As we walk down the hill towards Brown’s Bog my eyes scan the landscape. I am looking at the trees rising above me, the flowers off in the distance, and the grass at my feet. A glace to the left and a beautiful wooded area is visible. A glace to the right there is a farm field, just as beautiful in its own right. Standing in the open looking at the world around me for a moment I feel alone and at peace. As we step onto the wooden boardwalk and walk into the woods I begin to feel something different. I walk forward in line with the person in front of me. My pace is set by the leader and matched by everyone else in the line both in front of and behind me. The sounds of the woods are muffled under the constant march of feet on the boardwalk. I feel trapped. I can’t move ahead or fall behind for I am in the middle of the line. When we reach the bog my view is muddled by all of the people around me. I don’t know what to look at or what to listen to. The serenity of nature is lost, buried under the voices of people. It leads me to wonder how is nature best enjoyed? Can more be taken away from a solo journey, than a small group; a small group more than a large one? I would consider myself to be a solo hiker. The only company I am used to is that of my dog or occasionally one other person. The nature of Brown’s Bog was lost for me somewhere in the footsteps and voices.

Johnson’s Woods. It was quite a unique experience for me. The woods were about a fifteen minute drive from campus, and each minute intensified my nervousness. I can boldly admit that I am a “City-girl”. Growing up in the city of Cleveland and it’s suburbs I had never experienced being in the woods, at most I rode or walked along side of the wooded Metropark in my area. Never the less, this trip was quite peculiar. On the ride out we passed vast farmlands seemingly a native sighting in the City of Wooster, but as we approached the woods more closely there was only a patch of wooded land in comparison. Though I knew that Johnson’s Woods were over two hundred acres of land its comparison to the farmlands made it seem so small, which soothed my nervousness minimally. Standing across the street looking into the woods proved that my perception of the woods coming in was not the same. The trees seemed to stand nearly one hundred yards and my nervousness quickly returned. I noticed that I do love nature, but only from arms length. Which I find both humorous and sad. As we progressed into woods and the vibrate blue skies turned to a dense mass of tree canopies my nervousness turned to amazement. It was a very nice sighting. The suns rays peaked through small cracks between the trees hit the wildflower beautifully. The birds sang with out a caring in the world. Soon, however, my view of the woods were tainted by the bugs swamping my head, and the underlying thought that I did not belong there. The chipmunks seemed to confirm this idea in their frantic sprints and cries.

In the first passage of Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, the writer attempts correct the misconceptions of time and lifespan of earth. He explains that the perception of Earth’s age as prolonged is a falsification developed throughout time and establishes the idea that Earth’s age is vast an well beyond what many perceive it (earth’s age) to be. He supports this idea with substantial evidence of generational processes. McKibben writes very bluntly throughout the beginning of this book, which in my opinion is very beneficial to the audience, due to clarity and precision. However, as the reading progresses into the issues of the vast coexistence of humans in nature McKibben’s seems to really neglect his own contribution to nature’s detriment, largely lacking humility in my personal opinion. Being that even as an observer in nature, his presence is still an outlier in the natural processes that occurs in the very nature he is observing.
Just earlier this week, I found myself in an odd encounter with nature. I was studying Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, outdoors in the city of Wooster. The air was crisp and the beamed down at its highest point. While sitting on the front steps of my temporary home I noticed a unbeknownst ant inches away. There it sat small and black with it’s antenna blowing in the wind, facing the street as if it was watching students and motorists pass us. In hindsight I can depict this ant perfectly; it was a profound experience, the ant and I sitting there. In that moment however, my inadmissible fear of bugs got the best of me resulting in the flicking of this ant across the sidewalk. In retrospect, I find myself asking if the ant posed any form of a threat to me in that moment and why that split second of tranquility turned detrimental so quickly for this ant.

I am writing this while sitting on a bench marked number four in Johnson’s Woods located about twenty minutes away from the town of Wooster, Ohio. There is a group of chipmunks running in and out of their burrows, rustling the leaves, disturbing the silence. Mosquitoes, bees, flies and everything between buzzing in my ears. As I look around I notice a beautiful oak tree standing alone surrounded by various sorts of orange and red wild flowers. It extends taller than any of the other trees, watching over everything below. There is a marsh that seems to be forming underneath the boardwalk. The boardwalk is essential to allowing visitors to comfortably walk thru the forest. It is nice to be able to escape from the rustle and bustle of my everyday life and just sit here and reflect on the natural world.

Maybe it’s an evolutionary callback to a long-unneeded instinct, but the cover of trees always feels like a form of sanctuary. Though the reek of manure pervades the entrance to the forest, the worn wooden path quickly guides us away from this memory of agriculture and the endless fields of government-subsidized corn we passed. Here, the soft scent of leaf decay and fresh air fills the air below the leaves. The path aside, it’s easy to get lost as if into another world as the tiredness of a day of lectures is shed in the green-lit shade.

The strength and age of the trees surrounding us awed me. Many of the thick trunks were over 400 years old—extant through roughly sixteen human generations and older than the country many of our number call home. The forest, changed though it may be by human intervention, can still resonate with a part of me that came before the development of speech. The sensation is timeless and miraculous, and not one I’ve ever found away from nature.

My eyes are drawn to the sight of decay and growth contentedly commingling across the forest floor. I’ve always found mushrooms amusing and fascinating in turn. Did you know fungi are actually more closely related to eukaryotes, us, than they are to plants? Stranger still, what we see of the fungus is actually no more than its fruiting body. They have long complicated circulatory systems that stretch beneath our feet, often many times larger than we expect and significantly larger than we see. The fungi here seem to be quite happy in their role of breaking down the dead, just as brightly colored as the flowers that sprout beside them, from the fertilizer they leave behind.

This cyclical relationship is continued in the trees, taking a bizarre form in the sight of colonies of beech blight aphids, the white clouds that dotted the branches of the light grey beech trees. These aphids have a cotton protrusion from their body, like a peacock’s decorative plume, and united together these tiny insects resemble another sort of alien fungus. They feed on the beech trees, and in turn, I’m certain, are food for something else. I’m always blown away at how nature can have such structure and flexibility of design, that for all my years of novice but dedicated research and exploration I can still encounter new creatures even in my home state.

And I can also encounter some familiar ones in peculiar places. Walking along taking photos of felled logs, I froze at the familiar sight of a set of eyes and ears. Camouflaged almost perfectly among the leaf litter beneath a log, was a cat! It seemed to be perfectly content beneath its log, eyes-half closed in the comfort of a well-fed predator. We sat, quietly regarding one another, until it was time for us to go. Unlike this remarkable species, we humans are not so flexible in our choice of home, and it was time for us to leave.