First Parish Unitarian UniversalistIn Wildness is…
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane D. Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
September 23, 2007
Reading
Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder
By Richard Louv (2005), from the Introduction
Americans my age, baby boomers or older, enjoyed a free, natural play that seems, in an era of kid pagers, instant messaging, and Nintendo, like a quaint artifact.
Within the space of a few decades, the way children understand and experience nature has changed radically. The polarity of the relationship has reversed. Today, kids are awere of the global threats to the environment—but their physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading. That’s exactly the opposite of how it was when I was a child.
As a boy, I was unaware that my woods were ecologically connected with any other forests. Nobody in the 1950s talked about acid rain or holes in the ozone layer or global warming. But I knew my woods and my fields; I knew every bend in the creek and dip in the beaten dirt patsh. I wandered those woods even in my dreams.
A kid today can likely tell you [all] about the Amazon rain forest—but not about the last time he or she explored the woods in solitude, or lay in a field listening to the wind and watching the clouds move.Sermon
Our sermon title today is incomplete, intentionally. Perhaps you recognize the quotation from which it is drawn, that of our Unitarian forebear the Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, in his 1862 book called Walking. There he wrote, “In wildness is… the preservation of the world.”
Or perhaps you recognize it to be the words of the great environmentalist John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club. It is known he was an avid reader of Thoreau because his copy of Thoreau’s In the Maine Woods is heavily underlined. He penned something similar nearly thirty years later, “In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world—the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.”
In wildness is the preservation of the world… In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world.
In these days of dire warnings of global warming, preservation and hope are closely entwined. Indeed, it seems to most of us now that there is no hope for the earth without preservation (and a few other key measures, such as energy use reduction!).
This past summer, I was fortunate to spend a week in the great fresh, nearly unblighted, nearly unredeemed wilderness. In that wildness, it was my spirit that was preserved, renewed, redeemed.
What was it about that experience in the outdoors that was so rejuvenating? How does it happen that being “in wildness” preserves the world, gives us hope? That week felt like a highlight of my life and I returned very much wanting to recount my experience to the people I love, including you. Which I will do in a few moments.
Also, having been so moved by the experience, I wanted to do something like it with you, and realized that I had traveled so far up into Canada to learn so much in that environment, when I didn’t know much of anything about the one in my own, our own, backyard.
So, I planned a series of beginner-appropriate canoe outings on the Neponset River in Canton. And, to learn more about the Neponset River myself, and to include those unable to join in on the canoeing, I am setting up a series of public lectures by local experts, with the working-title “The Spirit and Sorrows of the Neponset River.” dates and subjects to be announced.
The next canoe outing is this coming Saturday morning and the last is on October 13 th, in the afternoon. You can sign up today in the Parish Hall if you want.
The first outing was a week ago Friday, a school holiday. Fourteen people, including nine children, met at the Neponset Street put-in and it was a perfect day, sunny but not too warm. We saw way more turtles than trash along the shoreline, to the delight of the children (and me, they’re my favorite animal) and to the relief of those of us adults who expected lots of gross debris. We exclaimed over the great view from Signal Hill where we stopped for a snack, passing fragrant ripe wild-grape vines, under the rail road tracks (just in time to see the Acela pass by!), and around many fallen trees and bends in the river to the pull-out at Green Lodge Street, later than scheduled!
I experienced something curious and unexpected on that outing. There we were paddling on a quiet river, soaking in the sunshine and exclaiming over the sights —and all the time we were within earshot of the highway on which I drive to work every day, and many of you do too (Route 128). But it seemed to be another world on that river, an alien territory, one that I knew not, with which I had no relationship—even though I travel right through it at least five days a week!
That’s modern life for you, I thought. In fact, I had just experienced the tell-tale signs of “nature deficit disorder” so well described in the book from which came our reading this morning [Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-deficit Disorder by Richard Louv]. So removed from the nature of the places I frequent. So unfamiliar with the shape of the terrain, and the fauna and flora living there.
That’s many of us, so out of place in the places through which we live and move and have our being. So out of touch with our place, with its wildness, with God’s wildness. So out of touch with that wildness in us, and so far sometimes from hope, so far from preserving the world.
A week in the wilderness of Algonquin Park in Ontario, Canada gave me a taste, a window into what it is to be in touch with the wildness of a place.
The trip was sponsored by a nature center in Maryland where my good friend Jane is a volunteer canoe instructor. When she first told me about the trip, I knew without hesitation I wanted to go. I’ve been to Algonquin Park before, twice with my husband and children. Of all the places we’ve taken them camping, almost all of which we liked so much we wanted to return again next year, Algonquin is the only park to which we did actually return. It is a carefully maintained park the size of RI in a gorgeous setting of Northern forests and lakes, with great trails and lovely campgrounds situated a couple hours from both Toronto and Ottawa.
But even before I ever went there, Algonquin was a mythic place for me. I’d grown up hearing about its wonders and the joys of backcountry canoeing there. My mother, as a college student, was in a women’s outing club that canoed there, carrying their canoes and gear overland between lakes, sleeping under the stars or overturned canoes if it rained, making a circuit back to Brule Lake where the club advisor leased a cottage. The women brought their men sometimes and so Algonquin Park was significant in the courtship of my parents. They even went canoeing there for their honeymoon in September 1951. Because I am the eldest of their children, I’ve always wished it were true that I was conceived there. But, at some point in my life, I counted the months and knew I wasn’t… It would be a better story!
So I signed up for the trip! It was led by two naturalists, Frank and Peggy, the founders of the nature center; it was their first adult trip open to the public. Eleven men and women signed up, ages 26 to 75—yes, 75!—but most of us were in our fifties.
Jane had arranged a ride for the two of us for the thirteen hour trip from Baltimore up to Algonquin, with the 75 year old man and his 40-something son. We weren’t out of Maryland before we had learned that all four of us have Unitarian Universalist connections, and that the older man, Howard, had grown up at All Soul’s Unitarian Church in Washington DC when the revered A. Powell Davies was minister and whose family was friendly with his! We were soon to learn that there was a fifth UU on the trip, making 5 out of the 11—what are the odds of that?!
On Sunday late afternoon, we all met up at one of Algonquin Park’s beautiful campgrounds, where we would have our first meal together, begin to get to know each other, hear about the trip, and each get our bright yellow vinyl “dry bag,” a large waterproof duffle with shoulder straps into which all of our personal gear—tent, pad, sleeping bag, clothing, toiletries, and other items had to fit. We would be carrying our canoes and dry bags overland between lakes, so due to my recent shoulder troubles, I’d packed very lightly (and got the prize for the lightest dry bag!). In addition to these dry bags, there were three large, bear-proof barrels for the food, two-burner gas stove, and cooking gear, also with shoulder straps for carrying on portages.
That first night, I went down to the water to get my first view of the night sky. It was so dense with stars that the usual constellations were hard to find. And the Milky Way, that gauzy white sash of distant stars, was visible from horizon to horizon. And, as I stood, my neck strained so my eyes and heart could take it all in, a yellow shooting star streaked briefly through the sky, and was gone! Awesome!
The next morning, Monday, half plus one of our cars went to where we would be ending the trip on Saturday. Then that one car, full of drivers, met up with the rest of us and all the gear where we would begin our journey. We would be paddling and portaging for two days before we’d see our last motor boat, though fortunately they hadn’t been so large or prolific to scare off the loons. On Wednesday mid-day, we arrived at Clydegale Lake, our remotest location, where we would spend two nights, giving us time to explore the area on our own by foot or paddle or just laze around the camp.
As we finally came in view of our campsites on Clydegale Lake, Frank spotted a tiny dark form in the green grasses on the far shore. Likely, our first moose! So, some of us followed his red canoe in an indirect circuit around an island and then slowly and silently closer and closer, so close we could hear the huge moose’s gluttonous chomping of lake grass. Frank told us how to recognize it as a young male moose, with his short “rack” (antlers) maybe 8 inches tall still “in velvet” (dark and fuzzy). We’d approached so slowly that he wasn’t alarmed. Four canoes floated still in the water for the longest time, while we watched silently amazed at how much vegetation he took in, getting ready for the long winter ahead with cool weather only a month away.
Later that afternoon on Clydegale Lake, after we’d pitched our tents, found the location of the “thunderpot” aka out-house, and had our daily lunch of peanut butter and jelly on whole wheat bagels, we set out in our canoes for one of the few sandy beach shorelines we’d seen. This narrow beach turned out to be a veritable wildlife highway!
Its damp sand showed the tracks of wolf, doe, fawn, raccoon, squirrel, shore birds, and beaver. Most traveled parallel to the shoreline but the beaver tracks came down to the water from the woods, dragging their broad flat tail behind them and pushing their tree-branches out in front of them—headed to their lodge in the nearby cove--all of this revealed by the marks in the sand!
Furthermore, Peggy pointed out blood around the edges of one of the doe’s hoof prints, which were spaced far apart as if she had been running, with the wolf tracks behind. Peggy surmised that the wolf smelled the blood, knew the doe might be slow and vulnerable due to her injury, and gave chase. But, the wolf failed, judging by the fact that its tracks disappeared before the doe reached the edge of the woods.
This beach was their highway, these animals. Even though we’d be camping out on the opposite visible shore, this was their world and we were mere visitors. We could choose to see it as vicious world of struggle and death or as merely interdependent, with each playing a part in the whole.
The next day, Jane and I packed a lunch and set out for a solo adventure on Clydegale Lake. We’d planned to find a portage trail on the other side of the lake, leave our canoe there, and find the carnivorous plants we’d been told lived in the marsh area there. Then we were going to follow Peggy’s instructions and sit in solitude in one place for thirty whole minutes observing everything there was to observe.
Well, we never found the trail. We paddled all along the shore line, except we didn’t want to go into the cove where the moose had been and disturb it in its habitat (both for our sake—he was big!—and his, after all, this was his home). So, instead, we pulled the canoe up on the edge of the cove and bushwhacked through the undisturbed pine woods of the peninsula, to see what we would see.
We were well-rewarded by our adventurous spirit. We came upon a great find—I spotted this skull upside down in the dirt—which we thought might be a moose, it was so big—and Jane found some leg bones nearby, which were perhaps from the same carcass? Later they were identified by others as the remains of a young (two years old, judging by the condition of its teeth) male (judging by its Pedicles, the two knobby, skin-covered nubs protruding from the skull, each to support an antler, found only on males) White-tailed Deer which are much larger in Algonquin than they are in either Maryland or Massachusetts, thus the large size. I named him “Mr. Clyde” after the lake along whose shores I found it, and he rode proudly like a figurehead in the bow of my canoe for the rest of the trip.
Anyway, we left our treasures where we could find them on our way back and eventually found a place high enough to have a view of the cove, with a separate perch for each of us. After thirty minutes in my perch, in my notebook I’d described all the sounds I could hear (including the whine of a dead tree rubbing alarmingly on a tree limb directly over my head as if the breeze might topple it off) and all the wildlife I could see (small white butterfly or moth, Monarch Butterfly, Great Blue Heron, reddish insect with black wings flying and more), and sketched nearby trees and plants, as well as my view of the larger scene. And, I watched as a few canoes with young men paddling noisily crashing through the shallow cove frightened that Heron, and another originally hidden from my view, into their majestic flight out of the cove and over the lake.
Heading back to our canoe, Jane and I took turns trying to retrace our steps, eventually picking up our skeletal treasures along the way. Coming toward the edge of the woods, the canoe wasn’t where we expected it to be. We both became quite uneasy: had someone stole it? How would we get back to camp? No one knew where we’d gone!
In our anxiety, we were thoughtlessly noisy and, clambering out and down the overgrown bank, our approach must have scared the living daylights of a nearby moose! The next thing we knew, there was a loud splashing noise very close to us. We looked over to see him galloping away, throwing up great splashes in the knee deep water! What a great viewing chance we had missed, all because of fear—fear of robbery, how ridiculous! — we had brought with us into the wilderness from so-called civilization!
Well, not to brag, but I have to say that we had one of the better tales-to-tell and finds-to- show when everyone had returned to camp. I was especially gratified when the 26 year old bow-and-arrow deer hunter who identified Mr. Clyde commented admiringly that he and his paddling buddy had seen our canoe beached and wondered where we’d gone, the woods were so dense there! We two women in our mid to late fifties had made quite a dent in our nature-deficit disorder that afternoon!
Thursday night, our last of two nights on Clydegale Lake, was bittersweet. We’d be heading back toward civilization in the morning, with only one more night to camp on the water. We’d just enjoyed the best of all the dinners we’d had (some of which weren’t so tasty), the sunset was going to be gorgeous and we were still hoping to hear wolves howling after dark. Jane and I paddled our canoe out to the center of the lake to get drinking water (we were using iodine tablets for purification). We basked in the glow of the setting sun and shared the solitude.
In the car, on the way back to Maryland, I asked my fellow UU paddlers what they would talk about if they were to preach about our Algonquin canoe trip. I listened, we talked, but I took no notes. Later, when I wasn’t driving and each of us was drowsing or lost in our own thoughts, I shut my eyes and recounted to myself what we had each said. As best I can now recall…
The elder, Howard, said, simply, “the solitude.” His son said “time—it seemed to go so slowly, maybe because I was savoring every experience, rather than dashing through my list of things to get done.” Jane said “the marvelous animal highway—and how it was their world we were passing through.” And I said, “the amazing interconnections between living things, much more than I ever had known, how each plays parts in the life-styles and life-cycles of others, death always giving life.”
On that last night on Clydegale Lake, Howard had taken a sunset photograph in which Jane and I in our canoe are silhouetted black against the water reflecting the brilliant peach and lilac sky all around.
That photo is the back drop for the Start Screen on my computer now.
It reminds me, every time I log on and launch into the technological marvels of civilized life, of my week in the wilderness.
It reminds me that for one brief span of time, I knew the wildness in which is the preservation of the world, the preservation of hope for the Earth.
Amen.