The communicative functions of a rattlesnake’s tail, or the geometric series of burrows it crawls out of before being killed by a settler’s spade; which is more emblematic, to a reader? Which feels more instinctively natural, and which is more shaped by the fact that most beings are social? Is the natural a social fact or does it exist, a being unto itself? 

I remember a day with my father and aunt and cousins and grandmother. We drove up to the mountains, parked the cars in some gravelly little parking corner, and descended down a slope to a giant man-made lake, getting close to nature. It wasn’t all that giant anymore though, it used to be much bigger; I could remember from the last time, a few years before, that we had gone to that lake, all of us, together, the same as this time. It must have evaporated from the summer heat, or just not been filled enough… is this what global warming does to us? Where had the rain gone? 

We descended the steep slope, me and the aunts and the cousins, and tried skipping stones across the lake. We progressed to just chucking rocks into the lake to see who could make the biggest splash, and from there it turned into a flurry of javelin throwing with abandoned sticks. Two sticks landed atop one another in a cross shape, and the Jesus of the Lake was born. I wonder how far those sticks floated out, before coming back to shore. Isn’t that odd? How no matter how far out you throw a piece of wood, no matter how far it drifts, so long as it doesn’t rot to pieces and get eaten by fish, it will always find its way back to shore, back to the other trees? Do sticks stick together, or is it just our imaginations? They were once alive after all, sprouting leaf buds and waving merrily at each other with their leaves before they left the trees. I have always loved sticks and unlike words, sticks and stones have never hurt me.

I have a large collection of sticks and stones overflowing from my room, burbling down the stairs and cascading into the yard. They're more than just pets; I even remember eating rocks. Not large stones, or chunks of granite and marble that would crack your teeth, but sweet little tiny rocks that are used for xeriscaping and all the other things involving very tiny rocks. Red rocks. Not gravel. Little red rocks that you could grab a handful of, little red rocks that seemed to be made of hundreds of grains of sand, rather than a solid, crystalline structure. Little red rocks that you could take home, wash, and intend to eat but forget and still have them sitting on your table long after you brought them home, long enough to nearly forget where they came from. Not as in their natural geological origin, but the place you picked them up from before bringing them home. They tasted nice. I’m not quite sure what they tasted of. Stardust? 

I would wash them, with soap, who knows what was on those rocks, and I would wait for them to dry, or sometimes just eat them wet. When dry, and wet (but in a slightly different way), they did break up into grains of sand, they would crunch between my teeth, probably sanding them, maybe not, I don’t know the hardness of those rocks relative to teeth, and wouldn’t irritate my throat at all when swallowed, which is part of why I liked them, even though I almost never swallowed the remaining granules. They were too precious. Most of the time, I just gathered them to the tips of my tongue, wiped the tiny pile of rock onto my finger, and, as it dried rather fast, I could sprinkle them into the great oblivion, which consisted entirely of the hardwood floor of my room. Thus, they would go off on their own adventures, returning to stardust, along with all the other dust. Sticks and stones, it seems, stick together in some great social web I can only imagine, not at all like our manicured backyards, cured by man into a semblance of something unnatural, its wild gleam flashing by only when I close my eyes.

When I open them, I see blades of grass, small entirely green, some of them recently chopped by the weedwhacker’s attempt to whack the weeds. Weeds… perfectly good edible plants, just in what we consider the wrong place. Dandelions and mugwort, horsetail and mallow, all medicinal and edible and weedily whacked. When did we begin to see them as unnatural pests in our royal domains? Do we ever see nature for itself, or is it entirely outside our comfort zones? Do we see it whole, do we see it deep? Or do we see it through socialized spectacles? 

I see hollyhocks, giant ones, taller than me, although that’s not much of an achievement considering that I’m a grand 5 feet 1.73 inches, but still, very tall flowers, the topmost buds having bloomed into 5 concentric petals, gradienting from a light pink to a darker reddish color in the center, with bright yellow stamens contrasting them beautifully, running down the stalk a foot or so before encountering dark green, thick, buds that race a few more feet before they are lost in the forest of nothing-but-leaves. In the mini desert biome in the yard, sits a cactus poking its spiky head out of a pile of rocks, blooming with a single yellow flower, with so many petals, a cactus that I don’t know the name of because nowhere in google’s photos of cacti is there a single one that has a flower like this. When did it evade the human gaze and defeat being catalogued to death? 

I hear birds chirping. Or just one bird singing many songs? I think there were more but now there’s this one that isn’t chirping really, it’s more like a weird crow’s caw, producing sets of two chirps every couple of seconds. I can hear leaves rustling in the slight breeze, the breeze that could really be a little breezier because it’s very hot out and I am very hot and can there please be a breezier breeze? I think if I ask hard enough, all of nature will embrace my pleas. I can hear the grass rustling as I walk through it to try and find somewhere shadier. I can taste the air. I can taste the pollen. I can taste salt in the wind though I’m a thousand miles inland.

I can smell the hollyhock, it smells like a flower. I can smell the sunflower, it also smells like a flower. I can smell the general smell of summer. 

I can feel the hollyhock leaf, it feels like a leaf, a little thick at the base, thinner at the tip, as most leaves are. I can feel a blade of grass, the edges are sharp, so is the tip, and the ridge down the middle is not as sharp as I thought it would be; I must have picked a fairly weak blade of grass. I never figured out how to whistle with a blade of grass, I wonder if I can still learn. There’s a kind of grass that’s round, I can feel that too, it’s round. 

What will it be in the future, those days to come, those days when we will see things even more unnaturally as we walk down the path in the woods, down the path most traveled? Murdering nature. The natural entity. The one Emerson seemed obsessed with but couldn’t write about to save his life. He died. I’m not sure whether it’s because of his writing, or natural causes. We’re all going to die too, of unnatural causes. We already are. The last time the quality of the sky was unfettered by pollution was in the 1930’s. There hasn’t been a natural sky for nearly a century. An unnatural terminal illness is sweeping us away that can only be treated if action is taken now, but not by humans. Humans aren’t going to do anything. Humans have created ways to help but most refuse to use them. We are going to die a horrible, miserable death. Smoke and ash is going to fill our lungs, our first-response immune defenses, affectionately called the ozone layer, will crumble slowly, a thick layer of carbon coating us in grime. We will suffocate to death, unseeing, unfeeling, numbed by pesticides designed to inhibit tiny insect nerves, all we can do is hear the whir and thuds of pistons and pumps as factories work on and on and on. Unfeeling. Unseeing. Breathing poison into our air. We will be hooked up to machines, ecmos and ventilators, but we won’t be numb, we’ll burn.

As I write this epitaph, I wonder about nature and my relationship with it. It feels entirely strange to focus on specific parts of nature, being able to reminisce, describe, and ponder feelings and experiences, to recall the nearly forgotten, to experience my senses past the soft but ordinary confines of my bed, and go out into the great beyond; although the sun was a bit too hot, and a 

bit too bright out in the yard and I might have triggered my allergies, but it was still glorious fun. I decided to write in the style that I did, a sort of stream-of-consciousness thing that I thought I’d forgotten how to do, it felt natural and unschooled and I think I captured how I felt about nature in the moment. I wrote without even realizing I had done it, forgetting past sentences as I wrote the next. I wasn’t really writing to myself, I don’t think. I don’t know who I was writing to, or if I was writing to anyone at all. It was nice to not have an audience. It felt natural. And yet it appears that most writing about nature has an audience, authors have specific intentions, and the natural ends up being differently represented by what is seen, interpreted and written. And those who read then experience nature through those new lenses, like a telephone game, forever distorted. 

My thoughts drifted, much like the sticks, to two highly acclaimed nature writers, well-known for their interpretations of nature in the telephone game, who wrote books incorporating nature, just a few decades after Thoreau, that Father of nature writing. The Land of Little Rain, by Mary Austin, and My Ántonia, by Willa Cather, are detailed with vivid descriptions of landscapes and nature to engage an audience and portray a certain viewpoint of life within it. Both writers were human impressionists; they conceived of a reality by including and excluding elements, so that their conception can be intelligible to other humans; a far cry from natural realism, where truth transcends any human apprehension of it. The pictures they paint are reflective of their identities and the conversation that they wish to foreground rather than an entry into the natural world. Mary Austin portrays the desert as a deathly place, but beautiful in the life that flourishes in it, and scorns those that interfere with the ecosystem mindlessly, while Cather describes the lively beauty of small, western towns, with nature as a backdrop to them, focusing on humans and the way it can beneficial to them, but both authors use sensory imagery and emotion to emphasize the beauty of their respective terrains. 

Austin, when describing an entire landscape, focuses on various pieces of the landscape, starting from one aspect and jumping to various others. Austin describes pools of water as “never quite dry, but dark and bitter, -rimmed about with the efflorescence of alkaline deposits,” choosing to rely on scientific vocabulary to paint a rather observatory image. She uses geographical terms to describe the erosion of hills as “more wind than water work,” describing them scientifically, but not in a particularly connected manner, making it easy and interesting to clearly imagine detailed pieces of a landscape; however it is difficult to view the topography of the scene as a whole. 

Austin does not descend into scientific tedium, choosing to invoke emotion using strong, destructive verbiage to describe various facets, such as “hills, rounded, blunt, burned, squeezed up out of chaos, chrome and vermilion painted,” making the scene seem as though it had been aggressively painted via visual imagery, rather than a simple geographical occurrence. In addition, she personifies the storms as “sometimes scar[ring hills] past many a year's redeeming," making the forces of nature seem dangerous, but again, artistic, as they “sculpt” the hills. Austin portrays large landscapes aggressively, yet in a detailed manner, making the land seem beautiful through its chaos. She chooses to use complex scientific vocabulary, while at the same time using straightforward, easy-to-understand sentences, showing how although she does romanticize aspects of her landscape, she cares more about getting to know her subject intimately, reflecting her identity as a writer and her appreciation of realistic nature, rather than painting an embellished overarching scene for the reader, or using the environment as a tone-setter for another character, because the elements of her landscape are her characters, set against the backdrop of the desert. 

Cather, while similarly detailed in her descriptions of a landscape, chooses not to focus on scientific explanations for natural occurrences, rather focusing on the interconnectedness of various objects, natural as well as constructed. Cather starts out from a single point in the landscape, “from the windmill the ground sloped westward, down to the barns and granaries and pig-yards,” and then slopes outwards from it, drawing the point of vision from one object to the rest, then building layers upon layers of objects outwards towards the horizon, from “corncribs,” to “a muddy little pond,” to a “cornfield, and the sorghum patch behind the barn.” Cather also uses contrasting and complementary language to add depth and texture to her scene, having bushes grow “about” the pond, and having a road “climb the gentle swell,” all soft and slow verbiage, immediately followed by cornfields being “the only broken land in sight,” contrasting with the previous gently meandering tone, while still retaining a softness lent by the overarching tone of the paragraph. Cather uses her scenery to set a tone for her writing, romanticizing the frontier that shaped her identity through broad descriptions of imagery, showing how she appreciates a landscape as a whole, without truly seeing the beauty in the individual components. 

Austin portrays the desert as a tragic place, entirely unlivable, but less the fault of the desert, and more that of unlearned humans. She describes how nearby wells of water, close but unnoticed by explorers, are what causes the “tragedy of desert deaths;” poorly equipped humans are killed by their lack of knowledge, as water is indicated by plant life. However she also describes the desert as a deadly place, acknowledging that “every year it takes its toll of death,” and that there is “no help” for any unfortunate circumstances that may befall humans. Austin makes a comparison between the unlearned “sun-dried mummies” and learned Native American tribes, portraying the latter as “deftly” obtaining yucca seeds “for their own delectation,” commenting that one can “trust Indians not to miss any virtues of the plant world,” and emphasizing how the inhospitality of the desert is in part due to ignorance and under-preparedness. Austin essentially references survival of the fittest for humans, portraying the desert as an unforgiving environment, and one that humans must adapt to in order to survive; she stands in awe of the desert and her view favors the co-evolving Native Americans rather than the pioneers. 

Austin is incredibly detailed in her portrayal of desert life, noting very specific characteristics and habits of flora and fauna. Austin describes certain instances and behavior of animal life, choosing to focus intimately on the texture and lifestyle of various species. In one paragraph, she focuses specifically on the Yucca tree, describing them as “Tormented, thin forests,” lending a destructive tone to the desert as a whole and its impact on the yucca, however, she describes most plant life in the desert like this, thinking of the plants as tortured, but only because that is how they must live, how they adapted, showing instead an admiration for their resilience. In addition, she focuses on specific botanical features to the degree one might think she has a degree in the subject, describing “bristles with bayonet pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with age, tipped with panicles of fetid, greenish bloom.” A description tinged with death, but unexpectedly detailed, showing just how much desert life has impacted her and her perception of it; she holds a clear interest in desert life, a life that shaped her identity. Animal life also has to adapt to the harsh constraints, such as a pair of birds who were attempting to cool an egg, rather than incubate it, showing how harsh the desert is to turn natural processes on their heads, the birds “drooped above it, half fainting with pitifully parted bills.” They have such a dedication to keeping the egg alive that Austin is compelled to build them a shade out of canvas, showing how they influence her into admiration for them, then evoking a sense of pity and awe in the reader simultaneously. Austin treats the desert and the death that comes of it not with repulsion, but rather with admiration for the life that has managed to survive for so long in a harsh environment. This explains the way she treats the dead pioneers almost with disdain, as intruders upon a working ecosystem, life that does not belong and that is only brought there by a greed for “wealth.” 

Contrary to Austin, Cather describes specific life with a fictitious, vaguely dramatic flourish. She describes buffalo-peas as “blooming in pink and purple masses” and “larks… their heads thrown back and their yellow breasts a-quiver,” which while seeming vast and beautiful, fails to really describe the life itself, rather treating them as elements to aid in the overall scene and tone of “Sunday indolence.” Cather uses life as a backdrop to human actions and moods, rather than respecting it as it is. Instead of flora and fauna in her scenes, Cather chooses to represent vast swaths of interconnected life as a backdrop to human actions; a beautiful backdrop portraying resulting deaths as unfair and a result of a hostile environment, rather than as just. Contrary to Austin, who views the land itself as beautiful and disdains those who wish to take it for themselves ignorantly, Cather describes the Nebraskan terrain as “nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made,” showing how she focuses on the potential for human gain from the land, appreciating the individual aspects of human settlers rather than the pre-existing life. 

Perhaps we need to close our eyes and turn to the poet within to truly experience the mystery of nature, that land that we can only feel, that land beyond our grasp, that land we have

buried in our linguistic graveyards. Our society, the poet with-out has forced us to interpret everything through a lens. Society is the telephone game. Societal constraints, having neat gardens, ‘pruning’ grass. Did you know, a completely flat, green, grassy lawn is an ecological wasteland? You would find but not a single worm, or ladybug, and roly-poly in one. Those seemingly ‘unkempt,’ ‘wild’ lawns are simply the ecosystem desperately trying to knit itself back together. There are supposed to be forests everywhere, natural shrubs and so-called weeds, which proliferate in an attempt to soak up harsh sunlight provided by an endless lawn. They are the first step to re-cultivations. Then saplings, and bushes, which provide shade to the less hardy flora, the not-weeds. They are all society’s pests. The animals, which feed on the flora and take shelter in it. I bet you’ve never seen a happy rabbit frolicking in a ‘perfect’ lawn. There would be nowhere to hide, it would stick to the edges, shunned by society, especially if it was a gay rabbit. Rabbits can be gay, so can fish, and tortoises (including the oldest one alive), and thousands of other observed species, including humans. But no, the natural gayness and various other so-called ‘weeds’ are numbed, burning, by pesticides, and weed-whackers, and whatever mechanisms there are to ‘control’ the weeds- it’s all about control, isn’t it?- creating, writing, showing, the illusion of a perfect lawn, while natural flora hovers just beneath the surface, struggling to claw its way out.