This chapter was about meaning, and relationships, and hope. The book as a whole is quite intimate and this chapter zeroes in on aspects of intimacy, and the little surprises in life that can be so moving, such as receiving a letter from a friend, or spotting a flamingo in the middle of the Great Basin. Williams weaves the thread of hope through the chapter, detailing her mothers’ advice to a family friend and her own conclusions after confronting her mother’s cancer. She likens the mirage of a lake on searing desert sands to “hope on a hot day” where someone else interpreted the phenomenon as a reflection of life’s uncertainty. Williams argues for the irrational, the empirical, the qualities that can’t be defined by statistics. For her, hope is perfectly valid. She praises the diversity of probabilities and is inspired by the flamingos at Great Salt Lake– the odds of them coming to Utah were not high yet they came. The odds of her mother surviving her cancer, as described in another chapter, were not high, yet Mrs. Tempest was determined to survive.

It happens everywhere and I have seen it in too many places to simply stick with one so I’ll make a list (in no way comprehensive):

• The field across from my uncle’s farm being subdivided
• the remnant patch of forest surrounded on one side by a strip mall anchored by Giant Eagle, and by subdivisions on the other
• the overgrown field adjacent to Metzger Park in Westerville, OH, long untouched by a plow, finally being razed and graded for more subdivision development
• the vacant plot peppered with locust and linden trees north of the Yarnell family farm along Africa Road being sold off to developers and made a future site for a high-rise

All of these situations involve the inevitable incorporation of unincorporated land into the growing sprawl of a metro area. Three of them deal with the development in the part of Metro Columbus’ outer rim with which I am most familiar. They all have to do with property rights and the struggle that aging farmers encounter when none of their children feel up to taking on the property, and when the tight profit margins start to take their toll. None of those places I mentioned are particularly wild or spectacularly natural in their own right. However, their development represents the extinguishing of any sizable green space within a few miles of their vicinity. In the case of the wood by the Giant Eagle, it was surrounded on three sides by development, connected to the rest of its owner’s property by a narrow strip of grassy hill.

Here at this wood, or next to it, was a bus stop. In high school until I got a car and was recruited into that carbon-spewing horde of one-person commuters, I rode the bus. My bus-buddy got off at this stop by the woods, because he lived in a little house shaded by the trees at the edge of the property. I never went out to explore those woods but he would tell me about them sometimes. They weren’t like Johnson’s woods, but there were some sizable oaks and maples, at least from what I could see. Those woods became an integral, given part of the background for me– I would always sit on the same side of the bus so I could see them when we drove past. Eventually I got used to them and would pay them little more than a glance most of the time until one day, I looked up, and saw the carnage of 20 acres of hardwood forest crudely razed to the ground. It was a mellow spring day with traces of winter lingering in the air, and the hopeful, bright green of the new growth peeking out across the land. Many of the leaves on the trees were still the size of a mouse’s ear, or a grain of corn. Trunks were toppled onto each other, hacked off from the ground at different heights. Their crowns, naked but for the faintest green stubble (almost like velvet on a buck’s antlers), were tangled into each other. I only had a few moments to take in the scene before I was driven away. I closed my eyes and could still picture it. No one else on the bus even noticed.

Many months later I had joined the school play, a spring production of “Big Fish”, a musical. It centered around a son whose father’s words were a seamless flow of stories of his youth in a Southern town called Ashton. The picture of Ashton drawn by this father was colored by nostalgia and fondness, but it was nevertheless quite a place to live. The development that came to replace that forest by Giant Eagle was called “Ashton”. The houses were stately and asked a hefty three-hundred thousand dollars for their titles. I passed it sometimes whenever I needed to go to Giant Eagle. Whenever I think of Big Fish, I think of that forest, and whenever I see that development I think of Big Fish. I never went into that forest, and the son never went to Ashton. I’m as sick of that development as that son is of Ashton.

Driving to David Kline’s farm was a series of flashbacks. From Wooster to Apple Creek I paid little notice to the passing countryside, having passed it so many times before, but past Apple Creek I was sad that I couldn’t enjoy the view. The rolling hills now were painted with the dusty orange and washed-out yellow of autumn. At one point we drove through a promenade of tall trees, I couldn’t tell what species they were, but their crowns were all a crisp fiery orange, as if a pumpkin patch had decided to renounce the confines of rotundity and leap up to the skies.

When we arrived to Criswell and Carr, that intersection at a sharp angle, I remembered having driven down to a farm in those parts earlier in the month to have my walnuts hulled. I talk about walnuts too much, perhaps, but I enjoy them, and navigating Amish country without a GPS was such an interesting experience. Other clients at the farm had filled wagons attached to their buggies with burlap sacks of walnuts– my meager 10 pound collection of the nuts paled by comparison. These clients made good conversation with the family that was running this business, and with each other. This– gathering walnuts and travelling down to the Yoder farm to have them hulled– was a tradition within the area, not just for the Amish but the larger Wayne-Holmes county community as the whole. I was happy to have been a part of such a bucolic tradition and to remember my experience on the way to the Kline farm.

Upon our arrival, I didn’t know what I was expecting but a number of things stood out to me: the compactness of it all, with buildings huddled relatively close together and to the roads, the homestead resembling a hamlet among the surrounding acres of land. The new house had a spacious porch with raw support beams that smelled like fresh lumber. The inside of the first barn we saw felt like the bowels of a great merchant ship, with a maze of wooden structures, and pens dimly lit by sparse sunbeams, and the warm, earthy smell of animals. The barn cats made themselves known soon after we arrived, and enamored all of us while Mr. Kline showed us around the barn. They reminded me of my uncle’s cats on his farm– less domestic and more a feature of the land; a constant. Regarding barn cats, the question seems less, “will there be any?”, and more, “How many will there be?”.

Sedentary agriculture begets close contact with animals, which in turn seems to engender a fondness for them, and Mr. Kline has shown in writing and in speech his appreciation for all life. His love for birds goes without saying, and he loves his cattle enough to see them as more than a money-maker. Something that I marveled at was that his farm only raised enough animals to provide for the family. There was little to do with profits. Here, one farmed for the enjoyment of it and the life that came with it. The deliberateness of it all would be enough to stump even Thoreau.

After meeting Mr. Kline, I determined to take that sociology course on the Amish the next time it would be offered. His book does tell a lot about his lifestyle and his worldview as shaped by his culture, but there’s more that I would like to know about Amish and general religious approaches to the natural world. The emphasis on separation from the buzz of modern life and on close neighborly and familial relationships, and how those values have intersected with environmentalism, are particularly interesting. While we listened to Mr. Kline in the other barn, I couldn’t help but fell warm and fuzzy when he described how sometimes they clean it up to have weddings and church services. Seeing the grandchildren spying on us with innocent curiosity from outside the barn and from atop the hay bales within the barn, and even the little girl playing in a feed trough outside, convinced me that I was in an entirely different world from the one I had woke up in earlier that day.

Of all the authors we have read in this course, I would have to say Dillard interested me most. I appreciate her well-roundedness and many references to sources or case studies I otherwise would never have found. She wove together her outlandish dreams and the most mundane events that she encountered, and presented a treatise on the magnitude of the natural world. She, like Thoreau, emphasized perception on whatever level, searching the world within herself and the world around her. Her metaphors still escape me if I’m not focused enough on reading, but stitch the anecdotes and tangents together artfully. I really enjoyed her choice of setting, having grown up in a home next to a creek, and enjoyed seeing how someone else interacts with a creek.

One passage that seems to summarize her philosophy is “I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in its beam” (35). Throughout the book she describes treks into the countryside around her, in pursuit of muskrats, or to watch a praying mantis birth its eggs. She laments that only the simplest of animals perceive the world as it actually is. Her interaction with the natural world is characterized by observation. Her realization that “everything [she has] seen is wholly gratuitous” (130) ties back to the earlier quote and to her philosophy– the world was not created by her nor necessarily for her. She has little power to shape it but can appreciate its beauty and marvel at its horrors. To this end the becomes obsessed with the more grotesque activities that go on, often unnoticed by busy human eyes, and becomes distressed with the abundance of it all. While she cannot cause light, she represents one single force or particle facing an infinite ocean of life, much of it very unlike her and very distant from her genetically. Her book is a chronicle of her journey through the world mind and through the world of the map, but despite being as raw and revealing in some parts as a confessional memoir, it doesn’t feel like it. Her book is a sort of stream of consciousness, brimming with information of all sorts.

As I sat on the bus on the way to the bog, I couldn’t help but gaze out of the window, as much as I needed a nap. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, I was just amused at how bulky and out of place the bus must have looked puttering along the township roads. Soon after making a stop to look at some turkeyfoot grass in a remnant patch of prairie, the corn-covered hills rolling out to the horizon were replaced by shady woodland. Suddenly something caught my eye—a hickory tree! The bus passed so quickly that I couldn’t tell if it was fruiting but it was nice to find something I wasn’t looking for. Just as soon as I saw that hickory tree with its large drooping leaves the bus came to a stop in the shade of some black walnut trees (which were fruiting, but the nuts were so small that it wouldn’t be worthwhile to drive out and harvest them). A wooden sign identified the place as Brown’s Bog, and following a brief brief the class set out down the trail.

I had read that this reach of the Killbuck was sort of like the Everglades of Ohio, and although everything seemed a bit dry I was truly convinced some tropical element was at work. All around the trail were great bunches of ferns, their fronds reaching in every direction. Many of the trees had thin and spindly trunks with small leaves, casting a mottled shade. And of course there was us, trekking along one after another as if on a safari along a planned route, or similarly like a herd of elephants marching noisily down to the watering hole. The closer we got to the bog itself the more I wondered, having lived in Ohio all of my life without ever encountering a place like this. The ground itself was alien to me in some places, being porous enough to be tamped down by a few jumps upon it. The boardwalk here lead directly toward the water, stopping just short of it but having a railed platform. Here we had most of our academic discussion, and here I was reminded of the pervasiveness of human activities. An impressive condensation trail from some aircraft stripped across the northeast sky. The bog pond was in the beginning stages of eutrophication resulting from agricultural runoff, with algae beginning to mat over the water along the shore. The whole place was just a little bit dry– partially from the change in seasons but also partially from the drainage ditches that run adjacent to the reserve.

Leaving the lookout platform, we saw some pitcher plants clustered about the bog, verdant green and blending in very well with their surroundings. Once I spotted them, however, they were glaringly visible, foreign to me but natural to the landscape. We took a side trail to the uplands of the property and here, off the boardwalk, I slowed down and fell behind the group, the better to perceive these woods. I found the environment more typical of the Ohio I knew, less swampy and more woody. Here there were many hickory trees but they were all quite young; this forest was relatively new growth. Stumbling over knotty tree roots while listening to the muffled conversations of the group brought back memories of weekend trips with my boy scout troop, and I was thrown into introspective nostalgia for much of this side trip.

When we returned to the bus we were met with a Nature Conservancy worker whose calmness would have been appreciated best before the hike— I personally was ready to go back to campus and get ready for my other obligations of the evening. He was very informational, however, and even extended a volunteer opportunity to us.

All in all I am grateful to have experienced some of Ohio’s Everglades firsthand but a bit underwhelmed by the state of it. Learning about the consequences of human activity was helpful but ultimately opened up a can of worms with the discussion of keeping the forest in check to preserve the bog, in an area designated for unfettered wilderness. In addition to looking up the difference between bogs and fens (and marshes and swamps), I have some research to do concerning swamps in Ohio (particularly the Great Black Swamp of the Sanduskey) and of the Everglades. There was so much to learn from the Everglades, and the fight for their protection was an early battle in the crusade of the Environmentalist Movement, and I bet it could be applied to the quagmire that is Brown’s Bog.

Never before had I stood among so many beeches at once, at least not that I can recall. Many of them bore weathered scars inflicted by arrogant lovers, but still stood sturdy, smooth, and tall. They cast a mottled but respectable shade over the ground, working with the maples to crowd out older oaks and hickories. I couldn’t help but marvel at how green everything was! The sun, well into its daily procession, painted the canopy a dazzling emerald. The trunks holding up the canopy like elegant pillars touted a range of every shade of brown, accompanied by the ashy charcoal of the beech. The roots disappeared into a floor littered with leaves in varying stages of decomposition, sometimes wrapped in a blanket of wildflowers. The wind set everything to a gentle sway, such that the whole place seemed to breathe as one being.

Knowing the age of the place I liked to think that there was indeed a presence there, a slumbering consciousness that could only arise from a prolonged, uninterrupted existence. There seemed to be a succession of natural processes to an extent I had never seen– trees grew of all ages, with many examples of fallen logs decomposing, and a transition of forest type from sun-loving oak to shade-tolerant maple and beech. There were many sites where many different kinds of mushroom and fungi could be found simply along the boardwalk, with more bound to be hiding elsewhere in the woods. There were no tangles of kudzu, no thickets of honeysuckle. This was a free place, different from the cultivated and constrained landscape of the College of Wooster.

The mushrooms of the Woods especially stood out to me, not because they were foreign but because they were allowed to live. On more than one occasion I had been on my way across campus only to be taken aback with the realization that what once was a happy colony of mushrooms sitting below a tree had been poisoned by the grounds crew. At Johnson’s Woods there were no trustees who decided what creature could grow where. The mushrooms served their valuable role as decomposer and nutrient distributor in the ecosystem without interruption. Some bubbled a brilliant orange, others flared a powdery white. Some poked out from fallen logs or the trunks of a few trees like spongy shelves, and others stood straight from the forest floor, towering not in stature but in glory. Each had a part to play in this place that looked like a painting, and each knew its value.