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.

Vista 2

Here I am, back at my spot on the overhanging cliff.  I wasn’t planning on coming here right now – this is an impromptu visit and entry – so I don’t have my laptop, which I think is a better way to get acquainted with a natural setting.  So what, I’ll transcribe the entry onto my laptop later.

            Now just so happens to be around the same time of day as the previous time I was here.  4:30pm.  Sunny and beautiful.  Pittsburgh seems to shine like that.  Today I must be sitting a couple inches to the right, because through a chink in the branches in front of me I see a brilliant turquoise dome catching gleams of sunlight.

            Having read Nancy Gift’s book, A Weed by Any Other Name, I feel like I’ve taken on an ant’s eye view whenever I’m outside walking to class or sitting in the grass.  Right now, I’m noticing all the weeds around me on the lawn and in the surrounding brush. I can identify some, but most I don’t know the names for.  I wonder if they’re mentioned in her book.  Why didn’t she include pictures?  Drawings at least!  I would be able to identify this tangling gangly alien looking thing with the pretty flowers.  But I do see crabgrass, a yellow dandelion, and – ahh! a fluffy white dandelion about to blow away into a hundred pieces.  And clover.  Lots of clover.  Perhaps this explains all the bees circling my ankles.

            In Connecticut, I work in my town’s nature center, an amazing facility called Earthplace.  During the summer Earthplace runs a summer camp, which allows kids to get in touch with the natural world, through interaction with animals, lots of trail walks, experiments, arts and crafts, field trips, canoe trips, etc.  I love this place.  The camp director is an expert beekeeper and there are two hives on the property that she maintains throughout the year.  Bees are one of her passions, but she just so happens to be highly allergic.  We’re all prepared, of course, in case she’s stung.  There are a significant number of campers who show up at the start of camp every session armed with their Epi-Pen Jrs.

            The thought terrifies me though.  As Becky takes me on a tour of her hive, thousands of bees swarming around her head, her bare arms, her legs, my heart pounds.  You’re going to get stung for sure.  I want to grab her, snatch her back to safety.  But then she reemerges from the hive area, no stings, no swelling, no anaphylaxis.

            The next day, Becky invites the ten-year-old campers for a visit to her hive.  Are you crazy?  I don’t ask that.  Because what I realize is – these children need to learn not to fear things that are only threats if you make them threats.  A bee will sting you if you are provoking it.  Yes, sometimes a bee will sting you for no reason at all, and that sucks.  But cars crash, friendly dogs bite.  If you teach a child to fear bees, that snakes are evil, spiders are to be crushed under your shoe, then they will grow up with the wrong impression of nature – an ignorant and biased one.  Like Gift says in her book, children need to touch to learn.  Okay, so don’t touch the bees.  But getting up close is so cool.  And seeing that bee hive up close was really awesome. 

            I went off on a huge tangent here.  It’s getting a little chilly.  Clouds are passing over the sun, and golden rays are no longer reflecting off that turquoise dome.

Response 2: Tangled and Confused

            What are weeds?  The technical definition is “a plant out of place,” but as Nancy Gift points out in her book, A Weed by Any Other Name, people think of weeds as those pesky little plants that spring up in their gardens when they shouldn’t.  It is a purely subjective term.  Weeds are plants we don’t cultivate.  Why don’t we?  Good question.  That’s what Gift’s book answers.  As a weed scientist, Gift is an expert on the benefits and disadvantages of harboring weeds in your backyard.  She speaks very highly of the majority of these marginalized warriors and designates a spot for each of them in her garden, even the thistle.  The only weed she sanely exiles from her garden is the poison ivy. 

            Gift guides us through her backyard, her family life, her education in biology, and most importantly, through the intricate history and ecology of twenty types of weeds.  Gift is honest and thorough.  If there is a plant that is evil, she comes out with it.  This plant is going to stab you, give you a rash.  But many of these unwanted plants are edible, flower beautifully, and are natural guardians of our spoiled, wanted plants.  Gift loves her weeds, and I think it almost impossible if her passion hasn’t infected her reader.

            One of my favorite parts of Gift’s way of storytelling is the proximity we get to her home life.  Weeds were a key part of her childhood (she remembers playing with plantains on the playground and constructing clover crowns) and she cannot fathom raising her own children without the inclusion of weeds.  We therefore get to read wonderful little anecdotes about Gift and her daughters – planting bulb gardens, trying, and failing to raise chickens, playing croquet on a bumpy lawn.  In witnessing these scenes, many of which take place in her own backyard right here in Pittsburgh, I was really impressed by how much was going on.  Of course they have a lot of plants in their yard because their mother is a gardener, biologist, botanist, weed specialist extraordinaire, so they also get the animals – rabbits, toads, chipmunks, bees, butterflies.  They play croquet, they go sledding.  They make snowmen, they roast marshmellows.  They plant gardens, they grow vegetables.  They have a brush pile that is pretty much the most exciting brush pile in the entire world.

            What I’m getting at here is there is nothing unusually exciting about the Gifts’ backyard, except that Nancy doesn’t spray herbicides on it, allowing the weeds to grow.  But because their yard is in a natural state, it seems like there is so much more for her family to interact with.  There are certainly more plant and animal species inhabiting her land because of the lack of chemical treatment to the grasses.  Gift also is providing more shelter for animals in the form of standing dead trees, which she purposely doesn’t remove, as well as their enormous brush pile.  I imagine their backyard as a magical forest, the perfect place to raise a child.  How delightful it must be for her daughters – to be able to go outside and see all these animals and plants, to explore, to know their backyard is a wilderness in itself.  Sure, they can have a football toss on the lawn with their father.  But right there, on the edge of their lawn, is a huge brush pile, “covered with snow, its crevices possibly filled with warm, furry little bodies, waiting for spring.”

            This idea of a beautiful lawn captivated me throughout the book, and I was interested and frustrated by the idea of aesthetics.  Who ever said that manicured lawns were beautiful?  Uniform.  Trim.  Boxy.  All.  The.  Same.  It must have to do with a history of domination and control.  Coming to a land and conquering it.  It is a show of power, affluence, prosperity.  In American culture, it is a way of showing off success.  The backyard is a place where we relax after a long week of work, and a neatly manicured lawn is a way of showing we can afford to lavishly primp that space.  But it seems like there was a giant disconnect in the aesthetic regarding backyards.  Gift points out, “The presence of weeds is completely consistent with the lawn’s purpose.  Many of us buy homes so we can have places to relax, and weeds are an indication of relaxation – some might say relaxation of standards. (82)

            And seriously, is all the effort of lawn care really worth it?  The thousands and thousands of dollars spent annually on mowing and mulching and spraying and watering.  For what?  So your lawn can look like your neighbor’s lawn can look like his neighbor’s lawn?  Which looks pretty boring to me.

            “Is all the effort of lawn care really worth it?”  Really worth all the money?  What else?  Cancer?  Throughout this book, while Gift is serving to the reader all this fascinating information about weeds, she is also constantly addressing the battle of herbicides and pesticides.  To spray or not to spray?  This is what really stuck with me.  If the virtues of the weeds isn’t enough to convince you to have a natural lawn, then maybe it’s the threat of cancer.  Studies are showing that breast cancer has a statistical association with the use of lawn services (33.)  I’m willing to bet that more studies will come out in the near future using slightly more confident language.  Prostate cancer, breast cancer – cancer in general – WILL be linked to the chemicals we ingest through our food and water.  We spray herbicides on our lawns so that the unwanted “weeds” like clover and crabgrass won’t grow.  We’d rather have that inch tall uniform grass that’s considered so beautiful with chemicals that we roll around on, that inevitably will seep back into our crops and waterways.

            I cannot help but think that in the future (if we make it there,) society will look back on us and get a good chuckle in the same way that we laugh at Elizabethan women for using lead-based makeup to appear paler.  Future humans will say of us: “They used to spray chemicals on their lawns to look unnatural!  Ho ho!  And they’d breathe the chemicals, and they’d seep into their foods!  Ha!  And it would give them cancer!”  It’s worse than smoking cigarettes to look cool, or going to tanning salons.  Not only are you hurting yourself, you’re damaging the ecosystem on your property and creating a detrimental situation for a much greater population, including your children and their entire generation.

            So instead of killing the weeds, let them grow.  Gift is an expert, and she point out to us readers how weeds are helpful because the presence of certain types may be a clue that there is a problem with the soil.  For example, “Crabgrass…can indicate that a soil has been compacted; tall clumps of spiky, tan broom sedge indicate poor soil nutrition; broad reddish tinged leaves of dock can indicate acid soil – but violets simply indicate shade” (38.)  These plants are letting us know what needs to be done to improve the soil, but in many cases, our reaction would simply be to uproot them.  They’re weeds!

            I could not help but think about food when reading this section.  We alter our food so much; I have a hard time calling it food at all.  White bread for example (I’m not even going to mention Wonder Bread because I have a hard time distinguishing that from Play-Doh.) While whole grain flour is where it’s at – all the nutritious parts of the grain are found in the germ – we shell this off in the refining process and create white flour.  White flour, with its lack of nutritional value, has unfortunately proven to be contributing to the massive wave of obesity overcoming Americans.  Whole grain consumption, on the other hand, greatly reduces the risk of type II diabetes, cardiovascular, and coronary heart disease.  So it’s obvious that the whole grains are better for us: not only are they reducing our risk for diseases, but they also contain important micronutrients.  But we love our white flour.  So what do companies like Wonder Bread (ugh) do?  They add those missing micronutrients to their product.  And what do our health care systems do instead of pulling the problem up by its roots and nipping it in the bud?  They search for expensive cures for these diseases.  They find ways to incorporate them into our lifestyles.  Obesity is become increasingly tolerated.  Everything is bigger.  America is supersized.

            This is so much like weeding.  The weeds are giving us obvious clues as to what is working, what is natural, what needs to be done to make the garden (or our society) functional.  Nancy Gift offers, “We can choose to listen to what the weeds are saying, or we can try to cover the problem by spraying and putting down sod, in square trimmed patches as natural as peroxide blond hair” (38.)

            We need to stop and relax for a moment and let the weeds show us what to do.  

Vista 1

I have never had a view quite like this one.  From where I am sitting, perched on the edge of a grassy slope, legs dangling over the steep side, I can see a city.  Yet here I am, in what certainly feels like the woods.  At the same time, I hear both joyous buzzing of cicadas and frantic sirens of fire engines.  The wind is blowing, and far away is the whoosh of highway traffic.  This is Pittsburgh.

For the two weeks that I have lived here, this city has done nothing but impress me.  Coming from Connecticut, I knew nothing next to nothing of Pittsburgh’s makeover.  No, I didn’t think it was still the same smoggy steel mill, but I was definitely surprised when I saw the huge tree population, beautiful rivers, and the incredible new buildings like PPG Place and the unparalleled David L. Lawrence Convention Center, the largest “green” convention center in the world.   Pittsburgh combines the old and the new.  It remembers its past and embraces the promising opportunities of its future. 

This spot I have chosen on the hill seems to agree with these themes of the city it belongs to.  Surrounding me on three sides is Chatham, my new nest, where I will be learning, growing as a writer.  In front of me is a city, a brand new world. 

The buildings of Chatham are made of brick.  They are sturdy, official - what I think of as smart buildings.  Below me is a pathway where students occasionally pass by on their way to or from class.  Now that I’ve been sitting here for a few minutes, I’m very glad I picked this spot because it’s not in absolute solitude.  Between my floating thoughts, I get the periodic joy of people watching.

I feel that besides the beautiful vista that this site offers, I may have identified with this spot because of the odd staircase below me that descends over the cliff and down the hill.  It can only be described as a twisty tree-house.  Of course it reminds me of Arbofilia, the station in Costa Rica where I spent two months.  It was there, in the rainforest, where I felt most connected to the natural world, and as a result, found the pieces of my life fitting together, suddenly so clearly.

Beside the tree-house stairway is a tree that reminds me so much of home.  When I have a chance, I’ll look up its name.  It’s killing me that I don’t know it.  I associate it with the water or growing near sand.  

Other trees are starting to turn, I now notice for the first time this year.  It upsets me that I have a hard time appreciating how stunning the fall leaves are – I’m too busy dreading the winter that’s inevitably to follow.  Maybe by sitting in this spot every week and really connecting with these exact trees, I will be able to better appreciate the cycle of the seasons the plants go through.

I feel very at peace with this spot and am confident with the choice I have made.  I just have to be careful not to drop my laptop over the cliff. 

Response 1: Atom Bombs and Safety Pins

Welcome to my first ever blog!  Yes, I’ve always been a private one, hiding inside my spiky little shell.  But now, in the pursuit of knowledge, I am urged to reveal myself on the fascinatingly intelligent and worldly web.  For my course in nature writing, my classmates and I will be using our blogs for responding to readings on nature and the environment that intrigue us, as well as for keeping our own nature journals.  But this “nature writing” is a sticky subject, because, after all, what is nature? 

I think most people would say that nature is essentially anywhere on earth beyond human’s grasp.  It is a bird sitting on a branch, a forest without loggers.  It is a sea turtle laying eggs on a moonlit beach, a tadpole turning into a frog.  Babs, my mother, says nature is “the sky, the sun, the moon, the trees, the dirt.”  Then, more affirmatively, “The dirt.”  Wikipedia widens the definition to “the phenomena of the physical world” and also “life in general.”  With a definition like that, more than a sticky subject, I imagine “nature writing” as a whole fly-papered tree, taking hold of every thing, living or dead, that happens to stick to it during a hurricane.

In “This Nature,” Pattiann Rogers writes, “Nature is everything that is.  We are not and cannot be ‘unnatural.’”  She goes on a long and dispassionate rant how abortion and the atom bomb and language and the safety pin are all nature and natural.  Why?  Because we humans have created those things.  And what are we?  “We are thoroughly nature.  To claim otherwise is to attempt to place human beings and everything we do in some rare unimaginable realm beyond the universe, thus rendering the power of our origins lost and our obligations vague.”

This statement fascinates me.  Indeed, we do separate ourselves and what we do from nature.  But how can we?  Are we not animals?  In the same way that a bird builds a nest, do we not build houses?  Can we not see that Chimpanzees are territorial to the point that they will commit murder to another of their own species?  Isn’t that what we do in war?

It is ignorant (but at the same time, delightfully human) for us to distinguish ourselves from animals and nature, for as science continues to prove, the differences between all us critters are very very slight. 

So why, I wonder, have we identified ourselves apart from nature and the other two million identified species on Earth?  Something tells me it has to do with a pang of guilt we feel in response to those alarms blasting in our ears, signaling the destruction of the planet.  Oh, you don’t hear them?  It’s just a global crisis.  Nothing to worry about.

But back to that bird’s nest that we were talking about.  Picture this: It is early May.  A fat gangly looking bird, shiny black feathers on her back, bright red breast.  She flutters around a low brush, collecting twigs in her beak.  She grabs some grass, some paper, a feather!  Oh, what a find!  Now, for a spot.  Under the foliage of a thick bush, the perfect branch awaits.  She builds her nest.  Her home.  She lays her eggs, they hatch, they cry.  She feeds them.  They fly.  Summer fades.  The nest breaks apart.  Twigs fall away.  A feather is carried with the first autumn breeze.

Now picture this: Dad backs the Jeep out of the garage on Monday morning.  God, it stinks.  The trunk is filled with plastic trash bags.  He heads over to the dump, throws the bulging sacks onto the heap.  And that’s that.  He heads back to his nest, where he grows his family.  The cry out.  He feeds them.  They fly away.  Little does he know that eventually his trash will float out to the Pacific Ocean, to become part of a garbage patch twice the size of Texas.

So both these nests are natural, but what is the difference?  One is destructive, while the other blends back into that from which it came.  So we are naturally destructive.  And what else is nature?  Besides war and laughter and bombs and hospitals and marriage?  Nature is natural selection.  Like millions of species before us, humans have the potential to go extinct.  “We are destroying the environment,” we are warned.  But this is not true.  The “environment” will go on.  “Nature” will always endure, even if it is depleted, weak, and choking for a breath of fresh air thanks to humans’ (naturally) irresponsible behaviors.   It is us that may cease to exist, and perhaps this is to be our natural course of existence on this planet.  Am I comfortable with this somewhat tragic fate for mankind?  I think so.  But there’s one more thing.  If nature is everything, then nature is anything.  And nature is constantly changing.  Humans are the most intelligent and adaptive species ever to live.  And we do seem to care about one another, at least sometimes.  So maybe I’m too quick to subscribe to a “Life After People” mentality.  If anything could change the course of nature, it’s humans.