“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
IT’S RARE I feel steady and free of worry, so I join countless people and comb the sky, ocean, and trees for good omens. If I come across a pearly green luna moth clutching a screen door in Maine, a red-tailed hawk flying over the buildings of the Upper West Side, a silver fox slinking across the road in upstate New York, I interpret these marvelous chance sightings as indications all will be well. Maybe it’s a way to have control in a chaotic world. Maybe when you feel worried, about something like getting a job, there is a pit of uncertainty that is difficult to fill. Perhaps I should have a better meditation practice to handle concern. I don’t know, but if catching a leaf in the air as it falls from a tree makes me feel cozy and that the kids will pass their exams, I’ll take it.
The person who spends the most time in nature in our family is our oldest child, Hugh. When I was approaching this section of the book, he had just come home from tromping through the backcountry of Alaska, and was loitering around the house all tan and scraped up. An astounding realization for me as a parent is that when a kid speaks about something they have discovered and taken interest in on their own, it’s better than watching them take their first steps. For a teenager who seems to want less and less to do with me, Hugh really wanted to talk with me about Alaska. It seemed that the entire state was cozy to him.
“I thought seeing a moose in the wilderness would be cozy, but actually it was eerie and menacing. Moose are enormous, first of all—seeing a two-ton behemoth of a creature standing one hundred feet away from you will give you chills—it shocks you, suddenly all the real stories of how dangerous moose can be surround you. You’re in awe, but you’re frightened. On the other hand, when I saw three grizzly bears up close (they were in the bushes about ten yards away), there was coziness because I could see my own family in them. Bears are so human—you can recognize every emotion in a bear. What we find cozy is what is familiar, so when you’re in the wilderness, especially for me because I live in a city, it’s like being in outer space—so different . . . but seeing emotions I could spot in a bear was surprisingly cozy—and bears were by far the animal we were most warned about.”
“Inside every animal is an individual with its own emotions and needs.”
—NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPHER
I’m a city dweller. I don’t spend a lot of time in deserts and mountains, but I do love reading National Geographic magazine. I hit up their Instagram daily. In the 1970s, most families I knew had collections of NatGeos in their rec rooms and bathrooms. All the school libraries I’ve ever spent an afternoon in had the most recent issue prominently displayed, and if you wanted, there were rows and rows of the iconic bindings waiting for you to use for a research paper. In the technological era, National Geographic has eighty-five million Instagram followers. In 2017, they gained seventeen million followers and had 6.1 million comments and 1.4 billion likes. That feels universal to me. Do we all love it so much because we see ourselves in these creatures? Do we connect to them in a different way than we connect to one another? Is it easier to find comfort in trees and mountain ranges and the animal kingdom? If so, then we must look to it for comfort and solidarity, and we must protect it.
Hugh, just like all of us, struggles with this and that, and that worries me—but on that trip to Alaska, he found solace and wisdom from the most prickly of creatures.
“Another time I was cozy in the backcountry was every time I saw a porcupine. Sometimes you’d be hiking, and boom, there would be a porcupine just ambling along, minding its own business. It was not only really funny and cute, but it made me think that in life—even in really hard times, like a divorce [he said that—I swear] or death, there is always some kind of ‘porcupine’ walking by minding its business—and taking him in will make you feel better. Even in the most wild and unforgiving environments, the world gives you a porcupine, and that’s cozy.”
