The Tangled Bank

There had been for several years a sandy approach to a pool on Spring Creek, an artifact from a large flood. Visiting the spot today, I found it completely overgrown. Saplings, raspberry canes, waist-high grasses, and stout burdock plants obscured and blockaded the previous path. Here was an unhappy version of Darwin's "tangled bank." A weedy wall, more in the spirit of the threatening riverside vegetation depicted in Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, a kind of living deterrent, "as if Nature herself had tried to ward off intruders."

I fought through to the edge of the water. A bullfrog, the largest I've ever encountered, lurched off the back and splashed into the slimy backwaters as though someone had kicked a flat football into the water. I turned and crawled back through the green wall.

Of the rare occasions when I've felt dismay or distress outdoors, most involved a struggle to find a way through dense, tall vegetation. A hillside forest of Stinging Nettle were all the plants were seven to eight feet in height. The monotonous slog through seemingly endless cattail swamps. The shudder that comes with the sudden ascension of the knowledge that we are not where we want to be. An unwelcome claustrophobia under acres of open sky.

Posted on August 8, 2017 03:40 AM by scottking