Dirt, Sky, and Water

In recent months Peter and Veronique have both written compelling, thought provoking essays about nature and about wilderness. Ironically, or perhaps naturally, I too have been thinking about similar topics for the last many months.

One of the many ways Texas is unique among states in America is that 95% of its vast acreage is in private hands. Only 5% is owned by state or Federal agencies and even at that, public land is often geographically remote and almost always behind a gate. Texas, for all its size, doesn’t really have the open public land present in so much of the country.

That means growing up in a developing suburb outside Houston, TX, my experience of nature was somewhat stunted, though I didn’t know it at the time. Sure, I rode my bike into the woods near our home but I was technically trespassing and fortunately, at this stage the residential building boom that would be kicked off by Compaq Computer Corp., effectively eliminating these “woods” was still a few years in the future. I could spend hours amongst those 2nd or even 3rd growth yellow pines or down at the creek, which was often just a natural drainage that had been expanded by developers in preparation for new housing developments. Sometimes we would sneak onto private property with a pellet gun or fishing rod (ironically, often owned by Compaq), consciously pretending we were in the wilderness, but subconsciously aware of suburbia. Summers were glorious times when I spent weeks on end with my grandparents in South Louisiana. I fished daily, in farm ponds, in bayous, and sometimes in the dark waters of the Atchafalaya Basin. This was outdoors for me. This was nature…my young mind not at all troubled by the oil drilling rigs, pump jacks, and storage tanks that literally littered the landscape.

Texas too, is the land of the automobile, if not the enormous pickup truck. Between the oppressive summer heat and the vastness of the land and therefore, the cities, no one really walks anywhere, at least not willingly. People emerge from their houses to enter their cars, the world whizzing by at speed, and arrive at work with nary a hair out of place, quickly entering their air-conditioned place of employment. Many office buildings are lushly landscaped, some even with interior gardens; shopping malls frequently have trees growing indoors. Even downtown Houston boasts an intricate subterranean level of shops, lunch spots, and magazine stands so you can effectively pretend the outdoors don’t exist. Air lock to air lock we travel, as if visitors to an alien planet.

It isn’t that I haven’t been exposed to nature through my life. It’s that my experience has been so heavily curated. My experience of true “wilderness” in the way many of us desire has been limited to all too infrequent family vacations buffered by some Disney-esque approximation of nature conceived, often convincingly, by an unseen hoard of real estate developers and state park employees.

But this God-forsaken pandemic has disrupted my routine too, allowing a few more scales to fall from my eyes.

Instead of rushing each morning from the house to the truck to begin my morning commute, dodging other cars as make our daily migration to the office, I walk my dog early and watch the sun rise. In recent weeks I’ve noticed a change in the air as we’ve entered fall. The air is cooler, somehow softer, with a different smell on my tongue. During the day, instead of the walking from one meeting to another, I step into the yard and the let the dog stretch her legs as I do mine. The month of September brought more rain than the entire summer. The grass greened quickly and the Texas purple sage bloomed, not once but twice. I have to assume this happens every year and I’m simply rushing around too quickly to notice.

But now I have noticed, I am noticing, and it matters to me.

In the second chapter of the Book of Genesis God creates a garden full of trees and plants and all living things. He soon creates man and woman and puts them into the garden “to dress and keep it.” It is a place where God and presumably man, would “walk in the cool of the day.”

It would seem we were created or at least have developed, if you prefer, to benefit from, if not outright need, time in nature. We need time with dirt under our feet, sky over our heads, and flowing water nearby. I believe being in nature triggers something primordial inside our spirits, reminding us we are creatures of this earth. It fosters a reconnection with our authentic selves, instead of who our post-industrial society has convinced us we are.

There are times in our lives where a deep, prolonged period of time in the wilderness may be very beneficial. Our brains and our souls begin to rest, to relax from the incessant onslaught of man-made stimuli in which we daily marinate. We begin to think clearly, creatively. We smile a little more and our shoulders begin to descend from their ever-present location up around our ears.

I recently spent a few days in the “Big Bend” region of Texas with my 11 year old son, doing just that. For a few days we walked in the desert, the taste of Chihuahuan dust on our lips, sweated under the unforgiving sun. We looked into the night sky and contemplated the Milky Way. One we stood on the bank of the Rio Grande in Santa Elena canyon and looked across the river to the other side. “That’s Mexico,” I told him. “Mexico? It looks just like Texas,” he said. “Yes, it does. Don’t ever forget that.” He slept almost the entire 7 hour drive home while I simply relived the experience in my mind.

Those times in the wilderness are important, deeply transformative if permitted to be so.

But I think back to the time this summer where we sat on our back porch listening to sound of a buck moth caterpillar consuming a leaf. I think back to the stunning sunsets we regularly enjoy, the invigorating sunrises. I think about the near miracle of those Texas purple sage, their vivid color coming out only after an early fall rain, seemingly dormant the rest of the year. I think to the time a whitetail doe left her fawn on our front door step for an entire day, evidently confident that we were decent enough parents to watch her child for a while.

The point of which is this. Do not forsake the good for the great. Do not long for a wilderness experience and not appreciate the pockets of nature, though sometimes painfully small, that exist all around us. Enjoy deep experiences of nature when you can get them, but be grateful for that which we do have and can experience daily. Like gratitude, love, food, and air, little sips every day may be even more important than great gulps now and then.

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