Natural Habitat

Okay, I know that this will sound like bragging and that everyone in the Midwest and on the East Coast will get angry with me but it’s my blog so I’m just going to say it: one of my biggest problems right now is that it is just too nice outside to get any work done. It is January and in the 70s with bright sun, blue sky, and a slight breeze. It is absolutely the perfect day. And there are just magnificent climbing trees everywhere around me. I actually just sat in a tree for almost two hours. It was fantastic and I didn’t want to move. It’s one of those days where I don’t really want to swim or hike or bike or do anything, I just want to be outside. Feel the breeze and the sun and the bark of the tree, listen to the birds and watch them go about their business without racing around trying to see and identify as many as possible. Just be with nature for a while.

Of course, thoughts inevitably pop up that get in the way of that kind of serenity. Today as I was lounging in my tree I kept thinking about this sign that I saw a couple of days ago:

That sign just makes me so angry. It was at a park, too. Along a “hiking and biking trail” which was actually a wide cement path through a decent oak mot but close enough to the main road that you could always hear traffic. At one point there was a break in the trees and about twenty feet away was a golf course. The smallest amount of nature possible wedged into some suburban sprawl and they still put up signs to “Beware”. Why is everyone so afraid of nature?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I understand that plenty of things in the natural world are dangerous and should be respected. If there had been an educational sign informing visitors about the existence of snakes in the area and maybe explaining which species could be found here or simply telling people how to identify venomous snakes, that would have been fine.

In case you didn’t know, snakes that are venomous generally have a head that is distinct from and wider than their bodies, whereas harmless snakes usually do not. (http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/gaston/Pests/reptiles/venompix.htm)

Recently I had to promise my mother that I would try not to get bitten by a venomous snake (I don’t mean to pick on you, Mom!). I don’t blame her for being worried. I do have the biologist reaction when I see a snake (Ooh! Cool! Lemme see!) rather than the normal reaction (Aaah! Run away!). But even as someone who spends more time than most out in places where Scary Nature lives it’s still fairly low on the list of things that will likely kill me. It’s probably going to be heart disease, cancer, or a car accident. But I constantly eat fried food, drive my car, and, I don’t know, live in the world (pretty much everything gives you cancer these days). People seem so much more unnerved by the possibility of death by animal attack than any of those far more likely scenarios. Everyone told me I would get killed by a venomous animal in Australia. Yesterday I showed a friend this photo:

And he responded “Ah! Kill it!” I know he was mostly joking, but seriously? It’s a pretty small gator, and it was pretty skinny. It didn’t even open its eyes when I got close enough to take this picture. Pretty much every other gator I’ve seen has splashed abruptly into the water before I got nearly this close. The snakes at the refuge, too, were much more interested in getting away from me than in trying to attack. I barely got a look at the rattlesnake; I heard it rattling as it disappeared deeper into a brush pile. Obviously there are some more aggressive creatures out there, but by and large they would rather run (or slither) away than attack you.

So why is everyone so freaked out by them? I think it’s the uncontrollable aspect. People like to think that in laying down concrete over half the country and walling out the nature, clearcutting unsightly natives and planting swaths of safe, boring, completely useless turf grass that they’ve controlled their environment. There are designated “natural spaces” that people like to view from the comfort of their air conditioned cars (no one is ever too hot or too cold anymore, why would you allow yourself to be uncomfortable?) but the thought of interacting too closely with anything wild or uncontrollable is terrifying.

Also it’s gross. Nature smells funny and is dirty and it’s not sterile like everything should be. Growing up I used to go on long walks in the nearby nature center with my parents and my dad and I would pick up feathers to bring home and make quills. I love finding feathers. But once in high school I was walking with a group of friends and found a beautiful one. I picked it up and jokingly stroked a friend’s face with it and everyone I was with was horrified. “Don’t you know that feathers carry disease?!” I was embarrassed and even though I was pretty sure they were all wrong I didn’t really know how to argue the point. Even years later after being told by an ornithologist that my dad and I were right, I still hesitate for half a second before picking one up.

I am still fighting other aspects of this. Wandering through the woods today I spotted my new favorite climbing tree with a nice wide branch to recline on and I hesitated before hoisting myself up. “I’m wearing shorts, I might scrape my legs, it might be dirty (I’ve noticed raccoons like to poop on all the best sitting spots on trees. It’s really annoying), maybe I should just go sit on a nice man-made bench". But then I decided, “Fuck it! I want to sit in that tree!” And I did scrape my leg. It stung a little for about two seconds. And it wasn’t completely comfortable, like a couch up there. But it was better than comfortable. It was wonderful. I would be there now if I didn’t want to get all this off my chest.

I want to say it was perfect but I won’t because I think that’s sort of the root of this whole issue. Society is obsessed with attaining and maintaining perfection and nature is imperfect – asymmetrical (often, but not always), in flux, complicated, dangerous, messy. We fight so hard against it. But you can’t keep things from getting dirty. You can’t keep things from getting chipped or scratched. “Puppies turn into dogs, who get old and die!” And people do, too. Our culture tries hard to fight, deny, and avoid it, but you can’t. The best you can do is take a few precautions – get insurance, wear boots, don’t poke the snake – and then embrace whatever happens. The alternative is essentially making a cage for yourself to keep the unpredictable things out.