I can't count the number of times I've been on this country road. I'm familiar with its rolling hills in all seasons, from before dawn to after midnight. I know the bends in the river, the decaying barns, the grain terminals; I can predict where the deer will jump out, where the pheasants will strut, where the hawks will watch for prey. But one night my spouse and I saw something new to us. It was dusk, with wind-driven snow scouring the countryside, when we both spied a red-tailed hawk just sitting in a field a few yards from the road. Now it made sense on such an evening that hawks wouldn't soar the skies seeking dinner: I would have expected any self-respecting bird to find a protected spot to huddle, head tucked under its wing, waiting out the storm. But this hawk contentedly rested out in the open as though it were a cow chewing its cud on a summer day. We looked at each other, amazed. "Have you ever seen a hawk just sitting on the ground before?" Yet two miles down the road we saw another hawk sitting on the ground just like the first, and then another. In a thirty-mile stretch, we probably saw a dozen red-tails resting on the snow-covered ground. The next time I drove the road, on a pleasant spring morning, I kept my eyes open to see if the sitting hawks had been a one-time phenomenon that winter evening. They weren't. While most hawks were soaring or perched on telephone poles, I caught sight of two just sitting in a wheat field. Later on a rainy day I saw the same. Before long I saw field-sitting hawks day and night, in every season. I had learned to see the fields anew, with a wonderful reward.
In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes about the act of seeing:
Specialists can find the most incredibly well-hidden things. A book I read when I was young recommended an easy way to find caterpillars to rear: you simply find some fresh caterpillar droppings, look up, and there's your caterpillar. More recently an author advised me to set my mind at ease about those piles of cut stems on the ground in grassy fields. Field mice make them; they cut the grass down by degrees to reach the seeds at the head. . . . The mouse severs the bottom again and again, the stem keeps dropping an inch at a time, and finally the head is low enough for the mouse to reach the seeds. Meanwhile, the mouse is positively littering the field with its little piles of cut stems into which, presumably, the author of the books is constantly stumbling. . . .
The lover can see, and the knowledgeable. I visited an aunt and uncle at a quarter-horse ranch in Cody, Wyoming. I couldn't do much of anything useful, but I could, I thought, draw. So, as we all sat around the kitchen table after supper, I produced a sheet of paper and drew a horse. "That's one lame horse," my aunt volunteered. The rest of the family joined in: "Only place to saddle that one is his neck"; "Looks like we better shoot the poor thing, on account of those terrible growths." Meekly, I slid the pencil and paper down the table. Everyone in that family, including my three young cousins, could draw a horse. Beautifully. When the paper came back it looked as though five shining, real quarter horses had been corralled by mistake with a papier-mâché moose; the real horses seemed to gaze at the monster with a steady, puzzled air. I stay away from horses now, but I can do a creditable goldfish. The point is that I just don't know what the lover knows; I just can't see the artificial obvious that those in the know construct.
I've been privileged over the past two weeks to work with a small group of CLEO scholars. As our group works together to read, summarize, and comprehend cases, all of us are learning to see anew. Reading legal cases, the students are learning to see a text in a whole new way. Seemingly trifling words take on a new significance, like the brownish and blackish spots on leaves that seem like just so much direct but which actually signify a caterpillar above. Just as it's the rare person who can recognize "frass" (who knew there was a special name for caterpillar poop?) without the guidance of a more knowledgeable other, it's the rare reader who can comprehend that common words like "intent" are used in an entirely new way. Even apart from dealing with torts concepts, wrestling for the first time with the categories lawyers use when summarizing ("briefing") a case (such as issue, rule, reasoning, and holding) is akin to trying to ride a quarter horse when your total prior familiarity with the genus equus comes from graphic novels. The students aren't the only ones grappling with new ideas and vocabulary: while I am, in Annie Dillard's words, "the knowledgeable" and perhaps "the lover" in the law, I struggle with concepts such as sociocultural theory, materializing, and concept-based instruction, all of which are likely second nature to anyone who has earned an education degree in the past two decades. In order for me to see what is painfully obvious to specialists in this field, I too need assistance to learn to read and think in a new way, to see familiar territory in a new light. (Nancy Luebbert)
