Natural Space

I haven’t used this space much for one of my great loves. But in the background, always, I am reading about it and thinking about it.

Right now I am reading Last Child in the Woods and Timothy, Notes from an Abject Reptile. Both fall into the general category of nature books, but in vastly different ways. Last Child is a nonfiction look at how today’s kids are further and further removed from nature. The “plot”, if you can call it that, for Timothy, sounds laughable, but brilliant Verlyn Klinkenborg pulls it off. It is about the painstakingly slow moving and infinitely observant life of a tortoise, from the tortoise’s perspective. It sounds like it might be a cutesy anthropomorphization (anything but that!), but it is the opposite: very lyrical and thought provoking. For Timothy, time is pretty much irrelevant and the present moment is all important. My life is enhanced by garden visits with this tortoise Zen master.

I had to buy Last Child, because it resonated with me from the minute I picked it up. It’s a nonpreachy, convincing argument for unstructured outdoor playtime. Organized play, like soccer, doesn’t count in this author’s view. The ideal outdoor experience is all about poking around with a stick, maybe jumping in a mud puddle, holding a worm, building a fort. Figuring out how the world works, and how it feels. My own childhood was like this, but the world has sped up and everyone seems cocooned. Too often Gavin is shepherded from car to day care to stores and back to car, to home and videos and PBS, in the footsteps of his similarly under-aired, autopiloted parents. He wants to be outside quite a bit, but I am ashamed to admit that I too often have thought it messy and inconvenient, and perhaps exaggerated the dangers (bees, ticks, and poison ivy, not to mention the child stalkers I imagine in our bushes).

The best times I’ve had with Gavin lately have been outside. In Woodstock, after we exhausted the stores and restaurants, we strolled to the local playground. Gavin was most interested in the things beyond the slide and swings: the hawk babies in the cemetery next door, the bees that hovered all about, the couple working their tiny plot of the cooperative garden. We also hiked the Overlook Trail high above town. The highlights for Gavin were rearranging clumps of leaves in a small stream and making “paint” with spit and a red rock. Then, last weekend, our neighbor Rich uncovered a huge black salamander with yellow spots under his woodpile. Gavin promptly named him EyeFace (for his bulging eyes), and we set up a little terrarium for him outside. Poor EyeFace kept darting below the rock we had set down, and wouldn’t eat the ants we offered. He set his pulsating reptilian jaw in defiance, and we had to set him free so he wouldn’t starve. But how excited Gavin was about him! We would be doing other things, and Gavin would tear off to the deck: I have to check on EyeFace. He showered EyeFace with affectionate words and kind questions, not to mention an excess of leaves, grass, and water. All week I have hoped to see EyeFace again, perhaps emerging from under the deck or trekking towards the thick moss by the stone wall.

It’s been a hard week. I have a close relative in the hospital, an event too fresh and personal to air here. And I realized, grabbing a quick outdoor meal in town after visiting hours, that nature is such a comfort to me. There is a fragrant tree in the area that smells like grapes (I must find out the name). All through my quiet, exhausted meal, nature called to me, I am here. It’s me again. It was a balmy night for May in Connecticut, maybe 70 degrees. Everyone was out, reveling in that unbeatable spring sensation of warm evening air on the skin again. These little revelations, these recognitions, are constant like my porch wren (see a few blogs back: Wrens, Woodstock, and the Universe), and often my preferred route to God. Or forget the route, just God.

My love for nature is inexorably tied in with memories of my father, who died when I was six. I don’t remember many of our conversations, but I specifically remember one about dew on the grass, and another about fog (he described it as clouds on the ground, and the idea still enchants me). I remember my father wading in the Atlantic to fish, and wanting to toboggan in subzero temperatures in Vermont. My mom said he dreamed of a second career as a forest ranger, an escape from his stressful attorney lifestyle. I have my own outdoor dream, too, but mine of course works in writing a book. I want to be the next Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Annie Dillard) or Henry David Thoreau, transmitting volumes of wisdom simply by witnessing the natural world.

Now that spring is here, my predawn blogs are often accompanied by birdsong. I love to hear it swell from solo to chorus. I never tire of the tune as I stare through my monitor, wondering what to write next.