Still the Same Hawk by Waldman John;

Author:Waldman, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Dark Side; or, My Time Spent in the Nature That People Would Rather Not Think About

Robert Sullivan

If nature were a political candidate, and if newspapers and television networks took surveys of the public’s opinion of nature, then nature would, at this moment in the twenty-first century, most likely have, to use the pollsters’ phrase, high positives. For the majority of Americans who live in suburbs or the various rural and semi-rural permutations of the suburbs (exurbs and ruburbs, as they are known), nature looks good. It’s the place where we like to vacation. It’s the view from our calendar. The place we get away to—literally, or in video or in books and magazine of all outdoorsy kinds—after spending most of our time commuting to work on the highway or driving from the mall-esque school to the mall.1

Nature is not generally associated with the city, in other words, and when it shows up there, people can be overly complimentary about what is always referred to as its “persistence,” or we treat it as if it’s on its last legs. In the popular view, nature makes cameo appearances in the city—in the park, which we view briefly while on a stroll at lunchtime, or on Sunday with a barbeque, or in the view across the street at the squirrels and the pigeons nagging around the free lunch thrown from the bench. In the city, we feel that nature must work overtime to survive, or at least work harder than usual, just to break green through a crack in the sidewalk (an example of reverse anthropomorphization). In the city, nature seems to be confined and out of place. When nature does turn up, it’s often not card-carrying nature; it’s the bad kind. I’m talking about bugs, pests, vermin. This is the nature that is not considered natural. In the city, nature tends to show its dark side.

That’s what people seem to think, anyway, and I know, for I have been to the dark side of nature. I have spent a year in the city closely studying rats and all that is associated with them. I have studied rats in alleys, in basements, in sewers, and even in fancy restaurants and in nice parks where people don’t seem to think there are rats, and, thus, feel free to toss their lunch out for the benefit of what they are ultimately less likely to feed, the pigeons. I went to the dark side, in other words, and, to be overly dramatic about it, when I came out I saw the light. Or I saw a light, or, anyway—but I am getting ahead of myself. What I mean is I saw the nature that everyone is not looking at, the nature that Ansel Adams avoided, that people don’t use as screensavers or put on the side of their coffee mugs.

Before I explain my journey to the so-called dark side, I suppose I should say a few words about my own natural habitat, so that you might judge me by the nature in which I was raised.

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