A Space Never Inhabited
Created: 2024-10-08 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-06-02 (09:02:00)Status: completed
2024-09-16: “think and write about a space you’ve never inhabited - something you’ve watched from afar (in awe, fear, envy, etcetera), but never engaged in.”
O. has not once trekked into the subalpine wetlands. Travelling to the west, you come to the mountain range on the border, the furthest northern extent of the alps, and that’s where the wetlands are, in the flatlands between the peaks. One way to reach them is to climb the spur past the reservoir. It’s a hard climb, but past that it’s a straight shot if you know the trails. She is fit enough, and trusts her wayfinding, but that’s not what is keeping her down in the lowlands.
Exploring the mountains she does know, she has become acquainted with their cycles and lifeworlds. She sees how scribblygums prefer the sunnier aspects and brittlegums the shadier. She can differentiate her grasses and sedges and rushes and heaths, knows the names for the orchids and peavines that appear at the end of winter, knows about the crimson slime mold that now and then reveals itself in the hollows of dead trees.
She doesn’t know a single thing about the wetlands, and that’s both enthralling and frightening. They’re remote. There are not many photos to go off. The ones she’s seen are of sunken wet heaths. Forests gather at the boundaries. Fogs descend to just a few metres above the moss and peat. She imagines it silent and cold even in midsummer, although that can’t be true. The same bushfires that swept choking ash into the city for weeks passed that way too, several years back.
Names for things that inhabit there: bog snowgrass, coral heath, sphagnum moss, tassel roperush. No idea how they all fit together. Their umwelten. Undescribed insects preyed on by undescribed amphibians. Evening crustacea. Saturated grasses and sedges and rushes and ferns conspiring to keep the forest at bay.
An entire ecology, in short, completely unknown to someone who still barely even knows her own lowland mountains. Remote and intimidating, but enthralling too, and she worries that if she does just once make the climb up into these sunken fastnesses, that realising she understands nothing of them and maybe doesn’t need to understand anything of them, she may just remain up there, and gradually and gratefully dissolve into her surroundings.
Endmatter
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