Yearning for Spring, by Natalie Gross

I yearn for spring from deep within my bones. I try my best to appreciate winter, since in upstate New York–where I’m from–it lasts for nearly half of the year. But it doesn’t matter that I’ve spent my entire life in a region where subzero wind chills are the norm, and the roads are coated in so many layers of salt that they are white by March. I am a person made to thrive in warm weather. Every April I feel myself sprout and bloom to eagerly greet the returning sun, and I battle a restless urge to be outside.

Since my last walk in White Clay, the perennials lying dormant in the cold soil had heeded the silent signals of spring’s approach. I nearly missed the shy sprouts poking out of brittle leaf litter. The birds had done their job–by way of their droppings, thousands of seeds had been dispersed from across the region throughout the winter. As Tallamy remarks in Bringing Nature Home, the seeds like those that germinate each spring in White Clay are extraordinary travelers, likely to hail from hundreds of miles away.

I pushed further into the park in order to escape the road noise, staying parallel to the creek. The water level had risen, and the stream was now a disturbingly turbid coffee color, most likely due to last night’s rainfall and its consequent runoff. I searched for raccoon prints along the bank, crouching close to the sand as the water lapped gently at my hiking boots. All I saw were human footprints.

I made sure to be especially vigilant in the search for invasive species this time. I had always known them to be a massive environmental issue, but I suppose I’ve never been skilled enough at identifying plants–or just never paid enough attention–to notice their prevalence all around me.

Now that I knew what to look for, I saw it everywhere. In some areas, nearly every tree had been strangled, suffocated by Oriental bittersweet. I was sickened by one young tree in particular that had been girdled so tightly by the vine that it appeared almost bloated in the areas left untouched. The hardy invader was curling around everything, tightly wound like the stripes of a candy cane. My friend and I began pointing out singular trees that had escaped its squeezing wrath, cheering them on for surviving unscathed and standing healthy.

So many of the trees being choked by the invincible invasive species were old giants, with thick and immovable trunks, and pale fungi or lush moss scaling their tough bark exteriors. Despite the changes those trees had witnessed over the years, despite unpredictable weather and storms of great strength, the wise giants would fall to another member of the plant kingdom, and one a fraction of their size, at that.

Native plants and trees everywhere are caught between a rock and a hard place–they are threatened by habitat fragmentation and deforestation, and even if they are spared, they risk being strangled to death by foreign species that steal the same sun, water, and soil that have sustained the natives for centuries. Couple these factors with uncontrollable seed dispersal and the lack of connection between people and the natural world, and it is easy to see why our forests seem past the point of salvage.

 

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