An author’s stories make Sara Alexander reflect on the beauty of nature versus the modern world.
I was listening to the radio when the author of a book called Crossings was describing how the modern world was messing up the wild creatures: from fierce predators, like mountain lions, who can no longer get across the highways to their mating grounds, to fragile butterflies munching milkweed pods along the freeways being killed by the turbulence of large passing trucks. And the song birds, it turned out, burst into wildly beautiful and totally new songs when the Shelter in Place radically reduced street noise. Hearing his stories filled me with a sudden longing to inhabit a different world.
There is much I enjoy in our return to Pre-Covid conviviality; eating indoors at restaurants without my winter coat; mingling freely at concerts, museums, and airports; face to face appointments, singing in choirs, hugging the people I love. So much I am happy to recapture.
But not all of it. Am I a curmudgeon? Or just an introvert? But I’d trade, many days, the pleasure of sipping champagne with a pre-concert crowd, admiring women–and men–parading by in fancy ball gowns. I’d happily forego all that hoopla for being stuck at home, glued to the window, watching a tiny hummingbird lay, hatch and feed her brood.
Some days I just yearn to slow down, and some days I want even more: I want to time-travel backward. Further back than the Shelter In Place. Decades back; to a time on the planet when the sound of rain on the windowsill was just cozy and sweet, and didn’t mean the arrival of a devastating “bomb cyclone”; when the smell of smoke meant my neighbor’s barbeque, not wildfires 300 miles away: Even waaayy earlier…before the land became crisscrossed with huge freeways: when the deer and the bison did actually roam, and the mountain lions and butterflies–and even the gnats–could all safely cross the road; could all go where their instincts wanted to go.