Cattail Marsh

by Jonathan Shipley

I walk by them at the marsh without a thought, until I stopped one day recently to consider them. They’re everywhere; abundant enough to pay them no mind. It’s like seeing a bird in your front yard tree, sighing, “It’s just another robin.” No. It’s not just another robin. It is a robin. Have you seen its beautiful colors? Its shape? Its form? Its varied songs? It deserves attention. Praise.

So, I stopped. I took time to notice the cattail. “Come forth into the light of things,” poet William Wordsworth wrote. “Let nature be your teacher.” Perhaps he was in Grasmere observing cattails before jotting those lines down at his beloved Dove Cottage.

Let me learn something, then, about cattails. I sit on a bench on the trail. I pull out my phone. I search Google. Robins flit and dart nearby.

Cattails are possibly the most versatile wild herbage—in terms of continuous human use—of all time. Evidence of cattail flour has been found by archaeologists on grinding stones from 20,000 years before the known dawn of agriculture. Typhaceae is the plant family for cattails, from the Greek typhe meaning “a cat’s tail.” It does resemble that, a bit. The aquatic plants in this family are variously also nicknamed corn dog grass, swamp sausage, and, in the UK especially, bulrush (though cattails are not actually a rush). The Wemba Wemba people of Australia call their local cattail species gambang, which has been anglicized to the common name cumbungi.

Georgia O’Keeffe, the celebrated painter born and raised not far from Cherokee Marsh in Sun Prairie, once lamented, “Nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small and takes time. We haven’t time—and to see takes time, like having a friend takes time.”

It’s not just another robin. Another cattail. It is a friend.

We haven’t time. I have a timer on my phone set. Ticking down. I must get to work soon after my walk at the marsh. But there is time yet. The sun is rising. The cattails waft in the warm breeze.

There are paintings of Jesus holding a cattail while heading to his execution. Cattails are mentioned in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In Egyptian tomb art, marsh plants symbolize chaos tamed by order.

The chaos in my life slows down at the marsh. If I focus on these cattails, the chaos can all but disappear. “He who can no longer pause to wonder, and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.” So wrote Albert Einstein.

I open my eyes a bit wider. I turn the alarm off on my phone. Work can wait. And, what of work? Poet Mary Oliver wrote, “To pay attention, that is our endless and proper work.” I imagine her in Provincetown, perhaps chastising herself for not giving a chickadee its due.

A Washoe legend tells that cattail seeds turned into people, the ancestors of the Washoe, Paiute, and Minok tribes. Pueblo tribes used cattails during ceremonial rain dances. Navajo people used them for protection from lightning. The Mexican Kickapoo collected them as gifts to local water serpents.

The Ho-Chunk people, who have considered the cattail far longer than I, used cattail fluff for infant cradleboard padding and continue the practice of weaving mats from cattail leaves.

Ho-Chunk residents along the upper Yahara surely harvested from the very cattail marsh I gaze at: shoots in the spring to eat like asparagus; pollen and roots in the summer made into flour for cakes and breads.

“To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe,” noted Marilyn von Savant. Perhaps she’s in Manhattan as I write this, acquiring wisdom from a pigeon with a French fry in its mouth.

I’m always in a hurry to get somewhere. Once I get there, I’m in a hurry to get somewhere else. Where am I supposed to be? I ask myself that all the time, knowing that where I’m supposed to be is where I am.

So, I stayed at the marsh a while longer. “Yes,” I tell myself, let me sit and see that sparrow in the reeds. Let me watch the cattails wave their hellos and goodbyes as they have done since time immemorial.

I put my phone in my pocket. There is no rush.