Taking from nature

Richard
Taking from nature
Stabucks, April 16, 2007

We lope along beside coyotes with extra spring in their steps and quick brown rabbits, creatures who have learned to live in the desert. Laurie is not one of them. With her black umbrella and silk pants, she looks like a variety act in a Vaudeville show. The desert is alien to me, too, but I’ve lived here long enough to look local, kicking up red soil in worn boots, long cotton pants, and a straw hat.

Laurie steals wild-flowers, ocotillo branches, and rocks. She also makes deposits in nature: apple cores, olive pits, and lumps of bread, defying the maxim, “Leave no trace” that I learned from the Outward Bound, wilderness-loving folks I worked for some years ago. Laurie argues that human history is all about leaving a trace—indeed a great dirty, lusty slash.

She has a point. Ideas about the wilderness regularly flip. Up until the 19th Century, the heavenly city was the site of salvation and the wilderness the wellspring of temptation. Jesus meets the devil in the wilderness, and Hawthorne’s Puritans watch their their libidinal fantasies come to life in the forest. With the Romantics and the Transcendentalists, the holy place relocates to nature. People journey to mountains and woods to refresh themselves spiritually, which leads us to Thoreau, the righteous bastard, who throws around lots of cleansing imagery. These days we construct the wilderness in wildlife parks, preserve the pristine. This is just the sort of contradiction Laurie pounces on, and although I recognize the philosophical inconsistency, I’m against her interfering.

“What if everyone took rocks?” I pose.

“The rocks where we walk approach an infinite number. No amount of collecting can diminish the total.”

She has a point. Out here, a path is a place where the rocks have been cleared.

“So, we’re not exactly talking about untouched nature, are we?” She says she’s “relocating” rocks with arresting striations and smudges of desert varish in order to make something of the nothing of our patio. “This ‘don’t move the rocks’ doctrine is pretty essentialist, don’t you think?”

Walking ahead to mount my next argument, I look back to see her inspecting a large branch of dried ocotillo with its beautiful latticed chambers. She approaches me, beaming, and in her smile I see a wildness that sloughs off rules and wakes up a wildness in me. Instead of demanding she put back the branch, I suggest she hide it, thereby conceding the argument. She takes off her shirt (actually my shirt she’s stolen), wraps it around the branch and sticks it in her backpack. She looks like a woman carrying a large branch wrapped in a shirt.

My only victory is turning an open vandal into a furtive one. I credit Laurie with introducing nature rage into our relationship.