Truth about Nature

Nature is not the enemy. Nature isn’t just in everything.
Nature is everything. To kill Nature is to kill yourself.
  

New Seattle looked more like a plywood shanty-town than a modern city.  The City Fathers did their best. They white-washed most of the building regularly.  House paint hadn’t been available for since they evacuated Old Seattle, but even that probably would not have lasted well against the gale force winds that blew off the Pacific Ocean so much of the time. The high wall that surrounded the city served two purposes. It kept nature out and it protected the fragile buildings from the wind. The wall was originally a tall metal fence, but, as the need grew, concrete and building debris was piled against it to support it until it was close to twenty feet thick on the windward side of town.

This so-called city was built when the waters of the Pacific Ocean finally flooded the City of Seattle.  The mountains between what had been Issaquah, Washington and Snoqualmie, Washington were now islands and even North Bend was under water.  For a number of years the famous Seattle Needle could be seen above the waves, but even that had succumbed to the storms and toppled into the water.  The people had built New Seattle as a refuge. They had no idea that two generations later it would still be here. 

Plants and wildlife had started moving into the area and people were afraid to go out.  Some would occasional attempt to go out into the forest and never return.  From the walls of the city the inhabitants could see vegetation take over buildings until the building seemed to vanish.  Roads that once could be seen disappearing into the rising sea water were now gone.  At night people would lock the doors of their shanties and huddle together in fear; fear that was magnified every time a wolf howled. 

Tiffany Barnhardt had been born in New Seattle. Her Mother barely remembered the old city when they fled the sea water.  For almost a decade Old Seattle had built levees and retaining walls and pumped water out of the city. Her grandparents had lived in the hills of the city and had attempted to stay but they were finally driven out and their hills were now bumps of rock just showing above the water.  So the broken concrete streets of New Seattle was Tiffany’s playground and the often ruthless struggle for survival was her education.

As Tiffany sat in the park; which was literally a couple of vacant lots with some abandoned cars on which the children played; she noticed something green in the sand.  It caught her eye because green was not a color someone normally saw inside New Seattle.  Grey and dirty-white were the colors of the city.  There was no color in their buildings nor in their clothing.  It was like an old tin-type picture.  So, something green caught the eye, sparked interested and demanded attention. 

Kneeling down Tiffany saw a small plant.  She knew it was a plant because she had once been allowed to stand on the wall and look out at the forest.  It had been so beautiful, but she knew that it was dangerous and evil. Well, that’s what she had been told.  Now, here was a plant inside the city.  It was struggling for survival, just like the rest of them. It was so pretty and fragile.  She just sat and looked.

Suddenly a large hand reached down and ripped the tiny plant out of the ground. Tiffany looked up. It was a police officer.

“Nasty thing!” he exclaimed. “Good thing you didn’t get any closer.”

“It was just trying to survive,” said Tiffany holding back her tears. “It was . . . .”

“Was just going to grow into one of those monsters like out there and kill us!” the officer finished her sentence.

Tiffany looked back at the spot where the plant had been.  The ground was grey again. The ground was bare again. The ground was dead.  Sadly Tiffany made her way home.

That evening she told her Mother about seeing a plant, and how the police officer had killed it. 

“Why are we so afraid of plants?” she asked.

“The Elders tell us that Nature is seeking revenge,” her Mother told her.

“Revenge for what?”

“Well,” her Mother was a bit uncomfortable with the subject, but she knew that Tiffany was a bright young girl and would ask these questions sooner or later. “We evidently weren’t very nice to Nature before the floods began. I only remember how beautiful the forest was when we left Old Seattle. I was too young to know anything else.”

“Do you think that Nature really is seeking revenge?”

“I’m not sure.  As soon as we abandoned land or building the vegetation and wildlife took it over and what we had built disappeared.”  Her Mother sat down facing Tiffany. “It doesn’t really matter, Dear.  Inside New Seattle is the only place that we’re safe as long as ….” Her voice trailed off without finishing her sentence. Both Tiffany and her Mother knew the end – ‘as long as the food rations hold out.’

Her conversation with her Mother didn’t make Tiffany feel any better. It hadn’t answered any questions. Over the next several days she began asking questions around town.  Most of the people gave her the same answer as did her Mother, and all of them looked at her as though she was crazy just to be talking about such things.

“Why do we want to kill plants and animals?”  “Because they want to kill us.”  “How do we know they want to kill us?”  “Because the Elders say so.”  End of conversation.

Tiffany tried to go visit the Elders but she couldn’t get past the guards. The Elders lived in the large concrete block building in the middle of New Seattle surrounded by guards.  The guards told Tiffany that the Elders were much too busy to talk to a little girl.

On her way home, Tiffany literally bumped into an old man named Albert.  Everyone knew Albert. He was crazy.  People said that he had been lost in the forest and went mad before he was rescued and brought to New Seattle.  He slept in a hut he built from junk in a corner across from the Elder’s house and survived on scraps the Elder’s servants would throw out the back door to him. Tiffany had been told to avoid Albert.

“I’m sorry,” apologized Tiffany.

“That is very polite and kind of you,” Albert gave her a toothless smile.  It wasn’t pretty but it was somehow gentle.  He didn’t look crazy.  He just looked old, cold and hungry, like most of the rest of the population of New Seattle.  “Hey, aren’t you the young one who found the plant in the park?” 

“Yes, I did.”

“Did you like it?”

“Yes,” admitted Tiffany. “It was pretty and fragile. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before. ”

“And it was trying to survive, just like you and me.”

“Yes.”

That was the beginning of many conversations. Soon Tiffany learned that Albert had not been rescued.  He had been injured and was brought into town unconscious.  When he wanted to return to the forest he was not permitted.  Every time he tried to sneak out he had been caught.  The two became good friends. 

Albert taught Tiffany all about the wilderness, the marvelous plants and animals and the beauty of nature.

Several months later Tiffany’s Mother was killed in an industrial accident.  Without a Father, there was no place for Tiffany.  A couple took her in, but she was made to work for them.  Tiffany ran away.  She ran to Albert.

Over a period of weeks, while hiding from the police in the back of Albert’s hut, she started looking for a way out of New Seattle.  She would go out at night because people were afraid of the night; afraid of the dark; and after roaming along the eastern wall, she found a place where they could climb down a portion of the original metal fence.  This was Albert’s way home and an opportunity for a new life for Tiffany. It was quite a struggle for Albert, but he made it down the metal fence and the two fugitives headed into the forest. 

Over the weeks that followed their ‘escape’, Tiffany fell in love with the forest. It was exactly as Albert had described.  Actually, she thought, it was far more beautiful and he never told her about the smell of clean air and the all of the magnificent sounds.  She loved sitting quietly and watching birds and animals.  She would watch as they came to the stream to drink.

She saw a mountain lion kill a small deer.  She cried for the longest time even though Albert had explained that without predators many species would become over-populated, begin to kill the environment by over-grazing and end up dying of starvation.

“Like human?” She had asked.

“Just like humans,” Albert had said.

She had watched a Mother Bear teach her cubs how to live in the forest.

“She’s just like you,” Tiffany giggled.  Albert just gave her that toothless smile she had grown to love.

As the days began to get shorter and the nights a bit cooler, Tiffany encountered her first humans.  The Elders had told the citizens that no humans lived in the forest.  They appeared rather strange to Tiffany, but they were nice and shared some meat.  Tiffany had never tasted anything like it. They told her it was Elk.

The people’s skin was rather dark. Probably from having been exposed to the elements for so long. They wore garments made out of animal hides. It was called ‘leather’ and was made by a process called tanning and used the tribe’s urine. It sounded nasty, but the garments were soft and warm, and many had been decorated with juice from berries.  They hunted with a device they called a ‘bow and arrow’; a string drawn between two ends of a stick that propelled a narrow stick, with feathers and a sharpened point, called an arrow.  The hunters made it look easy, but as hard as Tiffany tried, she could not draw the string back.  When they traveled they lived in strange looking tents called ‘tepee’.  The tribe had learned how to make them from other people they called Native Americans.

The tribe was heading south for the winter.  It was warmer farther south and there would still be game to hunt.  They spend their summers near the ocean north of Old Seattle where there is good hunting and lots of fish. They carried bags filled with dried fish and meat for their journey and hunted as they went.

Life was good for the tribe and the people were happy.  They had everything they needed. Nature provided for them.  Unlike what Tiffany had been taught all her life, Nature was not evil.  It was not the enemy. It was not bringing down revenge on the people for the sins of their ancestors.  Nature doesn’t show favoritism, so life doesn’t always seem fair, but, to the contrary, Nature provides everything every living thing needs.  Nature is balance.  Nature isn’t just in everything. Nature is everything. To love and care for Nature is to love yourself.  To hate and try to kill Nature is to hate and kill yourself.  The Elders had it totally backwards.

“The tribe has invited us to join them,” said Albert returning from where the Tribe was camped. 

“They’re leaving in the morning and said that there’s room for us, if we’d like to join them.”

“Oh, that would be great!” exclaimed Tiffany.  

“That’s what I thought,” Albert agreed.

The next morning as the Tribe was getting ready to leave, Tiffany walked up to a high point where she could look down on New Seattle. One of the young men from the Tribe followed her and stood next to her. He noticed her crying.

“Why are you so sad?”

“Those people down there; in that city; are dying, and they don’t need to.”

“Why?”

“They believe that Nature is their enemy when it is their life.”

“That’s sad!”

“Do you think I should go and tell them?”

“Would they listen to you?” asked the young man. “Would they believe what you told them?”

Tiffany didn’t answer.  With one last sad look at the plywood shanty town, so afraid of the world around it, Tiffany turned and joined the happy procession heading south to their warm winter hunting grounds.

“I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer. . . . I care only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness.”  John Muir

#OldConservationist