The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours . . .
—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
FOLLOWING DIRECTIONS we’ve been given for a great walk into the middle of Pinhook, my husband and I reenter the swamp, this time on foot. Most of the roads reaching toward the heart of Pinhook are impassable. We drive in a mile or two on a stable, well-maintained road from the eastern boundary, and park. Carrying binoculars and camera and notepads, we take a tram heading west.
One of the great bodily functions we possess as mammals—as important as intellect, as crucial as movement, as vital as the heart pumping, pumping, or the liver filtering—is the enormous capacity of our senses. Wide-open they are, like flowers. Flower eyes. Flower mouth. The skin an enormous silky flower.
We have only one day for Pinhook, and I want to perceive as much as possible. I am present, tentacles out, ears perked, nose moist.
EYES: The eyes see the red-orange of tannic water seeping across the two-path tram. They see tangling expanses of saw palmetto, bay, fetterbush (March-blooming pink and white), and gallberry. Vines of catbrier. Cascading yellow jessamine, flowering furiously. Tracks of raccoon. The eyes watch for bears. Within a mile we count three piles of bear scat, stuffed with indicators of their carnivory—fur, crushed bones, and small claws, the largest of which is about one-half inch.
EARS: In the terrific silence that belongs only to nonindustrialized places, we hear, ahead of our passage, whirring wings of grasshoppers and soft plops of cooters plunging off logs into ditch water. We hear our own pant legs swishing together, and the low squelch of our rubber boots.
MOUTH: At first our tongues retain the residue of sharp cheddar cheese eaten in small chunks on blue-corn chips before we set out. Washed by the clean taste of our farm’s well water. The dry grassiness of broom sedge swirling from mouthfuls of air.
SKIN: The sun burning our arms, which are tender from a winter mostly indoors and weeks of almost constant cloudiness. Wind against our necks. The cotton of long pants. An occasional mosquito, piercing.
Walking along, not hungry or anxious or tense or fearful, I suddenly smell an odor that reminds me of the muskiness of rattlesnake. Yet it isn’t quite like snake. Sometimes plant odors resemble animal ones—like the weeds that when trampled replicate the stench of cat urine. For a few steps this bushy odor is real and distinct, a fecund smell of deterioration that is not death but fertility. A wan cloud of redolence.
“Do you smell that?” I ask my husband. I have a gut feeling. Hairs stand up on my arms.
“No,” he says at first, but trusting me, stops. I back up a few paces, sniffing the air like an animal.
“Now I smell it,” he says. “It’s sort of like mothballs.”
Could this be the odor of bear? We stand still, scanning the thickets around us, and listen. We smell again and again. We taste the air.
Only the motoring of dragonflies and the bright fluttering of tiger swallowtail butterflies interrupt the silent motionlessness of Pinhook Swamp. But some smaller sense, the one that prickles hairs on the backs of necks, that stirs like dislodged pebbles at the bases of brains, becomes known to us: in this case the sense of the presence of another animal, not our kind, and not very far away, protecting his or her own safety. What we smell we will never know. Species we know not. Big or small we know not. We walk on.
NOSE: Aroma of swamp. Sun-cured moss. Trickle of jasmine. Bear. Don’t I wish the olfactory senses were sharper.
Wouldn’t I wish all my senses to be keener?
Our senses function for safety and pleasure. They gather information that when fed to our brains drives most of our actions. Yet much of what we accomplish in our fervor to industrialize and technologize our world we do at the expense of arch sensual abilities. When we smoke cigarettes we dull our senses of smell and taste. Too long surrounded by the sameness of gray walls and square rooms, we dull our sense of sight, as well as our abilities to detect variations in patterns and colors and motions. With loud machinery, the firing of artillery, and high-decibel music, we impair our sense of hearing.
I am of course not forgetting the genetic or accidental losses of certain senses, which are beyond our abilities to heal. I am speaking here of preventable loss.
Ridding our environment of all potential dangers diminishes our need to hone our sensual detectors. Thus our capacities shrink. If we kill all diamondback rattlesnakes, we will never have to know what a rattler looks, smells, or sounds like. If we kill all alligators or red wolves, we will not have to recognize the signs of their presence. Most of what we have done to the land as agriculturists, as industrialists, as technologists, and as a people understandably terrified of harm diminishes the land, and thus diminishes ourselves. In this senselessness how will we recognize danger?
Nor do human sensual powers end with the primary senses. The sixth sense of intuition, along with, I believe, dozens of other senses, we have neglected. Sense of direction. Sense of longing. Sense of pitch. Sense of obligation. Sense of danger. Sense of being watched. Sense of another’s presence. Sense of hostility. Sense of time. Sense of place. And so on. These are our evolutionary birthrights, and I believe we are losing them as we strive diligently to sanitize and safeguard and barricade our lives, so that we are never hungry or scared or drowning or eaten alive, or even bitten or stung, or sick. In doing so we become weaker creatures.
I am not interested in lost powers, but I am fascinated by a life that hones all human powers, even those we have almost lost completely. Especially those.
We know if it weren’t for the road we wouldn’t be here. There is such a tangle on the ground beyond the road. I cannot fathom what this place would have looked like had I seen it 150 years ago. The trees were taken. They have started to come back. Sunshine bathes everything, with water for miles below—a low sheet of running water, beautiful red organic water—and that middle space, to the height of a very tall human, is a tangle of thorny green. This is not the savanna of our early brain, birthplace of the human race, but a ragged labyrinth beyond our comprehension. Not what we evolved with.
Can’t go over. Can’t go under.
Got to go through.
Headlong is the way the bears travel, in tunnels plunged through the bristling shrubbery of titi and gallberry, where everything is set to prickle the tender human skin. Where there is not even a place to lie down. Yet we know animals live here, by the tracks of raccoons and piles of bear scat, and once the track of a bobcat on the tram, and turtles falling, falling. As if the sight of a human infuses them with terror, and they must dive into the oblivion of the tannic water.
We stay on the road. We turn right, then right again.
“Which way is south?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you tell which way is east by the sun?”
“Behind us, I think.”
After a long way, we turn right again.
“There’s a Carolina wren.”
“Not much birdlife.”
“I like this candyweed.”
“Are you scared out here?”
“No.”
“Do you think this is the way back, all this turning?”
“I think so.”
“We can always get back to the car. Turn around. Left, left, left.”
“Is it A.M. or P.M.”
“I can’t tell.”
Preserving the wilds of Pinhook means that perhaps we have learned something about moderation, that human vision may have been broader than we thought, that human genius considered the bounds, always, of our biological selves. So that the push toward a bionic man or woman, or toward robots or remote-controlled craft, was an attempt to escape the bounds of our biology, which is not possible. We accept the knowledge of our destructibility and the pain, both carnal and psychic, connected with that understanding.
With the saving of Pinhook, we are saying we are willing to accept our mortality, our humanness, our need to forage and feed and drink and breathe and shit. We are saying we are willing to accept the necessity of our sensuality.
“More is required of us than simply being swept along,” Mahatma Gandhi said. Are we going to watch our culture and the world fracture and shatter? Or for the sake of the human being inside us all, capable of so much, are we going to stop the freight train of environmental destruction, much of it caused by corporate industrial globalization, and begin to remake the world? Are we going to begin to repair the damage?