Back before the dot com age, the fastest way to vast riches (besides marrying an heirless aristocrat with a bad cough) was to land a piece of the spice trade. Pepper, in particular, was worth several times its weight in gold. Until relatively recently, most of it came from India’s Malabar region—and even in the 5th century it was so valuable that marauding Visigoths plaguing Rome demanded ransom in pepper. Pepper pulled Vasco da Gamma around the African horn, and pepper fuelled the first fires of mercantilism—if even only one of your ships came in with a cargo of the stuff, you were set up for generations. But in addition to opening doors onto new geographical and economic horizons—pepper gave us the first glimpse into microscopic aquatic communities. Back in the 17th century, an unassuming Dutchman named Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was investigating (as he thought) the secret of pepper’s unique flavour and heat, probably in hopes of finding some commercial advantage in distilling or concentrating its properties. Thinking there was some connection between its piquancy and the abrasive surface of the peppercorn itself, he soaked several corns in a pot of water to soften. And when he observed the broth with a very rudimentary microscope. . . . he saw little organisms zipping in and out of his field of vision. The water was alive with little somethings. “They were incredibly small, nay so small, in my sight, that I judged that even if 100 of these very wee animals lay stretched out one against the other, they could not reach to the length of a grain of coarse sand.” I imagine at that point he lost his interest in pepper per se and probably his interest in soup for lunch. Every subsequent liquid sample he observed housed similar animals in unimaginable numbers, obliviously carrying out their daily chores in their undisturbed universe.
Other early explorers had seen the miniature beauties of the microscopic world—and their astonishment is equally breathless, as if they had stumbled upon an ancient buried Louvre filled with unseen masterpieces that put to shame our own efforts at symmetry and beauty. Here’s John Wilkins, the bishop of Chester in the 1660s, enthusing over Robert Hooke’s engravings in his recently published Micrographia: “Whatever is Natural doth by [the microscope] appear, adorned with all imaginable Elegance and Beauty. There are such inimitable gildings and embroideries in the smallest seeds of Plants, but especially in the parts of Animals. In the head or eye of a small Fly: such accurate order and symmetry in the frame of the most minute creatures, a Lowse or a Mite, as no man were able to conceive without seeing them. Whereas the most curious works of Art, the most accurate engravings or embossments, seem such rude bungling deformed works as if they had been done with a Mattock or Trowel.”
What van Leeuwenhoek saw was a game changer—it meant that not only was pond and ditch water teeming with previously unseen creatures, so was our saliva, our milk, virtually every liquid he could sample. Far from static, water was absolutely vibrant. It was as if an entire parallel universe was living among us unseen and until now undetectable. Suddenly, in an afternoon, water was no longer merely a facilitator of life, but living. The world had shifted.
But not for long. It’s hardly the first indicator that we as a species have a collective version of ADD; wonder fades, and water is once again mundane, something to be managed, like tooth decay and public debt—and we lose when we see it primarily as a means to generate power or keep our cars shiny.
Naturally, everyone knows that each drop of the Willamette, the Mary’s, even that stuff in our gutters where the leaves collect too far back to reach is a virtual condo in a vast and intimately linked metropolis. Yet somehow those gorgeous little creatures whose very existence set Europe on fire are now relegated to 9th grade biology class where they excite first time visitors for a week or month before something else captures the attention. They’ve become mere footnotes, buried along with their enormous amorphous culture in pipes, and relegated to drainage ditches, garden hoses, and underground sewers. As a culture, we hate getting our feet muddy, or even wet. Who knows what price we pay for this.
Yet that unseen world is still magic. Just add water to whatever piece of land you can imagine and see what happens. When we bulldozed part of our field into a seasonal wetland, careful not to disturb the creek. The resulting pool, at its deepest around 5 feet in high water times, bends around an island, and captures overland flow from the rest of the fields surrounding us. Honestly, the whole area yearns to be a wetland—there is standing water everywhere. But the basin we sculpted offers water a proper chance to show what it can do. Popcorn flowers, dormant for years, bloom along the margins. Some birds brought cattails, others willow and alder and now a thicket curves along the berm, soft with catkins. This time of year, the pond becomes a concert hall. We have a vigorous red-wing blackbird section whose sonatas transport even casual listeners. And at dusk the frog chorus (those little Pacific Tree Frogs) starts—by the time all the performers are warmed up you start hearing overtones and harmonies. It’s loud even with the windows closed, but better with them open. Water music indeed. By late April, choreographers arrive: the strings of translucent eggs open, sending tadpoles out into the water plantain, and salamanders in the pennyroyal. Heron hunch in the shallows, brooding. The cast changes as summer comes down and the crown sparrows and swallows take over from the frogs. Before water built our opera house, all you could hear was traffic on Philomath Boulevard nearly a mile away.
Recently a team of researchers discovered large populations of juvenile fish in those shallow ditches and streams that flow around and across grass-seed fields.
A true Van Leeuweenhoek moment—fish living in little streams that flood across low lying fields. Seems they’ve been there all along. This valley tries hard to revert to type, and repays even token visiting rights generously: keep the ditches and creek clear, leave a few trees over the edges, and everyone is happier. Even better, reintroduce water to those riparian lands long deprived (through benign or active neglect) and watch the transformation. You don’t need a ship full of pepper to grow rich these days. Just add water.
