Wolverines and the Poetics of Reverie

I think that Magda's earlier post has established that whatever the creature Christoph saw on his now infamous 1 am excursion was, it was probably not a wolverine.  The controversy and teasing that his disclosure of this sighting provoked, however, brings to mind an aspect of the human encounter with nature that we have not discussed at much length in class, but that I think is very relevant to our discussions of what is at stake in our imaginings of the natural world: the big fish tale.

In order to avoid the tall-tale connotations that "the big fish tale" might conjure, I'll explain what I mean through personal anecdote.  I was an avid fisherman as a teenager, and I hooked something huge one day while fishing off my boat on Lake Wawasee.  I battled that fish for a long time, long enough to get it pretty close to the boat, and close enough that it resorted to jumping out of the water in its struggles, since the line was too short for it to get far by diving.  Over the course of my encounter with that fish, I got several glimpses of its length, shape, and coloration, but it broke the line before I could net it.  Still, I was sure it was a gar.  I was told later that the chances of hooking a gar in deep, open water were very slim.  They prefer the warm, calm water back in the channels and marshes.  I was told later that it must have been a northern pike, and while I was and remain convinced of the explanation, after two decades I still have to correct myself when I recollect that encounter in my imagination.  This exciting  glimpse of a creature that takes on a life of its own in the imagination is what I mean by the "big fish tale."

Christoph's wolverine and my gar (and I imagine that nearly everybody in the class has a similarly magical though implausible encounter in their imaginations) are interesting artifacts of fleeting encounters with the natural world that are more interesting in some ways than the encounters that we can verify.  They seem to live longer in our imaginations; the mind won't let go of that first impression of the encounter despite convincing counter-evidence.  It becomes a poetic image, "independent of causality," as Bachelard might say.  

 Bary Lopez writes in Arctic Dreams about the necessity of embellishing non-fiction in order to achieve the effect of being there in person; fictional flourishes, for Lopez, function to make the reading experience more real.  Buell's second wave look at works of literature as environments seems to do the same thing.  John Tallmadge set out into the Sierras to prove that Clarence King exaggerated (did he have something else to prove as well?) and came back with an appreciation for the difference between what a landscape looks like and how it is experienced.  I wonder if the imaginary encounter in reality, the big fish tale that was unreal when it actually happened, might be a phenomena worth exploring in ecocriticism.  Bachelardian phenomenology might be the most productive way of examining those fleeting, misinterpreted-yet-magical encounters with the natural world, but I wonder if the phenomena might also have interesting theoretical ramifications for the ecocritical texts we've read. 

Thoughts?