White Clay is much more quiet today.  The sky is overcast, the temperature is hot, and the humidity is oppressive.  The insistent buzz of insects continues in the background, but even this sound seems numbed and muted.  The water is moving slower than I remember and it looks turbid, unclean.  The surroundings add to my weariness as the thick air inhibits my breath.  My body sweats and complains.  It is not the kind of day I would usually choose to go and explore in the wilderness.

Walking to my usual location, I view the woods with the more critical eye of one not entirely thrilled about the task at hand.  I notice bits of plastic on the ground and I identify with the plants that look somewhat wilted and unhappy.  I spot an empty prescription bottle under some brush and a crumpled up PBR can alongside my path.  My pessimism increases.

I begin to think about all the negative impacts the nearby university is probably having on this creek.  So many parking lots, roads, cars being driven, and chemicals being used so close to this fragile environment.  I remember last Saturday during a massive thunderstorm when the water runoff couldn’t drain fast enough and inches of water piled up in the parking lots and roadways, desperately trying to find a drainage outlet in the expanse of impermeable concrete and macadam.  I think about our beloved “green” and the signs that so often tell students to enjoy the landscape but to not touch the “newly treated” grass.  I think about all the synthetic and unnatural toxins that run off from our university and into Whiteclay creek, a beautiful, but far from pristine ecosystem.  Although surely it is the state of the weather and the permeating humidity triggering my negative thoughts, I can’t help but think of the watershed in Delaware as whole, running all the way down to the Chesapeake Bay, a seriously threatened estuary which people and wildlife alike rely upon for numerous natural resources.  I can only imagine the ways in which we are poisoning the water and all of the living things that depend on the land, ourselves included.

I try to focus on the purpose of my journey into the woods as I near my chosen spot, but all I can see are the flaws in the environment around me.  As I march forward, a tiny brown toad jumps out of my way.  I stoop down to look at him and I admire his bumpy skin and his specialized body.  He is at home here in the tall and damp grass, breathing through his porous skin and using his powerful hind legs to leap from danger.  He was made to thrive in his environment, to be a part of a specific food chain where the big eat the small and the fittest survive.  But under the influence of human interference, this creature is so vulnerable.  Toxins, a change in pH, or lack of native insect prey could easily kill this toad, eliminating him and the key role he plays in the web of the ecosystem.  Yet here he is on this miserable day, existing without care and only aware of his instincts and the way of life he knows.  I encounter two more of the same species of toad on the way to my spot.

As I sit down among the leaves and begin to write, I start to notice the sounds that I can hear on this quieter day.  I hear more individual bird calls, at one point a steady rhythm which could be a woodpecker.  I focus on listening and looking up when I am suddenly surprised by a loud huff which breaks the stillness.  I look down to see a young buck, staring straight at me, about 20 yards away in the clearing below.  It seems we have both surprised each other.  He huffs at me two more times and then lifts his white tail and dashes away in great, bounding leaps.  I’m left startled by the encounter but feeling truly lucky to have seen this solitary deer, to have this brief acknowledgement of each other’s existence.  I am back in love with this place again.  What could be a better way to wind up my Thursday than to examine some toads and run into a deer in the woods?  I feel elated, like there’s so much more beyond my man-made reality.  Something raw and natural and purely beautiful occurs here in the woods.  This wildlife exists based on it’s own rules, it’s own logical and orderly way of life.  The instinctual drives of the toads and the deer are so simple, yet they all connect to a much larger picture of an incomprehensibly complex ecosystem full of life.  Thinking about the implications of nature and its systems makes you appreciative of something much more important than yourself.  Perhaps if more people could experience feelings like this, grow up with nature, feel it’s power and wonder, we would be making the effort to protect such habitats.  Perhaps all of us would be taking the steps to ensure that we don’t lose our ability to enjoy nature through its destruction and disappearance.  It’s much harder to take the natural world for granted when you have spent time in it and have felt the accompanying awe.