Friday
looking into sapsucker woods...
Study the tracks, the signs, the flights and flocks of birds, the circles of life—the dispersion of seeds, the march of invasive species; consider the spiriting of autumn leaves on a windy October afternoon, the indiscriminate dew and fog at dawn. These permeable lines of wildness intersect our lives, become us, we live through them, we who reside wittingly or unwittingly adjacent to Sapsucker Woods. The breath of these woods imbues the very air we breathe, and we are healthier for it. This autumn, though, we find the southern half of this vital corridor of woods and wetlands slated for development, for razing, for destruction.
It is early October. After days of rain, this afternoon the clouds are breaking up a little, cottoning open, and the woods are alive with birds chattering and gray squirrels shaking free acorns for their caches. Autumnal preparations are already well apace. I stand at the edge of the woods and gaze into the briar and bramble and poison ivy and jewelweed. The woods seem anxious, reacting too strongly to my presence. Blue jays, a full family of them, pass back and forth, tree to tree, calling out in an array of sounds, some beautiful chimes, others harsh grating cries. A red-bellied woodpecker, and then a downy, calls. Chickadees chortle their warning call back and forth. Now a red squirrel darts past, chattering. The birds are furious and pointed in their calls; chipmunks bolt retreats and call out for many minutes afterward. I am habitually aware of the circles of life ringing out around me, but somehow today this vituperative reaction seemed disproportionate. Of course there may have been a predator in the area, but I can’t help thinking the residents of these woods perceive the broader intention forced on them, the fact that humans are designing to destroy their home, their trees and nests and food. Perhaps they know they live in the shadow of development. Again.
Perhaps the woods have an active memory of humans who have penetrated their thickets before—either the developer or interlopers who strew their bottles and garbage about. There is a language and meaning to their actions that we have long been ignoring. Some of these wetlands were “filled in” decades ago, during the early stages of housing development, for no particular reason other than abuse. The stumps in the upland attest to the logging that has taken place there. Worst of all, the trash and refuse strewn about, unkempt by the developer, is a portent of what is to come, when the blind hands of development and progress wield their rusty tools.
To gaze into the woods, though, is to confront our tame minds with a kind of verdant untidiness. We are accustomed to pavement and stale lawns, permitting these carpets of nonnative grasses, the easy domination of a lawn, to become our norm. We choke on the power the riding lawnmower grants us. We stain the soil with our battery of bottled chemical solutions and then expect the rest of the world to attain to our monoculture. Meanwhile, these woods burgeon with profuse vegetation, for the land is just beginning to heal itself from gross human insult. The succession of plant communities is still in its early stages. At least we should offer these woods a chance to heal. To say we know how to “improve” the land and “preserve” the wetlands is a kind of scientific hubris—the opposite side of the same coin the developer pawned when disturbing it in the first place.
The deer runs carve hollows under bushes, round trees, tunneling through the underbrush. The beauty of these deer runs is that you can’t see them from your backyard. You can’t see them from the road. In late summer there rises a seemingly impenetrable green wall, poison ivy and grape vines and raspberry. Our pockets of blindness, our domesticated corridors, have left the more-than-human world some refuge, some space to carve out their own corridors. You have to imagine that for a deer or mouse or owl or weasel, human beings are embarrassingly easy to avoid. You have to believe, based on our usual habits and rounds, that people neither are aware of these other animals, nor miss them.
The danger is, though, that our blindness to wildness leads quickly to an ethical blindness. If we don’t recognize that these woods are a refuge for sundry animals unknown to us, thousands of plants and trees we can’t identify, and a profusion of other organisms beyond our scope of perception, we quickly abandon any sense of responsibility to them and fall prey to the demands of private property and greed.
Sapsucker Woods adds depth to our neighborhood—depth in all senses of the word. The peril these woods face derives in no small part from the transience of the people living nearby. It’s hard to imagine the developer didn’t include this fact as part of his strategy. Renters, many who are associated with the university and might be in the area only a year or two, will by and large feel no rootedness and responsibility for the woods here. They will not have laid claim to the fact that this is home. They will not have “dug in,” as Gary Snyder exhorts us to do. Somehow we have to overcome our nomadic tendencies to establish our roots and participate in our (human and natural) community.
There is wisdom in leaving some parts of the land untouched. Not because we are yearning for an Edenic myth of pristine perfection but because we as a collective of engaged citizens choose to act with a sense of modesty and to honor a particular course of action for the future. Not a retreat, but an opening up to a space of wildness. Allowing our habitat to retain its wildness is not evidence of weakness. It is weakness, rather, to accept passively a single person’s sordid vision as to what our community shall be like. It can be weakness to let a phalanx of experts to tell us how to think. No rare hawks: build. No foreseeable drainage problems: build. Traffic concerns? Solved by cosmetics: build. The flexing muscles of private property rights: build. A balanced proposal: build.
Within the past week I have been lectured twice about where to devote my energies: one person told me to embrace the peace movement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But she did not reflect on whether there was not war, violence, and injustice being perpetrated closer to home. Another person—whom I wish I could identify but shall not for the sake of this essay—assured me that the most important environmental battle was for the coastal wetlands of our country. He is, in one sense, indisputably correct—our coastal wetlands have been ravaged, drained and destroyed by development and overzealous meddlers like the Army Corps of Engineers. But why is it that we should don binoculars, or peer through a telescope, to employ our ethical sensibilities? Should our first and primary obligation not be to our home? Technology, for all its sidewinding wonders, reels us further along so many distant trajectories we forget—or aim to forget—our very real, physical embodiment in a place. When we no longer feel responsive to that place, we no longer feel responsible for it, either. To embrace a community and our place there requires listening, repeated ventures, daily ventures even, and a receptivity to wildness of non-humans, a willingness to interact, to affect and be affected. It is both more modest and infinitely more challenging than what we are accustomed to.
aw
It is early October. After days of rain, this afternoon the clouds are breaking up a little, cottoning open, and the woods are alive with birds chattering and gray squirrels shaking free acorns for their caches. Autumnal preparations are already well apace. I stand at the edge of the woods and gaze into the briar and bramble and poison ivy and jewelweed. The woods seem anxious, reacting too strongly to my presence. Blue jays, a full family of them, pass back and forth, tree to tree, calling out in an array of sounds, some beautiful chimes, others harsh grating cries. A red-bellied woodpecker, and then a downy, calls. Chickadees chortle their warning call back and forth. Now a red squirrel darts past, chattering. The birds are furious and pointed in their calls; chipmunks bolt retreats and call out for many minutes afterward. I am habitually aware of the circles of life ringing out around me, but somehow today this vituperative reaction seemed disproportionate. Of course there may have been a predator in the area, but I can’t help thinking the residents of these woods perceive the broader intention forced on them, the fact that humans are designing to destroy their home, their trees and nests and food. Perhaps they know they live in the shadow of development. Again.
Perhaps the woods have an active memory of humans who have penetrated their thickets before—either the developer or interlopers who strew their bottles and garbage about. There is a language and meaning to their actions that we have long been ignoring. Some of these wetlands were “filled in” decades ago, during the early stages of housing development, for no particular reason other than abuse. The stumps in the upland attest to the logging that has taken place there. Worst of all, the trash and refuse strewn about, unkempt by the developer, is a portent of what is to come, when the blind hands of development and progress wield their rusty tools.
To gaze into the woods, though, is to confront our tame minds with a kind of verdant untidiness. We are accustomed to pavement and stale lawns, permitting these carpets of nonnative grasses, the easy domination of a lawn, to become our norm. We choke on the power the riding lawnmower grants us. We stain the soil with our battery of bottled chemical solutions and then expect the rest of the world to attain to our monoculture. Meanwhile, these woods burgeon with profuse vegetation, for the land is just beginning to heal itself from gross human insult. The succession of plant communities is still in its early stages. At least we should offer these woods a chance to heal. To say we know how to “improve” the land and “preserve” the wetlands is a kind of scientific hubris—the opposite side of the same coin the developer pawned when disturbing it in the first place.
The deer runs carve hollows under bushes, round trees, tunneling through the underbrush. The beauty of these deer runs is that you can’t see them from your backyard. You can’t see them from the road. In late summer there rises a seemingly impenetrable green wall, poison ivy and grape vines and raspberry. Our pockets of blindness, our domesticated corridors, have left the more-than-human world some refuge, some space to carve out their own corridors. You have to imagine that for a deer or mouse or owl or weasel, human beings are embarrassingly easy to avoid. You have to believe, based on our usual habits and rounds, that people neither are aware of these other animals, nor miss them.
The danger is, though, that our blindness to wildness leads quickly to an ethical blindness. If we don’t recognize that these woods are a refuge for sundry animals unknown to us, thousands of plants and trees we can’t identify, and a profusion of other organisms beyond our scope of perception, we quickly abandon any sense of responsibility to them and fall prey to the demands of private property and greed.
Sapsucker Woods adds depth to our neighborhood—depth in all senses of the word. The peril these woods face derives in no small part from the transience of the people living nearby. It’s hard to imagine the developer didn’t include this fact as part of his strategy. Renters, many who are associated with the university and might be in the area only a year or two, will by and large feel no rootedness and responsibility for the woods here. They will not have laid claim to the fact that this is home. They will not have “dug in,” as Gary Snyder exhorts us to do. Somehow we have to overcome our nomadic tendencies to establish our roots and participate in our (human and natural) community.
There is wisdom in leaving some parts of the land untouched. Not because we are yearning for an Edenic myth of pristine perfection but because we as a collective of engaged citizens choose to act with a sense of modesty and to honor a particular course of action for the future. Not a retreat, but an opening up to a space of wildness. Allowing our habitat to retain its wildness is not evidence of weakness. It is weakness, rather, to accept passively a single person’s sordid vision as to what our community shall be like. It can be weakness to let a phalanx of experts to tell us how to think. No rare hawks: build. No foreseeable drainage problems: build. Traffic concerns? Solved by cosmetics: build. The flexing muscles of private property rights: build. A balanced proposal: build.
Within the past week I have been lectured twice about where to devote my energies: one person told me to embrace the peace movement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But she did not reflect on whether there was not war, violence, and injustice being perpetrated closer to home. Another person—whom I wish I could identify but shall not for the sake of this essay—assured me that the most important environmental battle was for the coastal wetlands of our country. He is, in one sense, indisputably correct—our coastal wetlands have been ravaged, drained and destroyed by development and overzealous meddlers like the Army Corps of Engineers. But why is it that we should don binoculars, or peer through a telescope, to employ our ethical sensibilities? Should our first and primary obligation not be to our home? Technology, for all its sidewinding wonders, reels us further along so many distant trajectories we forget—or aim to forget—our very real, physical embodiment in a place. When we no longer feel responsive to that place, we no longer feel responsible for it, either. To embrace a community and our place there requires listening, repeated ventures, daily ventures even, and a receptivity to wildness of non-humans, a willingness to interact, to affect and be affected. It is both more modest and infinitely more challenging than what we are accustomed to.
aw
