Most Welcome Squatters On My Property

 

There is a loud rustling on my front porch, so I arise to see if the chipmunk has returned to the bird feeder. As I look out the window a large squirrel lands with a crash on the porch railing, no more than a yard from where I stand inside the house. This frightens the feeding birds to flight and, truth be known, gives me a bit of a start as well. But the squirrel is not there for the bird food, at least not immediately. He is there to slake his thirst, which he does by climbing entirely into the water bowl my wife has set out and diligently fills. Sensing my presence, he jumps out before I am able to snap a picture, but he soon leans back into the water bowl to drink his fill.

As I watch the squirrel on the porch, I notice the chipmunk moving below on the ground. No doubt he has designs on climbing up to the little basket that sits below the bird feeder to catch what the birds so messily drop. I have no idea how he manages to get up there, but I admire his determination. He for his part seems to have little fear of us, and when I come back from a walk to find him in the basket, instead of fleeing for his life, he simply engages me in a staring contest. Even the 90 pound Great Pyrenees that accompanies me on my walks holds little concern for the chipmunk.

A rabbit hops in my backyard, but I am too slow and he is too wary for me to take a good picture. I am amazed that a rabbit is willing to enter the boundaries of my property at all, seeing as it must contain within it evidence of a large though admittedly not so fierce dog. Surely it must know that no dog other than Snoopy is a friend to bunnies. But perhaps it is because he smells the scent of other animals here that he feels safe. Perhaps dog urine is less offensive to his senses than the sort of chemicals people use on their lawns in order to kill the clover that keeps the honey bees alive. Or perhaps it is the vegetables my wife grows which make the rabbits willing to risk being chased by a canine.

My wife does all the work of making our property more hospitable to plants and animals. She grows milkweed, cone flowers and black-eyed Susans for the butterflies and lemon balm and bee balm for the bees. I do my part by being too lazy to use chemicals or pesticides. I only participate in no-mow May because it gets me out of having to cut the grass. But my laziness has enabled the flowering weeds to grow, much to the delight of the bees.

Recently I managed to muster up the energy (or perhaps it was shame) to rake up a patch of Creeping Charlie, inconveniencing a bee intent on sucking nectar from its tiny blooms. I informed him that we would be planting clover on the space where I was now removing the weeds, but he merely buzzed his disapproval. I informed him that I had let some dandelions standing in the backyard for him, but he was rather unwilling to let go of the little purple flowers.

A week later, on a hot day, I was out watering the same area in hopes of summoning forth clover from the seeds we had scattered. A robin alighted nearby, and I couldn’t help getting the impression that she was hoping I would turn the hose on her. Using the mist option, I allowed the fine drops to fall upon her and she did not move away. In fact, I have to believe she appreciated and understood I was replying to a request she had made.

I have come to suspect that the little property that surrounds our houses have some purpose beyond impressing our human neighbors. That our responsibility is not to maintain human standards of aesthetics so much as make them little havens for the plants and creatures we evicted from the neighborhood when we decided to tear up trees in order to build homes and pave streets. Furthermore, I don’t think we do all the lawn work we do just to impress the neighbors but also because we feel we are being judged by them. As for me, I don’t care if the neighbors judge me on the quantity of dandelions in my yard. Ask any chipmunk, squirrel, or robin, and they’ll likely say “Ah, he’s kind of lazy, and he’s not much of a picture taker, but I guess he’s all right.”

The Road I Travel

A Drive To Work

(If you are a writer, you write about anything you experience.)

I now drive 40 minutes to get to work every day. As an environmentally inclined person, I feel bad about that, but I do need to make the house payments. And despite the fact it takes a bite out of my day, I enjoy the ride. It’s through rural areas, and a good stretch of it is along Lake Michigan.

What I notice most is the number of dead animals lying on the road: deer, racoons, skunks, opossums. Once, society took the time to remove the bodies from the road, but now we leave them there. We no longer have the resources available to do such things, no longer have the political will to do much of anything. Everything that is done is done through the market now, and the market doesn’t care about animals, dead or alive.

Perhaps it was only ever a matter of cosmetics anyway. Perhaps we were just lying to ourselves about how a technologically advanced society treats the natural world. We didn’t want to know what our need for speed was doing to the rest of God’s creatures, or the planet, so we hid the evidence. And now that we have come so far, we no longer care. We’ve grown used to it, like the factory farm I drive by that smells of animal waste, where semi-trucks daily haul out milk in shiny metallic tanks to be packaged in little cardboard containers imprinted with pictures of cows in a pasture.

A veneer of trees obscures much of the crops that grow behind them. Once I imagined vast forests lay beyond, now I know they are mere barrier walls for crops of corn to feed the cows to feed the people.

I reach the lake and soon I am driving past the closed nuclear power plant. Within its depths somewhere, God knows what is stored in God knows what kind of containers. There is no plan to deal with the radioactive waste, and so they sit and will gradually become forgotten about. It is part of our mental makeup to forget about things, no matter how important and dire they may be, if we don’t have a good way of dealing with them.

Not far past the mostly-abandoned nuclear station, I see several signs on people’s property warning about the health risks of wind turbines. I am incapable of understanding the degree of disconnect required to not notice the irony.

Working nights, I drive home in darkness. It seems I have encountered thunderstorms almost nightly this summer. I can never remember a summer so full of thunder. One becomes aware of such things when one has a skittish dog and a long drive at night.

I’ve become aware of the weather of late. It almost seems that nature itself has become unnatural. In late August, I noticed the moon was just a tiny sliver, but that sliver was more red than I ever remember seeing it. A harvest moon, I know, but still it seemed an omen to me. Perhaps it is just me. I know it is foolish to look for signs in the sky. And yet, the desire to do so is deeply imbedded in our species. Perhaps, like animals who can sense impending natural disasters, human beings too are capable sensing danger without being able to understand why.

Nightly I drive home and encounter the wildlife that must contend with traffic while crossing the road. I see a chipmunk speed across, a frog taking large jumps to cross as quickly as possible. I see a deer peering at me from a ditch, a couple of raccoons who, once committed, seem unable to turn back even with my car speeding right into their path. I brake and the disaster is narrowly averted.

My eyes are wide open, my mind alert. I do not want to hit anything, not even a frog. And yet there is something within me urging me to go faster. I need to get home, back to my life I’ve had to abandon in order to do my job to earn money to afford my car payments, car insurance, and gasoline. There is a subliminal urge too great for my conscious mind to control, and my foot applies a little more pressure to the gas pedal. Time is precious. I’ve calculated that driving even 5 miles an hour less should be sufficient to prevent an accident should something jump out in front of me, but somehow every time I look at the speedometer, I’m going faster again. Have to race my coworkers, have to beat them home, win the race.

What is wrong with me? Why do I love nature and yet not only drive so far to work, but drive so quickly from it? It is technology, it enables me to do what objectively I would never wish to do. It is like being home with a box of Twinkies: I would never imagine gorging myself sick on unnatural food, would certainly not go out of my way to do so. Ah, but if it is already there… If bad behavior is effortless and satisfying in the short term, it makes it far more difficult to do the right thing. If all it takes is pushing my foot a little harder on a gas petal, why not go faster? If gas is so damn cheap that I suffer little by polluting the atmosphere and endangering God’s little creations, it does make it more difficult to do the right thing. I do want to do the right thing.

The answer is to fashion a world in which it is easier to make good decisions. We’ve done a poor job of that. We’ve made a world where advertisement is constantly telling you to buy what you do not need, consume what is not good for you, trust in the system advertisers perpetuate. We are told that progress is our only good, and that progress means continually pushing further down on the accelerator.

We are, each one of us, driving down the road at too great a speed, heedless of the damage we cause to the natural world we ultimately rely upon for our survival. We must be reminded again and again that not only are we in control of the gas pedal, but we also have a brake.