Henry David Thoreau went to the woods because he “wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life…”
Most of us came to Westchester for the schools. Sometimes the longing for a yard and a dog to despoil it helped send us up the Hudson, but it’s easy to forget how precious and essential it is for children – and their parents – to come into frequent contact with what now passes for the wild.
Ever notice how stepping outside will raise your mood? Stay outside and your blood pressure will begin to drop. You will also lower your risk of diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
When we fell trees or pave meadows, we are thinking of utility, convenience, profit. We forget that when we diminish nature, we are diminishing ourselves as well. We didn’t come down from Mars to ride the planet like a wild bronco, break it to our will. This planet is our home, the out of doors was our nursery and school.
Separating humans from nature is like separating Siamese twins. Sharp knives will be required and one of the patients often dies.
Next time you step outside, look closely and you will be shocked by the beauty you see there, but also ancient pleasures and even older fears. Children understand their place in nature without even making up their minds to do so. When he was a toddler, my son Andrew used to go behind the pool house and dig in the dead leaves until he found a gigantic worm. He’d spread his wriggling treasure – with a little clump of leaves and dirt – on the white fabric of his mother’s lounge chair. She didn’t mind. I didn’t understand.
I must have been bored, because I picked up one of the worms at just the right moment, and I saw the creature’s face. Commonly hidden in a closed tube – that visage – when you glance at it – is both ancient and familiar. It might – I guessed – resemble the faces of reptiles that once hunted mammals.
Andrew cherishes the beauty of the great out of doors, but he also likes the power. Godzilla was his first love. Godzilla – in case you’ve forgotten – is a gigantic monster brought to life by the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nor does the big guy pass out soup and bandages. He stomps Tokyo and he roars.
After Godzilla, Andrew fell in love with great white sharks. He got posted to South Africa, so he could study great white sharks up close. He works now with dolphins, but you wouldn’t want to tempt him with a great white, or a killer whale either for that matter.
He doesn’t want to kill these creatures, or even catch them. He only wants to be around them. I never asked him, but I think I know why. He wants to be close to nature, cheek by jowl. If possible, he’d like to work with an animal that once had Homo sapiens for breakfast.
The secondary result of this passion is that – like his father – like his entire family, Andrew would rather be outside.
Archipelago Films (featured recently in the Inside Press) is at work on a movie showing all the proven benefits of contact with nature.
Like Andrew my love of being out under the sky is more instinctive than intellectual. I run a lot. I’ve run in Africa, Bulgaria and Rome, but most of where I run is on the trails of The Rockefeller State Park Preserve.
Here’s the part where I may lose you: I like nature as much as I like art.
I used to take the train to Manhattan to see Marc Chagall’s Cow, which once looked down the stairs at me at the Museum of Modern Art. At night the Union Church in Pocantico Hills will sometimes light up Marc Chagall’s stained-glass window, a piece he titled The Good Samaritan. This is a spectacle to behold.
And yet despite the tens of thousands of dollars my parents spent on education, I have yet to see a work of art that I thought could match the majesty of a single maple leaf in autumn.
This is not a decision I made, it is a position that grew in me and long before I even knew how to spell the word aesthetic.
The children and dogs of my generation were shooed out the screen door in the morning and not expected home again except for meals.
We formed cliques, built forts, pelted one another with snowballs. I don’t recall for sure if I ever ate an earth worm, but it was done, though usually on a bet for baseball cards.
I’ve been a church-going Christian and an ardent Buddhist, but really – and at my heart of hearts – I’m a pantheist. I worship nature, even though I know she bites.
The dogs I have loved are descended from the wolves, who once made nightfall terrible, pulled babies from their cradles, picked off stragglers in a march.
Two guardian dogs, let loose by accident, attacked a walker not that long ago and killed her poodle. I like poodles, and I like walkers too, but I like the guardian dogs as well.
They’re bigger and tougher than is my own dog, Fifi, but still the same species. Missing nature, all I need to do is take the time to look Fifi in the face. I can see myself reflected in her eyes. She’s a dog and dogs were wolves, and wolves were with us before we were became what we now consider human.
We’re all afraid now, and I don’t know why exactly, but it’s true. Instead of going outside, we stay indoors and look at screens.
Parents are afraid to let their kids out of the house. I understand. I’m frightened too, but this is something I’ve got to get over, don’t you think?
Fear is nothing new, though we have more of it these days. We have more fear and less danger, which seems odd, but then the truth is often odd.
My father wrote about fear on the last page of his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle. “Fear tastes like a rusty knife,” he wrote. “Do not let her into your home. Courage tastes of blood.”
