The Wilderness Between

09/04/09 1:30pm

My bit of wildness can be found on the wooden stairs leading down to Fifth Avenue from campus. It sits between a campus parking lot and the porches of on-campus apartments, and even when climbing up the steep steps, this patch of wilderness is like a breath of fresh air. It is cool in the shade of the trees. They block out most of the sun, and the little light that finds its way through the canopy sways with the branches, illuminating the greenness of the leaves and glinting off spider webs and wings. The undergrowth is thick here and carpeted in green ivy.

I like this place because it is neither one thing nor another, neither here nor there. It is just a place we journey through to get to campus or home. It is on the way to Grandmother’s house. It is the patch of forest we must journey through to find our way. (Though I must admit that the most threatening wildlife I’ve seen yet are the bees that hover near the rails of the stairs and the mosquitoes.)

I chose this space as my wildness because it was one of the only truly unkempt spaces I could find. Several places struck me as beautiful on my stroll through campus, but the perfectly manicured lawn seemed somehow wrong while meditating on the wild. Except for the wall of the parking lot and the brick of the apartment building hedging my wild space in, I doubt that much is done to modify this space. Probably. Maybe.

Then again, because this place is not taken care of as the rest of campus, I must admit that there are distracting pieces of garbage. Half of a paper plate rises from the sea of ivy like a capsized ship. Plastic cup tops steal light from the spider webs. And one spider has even made his home in a small potato chip bag. I can just barely make out the zigzags of his web over the shining silver interior. Perhaps next time, I will bring a trash bag to place the litter in.

But even with the trash, I enjoy these small patches of wildness, where nature is—at the very least—not micromanaged. I find myself enamored by tree roots here. These particular trees have thick roots that writhe above the soil. I suppose the trees need the extra support as they fight their epic battle against gravity, supporting an upright trunk on a very steep hill. I like how gnarled and twisted they are as they rise above the ivy like wave tops.

What really drew me to this place though was the ivy. I love the lushness of the blue-green ivy. Ivy is wild to me. It grows, reaching ever upward, on the tree in the front yard of my home in St. Louis. At the roots, it snakes along the ground, camouflaging itself under the bushes until it reaches the side of the house where it spreads its finger again. There, along the side of my house is truly a carpet of ivy.

My father tries to cut it back every year to keep it from overtaking the fences, the trees, and even the yard itself. However, it refuses to surrender in the face of such regular attacks. Instead, it bides its time, launching quiet counter assaults, so slowly that we don’t even recognize the victory until it has already reclaimed everything we took before.

The color of the ivy, too, is one of my favorites. If it were a Crayola crayon, it would be Jungle Green. I enjoy how lush and innocent the ivy looks, how brown and rich the earth looks beside it. One day, I will have to peel back a few vines to catch a glance of the hidden metropolis I'm sure lies below its stillness.