Blog post 6 -- Paved Paradise

It was a little disappointing, after the sunshine during my last visit to the pond, to again come upon so much gray. Everything in sight this week was gray or brown. The snow covering the pond was no longer white, but a pale ash. Slushy mounds of melting snow took on the color of steel. Bark on the large trees was a dark, menacing gray, almost black. On the smaller trees, the bark looked softer, smoother, like a small animal’s pelt.

Gray stalks wait for the sun

A group of school kids on the boardwalk created a shock of color and noise. Kids in bright parkas laughed as they hurled chunks of snow and sticks on to the frozen surface of the pond. Some left the boardwalk to stomp through the marsh grass to find sticks to throw, until the adults in their party called them back. As I watched them I thought about the ways different people approach nature. In the city, what does nature mean? Does it have to be a place like the South Pond, created by engineers and architects? Or are the trees lining a parking lot nature?

Last year my son was in the hospital, on a hall with other adolescent boys. One day in their group therapy, the discussion turned to a disagreement between two boys sharing a room. One of them wanted to keep the blinds open; one wanted the blinds shut. The boy who wanted the blinds open said he liked to look out at the trees. He liked the nature. He referred to it as "that shit," and said it was comforting.

At the time, this struck me as funny. But it’s stayed with me. The hospital’s windows were covered with an ugly metal mesh. It was hard to see out, and there wasn’t much to see. This hospital was close to Lake Michigan, but not close enough that you could see the park or water. The few visible trees, on the street or next to the tiny parking lot, were bare in late February. To my eyes, it was ugly. To this boy, it was nature.

As I watched the kids on the boardwalk, and especially the ones in the marshy grass, I wondered if it was their age or a lack of experience with this organized wilderness that prompted them to leave the boardwalk. All over there are signs asking visitors to stay on the paths, partly it’s about civility, partly to preserve the budding life in and along the water. It’s necessary to separate the pond and the pond visitors, of course. But does this boardwalk--constructed of recycled materials--that acts as a barrier between people and this patch of wilderness create too much separation?

In his essay, “The American Indian Wilderness,” Louis Owens questions the meaning of our modern idea of wilderness. “The global environmental crisis that sends species into extinction daily and threatens to destroy all life surely has its roots in the Western pattern of thought that sees humanity and ‘wilderness’ as mutually exclusive,” writes Owens.  Unless Americans accept the responsibility their relationship with the earth entails, “a few square miles of something called wilderness will become the sign of failure everywhere.” What does this responsibility look like? Could an appreciation for a few bare trees outweigh a multimillion dollar pond renovation? Or is it that one leads to the other and ultimately to more responsibility?

Fox or coyote tracks across the ice