The Unfamiliar Howl

It's always there, behind the walls, behind the windows, behind your eyes. All my childhood life it had been the soundtrack, but only in revisiting do I hear it.

The wind...

...is constant in the middle of Illinois where my parents live, where I grew up.

"It's really windy today," I say, looking out the window on the first day of my visit.

"This is normal," my mom says.

I'm writing this from my home in Georgia, where I've gotten used to the still air, the slight breezes—a blessing in winter, bane in summer. When it's windy, we know a big storm is coming, or it's already upon us.

In my hometown it's as if the land has been scoured flat and mostly treeless by the wind, a constant force like running water, a constant sound like the whirring of a great fan. Or is it the other way around? Is it the topography that allows the wind to ride roughshod?

What is too familiar becomes unnoticed, forgotten:
Howl becomes the sound of silence
love becomes coexistence
faith becomes duty
feelings become facts
prejudice becomes certainty
sacrifice becomes expected

Now I notice the stillness outside my window as much as I noticed the wind. I think this is what being constantly present must be like. Presta atención, lend attention, look and see, listen and hear. Know by experience rather than by assumption. Act by intention rather than habit. Go against your own grain sometimes.

And may you never get used to the howl of the wind.

The River Guide

Last Saturday, Andrew and I went on a four hour kayak trip down a stretch of the Etowah River in north Georgia. First time kayaking for both of us. The sun never came out; the wind stung our cheeks much of the way and made us paddle hard just to go downstream; the work made my arm and shoulder muscles knot up and pinch; I ripped open a cuticle because my knuckles kept scraping the kayak whenever I dug the paddle into the water. I had to make an emergency stop and climb up a bank to pee in the woods. More than once, navigating over and between boulders in the shallow water, our kayaks wedged to a stop and nearly overturned.

But we're already planning our next kayaking trip. 

Because we didn't take our phones or camera, I have no pictures of my own from the day, but you can see some more gorgeous pics from other trips on the tour company's website.

Whenever I look down at my arms I see new muscles and think of how after a while the counter-intuitive nature of steering and paddling became normal. I think of how the water felt surprisingly warm compared to the air. How I saw blue heron and, for the first time, a kingfisher and a bald eagle. How the giant sycamore leaves stuck to my paddle and black walnuts as big as tennis balls bobbed beside our kayaks. How a woman in a lawn chair facing the river waved at us and called, "You're the first paddlers I've seen! I just moved here two weeks ago!" I think of how I learned to detect boulders by the way the light curved off the surface of the water above them.

How it felt to be carried along by currents who knew the way through the riffles and were a helpful guide if I kept pointed in the right direction.

Cloudy days...

...are far more interesting than sunny ones.

These are from my drive to work yesterday.

I wish I could capture how underwater I felt driving beneath these clouds with inexplicable waves and undulations. Ripple effects.

The odd thing is in Illinois, these would be rain clouds. But in Georgia, they're just for show. Georgia gets some of the coolest clouds passing over, billowing, flowing, randomly wisping in an otherwise clear sky. And these. I was so giddy by the time I got to work--I really am happier when it's cloudy.

corrugated tin clouds, or a perfect day

High a.m. clouds like corrugated tin precede rain. Rain comes, goes, and with it the clouds and with it the heat. Perfect powder sky running above me into the west as I run east, home.

Backyard Spring

I put my leftover calzone in the oven to reheat and stepped outside with my camera. I know how ephemeral this springtime vibrancy is. I made myself quit because I knew I needed to take my calzone out of the oven. It was a little crispy.

Can you see the spider in this tiny pine sapling?

To see more, visit my online album.

Birthday!!

I spent yesterday wandering around the farm with a camera...

Then my parents took us out for dinner at Bombay Indian Grill...

S'wonderful

Wildlife

American Green Tree Frog: Hyla cinerea | Untamed Science

This is the second time one of these tiny green beauties has hung out on our patio door. Apparently they're getting ready for mating season around this time of year. Sorry for the fuzzy picture. It was dark out and I didn't want the flash to scare the frog away.

Outdoors

I don't remember how old I was, probably various ages between eight and thirteen. Sometimes, when I needed to get away by myself, I walked to the southwest corner of our 4.5 acre Illinois property, where our field of clover and alfalfa met two adjacent cornfields. Between the cornfields, a ridge of earth and long grasses marked the boundary.

By July, I could disappear between the fields, hidden by cornstalks, and walk what seemed like a mile to another confluence of hedgerows--a small patch of meadowy-soft tall grasses, and an old oak or hickory shading part of it. Seems like on at least one occasion, I found the grass beneath that tree matted neatly down--a deer's bed. I sat in my own spot of grass beneath the tree with a sandwich, a book, and a journal, and let time simply pass.

I don't think I fully appreciated that place, or I would have gone more often. I remember noting from season to season, the hedgerow seemed to get narrower, a few more inches here and there plowed under by the farmers on either side. I became afraid of foxes, coyotes, or worse, ticks. At some point all my experience with nature became clouded with the knowledge and worry of things out to get me--the knowledge of good and evil, and I let it chase me out of the garden.

And now I wish I could go back--that probably goes without saying. I regret not living there more, not inhabiting that nook in the fields more frequently. I lived in the house there for ten years before going to college. I lived there two more summers during. But I didn't live in the land enough, while it was available to me. Nothing that private is available to me anymore. But it doesn't have to stay that way.

Nature writing

This semester I get to/have to (some days I can't decide) write a 15-20 page essay on some element of craft in fiction. Thanks to my gift of indecision (too many interesting possibilities), I took well into the first month of the semester before I decided on a topic, and once I decided, I bought a ton of books and essays on such a thing called "ecocriticism." In the field of literature study (or any art form perhaps), you have different modes of criticism: historical criticism, deconstructionist criticism, feminist criticism, marxist criticism. In the last 40 years, ecocriticism has emerged as a way to view art:

If the creation of literature is an important characteristic of the human species, it should be examined carefully and honestly to discover its influence upon human behavior and the natural environment—to determine what role, if any, it plays in the welfare and survival of mankind and what insight it offers into human relationships with other species and with the world around us. Is it an activity which adapts us better to the world or one which estranges us from it? 

- Joseph Meeker in The Comedy of Survival

I examine four short stories for what they say about the human relationship to the world around us: "The Last Good Country," by Ernest Hemingway; "Theories of Rain," by Andrea Barrett; "Phantom Pain," by Lydia Peelle; and "The Boundary," by Wendell Berry. Below is an adaptation of my rough-draft introduction to the essay, a little introduction to what ecocriticism and nature writing are good for. Thanks for letting me wax a little academic on you.


Most studies of “nature writing” focus on non-fiction books and essays and the pastoral wilderness setting. But literary fiction has plenty to add to the conversation about the non-human living world of which we are a part. Many novels and short stories show the natural world playing an important role. Whether their authors intentionally wrote “eco-literature” or not, the writers have represented the land, plants, animals, or weather in the story’s world as a vital actor in the narrative. 


“Ecocriticism becomes most interesting and useful…when it aims to recover the environmental character or orientation of works whose conscious or foregrounded interests lie elsewhere” (Robert Kern in The ISLE Reader). Whether obvious or discreet, the environment acts upon the characters, and vice-versa, in a way that informs the reader about the characters, and ultimately about the reader him- or herself.


Fiction’s “made-up” narrative can often hold up a mirror truer than reality to remind us how intimately we are connected with the world around us. “Human beings are the earth’s only literary creatures,” writes Joseph Meeker in The Comedy of Survival. “From the unforgiving perspective of evolution and natural selection, does literature contribute more to our survival than it does to our extinction?” 


At the risk of sounding too utilitarian, eco-readers ask whether a piece of fiction is useful in teaching us how better to survive in the future, with as much of the earth still intact as possible. They might argue that fiction which regards the non-human world with only cursory interest, as a mere stage prop (or setting) for its human characters, tends to further the ego-centric view that has contributed to unchecked use of the resources we find in the world around us, with often disastrous consequences. 


On the other hand, fiction that quarrels with the dominant voice--the inherited ways of seeing the world--plumbs deeper than shared intellectual slogans of "going green" and contributes to a counter-cultural movement of eco-centric progress.

Justice Like Jewelweed

Impatiens capensis, in North America, grows in roadside ditches, or near stream beds, and the internet claims you can use Orange Jewelweed as a remedy for poison ivy. Why this plant is really cool: the seed pods burst when you touch them--this is known as "explosive dehiscence," or in common vernacular "spreading its wild oats."

I know just enough plant biology to be dangerous. Andrew knows I often stop along our walks to examine an unusual plant up close. One early fall day in college, we walked along a quiet Indiana road nearby. I had just learned about jewelweed in class, and I stopped to show him the delicate orange flowers. He leaned in close to look, just as I lightly squeezed one of the seed pods. The plant jettisoned its seeds several feet at the slightest touch. 

The Germans call the plant Springkraut. We also call it "touch-me-not," although, I don't know why you wouldn't want to.

It's nature's bubble wrap!

This plant's existence refreshes my soul. I wouldn't want to tame it or bring it inside or plant it in a garden. Impatiens capensis belongs where hikers can come along and find themselves lost for a little while enjoying the tiny flowers' orchid-like beauty, and in helping the next generation of Orange Jewelweed get its start.

Essay

I was up till 3am this morning working on an essay for school. Today I mailed 10 pages of rough draft looking at representations of nature in fiction. I have read and re-read Ernest Hemingway's "The Last Good Country," Andrea Barrett's "Theories of Rain," Lydia Peelle's "Phantom Pain," and Wendell Berry's "The Boundary."

That last story, "The Boundary," makes me weep every time I read it. On our camping trip, I read it to Andrew, and I could barely get out the last zinger of a sentence. Even when you know it's coming, it knocks the air out of you. If I could write just one story in my life that had that effect on people.