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People have, over the years, made a number of footpaths leading into the woods that runs alongside the cemetery.  Sometimes, particularly in winter when I know that no one else is likely to be walking there, I'll follow one of these.  My favorite begins with a sudden, sharp plunge straight downward for a distance of three or four yards, then veers off to the left and trails along the side of the gully a quarter mile or so, eventually descending to the creek at the bottom.  From there you can either follow a path up the gully's far side and go deeper into the woods, or take another path that leads you up towards the cemetery again.  This latter route makes for a nice little walk.

One day this past winter when I was following this path, I spotted a bit of trash nearby and decided to pick it up.  Turning it over in my hands, I saw that it was a small tray made out of plastic, part of a container that had once held barbecued chicken wings according to the label I found on it.  Lying close to that were a couple of plastic pots, tossed into the ravine I suppose after someone had planted some flowers on a grave.  I decided to pick these up as well.  Since that day whenever I have gone into the woods I've continued to pick up whatever garbage I happen to find, even going so far as to carry a small plastic bag with me for just this purpose.  Some of the debris, like the artificial flowers and wreathes that are scattered about in such abundance, I can understand being there, the woods being situated so close to the cemetery.  But when I come across items like the container for barbecued chicken wings, or the empty bottle of cough syrup I once found, or a jar that had once held pickled pigs' feet in it, I sometimes have to stop and wonder how such things ever came to be in the woods.  It's a mystery to me.

I've collected any number of bags of this garbage, and yet it seems to me that the more I pick up, the more I find.  Recently I came upon six large trash bags that someone had thrown down the side of the ravine; upon opening, these turned out to contain nothing but dead sticks and leaves.  Why, I wondered, hadn't the person simply opened the bags and dumped the stuff out?  Another day I opened a bag to discover the skinned remains of a deer.  Needless to say, this was an unpleasant find.  Still, I was cheered by the thought that gradually the woods were coming to look something less like a dumping ground and more like the woods again.

When some of the snow melted earlier this month I found even more plastic pots, artificial flowers, strange jars, and other miscellaneous debris.  And so I got busy and picked it all up.  But when the rest of the snow had melted away, I saw how little I had really accomplished.  Perhaps it's because my eyes, having been trained now to spy out garbage, see too much of it:  it seems as if there must still be bagfuls and bagfuls left to collect.  I confess to feeling somewhat depressed about it.  The struggle to make a difference even here, in a small woods at the edge of a small town, seems overwhelming in the face of such carelessness.

Perhaps I make too much of this.  I would like to be a more forward-looking person, to believe that the problem of pollution in the world today is only one of the many unavoidable hurdles we must overleap as we make our way towards a better and richer life.  Yet I remain unconvinced.  It seems to me that as the flood tide of humanity rises ever higher, leaving its debris strewn on every shore, we show ourselves to have no more regard for the havoc we wreak upon the environment than would any other phenomena of nature.  And yet, paradoxically, the extent of our unconcern seems to me a sign that the human species, taken as a whole, is losing its sense of connection to its roots, to the earth, to that which gave it corporeal existence.  As the latest experiment put forth by nature, I fear sometimes that we are proving ourselves to be something of a failure.  And yet, if this is true, where does the fault lie but with nature itself?  For it was nature, after all, that produced us.

These thoughts have begun to take on the semblance of fatalism to me.  If we as a species lose our sense of connection to the earth which made us, what, I wonder, will happen to our spirit – by which I mean, that aspect of ourselves which yearns to discover the truth about who and what we really are?  Perhaps it is only through the closeness of death that we will find the answer.  Perhaps we must, being the kind of creatures that we are, bring ourselves into a physical proximity with our own extinction – its mere conceptualization not being enough – before we will be able to develop the greater clarity we need to survive.  I don't know.  It all depends, I suppose, on who, or what, ends up holding the final trump card.  Perhaps nature will simply do with us as it will.  Perhaps it has been doing so all along.

In any event, as winter ends and spring begins, this is the state of mind in which I find myself:  tossed back and forth between hope and hopelessness, caught up in a battle taking place both within and outside me; and still I continue my self-appointed task of picking up the trash I find in the woods, all the while feeling an ambivalent sense of servitude to both nature and the human race.

INTERRUPTED CONVERSATION