New Territory

Tuesday, December 8, 1:00 p.m. - The first time I had to put gloves on.  The ground isn't too hard, but it has lost that muddy feel.  The stiff grass cracks under my boots.  Once in the woods, Manny is off.  He sprints down the path but quickly pulls up to explore and sniff around.  I look through the trees and realize that everything has opened up.  All of the remaining leaves around are on the ground blending into the dirt and branches across the ground.  I take my usual seat on my log.  Manny sprints back and forth in front of me in the small opening.  He's missed it out here, too.  On each of his turns, he slides through the leaves piled on the ground spraying them in the air like an ice skater stopping and shaving a mist of ice into the air.

I can see more houses in the distance.  The lack of leaves makes this place seem even less secluded than it already was.  Little blankets of snow cover a few logs here and there.  The plant life and weeds are rotten brown.  Their leaves sag towards the ground; they are soft.  I can hear them squishing around in Manny's mouth as he chops at them.  I can't really hear anything else.  I don't hear the chirping of the birds that frequented the woods when it was warmer.  The wind picks up and sends a chill down my spine.

Manny seems to want to go for a walk, or I just make that excuse so we can explore.  I'm not sure how I missed it in the past, but I find another tangent of the trail.  We walk under a leaning tree and head down a sloping path.  At the bottom of the hill, there is a giant tree that has been uprooted.  I'm not exactly sure what they are, but a cage of thin vines and sticks surround the roots of the tree.  They hang like a bird cage and weave to a point at the top forming what looks like an mini golden roof of an ancient church.  On the ground, the hard mud converges onto an area of green grass.  It looks fake, like it doesn't belong in the dull, dead colors of winter.  Just beyond the fake artificial turf is a giant tree, standing by itself in the middle of everything.  Connected to the side of it is a tree stand, i think, for hunting.  But it is so close to the houses.  It's got to be twenty feet high.  I'm terrified of heights, but I decide to make the climb.  Manny circles below watching and ready to catch me if necessary.

At the top of the stand, I can see forever.  I am in the line of sight of the canopy of bare branches.  I wrap my arms around the trunk and lean out to see around the tree.  I imagine jumping from tree to tree.  What it would be like to be a squirrel or a bird and have the freedom to move about from the ground to the sky.  In the distance, I finally hear them.  I can't see where they're at but a flock of birds are working to break the silence.  I slowly climb down the tree stand and head in their direction.

My blood begins to warm along the walk.  We come to a break in the ground.  Rocks and a Mountain Dew bottle cover the bottom of the deep creek.  My friends and I used to walk through the shallow flow of water, which led us to another creek that opened into the community pond.  Manny and I decide to stick stay dry and continue our walk.  We make it to a rusted barbed wire fence that has become a part of the vines before we turn back.  On the way back, Manny urges me to play a little fetch with him.  Stick after stick he shoots after and destroys.  I think he's still a little fuzzy on how the game actually works.  Before we walk towards home, I pause here and there to take some pictures, even though I know I'll be back.

Reflection on the Class

I'm not sure what I was expecting when I signed up for this class, but I'm glad I took it.  I never really thought about doing any kind of nature writing, and I really felt out of place in the beginning of the semester.  As the term went on, I started to feel more and more comfortable.  I think it was pretty helpful that everyone in the class was so easy going.  I probably learned just as much from all of our readings as I did everyone in the class.  Like Sheryl said earlier in the semester, this class seemed to be really advanced and into nature writing, which helped me get more from the class.  Even though I'm not on the same level as everyone, I think it was nice to be that kind of environment.

As I continue to grow as a writer, I think it is more and more important to feel uncomfortable at times.  Putting myself into a new and different situation has only helped my writing.  I now have began to think about my writing differently and maybe focusing more on the natural world.  I don't consider myself a nature writer, but almost everything I write seems to deal with a certain place.  Grounding myself in whatever place it I'm writing about is just as important as the characters or what's going on in the story.  This class has given me a starting point for looking at the world in a different way - noticing the smallest details that the average person might not see.  I have started to use all of my senses in descriptions of setting.

The blogging exercises about place have been extremely beneficial.  Even though there have been weeks where I just didn't want to go to my place because of the weather, I gained an understanding of how one place can change or develop over an extended period of time.  I think it has been awesome to see my woods transform over the last fourteen weeks.  There's so much that goes over looked in nature.  Things that I used to just walk by.  Now, anytime I'm anywhere - walking Manny, driving, etc. - I pay closer attention to everything around me.  For example, after reading Nancy Gift, I couldn't walk up and down my street without noticing peoples' front yards.  I would pull Manny out of the yards with little chemical flags.  I held a sort of contempt for the yards that were trimmed and clean cut.  I imagined everyone's yard overgrown and free - something that only one could imagine.

When writing my nature essays, I gained more of an understanding of my past.  I became more aware of my past and where I come from.  This class has opened my mind to different doors that I may have never explored.  I even found myself learning things about myself and my family from drafting my essays.  I have always known about the things I've been writing about, but I have never dwelled on them or thought about how these things have shaped me as a person today.  Especially the environment around me and how that has affected me and my family.  The changing of land and scenery in the suburbs has had a profound affect on me.  Unlike the open spaces around the world where maybe I would have had a better connection with nature, the suburbs have created a barrier or some kind of block that has been getting in my way of this lost connection.

Overall, I was pleased with this class.  I think it's important for everyone to have a class like this even if they're not a nature writer.  The main point, I think, is learning how to write about place and immerse yourself somewhere.  Being able to bring people along to where ever you're going (at) is important for bettering your craft.