Nature Essay - Revised

Borderless

by TED WALKER

For reasons that are difficult to explain, I spend a lot of time, sometimes hours, at my computer desk. By the second or third hour, my body and mind are rough-edged and irritated from the cramped position of the char and the intense stimulation of the flashing screen images. So I put on my shoes and just start going somewhere, feeling the chain linking me to the computer break as I leave the room. If I'm feeling an intense need for relief, I'll go to the park, the closest thing to unfiltered nature we modern humans have.

I think danger, a necessary ingredient for the wilderness experience, is almost universally absent from these parks. This is not really the wilderness; If I continue to walk, I will reach a farm, or Hy-Vee, or the Highway. So I savor walking over a simple utilitarian bridge: nothing to lean on, nothing to prevent the traveler from ending up waist-deep in water after a hilarious fall. I am a trickster at heart, and enjoy a good thrill, but I don't actually want anyone to fall to their death, or get eaten by a savage predator. I simply want trust from whoever made these parks that we don't need safety nets, and that we know what we're doing. Even if we don't deserve that trust.

Of course, there are children to think about, and nobody wants a child to get injured. Children who grew up as I did don't know how to behave in a natural setting. If they have been confined to an artificial one, you may place them in nature, but don't expect them to react appropriately. You may be lucky enough to get them to appreciate the beauty, but what will be missing is the proper attitude of respect for nature.

I've never been able to shake that feeling of disrespect. Animals here are on high alert – every area I enter, I hear things moving in the underbrush before I have a chance to see them. A clunk or bam or rustle and I feel like a made some terrible mistake; I was too ignorant and loud, and missed my chance to see something truly worth writing about. It will take hours for nature to reset and return to a state of equilibrium where the animals are at ease, just because of me. I move away from the swamp after a long wait to see if anything else moves. In my wake, Life continues where it left off.

I suppose I could make more of an effort to go into the wildness, to get away from these shallow wading parts and into the depths of Nature. In these shallows the signs of man are visible everywhere you look. But still, there is the joy of seeing your fellow man taking pleasure from the same things you do; across the pond from me, a photographer gratefully spreads his arms to take in the expanse of the water before him. This is before he mechanically falls into snapshot mode and loses his wide-angle focus in the lens of his own camera.

For the modern person, the price of admission into the wilderness is contact with fear, discomfort, and break in routine. This is all our baggage we bring along into the woods, and in the ignorant, it can turn violent. I too have felt the instinct to destroy nature. Even on this walk, it comes up. On the path leading away from the pond, I pick up a piece of wood laying before me. It looks solid and sturdy, like it could make a good cane or staff, until I see fungus growing on the other side. Annoyed at touching the white growths on the bottom, I hurl it at a tree nearby.

Right before smashing the would-be walking stick, I feel the most subtle voice or impulse (so subtle it really has no word) informing me that my action will be somehow wrong, will result in guilt. It really happens right as I toss the stick, smashing with a painful, woody tunking against the lovely tree; half of the heavy stick falls on a young, green plant nearby and crushes it. The plants vibrate with the impact and return to stillness, and I am suddenly reminded of a person's involuntary shudder at witnessing a scene of violence. These plants patiently and silently bear my abuse.

I remember when I was a teenager, how I used to smash and attack the tree by the school near my house, by the baseball diamond. I was in rage, in anger at the world, at school, at everything. And the tree there took my punishment, the ultimate martyr, as I struck it again and again with its own fallen branches. It never objected, but one night, as I tore a branch from it by twisting, I felt a sort of gut-pain, and I realized (as if the camera had been pulled back) what I was doing. I walked away and never did it again. (Last time I checked, the tree was doing fine – I even patted its trunk and apologized.)

As I wander, lost in thought, a painted frog leaps out of the path of my shoe, directly into the tall grass beside the walkway. There she sits, totally motionless – her living eyes the only sign of animation. I have heard in these moments of paralysis that the animal experiences great stress. This must be a defense mechanism, to remain so motionless for so long. I imagine the frog's tiny heart (I know just how tiny from our dissections in high school) beating furiously in the face of death.

I don't know if any of my feelings about the frog are true or imagined, but I reluctantly move on and leave – as I go, the frog must feel like it can move, and jumps repeatedly at the tall grass in an almost clumsy fashion, looking to me like a panic to get away. Again I am filled with a sense of guilt, that I am causing a disturbance here and stressing out animals.

It's not always like this. One night I was walking home; it was a beautiful summer evening, and I had decided leave early from my friend's house. As I got to the edge of the bridge, I saw a rustling by the trunk of a tree not too far from where I had stopped. No, not just a rustling; a munching noise. Thinking that it must be a rabbit, I waited for it to continue on its way. But it was not a rabbit; it was something I had never seen before.

The word “muskrat” stuck in my mind (even though I knew it to be an incorrect identification) as I watched it emerge from the cover of foliage. It had a rat-like body, and a somewhat short tail, but it was absolutely adorable. It crossed the path in front of me – about 6 or 7 feet away – and went over to the other side of the path, where it disappeared down a slope. I stood still for a minute longer since I could still hear it, and to my astonishment, it emerged about a foot – this story at least has no embellishment – from where I stood transfixed. Incredibly, it even sat down with its back to me like the guardian of the bridge. It yawned, or munched whatever food was remaining in its teeth, completely at ease and natural. I was stunned.

It took my leg a bit of effort to remain completely motionless, and it began to cramp. I stirred a bit, to relax it, but the creature still did not move. Of course, with such an opportunity at hand, I knew I had to take a picture of it, and slowly pulled my cell phone from my pocket. I took two pictures (both of which turned out completely black), and at each “click” noise of the camera, the creature not more than a foot from my shoe began to take notice. Finally, it decided to turn back down the slope, but it did not seem panicked, just a bit busy, as if it was late for an appointment with friends.

I checked the internet when I got home. The thing it most resembled was not a muskrat, but an adolescent groundhog, or woodchuck. I still, however, feel that its nature is best conveyed by its correct name: the whistle pig. It was at ease with me and happy, unlike the feeling I got from the frog.

And the desire to embellish my frog story from what it is – a frog jumped in front of me – into “I saw a ton of frogs,” or “one frog jumped on my leg; I wasn't scared, just startled” comes on with shame. I write it down in my journal to get it out, to exorcise it, and as I do, as I write these very words in my notebook, the sun in all his glory lights up the white of the paper in a cleansing radiance.

Who were Thoreau's children? I think I recall that he had none. Was his relationship with Nature enough for him? More than enough? Along with the need to embellish stories comes the feeling in me that someone is not successful unless they have a family. These concepts rise to the surface, being threatened by these simple men and the environment they lived in. I suddenly am afraid that I have been living my whole life for other people. Thoreau's children, quite appropriately, might be those he inspired by his own personal conviction to go into the wild and see for themselves what he was talking about.

But I am not in the wild; these familiar paths lead only in designated directions. Neural pathways or else walking pathways, it is all the same. I think, as I see a carp-shaped leaf swimming around my feet, that perhaps the time has come to forge new paths, to be a Pioneer of Me. To see what's in my own underbrush, hidden from view.

I am on my return journey now, circumnavigating a field of flowers, when I come upon a yeti-like caterpillar. White and shaggy with black spikes, I catch it performing the ultimate fakir's trick: levitation. It climbs Jacob's ladder, ascending an invisible rope into heaven. I watch in fascination and childlike wonder until half-doubts cause my brow to furrow: is getting there really that easy?

I avoid mystical writing for two reasons: out of embarrassment, and fear of fraud. I don't want to be seen as an “out there” hippie type who can't be taken seriously, but feel like if I neglect telling about this area of myself, it will fail to mature. So, as I continue along in a mystical mood after my encounter with the caterpillar, I end up getting all excited over a hollow.

I take a fork towards a bowl-shaped hollow with a path running around the brim. Sunlight forms tiger stripes on the descending slope. Huge oaks are the gateposts, with splitting trunks and spreading branches like huge hands in the late summer glow. I think that I will call one of the trees in the center of the hollow the king, but then I notice another of the same height, and suddenly am startled to see that all of the trees, thick or thin, are of the same vertical size, their leaves making a perfectly round canopy. It exists as magic cauldron, a womb. Living, expanded, open like a mother's arms. I see nothing move within – just silence that is awake and alive. Nectar just in the seeing.

I want to do it justice, but how can I work the magic of the true appreciators, the brilliant writers who can almost adequately express how this feels? Practice makes perfect they say, but talent – I am afraid I don't have it, or maybe the wrong type of it. My words on paper are too literal and too the point, too grounded, avoiding the freedom of the space which surrounds them.

It really is beautiful here. Fairies have been on my mind a lot recently, and I wonder if one day, I too will see them. This flower-laden, brilliant scoop of one of Nature's countless hands seems like their natural habitat.

And what separates the Fair Folk from a mortal whose heart melts at this beauty? While we are stuck on half-believed ideas and identified with the toys of our own minds, we don't belong to this world and we know it. Perhaps, I think, with training, we too can cut through the noise of ignorance and fall back in love with nature, become fully acknowledged children. Then the feeling will arise “this place is right for us.” Nothing will remain to separate Man and Elf. The sacred broughs will become our homes too.

That very night, after I am done writing, I think that my wilderness trek is over. I've been invited to dinner at a friend's cabin north of town. My girlfriend and I bring vegetables she has herself grown. Thinking that this is just a regular house we'll be cooking at, I am surprised when we have to walk from the road past a green pond, through a field, and across a wooden plank bridge to a tiny, one-room cabin by a stand of gorgeous pines.

My initial annoyance that we don't even have electricity, a working sink or overhead lights falls and begins to disappear with the sun over the trees to the west. It is really a beautiful cabin, and the working of the wood is done with a master's attention to detail; art, carved by hand, decorates the interior. And so we cook the vegetables we have grown in the twilight, lanterns our only source of illumination as it gets later and later.

When we finally sit down to eat, the food is delicious, and the company sweeter still. I feel the same sense of sacredness, growing subtly since I arrived, that I felt at the edge of the hollow. The duality in me breaks silently and softly: we belong both to the wild, and to civilization. We celebrate, as natural and free as any Elf, by lantern light in a simple cabin at the edge of the world.