The tulares are full of mystery and malaria. That is why we have meant to explore them and have never done so. It must be a happy mystery. So you would think to hear the redwinged blackbirds proclaim it clear March mornings. Flocks of them, and every flock a myriad, shelter in the dry whispering stems.  

As other posts have already mentioned, Austin is interested in the warped and ironic fecundity of the bed (or “border”) of the irrigating ditch. It is difficult to get to know the ditch itself— the history of its “appropriated waters” have been erased, and therefore, we will never know the irrigating ditch as it was “when it was a brook”— we will not ever live by the “morning and evening tones” of its “rising and falling” waters (123).   Instead, we get to know the ditch by proxy, in a way, via the ditch’s “border” (which, in turn, we cannot fully know but instead get a glimpse of through Austin’s species descriptions, which are at once attentive but also hesitant). I think it would be useful to bring Brooke’s earlier idea about the “thirst for narrative plot” into the discussion of this chapter. Austin replaces the “true” history of the “appropriated waters” with an equally true, though temporally divergent (or, perhaps, simply future) narrative: the “story” of the weeds, shrubs, willows, and reeds that grow near the ditch, stealing and sucking up the already “stolen” water—deviant, somewhat sickly, but admirably persistent in their life and creation of habitats for new sorts of visitors (like the wild fowl in the chapter’s final paragraph).

We do not know the bed completely, however; its tulares are “full of mystery and malaria,” Austin writes (129). My final comment has to do with the religious undertones that Mary brought up in class on Wednesday. The phrase “It must be a happy mystery” is striking to me (especially paired next to “the redwinged blackbirds proclaim it”), and I can’t figure out its meaning. I am convinced it’s a reference to the joyful or glorious mysteries of the rosary, which involve prayers of humility and faith, and I’m trying to figure out what this has to do with the bed of the irrigating ditch.  I’m thinking that Austin observes (or at least believes in) something divine about the life that survives in the ostensibly “sick” irrigation ditch—though I think it is important to note that the “malaria,” at least, is borne by human  visitation to the creekbed (I’m assuming the fauna hosted large clouds of mosquitoes?). In this way, the mystery and malaria of the last paragraphs are twinned; in order for our own survival, we must be content with not knowing first-hand what’s in the tulares reeds. In this context, I wonder how we might think of Austin’s entire text as either a prayer or some other sort of religiously-oriented didactic text…is she writing to keep us away from the American West—to give us enough to be satisfied with not knowing? 

(Note: my page numbers correspond to the Rutgers edition.)