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1. Big Trees and Back Yards: Time, Landscape, and the Borders of Nature
- University of Iowa Press
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short leg was a hedge separating our yard from the neighbors’, and the remaining side was a wall of trees. Although I haven’t been back there for years, I remember those trees as being a mixed coniferous forest, blanketing the ground not with leaves but with needles, their verdure providing an annual green counterpoint to the blazing colors that distant Mount Tom splashed on our northern horizon every autumn. The trees extended for several minutes’ worth of childhood tramping away from our yard, and then gave way suddenly to a broad expanse of tall grass, a meadow that marked a zone of transition away from the known and familiar world: the other side of that meadow seemed uncomfortably far from the house to a small child, as did the terra incognita we would enter if we strayed too far to the north or south of the patch of woods that extended straight east from our property line. Limited in extent as it may have been, the world on the other side of the yard’s edge was a favorite haunt of my sisters and me, rivaled only by the East Aspetuck River just down the road. Some of my fondest memories of those years are not of specific events or episodes, but of patterns of activity in the wooded and watered landscape, repeated moments of contact and exploration and immersion: digging in a natural outcrop of sand where a rocky ledge broke through the meadow’s grassy surface, revisiting a favorite shaggy-barked tree and marveling yet again at the odd and delightful texture of its skin (a texture that I wouldn’t be writing this book if I hadn’t spent the first nine years of my childhood in New Milford, Connecticut. Our house sat on about an acre of ground, a plot that was shaped roughly like a right triangle: the hypotenuse was the road, the o n e Big Trees and Back Yards Time, Landscape, & the Borders of Nature QR demanded that bits of it be pulled off and shredded and smelled), weaving a new route through the trees that I hadn’t tried before, pulling apart the jointed snakegrass that grew along the river’s edge, kicking off our shoes and wading into the swift shallow river itself on hot summer days. I learned to love that landscape, to the point where it became difficult to imagine my young self away from it: when my father gently broke the news to my sisters and me that we would be moving to Wisconsin, I remember crying hardest not because I would be leaving my friends, but because I would be leaving the woods. It’s probable that I would never have become interested in thinking and writing about the natural world as an adult if I hadn’t accomplished the first nine years of my growing up in such close proximity to those woods, just up the hill from that river. In reflecting on his own path through life, the writer and biologist Robert Michael Pyle has noted that “when people connect with nature, it happens somewhere . Almost everyone who cares deeply about the outdoors can identify a particular place where contact occurred,” he continues, and that place is usually not one that is storied, monumental, breathtaking, destined for calendar photos and official preservation and vacation visits, but is rather “unspectacular: a vacant lot, a scruffy patch of woods, a weedy field, a stream . . . — or a ditch,” a reference to the High Line Canal that meandered through the Aurora, Colorado, of Pyle’s youth and whose waters continue to nourish his days both personally and professionally: “Without a doubt,” he believes, “most of the elements of my life flowed from that canal.”1 Likewise, a thoroughly unremarkable sliver of New England hillside field and forest — Mount Tom’s poor cousin, the kind of landscape that the leaf-peepers drive through to get to the worthwhile woods — and a shallow rocky brook with no particular distinguishing marks somehow conspired to narrow my range of choices and preferences, to literally prepare the ground for many of the things I have come as an adult to think and write and care about, to subtly shape my ways of seeing: when I hike through New England forests now I am still shaded in imagination by my old backyard woods, and when I lean on a bridge railing to contemplate a stream I still hear quiet plashy echoes...