Wikiup

The particular branch-shaped bruise is the only physical reminder I have of my semi-successful hike at Wikiup, but it's quite sore now.  Wikiup Outdoor Learning Center is just that: an outdoor preserve of trails, a large pond, and a prairie.  It's a beautiful, well-kept place, and actual wild animals live there! 

Yesterday I had decided to go off the trail and slide my way down to a tiny little creek.  Creeks are fascinating.  They are so much more lighthearted than rivers.  What was interesting about this particular creek was that it had worn a 3 and 1/2 foot canyon out of the ground.  The water was at deepest a few inches -- how many years it took to carve that cut in the earth is mind-boggling.  The landscape we see around us was formed in that fashion.  Each hill was meticulously carved by the bottom of a glacier; each cut by the creeks a force of eons of water flowing by; each river stone smoothed by the current of a river.  The sheer amount of time it took to make what we see around us is what makes it so precious.  In an antique store, people look for the oldest, best preserved items so they can marvel over their beauty and hold something of another time.  It's the same with nature; here we have something that has lived steadily through our wars, our lives, our deaths, our defeats, and our victories, something we can't even begin to take credit for but we can take inspiration from.  We've invented air conditioning, the blender, and nonfat ice cream, but we have yet to create the majesty of a sunset.

For animals, the homes we live in are quite ostentatious.  All the little burrows beside the creek were half hidden and only revealed by a careful survey of the area.  Here, a muskrat family could live out their days in peace, hidden from predators and yet situated close to water.  Here a frog could blend in with the intricate tapestry of fallen trees and branches and live his life happy and free.  On the other hand, humans live in houses or apartments, easily distinguishable from the landscape and easily invaded.  This past winter, a mouse illustrated this point well by gnawing through the side of our house into my bedroom and attempted to run into oblivion by disappearing into a closet.  Unfortunately, this didn't work out well for him and he ended being trapped in a handheld vacuum cleaner and freezing to death outside.  But the point is that mouse, probably half-mad with the cold from the recent snow, managed to find a way into my house and managed to wreak havoc on our perfectly ordinary morning.  There's never been any hope that a human-made living area would blend into the background when threats appear.  The earliest settlements still were distinguishable from the surrounding landscape, showing something intrisic and basic about the level of human fear.  If we are willing to live so openly and boldly, even before the age of modern technology, humans must be less afraid of the natural threats than other animals.  Fear is not inborn in us as it is in other animals.  We weren't born to burrow deep into a riverbank or blend in among the grass.  We were born to live freely, to be assured of our capability to protect ourselves.  And that, with all its contradictions and assumptions, is a unique and critical facet of humanity.