Well, we didn’t find any beavers last night. It was beautiful weather but low tide and not the best time to see a wayward beaver. We did learn a few things, though. Like the fact that beavers might have used tunnels through the mud to get to the water at low tide. Night Herons wake up when the sun goes down. And wow, sitting at the Granger’s wharf bridge is a lot prettier than sitting at the footbridge. With no trains, homeless or traffic.
We’ll be back.
In the meantime, a reporter contacted me about doing a beaver retrospective 10 years after the story broke, and we have that arranged for Monday, so it’s like old times. And there’s another fine read about Henry Morgan:
Flat tails, beaver ponds and trout streams cited
There’s an old trout pond in Marquette County said to have years back held one monster fish, a true pole bender, a devilish delight caught just after sundown on a fluffy makeshift fly cast from a canoe.
At times, the culvert is clogged with sticks and other materials put there by working beaver intent on blocking the shallow, cold creek from flowing — from singing as it tumbles downstream over the black rocks.
These beavers continue their stick, log and mud works a good deal more than a century after the death of Lewis Henry Morgan, the namesake of the creek, the pond, the land around them and a nearby residential location.
His work sought evidence that all humankind descended from a single source, determined that family and social institutional structures develop following specific patterns and viewed kinship relationships as a foundation of society.
Morgan suggested matrilineal clans, rather than families headed by a patriarch, were the earliest human domestic foundations.
Well, duh. Just look at the beavers.
In pursuit of Michigan’s beautiful brook trout, Morgan became interested in the activities of beavers. He studied them intently for several years before producing his captivating 1868 natural history volume, “The American Beaver and His Works,” a book still available in reprint.
Irene Cheng, in a 2006 piece in Cabinet Magazine, said compared to Charles Darwin’s precise bees, with their mathematically perfect hives, Morgan’s beavers appeared “downright brute-like and their dams primitive.”
“Yet what Morgan admired about the beavers’ works was not the final form so much as the process of reasoning that allowed the animal architect to adapt its constructions intelligently,” Cheng wrote. “Unlike the bees, Morgan’s mutes built not out of base need, or driven by a ‘struggle for existence,’ but to further their own well-being and happiness. He believed that the beaver had a fundamental awareness of its own creation.”
Morgan wrote, “When a beaver stands for a moment and looks upon his work, evidently to see whether it is right, and whether anything else is needed, he shows himself capable of holding his thoughts before his beaver mind; in other words, he is conscious of his own mental processes.”
Well, I have watched enough beavers building a dam over years to know, like Enos Mills said himself, that not EVERY beaver thinks about his creation. Just like with people, there’s wit, and there’s half-wit. Some just place sticks or mud any old where and some never seem to learn from their mistakes. But SOME have a vision of how it should look. Like our father beaver who would patiently move sticks to better homes after the children put them in silly places. Or our tule artist Reed who refused to place logs on his dam at all and moved them OFF even when the patriarch put them on, preferring instead to weave his fortune with cattails.
Some beavers are listening to an inner beaver voice, and some are just dancing in the moonlight.
