Do We Need to Trade in Nature?
Our old house in the urban suburban area of north Ballard was unusual: it had a lightly forested back yard, and it lay half a block from a major trailhead which took you to the beach and an expansive woodland park. Birds were so numerous that at times you couldn’t hear yourself think because of the grand spat taking place among the crows. When seagulls showed up in the yard we knew a storm was coming soon, rolling in off Puget Sound. Raccoons hunchbacked around the yard at night, testing to see if they could lift our garbage can lid and raid the contents. Squirrels darted from branch to branch and ran the utility wire like tight rope walkers on speed, all the way up onto our roof. Every spring, we were visited by owls who who-who’d their way through the night like specters. Increasingly frequently, coyotes appeared in the street below our yard, always solo, looking both lost and on a mission. We were surrounded by more wildlife than we ever would have imagined in this Seattle neighborhood just a twenty minute drive from downtown. The consequence was that we absorbed their presence into our every day life. These urban-suburban creatures became our background music and our home-owning companions.
One of my biggest wonderings, when we moved to our downtown apartment, was about these animals: not the ones we were leaving behind, as I knew they would simply keep living their lives, and would absorb whomever bought our house and chose to live there into their own everyday routines. But instead about the wildlife and nature we were moving to. Would there even be any? Seattle is a seagull city as opposed to a pigeon one. They were more likely the birds you’d see on the pavement outside Pike Place Market, tearing apart some morsel with their curved yellow beaks. But would we see any seagulls twenty six stories up? Would we awake to the sounds of any animals at all? Would our thick windows insulate us even from the sound of rain on glass? Had we entirely traded the calls of birds for the sound of cars and sirens? It was a trade off we were willing to make for awhile, but I wondered if we’d even have to make it.
The answer so far has shown itself through the windows. From twenty six stories up, we see both Puget Sound and Lake Union. We see the entire south side of Queen Anne Hill, with its surprisingly large number of deciduous trees in this state of evergreens. We see rooftop gardens and one small swath of green down on the street. We see the lawns of Seattle Center. But most of all what we see is the sky. When we stand at the windows we see everything. But when we sit, our angle is such that the windows frame the weather: clouds, smears of rain, unbroken grey, picture-book fluffy white clouds on perfect blown-glass blue. Our nature neighbor has become this west, north and east-facing sky. Because it’s Washington, that sky, even when we’re seated, also includes the curved and pointed tops of mountains: Olympics to the west, and Cascades to the east.
And so we’ve begun a relationship with the sky. It’s the first thing we see in the morning, and it’s the last thing we look out at at night. As a Washington native I’m well-versed in the myriad shades of white and grey which exist here, but now I see there are ever so many more than I’ve ever known. It’s a different angle on a sky I thought I knew, and a different lense on the people/environment relationship. The other day Spring flung its robes around, creating beautiful chaos: sun, clouds, rain, sun, and, finally, hail. Before we would have rushed out onto our house’s deck, stretched our hands out, and felt the icy pain of the pellets. We would have looked down to see the effect of the hail: the accumulation. But the other day we looked out. We looked up. Hail, when viewed well before it hits ground, looks exactly like snow. We were up in the midst of its fall, instead of at the end of it. I love watching hail pile up on the ground so much that it looks like snow. But seeing that it looks like snow while it’s falling was strangely reassuring. Snow looks gentle, wafting down as it does, while hail, so I thought, looked rushed. Sometimes it looked violent. But it’s only when it makes impact with something that that’s the case. Before then it’s just falling, just like snow. And I don’t know of many people, at least those in mild-weathered Seattle, who look at falling snow and think of pain, or destruction, or violence. Instead we say, “It’s snowing!” Now, living here well above the ground, I can see we’ll be saying, “It’s hailing!” too.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere; I know it.
And one more thing: you do hear birdsong when you live in a high rise: lots of it, in the morning, as the birds perch on the sills and roof, chirping their good morning from any place they choose to land. — Come to think of it, there’s probably a lesson in that, too.
