By the Numbers
On a hot, oppressive day in the summer of 1988, an ecologist’s Chesapeake Bay retriever named Muddy made off with my socks and trotted to the end of a log that jutted into Little Howard Pond. The ecologist shouted at poor Muddy, ordering her to return along the tree trunk. But all that didn’t make much sense to Muddy, who argued in her doggy way that a swim was a much better thing to do. She whined and whimpered and looked back and forth between ecologist and pond. Finally, she chose pond, and with a splash, doomed me to a day of counting trees in soggy socks.
I lowered my head and looked out across Little Howard, a big brown puddle that lies to the south of the Adirondacks’ Dix Range. An arc of birch and maple ringed the pond—spindly, sad trees, many of which I would have to count in the afternoon ahead. Muddy had had the right idea. What was the point of this endless tabulation of nature? I’d been counting things for so long that all the data points blurred together into a number cloud of random digits. True enough, Muddy. Might as well jump in a lake.
I never
