Human Nature

A few weeks back I was driving down Rosaryville Road in Upper Marlboro, MD, the main conduit to get to my father's house. Once the backwoods of Prince Georges County, now one of the most thriving suburbs of Washington, DC, the area was once mostly farmland, an expanse filled with horse stables and many ranch like estates.

For most of their lives my sisters would ask to go over to the Pond across the road in Spring and summer to watch the ducks and geese gather on the lake. One can still see many a rabbit scampering through yards early in the morning foraging for food with the squirrels and other animals. And if it's early enough, you might even see a deer. I remember getting up early one morning to see one just chilling on a lawn a few blocks down before it ran off into the brush. A deer right there in the middle of the subdivision.

Though I was a Cub Scout, I am a boy from the city through and through. I am used to car horns and the rumblings of buses and heavy traffic. I'm used to increased cop presences, empty baggies on the concrete, etc. etc. But since my Dad moved out to the burbs I've been reminded of the other world every once in awhile, the natural world, a world that's being made extinct.

Pop was telling me that more and deer are getting hit by cars as the forests are being levels for more and more housing developments for the increasing number of folks fleeing to the burbs due to the high expenses in the city. Fewer places for the animals to graze. More humans worried about their own sorts of safety. I've even seen a few dead deer on roadsides, the victims of technology and progress and our need to live our way wherever and whenever we want.

As I was driving on this one day, coming over a hill, I saw a small fawn standing in the middle of an open field on a Wednesday afternoon. It was the prettiest picture I never took. I didn't have my camera and the joint on my phone could never have gotten a flick from that far away.

For one moment I imagined what it might be like to really have to hunt and farm for a living again. How would it be for me to go out into the wilderness with rifle or bow and arrow fueled by the desire to bring back dinner for my family or an entire compound, to spend my days tilling the soil or harvesting crops, to sleep by firelight and only get messages from others though face to face contact and perhaps my dreams?

My boy K and I have been talking a lot about doing nature trips: Hunting and camping and fishing (all of course done in extreme moderation and in the name of both skill and preemptive necessity). Sometimes I want to lay down all my tech-head devices and just smell the air, close my eyes at the top of some hill and meditate to the sounds of life in it's raw form.

Sex in the bush might be kind of interesting. Actually it is interesting. And it would be interesting again. So is eating by firelight, the art of conversation filling the winding down hours between work and sleep. I can see why the rich love their cabins and vacation homes. They are an escape from the hell that they played a hand in building for us all.

We live in a world where we live in fear of mice and roaches, some of the smaller of God's creatures. When a New York pigeon gets too close we're flailing away in fear.
Imagine contact with wolves or hyenas or seeing a bear moving from 30 yards out. This is not to say that I'm looking to be Crocodile Dundee or anything. But shouldn't we all know that we could be if the bottom fell of our 'civilization' fell out?

But as we devour so many of the Earth resources in the name of selfish comfort, the idea in the back of our heads is that we'll never have to.