The Chipmunk’s Human Experience, Johnson’s Woods Post

Moseying along through Johnson’s Woods I especially took the time to stop, pause, and glance around me slowly when I came across a sign. Since being taught from a young age that reading the signs is half the experience from the vacations I took as a child on historical sites where the signs were the explanations to what it was, exactly, that you were looking at I felt the need to read them. My favorite by far was not so much explanatory as it was a specific. A strange tree loomed before me, its bark appearing as if it was peeling away from the bottoms up. The sign read, “SHAGBARK HICKORY Carya ovata” with a picture of its leaf beside the words. The name, I felt, was truly fitting. Not something I usually feel when discovering the names of plants. Along with feeling an inner chuckle at the greatness that was this tree’s name but I also took a second to notice that it is of human touch that a sign was placed there, to allure more humans to this place and be amazed at the name, the what I assume to be Latin name, and an intricate drawing of the leaf. And it is of human decision what this tree will be called, since tree’s have no form of communication with people and no way of saying whether or not they call themselves by a different one. However I do not think that naming trees is such a bad thing to do as people. In this same space, however, there was a burnt out cigarette butt lying on the trail. At least it wasn’t in the woods itself, but still, I felt anger seeing that someone would dare smoke within such beauty and then continue with the audacity to toss their garbage to the ground. This, I feel, is a bad act as man to do upon nature. There is wildlife that lives and feeds off this land. It is cruel to force this upon them, if by chance they mistake a white butt end of a cigarette to be a new treat, maybe a foreign white plant that has fallen off a tree, in their eyes. At one moment, well there were many moments where this occurred but one in particular, there was a chipmunk rustling in the leaves beyond. As a huge fan of animals I was delighted to see so many of them. I’m so used to seeing one chipmunk among hundreds of squirrels but in Johnson’s Woods it was all chipmunk and no squirrel. I watched the little thing dart around while whipping out my phone to try and snag a picture before it could dash away just as quickly as it had come. Yet the chipmunk instead perched itself on a log perfectly in my line of sight. It stayed there, still as it could be aside from the rise and fall of its tiny stomach I couldn’t even see from that distance. I got a few pictures of it before knowing I’d had enough. I lifted my hand, in a gesture of waving goodbye. It waited a moment longer as well, taking the time until after I had put my hand down to scurry away. Maybe it had even blinked as its own gesture, but again I was too far to see any of its movements. But it was as if it knew what I was wanting and then what I was doing. Never have I had an experience like that, such a communicative connection, with a wild animal. Then again, this chipmunk may have been one that has had many such experiences with humans.