Vista 12

It rained all night, loud plopping drops, cascading off the roof of my house, down the gutters, into the streets. I knew that my spot would be flooded again, like it was during my last visit.

So now I squat on one of the cement steps, avoiding the soggy grass, which when dry I usually enjoy. Today the sun is so bright. I can hardly look at my notebook, the glare so strong. My eyes hurt, but maybe that’s because of more than just the light. And to top it all off, violent winds are blowing the empty branches like I’ve never seen. Sticks are flying through the air. Leaves are stirring from their fallen slumber in the ground. My notebook pages protest against my writing, flaying and billowing out. For the first time in a while, I am focused on the act of writing out in nature, as opposed to the content of my surroundings.

And I guess that’s appropriate, for this is my last official entry, and I’ve come full circle. As I sit here, trying to note the way the breeze blows so fiercely it’s as if it’s attempting to the air of whatever has recently come to pass, I’m instead physically battling that breeze, fighting – writer against nature. I’ll get these words out.

The wind is warm, unnaturally so for December, but I close my eyes and tilt my head toward the sun, letting the air sweep my hair out of my face. Distant chimes on porches chime, and I’m amazed that I can hear them from here.

The trees forfeit their last leaves to the gusts, and tiny shriveled leaves disappear into the sky, never to reunite with their branches again. That’s what autumn windstorms are for, I think, to rid the trees of their leaves. This one, so late in the season, seems like a final sweep, a last check before winter. What are we leaving behind?

Our first semester is over, and today it truly seems so. I think back to this spot when I first arrived: the bees that hovered over the grass, the tall flowers in the garden, the vines and leaves nestled up against the trees in the woods. I wonder what I would write about that season now, after all I’ve learned, if I to visit it as it was then.

Maybe I’ll come back to the spot again throughout the year. But this moment feels like an ending. The wind tells me so.

Response 11: Nature and Environmental Writing, To Continue

“Nature and Environmental Writing.” I heard the name of the course and knew that’s what I wanted to do. I’m here to write. I’m passionate about the environment. This, I realized, is going to be my channel.

This course was a wonderful introduction to all the different approaches one can take to writing about nature. Poetry, rants, essays. I really loved them all. As a beginning nature/environmental writer, it was so helpful to read a variety of works and decide which methods and arguments were the most compelling. I can honestly say that there was not one subject matter I cared about more than another; no environmental issue was most important. But I tended to favor those writers whose works were both influential, arguing for a cause, as well as crafted lyrically. Gretel Ehrlich, Mary Oliver, Janisse Ray, and the selected contemporary nature poets are writers that I would like to emulate.

And I think I’ve already started to. Every week, we’ve been posting blog entries, both in response to our readings and about our “nature spots,” which we visit every week. I’ve really enjoyed these tasks because they’ve pushed me to write, even when I don’t feel like it. Having a journal routine has allowed me to keep track of the progression of my writing, and it’s so interesting to see how I’ve changed through this semester. My writing has clearly been influenced week to week, depending on what we’ve read. After we read Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, my blog was an argumentative rant mixed with descriptive scene. But once we started reading the poetry, I think went off the deep end. I noticed my place blogs have become more and more abstract over the last few weeks. I recently reread my first place blog entry and then read the one I was working on at that moment. I laughed. “She’s gone crazy?” Sheryl must think. No, I think that this blog has been a huge success. Whatever direction my writing is going, it’s clearly in pursuit of a voice, a personal one, and that’s what we’re trying to do in this course and in this program.

As well as the blogs, another hands-on aspect of this course that I really enjoyed were the field trips. We’re writing about nature, reading about nature, talking about it, but how can you know anything about it unless you’re IN it? So we went to Eden Hall Farm on the coldest morning we’d had that fall, and together as a class we planted a garden. It was such a wonderful experience to be out there in the dirt instead of sitting under the fluorescent lights at our desks. I felt we really bonded then and were able to connect with our subject matter more definitely.

The visits from Jimmy Santiago Baca and Nancy Gift were really special, and I felt privileged to be able to talk with them before their public readings. We certainly got a lot done in our class, now that I’m thinking about it. It was really nice to have so much activity, so many different aspects to the course. Out of all my classes, this was definitely the most engaging and interactive.

Our class is ending, but nature and environmental writing is not a phrase I’m leaving behind with the semester. Marc Nieson told our class in regards to finding our writing voices, “You write about what you love the most and what brings you to your knees.” This is it. I look forward to experimenting with different forms, continuing to dabble in poetry, expanding my essays, and hopefully reaching an audience, bringing them to their knees.

Vista 10

November 30, 3:30pm

Today I climb the hill by the cement steps of my tree-house stairs. I can see my spot, the cold flat grass, the sudden drop where I like to hang my legs. It’s all above me now, coming into my line of sight as I heave my book bag, take another breathy step. Once I reach the top, I’ll look back down, down over the hill of naked branches and dead leaves, and over all of the houses and trees and cars and streets, as far as I can see.

But I’m not excited, not like I am every other week. The stairs today seem shallower. Are there less of them? Pausing on a step, I look out to what in summer was dense forest. Even last week, I thought the vines and branches wild, a little bit of jungle oasis amidst the likes of a city and the manicured campus. But the trees seem sparse. I think of Connecticut, where I’ve just been before these steps, before this walk, one sleep and a long drive ago. Sitting in my backyard, I’m overwhelmed by the towering trees, so dominant that sky is allowed through only a small gap between their heads. I exhale, and my breath reaches out, constantly expanding toward the woods, never returning. In the night, the crickets and frogs croak and buzz, and it seems the sounds echo forever, but no, it’s not an echo.

I pass a lone plastic bottle, half buried in the dirt. I wonder if students on this campus pick up trash when they see it like this, if they make the effort. At home I pull it from the ground, angry at its impurity. “Jon you better go get those beer bottles from our woods,” I tell my brother. “At least have some respect toward the woods, if you don’t have it toward anyone else.” Now I walk past the plastic bottle. This defiance is conscious, though I’m not sure who it’s towards. Not the ground, surely. I feel guilty.

I cannot sit on my usual bed of grass unless I want to get muddy. The pathway that snakes around the garden of bending reeds is drowned in puddles. I stumble around them, wondering why they haven’t frozen over yet. The air is still so warm, I realize. These puddles should be frozen by now.

The pathway is flooded, and so I stomp across the soggy grass toward another set of stairs, the ones that lead toward the school. I’m done here for today. At the top I’m halted. I Take a heavy breath and turn back to face the valley of winding streets, unfamiliar, dead end turns. On the steps, orange tape and a yellow construction excavator block my path.

Vista 9

November 19

They circle in the sky, churning the air at the hands of some invisible diviner. He brushes a palm against the breeze and leads them over to the trees. They settle, there, black and ferocious feathers fraying against his breath. They wait, hovering over the streets, the people, uncertain, afraid. Light fades, the opaque paleness of a sun trapped in his cold breath. He exhales, and against the last fleeting light, they break from the trees, and a thousand dark shadows, silhouetted, erupt back into the sky.

The birds. Today they appeared in bellicose flocks, surveying the valley of Shadyside in repeated circuits before retiring to the treetops. There they perched ominously, ruffling their feathers in some pre-war ritual, reporting their findings, planning their next moves. I watched them from the hill, curious. And then just as I thought I might be able to infiltrate, perhaps understand what they’re doing here, they took off, thousands, all at once, without any warning, proving for certain that they are up to no good.

I have never been afraid of birds. I am not afraid of birds. But as I walk down the hill and onto the streets that I’ve just overlooked from my vista, I hunch my shoulders, throw my hood over my forehead. The birds have settled on branches extending over my very street. Crows, I see now. I hear flapping, repeated flapping. I run into the middle of the street. Don’t run in the street, I think. But I feel safer here, all of a sudden. Some of the birds are swooping from the trees, like charger planes, diving low to the ground, and I don’t dare cross their path.

On the hill I was not afraid, I suppose because they were so distant. Like a cyclone their tiny specks of bodies swirled, forming some miniature dark milky way in the sky over Shadyside. I could not hear them either, as they sat distant from me in the trees. I watched, interested, though removed.

Now the trees are moving as I hurry toward my home. In the dark, they are worming, writhing with the birds’ ruffling wings, their twitching heads. I hear a screech, like a dinosaur, not a bird. I pick up my pace. These creatures have infiltrated the whole neighborhood, declared war on my street.

Go on, I think. They’re not here for long. To the next place, go on. They’ve unsettled me, darkened my street with their black bodies. I can almost feel the oil from their feathers, their boniness. How horrifying if one should flutter past my face.

The breeze changes, and in one day, my home feels unsafe, the familiar becomes foreign. I am frightened of what before would never frighten me. Today was cold, and tomorrow will be warm again. I suppose I am still unsettled here, though maybe not. I want the birds to leave. They’ve outstayed their welcome.

Vista 8

11/16/09 4:00pm

In winter, day and night get closer. They’re pushed together, seeking warmth. Down in the valley, street lights beam white, but the sky still glows pale, electric. It’s not yet night. Black tree branches, silhouetted on the fading canvas, look like skeletons of lovers embracing.

In winter, I hear clearly. Sounds cut through the crisp air. Up the hill, highway traffic rushes, swooshes, shakes the reeds of the wheat stalks. Its dull drone says hello. The stalks shiver. I shiver too.

Far out over the sky, tiny black birds whirl. They circle the city, trying to catch a wind gusting south. Their tiny beaks part and the sound is right there in my ear, the caw caw caw. That’s how crisp this air is.

Footsteps on my tree-house stairs. Her heart beats faster every step she takes. Warm breath meets the icy air. I hear this too, in winter.

There’s more to feel now that it’s here, the frozen months. My neck prickles, tiny icy pins. I pull my jacket tighter. The air backs off and moves to my cheeks. I feel them flush. I rub my face. Like a child, I turn away from the cold. Where next will you make me shiver?

Pointy branches. Frozen grass blades. Icicles, they’ll come. Words that cut through crisp air, direct and unavoidable. Dullness disappears with warmth.

I feel things in winter, a sharpness. Goosebumps under my big white blanket, a shiver not from cold. I trace my finger along the knots of a spine, blow a cold breeze to shake the limbs. Say hello.


And I’ll feel the pedal under my foot as I roll up the window to shut out the cold. Early morning, I’ll find a gust of wind heading east and drive toward the sun. I’ll absorb the highway noise as it echoes behind me, before me, all around me. I’ll find where the day and night grow close, and I’ll meet them halfway.

Response 10: Jimmy Santiago Baca

I’d just finished reading the excerpts from Jimmy Santiago Baca’s memoir, “A Place to Stand.” From where it left off, I was crushed, though hopeful, knowing he was experiencing revelation in prison. He was writing, dreaming, finding hope through poetry. The memoir offered snippets of his early poetry, rudimentary rhymes and dabbling in a foreign language. But his tragic childhood still haunted me. I picked up “Martín & Meditations on the South Valley,” flipped to the first page. I read the first stanza and felt triumph.

I was so moved by Baca’s poetry, as well as by his memoir, and I’m grateful that I could read excerpts of both forms at the same time, for I feel both works are informative, if not crucial to one another’s experience. Experience is what makes Baca’s writing powerful, what sets him apart from others. He had a tragic upbringing; he was abandoned by his parents, abused, mistreated. He was homeless, alienated from his past. Many go to prison, but it was there for Baca, that he actually found what he had lost, rediscovered that his “home” was much more rooted than in a house, deeper than a “family.” In his memoir, he writes, “One day, looking up from my journal to stare absentmindedly at the cell wall, I experienced a revelation. On the wall – in the sand and mortar and stones and iron and trowel sweeps – were the life experiences and sweat of my people. It contained a mural of my people’s toil, their aspirations, their pain and workmanship. I imagined my grandfather’s hand smoothing out the concrete…The iron that made the bas came from a mill in Silver City; the workers who had built the mill came from little villages on the plains. The dirt that mixed with the cement, before it was scooped up and trucked and delivered to make this wall, had been prairie soil where families camped and a woman had lain and gave birth to a child. People had slept on this dirt, tilled it for their crops and gardens, built their adobe homes with it” (239.)

Baca rekindles a tie with his people that he had lost in his upbringing. He reconnects with the land he can call his home, though he never did before. As I read through “Black Mesa Poems” and “Martín & Meditations on the South Valley,” the characters from this land came through vividly, as if he had never been separated, as if he had never felt lost. In “Too Much of a Good Thing,” Baca voices farmers and their crops. He often refers to the cycling of the seasons, the snow, the fall. In segment XII of “Martín & Meditations on the South Valley,” the narrator becomes one with the land.

I dream
myself maiz root:
swollen in pregnant earth,
rain seeping into my black bones
sifting red soil grains of my heart
into earth’s hungry mouth.

I am part of the earth.

When reading “A Place to Stand,” I was enchanted by the childlike voice which he embodies to describe these extremely vivid experiences. Of course, he is a child in many of the segments and the language is appropriate. Yet, while the language is simple, the descriptions still grasp the range of human emotions associated with the experiences. In the prologue, when Baca describes visiting his father at jail for the first time, he writes, “I wanted to tell him I was sorry. I didn’t want to keep him in jail. Only when he was drinking did he threaten to beat Mom up, wreck the car, lose his paycheck gambling, or sometimes not show up for days. He was not drinking now. We should have let him come home with us” (2.) The sentences are direct, the emotions straightforward. But they are sharp, and they bore through us because we know they are coming from a child, but resonating years later in the heart of a man.

The language of Baca’s poetry is quite opposite to that in his memoir, and it makes me think of prison and freedom. Every sentence is chocked full of descriptive words, sparing literally no space for a boring verb or noun. He hardly ever uses the verb “to be” in present or past tense. I feel the care with which Baca chose his words, as if he’s appreciating the beauty of that which he’s describing in a way a person who has always been free can’t even see. He picks the words like they’re fruit from a tree; why use any but the ripest, the sweetest, the tastiest?

I had an image of mother in the morning
dancing in front of the mirror
in pink panties,
masking her face with mascara,
squeezing into tight jeans,
Her laughter rough as brocaded cloth
and her teeth brilliant as church tiles.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Jimmy Santiago Baca’s work, and I can’t wait to meet him on Thursday. I wonder if despite his troubled childhood, there was any instant when he found himself considering language in his youth. With such talent, I wouldn’t be surprised if even as a child, he spoke to himself when no one knew. Perhaps he didn’t even know he was doing it. Does one become a poet like a phoenix rising out of the flames? Or is language a part of us? Like the land was a part of him, only needing to be discovered, relearned, really felt?

The Tap Water's Fine!: Pollution and Alienation

The problems Pittsburgh is having with overflowing sewers during nearly every rainstorm is a serious issues to me, as it seems to be about more than just the water, the sewers, and the rivers. Of course, I was interested in how this could happen. How every bit of rainfall could cause a back-up of raw sewage, which eventually overflows into local creeks, streams, and the main rivers of the city.

One source blamed record rainfall and the heavy stress it’s put on the sewage treatment systems. Another article sited technological decisions made at various points throughout the city’s history, such as to deal with wastewater in fast-growing suburbs through septic tanks or separate sewer systems that only provided for domestic waters and not storm waters.

What can’t be debated is that the sewage, along with chemicals and other pollutants that run into the waterways after heavy rains, pose major crises for Pittsburgh residents, as well as the wildlife that inhabit the area.

The first article I read assures the reader, “Treatment of drinking water is not harmed…” Yes, your tap water will still be filtered properly, despite the sewage in the rivers, streams, and lakes. But the article didn’t mention the fish – trout, bass – we take from the river to eat. What about the deer who drink from the river? Or the crops that soak up groundwater, polluted by these chemicals and sewage. Is their water filtered for them too?

The Pittsburgh water issue is part of a much larger crisis, one that’s plaguing all of this country on many fronts. We put things on our mouth, we chew, we swallow, without knowing what they are. Are they even foods? We certainly don’t know where they come from, or what their ingredients are. Just like this reporter didn’t think to address the greater issue at hand – that the water isn’t just drank directly from our taps – it’s absorbed by our plants, lapped by the animals we eat – we are alienated that which nourishes us. Food. Water.

I think of Janisse Ray and her writing about the Longleaf Pine Forest. The ecosystem was so intricate, and we came to know it through her stories of the salamander, the gopher tortoise, and the indigo snake. We learned how they lived symbiotically, and how the extinction of one species was like a deadly domino effect for the rest. We came to care for that ecosystem in the way that she hoped, through her passionate writing, but most of all through just through the awareness she brought to us. I didn’t even know these forests existed before I read her book.

I think the bones of this environmental issue that I’ve written about above is not just the sewage or the rain, but the alienation. We have this problem in the first place because of the overlapping of ideas, the development of a city over a long period of time, and the lack of consideration for key elements that would’ve sustained the system’s success even as rainfalls and populations increased. We develop and urbanize and search for solutions. But we have to try to see that the solution is to take a step back and remember how the world works naturally, because that’s the way that’s it’s going to work best. To write about this would be to create an awareness somehow, in the way that Ray did perhaps, gently. She was effective in relating the stories to her personal life, and I think that would be a good way to both avoid too much tension and also to draw out mirroring themes.

I don’t pretend to have solutions for the wastewater, but I know that we can’t create elaborate systems that transport toxic materials long distances if they’re faulty.

We have to be conscious that everything we throw away, pour outside, put on the ground (or on our lawns) will come back to us. The earth cycles, it lives. We wonder why people get sick with cancer, why they’re infertile. Think about the chemicals you’re pouring out – it will end up in the water and back in your food. And think about your food – it’s what gives you life. Think about it. Think.

Vista 7

Part I: At My Spot, Everything is Gone or Giving in

After a week away, I come back to my spot on the hill to discover that all the leaves have let go. Some cling stubbornly to the skeletal branches, but soon they too will be shaken by these wintery winds. I am shocked by the change in scenery. How bare the hillside is. Or maybe I’m just frozen in place; today is definitely the coldest day yet. Ten minutes pass, and I’m no closer to sitting down or even reaching for my pen and notebook. The leaves at my feet are pear-shaped and larger than my hands. I pick one up and wave it back and forth like it’s a white flag. I give in. Today I woke up with a “cold.” As far as I’m concerned, it’s winter.

As I imagined earlier in the semester, my vista has opened up now that the leaves are gone. I can see through the open branches, down the hill, out over the entire valley. Some houses have lit fires and white smoke rises in straight pillars from little chimneys.

But the birds are gone. The crickets are dead or underground. They’re no longer singing from the trees or chirping from the reeds. The hum of machines fills these voids. Their lull comes at me from every direction, so soft it’s almost not there at all. If you don’t think about it, if you pretend it’s not there, the humming fades into the white sky, the numbing cold. And it’s gone.


Part II: I Decide to Walk Down the Tree-House Staircase

Tonight I decided to take a different route while walking home from class. There have been a number of robberies in my neighborhood lately (armed, at night,) and seeing as the way I go is very dark and not the most direct, I thought, why not be smart? I looked at a map and discovered that my best option was none other than my tree-house staircase! I was so excited to walk down the stairs I’d been sitting in front of and staring at for the past two months.

I descended the twisty stairs, illuminated in the night. I thought how in the summertime I would feel like I’m descending into the depths of the jungle, for then the plants were thick with leaves and probably grew right in through the railings. Maybe squirrels dropped nuts on its roof. Did they hit suddenly, scaring students, then role downward and slide back into the forest? I turn a right angle. Down more steps.

I reach the bottom of the staircase. There are less steps here than on the staircase I usually take. I look around me. A parking lot. And buildings. A man in his twenties unlocks the door to his car. This is where those deer were going, I think. Why were they going here? Is this all they have? I was so surprised to see the deer that night in such a populated space. But Chatham’s campus is natural and spacious, like a park. I am disappointed that this is where the staircase leads. Of course I have to be honest – I knew the steps would not lead down to a Garden of Eden. But for the deer, I’d hoped.

Response 7: The Tenderness That Fills Open Space

Wyoming. Desolate. Empty. Vast stretches of plains and sky. In the winter, howling winds. Frozen. This is Gretel Ehrlich’s landscape in The Solace of Empty Spaces. Her description of the land is minimal. She can only write so much about the space between one thing and another. But the ways in which this uncharted landscape – this wild space – have shaped the culture of the people who live there is more significant than we imagined.

“To live and work in this kind of open country, with its hundred-mile views, is to lose the distinction between background and foreground. When I asked an older ranch hand to describe Wyoming’s openness, he said, “It’s all a bunch of nothing – wind and rattlesnakes – and so much of it you can’t tell where you’re going or where you’ve been and it don’t make much difference” (2.)

Background and foreground, I believe, has multiple meanings in this context. The people who live in this landscape are relatively new there, and not too long ago, Wyoming was part of the “Wild West.” The open space, the lack of buildings and cities, allows for an autonomy not found in more developed areas. You can’t tell where you’re going, and it doesn’t make a difference, because you have the freedom to go and do whatever you want. You can live on your ranch and raise your cattle how you want them, and I get the feeling from the way that Ehrlich has painted the landscape in this book, that no one is going to come and tell you otherwise. But background can also refer to heritage and social standards. Having recently moved to this place and adopted this lifestyle, old ways must have been discarded. Cowboying is a new lifestyle unique to the United States. Who were these people before they came here? Who will they be when the wild is all gone? Their freedom is unique to this area, nurtured even more by their isolation. They are held to no standards. They follow no preconceived notions of what it means to be a cowboy. Women cowboy as well, and within this book are female characters named Mike and BobbyJo. It doesn’t make a difference. They know who they are.

Perhaps the strongest connection between the landscape and culture in Wyoming is that of the cowboys. Ehrlich tears down misconceptions of this role, the stoic figure America characterizes thanks to Marlboro advertisements and Western movies. She reveals what makes so much more sense: that the cowboy is connected to the land that he works, the awesome landscape that he takes in every day, and the animals that he births and raises. These are not tough men who lack emotion. No, these are men who are required to tough it out, to possess patience and resilience. One man tells Ehrlich, “Cowboys are just like a pile of rocks – everything happens to them. They get climbed on, kicked on, rained and snowed on, scuffed up by the wind. Their job is ‘just to take it’” (50.)

Ehrlich finds that the cowboy’s coarseness is a mere surface for his underlying tenderness. Because of the harsh winds and conditions, a cowboy must be resilient. But they are also compassionate because of what they do. “Because these men work with animals, not machines or numbers, because they live outside in landscapes of torrential beauty, because they are confined to a place and a routine embellished with awesome variables, because calves die in the arms that pulled others into life, because they go to the mountains as if on a pilgrimage to find out what makes a her of elk tick, their strength is also a softness, their toughness, a rare delicacy” (52-53.)

What Ehrlich finds from living in Wyoming that this duality of character is something that she comes to embody as well. She braved the winter in a frozen cabin with no one except her dog, finding solace in the solitude. “The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly free” (44.)

She finds that “What can seem like a hard-shell veneer on the people here is really a necessary spirited resilience” (43.) While people may shoot the hats off their neighbors in silly fights, they also care for each other. Wyoming, with only a few towns and one university, becomes cozy for Ehrlich in its vastness, because with less human spaces, people congregate more. Friends drive hours to each other’s ranches for dinner. They offer help when its needed with the cattle. The landscape of Wyoming, so vast and empty, has created a people who look for the tenderness, who search through that cold space for the warmth of another heart. The people of Wyoming are rooted in their land; they care for the animals, who outnumber them, and they look forward and backward, not sure which is which, but live on.

I grew up in a small beach town in Connecticut, close to New York City. Many of the residents were originally New Yorkers. My parents moved my family from Manhattan on my first birthday, believing a life in the suburbs would be ideal for their baby girl. We have beaches, but the water is not the ocean – it’s the Long Island Sound. Our town is charming, quaint, beautiful, and considered a suburb of New York City. But it is not diverse like the city. Growing up, I was not exposed to the rich culture that any city, especially New York, has to offer. When I think of my childhood, I think of playing on the beach, in the tide pools, on the jetty. My mother would let me and my little brother run away for hours at a time, knowing that we’d be safe. There is no surf in the Long Island Sound, no real danger. We lived in a smaller, sheltered, more “idyllic” version of the city; the Shakespearian forest that city-dwellers escape to. It was like a vacation to the Cape, but one that never ended. The Long Island Sound is a small body of water – I could always see the other side. Are we sheltered because of the protective setting? We came to live here for that very reason.

On September 11, I watched smoke rise on the horizon from where the towers had stood. For the first time, I felt exposed, part of something bigger, closer to something dangerous. The city and all the possibilities within it were closer than I had ever imagined. And beyond the Long Island Sound was an ocean. I appreciate the protective arms of the Sound, that we can wade in its shallow waters and not worry about being swept away by bigger waves. I know every rock on that beach by heart, and I’ve discovered every creature that crawls or swims in the tidal pools. And I did it all on my own, the Sound protecting me.

Seeing Ourselves through Nature, and Other Contemporary Poets

I read all the poems for this weeks’ assignment in one sitting. Patiann Rogers, James Wright, W.S. Merwin, Maurice Guevera, Galvay Kinnell, Laurie Kutchins, Sheryl St. Germain. The only things that separated their words were thick lines, the flip of pages. But my experiences reading these poems were so strong and varying depending on the poet. Whoever thinks that nature poetry is just describing the pretty flowers has oceans to cross. I could not continue reading W.S. Merwin’s “The Last One” past the fifth stanza, and I only reread it today in order to write this assignment. But Sheryl St. Germain’s subject-matter appealed to me because of its proximity to the narrator, it’s ways of connecting nature to human experience. I learned a lot from reading these poems, both about what I appreciate in poetry, and where the themes of my own nature poems tend to be focused. But mostly, this montage of poetry showed me how all interpretations of nature can be equally as beautiful in the hands of a talented artist.
While I had trouble with one of his poems, W.S. Merwin’s works inspired me because they were the only ones in this collection of poetry that I believed to have an environmental message or, as we sometimes say in class, an “agenda.” At no point when I read Merwin’s poems did I feel threatened or preached to, and I think that would have been detrimental to their success. How does he avoid this? I think probably because these poems are abstract and self-deprecating. In “For a Coming Extinction,” the narrator talks directly to the gray whale, a species on the verge of extinction, and tells him what to say as he approaches the creator. The narrator is trying to come to terms with the actions of humanity, trying to forgive himself for being the cause of this great animal’s extinction. He can do this. He justifies it. “Tell him / That it is we who are important.” But the tone of the poem feels full of self-doubt, especially in the line, “winding along your inner mountains / Unheard by us.” Merwin is playing here with a character, man, who believes he can tell the creator what he has created, but at the same time, we don’t hear the words, recognize them as words, of any other animals in this world.
“The Last One” was troubling for me because of the simple sentence structure and repetition. I struggled to get through it, though I appreciate its message. “They” are so ambiguous. Are “they” the loggers, the trees? I think they are both at different parts throughout the poem. The ambiguity of this poem is what stops it from being threatening and accusatory and is what allows the text to evoke themes more subtly, while still retaining the tension.
I thought Patiann Rogers’ poems were successful because they present an unconventional relationship between humans and nature, perhaps urging the reader to stray from his or her prior conceptions of this relationship. In “A Hummingbird: A Seduction,” Rogers’ narrator imagines herself as a hummingbird, her lover the flower on which she is feeding, for Rogers is aware of the erotic natures in which hummingbirds suck nectar from flowers. She uses language that is evocative of love making, words like “sucking, “performance” “egg,” “semen,” “came.” She’s not hiding it. In this last stanza, “And I would take you and take you and take you” is repetitive, suggesting a sexual rhythm and also obsession.
Similarly, in “A Blessing,” the narrator describes a relationship between herself and a pony, one that the reader may be unfamiliar with. “I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,” she writes, “For she has walked over to me / And nuzzled my left hand.” The narrator connects with the animal in a way that transcends their species. Feeling the happiness that accompanies this experience, she writes, “Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.”
Rogers uses nature in every facet of these poems. The stories themselves are relating to experiences in nature, with many beautiful images of animals and plants. But also, the narrators’ emotions become that of the natural world. “I would break / Into blossom.” Rogers’ characters transcend species, they become plants. Rogers is acutely aware of the emotions of nature, the sensuality of the flowers, the eroticism of the hummingbird. This is what makes her poems successful. They are vibrant through and through.
Sheryl St. Germain shares similarities with Patiann Rogers. Both poets use nature as a mirror to reflect their human emotions. St. Germain takes this a little further in her writer, summoning events from her life, relationships with lovers, children, her mother, and finding ways that these stories reflect in her natural surroundings. I really like this kind of writing about nature because it shows a deep personal connection with the environment and also conveys how like us the animals and plants are. “At the Equator” resonated with me especially. I tried to imagine any of the other poets we read and what their poem about the equator would be. The equator. It’s not even a tangible thing. But it’s a place and it’s deeply symbolic. A line that separates. St. Germain combines what is personal and specific to that which is natural, creating something erotic. As I reader, I feel a connection to her narrators as I do when reading Mary Oliver, that I am joining her on a walk, reflecting with her on what she sees. The difference, and one that I very much like, is that St. Germain delves into the past. These characters are real.
Every week in my fiction class, we have to write one hundred words or less on the subject of one word. Someone chooses the word each class, and this week the word is “yellow.” After I read these poems, I wrote my one hundred-word assignment on “yellow.” I didn’t post one last week for the Mary Oliver assignment so I thought I would share this one here. I don’t know much about writing poems, but I’m trying.

My Mother’s Tomatoes

I woke late in the afternoon
as teenagers often do
to the summer sun through my
window, the cicadas,
my own hot sweat.
In the kitchen was a bowl
of cherry tomatoes, freshly
picked from my mother’s garden.
They were shiny and still
yellow. Unripe and transparent.
I could see right through
their blotchy skins.

Why does she do this?
They would sleep soundly
another night, clasped
to strong green stems.
Is it too hard to let the tomatoes grow?

“Why I went into the Jungle” reminds me very much of a story that I recently wrote for my non-fiction class about my experience in the jungle. What I appreciate about this poem is something I’m starting to do in a lot of my writing. The narrator here went into the jungle because she wanted “…to feel / darkness heavy and wet around me / like sex or death, the molecules of night /dancing in my skin like jaguars.” The jungle is extremely sensual, and to be there, to really be there, is to become a part of it. In this poem, I feel the narrator taking on the jungle’s character, becoming the malarial waters, being born again a dark thing. To go to the jungle, you have to be willing to become that which the jungle embodies: wildness. In my story, the narrator undergoes a transformation, and by the end there is hardly a distinction between herself and the character of the jungle. I like the idea of a place being a character in a story or a poem and the human characters adopting or becoming part of that place. Again, I think this is because it makes the reader view his environment and nature in a more intimate way, a way that perhaps he’s never thought about before. Anything that we can do as writers to help people get closer to nature is important.
Reading all these poems was enlightening for me because I’m finding more and more that I really do enjoy poetry, though I’ve never had any formal training. The different types of contemporary nature poetry excited me and got me thinking about what issues I’m pursuing would be more effectively written on a poetic front.

Vista 6

A miraculously warm day. It’s like summer, I think, sitting barefoot in the grass. I tickle my toes against the clover, the crabgrass. It’s still green, though it feels cold and a little wilted. It’s not the crisp carpet it was a month ago during the strong September heat. But just a couple days ago they said it would snow, and I feel like I’m getting a treat. I’m staying up past bedtime, being rewarded a second dessert. Nature is in retrograde, protesting the dying season, allowing us an extra burst of life. The sky is powder blue, without one cloud to spoil it. There are bugs again, tiny little fruit flies. Were they just born? Even those who you’d think wouldn’t be fooled – the little insects – think it’s spring. I don’t have the heart to tell them that in a couple days the ground will freeze and they’ll be gone. But for now, they can crawl on my legs, for that’s what they’re doing.
Even the crickets are back, vibrating away in the bowing reeds of wheat.
I’ve been feeling it too – the retrograde. Some of it has to do with the changing season. Like a little girl, I feel the urge to suddenly jump on the crunchy leaves I pass on my way to school. I don’t stop myself. At Whole Foods they had free samples of hot apple cider, and smelling the spicy cinnamon, I immediately wanted some, but though I should first ask my mother’s permission. At Hay Day, a market in our town, the cider was always scalding hot.
Mostly I’ve been thinking a lot about my brother. For years, I’ve held certain opinions of him – ones that may be based on things he did in his adolescence – things I’m too stubborn to forgive – and suddenly I’m writing all about my childhood for my classes. I’m remembering him as my little brother, my friend, my companion. As I’m writing with nostalgia about my experiences in nature from my youth, I’m realizing that he was there with me the whole time. Now, more than I’m homesick or missing the ocean or my childhood, I’ve realized that I miss the closeness we had when we played together in the woods near my house. And I feel to blame that we don’t have it anymore.
I can thank this program for helping me recognize these emotions. I’m churning up memories that have been settled at the bottom of my mind for a long time. I hadn’t thought about running through the woods with Jon and picking raspberries for so many years. Writing is serving as a sort of therapy – an uncovering.
The past weeks of autumn have been gray. It has rained drearily almost every day. Today the sun shines so brightly, and for the first time this fall, I can see how vibrant and intensely beautiful the leaves are. They were surely as vividly yellow and green and orange yesterday and the day before, but now I can really see them.

Response 6: Walking Through Oliver's Delicate Forest

            When I read Mary Oliver’s collection of poetry and essays, Blue Iris, I felt as if I was walking through the forest with her, or along the beach, and stopping to look at all the flowers and trees and animals that we happen across.  Her approach to writing nature poems, it seems, is a coveted ritual in which she takes a walk through the forest, sees something beautiful, and then spends the rest of the walk musing over that experience.  You can feel the rhythm of her walking in many of the poems she writes; in “Morning Glories,” “The Sunflowers,” and “Goldenrod,” the stanzas are separated to even look like she is climbing somewhere.  They are short, breathy lines, and you feel like she is writing them as she walks, perhaps back to her house after having seen the sunflowers in the field.

            She has a deep connection with a natural world that resonates in her poetry, making her work unique and identifiable.  Many of her poems are in the first person, and reflect on her physical interactions with the plants and the trees.  Toward the end of the book, she focuses on mortality, often thinking about death as she lies in the grass.  In “White Flowers,” she reminded me a lot of Emily Dickinson, when she writes, “Never in my life / had I felt myself so near / that porous line / where my own body was done with / and the roots and the stems and the flowers / began” (51.)

            One of my favorite poems was “Some Questions You Might Ask” because it addresses a subject matter I think about a lot, and she addresses it in the same delicate way she does with all her poems.

 

Is the soul solid, like iron?

Or is it tender and breakable, like

the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl?

Who has it, and who doesn't?

I keep looking around me.

The face of the moose is as sad

as the face of Jesus.

The swan opens her white wings slowly.

In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.

One question leads to another.

Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?

Like the eye of a hummingbird?

Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?

Why should I have it, and not the anteater

who loves her children?

Why should I have it, and not the camel?

Come to think of it, what about maple trees?

What about the blue iris?

What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?

What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?

What about the grass?

 

            This poem is so beautiful to me because it finds a way to approach a topic that is so difficult to address.  Questions are the only way we can talk about animals’ souls and whether or not creatures besides humans feel.  Oliver’s imagery is graceful, subtle, yet so suggestive.  “The swan opens her white wings slowly.”  The majority of the poem is questions, because as I said, we can only ask questions.  What is the soul?  Who has it?  What right do we have to say that animals don’t have it?  “Why should I have it, and not the anteater?”  Oliver doesn’t answer the questions.  She can’t.  But the only lines that aren’t questions in the poem suggest to the reader, without threatening, that we need to think beyond what we know.  “I keep looking around me. / The face of the moose is as sad / as the face of Jesus.”  “The swan opens her white wings slowly.”  “In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.”  Oliver discovers something in the actions of these animals, their intricate movements, their love.  How can we say that they don’t have a soul?  If it is human compassion that we are using as an excuse to distinguish ourselves from other species, then should that not be all the more reason to look for similarities between us?  At the end of the poem, she extends the question to everything on the earth – the stones, the leaves, the lemons.  This poem is about selflessness, about respect.  It’s ok to form opinions, to decide what you think has a soul and what doesn’t.  But first, isn’t it important to ask these questions?  Isn’t it your responsibility to ask these questions, to really think about it?

            Oliver’s poetry is relaxing in its transcendental quality.  When reading it, I feel detached from society, wholly immersed in her setting, the forest, the walks she takes, her mind.  She is distinct from society when she is in this element.  She frees the raccoon from the trap and then runs like the raccoon, touching the touch-me-nots.  “oh, life flew around us, everywhere.”  When she recalls her younger years, camping in Ohio with her friend in “A Blessing,” she is separate from the strip-mined forests.  She is of the first-growth forest.  At Blackwater, she lies in the grass and becomes one with the earth, feeling the roots almost take hold of her.  To read Mary Oliver is to participate in this relationship with nature.  I could not help but feel a part of this connection when I walked with her through the forests of Blue Iris.  It was tranquil, peaceful, delicate.  I wanted to cry, almost, upon reading of the baby skunk.  I think all of Oliver’s poems will echo with me for a long while.  In my mind, her footsteps patting lightly on leaves are a comforting and familiar sound.

Vista 5

It’s 8pm on Tuesday night, and because of a massive overwhelming never-ending flood of work I’ve had this week, I haven’t had a chance to come to my nature spot until now.  OK, maybe I could’ve come earlier today, but I secretly wanted to visit the grassy hill at night, because I feel like every week I end up going at the same time, which is getting boring.

  I immediately regret this decision.  It’s FREEZING.  My hands are shaking as I’m typing and this entry is going to take twice as long to write because I have to go back and correct half the words because they’re not even English, they’re icicle language or something.

            This is the first time I’ve seen my place in the dark.  Thankfully it’s not pitch black.  There are lights that illuminate the pathways and the tree-house stairway.  In fact, it’s interesting because I can see the stairway more clearly now than I can during the day.  It really does twist around like a snake.  There’s fencing on the sides, should someone fall, and thick black shiny railings for those who need to steady themselves.

            I haven’t been here in two weeks, and the leaves really have changed since my last visit.  While some are still green, many are bright orange, the tips blending to squash yellow. They are the colors of autumn apples, and especially right now, in the dark, this whole place reminds me of trick-or-treating on Halloween night as a child.  And I’m very scared. 

Every night I face the dilemma of whether or not I want to walk to class, knowing that it will be dark by the time I have to walk home.  This neighborhood is very safe, but still, it’s always worrisome to be walking home alone in the dark.  I can’t believe that soon the clocks will change and I’ll be walking to and from class in the pitch black.

            Someone just walked by.  OH MAN.  “What is this crazy girl doing?” she’s thinking.  I look insane.  And I’m the one who’s scared?  I’m crouching against the side of the hill with my laptop on my knees, wearing a big furry Russian bomber hat typing in the dark. Sketchy sketchy.  She’s just walking to class probably.

            Not a star in the sky.  What is it about Pittsburgh?  Rain every morning, cloudy every afternoon.  I have a feeling the winter is not going to be to my liking.  The grass beside me is shivering.  No, it’s not the wind, I swear.

A DEER.  Oh my god.  Two deer just walked by.  They saw me, stopped quick, then darted into the woods.  If that’s not some sort of sign, I don’t know what is.  My first Pittsburgh deer.  I would not see that in the daytime.  That made this frozen night escapade worth it.

I’m noticing now that language is sporadic when you’re in a situation like this.  I don’t have the patience or the facility to use long sweeping prose.  My hands are shivering and I feel like if I don’t write as quickly as possible my joints will freeze up.  But seeing the deer, characters that I’ve paid so much attention to in my writing over the last few weeks, really is an interesting coincidence.  “I have not seen a deer the entire time I’ve lived in Pittsburgh,” I said in my last place blog.  It inspired my midterm piece.  The deer are letting me know that they’re here.  Not even in Schenley Park, but right here, where I frequent every day, so close to where I live!

Response 5: Wildflower Garden of Eden

 

            I finally got out of the city.  No more sirens, no more lawnmowers, no more gridded streets – only rolling hills, leaves bursting into fiery reds, oranges, sharp cold autumn air.  I finally got outside.  Some days, it kills me to say it, I won’t leave my apartment until the sun is already setting.  Or worse yet, on the bad days when I have so much work for classes, I won’t even leave my apartment at all.  Ken Lamberton wishes he could reach through the window of his cell to touch the saguaro cacti that grows in the free open air.  I have the ability to leave my apartment, to go see those two squirrels who all day long, run up and down the stairs of the fire escape outside my back window.  But no.  One more page, I tell myself.  It’s a self-imposed prison.

            Eden Hall Farm was open, free, and so much fun.  Mostly, I was happy that I had to be there.  Normally, on Sunday morning I would wake up and start doing work.  This was a welcome alternative.  For me, farms are idyllic, an alternate reality, somewhere I’ll escape to when I’m done with this current lifestyle.  I do admit, my experience on farms is somewhat limited.  I’m not from a farming community, though I’m very jealous of anyone who was raised in that tradition.  The word “farm” has two associations for me.  “Old McDonald” farms – I think of the animals.  These are the farms I don’t know much about.  But anytime I visit one (this past summer I went to the Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts,) whoever is with me has to literally tear me away from the animals, or else there’s a chance I’d crawl into their pens, curl up in a heap of muddy hay, and live out the rest of my days as a trowel-feeder.

            The other type of farm, the one I’m more familiar with, is the kind I spent two months living on in Costa Rica.  “Arbofilia,” it was called.  A tree farm, aimed at regenerative, sustainable farming of the rainforests.  We grew saplings in rows, quite like crop-farming you’d see here, then we’d strap on our machetes, dig the saplings up, climb a mountain, and replant them in the remotest areas of the peak.  Thousands, we must’ve planted.  Who knew how many actually took root?  We were trying to recreate something that had been lost, do something that had been undone.  There was once a paradise on this planet, a garden of beautiful trees and flowers.  It had been logged, destroyed.  As we climbed the steep cliffs, falling, cutting open our legs, insects attacking us, I realized that our efforts proved that the paradise was still there – our caring enough to replant these tiny little saplings – wasn’t that something?

            We want the rainforests to regenerate so our world can become sustainable.  I think of organic farms as sustainable establishments.  In the same way that religious people are looking forward to salvation, I fantasize about abandoning my current lifestyle and moving to a farm, where everything is self-sustaining, clean, and organic.  When I think of “gardens” I automatically think about Eden, Adam and Eve’s utopia.  What did they do all day?  In Milton they tended to the plants, made love, lived peacefully.  That is, until the fall.  I guess I consider gardening and farming a very paradisiacal concept.  It’s essential to living harmoniously with the earth (if it’s done in a responsible way – maybe eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is like clear-cutting?)

            I read what I just wrote – fantasy – and I think that while the idea of a garden being a utopic alternative to my current life is a little fantastical, I don’t think living on a farm is a an outrageous idea.  What was most interesting to me about our trip to Eden Hall farm was how much we accomplished in only one hour.  My parents raised me in the suburbs, and even though my mother loves her garden, she for some reason never taught me anything about how to grow plants.  I guess I was too busy digging up all the bugs in the dirt to be bothered to put anything green into it.  But I am sure I could learn the intricacies.  Maybe if I’d been raised on a farm I’d feel differently, but after our trip, I was ready to move.  But then again, I’ve been ready for a while.  If only I could leave my apartment.  

Vista 4

I had a bit of a collision with a black squirrel on my way over here just now.  It was one of those awkward encounters when you think the other creature is going to the left, so you compensate by going to the left as well, but no, he goes right, so there’s a strange little shuffle, an apologetic smile, and you both laugh and go on your way.  The squirrel was totally in his own world.  He was so busy foraging for autumn nuts, he didn’t see me – human – directly in front of him.  Or perhaps he’s a campus squirrel and is so accustomed to close encounters to college students that nearly running into me just now was party of his everyday routine.

As I sit here in the grass looking out over the city, I think about the animals that we form relationships with wherever we dwell.  There are undoubtedly less animals living in cities than in forests, but the ones that do, we notice, we may bond with, we form relationships.

I have not seen a deer the whole time I’ve lived in Pittsburgh.  I’m sure they’re here – in Schenley Park, munching on any and all plants they deem edible.  At home in Connecticut, deer are everywhere.  Driving at night, when two glowing marbles appear off the side of the road, you slow to a stop.  When the deer has successfully skitted across, legs flailed out in all directions, you don’t go.  You wait, because you know there are at least four more waiting in the brush, about to dart in front of your car.  In my backyard and throughout our property, deer had regular trails that they traversed every morning.  My brother and I would go through the woods in the spring with hedge-clippers and cut back the trails, so we too could follow them.  We’d hike along the trails throughout the summer and pick wild raspberries that grew on long prickery vines.  When we came inside with a basket full of berries, my mother would rinse us off and check us from head to toe, because Lyme Disease isn’t as fun.

This past summer, I was standing out on my front porch when three deer that were feeding on brush meandered onto my lawn.  I decided I would stay incredibly still, in fact not move from the position that I was in at that very moment, and see what happened.  The deer didn’t notice me at first, but one of them, a doe with scars all along her side, sensed something.  She kept looking up mid-chew, staring in my direction.  I stared directly at her; I wanted her to know I was alive.  The other deer moved along the lawn, fully-absorbed with their meal.  She walked toward me, small steps, until she was only feet from the porch.  My heart pounded.  Was it possible she would charge the porch?  She wasn’t the healthiest of them, after all.  The other deer made their way over to my mother’s garden and commenced chomping on her tulips.  This is the point when my mother would appreciate me breaking free from my statue pose, stomping my feet, and making banshee noises to make them stop (and also feel guilty – I get the feeling my mother always tries to make the deer feel guilty when they eat her flowers.)  But I didn’t.  This moment was too precious.  My deer walked closer yet.  Suddenly, as if nature had reclaimed her, she bent down and resumed eating grass.  Animal.  She was an animal.  But a moment later she was looking up again, straight into my eyes.  I heard the bending and breaking of a stalk – one of my mother’s plants, and I felt guilty.  I became a banshee.  “All right, that’s enough!” I yelled.  The two deer, who I realized had no clue I was there, went into a frenzy.  Running faster than they should have, their hooves scratched across the driveway, and the two deer slipped and fell on the pavement.  But my deer remained still, unaffected by the screaming.  She gave me a last bewildered glance, then, as if she felt the need to prove to the others she was not human, still animal, not anything more than deer, she trotted into the woods and rejoined her frightened companions.  I stayed on the porch a little longer and saw the two times my deer came back to the lawn by herself, looking toward the porch to confirm that what she had seen there had been real: a living creature, a human, who meant no harm, who did not disturb them, who looked her in the eye, who said, “It’s ok.  I just want to let you know, it’s ok.”

Deer are animals of my home.  In Pittsburgh I am forming relationships with new animals.  Every night at 9:45, as I walk home from school, there is a gigantic slug that crosses the sidewalk by my apartment.  I know exactly where he will be, and I look for him.  Watch out, I think as I approach the one piece of concrete slab, I would never want to step on him.  Sidewalk Slug.  This is something I wouldn’t see at home.

Response 4: Junkyard Legacy

I have never read anything like Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, and I don’t think I’ll ever read anything like it again.  A personal memoir of a childhood lived on a junkyard in rural Georgia, a moving piece of environmental writing in support of the longleaf pine forest and their apocalyptic destruction, and a commentary on society’s alienation from nature, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is brutally honest.  Ray writes of her family and their “legacy of ruination,” seeking to expunge a history of environmental destruction through the therapy of memoir and the revelation of beauty in nature. It creeps into dark memories of a broken family, confronts you with the heartbreaking truth of birds whose calls will never sing in the upcoming spring – for they are extinct – and very subtly pokes you with the idea that all our actions teeter a delicate scale, whose balance is essential to harmony. 

I see many similarities between Ray’s writing and the other authors we’ve read in this class.  Memoir is obviously a hugely important aspect in Ray’s book, and just as in Nancy Gift’s book, I was much more sympathetic to Ray’s environmental cause to save the longleaf pine forests because I felt a strong emotional connection to her family history and the personal significance the forests had in her life.  Ray channels a bit of Abbey too, in a chilled-out non-threatening way.  Abbey, when he’s not on his rants in Desert Solitaire, is illustrating for his reader what exactly is worth saving about the parks in the desert, which was crucial for me, as I’ve never had the privilege of traveling out there.  I was absolutely blown away by Abbey’s language, and Ray manages to evoke equally as vivid images of the longleaf pine forest, an even greater feat, as these forests don’t exist anymore.  Many of her descriptions of old-growth forests are how she imagined they must’ve looked by the way explorers described them in letters.  She then goes on to give the facts – .01% of old-growth longleaf pine forests exist today.  The rest were destroyed by loggers.

The beauty of the forests is irrelevant, though, in comparison to the crucial role the trees play in the longleaf pine forest ecosystem.  Ray brilliantly interweaves the narrative of her life growing up in the junkyard with chapters detailing different species of animals and how their existence is drastically affected by the absence of longleaf pines.  The reader begins to understand how crucial every detail in an ecosystem is, all the while bonding with Ray’s family through her personal narrative and gaining insight into the ecosystem of her people.  To a reader outside the realm of nature and environmental writing, the two narratives may come across as fragmented and separate.  I thought they connected beautifully because both were inextricably linked.  Ray’s family includes a history of mental illness.  Ray fears she too will become mentally ill – that she is endangered.  The mental illness that plagued her family created an isolation from their surroundings, which came from a fear of the wilderness that was implanted in Ray’s father by her grandfather.  Ray writes, “So much for tradition.  So much for a long line of outdoorspeople.  So much for the woods.  What my grandfather planted in my father was a crazy fear and mistrust of being lost in a wilderness alone.  If there ever was a wilderness misunderstood, insanity is it” (97.)  For the Ray family, the wilderness has become a place of brokenness, of sickness, of misunderstanding.  And like the forests that their ancestors chopped, endangering the species which once thrived there, Ray’s family is living in a tainted environment, surviving barely, as do the animals in those forests.  Ray, fearing she will follow the footsteps of her father and grandfather, seeks to go back to nature, to find peace with the longleaf pine forest, to rebirth it and therefore connect her family again with nature.  She writes, “I search for vital knowledge of the land that my father could not teach me, as he was not taught, and guidance to know and honor it, as he was not guided, as if this will shield me from the errancies of the mind, or bring me back from that dark territory should I happen to wander there.  I search as if there were a peace to be found” (97.)

Ray utilizes motifs of the animals that live in the longleaf pine forest and has them appear in both stories to strengthen the ties between the two narratives.  In the junkyard, Ray tells of a time when a boy who lived near them viciously killed a turtle.  Ray and her two brothers, who witnessed the act, were beaten by their father for not stopping the boy.  Later in the book, we find out that the gopher tortoise is one of the most important creatures in the longleaf pine forest, its burrow providing a refuge to over two hundred species when the forest catches fire.   Ray also tells in the junkyard narrative how whenever someone saw a snake, they’d kill it.  “Snakes were the lowliest of creatures, condemned by God to a life spent belly to ground.  One unlucky enough to reveal itself was a dead snake – nobody cared whether it was venomous or not.  If a snake crossed the road, you ran it over, pulling back and forth until it was unmistakably dead” (179.)  Later, in a chapter called “Indigo Snake,” Ray refers to this type of snake as “the most beautiful thing you’d ever want to see” (188.)  Endangered now because it takes refuge in gopher tortoise burrows, I still couldn’t help but think how many were killed by the people Ray were describing.  Ray makes a conscious choice to tell stories about snakes and turtles because she is trying to associate the junkyard with ruination.  Her people, whether they knew it or not, like her logger ancestors, were contributing to the destruction of their natural surroundings, and as a result, they were destroying themselves.  The junkyard is a mess of broken glass, jagged metal, exposed pipes, which will be stepped on.  As Ray goes out to repopulate the longleaf pine forests and retouch her roots with her surroundings, so she also hopes to rebirth the junkyard.  In the final chapter, “Second Coming,” she writes of the junkyard as she has of the longleaf pine forest, with statistics about its ecosystem, its promising future.  “Eighty to 95 percent of the metals of vehicles of that era are recyclable, but what do you do with the gas tanks?” (268)  It seems this will be her next endeavor.  Because after all, the junkyard is nature too.

 

Vista 3

            It is 5:30pm, September 24.  The clouds hang over the city today like a warning.  I stand – I cannot sit – and watch over the village of Shadyside, my new home.  All is still, but by no means silent.  Shrill sirens whine on and on, finding no relief in their distress call.  The rapping of a helicopter somewhere above me, out of my sight, echoes in my ear.  The birds are quiet today.  Are they aware they are being spoken for?

            The effect of the G-20 in Pittsburgh is almost fantastical.  Like a giant sifter, the city has been separated.  Some are hiding, fearful of the sudden surge of protestors and potential dangers, while others, inspired by the opportunity of place and time, are stepping up and supporting their beliefs in radical ways.  Before, most were indistinguishable, a community.  Now, there are labels.  “Protestors.”  “Anarchists.”

            As anxious as I am knowing that the neighborhood I am watching from upon this cliff is currently being vandalized (my friend just called me and told me there was a tank with one hundred SWAT marching past her apartment in Friendship,) I am comforted by the rain.  Today is the third wet day in a row, and the moisture has extracted various scents from the grass and dirt, the leaves that are starting to die.  As if the rain coaxes these fragrances from its earthly counterparts, their scents come forth and fill the air with such pungency and sweetness, letting us know the two elements have merged.  I close my eyes and try to close my ears – only breathe in the different aromas.  Something smells like ginger, only sweeter and rotting.  Another whiff is a fruity manure.  Not far from me, I see some smashed berries on the pathway.

            I decide to sit down.  The grass is damp, and I’ll deal with getting my skirt a little wet because today, of all days, it doesn’t seem to matter much.  Within a minute I find myself combing my fingers through the wet blades and tearing them up in quick little strokes, something I always do when I’m nervous.  I immediately make myself stop.  Why would I ever do that?

            I wonder if I should have picked a spot more hidden, more in the woods, where I might be able to escape this anxiety that I’m feeling today.  I walk down the sidewalks and I’m afraid that there will be police with guns.  I don’t like police.  Never have.  In a forest, I could hide under a tree trunk and get lost in the intricate patterns of a spider web.  But it wouldn’t be a forest; it would be a park.  And today I would still hear the pulsing of the helicopter, the blaring sirens.  Below me, the tree-house staircase winds its way down to some unknown wooded place unfamiliar to me.  I could go to Costa Rica, that amazing jungle, my own paradise.  There would be no helicopters; the G-20 would never host a summit there.

            

Response 3: Stomping on Pretty Flowers; Damn You, Environmentalists

“…Nature’s polluted,

There’s man in every secret corner of her

Doing damned, wicked deeds” (165.)

In our nature and environmental writing class, we are advised to steer clear of charged environmental issues.  There is nothing more off-putting than a writer who is actually trying to get a point across about the environment, especially right now, when we’re all so busy more important things, like Facebook and our investments.

            I can appreciate this class’ purpose to have its students form an intimate bond with the natural world and explore that relationship through writing.  I think it’s beautiful.  The poetry and art that has come out of

 this connection between man and nature is more special than any other.

            But what if we do have something more provocative to comment on about the current (or past) situations of humans and their relationship with nature.  Should we muffle it?  Where else are we to write about it?  In my other courses, writing fiction and non-fiction, I always focus our little hundred word story assignments on some environmental issue.  This works without coming across as an “angry environmentalist” because there are characters that convey the emotions, speak the dialogue, portray the sentiments through my subtle imagery.  But I should think it would be here in my nature and environmental writing class where I can directly speak of such environmental causes of which I am passionate.

We are reading Edward Abbey in this class, and he is the master of such writing.  In Desert Solitaire, Abbey employs beautiful prose with sprawling descriptive language to show us the desert that stretches around him in every direction.  Reading the poetry he uses to show us his vision of the desert is left me in awe – it was simply so vividly and sublimely magnificent.  In the first chapter, Abbey describes a sunrise: “Suddenly it comes, the flaming globe, blazing on the pinnacles and minarets and balanced rocks, on the canyon walls and through the windows in the sandstone fins.  We greet each other, sun and I, across the black void of ninety-three million miles.  The snow glitters between us, acres of diamonds almost painful to look at” (6.)

But then Abbey will shift to a different voice completely – one that lets us know he is not just a romantic; he has strict beliefs about how the wilderness should be treated and how we humans are ruining it more and more.  Abbey is an environmentalist, and spares no space in his book sharing his opinion on how to improve our nation’s environmental procedures.

Abbey has strong ideas about our national parks, which I very much agree with.  He believes that in order to preserve our wilderness from further erosion, no new roads should ever be built through the parks, and all motorized vehicles should be forbidden.  In response to the complaints Abbey foresees, that “they can’t see enough without their automobiles to bear them swiftly through the parks,” Abbey retaliates, “A man on foot, on horseback, or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles” (54.)  Like Abbey, I think that people have been separated from their natural surroundings to the point that they don’t even realize there is a difference between seeing a forest on foot from seeing it through the glass window of an SUV.  Abbey believes, “…[W]ilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.  A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself”(169.)  His beliefs about the roads and motorized vehicles is important in regards to the human spirit and its necessary interaction with the environment, but not only that – for the preservation of the ecosystems, the roads and vehicles have to stop.

So, without scaring us, Edward Abbey manages to reveal to us his environmental “agenda” by alternating it with poetic imagery of the natural landscape.  This juxtaposition is important because the more we get of Abbey’s criticism, the more we feel the beautiful scenes he’s painting are precious, threatened, retreating before our very eyes.

Nobody likes an angry environmentalist who hammers hard truths at him: You are depleting the ozone!  You are raising the global temperature!  You are eliminating important species!  You are dooming the planet!  But when this information is conveyed in a meaningful way, translated through art, is that so harsh? so painful?

Westport, my hometown in Connecticut, is a beautiful beachside town with a strong sense of community.  Because of its close proximity to New York City, Westport’s citizens tend to think of themselves as very liberal – they prioritize the arts in their school budget, and they love their farmers’ markets.  They also pride themselves on living in the first town in the eastern United States to ban the distribution of plastic bags at stores.

The town is indeed idyllic.  With rolling acres of forest, dark nights where you can stand outside and feel the presence of nothing but cricket song, yet to know that you are nestled tightly within a community – it is calming.

My favorite place is Burying Hill Beach, a small private beach that I much prefer over the packed, stroller-ridden, kiddy-fun in the sun (still private,) Compo Beach.  There is a tidal creek that runs next to the beach, and I always go straight to it, for that is where everything is to be seen. 

It’s one of those scorching days in late July, where the sky is a vivid robin’s egg blue.  Far away at the horizon, clouds are forming soft peaks like marshmallow fluff, foreshadowing a late afternoon storm.  I wade out into the shallow water of the creek, which shimmers against the sunlight when the breeze strokes its surface, ever so gently.  The water is warm, and I can see clearly through to the bottom.  There are mollusks and bright green seaweed that I always mistake for some mystery creature, as it lurks toward me with a sudden surge of the current.  I stand still and let my bare feet sink into the warm sand, which gets comfortable in the crevices between my toes.  With my hands on my hips I raise my chin to the sun and let its warmth beat down on my face.  This is my beach, my creek.  Nobody feels the way I do when they come here.  I remain still so that whatever is swimming or crawling about below the surface of the water will become accustomed to my presence.  Soon, I feel little nips on my ankles – minnows testing out my skin to see if it’s palatable.  I don’t shake them away.  Snails crawl across my feet, their slimy bodies suctioned to my body.  I giggle and squat down to get a better look at these molluscan pioneers.

The tide is going out and the water that was trickling out of the channel begins to gain power.  Within an hour, it is surging out toward the Long Island Sound with enormous force and my minnow friends can no longer keep themselves from being carried outward to deeper waters.  I turn toward away from the Sound toward the mouth of the creek, feeling the water push against my legs, white-water cascading around my knees.  A plastic bottle floats by me, faster than I can reach and grab it.  Moments later, a plastic bag on the other side of me.  As the tide goes out, it’s as if someone is emptying the trash from the inland marsh into the polluted Sound.  I start to get a knack for seeing the trash before the pieces rush past me, and I seize as many as I can, tossing them onto the beach so I can dispose of them properly.

            I traipse over to the garbage can, arms filled with disgusting briny garbage, and I get interested looks from fellow Westporters retrieving their beach chairs from the trunks of their BMWs.  Why don’t you go grab your reusable canvas bags and make a couple trips back and forth from the creek to the garbage cans?  I don’t say that.  Instead I stare uncertainly at the garbage cans into which I’ve disposed the salty trash, realizing it’s no better off in there than it was in the ocean.

            Westport is so proud of its plastic bag ordinance, but I still see plastic bags in the grocery stores.  I see those plastic bags that you put produce in before you weigh it.  Are those not plastic bags?  What about plastic in general?  Since Connecticut is working on a state-wide ban on plastic bag, maybe Westport, if it’s so “eco-friendly” should be taking the next step and working toward minimizing as many plastic product as they can.  And while they’re at it, they can improve their recycling routine, which is one of the worst I’ve ever seen.  I’m tired of seeing the plastic bottle graveyards, disgusting evidence of a society that doesn’t know how to recycle or convert to reusable bottles.  Ever in the area?  Go to the Green’s Farms Train Station on New Creek Road, and walk along the side of the creek I’m describing here.  If you take a garbage bag with you, you’ll easily fill it with plastic products in five minutes.  Careful thought, you might hurt yourself trying to carry it on your own.  Westport, you try.  Try harder.  Recycle more plastic, use less plastic. 

Will we get there?  Edward Abbey believes that “Wilderness preservation, like a hundred other good causes, will be forgotten under the overwhelming pressure of a struggle for mere survival and sanity in a completely urbanized, completely industrialized, ever more crowded environment” (52.)  Written in 1968, Abbey could not see that the two, wilderness preservation and survival are inextricably linked; if we hope to survive as a species, we must appreciate that our pollution is destroying the natural world, without which we choke, we die.