The Wilderness Between

My place is soggy. The constant rain over the last few days has seeped into the decaying leaves, making them as pliable as wet napkins. The weight of the water drags the yellow leaves beneath that vicious green ivy, where the leaves will rot away completely, turning into rich brown earth. Oh, the ivy always wins. It remains hardy against the pelting rain. Water runs off of the leaves as if they were shiny plastic. If only I could remain as buoyant under the storms of life.

I am sad that this is my last entry here. I will miss this place. Though I pass through it most days to get to campus, it’s not the same. If I don’t take the time to stop and savor the wildness around me, it simply becomes another in-between place. Neither here nor there, and therefore, nowhere I want to linger.

But I do want to linger here now. Even if it’s nowhere. It’s special to me now. I’ve watched it die. I’ve watched the seasons happen here. So that even when I hurry up the stairs, huffing and puffing, I find myself glancing about, looking for changes, for signs of some new development. I see trash and litter like flashing lights. I see the ivy, creeping ever forward. I’ve seen the trees undress until they stood bare, tall and proud against the coming winter winds.

That is not something you forget.

I will worry about that savage green ivy when the snows fall. And when at last it melts away, in February or March, I will venture up the stairs as if checking in on an old friend.

I am grateful for the chance of having gotten to know a place so well. To see its moods, its different faces. I want that sort of intimacy with every place.

I feel that I have discovered something in this place that is not here, nor there. I have found a peace in the passing of time. I have watched death happen, and life. What would it be like if we all took the time to treat every place as a destination instead of simply a space to travel through? If every step took us somewhere.

In a world where so much of our lives are spent in these between places, like college, like grad school, where we spend significant amounts of time, but never settle. Places where we are not quite kids and not quite adults. Isn’t it important for us to look around at these places? To slow them down, to really experience them instead of passing through?

I’m not even sure we know how to live with such intensity any more. I don’t think we know how to slow down and treasure, notice, watch these in between places anymore. Do we remember how to identify with the trees, or ivy? I think as poets, we try. We try to rekindle those ancient connections between land and man, space and soul. But as writers, that’s our job. To look, to see, to tell others of that which they are blind to.

I think that Environmental and Nature Writing has been terribly important and constructive toward my writing. Already in my fiction and other work, I find a deeper sensitivity and connection between landscape and mood and character. I let myself linger a little longer in those moments of setting and description, allowing for a moment of reflection and detail before moving on to action and character.

This class also reminded me of the importance of specifics. Specific plants and animals and textures and colors. Knowing the name of a thing gives it power. It lends this power to the writing as well. I think this also has to do with metaphor. Metaphor is so incredibly effective and creates its own type of specificity. Nature Writing has really allowed me to work on the craft of metaphor.

Metaphor allows for the imprecision of language and communication to become more precise. It creates certain subconscious connections that convey so much more than just the subject itself. Some of the most memorable ones that I’ve written for me have been in my essay. Like the thunderheads over the prairie. I described them in my midterm as “convening like bullfrogs, swelling their chests to claim their territory.” And then in a draft of my final as “bullying thunderheads that flashed as they jostled one another like jocks before a big game.” The bullfrogs convey a much different image than the jocks, and the second description also gives a better sense of imminent threat. Or at least some ill will. I am really glad that I got this chance to hone my language.

I also feel that nonfiction writing has allowed reflection in my pieces that I don’t normally get to take. While I realize that I may not be quite reflective enough to succeed at nonfiction, I feel that this freedom to linger creates some very powerful moments. Moments that I would not have found if I had simply rushed on to the next scene.

Of course, I also learned a lot about the environment that I didn’t know about. Again, specifics. And a lot of the discussions we had (what is nature? Etc) really challenged what I thought about certain topics. I really enjoyed the class trips that we took as well. It was nice to get into nature. For similar reasons, even though it got to be a little much at times, I really enjoyed the nature blogs. I liked being forced to stop and really look at the nature around me. I liked watching autumn happen. I liked the few moments of quiet introspection that made me think, but didn’t feed into my neuroses like worry.

Overall, I thought this course was well put together. It had a nice balance of writing and reading, talking and doing. While I wasn’t crazy about all of the readings, I think that there was something for everyone in the wide spread of nature writing. I’m even recommending Ed Abbey to my father who is a geologist! Most importantly, though I wasn’t converted to nonfiction, I see the important lessons this style of writing can teach me in general. And I enjoy it.

This is my favorite point in fall. The trees are bare. There’s something so beautiful about a naked tree.

As I walk toward my wild place, they wave their thin branches in their air like an inefficient basketball forward, trying to block the city from my sight. But since their limbs are bare, I can see right through them. So vulnerable, you can see their weakest points. You can snap off the little fingers on the branches, the little twigs. In the cold, the wood would give a satisfying snap.

Suddenly, the birds’ homes are visible, high in the trees, a clutter of smaller twigs and needles cradled by branches; a black spot against the grey sky. The birds have already moved on, but I can’t help but wonder if some will return to their childhood homes to start their own families. Finding their old nests a little smaller, a little less soft then they remember.

There’s something holy about the bare trees and their scrawny arms in the dead of winter. I remember the trees at Knox after a long sleet. The lamps along the paths seemed positioned just behind the branches, always just behind, and after sleet had fallen, the branches would shine with ice. The little fingers glistened in the light, looking more like complicated spider webs than tree branches.

The way the light circled from the lamp into the glittering limbs, it made a soft sort of halo. It was magical.

There’s nothing to distract me now from the trunk of the tree except for its limbs. I get a sort of pleasure from looking at the small collection of empty trees so close together. It’s as if a tree forgets itself with the blob of green around its top, but when all of that falls away, it remembers what it is. It remembers that it is thin, narrow, and delicate. They make a different sound now (though even dead leaves are still a noisy bunch when the wind comes calling). They are silent.

Sitting below the naked trees, I can’t help catching their new vulnerability. The sky seems bigger, grayer. The sky can see me now, and I can see it. We watch each other warily, but the trees only shrug.

I think too, there is pride in a tree’s nakedness. They stand straighter without the leaves. They flaunt their twists and broken limbs as well as their long, delicate fingers. They are unashamed of their scars. If I could wear mine so well, I would flaunt them too. I wonder how humanity would change if we, too, were forced to drop our leaves every year.

If, for half the year, we lived physically and emotionally bare. Would we sway and bend with the wind? Would we break under the heavy ice and snow? Could we really free ourselves, or, like a few of the trees by my stairs, would we cling to they ivy that covers and devours our flesh? Accepting anything that covers. Are we as brave as the trees?

No. I think we are made of more penetrable stuff. More tender, more delicate, more ego-driven stuff.

Jimmy Santiago Baca’s experiences are truly moving in “A Place to Stand.” I found myself quite frustrated with the breaks in the sections that we read. While I am not a big non-fiction fan, I was completely captured by his narrative. I wanted to read all of it, know all of it, and be moved by all of it. His use of language is truly amazing. I kept trying to read his work like a writer, but ended up just reading. I had to stop myself multiple times to look at his craft a little closer.

While his world is completely different than my own, I could relate to everything he said. That is craft. It felt like I was there with him, watching his mother’s affair from under the floorboards of his house. I rode in the car with his drunk father, trying to sleep in the seat under a jacket. I was in prison, watching someone take over a space I had carefully created for myself (we’ve all had bad roommates). There is something so immediate about his language, so raw and vivid, that it completely passes through the analytical part of the mind and into the experiential.

I think part of this has to do with how seamlessly he enters and leaves scene. It never gets too clunky or awkward. Too, the language, while elaborate, is very natural. It isn’t overwrought or careless. It is precise and well-measured. The psychologist in me wonders how he processes and uses language since he learned to read at such a late age. It isn’t as if he just learned the language though; he’d spoken it all his life. So it’s odd because there is such a strangeness with something that had been so familiar.

His poetry itself is so vulnerable and rich. It was interesting to read it after having read “A Place to Stand” because it was like the guts of the experiences he had put in the book. I thought that the book had been so complete and well rounded, but the poetry is raw with emotions and images. The poem VI in “Martin & Meditations on the South Valley” which seemed to me to be about his mother was heart-breaking. The final lines “and your voices strained with the tragedy/ that you had lived a fairytale--/ Then he shot you and himself.” were devastating. I tried to see if this was, in fact, what had happened to his mother. If she had really been murdered because of the similarities in the stories, but I couldn’t find any confirmation.

I like how his poetry really struggles with these two worlds he had been trapped between as a child. We see glimpses of that in his story, I’m sure there is more of this in the pieces we didn’t see, but he never fully addresses it until he works on his poetry. And while he struggles with this white, “civilized” side, and this Mexican, wild side, I didn’t really see why he was considered a nature poet until I read, “Black Mesa Poems.” “Roots” was one of my favorite poems in that collection.

11/ 11/ 09 4:35pm

Everything here is a little more brown. A little more brittle. The moisture in the leaves has begun to evaporate, and with it goes the vibrant colors. Even the leaves that cling to the trees are so. Soon, I hope to hear that lovely fall sound: the skittering of dry leaves across pavement. It isn’t real fall until the cold has sucked the color from those already dead leaves, until the dry husks wander, aimlessly, under the direction of the wind. Like zombies.

It’s hard not to think of death and decay as you watch, week by week, the earth retreat into hibernation. I wonder how the class changes when it is taught in the spring.

In the spring, I suppose, there is that excitement as green suddenly springs forth. It’s exciting. The green affects you as you notice the first patches of green grass and clover. The first buds on the trees. Seeing the earth revitalize itself after the long cold sleep of winter give you hope as well. Music returns with the color. Birds. And fresh spring rains. Spring is a natural aphrodisiac.

But autumn is brown. The world shuts down, preparing for the dead of winter. It is an interesting experience to watch such a process so closely. It’s like reporting the decay of a loved one. Watching your parents grow old. Here is a crow’s foot at the corner of an eye. There is a grey hair, and there is another. Most of the time, we are so lost in our own lives, we don’t even notice this process until it has already run its course.

One day, it is a little chilly; the next, the leaves litter the ground. Watching it so closely, it is easy to see how slowly it really takes place. Like most occurrences in the natural world, these processes take place at a creeping pace. I wonder how the world must look to the snail or slug. I wonder if time or death make any more sense to them.

I wonder how black came to be associated with mourning, with death. Clearly, the color we should be wearing is brown. Death, his scythe, and his brown cowl. Death isn’t black, the absence of color. If fall has taught me anything, it’s that death is at least as colorful as life. Brown is the culprit.

I never liked the color brown as a child. Back then, it was a color that seemed to be lacking any beauty. It was the color of poop, of dirt. If you mixed all of the other colors together, whether using paint or crayons or markers, you ended up with a thick, disgusting brown color. Brown is what is left over after all of the other colors have been spent.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to appreciate brown and the subtleties of its hues. The differences between a mahogany and maple. The golden brown of skin and the crust of a bread. Hazel and nutmeg. Death must be the brown of dead leaves, of the leaves who still wander the streets on cold December nights, so brittle that they break upon touching.

I’ve heard so much about Pittsburgh being such a healthy and green city. Even when I tried to google for environmental issues or articles, most of them were praising Pittsburgh for all of the work they’d done reversing the harm done by the steel mills and lack of sewer plant for most of the twentieth century. However, once I started looking for more specific things, like air quality, little problems started to come out of the woodwork.

I was very surprised to hear that Pittsburgh was ranked number two for worst air pollution out of the country. In fact, the only city that performed worse than Pittsburgh on the American Lung Association’s list in 2007 was Los Angeles, which is down right smoggy. The air looked so clear here that I couldn’t believe the air was so unhealthy and downright dangerous.

This wasn’t the first time either for such a ranking. In 2003, the Surface Transportation Policy Project ranked Pittsbugh sixth on its list of the worst air quality, and then bumped it up to number two by 2005. The local news station even did an in-depth report on the subject, which won awards.

To be fair, a good portion of this pollution (40%) is caused by emissions from cars and other forms of transportation. However, apparently, many organizations in the area still burn coal for fuel, including three of the five largest sources of sulfur-dioxide in the country, all local power plants. When sulfur-dioxide mixes with ammonia already in the air, it turns in to a deadly, super fine compound named PM2.5. Though it’s not visible like the smog and smoke used to be over Pittsburgh in its steel mill days. Actually, it’s even more dangerous because of this fact.

The chemical, PM2.5, is so small that it bypasses the hairs in the nose that are supposed to stop such pollution from making its way into the body. It also slides pass the trachea, and nestles its way into the lower lung where it causes lung disease, asthma, and allergies. In fact, over ten percent of Pittsburghers suffer from asthma which is higher than the national average.

Too, these super fine particles can even work their way fro your lungs to your bloodstream where they then affect your heart. The damage that the PM2.5 particles can cause is devastating. It has been linked to much higher rates of lung disease, heart disease, and cancer because of how effective it is at entering the body.

I think this is a terribly disturbing problem for the people of Pittsburgh because there is this false sense of security. The city has already done so much to make itself more sustainable, but it’s still dangerously polluted, even though you can’t tell so without special equipment. To make matters worse, the owners of the power plants are refusing to put special scrubbers and cleaners in their equipment to clean the air before it is released. They say that the cost of installing such devices would cause their customers more harm than good because of the extra money they would have to pay for service. I guess saving money is worth more than our health.

My place is still yellow. Well, maybe a bit more brown. While last week, the yellow was as bright and vibrant as lemons, this week it has faded to the yellow of apples. Spots of brown rot have eaten small holes in some of the leaves, and brown has coursed through the veins and muscles of the leaves. Soon decay will set in completely and nothing but the brown will remain.

Still the ivy remains vibrant and hardy green.

I wonder how difficult it is to remain so beautiful when everything around you is dying. I suppose that’s what such parasitic plants do though. For all its beauty, it gets its strength from the trees around it. Those leaves that have fallen on top of it, trying to bury its shameless face are like the children trying to hide a parent’s affair.

I should not be surprised, though. Such beauty has a steep price in the wild. Vibrantly feathered male birds build those colors by sacrificing nutrients from their frail bodies. Those colors that attract females also attract predators. It’s a bragging right. If I can sacrifice all of these nutrients for beauty and still haven’t been caught by a predator, then I must be a good mate, right?

Young male syndrome. It’s a short life, but filled with excitement, beauty, and fucking.

A tree in this patch of wild has recently fallen over. It’s a steep hill, and I’m honestly still impressed by how the trees grip so tightly at the soil with their roots. How they balance so precariously. But this one has fallen. It looks so sad and thin. I wonder what made it fall. If the wind simply puffed too hard one day, and the tree teetered to the ground.

Or perhaps it was that ivy, that dreaded beautiful ivy. It wrapped its seductive tendrils around its base, winding its way up the shaft. The poor tree didn’t even notice the small sips she took of the sweet soil nutrients. Not at first. By the time he noticed, he was hollow and aching. She was already inching along to the next victim, too engrossed with the chase to notice his protests. That’s when the wind came. That bully. Talk about hitting a tree when he’s down.

Everything seems to be falling. The tree, the leaves, the temperature. I can emphasize with Chicken Little. Soon, bits of blue will tumble down like bits of fluff on the currents of air. Or rather, snow, I suppose. Considering clouds are made of water, the sky will fall soon. Little frozen water crystals. I see that it’s supposed to snow as soon as Thursday!

I am both excited and apprehensive about the Pittsburgh winter. Snow is both as beautiful and as dangerous as the ivy. Though the flakes are soft and light, they stick together, muffling even sound. Travel becomes dangerous. They trip tires and befuddle boots. They’ve even been known to float right into an open eye.

I love Wyoming. I really feel like Gretel Ehrlich captured the feeling of the place really well—and the people. It made me miss the plains. Since I am also writing my final on Montana, it was really interesting to compare how she described that part of the country. I think our differences come because I was mainly in Montana for the summer, whereas she was in Wyoming for winter. The season and time of year completely change how you relate to a place, or how a place feels.

For example, I’ve been to Colorado Springs twice. Once in winter to ski, the other to go to the Garden of the Gods in summer. In the winter, my experience was completely dominated by the large quantities of snow that they receive there. And the fact that I don’t like skiing. But in the summer, the prominent colors I would use to describe my time there would be red and orange—the color of the rock in the garden.

I found that Ehrlich really captured the people and feel of the place. The isolation, the quiet passion, the space(!). Nothing hurries, there’s nowhere to hurry to. Everything is on Rez time. Even in an emergency, the man took his time to close the door to the cattle pen. People take care of each other in this way.

I think that St. Louis culture has been affected by its place. The people have a small town courtesy even though it is a large city. It is hard to forget our history as a Midwest town. The plains and farm land that stretch out just beyond the suburbs stand as a permanent reminder. The Arch, too, is a symbol of our frontier heritage. However, there is also a conflicting feeling from the east, the stuffy pride of a historical city.

Unlike Boston, New York, or Chicago, St. Louis’s time as a center of culture and society has dissipated. However, as St. Louis citizens, we still carry that big city, eastern pride. We have semblances of a culture all our own, museums, art, and history. We even have old money. But people aren’t afraid to look each other in the eye. We smile at strangers, instead of cutting through midday traffic with our heads down.

We pride ourselves on being a Christian city, on our name. There are always bake sales, fundraisers, and marathons. Despite the isolation of the suburbs, people are always looking for ways to help out. Just look at our baseball team. We are proud of good sportsmanship.

Nine Mile Run was a very interesting and valuable experience for me. I had done my fair share of complaining about it—it was early, and the morning after a big Halloween party, and raining. However, I actually really enjoyed myself. It was nice to get down in the earth like that, standing out in the elements. It was also so much fun to bond and work with other people in the class that I hadn’t really talked to before outside of class. Definitely worth while even if I now have a sniffle.

10/26/09 4:30pm

My place is yellow now. The leaves, the same color as pineapple, drift down as the wind shakes the branches. They all go about the falling in a different manner. Some ride the wind, drifting gently downwards. Others plummet, falling quickly, efficiently. Still others spin and dance, like a helicopter, like a minuet. I wonder how I would fall. If I could be so graceful in death.

Now the ivy is riddled with yellow leaves, bursting from between the tendrils like delicate blossoms. Still, the ivy is green.

I think that the leaves feel different than from when I was young. Back then, they were better made. Crunchy and brittle. Papery and thin. They would claw at the pavement when the wind pushed, scraping, skittering across the space. These leaves feel plastic, rubbery. They bend and flex, decaying with the moisture they still hold even in death instead of lingering like their dried predecessors of my youth, like mummies.

I suspect this must have something to do with annual precipitation. Or the fact that the leaves that fall now have died young. The leaves that still cling to the trees will become brittle before the wind finally plucks them from their twigs; these leaves will be crunchy and ripe with age.

When I was younger, I used to examine the skeletons of the crunchy leaves. There was a certain technique. You first crunched the leaf in your fist, grinding it between your fingers, letting the little flakes fall from your hand. When you opened your fingers, you would find the spine, the arteries, the muscles still left, still mostly connected. You could unfurl the leaf again, and hold it up. Its basic shape was still there. Bits of the brittle flesh still clung to the skeleton like a shattered windshield. When the wind picked up these skeletons though, they were as quiet as dust; I’d hurried the process.

I noticed yesterday while walking to work that the school must clean up the leaves, regularly, as they fall. I could see the shapes, the half stars of the leaves on the sidewalk. The shapes they left were the deep brown of rot. I was glad that my shiny, beetle black work shoes were kept clean. But first, I was sad. Sad that none of the shapes the leaves had traced were whole, nor would they ever be because of the efficient facilities staff.

Still, I am glad that the tortuous days of raking leaves are at least postponed for me. I always hated raking. My family always let the leaves pile up. We only raked when it was cold. We only raked when the leaves were soggy and brown, half-rotted with weeks of morning condensation and rain. As a child, it was always my job to be the scooper. While my parents raked, gathering the leaves into a pile, while my sister opened large brown bags, so large that she put them over her head, letting them fall to her feet, getting inside to open them, it was my job to scoop. To gather the wet, dead leaves into my arms and lay them to rest in the body-sized brown bags.

I plant it

as if it were a piece of my mother

I really enjoyed reading this packet and book of nature themed poetry. It was interesting to me the ways in which the authors approached the subjects. Just as in essays, they could rant, reminisce of their own memories in nature, connect their personal experiences with nature, reflect on the beauty and complexity they see around them. However, I still enjoyed the same sort of tactic that I like in essays: relating nature back to the self/ personal, meaningful experiences.

I think some of the best examples of this were in The Journals of Scheherazade. Particularly the one poem, “No Tomatoes”, is so tender and heart-felt. The details of the speaker’s care of the tomatoes, her failure to stimulate either the plants or her marriage. It is so heart-breaking. The image of “masturbating/ each flower with a Q-tip” or “walking around at night like a thief/ with a flashlight”. And I’m completely swept by the admission at the end:

But there is nothing

like desire here, nothing

like a warm tomato picked almost

overripe off the vine, so red

you could cry, so full of juice

and flavor that salt and pepper

seem heresy.

No, there are no tomatoes here, no one to tell

me why, and I don’t know

what kind of interference

it will take

to want each other again.

The poem starts with the tomato plants, comes to the couple, then back to the tomatoes, and the last line reveals the couple again. Yet it is very sneaky, seeming seamless. The last line especially. “Each other”

I think these poems really made me think again about how we as humans relate to the world, and some of these poems even dealt with that directly. Like “For A Coming Extinction,” which was also one of my favorites. It speaks with bitterness and sarcasm about how we are destroying the world, wiping out whole species. And it is so moving. Actually, when I say that I mostly mean the first half. I wish the poem had ended at that first page, after two stanzas. It loses its momentum after that I think.

And “Walk in Tick Season” made me almost even like ticks. I think this is a good example of a poem that celebrates nature, but doesn’t get too purple or glittery. An example of a poem that fails is “A Blessing”. I really dislike this poem. I had seen it before in a beginning poetry class and it made me want to gag. Bleh.

I don’t like “A Blessing” because first of all, it’s a poem about ponies with eyes that “darken with kindness”. The ponies themselves “can hardly contain their happiness” and “love each other”. It’s like My Little Ponies with rainbows and sunshine everywhere. I will admit to a good detail: “And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear/ That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.” This moment is so sensual.

The line that eludes me in this poem that I dislike so much is “There is no loneliness like theirs.” It is put right after telling us that they love each other. It is simply stated. It is a quiet moment that I want to hold on to and explore. I don’t know what he means, nor does he try to explain or dwell here. Instead, he moves on to eating grass contentedly. Everything so happy and god damned content again. I don’t like it. I don’t trust it.

If nature poems have taught me anything, it’s to mistrust that front of happiness and beauty. Hummingbirds and tomatoes are sex. Wisteria is death. A tick, a vulture, and torn and mutilated fish are beautiful.

Here I am. The steps again. I’m glad the weather has warmed. I was not quite ready for fall. My trees here are still mostly green. I hear from second years that the trees at Chatham change all at once. One day, I’ll walk up my steps and nothing will be green. Oranges, reds, yellows, browns, maybe, probably. But no green.

I am interested in watching how fall treats my ivy. I wonder if I will watch it brown. More likely, I expect that it will be green until the snow covers it, but once the snow melts away, the ivy will be gone or brown. Some part of me suspects that the ivy is actually inching into itself. I seem to feel that it was a wider patch last time I sat here. Perhaps I will make a marker to see if the ivy really is shrinking.

I’ve been finding wildness in the strangest places lately. I mean, there’s this piece of wildness between campus and home. There’s the large “weeds” that have sprung up between two plates of concrete in front of my apartment building. And then there’s my friend’s fishtank.

I am not a friend to fish. I had many as a child, and they all, without exception, died. Because I didn’t realize—and I guess my parents didn’t either—that you had to change the water out. All my fish suffocated in their own feces. How terrible. I hope hell is kinder than me.

But my friend is a meticulous fish keeper. He keeps a constant level of water. He cleans the tank weekly. He buys the expensive fish food, and even little fish snacks. Recently, he bought a second tank to keep crawdads in to feed his fish. Now, I thought these were just regular house goldfish. I mean, sure they were black and blue and orange with electric accents, but they were in a tank. How wild could they be?

They are savage.

The first crawdad was eaten by eleven fish in four days. (The fish were still young, still remembering their hunting instincts.)

The second crawdad, significantly larger, was slowly eaten. They were cruel. First, the fish bit and pulled off its claws. Then, slowly, they picked off its legs and antennae. After that, they left the crawdad on its back for two days; all it could do was blink, wave it proboscis in the water, and wait for death.

It was horrifying. For two days, I checked on the poor crawdad at regular intervals, hoping that one of the fish in the tank had had the decency to put it out of its misery. But, no. On the third day, the crawdad was simply gone. A few pieces of its picked-clean exoskeleton drifting along the bottom of the tank were all that remained of that poor crawdad.

When I asked my friend why he fed his fish live crawdads, he told me that he thought it important to let his fish keep at least some of their natural wildness. And I really admired this answer. I had never thought of fish in a tank as wild. But they really are brutal. I still may not like fish, but I respect them now. Damn.

Mary Oliver’s Blue Iris was a very refreshing read after so many essays. I am not a poet myself, but I really enjoyed this collection. Her writing was excellent. It really captured the feel of these moments and sensations. Her work really reminded me of haiku. The essence or the feel of the work captures the “zen” of haiku, its gentleness and reflection. Too, her essays make you reconsider the thing itself as the poem goes on. Like “Touch Me Nots” or “Rice,” at the end of the poem, she comes back to the thing, and it has changed.

On the other hand, I admire her for not simply relying on the haiku, which is the traditional form (as far as I, the fiction writer, know) of combining poetry and nature. But there are still those passages that steal my breath. In “Touch Me Nots”: “a little raccoon inside/ praying,/ as it felt, over and over,/ the mesh of its capture”.

This image really stuck with me. The vulnerability it invokes, the helplessness. I think she gets this by using “little”, “praying”, and the repetition of “over and over”. It’s lovely.

I think my favorite poems though were “Roses”, “Some Questions You Might Ask”, and “Black Oaks”. But even as I list them, I can’t help but remember the one about sunflowers. Or the one about…

I won’t discuss all of them here, but since “Roses” keeps coming back to me, I’ll look a little deeper.

The look on her face in a dream

Stayed with me all day

Like a promise I had failed.

Not that I had made any—

Not that I could remember—

But she was looking into the north

Where nothing lives but white clouds

Of crying birds, like bits of snow.

And the grass on which she was standing,

And the roses thick on the fences

Were soft and bright, able to renew themselves

As a woman, finally, cannot do.

First, I love that it starts with a dream. It makes the peaceful, sort of foggy details that come even better. Really, it is the third stanza that makes it. Oliver makes us look north, and then breaks, “where nothing lives”. Beautiful. Then white. Clouds of birds, snow. Gorgeous. And then I really love how the story comes back around to the woman and the promise. The last line really rings with such finality. Probably because of that word. Final. And Cannot.

I’m not sure that my poetry is quite up to par to be able to ramble off even a draft of a poem right now. However, I can share my personal experience with roses, and we can pretend that it is crafted well enough to be a lyrical essay.

When my mother moved into her own house after the divorce, she began to take gardening very seriously. She went to the gardening store at the end of the street every weekend to pick up some new bud, or seed. After some time, I prevailed upon her to try roses. I was probably twelve and fancied myself to be like Belle from “Beauty and the Beast,” and so I wanted roses. I thought that this would be my break into gardening, and I was determined to grow beautiful red roses.

My mother bought two bushes for me and, catching my excitement, helped me plant them. Romantics, both of us, we planned to coax them over the dilapidated shed in our backyard. However, the bushes were not what I expected. They looked more like gnarled fingers pinching at the ground rather than the beautiful plants I had seen in books. My mother and I took extra care of the plants. Every afternoon, once my mom came home from work, we would survey the bushes, trying to read their signs.

However, despite all of our care and our desire, the bushes withered and died in front of us. We watched as the few leaves that had come attached, became brown and brittle. The petals of the few buds that had initially taken shape wilted and withered. Instead of a lesson on gardening and life, the bushes became an instruction on death.

I really fond Paul Theroux’s essay, “Lighting Out,” to be extremely well written and organized. The way he captures Cairo in his interactions with the civilians is amazing. Personally, it took me back to Greece where I had a similar experience with cabdrivers and the general local tourism.

I really enjoyed the use of the phrase “inshallah” throughout the essay. I liked how it rounded the piece, and changed meaning for the author as the story progressed.

However, I’m not sure that I would have called this piece “nature writing.” This seems to me to be more about place in general than the other pieces we have focused on so far. Even in the desert, he focuses more on the Sphinx and historical aspects rather than the land itself. In the city, he focuses on the people. Too, his discussion of Africa seems entirely focused on culture, history, and people and not so much the land itself. He wasn’t worried about erosion, or the struggles farmers have with the ever growing desert. Theroux focuses on war, famine, and disease instead.

I’m sure that there is much more reflection on nature later in the book, but this particular chapter, while well crafted and fascinating, seemed more people based.

Then again, as we’ve often discussed in class, how can you separate nature from people and still have human readers become invested? The people of Africa as well seem particularly tied to their country. For example, we rarely discuss the individual nations of Africa. In Western news and media at least, we only talk about the whole continent. And with all of the disease, corruption, and general suffering, the people are stuck.

Perhaps this is a particular case where the people become the place, and the place becomes the people. It is impossible to separate one from another. Cowboys make the West. Farmers make the mid-West. Old money and big business makes the East. Movie stars make Los Angeles.

I think that in class, we have discussed a lot about twining people and place to make place more palatable and relatable to people. We have talked about it as a tool. But how about more simply, place is people; people is place?

In Theroux’s essay, we see the cab drivers and the desert. Forget wars, famine, rampant AIDs, and focus on the land. The desert itself is harsh and inhospitable, and the Nile River Valley only flourishes after the flood. To get through the more lean times, any survivor would learn to take advantage of the good times to get through the bad. To do what they could to survive.

I think we see this even now in the cab drivers as they smile while swindling you. These are desperate times for Africa as a whole, and the drivers have simply found some of the most effective ways of taking what they can. 1) Most important is friendliness because otherwise no one will want to do business with you. 2) Foreigners don’t know how things work or how much things cost, so adding a little extra (especially because they have so much) won’t be a problem. And 3) If you are persistent enough, or tell them about your eleven children and their hungry bellies, the foreign customer will more likely give in and even feel good about giving you their money.

Fall has come. The air is crisp with a chill that already steals into your bones if you let it. But I’ll pull my coat a little closer to keep warm.

With fall, death has come, both figurative and literal. Brown leaves skitter across the wood, and corpses of bees lie strewn up and down the steps. The spiders have taken the hint and have abandoned their webs, leaving their homes to the merciless autumn wind. Only my ivy remains vibrantly green, stretching its roots into the warm earth.

I’ve never noticed how the leaves in the trees sound different once fall comes. When the trees rustle in summer, it sounds like they are whispering secrets to each other like children in their tree forts. Or maybe they are chuckling, basking in the sun. But in fall, the rustle sounds more like a shiver. Sounds more like an old man shaking the cold from his bones.

Then again, perhaps the sounds themselves don’t change; rather, the crispness, the coolness, the thinness of the air now changes the sound as it hits my ears.

There is a new sound too, besides the wind. The squirrels have come to life in these parts now that a chill has set in. Now, I see them everywhere, hear them chattering and romping across the tin roof, scurrying to fill their underground stores before the first snow falls.

It is interesting to me, the way I can categorize the places I’ve lived by the squirrels.

In St. Louis, the squirrels are bigger than in Pittsburgh, but nearly all of them are grey. They are more skittish than most because of our pets. They are also known as bullies around the birdfeeders; scavengers, they take where they can and as much as they can until their food source is taken away by angry bird fans.

If you tried to walk up to a squirrel at Knox, it would watch you the whole way. You could get to nearly reaching distance before it would run. I knew more than one student who mistook their cuteness for niceness and were actually bit while trying to feed the squirrels. Then again, some of us chose not to get the close for fear that the squirrel would attack rather than lose its ground. They have such beady little eyes. They think everything is theirs.

Here, in Pittsburgh, the squirrels seem so thin and slinky after the Knox squirrels. When they run, it makes me think of ferrets or weasels—they are long and thin. Too, there are black squirrels that never fail to stop me in my track with wonder. They are so strange with their little ear tufts. They also seem particularly skittish to me after the Knox squirrels. You can’t even stop to look at them without the squirrels getting suspicious and turning tail.

Janisse Ray’s “Ecology of a Cracker Childhood” is a fascinating exploration of a family and their environment. This book really captures for me the theme of this MFA writing program about how crucial environment is to a story and a character. All of the elements of this book, each description and story, comes back to the family and reveals another facet.

One of my favorite sections of the book was the chapter titled, “Built by Fire.” In this section, Ray personifies the lightning and the longleaf pines, turning the constant battle between the two as a kind of myth. The greedy lightning has claimed the land below and will destroy anything that tries to claim it. The innocent pine finds the ground to be fertile, and thus, the battle begins. Every few years, the lightning strikes down the pesky pines, only to have them grow back even stronger and smarter. Slowly, the pines build natural defenses against the lightning’s attacks until one day, fire is no longer much of a threat.

In this way, Janisse Ray’s family has survived in an otherwise flat land where poverty and mental illness ran rampant in their family. Like the pines, they dug their roots deep. Despite the lightning strikes of hallucination and depression, the familes always grew back even stronger, more solid. The grandfather, Charlie’s, mental illness ripped his family apart, but by the time, bipolar disorder struck Ray’s father, the family was able to cope with it in a much less destructive way.

Too, the second generation had learned from the generation before. Ray’s father forbade Charlie from cursing or physically punishing Janisse and her siblings. We can see that his mental illness veered away from the violence of his fathers in the chapter of “Native Genius.” As Ray explains, the savage and trickery of the wildness in her grandfather had resurfaced in her father, but in a much more constructive manner. Her father used the intellect his own father used for cruel jokes to reconstruct and build machines. Even in the throws of madness, he used what wit he had to protect his family, not harm them.

When I write my essay for this class, I want it to be as involved as this book is. The closest thing we’ve read like it in this class so far has to be the essay called “Buckeye,” where the author uses the land to remember, characterize, and even to come to forgive his father. I think Ray uses this book much in the same way. She is making a sort of peace with her childhood in the junkyard and her own “Southerness.”

I imagine that if I wrote an essay on growing up in Texas, I would want it to be something like this. However, I’m not sure that I can. I only spent five years there, and I’m not sure that I know it well enough to reconcile the stereotypes that I know of Texas now as a fiercely liberal woman who made it through the Bush administration and the few glancing memories of a young child.

I very much emphasize with Janisse Ray and her struggle with her Southerness in this way, though I know it is in no way as deeply ingrained in me. I think her book walks that tenuous line of loving (at least most of) the memories she has, while feeling shame for the place at the same time. A shame that is a gut reaction. A shame that no matter how much you tell yourself you don’t feel, you keep finding yourself of the defensive.

9/27/2009 5:30 pm

Today, it is wet. The exposed soil and bark are still black from the rain over the past few days. I find it interesting that I was so drawn to this spot for class. I find so much peace here among the trees and the undergrowth where it is always dark even when the sun is out. The forest does hold a special place for me, but I still think that I will always prefer the plains.

The open prairies of Montana and Wyoming are the most beautiful places in the world. The great vastness of the sky against the endlessness of the sea of grass; it’s the closest one can get to being in the middle of an ocean with both feet on solid ground. I can’t help but think of Rita Dove’s “Ars Poetica” now, when I remember my time the prairies:

Ars Poetica by Rita Dove

Thirty miles to the only decent restaurant

was nothing, a blink

in the long dull stare of Wyoming.


Halfway there the unknown but terribly


important essayist yelled Stop!


I wanna be in this; and walked


fifteen yards onto the land


before sky bore down and he came running,


crying Jesus—there's nothing out there!

I once met an Australian novelist


who told me he never learned to cook


because it robbed creative energy.


What he wanted most was

to be mute; he stacked up pages;


he entered each day with an ax.

What I want is this poem to be small,

a ghost town

on the larger map of wills.


Then you can pencil me in as a hawk:

a traveling x-marks-the-spot.

See, I want to be in this, but I have yet to run from it. I don’t find the exposure of the expanse to be frightening. Oddly, I find it familiar and peaceful where the great blue sky tries to swallow the yellow-brown of the half-scorched prairies.

One of the most influential times of my life was spent on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Montana. I spent only two weeks there, doing service for the community and sleeping in a teepee the men had set up for us outside of the prayer lodge where we “officially” stayed. Three other girls and I spent all of our time together, and when our service was finished each afternoon, we would wander the prairies around the lodge we were staying outside of.

There was a cattle ranch next to our plot of land, though we never saw any cattle, only horses. Some times the women who lived at the prayer lodge would show us certain landmarks, hidden by the subtle hills under the long grass. One afternoon, we traveled a few miles away to Mother Rock, a sacred landmark of the tribe. We were led in prayer with sage and given time to sit with Mother Rock and reflect with the wind swishing about, playfully batting at our hair.

When we were all finished, we made our way back to the prayer lodge. Suddenly, something caught my eye. At first, I thought it was a big, white rock, but when I drew closer, I saw the empty eye sockets and the cavernous nostrils. They were bones, bleached a creamy white, resting quietly below the grass. The remains of six or seven whole cattle lay there, mostly intact.

My friends and I examined the skulls, the long elegant femurs, the whole rib bones that stuck into the earth and out of the grass like ornamental hair combs. It looked to us like the cattle had simply laid down and died, but what did we know. We each dealt with it in different ways. I looked closely, but couldn’t bring myself to touch the bones. Another girl took pictures. One, lifted a skull to her shoulders by the horns and pranced around like it was a bacchanal, while the other just laughed.

But that night, when we lay in our teepee, listening to the coyotes call in the distance, all of us heard something that we hadn’t heard before in their cries. It was something more sinister, something more wild, and as the calls grew closer, we brought our sleeping bags together so that we could feel each other’s warmth as we waited for sleep.

“Progress has come to the Arches at last, after a million years of neglect. Industrial Tourism has arrived.” (55)

At last, a nature writer with some bite. Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire was a blast to read. It reminded me so much of one of my favorite fiction writers, Kurt Vonnegut. His style (without quoting from my presentation too much) is a tenuously balanced mixture of fact, romanticism, philosophy, and biting wit and humor. And after my latest trip to the Rocky Mountain National Park, “Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks” hit especially hard. Abbey likes to keep the reader guessing at what he will do or say next.

One of the most shocking moments is when he kills the rabbit in “Cliffrose and Bayonets.” With the same dispassion Oates displayed, killing the ants with her fingers, one by one, Abbey kills the rabbit with a rock. As a nature writer (even if he did not want to have such a title) and crusader for the natural and the wild, it is odd to us that he could needlessly kill a living thing. Abbey knows this, and despite his apparent innocence at the end, he spends quite a few paragraphs rationalizing his deeds. He also has no interest in ever killing again as he says, “The experiment was a complete success; it will never be necessary to perform it again” (42).

I think this scene is crucial to much of the idea that he is trying to convey throughout the book: a picture of modern man living in the wild. Like Thoreau, he has decided to seclude himself in the wild for a few seasons or years. Abbey scoffs at tourists and their automobiles, their cushy campsites. He explores secluded and forbidden areas of the Arches. He drinks river water when he runs out of beer in “Down the River.” He (very resourcefully) uses a gopher snake to rid him of the rattlers instead of killing the rattlesnakes. However, he does not truly live off of the wildness. Abbey eats beans and bacon for much of the book, which, last I heard, were not natural to the Arches.

Abbey kills the rabbit because he must know that he is really a part of this whole wilderness, even if he eats beans and finds shelter in a trailer. Abbey kills the rabbit, because he needs to know that he can survive out there, not as a sportsman or scientist, but as a part of the natural world. He says: “No longer do I feel so isolated from the sparse and furtive life around me, a stranger from another world. I have entered into this one. We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey” (41-42).

My favorite part of Abbey’s book has to be in “Water” when Abbey’s friend, Newcomb, gets stuck in the quicksand. You can’t help but feel terrible for poor Newcomb, who could only cry out in long lonesome wails, sure that the quicksand would be the end of him. Abbey was no help either with his wit and amusement at his friend’s distress. I was very glad when Abbey pulled him to the solid ground.

If I take anything I’ve learned from Abbey, I think it will be his sarcasm.

9/22/09 10:34 pm

I decided to mix things up a bit by coming to the steps at night. They are different in the dark, and the wilderness feels more ominous, more dangerous. Anything could be hiding in the shadows. The night air is thick with humidity, and cicadas and grasshoppers sing from the dark. It makes me think of my home in St. Louis, where it is always humid. Where the air is always syrupy with adolescent rain.

On such a night as tonight, in the dark of my wilderness, however, I feel I must admit to myself, and you, that I am not actually from the muggy shores of St. Louis. That’s only what I tell people, and it’s true that I did spend most of my life there. However, in complete honesty, I am really from Dallas, Texas. I was born there and spent the first five years of my life on its dry, red earth. I don’t often admit this to people though because of the stigma Texas now carries.

Texas is the land of gun toting, extreme religious and political conservatives who want to take the valuable bits of earth from the rest of the world and squeeze them for every drop of oil. Everything’s bigger in Texas, but it wants even more. Texas doesn’t care about tomorrow, or you; who are you? Fill’er up, and don’t stop til you get the worm at the bottom of the bottle. Texas wants to bear arms and use them to praise to God. Hallelujah. Texas builds walls. Texas, the ultimate cowboy, looks out for Texas.

At least, that’s what my liberal friends think. And I would be lying if I said I completely disagreed with them. I know some good people down there, and they are some of the friendliest, most hospitable and giving people I know. Still the stereotype persists even in my own mind. It’s true that Texans are a proud and independent people, tending toward the conservative. But they are good people and their name should not be twined with the oil companies.

Of course, none of this is really even mine. Here is what I remember from Texas:

I remember the dry, red soil covered by green grass. I remember the pecan tree in our backyard. I remember the dry heat that rose from the black asphalt. I remember getting my mouth washed out with soap for using curse words at the age of four. I remember sneaking a piece of watermelon into the house during a barbeque. But most of all, I remember the fire ants.

It’s one of my earliest memories. I had been playing Ninja Turtles with my best friend, Jeremy, out in his backyard while our parents sat on the porch sipping beer and talking. In our game, I got shot, so I fell to the ground and played dead. Immediately, Jeremy ran to my side. “Are you all right?” he asked. I remember laughing at his concern. “Of course,” I replied looking up at him. “I’m just playing.”

That’s when I felt it. I had forgotten about the mound of fire ants that Jeremy had pointed out to me before we started playing. It was the biggest mound we had ever seen, and now, I was lying right on top of it. I must have screamed because the next thing I remember is running toward the house, covered in thousands of fire ants, while my dad and Jeremy’s dad ran toward me at a dead sprint.

After that, my memory finds me being stripped of all my clothes and thrown into a bathtub where I floated in the water, watching all of the fire ants float with me.

For me, Texas is the land of fire ants. Don’t mess with Texas.

9/13/09 4:37pm

Today, I let myself sit on the stairs and rest. Today, a Sunday, I find the stairs particularly inviting and peaceful. Few people use them, it seems, when there are no classes, and the traffic from Fifth Avenue almost sounds like waves.

It is still so green here, so shady, though soon, I expect Autumn will take hold. I look forward to the oranges and reds and yellows, but green will always be my favorite. And of course, when the leaves fall, what shall become of my ivy? I know now, that my ivy is English ivy (or Hedera helix). The leaves are bright and waxy and almost heart shaped—the ivy Dionysus claimed for the memory of his mother, Semele, and the female counterpart to mistletoe according to the English.

The ivy has already made its way up the most impressive tree in the vicinity. Oddly enough the ivy does not start until half way up which makes me think that it must have been severed at some point. But, really, it is too late: I can already see the damage the ivy is doing to the tree. The lower branches of the tree are shriveled and broken; it looks brittle for all of its thickness and height. I’m sure that in a few more years, the tree will surrender completely and die under the parasitic ivy.

Here I must stand and stretch my legs, already asleep from sitting on the steps. I also had to get away from the spiders and their webs, thick with corpses, which range particularly along the bottom rail of the stairs. One of the smaller spiders had grown interested in me, and I wanted to get away before it decided to explore this strange, large monster in its home.

I must say that I love spiders. I really, really do. They are the most beautiful, most graceful insects. I love their delicate legs, the sectioning of their bodies into prosoma, abdomen, and spinnerets. I even admire their eight eyes and glistening webs. Arachne is lucky that Athena turned her into such a beautiful insect—she could have done much worse.

However, much of my dislike for spiders comes from the fact that during my first month in Pittsburgh, I received over two dozen spider bites. (You can tell a spider bite from other bites by the white center, where the actually bite is.) The funny thing is (and this is why I respect them) I never saw a spider. I checked under my covers, between my covers, under my bed, around my bed every night to no avail.

When the problem persisted, I vacuumed and washed every inch of my apartment, but I never found a single spider. I did find pill bugs in my living room, sneaking under the alley door, and silverfish scurrying in the front window, but these are lesser creatures.

Spiders are clever. They are sneaky and make a living doing what most humans like—catching and eating other bugs. Luckily, since the cleaning frenzy, the bites have stopped. I can only hope that I’ve taught then a lesson, and that in the future, they will stay out of my bed.

I must say that I agree whole-heartedly with Joyce Carol Oates on the subject of nature in her essay "Against Nature."

What is nature? Whatever it is, I feel my response will only be "glamorized" and "romanticized". Or perhaps, feeling particularly scientific or bitter, I would lean towards my evolutionary psychology background and tell you that I for one am glad that the baby antelope on the National Geographic channell was eaten because it is survival of the fittest.

When I think of how to define nature, the first thing that pops into my head is the word "ecosystem." Nature is terribly complex and busy. It is beautiful and ugly, shocking and banal, but all of these things fit together, balanced precariously. Sometimes the scale is tipped in a certain direction, but more often than not, if left to its own devices, nature will right things again with comets or ice ages.

To put it simply, and in the context of our society, nature is "outside." To put it in a philosophical setting, nature is. It is a force like gravity or time. Honestly, I'm not even really sure what is included in "nature." Is it biology? Is it mircobiology? Is it rocks? Is it weather? If it is weather, does it extend to outer space and other planets where temperature and positioning play a crucial role in denying these rocks the same green, leafy life that we normally associate with the word "nature"?

To me, nature is all of these things, and the result of all of these things. Anything not constructed by man. However, I am reconsidering this last clause.

Before this class, I would have said that my wild places are in South Dakota and Wyoming, places where humans live miles apart, where you can drive for hours without seeing a single person, where the landscape is beautiful and harsh. But none of my wild places seem particularly wild now, and after reading Oate's essay, I must agree that "Nature, as it is understood in the usual slapdash way, [is] as human...experience". Hiking and camping were nature to me before. These were the means by which I met "nature" and "wildness".

At this point, wildness, to me, is simply an unkempt space where nature is allowed to take hold as it will. The grass is not trimmed, the trees are uncut, the leaves do not get raked, and the wildlife is allowed to fend for itself as it has for thousands of year. I realize how limited this definition is, how tame. But there are very few places that I can think of that are truly allowed to thrive and flourish as they are.

On my recent trip to Montana, Estes Park, and the Rocky Mountain National Park, I was surprised by how many roadways there were in the “wild”. Even the national parks cut their grass, place gravel for paths and aluminum cans for trash. They cut trees to make room for more cabins and telephone poles, and the "wild" animals wear collars and tags so that their populations can be controlled.

One of the most depressing moments in my recent memory was finding a herd of elk, proud and majestic with antlers as a crown, eating from the dumpster outside of the cabin area.

We were supposed to be in one of the most beautiful wild places left in our country, but it was too late. These nature trails and mountain hikes that allowed us city dwellers a glimpse into the wild, tamed it. It shaped it, and often, just to allow more humans to wander saftely and take pictures to hang on their walls.

What happened to that darker side, the dangerous side that is crucial to my definition of wildness? Of nature? The big, bad wolf has left our forests.

I'm hoping this class will help me become more comfortable in nature. I also think that it is already challenging my beliefs about nature, which is always a good thing. Finally, I hope this class will help sharpen my creative non-fiction. I've never taken a non-fiction class before.