Whispering into nature

And hearing it howl back

Listen, I have to level with y’all. This is a joint post with my friend Tom Pluck and if you ever want to understand how two people can do the same thing — in our case, take a hike in the ruins of a former Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp in Bass River State Forest, New Jersey — and come away both enjoying it but with completely different takes, read our posts.

Also, if you want to actually understand who we are, what we were doing, and why, read his post. I end up talking about why I want to live alone in a box with a hawk, I don’t know why. Alls I know is, it’s a good thing we went together, and I’m looking forward to doing it again.

If you enjoy my circuitous approach, please do subscribe.

If you’re already a subscriber and know someone who likes taking the low road and perhaps getting to Scotland a little late, if they get there at all, please do pass this along. Thanks, y’all, and I hope you enjoy.

---

I have a friend who wanted to spend the night in the snow. He had a hard time last year & it’s getting better now but even so, what he wanted, before the winter was out, was to join up with a bunch of strangers who also felt the need to squirrel or the need to survive, the need to whisper something into a roof of twigs, maybe a shock of moss, maybe a fragment of ice on a river that in a few short weeks or even days would melt and so would their secret. Not just melt: be forgotten. No one would have remembered the shivering twig lean-to, once the flowers came out except my friend, who had survived it. 

He never got the chance. 

California — and by California I mean one of many many places now with wild, disordered weather but also, specifically, California — ran around the country this year collecting snow like a kid grabbing all the cake at a birthday party, which is why New York didn’t get any. Or I assume that’s why. I don’t know, I’m not a meteorologist.

Alls I know is, I left some friends in the California desert in January, and they keep sending me pictures of snow in Joshua Tree National Park.

And then I have another friend in New York, desperate to make himself a twig lean-to and spend the night outside in the ice and cold for whatever reason and he can’t do it.

Even though his overnight trip was canceled, he did at least get to go into the Hudson Valley and see the snow on a day trip. He learned to use snow shoes, walk on (frozen) water, become a minor winter deity.

My friend Johnny’s video.

It reminded me of how we turn to nature, in times of desperation. I’ve felt that myself.

I’ve been re-reading that book, H is for Hawk, the one I read obsessively after my Dad’s death. (Which is why it’s taking forever.) 

The author of the book realizes she’s not doing great with her own Dad’s death. She proceeds logically, for her. Falconry is something she’s trained in, something she’s good at. She’ll procure a hawk, she thinks, a goshawk, one of the most temperamental hawks. It will be absorbing, a project. It will connect her to her father, who used to take her bird watching, used to take her to watch wild peregrine falcons.

It’s all so logical.

She gets the goshawk, it’s living with her, training her. She’s watching the hawk who’s watching her. She realizes she’s always wanted to be a watcher, the way hawks are watchers. She starts to step out of the stream of human life, into hawk life. She’s watching us, and we look very strange to her. She loses her job at Cambridge University and has to pack up her house; when the house is empty or nearly so, she hides in a box, thinking of the hawk’s thoughts.

When I read this passage after my Dad died, I was entranced. How could I get a hawk? I wondered. How could I end up alone in a box with nothing left but a bird, and only a bird brain left to think. It seemed to me the greatest paradise to step out of the human stream and into the hawk stream. I wanted to become a watcher. I never wanted to tell anyone anything ever again, never wanted to be vulnerable ever again.

Last weekend, I met up with Tom Pluck in his neck of the Pine Barrens woods, and — because I am perpetually running a little bit behind in life — we raced over to the Bass River State Forest for a 90th Anniversary tour of celebrating the Citizen Conservation Corps’ (CCC) development of that state park.

The young men who joined the CCC — men between the ages of 18-25, though our guides said a lot of 17-year-olds snuck in and some even younger, and also veterans of World War I in a separate program, I’ll get to them in a minute — who built that state park had been desperate, had ended up in nature not because they necessarily wanted to but simply by necessity. In return for their labor, they got three meals a day, free healthcare, and $25/month, of which they got to keep $5. Twenty dollars automatically went home to their families.

An abandoned chimney with a pine tree growing through it. How long before all trace of the building is gone?

I can’t imagine. A bunch of hungry, undertrained young men, gathered together in a forest, and told to build a state park. The labor required was likely new to most of them. Maybe they had grown up as farmers, or sons of butchers or school teachers, or really anything — and they didn’t necessarily always get it right.

A few years into their time at Bass River, the original “camp,” or collection of men, were shipped out to Arizona, and a new “camp” — made up of those World War I Veterans — were brought in. Apparently, the CCC ended up using the younger men for brute force jobs, and using the veterans for the jobs that needed, say, a certain finesse with planning and foresight. In the case of Bass River, the younger men hadn’t quite got the dam on the lake to work, and the older men were called in to fix it.

Me and Tom in front of the dammed lake (or damned lake, depending on whether you were in the first “camp” of men or a veteran).

Nonetheless. All these desperate men, now out in nature. What must they have found there, what must they have brought with them that sustained them, long after the end of those three square meals a day.

Speaking of meals …

because of my occasionally less-than-charming issues with timing, Tom and I had not had lunch. It was now 3 pm. We’re not such friends yet that we can be hangry with each other so we were alternating being polite and going silent instead.

Also, we talked about food. Then we apologized for talking about food. Then we talked about food some more.

Despite the fact that after that hike and at that time, a hawk’s cardboard box would’ve tasted good to me, Tom brought me to a bar that — I swear — really did have unbelievably tasty beer and eats.

We tried to keep our appetite for dinner with Sarah, Tom’s wife, but holy fried mackerel those appetizers were good. We got corn fritters (which I had never had before, with maple syrup of all things, but it was perfect, like flapjacks for dinner), onion rings, and a philly special of cheesesteak egg rolls. I don’t remember the exact name of the beer I had — swamp something? It was on tap, I got it because it sounded so Louisiana — but it was delicious.

(Also, miraculously, I still had an appetite for dinner with Sarah.)

Can’t wait for the wolves, Tom. We’re gonna whisper something to them, and months or years later, they’re gonna howl something back.

No longer hangry.

Have a great wandering week y’all. I hope you whisper something, I hope you hear something back.