As apples fall they occasionally impale themselves on the green wire fence that Wes constructed to keep the dogs out of my cutting garden. It isn't a fence for aesthetic purposes; it's more about controlling the dogs and in a way controlling the plants. Along with the fence, he also constructed a raised bed out of thick lumber that is intended to keep the flowers in and the grass out (field-notes 10/19).
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Photo by Wes Reid
20 Oct. 2014 |
These apples must fall with a lot of momentum because usually they impale themselves to their core. Some even end up on lower rungs of the wire fence. I spend a lot of time outside but I have never seen this happen.
An apple just fell. I heard it but didn't see it. The sound of an apple falling is unique: it starts with a rustling in the drying leaves that gets progressively louder, then ends with a thud when it hits the ground or the neighbor's back patio or the wooden fence, or a lighter thud if it hits a plant underneath (field-notes 10/21). Oddly, of the thousands of apples that have fallen, I've never seen one fall.
I started counting the impaled apples; the number reached seven before they started falling from the fence. It seems that the flesh of the apple softens enough over time for the apple to break in half and slide to the ground. I have found the severed pieces decaying in the rich soil at the base of the fence nestled in the grass that has found its way into my flowers.
The fence was not constructed to keep apples from the soil, but, as I've been watching the apples and the grass that has found its way into my flowers and the flowers that have found their way into my grass, I began thinking about my desire to control nature, to shape it, to make it look the way I think it should look. Last week Wes Reid wrote about how a farmhouse can be "taken back by the land." He was referring to the power of nature and how our efforts to control nature are often short-lived and a bit futile. I would go so far as to say our attempts are often arrogant (and I am part of this effort).
We, Homo sapiens, tend to think we are bigger and badder and more powerful than all living beings. We are the rulers of Earth. I guess in some ways we are but...
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Photo by Wes Reid
20 Oct. 2014 |
I was thinking about all this when a
Ted Talk came on the radio. On this show, Louise Leakey, a paleontologist, was talking about the history of humans on earth. She said one way to think of our history is to use a 400 sheet roll of toilet paper. Unroll the toilet paper in a line (a long line). Leaky explains that if we see the sheets of paper as the age of the earth, the first aquatic life would appear on the 240th sheet. She goes on to say that dinosaurs would appear about 19 sheets from the end (that represents now). The dinosaurs would disappear about five sheets from the end. And then we have us, the mighty Homo Sapiens: "Our story and place on the timeline as upright walking apes begins only in the last half of the very last sheet. The human story as Homo sapiens is represented by less than 2 millimeters of this, some 200,000 years" ("Louise Leakey..."). Our existence is a tiny speck in the picture of this planet and yet
we think we are the it of all itness (field-notes 10/21). Perhaps our existence will last a bit longer if we learn to be humble, to work with our surroundings (like the apples and the grass) instead of trying to control and shape those surroundings.
Works Cited
"Louise Leakey: A Dig for Humanity's Origins." TED. Feb. 2008. Web. 26 Oct. 2014.
Reid, Wes. "Third: The Pear Tree." Hexagon. Blogger. 18 Oct. 2014. Web. 26 Oct. 2014.
