JULY 2, 2021 – I love Mother Nature—her beautiful sights and sounds in infinite varieties. But to my affections she’s indifferent. Even when I shower her with praise and adoration, she rains on my parade or, alternatively, refuses to rain when my tree garden needs it most.
It was in the tree garden yesterday where I experienced Mother Nature’s unfeeling . . . nature. The “garden” is a +20-acre portion of our woods where I’ve planted hundreds of white pine and cultivated hundreds more “volunteers.” One entrance to this special place lies just beyond a gigantic poplar that snapped at its base and fell into the arms of sturdier trees. I have to duck to navigate under this leviathan—a feature my wife with her bad back doesn’t appreciate. But yesterday, with my bad back, I didn’t duck enough, and suddenly . . . Whack! Mother Nature struck me unceremoniously on the shoulder, drawing blood.
I grunted expletively. “So much for what I was about to say to you,” I said to Mother Nature. (“Your sunlit gown and tiara make you stunningly gorgeous this early morn.”)
As I pursued my objective—trimming plants along my trails and away from pine seedlings—I realized that Mother Nature is in constant competition with herself. Much of it is unseemly, as exhibited by noxious weeds and scrubby shrubs that hog the ground in which royalty—pine, oak, and maple—struggle to survive. As I marveled at the tre[e]mendous growth and beauty among the trees I’d planted, I cursed the boisterous raspberry shoots as they lacerated my legs.
In her silence, Mother Nature spoke her retort. A few years back we’d contracted to have earlier generations of oaks, maples and “commoner” poplar harvested—ironically, to help pay the cost of preserving Mother Nature. Now she was exacting her price: prolix raspberry bushes finding hospitable grounds in stirred up soil—with wood ticks thrown into the deal and deer and diseases to threaten the object of my efforts, the majestic white pine, the dominant, indigenous species of this part of the country before MAN slashed the forests mercilessly for MAN’S insatiate demand for the lucre of “progress.”
I wrestled with the question, “What’s truly natural anymore, given man’s original disruption of Mother Nature?” There I was, fighting her to restore her to what she’d been before previous generations destroyed her so that they and now we, in our collective hubris, could live free of her.
I recalled a recent conversation at a lumberyard. When I asked the guy in charge about lumber futures, he said he’d just moved to Minnesota from Oregon. He remarked about the fires and how they’re consuming enormous quantities of timber; how the whole drought-ridden West is undergoing fundamental change.
You don’t mess with Mother Nature without consequences.
On my way out of the garden, a spider rappelled from the brim of my cap. Distracted by Mother Nature’s trick, I forgot to duck for the fallen oak.
WHAM!
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
