After walking down the boardwalk for a while I wanted to find a bench that I could sit on and just enjoy the woods for a moment. I found a bench and sat on it and just as I was about to write about the things around me there was a spider crawling towards me. It was one of the really long legged spiders with a tiny body.  I jumped in fright and continued walking to find another spot to sit on. It may sound a bit too much but I felt like nature didn’t want me there and was shooing me away. As I was walking I stopped by a beautiful patch of Trout lilies, the sun was peek-a-booing through the tree leaves and it was hitting the patch like a spotlight. The lilies were yellowish orange in color and they looked like jewels under the sunlight. I heard something move beneath the patches so I squatted down to see what it was. There were a bunch of brown chipmunks with light brown strips that were gnawing on some sort of nuts. I was looking straight at one of the chipmunks. For a brief moment the chipmunk looked right back at me, it looked stunned but it didn’t move until it realized that I was an intruder. It scurried away right after and I felt uninvited yet again. I like to think that humans are a part of nature too but small moments like the ones I had that day at the woods makes me question if that is really true anymore.

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.

While walking along the path at Johnson’s Woods I was struck not only by the constant presence of a wide variety of insects, but by how many chipmunks were running from tree to tree and beneath the boardwalk. As I reached close enough to see the stripes on these chipmunks’ backs they would scurry away out of site. I began to wonder as I walked if my being on this boardwalk–or the boardwalk itself being there–caused the chipmunks significant distress.

My human presence, however, was not the only thing that could have upset the chipmunks otherwise peaceful day basking in the sun at the foot of a tree. My four-month-old goldendoodle puppy could have also been an unwelcome intruder into the chipmunks’ habitat. The boardwalk was also an unnatural barrier to the chipmunks having free reign of the woods which they so bountifully occupied.

I suppose that, in living in an area such as this, humans and other unnatural visitors and features have become part of the daily routine for the wildlife of Johnson’s woods. The chipmunks, insects, greenery and other flora and fauna are thriving despite visitors and structures that occur unnaturally. Were there a few chipmunks who were frightened to death by a giant (to them) puppy? Possibly. It is also possible that the natural and the unnatural live in a balanced harmony within Johnson Woods.

I was meandering along the path of Johnson’s Woods examining the jade leaves that climbed the moss covered logs scattered on the forest floor when suddenly I was jolted out of my reverie by bold words scraped into the silver thinly creased bark of a beech tree. They were not freshly carved, the bark had scabbed over the letters and they had darkened from age, making them even more noticeable. But they were easily visible which made me believe that they couldn’t have been more than a couple of years old.

Why do humans leave behind destructive evidence of being somewhere? Not just footprints, but large striking signs carved into trees to tell the world that “B+T” are in love. Some animals create disruptions of the natural environment as well. Like bucks who leave behind rubs on trees because they are getting rid of the velvet on their antlers. But they don’t carve their names into trees the way humans do.

Is this scarification of forest a way to claim ownership over an area the same way wolves mark their territory? Is this akin to a flag piercing the ground of a new land, calling it property of the ‘discoverer’? Johnson’s woods is by no means a new discovery. In fact, by 1823 when Andrew Johnson’s great grandfather left France and settled in Ohio many of the trees were already 200 years old. Someone had to have been there before ‘B’ and ‘T’ became a couple, probably even before they were born. And yet ‘B’ and ‘T’ assumed that they had the right to commemorate their relationship on an living tree that is probably older than they are.

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.

Wayne County Ohio is wearing farmer’s perfume. It smells of the manure that is thinly spread across the corn and soybean fields. The stench encroaches the edge of Johnson’s woods, a wooden space that is an anomaly amidst domestic plants ready for harvest.

The sights here consist of a different mixture of plants compared to those growing at the border. They consist of shady oaks, maples and beeches that color the air in a mosaic of green and black. Their trunks are huddled together, unlike the lonely walnut trees that are planted around the parking lot. Even the animals here are varied. Instead of cattle, the grazing creatures here are swarms of chipmunks and a few squirrels. The ancestors of these lively rodents likely planted the trees above, now serving as shields from the hawks patrolling the surrounding fields. All of these giants likely began as forgotten acorns, but they now imprint themselves as memories in the minds of visiting mothers and their children.

What hooks my eye most is the orange Jewelweed. The thumb-sized flowers look like schools of goldfish suspended in dim light. Perhaps it is not a mosaic the trees make, but an ocean of petals that have blossomed into fish. This sea of scenery seems tainted though, for the metal silos and machines beyond this refuge sail menacingly into my thoughts. Johnson’s Woods is only a preservation of the world as it was, a tiny pond in troubled water.