So Long, Farewell: The Final Wander through the Woods

Dispatches from a Wild Mind is a weekly Precipitate feature that explores the wild in place, nature, history, and art.

No. I’m not leaving Precipitate. Today is my last day at Iowa State University, the last day before I move that I’ll walk the two or three miles home from campus. I will miss this walk, the well-worn foot-printed path through the leafing trees and flowering weeds along the meandering creek, the rickety lumber bridge I cross, the water’s trickle. Sun sparks like flashbulbs off the current’s soothing ripples.

Last week, walking home, I paused on the small arching bridge and leaned my hips against its two-by-four railings. A woman in a summer dress walked barefoot in my direction down the center of the creek. Water swirled around her calves as she held her dress up above the passing current. Her boyfriend or a classmate stood in the water nearby and snapped photographs. Elsewhere in the park, children climbed a jungle gym and slid down its slide, and a couple tossed a green tennis ball for their small dog that could have been a Jack Russell Terrier. In the distance, a half-dozen high school or college kids played soccer on a recently mowed field.

When I wrote last month about an English Department proposal to create a Ph.D. program with an environmental concentration and literature core, the post ended with me advocating for a Ph.D. that taught candidates to be “active, well-informed, and thoughtful walkers.” Can you name an environmental thinker in the last two centuries who hasn’t been a walker actively pursuing full bodily-that is, full sensory-immersion in the outdoors? Of course, I think of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, the American nature writers and wilderness icons Christopher Zumski Finke wrote so eloquently about in “Fleeing to the Woods, or, Giving Thoreau His Bite Back.”

Like Chris, I agree people have romanticized and subsequently simplified and misunderstood Thoreau and Muir, have as a consequence oversimplified and tamed nature and wilderness, those Others that exist for most people today as little more than backdrop and setting. Don’t believe me? Survey American fiction and children’s literature, as I wrote about recently: Nature’s rapidly disappearing as anything more significant than setting.

What I’ll miss about my walks home from work is the reminders of nature, small and however tame and romantic they may be in a suburban park and forest: the explosive arrival of green grasses and trees’ leaves, wild purple-petaled violets that resemble butterflies, wings spread; white-faced, black-crowned nuthatches bounding up and down tree trunks; the distant rhythmic beat of a woodpecker. This immersion, no matter how brief, relaxes me, soothes tired mind and muscles.

According to new research from the University of Kansas, people who spend time outdoors show “startling cognitive improvement-for instance, a 50 percent boost in creativity-after living a few days steeped in nature.” Ruth Ann Atchley, a psychologist, says nature offers one a very real and tangible escape and respite from the information assault and overload such as Chris described in “Fleeing to the Woods”: the endless accounts of people’s violence against people.

In another few weeks, when I get to Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, I’ll test Atchley and her colleagues’s conclusions that time “steeped in nature” boosts creativity. Maybe I’ll write more; we’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, I’ll miss these frequent walks home along the creek and the momentary escape from thinking they offered.

A day or two before seeing the woman and her boyfriend wading in the water, I paused on the trail beside an S-shaped bend in the creek. The water flowed clear, revealing each washboard-like dune of settled silt as if I peered through glass. As I watched, my vision focused only on the creek. My sense of surroundings faded. I saw only water, the fallen limbs it passed over and around. I listened. My ears opened, became more attuned to its trickle and flow, its ripple as steady as small pebbles like jacks, the metal game pieces, tossed across a wooden floor. But instead of stopping like pebbles or jacks, the sound continued. In its continuance, tension ebbed from mind and muscles. For a moment or two, I’d stopped thinking and reacting. I simply sensed and felt. I inhaled deeply and sighed. When I resumed my stroll home, I felt happier, at peace, thankful for the opportunity to walk, thankful for the beauty of a clear running creek and cardinals, their joyful calls reassuring, hopeful, and lovely.

Fred MacVaugh, Staff Blogger