THE STANDOFFf
The Isolation Blues;
reflections during covid-19
After spending four or five days surveying and drawing a plan incessantly, I especially feel the necessity of putting myself in communication with nature again, to recover my tone, to withdraw out of the wearying and (often) unprofitable world of affairs. The things I have been doing have but a fleeting and accidental importance…I would fain have been wading through the woods and fields and conversing with the sane snow. I wish again to participate in the serenity of nature, to share the happiness of the river and the woods…I thus from time to time break off my connections with eternal truths and go with the shallow streams of human affairs, but when my task is done, with never failing confidence I devote myself to the infinite again.
– Henry David Thoreau Journal entry from January 4, 1857
I stepped out the backdoor this morning to empty the contents of last night’s coffee pot when I looked up and saw I was being watched. A large white tail deer stood less than fifty feet away, down the hill towards the cabin standing by the solar panel. He was motionless with his gaze fixed on my curious behavior of tossing brown liquid and grinds onto the cold, white snow. It soon turned into a backwoods standoff; me with my coffee pot and he, well, with nothing but his instinct. I’m not sure how long the standoff lasted since neither one of us moved and I didn’t want to take a chance to check my wrist watch. But since he was better equipped to handle the cold, and I frankly was not, I made the first move. I gave a friendly wave and said, “Good morning…” and with that, he turned and bolted for the woods. I guess he had had enough of me (his curiosity waning perhaps) and although he didn’t seem upset with me, he apparently had decided to move along with his day.
When our lives become overly stressed or the responsibilities of the day begin to weight us down, a return to nature can oftentimes restore our sanity, if just for a moment. In nature we have an access point to what Thoreau calls “the infinite.” From out of this space we have a limitless supply of beneficence. What seemed so difficult, if not impossible, just moments before now opens into possibility and new action. Each time we touch “the infinite” it changes us as well as everything around us.
As I was getting ready to go back to the house suddenly, three more deer (as if from nowhere) appear out of the brush and chase after the standoff deer who had just abruptly left. I was left, as they say, holding the coffee pot…
In the woods,
Dave
February 24, 2021
You are right about the restorative function of nature. There is no doubt that I feel most relaxed, most at home, most in tune with nature, when I am at Meduxnekeag Lake. However, there is a long term irony brought to the fore by your having seen 4 deer in the time it took you to dump your coffee grounds. The irony is this: I have spent 6 to 7 months of the year, from early spring through late fall and a week in the winter since retiring in 2007, upta camp. We have owned the camp since 1985. In all of that time, I have seen one moose, no deer, 1000 chickadees, 20 red and, a while ago, gray squirrels, 400 bluejays, 250 nuthatches, 3 racoons, one mother bear with 2 cubs, and some, but not a lot, of sign in the shape of moose turd, deer turd, and tracks. I used to see jack rabbits, but not any more. Now, down here in suburban South Portland, I, too, toss my coffee grounds into the white snow, using them in place of salt sand on the path behind our garage. Down here, I saw a coyote in the middle of Sandy Hill Road a couple of weeks ago. I have seen a couple of skunks, a couple of raccoons, and our neighbor sees these things every night when they trigger her motion-detector floodlight. We also get to see cardinals, bluebirds, one daily Baltimore Oriole, 1000 chickadees, 6 starlings, and 3 gray squirrels. You get the picture. When I want to see deer, I go to Sam’s home in Tarrytown, New York. When I run with his golden in the morning, we have jumped (or been jumped by) 3 or 4 deer at a time, occasionally. So, I guess I would say that nature is where you find it, or where it finds you. You just have to be receptive. And my experience is that it is as likely to be in or near cities as big as NYC as it is at the lake in Linneus.
Poet Gary Snyder used to say that the concrete sidewalks and back alleyways of NYC were just as much “in nature” as any wild place on the West coast…thanks for the post Mike.