Predetermined Outcome

I hope this response to Michelle’s heartfelt personal essay inspires more of the same from readers. I too found it rewarding to reconsider my “Inspired by Nature” moments, and I think you will feel the same about yours.

I moved to western Connecticut when I turned 5, living a year with my mother’s father while our new house was being built. The population of Connecticut was then half what it is now, and only 25% of us lived in rural areas. Imagine the tranquility. Across our quiet road there was a small pond.

Memory is faulty, especially mine. I have only a few blurry inklings from before then, the clearest one of night sounds in the Bronx: traffic and sirens. But that little marshy pond remains firmly in my mind’s eye. Only the size of a stage, it was home to a pair of mallards and the expected cast of frogs, turtles, and water snakes. Cattails and purple irises lent the set decoration. There was such an abundance of natural life in that tiny theater, it seemed to glow whether the sun reflected off the surface or not. It sure reflected on me. Remembering gives goose bumps; I wanted to be there every day. I’ve seen what happens to Edens like this over the ensuing years, so I’ve never gone to find it again – for fear of adding more melancholy about the environment to that I already carry around.

I came to this “nature lover” state of mind naturally, of course. The childhood pond was the first of many environs that pulled me in, or rather, out. Was it an instinct, one that some possess and others not? My brother is the same. Is it genetic? Our father, while a New Yorker until then, was also a hiker, birder, wildflower enjoyer, and yes, he first took me to the pond. Thanks, Dad. Nature or nurture indeed.

My adolescence included a lot of woods and streams, hills and dales, pumpkinseeds and salamanders. I liked snakes too…weird kid. Then my freshman year of high school began with the Kennedy assassination and ended with Beatlemania, bringing a rousing coda to my forest time (I already had a guitar). You know how high school can change things.

In April of my senior year at UConn, two literature professors suggested Milton’s Paradise Lost might be found – nearby – and we should keep a journal of our search. I’ll always be grateful to Jim Scully and Roger Wilkenfeld for teaching that class. My buddy John had come back from spring break with an old spinning rod, so we went looking for Paradise (accompanied by some awful beer) along the Fenton River. The profs were right! I still hike by the Fenton and can show you the place, a moderately paced run that slows in a dark pocket, deeply shaded by a ledge with overhanging hemlocks. The trout in there were mysteries. I’m not sure we solved any.

Rivers change too, so your guess is as good as mine that it’s still paradise. And time goes by, and you lose touch.

Then some years after UConn, John found me and came by. We went down to my local trout stream, the Pootatuck, where he showed me his fly rod, inherited from his ex-father-in-law. Turned out we were both newly solo, he from a divorce and I from a ‘dis-engagement’. Into the sweet and tumbling waters, he cast the tiniest of feathered trout lures, and my life changed back. The experience revived my latent relationship with the outdoors as well as with a lifelong friend. We’ve been fishing ever since.

“The old stone wall, no more than fifty feet long, encloses nothing and keeps out nothing. Built from thousands of small flat rocks, mostly shale, it doggedly resists time in much the way a sapling resists wind. It flexes – along with the field and the snow and the rain, and the years, until it has now become a natural version of Andy Goldsworthy’s famous stone wall sculpture at Storm King Art Center.” 

but it wasn’t until this century that I engaged with Edwin and Nellie Teale’s home more fully. Hiking led to photos, which led to pencil drawing. Then to Alison Davis’s writing workshops there for CT Audubon. My workshop “conversation” with a Trail Wood stone wall (above) helped land me a volunteer job as blogger-in-residence at Grand Canyon National Park for the summer of 2016, and thus the longest, deepest immersion in nature I’ve ever had. Thank you, Alison.

Instinct or not, there are many people – and sublime places – to be grateful for. This trail has always been mine to follow. Thus, a lot of events that seemed random at the time now seem, well…inevitable.

Happy Trails,

George Jacobi