The Line

“The spring over there takes you by the throat, the flowers blooming by the thousands over white walls. If you strolled around for an hour in the hills surrounding my town, you would return with the odor of honey in your clothes.” — Albert Camus

My students know this instinctively, and I’ve been in a bit of awe this week at the teacher-class relationship which has apparently also so blossomed, in spite of my multiple missteps this year, that instead of dragging in and disengaging in favor of honey in their clothes, they throw their cards right on the table: “Ms. S, can we go outside?”

Truthfully, they know they have a sympathetic ear. I try to honor this request whenever I can justify it academically, which is fairly often– one of the joys of teaching English. Nothing like honing the powers of observation while outdoors. Additionally, by happy accident, the novel we are about to embark upon, A Day No Pigs Would Die, begins and ends in April. We are tracking its content under the essential question Why was this novel 17th on the list of Top 100 Books Banned for the decade? as a continuation of our unit on the First Amendment.

The unit I’ll try next, as it turns out, is going to really offer my throat to Spring: it’ll be based on a workshop I’ll take in August through the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, called the Leopold Education Project.

For more and more I am convinced that this is a fundamental need of children that I am (frankly) morally bound to address immediately: In content, to be able to negotiate decent scientific nonfiction with confidence. In communal responsibility, to understand the finite, fragile, and internconnected nature of our resources. And in plain ol’ to get the heck outside– especially in the face of continued and ever-widening acceptance of physical digital isolation.

Such a unit cannot be solid milk chocolate sunlit meadows and daffodils, though. One of the first “wilderness texts” I read and loved was Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and it comes to mind with a vengeance now. Its first image is one of a frog being liquidated from the inside by a preying water bug. Yummy.

I have to square this with the inimitable sense of belonging I can find nowhere else but out in the woods– the same impulse that drives my kids to bombard me with “Can we go outside?”I struggle with it, as Annie does throughout the entirety of Tinker Creek. The late Stephen Jay Gould, the brilliant Harvard biologist, terms this aspect of nature “non-moral” in an essay that uses similar gruesome examples of predator and prey– I don’t know about you, but bugs seem to have cornered this market.

It’s what causes me to balk when folks suggest that a complete moral code, or system of meaning, may be found entirely with nature or nature’s metaphors. Sorry– I can get with cycles and our bodies being made of elements that are only created within stars, but the bugs. You’ve got to explain the bugs. CS Lewis had to write several whole essays on the problem of pain in the animal kingdom to try and do it.

Beyond that, I know well that if I break my ankle in the Adirondacks backcountry winter with no survival equipment, the mountains will look upon me in their loveliness, unmoved, as I fade away. Funny, perhaps, that this might also be the source of my sense of peace. The trees will never say anything as mean-spirited or abusive to me as I will to myself. Such as how I overphilosophize about my units.

Anyway. These are the things I will somehow have to repackage for profitable consumption for 7th graders. Maybe in a pill? Nah– someone’s tried it already.