My Green Manifesto. David Gessner
let me leave the car in her driveway and promised to keep an eye on the boats. I followed her instructions and hiked back down the road before cutting in on the ATV trails as she’d suggested. After about a mile I came upon the lake, which gave me my first hint that there was a hidden wilderness within the confines of Boston’s suburbs. It’s true that my initial sight was of a pile of litter at the base of a red cedar—Coors empties, water bottles, and a Newman’s Own salad dressing bottle, as if these had been particularly health-conscious litterbugs—but what I saw next was the blue bowl of the lake itself. Silver shined through the birch and pine and, with its many small coves, you could easily imagine you were looking out at a lake in Maine or Canada. I tramped around for a while—following deer tracks in the mud, listening to a kingfisher overhead—and tried to determine the indeterminable: Which of those muddy brooks, barely trickles now in early summer, was the true source of the Charles?
After hiking out, I thanked Amy, promised to dedicate a chapter to her, then drove back down Granite Street and pulled over by a mossy graveyard to study the brooks to the north of the reservoir. These nameless incarnations are the first drops of what eventually will become the Charles—a truly modest beginning to a great river.3
On the other end of the reservoir, the water dribbled out of Echo Lake and along Route 85, next to Wendy’s and Pizza 85, gradually picking up force and momentum. But only gradually. If you judged this river just from its beginnings you would have to conclude that it would never amount to much; a shiftless townie river that wasn’t going anywhere much less the Ivy League. Unambitious, it seemed destined to do no more than dribble behind the strip malls of Milford. Of course I knew that the river, like a lot of us, would overcome its muddled beginnings.
A NEW MUSIC
For the better part of the morning and into the afternoon a great blue heron waits then flies off in front of me, waits and flies off again, engaging me in a marathon game of tag. I first saw the bird not long after the initial rapids on the left bank by some turtles, and its size startled me. To real bird watchers, great blue herons, which have done surprisingly well in the face of continued habitat destruction, have lost some of their appeal due to the fact that they are fairly common. But, all alone and drifting up close to the bird with its full six-foot wingspan, I was reminded that it had earned the “great” in its name.
Our game goes like this: I try to paddle by as quietly as possible, but inevitably the bird periscopes its long neck up, tightens as I approach, then rocks back slightly before leaping into the air. The pre-leap moment is a tense one for the bird and part of my game is trying to guess the exact second it will launch itself into the sky. Often this departure is accompanied by a loud, pissed-off sounding sproak. Of course I know I am anthropomorphizing: If the bird really is pissed off, why does it keep flying downstream from me instead of simply heading upstream a little and letting me go by? I don’t know the answer to this, but if I’m an irritant to the bird, then it is anything but to me. Each time it flies off I study its deep, slow flapping, its long neck pulled back into its chest. It looks graceful, ghostly, and ungainly all at once. A gray vision except for its chest, which seems to absorb whatever blue the reflected river offers. Even more than its size, its wing beat—so muscular and deliberate it looks like it is paddling through a substance more viscous than air—distinguishes it. The heron glides ahead to the next stop and the game continues.
Pardon me for going on so long about a bird. These things happen when you are alone on a river. As it turns out though, Dan Driscoll has a thing for great blue herons, too. Dan can sound hardheaded and funny when discussing the Red Sox or the idiocy of state bureaucracy, but, like a lot of us, including me, his language sometimes goes soft when it turns to nature.
Last night I slept over at Dan’s house in Watertown, and during the late innings of the Sox game, after a few too many beers, he began to talk about nature as his “only religion,” and admitted that the great blue heron was something close to his “totem bird.” I squirmed a little at that, and he backed off.
“Well, at the very least, it served as a kind of mascot,” he said.
The heron’s body is the blue of stains from old-fashioned carbon paper. The blue darkens to something close to black at the wingtips, lightened only by a white splash of feathers—the heron’s “headlights” as birders call them—between the two tones. I see it near a small side creek, periscope up, on alert, then retracted enough to completely change the metaphor: now neck and head look like a curled-back hand puppet. The primary feathers are more blue than the rest, the secondaries more gray, and together they create a color uniquely heron. Shining yellow eyes are circled by rings of black, but between eye and mask there is smaller circle of color: a whitish yellow that seemed to run like a bad watercolor down into the bill. At first the bird appears completely motionless, but then I notice the bill slowly opening and closing, as if it is whispering to itself. The wind ruffles the heron’s feathers slightly, but other than the bill, and the slightest shifts in posture, it stays still. Then, suddenly, it twists its head around and its bill flashes like the blade of a knife.
When I take a break and look down at my field guide, it tells me that herons are colonial nesters, gathering together at night after days spent on their own. This strikes me as odd, counterintuitive. Herons always seem prickly about their privacy; they like their space, as the saying goes. My trouble reconciling the bird’s love of solitude with the fact of colonial nesting clears up when I read further down the page: Heron social life, like human social life, varies from season to season. For humans, summer is often the most social time, and the same holds true for herons. In summer they live in colonies and disperse to fish their own waters during the day; in winter they are on their own all the time, becoming territorial about their space. Part-time outgoing and part-time antisocial. A rhythm I could live with.
I mentioned that Dan’s words grew soft and mushy when he began to talk about nature. Perhaps I am too persnickety, too preoccupied with the language that he, or any of us, uses to describe the natural world, but I am in the minority that believes we should watch our words, that false language both reflects and encourages false thinking, that our lives depend on our sentences. I feel particularly strongly that “being in nature” should not be described as some precious or highfalutin experience. After all, didn’t we as a species evolve, along with our words, while spending a million years or so living in the midst of the natural world? And wasn’t our relationship with that world, among other things, quite practical and direct? “Nature” is where the living roots of our language evolved, which suggests that that language should still be able to circle back and describe the place from whence we came. Like the natural world itself, natural language has become fenced-off and attenuated. Our words are zoo animals.
So many people who speak for the wild world seem to feel the need to speak in the voice of the mystic, a hushed, voice-over reverence. We affect this high priest tone, and everyone else is expected to get down on their knees and listen to the whispered wisdom of the shaman. At times like those there’s very little indication that any of us have the quality that many humans find most important for living on earth: a sense of humor. You’d never guess that any of us ever laughed or farted. (Which, it needs to be pointed out, is different than translating Native American myths about trickster coyotes who laugh and fart.)
I cringe when my language grows too flaccid on the one hand—oh, Great Blue Heron, help my soul and keep all sweetness and light—or, on the other, too rigid and devoid of feeling—Great Blue Heron, or Ardea herodias, a member of the order Ciconiiformes.
Lately, I’ve been invited to give a lot of talks, and when I speak people sit listening, rapt, or at least putting on rapt faces. I suppose if I really wanted to make it big I would start spreading the word of doom and intoning the phrase “global warming”