This past Thursday morning, my little town of Hillsdale was hit by a severe thunderstorm that caused a lot of damage in the town, including on my college’s campus. I spent part of Thursday morning driving around, just looking at the trees down and observing the effects of the power outage. This post springs from those observations.
It was saddening to see the big, beautiful trees wrecked and fallen around the College’s campus. Large oaks and maples don’t just grow in a day, after all. I do not know how old some of the thick and tall trees are in the Hillsdale area, but I imagine that they have “seen” a lot of history, “watched” for decades (or centuries) as the world spins and changes around them, nations rage and tumble, and people and students come and go. Now, those magnificent and ancient trees are gone, living only in memory and the ever-fading vision of the mind’s eye. Sure, they are “only” trees, but time and time’s ruins are not things to be taken lightly.
These past few weeks, my daily walk or run has included the nearby Oak Grove Cemetery and part of the Baw Beese Trail system next to it. Naturally, I was particularly angered to my core—at Nature and the universe at a minimum, I think—by the mangled trees that I observed in that dear cemetery. I cherish what those trees, when they stood, represented—sentinels amidst the passage of time, sturdy and sure in their aims while processions of life and death rolled on beneath each funeral day. I do not know if the shattered trees crushed any gravestones or marred anything else in the cemetery, but if they did, that would be sadder yet. Sure, stones can be repaired, flowers re-laid, and trees re-planted. The mess in the cemetery nevertheless felt like an affront to the beauty of life and the dignity of the human person.
Let me explain that further.
What I have often contemplated as I have walked through the cemetery this summer, is the humanity and “specialness” behind each of the gravestone markers. I know basically none of their stories, yet the names on the stones were once real people, who lived, loved, and struggled in this world—people who should not be forgotten, as each one of them existed once in a community and impacted real “somebodies” in a unique way, for good or ill. Each of them mattered and matters, simply because they were human—because they were humans who knew the same triumphs and challenges as any of us today. Their plights in life and their ends in death were ones common to humanity and the human condition, ones that should resonate with all of us mortals. So, needless to say, the fact that the “laws of Nature and Nature’s God” can just erase and bring to shambles—seemingly indifferently and unseen by most people—the graves and evidence of such real lives bothered me. Life should be more precious than that. Or, at least, a feeling of that gnaws at me.
Sometimes you just want to scream at God and Nature and rail against the corrupted, sinful, fallen version of Creation that we exist in and that so desperately needs renewal, such that death and suffering of all, especially of the most innocent, can at last be finished.
Such emotions reminded me of some lines from a short story by the American Naturalist writer Stephen Crane, called “The Open Boat.” In the story, four shipwrecked men battle the turbulent sea to reach the shore, where they believe that they see rescuers. To the sailors’ dismay, the sea seems to taunt them, allowing them close enough to land that they can hope to reach safety, but simultaneously threatening to bash their dingy against the rocks should they take their opportunity and row closer. In providing this conundrum or “catch-22,” Nature looks as though it does not care at all about the justice of the situation and regards man and man’s efforts as nothing. It is Crane’s description of man’s response to Nature’s coldness that echoed in my mind:
“When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers.”
Stephen Crane, The Open Boat
I also had no “temple” at which to rage for the destruction of the trees and for the apparent arbitrariness with which the wind had broken them, nor any means of retribution for the perceived wrongs. Both strong, old trees and younger, conceivably-weaker trees had perished. Both fallow and filled cemetery plots had felt the impact of the fractured limbs and trunks. Nature was indifferent.
Fallen trees, of course, are enormous and visible reminders of the fragility of life and the curse of decay that is upon all of Creation. You cannot ignore one of them if it is in your path, and the loss of one creates an obvious hole in your line of sight.
Not all of the casualties of the world are so apparent. That does not mean that the smaller ones mean less though. Far from that.
As I walked on the Baw Beese Trail that Thursday morning, seething internally at the destruction around me, I came across what I thought was the most sobering sight of all: lying on the path in front of me was a goldfinch nest, with three perfectly-formed, almost-fledged baby goldfinches strewn there, dead. One young goldfinch looked like it had survived the first impact when the nest fell from the short tree above it, as that bird was several feet away from the other two—but dead, all the same. The tragedy of the situation was multifold.
Had the storm occurred just a few days later, the finches may have been of flying age and would not have been at the mercy of the nest to protect them. The very thing that was supposed to keep them safe—their nest, alongside their mother, presumably—was what held them there, helpless, while the storm raged and ultimately catapulted the nest to the ground. Time was of the essence. Nature was indifferent.
Had I gone on a walk earlier in the day and stumbled across the nest just a bit earlier, who knows, maybe I would have found them still alive? Perhaps it was not the nest’s fall that killed them, but rather the cold and chill of the rain or the smoldering heat of the asphalt upon which they fell and lay exposed for hours. My decisions had consequences. Nature was indifferent.
Had the tree been in a different location, the nest may not have fallen at all. You see, the tree that the nest came from was still okay. It was the tree behind the nest’s tree that had succumbed to the storm and toppled, with just a few of its many branches fatefully whacking into the tree that actually held the nest, enough to dislodge the nest while leaving the rest of that now-empty tree standing. The birds were not even victims of their mother’s choice (or more likely, her instinct) to build the nest in that little tree; they were victims of other circumstances, the casualties of another’s action. Nature was indifferent.
Sure, goldfinches are just birds. They do not come close in value to that of a human life, certainly. And, many birds and animals and people die every day—why take notice of these at all? I may be an idiot to have spent so much thought on the demise of those unfortunate birds. Go ahead and call me crazy for being moved by such things. I think I sometimes do feel and care too intensely, and I acknowledge that the simmering anger that causes my heart to swell and my fingers to tremble, even now as I write this all and contemplate the state of life, may be too great. Indeed, I may be too sentimental of a person and have to work on the ordering of my loves properly, to take note of a quintessentially-Hillsdalian goal.
However, I think—no, I hold—that what I saw in the goldfinches and in the cemetery and in the trees was something that everybody should take to heart:
Life is life.
The loss of an innocent life or a life at all is significant. It means that something is terribly wrong with the order of the universe, that something is just “not quite right” with the world in which we live. We ought to mourn for people who are gone and—within reason, of course—for anything else that still bears the stain of death and Adam’s curse. Even goldfinches. And we ought to long with every sinew of our hearts for that day when all is made new.