We drove past the farmlands in Wooster in Ohio. I could not help, but think of my insignificance in the vast, rural landscape. I could easily lose myself in the lush maize fields and among the dairy cows and miniature horses that dotted the greener pastures. It was too spacious. There were not many people in sight. I learnt that I was of no importance to anyone in the world, but to myself. I was a nobody. Earlier our bus driver took a sharp turn to avoid crashing into a speeding vehicle. I felt sick to my stomach. I wanted to go back home. I wanted to go back to my college campus, where the campus grounds were safe, crowded and constricted. On the campus grounds, each stone, torn leaf and pinecone, contributed to the beauty of the landscape. Like them I too, felt that I mattered. Whereas in the farmlands of Ohio, I was just another corn stalk, growing in the midst of my identical brother and sisters, only to be chopped down for food and fodder.

And though we drove to Johnson Woods, trudged through scorched leaf piles, snapped photographs of scurrying chipmunks under the diminishing canopy of maple and oak trees, shoved our knowledge on Ohio’s forests down each other’s throats and then drove back, the Johnson Woods did not appeal to me as the abundant growth of corn in the farmlands, that I looked upon through my bus window. It was funny to think that a random cultivated plot of land would appeal to an amateur naturalist than the famous 155 acre Johnson Woods, but strangely it did.

The farmland taught me of my insignificance as a human being. I learnt that like the corn stalks that were grown, harvested and then replaced, I too, could be replaced by someone else, in both my personal and professional life. Once I would graduate, I would be replaced by another English Major at the college, once I become a mother, my children would leave me for their own families and once I grew old and weak, someone would replace me to do my job , so I could retire. The Johnson Woods did not teach me anything about myself or my life. The many oak and maple trees that rose 40-50 feet and were more than 400 years old, were meant to last forever. It felt so unnatural to preserve them. Unlike, the corn stalks that grew in the fields, no-one would replace the older trees with newer varieties. And that “unnaturalness” of preserving the same trees, without allowing Nature to take her own course and spread her vegetation in a way she liked, at the Johnson Woods, did not appeal to me.

 

 

 

 

My latest obsession, a young adolescent female swan, floats almost effortlessly, into an open circle of water. I conceal myself behind a clump of cattails. She slides towards my direction. I do not want to frighten her, so I sit still. She focuses her soft, almond shaped eyes on me. Then she turns to face her male counterpart, an eager —though feisty cob. 

As they come closer, the trumpeter swans set themselves parallel to each other, with a precision that almost seems rehearsed. They extend their white elongated necks and form an elegantly shaped heart. I lift up my charcoal pencil to sketch them as the tips of their black beaks touch. But the quick-eyed female catches me in the midst of my artistic voyeurism. She cocks her head in disgust before outspreading her large wings and launching into a short flight across the lake. 

Her cob unhappily watches her slip into a backdrop of flowering rushes. And then after noticing me drawing on the nearby Lake Erie shorelines, he too makes an exit, disappearing to a point not far from where his partner has landed, where I know they will resume their mating once they feel I have left.