英语佳文共赏-Alaska Denali National Park

 

 

Gaze across a broad expansion of Denali National Park and Preserve, and you will see a living tapestry. Tundra carpeted with tiny wildflower. Braided rivers. Thin-soiled slopes embroidered with the tracks of sheep and caribou.

 

Nature’s loom never rests. Each day and every passing hour, new designs emerge, even while underlying patterns remain unchanged. Rain may freshen and brighten the colors of exposed rocks. A bear may appear, its golden hairs ruffled by the breeze. The next moment there may be only woolen fog, softening the distant, rolling hills.

 

What makes this living tapestry most remarkable is that it is intact.

 

“An ecosystem is a tapestry of species and relationships,” observes nature writer David Quammen in The song of the Dodo.  “Chop away a section, isolate that section, and there arises the problem of unraveling.”

 

In Denali, the weave holds. Ripening blueberries in the fall tundra provide feasts for grizzly bears and voles alike. The well-fed voles become food for wolves. Basic ecological patterns repeat undisturbed. 

 

 

The tundra is where Denali’s living tapestry seems most magical, a carpet of colors and textures that unroll as far as the eye can see.

 

But look far and you‘ll miss what is near and close: an amazing, miniature world of plants and lichens, clinging to the earth.

 

Like the taiga, the tundra must contend with a short growing season. It is even more exposed to abrasive, blasting winds and plants must root in thinner and rockier soil.

 

Delicate tundra plants grow together in low clumps or warmth-trapping mats. Tundra plants often have leaves that are waxy, to hold in scarce moisture, or are hairy, to provide a fur-like barrier that blocks out wind and cold.

 

Tundra can be moist or dry. Most tundra is brushy; what may look flat from a distance can be a nearly impenetrable, waist-high tangle of willow and birch. Dry tundra is low-lying but can still be spongy. Watch the spring step of a caribou crossing a distant ridge, and you can imagine how the tundra feels underfoot. Tundra plants make the most of the long summer daylight, as much as 20 hours out of every 24 in June, doing their best to grow during the three months in which they are not covered by snow.

 

Wildflowers appear to bloom quickly, erupting into color at summer’s peak. In fact, that floral burst comes after a long and patient wait. Many plants must grow for a decade or more before they can produce buds, and buds themselves may develop for several years before they open.

 

Surprisingly, in a realm this exposed, snow is not a foe but an ally; it helps to insulate tiny plants from subzero temperatures. Some evergreen plants can continue to photosynthesize—capture energy from the sun—even beneath the snow’s surface.

 

Growing in such adverse conditions, and at such slow rates, the tundra is incredibly fragile, each shrub and flower and lichen a delicate stitch in Denali’s tapestry.

 

 

A silt-laden stream flows and shifts, carving out a wide riverbed. A caribou sniffs, paws the ground, and hurries along its way. A winter wind blows across a ridge, exposing plants and lichen that hungry caribou relish. The three make an enchanted braid: water, wind, and caribou, all covered by a northern restlessness.

 

In Denali, everything is moving. Wind and water, flora and fauna, all seem to be engaged in a struggle to keep pace with  each other—and with the seasons, which have the most restless spirit of all.

 

The pikas gather grass all summer and dry it into hay. Fireweed flowers bloom and shrivel in a matter of weeks. Not long after it has arrived to nest, the arctic tern must prepare to migrate back to Antarctica, a round-trip of 25,000 miles.

 

“Seasons tend to blow open and shut like doors in the wind up here,” says driver-naturalist  Aaron Coons. Even in July, it’s easy to feel that winter is close at hand—as close as the perma-frost  a few inches below the soil, or as close as the permanent ice and snow shimmering on Mount McKinley’s flanks. New life bursts onto the landscape with urgency in late May as long daylight hours bathe Denali with warmer temperatures. Moose, caribou, sheep, and other animals that mated in fall and nurtured new life internally through icy months give birth to their young. The spindly legged creatures quickly struggle to their feet. They must be able to follow their mothers, to flee bears who have emerged hungry from winter dens and wolves who are feeding their own young.

 

Autumn may be the briefest season of all, but it passes in a blaze. Nature’s loom goes into overdrive. Seemingly overnight, the emerald-green tundra turns saffron, cinnamon, and russet. Fall is a time for mating. In one of the most dramatic rituals, bull moose challenge each other with large antlers they have grown all summer; they drop the antlers after the mating season.

 

A few months later, in midwinter, the sun will stay hidden for all but four hours each days, and temperatures may drop to forty or fifty degrees below zero. But even when it’s brutally cold outside, and some of Denali’s animals have migrated or are hibernating, others—such as the chickadee, the ptarmigan, and the wolf—will be awake and busy as ever, their restlessness necessary for survival.

 

 

Any braided river, with its soothing music and mirrored surface, is a good place for reflection. But the 

Toklat—home of a wolf pack, place of bear tracks, and of human memories, too—is an especially good place for quiet contemplation and inspiration.

 

Alaska may seem distant and pristine, but no place on Earth is exempt from the problems of air pollution, environmental contamination, and global warming that affect us all. Nor is the weaving of any natural place ever complete. From within the park, or from thousands of miles away, we all decide whether or not nature’s designs will become unraveled.

 

“National parks are paradoxical places,” writes Alaska author and former park ranger Kim Heacox. “They offer us freedom, yet require restraint. They are best explored deeply, yet lightly. They demand new sensibilities if we are to leave them as we found them, unimpaired….”

 

If we can leave our national parks unimpaired, they will be here for future generations—not only for our children, but also for our children’s children. Some day they, too, may ride the ribbon of Denali Park Road and see with their own eyes the intricate weave of true wilderness.

注：

Tapestry: 挂毯

Braided river:纵横交错的小河。braided原意是编的辫子，想象一下河流的样子。

abrasive , blasting wind: abrasive原意是指像沙纸一样毛糙的东西，既可以是名词也可以是形容词。这里用来形容风，刀割一样的风(？)。

Tundra/taiga：生长在Alaska寒冷地带的植被，生长期短。针叶状等植物矮矮地覆盖在薄薄的土壤上。

Wind and water, flora and fauna: 这两组词，以同一字母开头，起到押韵的效果。flora泛指植物，fauna泛指动物，两个词原是罗马神话里女神的名字。例： Many people visit the nature reserve to study its flora and fauna.

shrivel: 起皱，缩水，凋零，干枯； 同义词wither。例子：Presidential power, like a muscle, can strengthen if exercised effectively--or shrivel.

Let the oysters simmer over the fire, but do not allow them to come to a boil, as that will shrivel them.

Into overdrive: overdrive在此是noun， into a state of intense activity.

spindly: long or tall, thin, usually fragile; spindly veiny leg