Sunday, June 24, 2012

To See For Ourselves

Hiking Assateague Island

It wasn’t long after our departure from the car that I wanted to run as fast as I could through the forest.  Clouds of mosquitoes, thick as smoke, enveloped us as we moved along the asphalt path.  To stop even for a moment to admire a particular plant or flower allowed the hovering insects to land on our exposed flesh and drain the life out of us.  Our store bought bug spray did little to deter the tiny monsters and our group was forced to resort to any manner of shuddering, spastic movements that gave us even a moment’s respite.  I myself spent most of the entire walk swinging my scarf about my neck like a cow switching flies as it grazed.
This walk through the woods made me wonder under what circumstances Thoreau took his walks to which he speaks so highly of.  He often spurns mankind for their intolerance of nature and insists, in what I’ve come to regard as an elitist attitude, that people should spend most of their time in a more natural state, deep within the forests.  However, I wonder if he has ever walked for miles in the baking sub-tropical heat along vast beds of stagnant water, covered in blood sucking insects.  I’m pretty sure even he retreated to the safety of his cabin more than once back on Walden’s pond.
                That’s not to say that my trek was entirely miserable. I saw several endangered fox squirrels, birds of all shapes and sizes, and quite possibly the largest heron I have ever laid my eyes on.  In Thoreau’s essay Walking, he represents nature as a two dimensional force, presenting itself to whatever introspective whims he is contemplating at the time. But when we experience nature, we experience it on nature’s terms, not our own.  When he states, ‘Now a days, almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses, and the cutting down of the forest, and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more cheap,’ (Handout Pg. 2) he is implying that mankind as a whole augments the true order of nature to suit its own needs.  Yet, nowhere in his patronizing diatribe does he mention the harsher aspects of the forest.  Mother Nature is the epitome of balance, each wonderful adventure paired with a grueling trial.  On our walk I was able to partake of fresh raspberries, mindful of their surrounding thorns.  I was able to see many species of beautiful birds which were only there to feast on the millions of insects I was forced to wade through.  Thoreau manages to omit these facts from his accounts, and these ‘improvements’ of his are also ‘tame and cheap’.  Like all things in nature, you can only appreciate them in their entirety.
                Thoreau goes on further to say, ‘I walk out into nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer walked in. (Handout Pg. 3) Barring this inflated sense of ego, which I am quite sure at least Moses and Homer would have found amusing, he attempts to set himself up as the definitive path to truly experiencing nature.  He recommends daily four hour walks to avoid the ‘moral insensibility of [his] neighbors’. (Handout Pg. 1)  If he were alive today I would ask him who benefits more, a man who spends every day walking within the same twenty mile radius or the man who spends thirty minutes seeing the ocean for the first time.  The force of nature itself defies his line of reasoning simply by its existence. Were it truly meant to be view through one set of eyes, life would never have exploded into the multitude of forms I saw that day during my walk.  A coyote doesn’t view nature from a fox’s point of view, just as none of the people I saw that day viewed it quite as I did. Each of us is affected by nature in a unique way. 
                Furthermore, I cannot come to grips with Thoreau’s assertion that we must ‘walk like a camel’ (Handout Pg. 2) and look inside ourselves in contemplation.  To focus on oneself is to ignore the surrounding majesty of the woods.  Introspection and personal growth does not occur by curling up inside our own heads to ‘ruminate’ on our own thoughts.  It comes from interacting with the world around us and seeing how we fare against that world.  You don’t know how high you can climb by thinking about it at the base of a cliff; you know when you stand at the top of that cliff and look down on world below you.  You can’t tell how strong a rivers current is until you attempt to cross it.  I stated in the beginning that I wanted to run as fast as I could through the forest to avoid the mosquitoes.  Yet I endured them and by doing so I was able to come within inches of an endangered species, taste the sweet stem of a sassafras leaf, and marvel at the site of dozens of shore birds taking flight right in front of me.  None of this would have been possible if I had stayed tucked inside my own head.  By acknowledging the duel nature of the forest, and accepting it, I was able to become a part of it in a way Thoreau never could.
Works Cited
Thoreau, Henry. “Walking” Handout, June 2012
Jim Mason

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