(5)

A great many thunderstorms have come rolling and crashing through my town this spring – at least one every day this past week alone.  There have also been several extremely hot and muggy days, though mostly the temperature has remained blissfully cool.  But it's muddy and wet everywhere you go.  The town looks almost as if it were the scene of a recent flood – pop cans and cigarette wrappers, beer bottles and plastic bags, paper cups, soggy bits of newspaper, and gobs of chewing gum are strewn about the streets and through the yards downtown as if rising tides of water had churned up all the debris that had lain half buried throughout the winter and left it tossed about anywhere and everywhere.  I pick up whatever recyclable material I happen to come across whenever I'm out walking.  This habit of picking up garbage, whether in the woods or on the street, seems a hard one to break.

Every time there is a lull in the rain, the lawn mowers start up again.  What a mania people have for neatly trimmed grass!  I told my boss at work the other day that if I owned my own house, I'd dig up the lawn and plant wildflowers there instead.  He said:  "Hmm.  I wonder how the neighbors would feel about that?  All those seeds floating over into their yards."  I said:  "And the bees would be a problem, I suppose.  But I wouldn't care.  Why does everyone want their yards to look exactly the same as everyone else's?  It's boring."  He said:  "It gives people a sense of order."  And he pointed out that a lot of folks do have bushes and hedges and beds of flowers growing.  I said:  "Yeah – they're happy as long as the flowers grow where they tell them to . . ."

The last of the spring flowers are now in bloom.  The irises are at their prime; their rich, delicious perfume fills the air.  At the cemetery, the rhododendrons are massed with flowers.  Shiny yellow buttercups dot the long grasses growing along the edge of the ravine, little dabs of brightness amongst the green.  But everywhere, the lawn mowers roar . . .  The lawn mowers roar noisily away at the cemetery too; day after day the caretakers work their way up and down through the graves.  When I went to the cemetery this afternoon I'd planned to just sit under a tree awhile, then decided that, what with the noise of the mowers and all, I'd go into the woods instead.  It was very cool in there, and the lushness of the vegetation gave it an almost decadent feel.  I was in luck as far as the mosquitoes were concerned too; there were hardly any.  Perhaps the recent thunderstorms have drowned them all, or caused them to starve; perhaps I hit a momentary lull between successive generations.  I don't know.  But the woods felt delicious.  The skunk cabbages, I saw, had passed their prime; their huge leaves were flopping over into the mud.  The ferns, on the other hand, were unfurling their frilly stalks everywhere.

Once I'd worked my way down to the creekbed, I decided to just follow it for awhile.  I've been doing this more often of late – following the creek a little, then climbing straight up the far side of the gully into the woods.  By staying clear of the paths, I'm less likely to run into any humans who might be walking there.  At one point, jumping from the stony bed of the creek onto the bank again, I accidentally broke a spider's web built amongst the ferns.  I felt rather sorry to have done that, wrecking by my clumsiness all that careful work.  Hunkering down on my haunches, I watched the spider begin to slowly traverse its way along the remaining unbroken threads, checking out the damage.  I thought that maybe, if I were patient, I'd get to watch it weave a new web.  It's one of nature's common miracles, that intricately woven spiral of life and death:

6000 years of civilization, spider!  What d'you think?

But it only clambered its way to the underside of a fern leaf, curling up on itself miserably – or perhaps just deciding to take a little nap before facing all that hard work.

The creek bubbled away at my side, the water rushing by so close that it was all I could hear.  Gone were all sounds of cars and sirens, electric saws, and lawn mowers too.  For a few minutes, much to my delight, the world both shrank and dilated until it seemed as if there was nothing left but the sound of rushing water, piles of jumbled rock, towering trees, mud and moss and ferns . . .  But still the spider did not move from its spot.  Eventually my legs began to ache.  I decided to move on.

Once I'd climbed the far side of the gully I wandered a little way into the woods, then settled myself under a tree.  I took an apple from my shirt pocket and ate it, its tart juiciness the perfect antidote to my thirst.  Then I sat and just gazed off through the trees awhile, thinking of nothing in particular – refusing, in fact, to think of anything at all – when suddenly I noticed that my eyes had focused on something rather peculiar.  Some twenty feet or so away from me there was a fallen tree.  The bark had peeled away, and the wood underneath had turned green with algae.  There was a white squiggle in the green stuff though, a place where, for whatever reason, the algae had refused to grow.  But the squiggle, I noticed, was not just a squiggle; it had taken on the shape of a definite design.  I recognized that design:  it was the astrological symbol for Saturn, planet of hardship.  But on the tree the symbol appeared in reverse.  Perhaps this was a positive omen for me!  I decided to take it so, in at any rate.

After sitting under the tree awhile longer, I got up and walked on.  Eventually I came to another gully (there are a number of them in the woods) and made my way down to the creek at the bottom.  This creek was quite narrow, it being only a tributary to the main stream.  Once there, I again hunkered down and began looking around me.  Suddenly, much to my surprise, I saw close to my feet the hand and arm of a human infant sticking out from under a rotted log that had long ago fallen down into the creekbed.  It was not real arm, of course, but only a doll's limb, made of hard white plastic and covered with mud.  I found it's appearance at once amusing, dismaying, and mysterious.  Amusing because the hand and arm were life-size and, except for the color, quite realistic; I felt as if I'd tumbled upon a parody of one of those gruesome crime scenes you sometimes read about in the newspaper:  HIKER DISCOVERS DEAD BODY IN WOODS.  Dismaying because it seemed there was no place I could find that had been left untouched by humans, unpolluted by human garbage.  And mysterious because this odd find too had taken on the implications of a "sign" to me . . .

Losing interest in the doll's arm I began look further afield.  Glancing over my shoulder, I saw in the near distance a shaft of sunlight raying down into a tangle of sticks and fallen trees; and in that shaft of sunlight I saw a face.  It was the face of an animal – a monkey or a chimpanzee perhaps – and it was watching me.  This was only a trick of light and shadow, of course; and I recognized it as such immediately.  Still, the face remained; and it held me, transfixed me, for several long minutes.  I could even see its eyes, gazing at me with a look that was primitive, not quite human, but yet intelligent, and slightly sorrowful.

The sun disappeared, and with it vanished the monkey's face.  Looking up, I saw storm clouds beginning to gather and decided I'd better start heading for home.  I climbed back up the side of the gully and, some minutes later, clambered back down to the main creekbed.  I felt I needed to hurry if I didn't want to get caught in the rain – but before I left I wanted to make another quick check on the spider whose web I'd wrecked earlier.  I found the spot where it was easily enough – but the spider itself was nowhere to be found:

Did I dream you, spider?  Or did you dream me?

Walking through town on my way back home again, I counted no less than seven people frantically trying to get their lawns mowed before the rain came.  Big-bellied men, flabby women, and skinny young kids pushed noisy little blade-propelling motors that left behind puffs of smelly blue smoke wherever they went.  All that just to keep the grass nice and even and flat.  I thought:  These people are like insects in a way, blindly trying to bring order and safety into their confusing, chaotic lives.  Unlike real insects, however, much of what they do is not only pointless but also harmful.  The self-indulgence of humans will be their downfall, I fear; and though the subjects of humanity that I've witnessed here in this one small town may as often as not be but crude examples of the type, the self-indulgence of the species is, I've no doubt, the same everywhere, however sophisticated an appearance it may take in other places.  And the conclusion I come to, after all the time I've spent studying humans, is that they probably have something in the neighborhood of a fifty-fifty chance of survival – perhaps less.

. . . This conclusion, at any rate, gives me some small measure of satisfaction.