Endgame: meditations on a diminishing world.
From: Harper's Magazine
Date: June 1, 2007
Author: Hoagland, Edward

Endgame

The fox family we fed last year must have killed our weasels. First, the vixen had come alone at dusk that spring, haggard from the nutritional demands of making milk, simply to finish any kibble left in the dog's dish. The dog was of course offended, but impotent in the house by evening, especially after we began putting out extra food, as the interloper decided not to mind being watched. Besides replenishing her strength, she might carry mouthfuls to her cubs, denned underneath the neighbors' fallen-down barn, or bury some for a rainy day under the highbush cranberries nearby. Soon she looked less emaciated, even though shedding her red winter coat for summer made her dark-bluish skin show through. The male never chose to approach by daylight, but the amount eaten sometimes indicated he may have after nightfall.

When the pups were three months old, she permitted them to watch her eat, sitting twenty yards away, and brought them helpings, later letting them eat from the dish themselves, by order of a five-part hierarchy, interrupted by her own favoritism. If the dog barked, a car passed, or I emerged, she'd squall repeated warnings, teaching them to scramble down into the alder thickets by the stream and then the spruce woods, uphill, beyond. Our Belgian shepherd was too fat and old to catch them once they'd reached their impudent stage, but I think may have spared one or two at earlier moments, when we appeared while the vixen was training them to hunt voles in the field and she squalled that doelike alarm. They'd reached the birches and firs to hide, but certain whimpers sounded, as if the dog--herself female--had overtaken but not bitten them, from a bitch's instinct not to kill puppies; and the fox immediately swung back as a decoy, loudly crying her squall.

They learned to pounce on grasshoppers, nip blueberries, cut off a foolish chipmunk, or grab a writhing garter snake. It was a quicksilver treat to watch the five tumble and interact, homing in on a woodchuck's scent, and as they matured, they'd taunt the dog with their agility, as a final insult hauling her dish out toward the trees. But I needed to lay down sheets of roofing tin near their hibernaculum for the remainder of my colony of snakes to hide underneath, and regretted gradually losing the family of woodchucks who for generations had lived under our own raffish barn and defunct chicken coop. Snowshoe hares, too, vanished from the vicinity, as well as our pair of weasels, which meant that last winter mice built nests among my socks and books, gnawed a sweater and a poetry anthology. I'd see their elfin figures dart from the plumbing under the bathtub to get into the kitchen. And to seed poison about only complicated matters because the dying mice, mad with thirst, jumped into the toilet and clogged it up.

I like the fact that in this hundred-year-old house two miles off a paved road in northern Vermont, the mice are still the native white-footed species, with long white tummies and acrobatic tails, using my dwelling as they might a cleft in a ledge or a hollow maple tree--not European house mice, such as infested American towns and cities centuries ago. Nor has a Norwegian house rat ever shown up in my thirty-eight years here. The gauntlet of woods must be impossible to run; even stray cats don't make it anymore. The coyotes, the fisher, the bobcats would grab them, not to mention Mr. or Mrs. Fox, who themselves would furnish a meal for the coyote pair, if either were ambushed and cornered by them while foraging. That's perhaps the main reason why the vixen and her mate denned among the abandoned farm buildings of my neighbor and me, ceding the coyote family--whose howling from the ridgetop I enjoyed nightly when I wasn't feeding her--a hunting territory concentric to hers. The coyotes, in other words, also munched rabbits, woodchucks, meadow mice, deer mice, jumping mice, and freelance miscellaneous booty like frogs and fallen apples and muskrats, but being never tolerated as close to a house as a fox, they accepted the concentric arrangement around our farmsteads of necessity, allowing the fox a safety zone to raise her pups. Otherwise, not the quick, canny adults but the callow cubs would be carried back to fatten young coyotes. Their cowering, whimpering, wouldn't help them, as it had with my shepherd dog.

I don't know but what she lost one or two blunderers to predation by her larger kin even so. In any case, after that litter dispersed, our vixen sited her new den this spring down close to the asphalt, where there are more houses, garbage, domestic critters, and roadkills, but another trucial zone exists where coyotes are loath to go. The price was losing at least one pup to a car, but likely worth it, since her risky visits--undulating up our mountain notch alone through the woods (I might meet her on my walks), to wolf down whatever was set out for her, usually a mouse, after I'd switched from poison to traps--became infrequent. Red squirrels also have boldly been entering the house, more intrusive than any mouse. One woke me recently by hopping onto the arm of my chair and tapping me on the shoulder when I was napping, to see if maybe I was dead. I'd been shouting at him for stealing from the cupboards, so he wasn't begging to be fed. The fox had kept him and his ilk afraid of being waylaid on the ground if they left their big oak trees; and no fierce long-tailed weasel has appeared yet to challenge them, it seems. Close to the house he's safe from the main squirrel-hunter: the ten-pound weasel-relative called the fisher (sable, to a furrier), which likes deep woods. And the slow raccoon, nosing around omnivorously, now that the vixen's aggressive presence is gone, is no threat to squirrels, although as a tree-climber he can coexist with coyotes--and with people as well, because he seldom angers us; strikes us as personable instead.

I miss that vulpine panache, however, that pouncer-on-a-grouse, though coyotes have more glamour, if you can see as well as hear them, which I do occasionally. Answering my harmonica, they brought their pups down off the ridge to observe my dog and me and bark a little at the two of us from a distance of thirty yards. Startling the family another time, I made a pup drop a fawn's head it was carrying. June is when they're that clumsy, but also ebullient enough to answer barred owls' calls, or ravens', or, in yapping, attempt to howl. When I acquired this property there were no coyotes, or fisher either. The most thrilling nocturnal sounds were the bobcats' screams, which are rarer nowadays because the fisher--at half the weight--are adept at catching the bobcats' smaller prey, while the coyotes--about twice as large, and especially working as a pack--do better with meat on the upper end, like a snowbound deer, whereas the poor bobcat is solitary year-round, except to breed. Indeed, it may arduously snag a deer in a drift, but have this stolen from it by a pack during the starving months; then the next week, yet again. Meanwhile, the fisher are keeping trim on porcupines, which no other predator around here has mastered the knack of killing, or else by monkeying in the trees after squirrels.

The squirrel that woke me up to see whether I was dead then chewed through a peanut-butter lid, and stole a slice of raisin bread. There's a pair of goshawks I'm hoping will catch him, if he carries his overconfidence out of doors. Hunters keep our bears from that sin, though they become bulimic, fattening on apples in the fall, and vomit under the trees. I've seen a moose, too, stop cautiously at the side of the road, look right and left for traffic before crossing, then sniff my car, if it's parked in the drive, for clues to its nature, but without lowering his rack of antlers to whack it, as you'd think he might want to. Instead, like the bears, he soon climbs the ridge for safety's sake. That red squirrel, by contrast, wants this house, like a hollow tree. He defecated on my toilet lid the other day, and leapt against the wall to knock down an African mask hanging there, as if to rid the place of all of its human imagery.

The next town is slated to double in populace soon, due to the construction of a new ski resort. In the jumpy atmosphere prevailing nationwide, which is both hyper-mercenary and health-obsessive, people regard real estate as more than just a dwelling or a spot to park their assets. They want a dab of garden, several healthy trees, with birds at a feeder, a breeze, and grass to mow and put lawn furniture on, which is a fancy way of lying on the ground. They want low blood pressure, no acid reflux or palpitations--longevity. Politically, in the grabby phase we're living through, this impulse doesn't take the form of widely wanting to preserve nature as a public domain. Rather, we'll tend to hire a backhoe to dig a private mini-pond and plant nursery vegetation, after chopping down whatever had grown up naturally in the vicinity before. People want muscle cars and a swatch of land to play designer on. A guy next door to where I used to live simply poisoned all of "his" frogs in the pond outside his house because they sang when they mated in the spring. He had thought he was buying silent water.

Several big-box stores are being installed on a road paralleling the Canadian border, a couple of dozen miles north of me. So that intervening stretch of farm and logging land will gradually fill up, too, and wind turbines perhaps crenellate the ridgelines--a change I wince at. Yet much more flabbergasting alterations are in store--the mowing of parts of Amazonia to grow ethanol; the melting of the poles; the desertification of more of Africa (and if you've already seen famine there, as I have, the idea of growing corn in Iowa to drive cars is obscene). Dumbfounded, conservationists are hard put to express the scope of what they feel. John Muir could save Yosemite Valley and Rachel Carson reduce the use of DDT with eloquent polemics--but those were cap-gun battles compared to the tsunamic changes now under way. A hundred and fifty years ago, with the Great West still awaiting settlement, Thoreau proposed in an essay called "Huckleberries" that each American town should set aside a square mile or more to coexist primevally with whatever people chose to build on the rest. But what formulation could Thoreau--or Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Rachel Carson--muster in this steamroller era to divert the avalanche of crashing catastrophes? Being aghast doesn't do it.

Not just honeybees and chimpanzees are disappearing, but incomprehensibly innumerable species that have never been discovered at all. Words are needed that surpass the wails, the rage, when temples are destroyed, because this is not Yosemite Valley--this is not a cathedral whose pristine views Muir could defend, knowing he personally had all of Alaska's wilderness behind him to retreat to if he lost. Muir loved glaciers and on his hikes "discovered" some. How would he find voice for his grief at what is happening to them now? "In wildness is the preservation of the world," Thoreau famously said; and vastnesses of it existed on most of the continents then. Yet not mere cathedrals but maybe the godhead is now being destroyed. Life is an ecstasy, Emerson stipulated in his essay called "The Method of Nature"; and in American Transcendentalism heaven is on earth--there need be none further. However, if we are stripping, dicing, and deforming the landscapes, souring the oceans, and sooting the skies, we are not just wiping out cheetahs and codfish, blue whales and sandalwood trees, but undermining our very lives and our afterlives.

There seems to be no baseline, as if we're in free fall. And Conservation, which used to embrace national parks and forests, wild rivers, and the like, has blurred into a new term, Environmentalism, concerned with petroleum efficiency, groundwater quality, ozone statistics, sea-level maintenance, trade-winds pollution, recycling yardsticks, climate stabilization. People want mobility, yet a hideaway "off the grid," and to have the heart muscles of a hunter-gatherer, attained in a gym, though practically living in cyberspace, but still touch the earthly verities through yoga. Meanwhile, the pace and enormity of destruction is paralyzing, as is our general indifference. The so-called robber barons, in their epoch, also had the advantage of public indifference, but theirs was an era of plenty, of surplus. Always before, we've had mountains unnamed, spare reaches of prairie untilled, oceans hardly fished, scarcely sailed. I'm hearing, however, a continuous down-curve in the volume of birdsong and its diversity every spring. Wood thrushes, like wood turtles, are rarer now. The "bittern boometh," as Chaucer said, but for how long?

The visionary poet Robinson Jeffers enunciated the situation bluntly, describing mankind in poems including "The Broken Balance" (1929) as "a sick microbe," "a deformed ape," a "spreading fungus ... slime-threads and spores," "a botched experiment that has run wild and ought to be stopped." For many decades I've been slow to agree with him, feeling of course more empathy for people than for fungal spores or microbes--but a botched experiment, yes, I fear so. And I think by this point, Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Wallace Stegner, Herman Melville, John Muir, would too. The word "Creation" was in common parlance throughout my young years, meaning what human innovation had not brought into being but, rather, was provided for us to start with, either by a "man upstairs" or by eons of vitality evolving before; and people, although spendthrift, felt somehow that they were embedded within it. An inherent awe or mystery was taken for granted, whereas now, I suspect, the metaphor of cancer will become commonplace, as we eat our planet's skin and soil its liquids, like a metastasizing disease. Another visionary writer, Edward Abbey, put it well, in 1970, for the new century: "We are none of us good enough for the world we have."

Will those wind-farm turbines expropriating the mountaintops wind up as a sort of Easter Island, end-of-a-civilization spectacle? "Where do the birds land when they migrate? Where are the butterflies and bats allowed to fly?" my grandmother might have asked, if confronted by our contemporary spaghetti sprawl, or the fizz of electronics facilitating the interior monologues we carry on together in a solipsism so complete it appears to eclipse the whole of the out-of-doors. Hurricane-insurance premiums do register a bit more on us than our actual demolition of habitat, although no organized religion has ever countenanced such wholesale obliteration of nature. The work of God was assumed to be a source of jubilation and was usually depicted in the arts by rhapsody, with obeisances to the scary side. Wildfires and mud slides will register as well, and any pandemic that breaks out of a blitzed rain forest, any pelagic thermal somersault, or crash in fish stocks--but not the loss of galaxies of less utilitarian creatures, the multiple varieties of greenery, the timbre of countless noises we've lived with for millennia--as society emigrates indoors and Creation becomes a graphic.

Are we kneecapping ourselves? Would Wordsworth, Frost, Turgenev, feel not just glassed-in and deracinated but amputated? Would Conrad and Melville have enjoyed the work on a container ship? Bird-watcher populations grow, however, as bird numbers fall: richer folk target their travel to Bhutan or Costa Rica, poorer ones tack up more feeders for the mourning doves and nuthatches that hang around. We do have a tuning fork in us that continues to vibrate to the ocean's susurrations and contrapuntal thump--to the seasons' scented swell, with birdcall ebullience and the amphibians chiming in. Quite apart from any considerations of groceries, joy blossoms for us in the sunshine, as photosynthesis does in plants. To see the curly glint of spindrift on surf, the greenly vivid pictography of moss on boulders underneath a hemlock's boughs, may make it sprout. But why? We don't eat moss or phoebes or spindrift. And the question of delight shouldn't be moot. What deflects us from a deterministic focus solely upon consume-or-be-consumed? The magic of our retinas, eardrums, and nostrils anchors us in equanimity besides feeding us. With nature mostly shelved, can iPods do it? Nature has lent me a lifetime of flotation, to the point where I can gaze at the mountain across the way from my house that I will never climb again because of old age, and feel so thoroughly a part of it I'm not even bothered by this. Like the hawks' guano, I'm always up there.

But a penalty of an ecological education "is that one lives alone in a world of wounds," as Aldo Leopold remarked. When John Muir and Edward Abbey lost their major conservation battles, dams were constructed that they didn't want, drowning cathedral valleys (Hetch Hetchy and Glen Canyon, respectively). In other words, such campaigns could then be discrete, when nature seemed fairly ubiquitous and people might still carry a rabbit's foot or split a chicken's wishbone to forecast their luck. Rivers sculpted the prairie's roll, dusk mediated the day's close. Now dusk is becoming irrelevant, in an electric tempo of 24/7, without that hour of modulation. And half the problem is that each of us notices change only by the micro-horizon of what we ourselves have witnessed. Our childhood wistfulness relates to a particular meadow with larks and bobolinks, paved over; a shoreline where terns nested, blistered instead with McMansions; a Victorian residence where cliff swallows fledged their young from mud gourds under the eaves that has been leveled for condos. The countryside we pedaled into couldn't be reached by a child on a bike nowadays, yet the memory is so personal it may not coalesce into a larger sense of crisis.

Born in 1932, when I got my license I drove the length of Route 66 to California in a Model A Ford. But my grandfather had been born in a sod hut in central Kansas, his father a Shiloh veteran and homesteader who had rolled there by covered wagon. What he saw of buffalo, Indians, and lobos cannot be reconstructed. I watch maples bloom, gulls dive for porgies at the beach, and contribute money to save a remnant of the Everglades, or gaze into my dog's woodsy eyes for a glimpse of perhaps what the lobos knew, if through his more recent ancestry he hasn't been clipped like a golf green. The punch of Silent Spring has spraddled out to cover a multitude of toxins and settings, and none of them a worse threat to some of our best birdsong than the hamburger industry's grinding up of subtropical forests. Fifty-five years ago in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, I took care of Sumatran, Siberian, and Bengal tigers, an orangutan, a rhinoceros, a hippopotamus, and other now-endangered animals, with no idea that within my own lifetime they would all represent relic gene pools, severely guarded in the wild, or exhibited in imitation jungles, rather than simply geographical curiosities caged in iron wagons. At the New York World's Fair in 1939, for probably a quarter, my father had installed me in a wonderfully swaying howdah on an Indian elephant at Frank Buck's Bring-'Em-Back-Alive pavilion; and here I was, in 1952, in the constant presence of a herd of twenty-four. They and the red-assed, blue-cheeked mandrill were not rarities either, but supposedly commonplace in exotic corners of this inexhaustible planet that, in adulthood, you could visit--and not only if you were rich. Just ship out as a merchant seaman and jump off in Bombay or Mombasa. Dark-skinned peoples who hadn't been industrialized surely still lived as neighbors to parrots, boas, monkeys, and chimps.

As a script, this is eclipsed, except for the fanciest ecotours; and as our democracy crumbles at the edges, the jitters have precipitated a kind of land rush, quirky and behind the curve. If a bubble has popped and they've scored some severance pay or downsized wherewithal, agitated persons, after an itchy spell, with as many thousands to spend as they have fingers and toes, show up who want acreage. Here in Vermont, for such a price they can do that, if it's been logged over and grown to fireweed and goldenrod. They'll hire a bulldozer to consolidate the stones; then park a camper on a flat patch, dig a firepit in front for grilling steaks and roasting potatoes, with a card table and folding chairs underneath a tent fly they've put up as an awning, for the month of July. A padlocked cable across the entry tells you when they're not home.

"For the meltdown. My cyclone shelter," a bearded, fiftyish guy of temporarily Libertarian views explains with a grin, although he may shave the fur off when he gets another job. Probably guns are part of the fun--a Magnum or a 9 mm--because you can't shoot those off much or carry them concealed downcountry, as in Vermont. One reason we don't have lots of burglaries is that a thief should expect every householder to have firearms; and playacting at anarchy may be a pleasure for somebody furloughed to the woods from a career in government or the military. A mutual-fund manager's screen saver pictures his hut in moose habitat. "It came on a truck, but doesn't it look like Davy Crockett?"

After a divorce or bankruptcy, a sick leave that turned permanent, another burly, seedy-looking, bitter guy arrives seeking solitary absolution in a petri dish of rancid grievance and fantasy. One recent acquaintance, showing me his newly bought old farmhouse, pointed at the cellar door as we walked past: "I bet you're afraid I'm going to lock you down there?" I tactfully demurred, but became so, having thought, like most of us of a certain age, that I'd mastered the quick size-up. Does the person seem agreeable over coffee at the drugstore counter and picking up his mail at the post office, drive a plausible vehicle, and know the weather forecast? But the stuff that used to matter in a small town, like job history, paternal responsibility, loves lost or cowardly declined, drinking predilections and cancer scares, remains unknown. We had a bank holdup, and the rolling-gaited graybeard who fled was a look-alike on the security film to many of the mystery retirees roundabout, who may have been fired before their pension plans were slated to kick in. His escape route, too, was not toward Canada or the interstate but the spiderweb of dirt byways where such individuals live, with mini-mountains in between.

Regular dairy families are interspersed with them, haying in June, while pet geese wander down the roadside and sixty black-and-white Holsteins wait at the fence line to be let into the milking barn. And there are wholesome dropout couples making candles or ceramics for a livelihood, farming emus and alpacas, dyeing yarn or sewing leather, and schoolteaching or doing online accounting. Radiologists will soon be reading X-rays transmitted to them in sanctuaries such as this as well. I used to visit a neighbor's farm every evening, but economic shifts have hammered him so mercilessly that the region's future may be more typified by a stranger and his girlfriend in a yellow halter top and shorts who have bought a nearby field and hauled a self-storage container to it on a flatbed trailer they're living in. No windows or conveniences except for a globular black barbecue set and propane tank, and their belongings in fat black twist-top garbage bags stacked about. New Orleans was too low, the World Trade Center was too high, and our democracy has gone spavined. Knowing other people rusticating in vans, with a trailer lot in Florida and a dozen acres here, I haven't asked where they're from. We have hero firemen from 9/11 afflicted with a cough, and tinkering with a doodlebug, learning to split firewood and distinguish mountain ash from serviceberry shrubs. As in a Richard Scarry children's book, you might wonder what are all of the occupants of these housing units doing?

They could camp off-site in the state forest stretching behind my house and never be discovered, because most trippers seldom leave their cars. Southwest and uphill from me only half a mile is a ledgy outlook above where the local mother bobcat has her kittens every spring--a few hundred yards from the cleft in a pile of rocks in which, every other February, a mama bear gives birth to cubs. It is also where, on account of the spacious view over a pond and, further, undulating mountains, our Congregational clergyman chose to subject himself to an eighty-hour annual fast and "vision quest." But his hunger pinched him too badly to meditate properly, he said, so the next year he cut the fast to sixty hours, and in the third year to forty: whereupon he sought a transfer. Another man, a Roman Catholic unconnected to the minister, then picked the area of the scenic site to shoot himself, after being accused of sexually molesting a mute, paralytic nursing-home patient dying of Hodgkin's disease whom he was supposed to be caring for. He left both a death certificate already filled out and an apology for his girlfriend to find when she came back to their apartment from her own work, specifying his location; and she tied his belt around a tree at the spot, to mark her forgiveness. It's worth noting too, perhaps, that land is at such a premium, not just the bear, the bob-cat, the clergyman, and the suicide have recently shared the vicinity of this ledge for important events. Catty-comer across a marshy brook and notch, yet remarkably close, as the ravens fly, is the ridge slope where the pair of coyotes raise their April pups--above but not far from a cow moose's June nursery bed, and ten flaps from the cliff face on which our ravens nest.

Wildlands shriveling and landscapes checkerboarded with ever more constricting improvisations--cleated like a football field--people tend to carom from Boise to Bangor. A beetle-browed CPA will look as headlong as Doc Holliday, his driver's license from a different state than his car's registration. At our chili stand, a heavy blonde divorcee has ricocheted from Lake Tahoe with her daughter, looking for the elixir of New England land, "to plant our roots." The owner serving them has arms freshly adorned with pastel tattoos, pink and blue, and he tells me he's likewise a newcomer. The pain of those procedures has been "therapy" for his grief at the brain damage his grown son has just suffered in an auto accident back home in Connecticut. The boy is in a coma, so he's sorry he's sunk his life savings into this crummy joint and can't be alongside him all the time. The tattoos aren't babe-and-anchor but psychedelic, as if inscribed by a technician kiting on drugs.

Which bushy whiskers are to fend off the frosts and the blackflies and which mask a man who used to juggle a multimillion-dollar budget but left a mess of broken partnerships behind? So few farmers are still actually afloat that many people dressed like farmers and driving pickups can't be--you need to glance in the back for a tool chest, tow chains, chain saw, or whatever. That fellow of indeterminate age who dawdles through the wash-dry cycle at the Laundromat for an opportunity to chat with the lady who makes change could be a widower, or a genuine recluse, or a millionaire unwinding at his hideout for a week away from "Cancer Gulch" in the big city. Solitary self-medication, with the millennial refrain that "land values can only go up, right?" is very different from the back-to-the-landers of three or four decades ago, lacking the communal notion of reconstituting society, as the hippies once hoped to do. Today's mantras are crabbed, apprehensive, self-involved, as we shop around for tidy climates in gated self-ishness, like a chameleon going from green to brown.

Public lands, public causes, suffer, as well as public life. But without being an optimist about the future, I still believe in the blitheness of private life. Fox fire and fireflies, or a loon's nervous giggle as it arrows overhead between two ponds, delight me. So do a woodcock's whickering, a grouse's drumming, for purposes of mating, and a toad's ethereal, extended trill, which, more than any single songbird's, seems like spring's angelic epitome--whereupon the male may clasp the female for many hours. And by late June the derisive coyotes will bring their pups down close to observe me and my dog, yapping disapprovingly so they can remember who to avoid henceforth--as do the raven parents. The whole family flaps down in conjunction with a flying lesson for the fledglings, to perch in a tree adjoining my house and indulge in a lot of censorious commentary.

My chimney swifts disappeared a quarter-century ago, and parula warblers more recently than that. But winter wrens, in reduced numbers, still sing as intricately as ever; and in the dappled sunlight or pewtery moonlight of the forest I'll notice a ghostly, loaf-shaped, two-foot dome of white stationed on a downed log, and wonder what it could be. Nothing white except mushrooms can survive a summer. Yet it turns out a diligent squirrel has piled poplar fluff into an orderly mass to pick through later for the tiny seeds, while watching out for a broad-winged hawk that would love to seize him. The dappled patterns of the sun's shafts bewitch me, then the pewtery moon, the barred owl's chow-house call--Who-cooks-for-you, who-cooks-for-you-all--and the toad's sustained, half-minute, thrilling song. (And would you claim his mate finds his proverbially jewellike eyes less fetching than Shakespeare did?)

The bounty of wildflower colors and perfumes that magnetize bumble-bees and butterflies to pollinate their plants elate us, too, although no utilitarian function is served in our case for either party, since we don't eat or propagate them, except that indirectly--bypassing Darwin--we employ bouquets for courtship and requesting coition, an odd connection, since they, the flowers, don't smell like sex. Why is their scent enticing to us as well as to insects who wish to implant eggs and grow larvae right at the source? A gift of chocolate to a woman has the logic of concentrated carbohydrates; diamonds a show of earning power; dancing demonstrates coordination and virility; clothing and accoutrements perhaps imply elan. But flowers? Besides promising a certain sensitivity to the gentler gender, they may correspond to our exuberance when gazing up at the majesty of inaccessible scenery. Then why such exhilaration at mountains too high to be hunted on? Why these features unrelated to meat, or progeny, or proving who is the fittest? Until recently, people didn't wish to "conquer" peaks. Nor does some mechanistic evolutionary theory account for how entranced we are by sheets of falling water. Except perhaps in a salmon stream, they provide little protein, and interrupted subsistence travel. Nevertheless, like the thunder of surf, we drink in the roar. It calms us.

And why is camouflage so much lovelier than it needs to be? In terms of beauty, a cottontail's, a salamander's, a tiger's, or a python's--nature's designs--have it all over the most effective concealments military technicians have managed to devise. "Every natural fact is an emanation," as Emerson suggested: which may be the best explanation of any, because what prehistory pioneered or prefigured our sense of beauty? I don't believe we developed an aesthetic sensibility on a just-in-time basis for civilization to welcome Titian, Turner, Bach, and Mozart. Bone flutes and cave art have proven that. But autumn leaves aren't simply extraneous, like flowers, to our needs. They soon crisp into noisy litter that surely impeded hunting and augured the most grueling months of the year. So why do we admire--love--the fall colors, like thunderous sheets of leaping water of no practical benefit to us whatsoever, or a hermit thrush's solo fluting, or a modest monarch butterfly leaving the milkweed to flutter away with our good wishes toward Mexico? I doubt that we, the first Northerners to know where it goes, are the first to wish it well.

But what did inspire our sense of beauty? My hunch is that, like our intelligence, it's an outgrowth of a gradual refinement of existing rudiments in other creatures. Genome research and field studies are cumulatively documenting the intelligence angle. Joy in beauty will be harder to demonstrate except by an appeal to common sense. Do the species that wear the splendid plumage or coats of fur or superb scaly camouflage we admire not feel an equivalent ebullience at the sight of one another, too? Not merely lust or rivalry, in other words, but something of what Emerson expressed in his essay: that "ecstasy is the law and cause of nature." "Nature is a work of ecstasy," he added, the italics his. The idea that birdsong, toadsong, are a pleasure only to us strikes me as frankly absurd--or that turtles, for example, apart from appreciating one another's spots, don't gaze with gratification into a cerulean sky. As we spin in space, our joy may be a facet of the universal spate of energy, which launched us all.

Not "designed" or anti-evolutionary, this theory, as Emerson put it, that "the power or genius of nature is ecstatic," is simply supplemental; and both Thoreau and he, as freelancers in Concord, accepted On the Origin of Species before Harvard's contemporary faculty did. Previous cultures of course had maintained a rapport, a cross-current telepathy, with other creatures for ages in order to hunt. Also because they served as sentinels and, beyond that, might be reverberant or versatile as spirits. During Christianity's defeat of pantheism, and then industrialization, the cleverness of wildlife and even animals' capacity to suffer were questioned, especially by mainstream science, as long as evidence to the contrary could be ignored. But in the meantime a kind of peasant grounding or savvy endured among people who truly knew about the outdoors. Even in the city, you'd see this older fellow feeling in Lower Manhattan among the immigrant folk who tended pigeon cotes on their rooftops and flew their flocks in mesmerizing circles--whirling glee--Tevery evening after work, or sat with cats on the fire escapes like Continentals while the sun set.

The velvety rustle of fine fishing water, the dewy scent of a deer herd's favorite glen, are delights that connect to evolutionary logic. But not all that's delectable to us does: like frost flowers on a windowpane, more delicately shaped than real ones but signifying how the cold outside will bite. And when we present long-stems on Valentine's Day, are we sharing something deep-seated in common with insects? Indigo buntings, yellowthroats, black-and-white warblers, give me a kick, as does the boar bear's hibernation site under a knob on the ridge facing my house, about halfway between where the ravens nest and the coyotes den. We're at close quarters here in this endgame on a pocket of state-owned forestland. His cave may be a twenty-minute climb away, above the twanging green frogs, the black-throated green warbler's zoo zee zoo zoo zee, the cedar waxwing's excited, lispy wheezing, the vixen's querying squawl, the territorial owl, the white-throated sparrow's dauntless whistling, the wild turkey's gobbling.

Garter snakes are strongly, matriarchally communal, when you watch them, as are mice, with that bustling optimism that can make my tuning fork vibrate sympathetically, and deer, so often cheerful when together, too. As that vixen carried her young about in her mouth, how different were her feelings from a mama crocodile doing the same; or a human mother's protective hug? And when a drought ends in the desert and toothsome rains begin to fall, is just the pick-and-shovel prospector, with perhaps his donkey, happy? Do other living things only process the new conditions mechanistically? Or if antelope, bighorn sheep, cactus wrens, peccaries, and coatimundis experience a surge of gladness, does the chuckawalla, the sidewinder, the desert tortoise also? I'd certainly be sure about my toad, with his radiantly tremulous sweet song, his vocal sac bulging.

And will we wither like a girdled tree, as so many of our ancestral satisfactions are either dissolved or virtualized for indoor use? How integral are our origins? Can we simply demolish, atomize, dissipate them? What ground will we stand on? When medieval Christianity sidelined nature, it wasn't destroyed but remained as ubiquitous as bedrock. Absent that, is chaos a likely result? Worldwide, with a TV click we can view what used to be called the Levant, the Orient--drop in on Mandalay without a Suez passage--or the Amazon and Congo. Surf from a bell-voiced evangelist to pornography, or from a famine to Main Street obesity, from war footage to wastrel celebrity, in a quarter-minute. In this bubbling of images transmitted--architectural masterpieces, famous scenery--will the substance simmer and gradually evaporate, as in our easy chairs we think we've seen everything?

Vermont's endearingly recalcitrant tradition of aginners, with a three-legged milking stool strapped to their asses morning and night, talking sidewise unhelpfully to tourists, has been diluted into service industries like skiing, leaf-peeping, B&B'ing. Logging and milking do go on, but even the guy with a bum left leg and busted cars in his dooryard may have a child who is deft with a computer and college-bound. Television has stripped the summer people of their mystique because where they travel and live during the winter is shown. Local kids can reasonably aspire to white-collar mobility if they stay in school, and the father can hope for a slot in a Florida trailer park if he wants a second home, too.

Worldwide, the question is room. Is there room for our multiplying leisure activities and longevity; the cruelty of our market economics; our implacable seining of both land and sea, lest anything escape the harvest, but otherwise fabricating a boxed reality of electronic graphics to live within? Nature has been our aquifer, siphoned from, and thus sinking, century upon century, seldom replenished even a little by anyone, not in the tropics, not in the arctic, the first world, the third world, or our mind's eye. The electricity that powered our changes in direction and attention span is derived from fossil fuels, but scalds the present. Robinson Jeffers's 1929 simile of humankind as a vast spreading fungus of slime-threads and spores may be too laggard a blight. Blindly accelerating, we burn through entire galaxies of other life, unimaginably interlinked and unmapped--amputating ourselves from the rest of Creation, whether destroyed or still undestroyed. The risks are unfathomable. And if you don't find this tragic, open your heart.

Edward Hoagland is the author of nineteen books, most recently Compass Points.

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