Entry 5: Ecotones
Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve, March 2015.
An ecotone is a transitional space between two biological communities: a borderland containing characteristics of each ecosystem, a place of stress and abundance. If you’ve ever stood on the shore of a lake, water lapping at your feet, or climbed from a forest onto the rocky slopes atop a mountain, you’ve experienced an ecotone.
I first learned the word back in 2015, when I accompanied a group of college students on an environmental service trip to the Nature Conservancy’s Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve in the Florida Panhandle. There, wiregrass, prickly pear cacti, and longleaf pines cover the rolling sandhills. But there are places where the ground drops away, where springs seeping from underground waterways have carved out deep, narrow gullies. These “steephead ravines” served as refuges for plants and animals during the last ice age, and even after the glaciers retreated, some of those species stayed. Today, mountain laurel, beech trees, and white oaks grow amidst cypress trees and loblolly pines in these strange and biologically rich gullies. I remember standing at the lip of a steephead ravine, my face cooled by damp air rising from its depths, my back scorched by the afternoon sun, and my tongue enchanted by the word it had just uttered for the first time: Ecotone.
Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve, March 2015
Since then, I’ve come to appreciate the word’s value as a metaphor. Heck, my forthcoming book of essays, In Between Places, is about experiences of being physically and existentially in between places. It’s a book about literal and figurative wildernesses—about shifting identities and allegiances, about the transitional space between one marriage and another, about my cautious journey into motherhood. It’s a book about ecotones.
And today, I find myself in another ecotone: After 20 months living in a cabin overlooking a farm valley in Appalachian Ohio, my family is resettling into our Harrisonburg, Virginia house—a midcentury ranch with high speed internet and a dishwasher in a neighborhood with paved streets and landscaped lawns and fences marking property lines. Instead of focusing on the stresses of this transition, I’m trying to focus on its magic. For our first few weeks here, our refrigerator held both the bounty we had brought from Ohio (fresh tomatoes, green beans, and homemade pickles from my in-laws’ gardens) alongside takeout boxes from my favorite Indian restaurant and exotic fare from the local international foods store. The love of our Ohio family and friends still feels near as we exchange texts with photos, jokes, and quips about the local news. It mingles with the warmth of seeing old friends and colleagues and the joy of running into students I taught last year but had never met in person.
There’s this too: I am approaching the halfway point of my second pregnancy. My body is an ecotone—the territory where my daughter is transitioning from nonbeing to personhood. Her cells are swirling in my blood. The food I consume is feeding her. I’m not going to lie: I don’t love being pregnant. I could do without the exhaustion, the nausea, the chaffing, the sciatica, the ever-intensifying feeling that my guts are being shoved into my chest cavity by an alien invader. But I can’t deny that this liminal state inspires awe—the same combination of wonder and dread I felt peering into Yosemite Valley from the top of Half Dome, the same combination of strangeness and connection I felt dropping from the Mojave Desert into the Sonoran Desert in Joshua Tree National Park.
Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, June 2013.
