by Kirk Carter Mona
“Can I use this sugar?”
I looked up from playing with my son as my mother-in-law poked her head through the dark, wood-framed doorway to the kitchen in my 1925-vintage home. She was holding a handmade stoneware container that had been a gift from my grandmother. It was the morning of Thanksgiving and she needed a large amount of sugar to sweeten the pumpkin pie.
I contemplated the container in her hands for a few seconds before I replied. It was a beautiful brown-glazed piece of pottery with a large cork stopper in the top. My grandmother bought it from her favorite potter Ken Olson back in the 1970s. It was roughly as old as I was. The potter had sculpted it with his caring hands and it had sat on my grandmother’s kitchen counter in her 100-plus-year-old farm house for years. It came into my hands when my grandmother finally moved out of her home this year and into an assisted living community where she no longer has to do her own cooking.
I wasn’t sure what its purpose was when I first saw it. It isn’t all that big—about the volume of a grapefruit—and it holds only about two cups. My mom explained it was to set next to the stove for when you need a pinch of the contents to add a little flavor to the cooking. I do most of the cooking around the house and I feel free to create or improvise recipes as I go, so the little family heirloom fits perfectly next to my stove where my mother-in-law found it.
The opening is just the right size to stick your fingers in and get a pinch. I think my mother-in-law was looking to add more than just a pinch of the white granular powder to her pie. I told her she was free to use as much as she wanted, but she might want to reconsider, as the container is used for holding salt.
This made me think of a dinner party at a friend’s house years ago when I was starting out in the field of interpretive natural history. No one at the dinner knew anyone else, so we went around and introduced ourselves saying what we do. I said I was an interpretive naturalist, and that seemed to immediately raise the ire of one of the guests. “Why do I need someone to interpret nature?” she asked. She seemed offended that I would dare to mediate her direct experience of the natural world. Of course, this isn’t always a fair description of what we do, but sometimes it is. We do mediate people’s experience of the resource and that can be an overwhelmingly positive thing. People mistake salt for sugar. People mistake oak trees for maples. People mistake poison ivy for toilet paper. People bring all kinds of misconceptions with them and, as a person who studies the natural world more than the average person, it’s my job to know as much as possible about the true nature of the resource so I can help the visitor more fully understand and appreciate it.
There is surely something to be said for direct, uninterpreted experience of a resource, but if that’s the only true way to experience nature, as the woman insisted, then we might as well throw away all the field guides. People cannot learn from them as they are interpretation. People can’t learn anything from their elders either, that’s interpretation. People really can’t even trust what their eyes show them, their ears tell them, or their fingers feel because, after all, their brains are merely interpreting the data. Most of all, they certainly cannot trust their sense of taste to tell them what is salty and what is sweet. Their tongue is merely interpreting flavor and getting in the way of their direct experience of the molecular structure of sodium or sucrose. This is clearly going too far, but so is thinking that there is no room for the interpretation of nature.
People are almost always free to experience nature or any other resource on their own terms. Sometimes they want our input, sometimes they do not. Sometimes, all we can do is sit back and wait for them to come to us wondering why their pumpkin pie tastes overwhelmingly salty.
Kirk Mona is the outreach coordinator for the Lee and Rose Warner Nature Center in Marine on St. Croix, Minnesota. He has been an NAI member since 1996. Kirk welcomes your comments at kmona@smm.org.
