The Nature of Nature 2019

When I was young I kept a pet caterpillar. I found it on a tree at recess. I carried it around with me, everywhere I went, for a month or so. I did not know the species nor was I particularly entomologically inclined at the time. It was not host-specific, and I would go into the garden to find an assortment of leaves and plant matter for my little friend, bringing it a haphazard salad. I remember holding it in my hands and let it climb over my fingers. At their tips it would dance, swaying the front of its body and legs in search of a new structure to climb, a new thing to explore.

One day I woke up and didn’t have a pet caterpillar anymore. Instead a dusty and webby pupae was stuck to the side of the jar, yellowish white and ghastly. I went on my father’s outdated PC with its comically large monitor. I found photos of my caterpillar and its pupa on a site about invasive pests. The moth it would have become was most notably harmful to native fruit trees.

I took my companion and friend outside and used a stick to place the pupa on the stone steps leading into my house, and crushed him underfoot with a sickening pop. It left a stain on the stone for a year, and on my conscience indefinitely.

I used to talk to birds. Oddly, they used to talk back. Walking down my street, in the shadow of tall trees, I would hear a solitary whistling call from some lonely bastard or other. I would whistle back in the same rhythm. A few moments later, I would get a response in a slightly different tone. Then came the crucial part. If I failed my response, the conversation would end. There would be silence, and no amount of whistling could bring my conversational partner back. Repeated experimentation allowed me to feel out the breadth and basics of the social cues they used, and eventually I was able to progress through multiple calls and responses without committing avian faux-pas. I was very proud of this ability and would practice it often.

I do wonder whether any of them figured out that I was not a potential mate. I never thought at the time about why the birds were calling, I just felt compelled to call back. I wonder how many species I irrevocably damaged, how many birds I cockblocked, just by trying to say hello.

In my freshman year, a squirrel was murdered outside of my dorm building. The perpetrator was a bird of prey of some fashion. It gathered onlookers as it slowly consumed its victim, stopping at the halfway point, once the corpse was light enough, to carry the remains up into a tree for a safer meal. It was not especially large, and it struggled to carry even half of a squirrel into the lowest branch of a nearby oak, but it had efficiently and quickly killed its prey with a large set of talons.

I never looked into its identity then, and the pictures of it are long gone, but I think I’ve narrowed it down to two possibilities; A red-shouldered hawk or a red-tailed hawk. The former only occasionally prey on tree squirrels, while the latter do so far more often. This is probably due to their respective sizes – red-shouldered hawks seem to prefer prey that is smaller than them, and eastern grey squirrels such as our campus’ famed black squirrels can easily grow to match their weight. Red-tails tend to outweigh tree squirrels by a comfortable margin, but they also seem to prefer ground squirrels to their arboreal cousins.

Ultimately, based on their native ranges, I would guess it was a young red-tailed hawk. Red-shoulders only spend their summers in this area, but red-tails will often spend their lives here.

The title says it all. Thoreau was a pretentious son of a gun, especially when it came to writing and reading. In his aptly-named chapter Reading, he spends a great deal of time glorifying the ancient “works of genius” of the Romans and Greeks while at the same time bemoaning the state of both contemporary literature and contemporary literature of the middle ages. What specifically grinds my gears is his insistence that the spoken word is inferior to the written one.

“The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and health of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.”

That’s what Thoreau says, still discussing the epics of Ancient Greece. Then he hits us with: “No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of relics.” Now a pretentious pontificator is one thing, but a pretentious pontificator who forgets that the Iliad was created as an oral poetic epic while at the same time railing against the spoken word is something else entirely.

 

Johnson’s Woods is invaluable as a window into pre-industrial Ohio forests. And it only exists because for four hundred years people have not seen the land as valuable. It’s a funny thing, for the forest to have gained value thanks to being seen as worthless. Too swampy to farm and possessing no mineral reserves to exploit, it remained largely untouched by human hands. But as soon as our society began to appreciate the last shreds of our old-growth forests, we perceived Johnson’s Woods as having value.

And as soon as we valued it, we began to degrade it. A boardwalk was put in, and the tree-carvers followed. We made the woods accessible so we could better appreciate them, but in doing so we irrevocably changed the nature of the woods. The land was not farmed because it was too swampy, it was probably left un-mined because it lacked minerals, and it was not developed into a neighborhood or a shopping center probably because it is too far from other hubs of human activity. It was left inaccessible, free from harm, until, in our zeal to preserve it, we opened it up.

 

Tut-tut, it looks like rain!
When I was little one of my favorite things was Winnie the Pooh, and who could ever forget the rainy days in the Hundred Acre Woods. I am slightly convinced that these cozy childhood memories are the reason I am so infatuated with rainy days now. In fact, I’m not just infatuated with rainy days, but I’m infatuated with the word “rainy.” A rain is not a storm. A storm implies thunder, lightning, wind, or some other majestic violence. But rain is a calmer, more steady drumming of water against the earth. It is peaceful and life-giving. A rainy day is a cherished day, one for staying inside and baking, or perhaps visiting local museums. For some such as myself a rainy day is for a long walk, and admiring how much greener everything looks when it rains.
A rainy sky can be many things; a summer rain while the sun still shines may create a rainbow, or an autumn rain in late October may cause leaves to loosen from their branches, causing a sky that rains not only water, but an array of orange, red, and golden glory. A rainy sky in the spring may be a pale gray, giving everything a hazy overcast. Or perhaps it is raining at night, and everything becomes illuminated in the way light reflects off of the wet surfaces. “Rainy” can be so incredibly beautiful. Rainy is memorable, always bringing me back to some of my most cherished childhood memories.

Tut-tut, it looks like rain!

Along the boardwalk there is a spot of char where a bench used to be. The burned area is very obviously contained, and leads me and others I was with to regard it as arson and vandalism. However, I think the most unfortunate thing about it all was how I wasn’t all that surprised or taken aback. There were carvings in the trees and in some areas trash was left behind to fester and pollute the land. On a more legal side of things, there was a boardwalk beneath our feet. While I can see the importance of the boardwalk for safety reasons, it still cut a circular scar in the forest that is Johnson’s Woods. Man has claimed nature for his own, so it’s no surprise that some may want to burn what others consider to be precious. It makes me wonder what form of self gratification the arsonist acquired from his burning. After all, they wouldn’t be the only one burning parts of the world, unfortunately the fires we are currently in are not contained.

I first came upon the Oak Grove in the winter of my Freshman year. The air was thoroughly chilled and I desperately needed some air and a study break during a weekend grind, so I decided to explore some of the areas of campus I had not yet acquainted myself with. I had gone that way to inspect Kenarden, a building that I thought looked like a castle. After a thorough examination of the living space and getting lost multiple times, I headed down the brick path towards Kauke, stopping along the way to read the stone pillar at the entrance of the Oak Grove.
I was startled at what I found. I’m not sure what I was expecting, probably an engraving of dedication and gratitude to one of the school’s many donors, or a marker of a special tree dedicated by a graduating class. But rather than formalities I discovered a phrase that both at the time and still even now quite frankly creeps me out: “…” As I continued to roam the small area and admire the old growth trees the creepiness only intensified, especially considering that the sun was now falling to a brisk, late-November dusk. But it may be that exact creepiness that has left me so infatuated with the Oak Grove. It is now one of my favorite locations on campus, and I find myself there often, rereading the stones and speaking to the wise, old growth oaks.

In 2017, a week before my sophomore year began I went out with my mother, father, and grandfather to the smokey mountains to view the total eclipse. We set out under a small shade tree in a small clearing and my dad and grandfather began fiddling with the plethora of telescopes and cameras, making sure that they all would be set and ready to go before the few minutes of total eclipse that we would get.

My grandfather had seen two eclipses before that point, but wanted to see as many as possible. And in that moment when the burning hot sky turned to a dulcet chill I realized why. It was an eerie twilight. Neither dark nor light, with a beautiful corona bursting out above me. We watched the moon slowly make its way in front of the sun through a solar telescope, watching the sun rays tremble back beneath the dark silhouette of the moon. And as it reached its totality, the world went still as a hundred voices simultaneously stopped and sucked in a breath. The bugs and the birds were silent, and it was as though the whole world had stopped.