As I round out my final semester at the University of Delaware, the regular questions are on my mind: where will I be in 5 months? Where are all my friends going? What will we all be doing?
When considering the dynamics of my life, I find it helpful to imagine a vernal pool. I am the water, coming and going with the seasons. Settling for a period only to be swept up again and dropped to rivers, ocean, asphalt, or forest. But my pool always fills. Family and lasting friends take root in the form of maple and sweetgum. Mentors lay as large stones under which creatures hide and grow. They give the pool structure and I can hope to nourish them and assure them that I will come back. Those people that I come to know for brief periods are the salamanders and frogs that make their pilgrimages to the pool in spring. The earth herself is the soil on which I rest and the sun, the driver of cycles.
This imagery helps me to explain my need to travel while ensuring my loved ones that I will not lose sight of “home”. Since I became a naturalist I have had some nagging envy of those who grew up with a distinctive geologic feature of some sort. Whether it be the ocean or a mountain range or anything else, growing up in a suburb of northern New Jersey offered nothing but fragmented woodlots, an edge always visible. I grew to love these places for what they do offer but there is no denying the feeling that I am missing something highly valuable. This is part of my reason for travel. My home is one that has entirely rejected the earth. The wildest places in Glen Rock, NJ are gardens and wild seems to be a nicer way of saying neglected.
I have seen more. Endlessly flipping through guides, studying range maps of birds from around the country and world I knew the potential. My madness gene had been sparked. I began grabbing and stuffing.
Age 14, I applied for a scholarship for a naturalist camp in the Pacific Northwest. Upon receiving a full ride I informed my parents of what I had done. Age 16, I applied for a job on the North Slope of Alaska studying shorebirds. Upon receiving an offer I once again strong-armed my parents into sending me off. Between then and now there was Texas, northern California, the Carolinas, Puerto Rico, and most recently a road trip to Colorado.
It is deep in my philosophy that I must know as much of the world as intimately as possible for both my personal growth and to give me a fighting chance at protecting the planet’s natural systems. One must know their subject. My career as a field biologist has allowed me a snapshot of life in wonderful and varied places. Experiences beyond a vacation but falling far short of a life there. I haven’t seen Utqiagvik in darkness or Puerto Rico post-hurricane.
I have learned so much from my restlessness, it shouldn’t be let go but tempered. I need to know my impulses as well as the planet because after all it is humans that I will work to change for the better of the planet. One must know their subject.
I see restlessness as having multiple sources; there is the madness gene as detailed above and then there is the fact that my ancestral home lies an ocean away while my spiritual home lies here in the sycamores. The option of returning has been severed so the natural conclusion is to wander and find my own home or to have many.
Who is to say where the water that floods the vernal pool every spring is from? It certainly isn’t the same water every spring. I should let the world wash over me. When I consider my travels it is hard to distinguish any particular place that I felt most “at home”. When I am in the presence of trees I feel secure. Sycamore, Oak, and Tuliptree make especially strong cases but Ponderosa, and cotton-grass helped me through hard times in California and Alaska respectively. There is a distinct joy that I feel in forests across the continent and extending into Puerto Rico where Bursera and Cupania offered shade.
I have recently started to thank the earth in my own way. Whenever I am out on a hike and begin to get thirsty I try to remember to give the first drink to a nearby tree or flower or just to the trail. The idea came to me on my way up Horesetooth Peak in Colorado: I was considering Robin Wall Kimmerer’s father’s way of thanking the earth and struggling to think what I could give. I had only packed the essentials. What is essential to me is essential to the earth as well and water most precious of all. So I let some water splash to the ground at the feet of the nearest Ponderosa Pine.
Like that first drop of water and like fresh rain, I am young. Rain crashes and spreads before slowing and seeping into the earth to be taken by roots.
Thinking like water has helped me in the past. It has helped to escape the pits of self-analysis and criticism. My time in Utqiagvik encompassed some of the worst weeks of my life. The tundra was not as inviting as I had anticipated having heard tales of constant golden hour and exotic wildlife. The first three weeks had me lost in fog daily, sick with something, and failing to perform my job to find nests and survey the habitat.
My self-pity and loathing came to an abrupt end when for the first time, I attempted to meditate. I was at the breaking point. Once again I was lost and soaked in sleet. I sat on a knoll and just chilled the fuck out. In this moment breathing was all I needed to be doing. Upon opening my eyes I noticed that gradually the snow was thawing and most crucially it, along with the sleet that left crust in my hair, was watering the most delicate of plants as they began to emerge. I was reminded of an old mentor teaching children how many shades of green exist in the forest, I was learning to love the many shades of brown and gray.
Later that summer I would sit on shifting sea ice watching as the sun threatened to set for the first time all summer. I sat and closed my eyes to the sounds of the sea like I had never heard them before. No powerful pulse of waves or crackle of foam and spray. This was a beautiful warbling dribble of water freshly released from winter’s hold and finding their way through canals of their own making. This was accompanied by creaks and cracks of shifting icebergs like a creeping freight car. This was the music of energy and change. It swallowed me. I felt nothing but the pale sun.
The Sierra Nevada would be my biggest test of fitness yet. I was tossed into the mountains with legs accustomed to white clay strolling. The first thing I learned on the first day was the importance of the switchback. I would never get anywhere going at the mountain head-on. The biggest lesson however came from the Deer. Game trails, when I was lucky enough to find them, almost always marked the path of least resistance allowing me to navigate with relative ease. The deer must live like water.
These wisdoms are largely lost on mankind. I lose sight of them in times of strife. There is no need to force change upon the planet. Everyone is at home here. It has nourished us forever and will continue to do so if we let it.
The idea of home has become increasingly important this semester having read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s experience and seeing the loyalty of people to their homes illustrated by John McPhee. Wei wu wei is apparently how I will find some sense of home. I will continue to be swept around the planet like water seeing all there is to see and taking some with me to cultivate the feeling of home on earth. The sense of home I yearn for would ultimately be an imitation if I was to somehow attain it. I imagine that the deer hardly concern themselves with this thought because they are their home embodied. This is already true for me as well, I just need to convince myself of it and find comfort rather than panic in distinguishing between empty and hollow self. Without being grounded in a particular space, I allow myself to be filled to same extent wherever I go.