the slant of attitude as in the shift of the metatarsal."
"In wandering there is great reassurance, for it is then one fits into the continuum of a larger world, a world for which for the naturalist has no beginning and no end. We all need to know that there is purpose and worth and reason in living. A naturalist finds these in the sibilant logic of saltating sand grains spinning into a dune, in the spoked spine patterns of a cactus, and the hexagonal mud cracks in a dry arroyo, in bee-beset willow catkins, and in clouds that curtain a western summer sky with virga."
"Nature, time, and patience are the three best physicians."
"This afternoon there comes a gentleness I do not often feel on this big river because there is so much to learn, so many puzzles that gnaw, so many complex layerings, so many angles and turnings, so many thickets and so many thorns, and always, always the pressure of time, schedules to be maintained, miles to be made, promises to keep. Never enough time. No centuries to wander around in, no millennia to cross, no epochs to explore.
This afternoon is the sum total of years of quiet afternoons, at times and places completely different, but for some peculiar, stumbling glitch of time, today sums them all up in a new way, with words that ring like anthems: Kaibab, Muav, Redwall, Coconino, Hermit, Bright Angel, and always, the flowing color - Colorado."
- from Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon
"Often the "down there" encompasses contrasts between minute midge and pounding waterfall, between eternity in an ebony schist and the moment in the pulsing vein in a dragonfly's wing, a delicate shard lost in an immensity of landscape, all bound together by the time to observe, question, presume, enjoy, exaltate. The "down there" is bound up with care and solicitude, sunlight on scalloped ripples, loving life and accepting death, all tied to a magnificent, unforgiving, and irrevocable river, a river along which I wandered for a halcyon while, smelled the wet clay odor of the rapids, listened to the dawns, and tasted the sunsets.
Some of the things I know about the river are undefined, as amorphous as the inexplicable connection that seeps into my bones while leaning against a warming sandstone wall on an early spring afternoon, or the ominous rockfalls on a winter night giving notice of a canyon under construction, the ragged pound of a rapid that marches no known rhythm but has lodged in my head like an old familiar song, the sheer blooming, healthy joy of the river's refrain."
- Ann Zwinger's response after pondering the answer to a question from a woman standing on the south rim of the Grand Canyon who asked "is there anything down there?" - from Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon