It didn’t have to be a barn swallow, but it just happened to be. It is said that the barn swallow is the most abundant swallow species in the world, nesting in almost all parts of North America during the summer, and over-wintering in all parts of South America, so I suppose that the odds are against. The barn swallow’s reaction to exhaustion and fear is not surprising for a bird its size–perhaps not surprising for any bird. It seems most true to say that the barn swallow featured in Tempest Williams’ chapter ultimately died from fear. Even once the danger is gone, there is too much adrenaline running through too small a body. I imagine rigor mortis setting in even before the barn swallow stops breathing, the adrenaline prepping the muscles for a tenseness with no relief.

I do wonder about Tempest Williams’ mother, who does not share the same quick release. Perhaps because she has had time to ponder her end she can also live with it. At once, her death is inevitable, but can be delayed for an immeasurable amount of time. I don’t fully understand what hope has done to her psyche, what damage lingers in her knowledge of her inevitable death once faced with hope. But maybe it’s just the time she can inhabit. Although she knows her fate, she also knows there is some time for her to continue with her life. Then perhaps it is simply the case that the “mother reclaims her body, for her own life” instead of dreading the death to come. Instead of preparing her body for death, she devotes it to herself so she can still live.

Saturday mornings I wake up slowly, letting the headache of sleep fall away from the bed and the covers and the cold. When I roll over to meet the light sifting in from my window, I can almost see the singular particles roving around. Or is it merely the dust? Outside I can hear the lazy traffic rumbling against the asphalt and cobblestone. My body stays asleep until I put the bones back in place.

On colder mornings, I move in autopilot. The sandwich of cold air is layer like this: floor, cold, warm, ceiling. A layer of dust films over my nose and presses down on my lungs. When I get up I imagine leaving and walking somewhere. I imagine getting lost and not coming back.

Edward Abbey stands in awe of the Arches. When morning comes he finds a new landscape. I almost say the landscape is waiting to be seen, or waiting for something, but this is untrue. The Arches simply are. The landscape simply is. And yet, Abbey desires the land and wants to take possession of it “as a man desires a beautiful woman” (5). The overwhelming beauty of what he sees makes him hungry for possession and awakens a greedy desire to know the land and, therefore, make it his.

I wonder if it is possible anymore to find such beauty. I’m sure the beauty exists, but I wonder how attainable it is, how well can one come to know any one place anymore. How can place compete with the entirety of human greed? I want to walk away and get lost and find some place new. I don’t know if it will be new altogether, but at least new to me. I want to explore a place and know it, know how to get anywhere because I’ve gone everywhere. I don’t know if I would feel greedy and want to be the only one who would know that place like I would, but if there was someone else who knew that place like I might, I don’t think I’d want to cross paths. There is something peaceful in perceived solitude.

On the other hand, maybe it would be nice to think of having a sort of companion on the journey. I could still walk alone, but not feel the loneliness of being the only one.

In Mason, OH there is a roller coaster park called Kings Island, which houses a handful of record-breaking thrill rides. The new rides wind through the sprawling property’s walkways, above and around booths, and near the older and clunkier rides. Most of these coasters, however, have levels of wooden boardwalk paths and stairs.

My mom recently left a job at a place that had only one perk: every summer the company hosts a picnic at Kings Island and treats employees and their families to a (mostly) free day at Kings Island. We were able to take advantage of this perk for a few summers until mom found her new job. Mom usually got four tickets so she could take all her daughters. Once at Kings Island, we would split up: Brittany and me; Mom and Savannah. This way, we each could take the rides that suited us.

Recently, I’ve started paying closer attention to the sound of things. While at Brown’s Bog I felt distinctly aware of myself. That is, I felt out of place as we walked on the boardwalk towards the bog itself. I have this habit of clinging to those close to me: a hand or a linked arm often suffices to give me the grounding and connection I flounder for. The clunk clunk clunk of our feet as we walked echoed my memories of walking hand in hand with Brittany to our next roller-coaster. Despite being surrounded by the class, the trees, the flora, the noise, I felt lost and alone. There was a moment when this feeling hit me completely for the first time, that I looked around, expecting to find someone I could latch on to, someone I could consider home. But, of course, there is no one close enough.

Tiny, Brittany walks like an elephant, but her feet don’t carry the same depth as a group of 20. But this is barely an issue. Most often, Brittany and I would walk a boardwalk with a couple of people beyond or behind, so the resonance is close enough. And as the class went hammering along on the boardwalk I couldn’t help but think: how loud, how rude.

If you are of the mind that once nature has been touched by human influence, in any way, to any extent, that it is no longer nature, then perhaps there is no more magic in the wood. As soon as the marsh is roped off, the boardwalk put in, the nature will lose itself to the human. As soon as the deer walk by, stifling the remainder of the wilds as a snarky response to their own overpopulation, it may also become clear how big the human hand actually is. But what can we say, after the boardwalk becomes the only path taken and nature, in general, is set to someone else’s plan?

Even after all we’ve done, the bugs remain the constant background music to the journey through. Through the woods, through the night, through the long drive home (splattered, speckled, across the windshield). Although the plane overhead drowns out the buzzing as it passes, the bugs are always here, on your skin, in your nose and ears, flirting with your face, giving you goose-pimples all over.

*A note on the supplementary materials: the file itself is very quiet, so you may need to turn up the volume significantly to get the effect.

If you were to take a couple of steps northwest of my mother’s house in Milford, you might find yourself walking through a small school of trees. This wood, hardly more than 1,000,000 square feet (or just about 23 acres) spans the gap between two different collections of property, a neighborhood and a branch of southwestern Ohio’s vocational schools, Great Oaks. When I think about nature, and my connection to it, I return here almost every time because it is where most of my experience took place.

All discoveries, even shared ones, are personal. McKibben’s rumination that there may be some added quality in a place when a person is the first to see it strikes me as extreme for a couple of reasons. To begin, it devalues that place as a part of nature, because it is then valued as something to be claimed. So, instead of appreciating that piece of nature, it seems like that piece is valuable only as something that humans can gain or use. There is a source of pride in property, but saying, for example, that going to the Arctic Circle is less of an experience simply because someone else has already experienced it is ridiculous because the Arctic Circle is going to be the Arctic Circle whether or not you or someone else goes. To me, it sounds a lot like saying a good movie is not as good if someone else has seen it, or even, if you have seen it before.

At one point in time, my cousins and I believed that we did own part of the wood behind the house. But as time went on, it was harder and harder to maintain that sense of property. Over winter and into spring every year the wood re-evaluated itself and shifted. Many parts remained the same, but ultimately, the paths grew over without asking us and the ground evolved. Walking and playing in the wood then became a matter of sharing with our neighbors and learning how to use the space together. Once we were able to do that, we were able to enjoy the wood and each other’s company more. We still had spaces we liked to call our own, but we could share those spaces, and feed off of each other. The magic of imagination became so much greater when we shared it, something immeasurably important in just a handful of acres.

 

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