Over the summer I gave a number of public readings from my new collection of Cape Cod Notebook radio essays. At the Q&A sessions at the end at the end of these readings, one question I could almost count on being asked was, “When and how did you first connect with Nature?”
It’s a tricky question, partly because I’m not exactly sure what “connect with nature” means, but also because some of our deepest connections seem to slip into our lives before we are even aware of it – and then we make up stories about how it happened.
As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up in a very urban and, for that matter, damaged environment. My home town was a suburb of Newark. On one side it fronted the Passaic River, which had the dubious distinction of being one of the ten most polluted rivers in the United States, and on the other side it was bordered by a vast tract of barren Phragmites marsh. My idea of a river was something whose bottom was littered with broken glass and whose surface was covered with rainbow-colored oil slicks. My idea of a marsh was something that was usually on fire.
Still, even in such an environment, I must have contained the seed of a naturalist’s curiosity. I remember one summer when I was thirteen I began collecting black widow spiders from under rocks in our neighbor’s yard across the street. I put one of the spiders into a glass jar containing some toothpicks that it could use to fashion a web, and pierced holes in the jar lid so that it could breathe. After several days, I noticed a small, silvery ball attached to the web. It was an egg sac. I felt pleased and was curious to see what would happen next. Several days later I noticed hundreds of tiny spiderlings crawling up out of the jar through the air-holes in the lid – baby black widow spiders crawling down the dresser, across my bedroom floor and out through the rest of the house. I had a moment of panic, but then I remembered how much of a clean freak my mother was, and realized that no spiderling stood a chance against her thorough and frequent vacuuming.
My only other early “naturalist” experience” came in high school, where I entered a science fair. I constructed an exhibit about Planaria, or flatworms. Flatworms are small freshwater annelids with the curious capacity for regenerating amputated or mutilated body parts. If you cut a flatworm across the middle, the head-part will regrow a tail, and the tail-part a head. If you slice a flatworm longitudinally –half-way down through the middle, each half of the head will regrow the other half, leaving you with a two-headed flatworm. And so on. I’m afraid my interest in flatworms and the exhibit I set up revealed a freak-show voyeurism more than a budding naturalist’s curiosity, but nonetheless it won a prize.
I’m afraid that’s about the extent of my contact with and curiosity about the natural world as an adolescent. Not exactly a model for environmental education, I’m afraid, but somehow these experiences were an integral part of a process, still mysterious to me, that eventually led me to a career as a “nature writer.” Nature, it seems, doesn’t care what motives you have for interacting with her – admirable or, in my case, not so admirable. Once the contact is made, she will draw you into her web and use you for purposes you could never have imagined.
