My reflection spot is in the woods behind the tennis court. After wandering through the woods, my boots crunching over gravel and snow, I settled on an upturned piece of a log where three gravel paths come together. I sat and fidgeted and tried to think of something to say, restlessly demanding of myself to come up with something worth blogging about.
I was reminded of one of my favorite places back home, Lake Conestee. Lake Conestee is a small nature park near my house. All through high school I volunteered there with my environmental club, where we fought a never-ending battle against trash and kudzu. If you kill the vines of kudzu it will grow back. Instead you have to dig deep into clay and yank up the node, whacking at the roots with metal tools. It was exhausting and itchy, but satisfying. When I first got my car I would go to that place a couple afternoons a week on my way home from school. I would climb the trees to do homework and walked on the trails till I could find my way without a map. At the heart of the park the sound of cars became indistinct. Although I didn’t put a name to it at the time, this was my reflection spot.
Sitting in the woods on campus I contrasted the places in my mind. The vegetation was similar, similar trees and shrubs. Behind the tennis courts the cars are not muffled, you can see them flashing down the road and when you turn away you hear them whip past periodically. But, when I force myself to pay attention, I can hear the sound of a woodpecker and the wind blowing through the trees. It takes a conscious effort to notice nature on campus.
From where I was sitting I could see a fallen down tree chopped up by a chain saw. It had fallen across the path and lay with its roots unearthed and sticking up into the air. The trunk had been chopped by a chain saw, broken disjointedly into sections. It wasn’t until I had been sitting there for a while that I realized that the wood I was sitting on had once been a part of the tree, the part that had lain across the path but had been moved across to allow people to cross.
I though about the tree that had fallen outside of Lakeview during a snow storm just a few weeks before, and how quickly it had been taken care of and removed by maintenance. What would our campus look like if we didn’t hire people to take care of its upkeep? If we allowed the grass to grow brown, the kudzu to crawl in and the bodies of dead trees to decompose where they lay? How quickly would we return to a state of nature?