AND THE COYOTES WILL LIFT A LEGAND THE COYOTES WILL LIFT A LEG

I wish I had said it first. Someone else did—who knows who?—and won’t get credit for it. Spinners of clever quotations share the relative immortality of their words sometimes; platitude-makers, almost never. Even so, I still wish I’d said it first: “nature bats last.”

On the other hand, maybe this isn’t a platitude. The thing about a “good” platitude is that it should be self-evident. I’m not at all sure that “nature bats last” is self-evident to very many people at all. Perhaps it’s just a platitude for pantheists, a byword for Earth First!ers and others who sometimes seem as willing to exclude humans from their concept of nature as most people are to neglect the other species. In which case, it misses the point altogether.

The point of a platitude, as I see it, is to preach a point to people who already know it but act as if they don’t. I doubt that those who need to know that nature bats last have any clue at all as to what it means, even lack a cosmology in which it could make any sense. That renders it an esoteric idea, an impossibility for a platitude. I guess it isn’t one after all.

An aphorism, then; a verbal balm, a tonic thought. It was meant, of course, as a warning, a shaken finger; but falling on mostly deaf ears as such, it recycles pretty well as a curse of revenge.

What does it mean? “Nature bats last.” It means, we may be in the lead now, the natural world may seem the underdog and down in points as well. But when we’ve finished our act, hit the grand slam, or struck out (which may be the same thing), nature has an extra inning coming—all to herself, unopposed, unending. No one will be keeping score anymore, and guess who wins?

Let me be clear from the start. This is not a threat. I am not writing another admonishment to repent before the day of ecological reckoning. It is late in the day for us to clean up our environmental act, and I am assuming we will not. On the local scale (as in Willapa) and increasingly on the larger, the major decisions have already been made, and we can only live with them. But I’m not preaching doom—what a waste of time to preach the inevitable! We all die; all species die. The only question is, when will we pull ourselves off the respirator?

To me, nature’s batting last is neither a warning nor a threat. It is a cheerfully flip recognition of a certainty. And a comforting certainty it is: imagine, the glory of the universe going on and on, free at last of the bad bet that was man on earth! When John Lennon wrote “Imagine,” he could have added a verse: “Imagine there’s no people.” My humanism ends where we become so fond of ourselves that we cannot imagine the mortality of mankind.

But supposing, against all odds, we began to run the world right (a phrase that contains in its hubris the seeds of its own defeat)? Couldn’t we then change the batting order? Wouldn’t I at least want to hope for the endlessness of the human race?

Sure. But that’s vain. The best we could do would be to postpone our departure. Any time on for good behavior would just amount to a stay of execution. To think we could indefinitely put off the end of the age of man by acting right toward the earth for a change is like taking up running in dissipated middle age in the hope of cheating death: it might work for a while. You can’t prolong life forever, not for an organism, not for a species. But you can sure as hell hasten its demise.

This is harsh stuff, and there has been some harshness in some of the previous essays. I have criticized and taken account of what I feel to have been mistakes. An ungenerous reader could mutter “Cynic!” and close the book, so near the end. But I am not cynical about humans and the rest of nature. When I insist upon the mortality of all species, including our own, it is not an unhappy thought. And when I invoke that aphorism of uncertain category and origin “nature bats last,” it is in good cheer that I do so. My outlook, ultimately, is not a pessimistic one. But then my frame of reference does not encompass human fortunes alone.

Let’s look at outlook, for nature, humans, and otherwise. I have always been a short-term optimist, by nature. Whether that has a genetic element or comes from example, I cannot know. But I have always believed that more good things were likely to occur than bad. (This may have to do with my rather catholic tastes as to what constitutes “good.”) It is a matter of being open to possibility and aware of serendipity’s whisper. Everyone is invited to serendipity’s picnic, but only a few bother to attend. Positive thinking? Are we headed toward platitudes? It’s more than that. It’s being willing to conspire with the physics of fate (chance, really) to harvest luck from happenstance.

Jung called coincidence “synchronicity” and it happens to us all if we are only aware. Coincidence—happening with. You must be ready to see it and do more than say “wow” when you do. To pluck a plum when you pass beneath the bough, you’ve got to be looking up. To catch the glisten of the green snail beneath the plum tree, you must regard the ground. To capture more good than bad, you scan the whole and, mantislike, snatch the happy moment before it springs away, out of reach.

I am not a fatalist, and when some great coincidence brings me joy I try not to say it was “meant to happen.” Strings of bad “luck” do sometimes befall people, even those who watch for the good. My brother has had a lifelong run of bad breaks, more than his share, while I feel I’ve had more than my fair share of good ones. Stochastically (a word I learned to toss around in graduate school that means “chances are”) one is as likely to be felled by lightning as lifted by the lottery. Life is a lottery. But somehow, seekers after something often seem to get better breaks than others who fail to look around. Or do they simply find more compensations?

Of course, another reason for short-term optimism lies in our ability to apply will and thought and action to effect change in our time. We can create a nature reserve and enjoy it for the rest of our lives. We can vote the bums out. We can live selectively, choosing that which we wish to experience. And there are, after all, far too many pleasures available to be able to sample them all: too many wild and intriguing places to ever visit, people to meet, birds to watch, books to read, symphonies to hear, and so on. The riches embarrass our poor ability to enjoy them. Pessimism in the shortterm is its own punishment, since it vitiates the will and makes one a pawn of circumstance.

Looking out toward the midterm, however, my attitude rotates. Beyond the here and now, a cautiously pessimistic outlook seems only reasonable and realistic. I suppose this means shifting out of my own life and into the many other lives on earth. Speaking of the world, there is no gravity; the earth sucks (whoever said this first probably wouldn’t own to it). My, how it sucks these days. Admittedly the Wahkiakum County Eagle gives one a less jaundiced view than The New York Times might, but I also see the Longview Daily News occasionally, listen to All Things Considered, and watch what the cat brings in. How anyone can be honestly optimistic over the next century, regarding mankind, I cannot divine. I won’t repeat the litany; it’s there for all to see, who read any papers at all, or the walls, between the lines, tea leaves, sweaty palms, tarot cards, or the weather. Even the Bible seems to have it about right, somewhere toward the back (if not in the “to have dominion” part in the beginning).

Come to think of it, the Bible does get it right at both ends. Humans took dominion over the earth, now they face Armageddon. The story is rather circuitous from A to B and the cause-and-effect gets a bit mixed up, but it’s all there. The sad part is that it gives people the idea that someone else is going to clean up after them. If they’re not responsible for the outcome, if they’re not culpable for their mess, how can people be expected to function with the future in mind?

The present and near future could get downright depressing if it weren’t for nature. As John Hay more elegantly put it in his small classic, In Defense of Nature, “What is there to be optimistic about, especially in the face of enduring human perversity? Not a great deal that is predictable; but if enough of us are willing to walk out and meet nature instead of by-passing it, then we will at last belong. And when all is said and done, real stature comes from an attachment to the unknown.”

Yes. And this brings me to the long-term, where for me optimism swings round like a major moon to again eclipse the darker view. Unreservedly, I am optimistic in the long run. Not necessarily for Homo sapiens, whose puny fate fails to concern the cosmos. But for nature, which is everything, the whole to which our greater allegiance belongs. And for the earth, which is all most of us shall ever directly know of the universe, finally to be freed from human bondage.

Here is where I differ from many theists. They see salvation from earthly dross in an afterlife for the soul. I see afterlife as salvation of earthly dross that is the soul. The perpetuation of my matter in crocus, coal, or comet is all I need know about the next act—that atoms continue in nature. We both see something coming that ratifies what has gone before and flenses the flesh of suffering. To them, however, heaven is full of personalities on permanent vacation; to me, heaven is a permanent vacation from personality.

This inability to face the extinction of personality serves as one of the main reasons for the rejection of evolution by some creationists. They are smart enough to see that, if life evolved, it will continue to do so, and that we (body and soul) may not survive the process. So they seek to preserve their cherished selves by pushing fairy tales—as if, by evangelizing hard enough, they could make it so!

The latest version of the creationist credo delivered to my door is a “textbook” that its makers, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, hope to have placed in schools. Entitled Life—How Did It Get Here? (By Evolution or Creation?), this heavily illustrated and simply written tract attempts to convince the reader that evolution is a “lie,” claiming: “We should feel even stronger indignation toward the doctrine of evolution and its originator since the intent is to defraud us of eternal life.”

The “marvelous new era” that this book promises for believers will have peace and plenty and endless health, youth and life for all. Apparently there will be room for endless population growth, because “mankind will have the enjoyable task of transforming the earth into a paradise.” Man’s “loving dominion of animals” (sic) will be a feature, and “the wilderness and waterless plain will exult.” I am struck by the presence, in one of the pretty illustrations of paradise, of a bulldozer. Not my idea of heaven!

Nor is my purpose to make fun. The picture painted is a pretty one, and touching, in a way. But were such beliefs to gain many adherents, I would tremble for the stewardship of the earth.

What incentive could there possibly be to maintain biological diversity if you didn’t believe in its mortality? In the same way, millions trembled on hearing Ronald Reagan speak of biblical Armageddon during the 1984 campaign. If it is inevitable, as foretold, what incentive exists to keep the finger off the button?

Probabilities speak louder than prophecies, but they both speak of annihilation if we carry on the way we have been. I would rather it didn’t happen and support peace (and nonnuclear) activism for that reason. I see no inevitabilities as regards human behavior. However, should annihilation occur, I console myself that nature will persist.

I call this attitude a cosmic optimism. It simply suggests that nature, in the broadest sense, will carry on, having batted last in its minor-league game with us. We played catch for a brief while, dropped the ball, and threw a tantrum; whereupon nature took her big blue ball and went home to repair the scratches and scuffs we’d inflicted in its soft hide. We lost by default, and there were no more games in the season, for our season was finished. It mattered very much to us, but the rest of nature just didn’t care, was rather tired of our company, thought perhaps we’d been a bad recruit to the league of species in the first place, and that she might not try that same experiment again.

That’s supposed to make one optimistic? Let me put it another way, dropping the tired metaphor of a ball game like a high fly with the sun in my eyes (which was my first and last act in Little League). Imagine the sun in your eyes—your lizard eyes—through no smog. Imagine the lakes in your fish gills, fresh, pH 7. Conceive the cosmos untroubled by that spot of bother on earth, as all its peaceful, dumb species go back to their business of life and death and evolution, unperturbed by busy-busy people. I like these thoughts.

It would be dishonest to say that I feel no sadness at the prospect of the passing of humanity. Untellable sadness greets the very thought of it. When I consider the moldering of the last lost manuscript of Mozart; the combustion of the libraries when Fahrenheit 451 is reached early in the firestorms; the tumbling of towers and the crumbling of cottages, I could swoon (if I knew how) with earnest, dolorous regret. But think: all of the sadness in the world belongs to us. When we’re gone, there will be no sadness, for it is a human conceit. So it would not matter, afterward.

The fact is, nature doesn’t care. Only we care. And if we care so much, perhaps we should look for a few good platitudes to guide our critical actions in these days. T-shirts are a fruitful source of sayings: “Extinction Is Forever” is a good one; “We All Live Downstream” is another; and “Share the Earth.”

“Cosmic discipline,” John Hay wrote, “will not allow too much ignorance of what it cherishes.” It is that discipline, finally, that lies at the root of my so-called cosmic optimism (just as our mammoth ignorance of what it cherishes makes me dread what comes next). And the “real stature” Hay mentioned, that “comes from an attachment with the unknown,” I take to mean a buckling-up of our seat belt for the universal ride. Attaching to the unknown can be acceptance of nature, a faith in the course of natural events, even if they entail our own eventual extinction.

Taking satisfaction from such ideas implies a nonanthropocentric viewpoint. Copernicus saw that we weren’t in the middle; why can’t we? The natural world does not revolve around us, it merely tolerates us for a spell. We are indulged, yet we continue to indulge our own earthly xenophobia. Biting the land that feeds us, behaving like bulls in nature’s china shop, and casting clichés across the littered landscape, we run serious risks. I am told the Finns around here had a saying, “You shouldn’t shit in your own house.” Taking it literally, they built their johns outside long after others had brought them in. We not only foul our own nest, we do it in the living room.

I can’t help but keep on quoting John Hay, who employs never a tired phase and whose phrases never tire: “We have been cutting ourselves off, and we are wise to be alarmed. We have not been meeting the earth, we have only been erasing its opportunities, missing its indefinite, healing associations. Suddenly there is a terrible need for a great cognizance of the unity and interdependence of the world, in the sense of both human and natural communities.”

There is another need, among progressive people, to realize that humanism can only take us so far down the agenda of “what,” to quote Lenin, “is to be done.” Beyond that, species-ism takes over. Liberation doesn’t mean a damn in the face of imminent extinction, but if we can arrange a rain check on infinity, liberation means everything.

To return to heaven briefly, the popular idea of deferring it till later does nothing for our sense of obligation to the earth. The naturalist knows that heaven is here on earth (for those whose lives are neither too meager nor too glutted, too shackled or too free, to notice). The traditional view holds that there’s more, and better, where this came from. I prefer to think that this is all we’re gonna get, and it is more than enough, if we take time to experience it and care for it.

Beyond heaven and humanism, an evolutionary view is necessary. Evolution, we find, will adjust in rate and degree to the kinds of stresses imposed upon organisms. Extinctions will occur under stress, but so will resistance evolve, tolerances develop, and tactics adjust. Organic evolution will go on. As the only show in town, it must. Whether it goes on without us is another matter entirely. Eventually, it will.

Leading conservation biologists believe that opportunities may have ended already for significant evolution among large mammals, under the management regimes, stresses, and rarity we impose. Otto Frankel and Michael Soulé, in Conservation and Evolution, argue that this may be the case and that we bear the responsibility of preserving evolutional potential for as many species as possible. Whether we give them a chance to get back on the world by getting off ourselves, or take them with us one way or the other, will soon be seen. We still have some limited powers to affect the outcome. What stands certain is that we shan’t arrest evolution much more without arresting our own.

Whether we choose to remain is our concern, and ours alone. Nature doesn’t care. We are but a drip of spittle on the whisker of a beast in a constellation we can’t even see. Nature has a right to care, and a sagging sack of grievances against our tenancy, but she doesn’t. Nature gets along. Which brings me around at last to Willapa.

In the ravaged land through which we have been rambling, rarities have been lost, common creatures rendered rare, and the productivity of a great forest diminished for ages. The big trees and the bears are nearly gone, and the humans, many of them, are following. But certain species are doing just fine. Natives like the salal and the coyote thrive in the logged-off land, finding opportunities for expansion that they never dreamed of in the old-growth forest. Aliens such as the gaudy foxglove and the dowdy opossum proliferate still more, covering the clearcuts and the roads with their magenta blossoms and gray hides, respectively. These organisms evolved under stress; they know adversity and eat it up.

The weeds do it even better. Farmers with their sprays and archaic weed boards with nefarious powers battle gamely the tansy ragwort, Canadian thistles, and Himalayan blackberry. They make inroads with their powerful poisons. But make no mistake: the weeds will win: nature bats last.

In a sense, all life in the ravaged land is a bunch of weeds—survivors, coping and adapting under adversity. That goes for tenacious families who find something else to do when the creameries go under and the timber companies pull out, as well as for abandoned cats foraging at the local dump, and for huckleberries that clothe the clearcuts as soon as anything can.

Whether or not the weedy, faithful humans choose to remain, nature will not be crowded out, even here. Tonight I watched a possum waddle across the yard and up the slope to the road; every night, it takes what it will from our compost. We look forward to the marsupial’s visits and hope it never has a date with a Dodge. I appreciate possums in the same way I admire starlings and cabbage butterflies and reed canary grass—not as native species, but as tough, clever, evolutionarily and ecologically astute organisms—as survivors, against all we dish out.

Last night the coyotes called by the covered bridge: first one tight, metallic yip, then a tentative croon, followed by five minutes of falsetto chorus in many parts, all countertenor and tremolo. “We are here,” they say; “we’ll eat your apples, your voles, your cats, the afterbirth of your calves; we’re here, we set your dogs to barking, we intend to multiply. We are here to stay.” That’s what they say. Then silence, as they go about their wise, tenacious hunt for whatever there is. No other animal is more systematically or aggressively persecuted across the West. The coyote: evolving, getting better all the time, under heavy pressure.

In his book Giving Birth to Thunder Sleeping with His Daughter, Barry Lopez recounts a wide array of North American Indian tales of coyote. Coyote as trickster and in many other incarnations emerges from the pages as from the ancient campfires. I suspect one of those storytellers originated the last aphorism I wish to use.

Anyway, whether ancient or modern, it is a good one, and after publication someone will write to say they said it first. Watch for a credit in the second edition, should I be so fortunate. The saying: “When the last man takes to his grave, there will be a coyote on hand to lift his leg over the marker.” The image should be struck on a new coin, with Charles Darwin on the other side; not negotiable, but a good-luck coin to remind us of change and evolution, and of creatures that will be happy to adapt if we ourselves cannot.

The land has been hurt. Misuse is not to be excused, and its ill effects will long be felt. But nature will not be eliminated, even here. Rain, moss, and time apply their healing bandage, and the injured land at last recovers.

Nature is evergreen, after all.