Falling Out Of Love With Trees - The Tale Of A Reformed Environmentalist

The world is Gaia, the Earth Mother, a universal whole, a One, a miraculous integrity of living things.  It knows when a butterfly has hurt its wing, when a fish jumps in the ocean, and when a sparrow drops from a tree. Man is the interloper who trespasses on Creation, the damager, and the destroyer. 

These were the thoughts of Selma Potter as she drove to the Shenandoah, the valley in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, his place of solace, peace, and belonging. As he left Washington far behind, a feeling of serenity and happy expectation came over him.

Every weekend she loaded up the car and headed for the mountains for two days of hiking, camping, and communing.  The woods were not just a place to go or a getaway or even a refuge. In fact they could not even be called a place, nor did their copses, glades, rooks, and rills. 

She belonged to them  They were a part of her. When she was in them, they and she were indistinguishable. A wind through the trees was her breath, the water rippling in a stream was her lifeblood, the ground beneath her feet her solidity, her body, her substance. 

Only the Shenandoah gave her a measure of inspiration, some inkling that her life was not entirely meaningless.  Nature was itself inspirational, intimating meaning, suggesting that the life of Hindu sadhus and Tibetan monks sequestered high in the Himalayas reaching out for God was not just religious extremism but something valuable to be sought after. 

'I am Nature', she wrote in her diary, annotated after every trip to the woods and illustrated with miniature pen-and-ink spectral drawings, somehow capturing the spiritual nature of the environment.  'I am God and God is me'. 

The woods of Southington Mountain the ponds and lakes in Vernon, Avon, and Farmington, and the shores of Long Island Sound now meant something profound; and for the first time interior and exterior became equal parts of an existential algorithm. Philosophy and rocks, stones, leaves, and branches were joined in an intellectual symphony. 

On a recent trip to the Rockies Selma felt herself transported, from the intimate confines of the Shenandoah to the high peaks of the West.  She smiled as she started up the long, winding cliff trail up to the top of Blantyre's Peak, her place of rest and solace, his Tibetan sanctuary, his holy shrine, her resting place.  The day was bright, clear, and cold.  The first tinges of yellow were on the aspen leaves, and few reds and golds were appearing on the cottonwoods.  

The day was brisk, and Selma felt that special energy that she always had when she stepped into the mountains.  A spring in her step, a firm grip on the steep ledges of the upper reaches of his climb, deep breaths at 12,000 ft. in the air.  All was right with the world. 

Selma had not always felt such an intimacy with nature, if fact just the opposite.  She resented - hated - her family trips to their cabin in the woods a dreary, dark, sodden place in West Virginia.  As a young child she was spooked by the silence. It was an alien refuge, hostile, abandoned, and frightening. 

The nights were worst, but the days down on this bottomland were barely more light, and it too hours of hard climbing to reach sunlight, and the empty, desolate plateau where it shone was no better.  It was flat, featureless, and devoid. 

She never expected those dark days to return and so she was surprised that when one day the hike up Blantyre's Peak became more and more of a slog.  No matter how hard she tried to rid her mind of the clutter of dissatisfaction, there it was ahead of her at every turn.  Nature had become an empty, spiritless place, devoid of anything remarkable or new.  The view from the top of the mountain, a hundred miles of prairie extending to the Montana border, a vast empty space she once saw as a metaphor for infinity had become simply a desolate, empty, unwanted place. 

It wasn't supposed to be this way.  There was supposed to be something permanent about nature, some indescribable subtlety that always touched the soul, landscapes that in their simplicity reflected the mind of God more than any New York skyscraper could; so how was it that she was bored, tired of being cold, pulling off galoshes and stoking the fire.  Tired of seeing nothing but featureless rangeland in the shadow of uninhabitable mountains.  

After a while even the Shenandoah had lost its cachet; or better had lost the spiritual significance that she was so sure she saw.  Leaves were just leaves, vistas were just breaks in the clouds, panoramas just perspective, silence was not golden but empty.  What was she doing here? she repeatedly asked himself; but she had no ready answer. 

On every hike in every season, her mind filled rather than emptied, and the clarity he had once sensed in solitude was entirely gone, replaced by nonsensical clutter, scattershot ideas, bits and pieces of men, food, and camaraderie. The woods - her woods, her solace, her go-to place for spiritual rest had become nothing but a buggy waste of time.  What had Thoreau been thinking?

The fluttering leaves on the trees which once gave her a poetic sense of justice and profound happiness were now just leaves.  Fluttering was physics.  The magic of the woods, the spiritual sanctuary she had always sought had become simply a buggy, hot place she wanted to leave. 

Were Thoreau and his Transcendentalists crackpots? Outliers? Crazy hermits fleeing what was humanity's best and most enduring expression - cities? What was nature after all but a place to be transformed into Westward Expansion, Manifest Destiny? Was Genesis wrong?

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and on every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth 

What was she doing in the woods, far from anyone or anything.  Who was she kidding? And so she returned home.  She had not had the epiphany she sought, but an epiphany nonetheless. Copses were not the spiritual idylls of the deep woods.  Glades were only incidentally infertile bits of ground not miraculous visions.  Susurrus was not a verse from heaven but equation - wind + pine trees = sound. 

Selma felt that she had been sold a bill of goods - or rather had bought the goods from a snake oil salesman.  Nature was nothing but rocks, trees, and vines. Louis XIV, the Sun King, revised nature, cleared the land and built the Gardens of Versailles. That was something to reflect upon.