Flying

I have the single most pleasure of having a father who can fly an airplane, and because of this, he was able to fly me to the University of Wisconsin at Madison's campus this past week for a college visit.  Although I liked Iowa State University better, the flight to Wisconsin was magnificent.  It was one of those days nestled between rain and clouds, wind and cold that was almost perfect.  Once we got up off the ground, it was only a matter of breaking through the thing layer of clouds that were hanging at about 2500 feet.  The flight was an hour and a half long, and because I didn't bring any homework, I had plenty of time to look out the window.

Usually, flying in this area of the country is boring for me.  When my family and I used to live in the Northeast, the splendor of an autumn's  mountain could take my breath away, but here, the ground is flat and covered in fields.  I watched our shadow race along the ground, curving along hills you wouldn't notice from above.  Weaving in and  through the fields, creeks -- full of spring snow -- were swollen.  From above, I could easily see the bends and the crevices of the creeks and rivers, making an entirely new perspective than when I was on the ground.

Thirty minutes into the flight I realized that the lawns of houses were green, unnaturally so, and the riverbanks and forests brown.  Already in March, the lawns were neatly clipped and obviously fertilized.  The wealthier neighborhoods we flew over were blatantly doctored in some strange attempt to mollify and beautify the little piece of nature the homeowner could call his own.  In a few weeks, all the residents in our neighborhood will begin to cut, to seed, to fertilize, and to do various other things to their lawns because nobody wants to stare at an ugly lawn.  There's always the one person in the neighborhood that doesn't put out any effort -- it's amazing if they even get out to mow their grass -- and everyone else complains about their lack of maintenance.  And rightly so!  But there is a difference between maintenance and plastic surgery on the lawn.  In my father's airplane, the places that were the most beautiful were the brown, barren, and wild forests and riverbeds, the hills that curved underneath the topsoil, and the water itself.  There was no leaves, no wildflowers, and no green, but these places had an appeal beyond the green buzz cut of my neighbor's lawn.  On his land, nothing unplanned is allowed to grow, his grass is never thin or off-color.  Yes, his back yard is pretty, but something is missing.

When I was younger, my sister and I used to play make-believe in our backyard.  Our favorite game was to pretend that we lived in a jungle tree house and had to make our own food.  After the extremely dramatic shipwreck scene, we used the little white flowers that grew in our yard as food -- not actually eating them.  One of us would gather them, and the other would put them carefully in a little hole underneath the treehouse, covering them with leaves and grass for the long winter ahead.  I suppose that if you were to go looking, you might find a little store of dried white flowers under the treehouse in New Hampshire.  These flowers were only weeds of course, but these weeds were beautiful and essential in the eyes of two young girls.  Sometimes, the idea of a little less rigidity and a little more nature in our lives is better than a perfectly manicured, wonderfully spotless life.

Flying over Wisconsin and Iowa, a new kind of beauty, a subtle one hidden in the bend of a creek or in the rich browness of tilled earth, revealed itself.  It did not need fertilizing or pruning, cutting or weeding.  The minute human effort became obvious, the beauty evaporated.  Nature has a store of treasures for us, but our eyes and hearts have to be open to see them.  Look around you, see the tree limbs dancing in the wind, the young shoots of green grass among the older brown lengths, the way bark peels from the trunk of a birch tree.  They will continue whether noticed or not, but they will make your life more vibrant, more real if noticed.