It was a real dump I thought coming around into the backyard. That certain smell, that fine lousy dust that packs of strays somehow create. It was all too reminiscent of the yards I used to play in as kid on the South Side. I once got a case of ringworm so bad the doctor said it should have killed me already. So I over-applied the steroid ointment and ended-up with a major stretch mark on my inner thigh. When I asked if it would go away the doctor paused and said "In time." I guess he meant after my body decomposes because it's still there 30 years later. But I digress.
This single-story double was on the West Side, different racial profile, same sort of poverty. An epic grape-vine had devoured it for years, destroying the roof and eaves while providing the back tenant with home-made wine. He was convinced that the landlord had killed it out of spite. I could see why he was leery of her intentions, he showed me a video of the water raining into a kiddie-pool she gave him for the living room. The sound musty have been unbearable, until it got a couple of inches deep.
Contractors had done their shoddy best with the roofs and the eaves and so I went about applying cases of caulk and carving Great Stuff to fill the gaps, which actually looked pretty good smeared with a handful of caulk (cut the tube open in these cases, that nozzle aint gonna cut it). Luckily there is one part of my hand an inch below the pinky and down to the wrist that makes a straight smoothing edge if wet. It was my masterpiece in caulk by the time I was done.
We had to store our jackets in the truck, for fear of roaches coming out. I never saw the inside of the front apartment, but I could smell it when I opened up the gaps in the clap-board: that smell of poverty mixed with entitlement; rotten junk-food and cat hoards. No wonder the tenants lived on the front porch even though it was falling in. I didn't want to tell her she was sinking money into a property she was never going to sell, but I did try and hint by refusing to paint their front door. The smell that wafted out was unblocked by carbon filters. It was a monument to filth and hopeless laziness, subsidized by the taxpayer of course.
But all that was ahead of me, for the moment I was marveling at the way the back fence managed to stay upright, buried under a small landfill from the house behind it. The one side didn't need a fence, a structurally unsound garage of ancient cinder-blocks finished it off, complete with wavy antique glass windows in the process of being squeezed out of their sashes by... what the hell? The whole side of the garage just disappeared into solid bark! One of the biggest trunks I've ever seen was hiding in plain sight, so huge it didn't register in the brain. A god of the forest, the last elder of it's kind, an anachronism of stunning dimensions slumbered there in that corner. The branches lifted out of the filth and cat-spray into another world it had created for itself, like looking up through a portal to the past the canopy went on and on; four or five full-grown trees compressed and suspended somehow. This would have been the altar of my ancestors, the kind of behemoth human and animal blood nourished on sacred days appointed by the cycles of sun and moon.
She noticed me marveling at it and asked if by any chance I knew of a tree-guy crazy enough to take it down as the house was on the market and it might devalue the property. I could see why, any one of those limbs would have made toothpicks of her shabby slum dwelling. Then again, it was so much older than the house I guess it would have crushed it already if it was liable to shed itself in that direction. She wanted the city to come and chop it, but didn't really know whose property it was on, being in fact on the junction of four individual yards. Maybe that's why it was spared: a useful marker of territory in the beginning, and someone else's problem later. It was a lucky tree indeed, not near any power lines and not rooting into the water system so it could grow and grow without the protection of any societal taboo. Certainly this Prius-driving lady of liberal pretensions was not about to save that old mammoth; her environmentalism didn't apply to her own property, only to her ideas about what other people should do or be forced to do.
The groves of ancient times were often spared because they were sacred. Even invading armies tread on thin ice if they invaded their shade with the ax to build their siege weapons and stockades. The great pillars of cedar that constituted the halls of Carthaginian power were signs not just of the builder's craftsmanship, but the patience and plenty which allowed them to wax inch by tedious inch. They didn't have a word for environmentalism or conservation, but they respected the meaning and the mystery of the wood. Indeed, the primeval forest was not always a pleasant place for the human imagination: it was full of darkness and savagery as well as beauty. Yet, it endured until the age of modernity.
Now we have "environmentalism," which is often just another excuse for man-made destruction. My favorite tree on Westcott St. gave me bushels of apples every year which I made pie out of even though it was right next to a parking-lot and probably toxic. There it had stood for at least a hundred years producing food, until federal dollars came down for the "Save the Rain" initiative and Norm Roth cashed-in. He did put some porous brick on the edging and plenty of gravel underneath, but alas all the trees that had shaded the walk throughout my youth were sacrificed, including our apple-giver.
Thus is progress made in "saving the environment."
But what exactly is the environment? Is it some objective state of being, frozen in time? A certain quantity of water that once flowed down the valleys and into the river and Onondaga lake, now altered by the addition of asphalt and shingles? Are we doomed to this unending quest to restore that which we cannot ever restore, to recreate a past that is simply gone? We go about trying to recreate the past by destroying the last vestiges of it.
Yes, I miss my shabby city, lit by the humming yellow sodium lights. Sure it turned the sky an apocalyptic shade of orange/purple on cloudy nights, but one could walk among the streets for hours and ease the mind in the gloom. If it didn't fit the rust-belt scenery quite as prefect as the old oil lamps, at least it was better than this newly-installed hell of high-powered LED clusters that light everything up like a prison-yard. Say good-bye to the gentle breeze coming in on a a summer night through the sighing trees: anything less than black-out curtains and one feels as if a spotlight is on your bed. Blue/white radiation bathes everything in toxic frequencies that cause insomnia in humans and does who-knows-what to anything unfortunate enough to live outdoors. They're dangerous too. You can't even tell when a car is coming since their headlights are the same white and about as bright. They may be killing the insects of by droves and birds are getting noticeably scarcer, but by golly they are so damn energy-efficient!
Another human-made environmental catastrophe has come to Syracuse, just like humans usually do when they try their hand at terraforming. We forget the lesson of the Hawaiian islands, the ships that brought the rats, the snakes that were introduced to kill them, the mongoose that were shipped-in to kill them, who of course just feasted on the eggs of unique birds species instead. Our obsession with energy may be based on real concerns about coal or nuclear, but do we really want to sacrifice the great predatory birds to the windmills? At least it distracts us from the actual destruction going on around us and is always a good excuse for higher taxes.
We can't turn back the clock, we have to make value judgments about the world we want to live in. The concept of nature as something separate and distinct from the humans who live a fence-hop away is as irrational as the ancient worship of the great oak, and far more destructive.
So I thought of these things as I rested beneath that gnarled trunk landed there like a time-traveler, in wonder that the new scene before it is in fact the same place. I remember the first time I really began to question my lifelong devotion to the ideology called "environmentalism," the first time I considered that maybe it was something very different from my love of "nature." I was watching some HD nature doc in Africa that was following a herd of elephants as they marched through the vast desert of some fenced-in park reserved for them, or "the wild" as we call it. It was a large park, but becoming drier, and the producers laid on the climate change guilt as thick as possible, too thick indeed. One of the baby elephants was wobbling on it's feet and finally collapsed in the dust, it's mother pleading with her trunk for it continue. Not this time, the sad music played as she finally, after agonizing hours, had to leave the poor endangered beast to die of thirst.
This was meant to affect me emotionally, meant to move me to donate to the climate cause, to contribute to the preservation of more wild places (presumably with some water in them), to bring home the reality that this species could be lost forever due to human indifference. But I also knew that there was a film crew standing there the whole time, gallons of water at hand, and more a short drive away. Of course, they couldn't intervene and save the baby, no no! That wouldn't be "natural." I remember an earlier documentary when a baby elephant drowned in a mud pit despite the mother's valiant efforts and how my own mother told me that the film-makers had to stand aside even though they could have hauled it up with their Jeep, sort of like the Prime Directive in Star Trek. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they actually had that classic scene in mind when they filmed the latter-day baby elephant doing the opposite of drowning.
This time I felt differently. I don't see anything natural about the way those elephants are living. Now I know some other facts about elephants, for instance their memory is extraordinarily accurate. They are able to map out watering holes thousands of miles apart. They probably knew where the water was, but it's not in the park because the humans are using it. The park is just a larger cage for an animal designed to travel so far, and the documentary crew is just exploiting their pain for eco-dollars. We could actually just bring elephants to where the water is, say Florida or another politically stable environment where they could be bred for their ivory. They wouldn't know the difference and their species could be saved. But that wouldn't be "natural." It's not just the ivory poachers profiting from the beast's torment.
The environmental movement is like me coming into that backyard and not even noticing the largest tree in the city sitting right there. Maybe it's time to ditch the whole philosophy and start integrating ourselves into nature in a more selfish way. We humans are good at shaping nature in the ways that we like it, but leaving it alone is not only a failure ecologically, it goes against our nature. We may plant two trees for every beauty we chop down, but until the groves are sacred once again I do not think they will be safe.
