Everywhere, Everything and Everyone

I slammed the door as I left. I knew that the source of my anger wouldn’t hear the sound, but I felt like Nature would and that somehow she’d fix it. It was pouring rain, but I didn’t care, I walked outside without an umbrella, I had a rain jacket on, but it stopped being waterproof years ago. I stared up at the sky and watched the raindrops pelt my glasses and the fog begin to form. Maybe Nature was in the same mood I was or maybe she was just trying to tell me something. I took my glasses off, put them in my pocket and continued my walk. Nature was trying the best to suffocate my anger, but perhaps I was just too large of a conflagration. It was a while and a few blocks away before the fire was put out enough so that I could think about things other than what had incensed me. That’s when I noticed Nature was burning too; the leaves had reached their peak and their auburn flames licked at the sky. The dark the rain had caused made them appear more prominently than any sunny day had done before. I noticed fellow people running, like squirrels running to their trees as quickly as they could before their coats could get soaked through, and I wondered what was wrong with me. I wasn’t running back to my dorm or any building in particular. I wasn’t even running to a tree… I wasn’t even running… That’s when the wind got me, whipping itself around me with such a force that the rain drops felt like bullets, but they were nothing compared to the cold. I discovered that all of my anger had left and I felt rather ashamed of myself. I didn’t even need the scolding squeaks sounding from the trees to convince me that I was doing something wrong, so I turned back towards my room and ran.

This walk and the thoughts that I experienced on it made me think about how much we personify nature. Personification appears to be everywhere in Leopold’s writing, but it’s when he reigns it in that I think he achieves more. He makes us go looking for the personification and in turn how to relate it to ourselves. In a really non-personified passage on page 35 he is talking about the upland plover and how it has adapted to the changes we have made to the landscape. He says, “He nests in hayfields as well as pastures, but, unlike the clumsy pheasant, does not get caught in hay mowers. Well before the hay is ready to cut, the young plovers are a-wing and way. In farm country, the plover has only two real enemies: the gully and the drainage ditch. Perhaps we shall one day find that these are our enemies, too.” This last statement asks us to look back through the paragraph and see the upland plover as an ally, a friend we have forced to adapt to our agricultural life. It makes us feel even more for the “clumsy pheasant” which cannot avoid our hay mowers and we feel the loss of the brown buffaloes even though the plover seems to be ok with the black and white ones as a “substitute”. The last statement suggests that we may soon have the same enemy as the plover, but I believe that Leopold wants us not to think in direct terms of the gully and the drainage ditch becoming detrimental to us, but instead that they will become detrimental to us because they kill our ally, the plover. I think that Leopold believes it will take many losses like this before we can recognize the “age-old unity” of not just the Americas and hemispheres, but the unity of everywhere, everything and everyone, a unity that the birds already seem to have figured out.