Cosmic Outlaws

In the mid-1950s Henry Beston, awestruck by the Great Beach on Cape Cod in Massachusetts spent a year, including a menacing winter, in his tiny Outermost House living on one of the greatest Atlantic beaches. Here he renewed his core beliefs concerning the elements of humanity.

This important quote comes from the foreword of the 1956 edition his book, he Outermost House:

“Nature is a part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man. When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither a completeness and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.”


If we ignore nature our humanity ceases to exist.

Overhead, at night we can view the Pleiades, the brightest star cluster in the sky. The cluster is easily found by using the three stars in Orion’s belt as a pointer to the “thumb smudge” on the right, the Pleiades, visible to the naked eye, and easily examined in detail with binoculars. The 400 stars in the Pleiades, born about 20 million years ago, were never looked upon by the eye of a dinosaur, for the great beasts had disappeared for 35 million years, when these young nuclear furnaces took form. The point being that the beauty of the Pleiades is there for the looking. It is a vision that should not be left only for astronomers. It belongs to everyone. We only need to care enough to look up.

As to the wind in the grass, the pounding surf on the Great Beach, and the other simple measures of nature, it is our loss if we ignore them. Republicans would have us forget these simple, everyday delights in lieu of the fear of science jeopardizing their greedy agenda of commercial development with little regard for the environment and their fundamentalist cousins discounting the ancient age (really new arrivals, astronomically speaking) of the 400 stars in Pleiades to support their anti-science myth of a 6,000 year old universe. Are the Republicans and Christian fundamentalists then the cosmic outlaws of which Beston writes?

Beston tells us that beside nature being part of our humanity, humanity is part of nature. They are inseparable and we ignore their commonality at our own peril.

The Nature We Ignore

Wherever we live there are probably those small streams we pass every day on the way to work, school, or shopping that we take for granted. Some of these are the same types of creeks that intrigued us as kids. Fish, frogs, snakes, raccoons, skunk, deer, muskrats, beaver, arrowroot, skunk cabbage, willows, reeds, and sometimes just a lot of dark mud kept us busy. There is a stream, Black Creek, near my home that in places fits the bill. It eventually flows into the Hudson River where herring hunters net and hook the spawning fish for salting for human consumption or stocked in aerated live wells for use as striped bass bait on the Hudson. In many places it is thin water cutting through brush and meadows.

At the point where Black Creek runs under New Paltz Road, now closed in sections due to flooding over a year ago, the stream is about wide enough for two canoes to pass each other with little room to spare. To the north, the creek winds through an area of brush which overhangs the banks. In the spring it is a haven for large chain pickerel prowling the brush edges for food. I’ve hooked several large pickerel fishing from the narrow road, but never landed one because they skillfully used the brush to quickly foul my line and break off. They seem very adept and practiced in using the brush.

Two years ago I stopped at the road crossing to check out the small pool on the south side of New Paltz Road. A small rocky outcrop juts into the creek just before it flows beneath the road. It was there I spied a large blacksnake – couldn’t decide if it was a racer or ratsnake – about five feet in length that had thrown body coils around and was attempting to swallow a foot-long brown bullhead headfirst. High and dry, the snake and the bullhead struggled on the outcrop as I watched. The fish resisted the swallowing procedure by expanding its thorny fins making it more difficult for the snake to swallow. The snake was equally persistent as it tightened its coiled grip on its prey. The snake, trying not to have wasted its precious energy, worked hard to expand its jaws around the fish’s spiky frame, but it just wasn’t happening. As an outside observer I saw the contest as an inevitable draw. In violation of the “prime directive” of not interfering I grabbed the snake in its midsection – not the best point of attachment -- and caused it to release the fish, which quickly flopped its way back into the creek. In turn, the blacksnake lashed out at me in a series of defensive strikes until I dropped it into the pool to swim upstream out of sight.

This is nature in clear view. The fact that creeks like Black Creek are small and common tends to drive them into the realm of the disregarded with little practical use.

Black Creek is typical of so many small waterways we ignore and take for granted. Many times the result of our apathy is that the stream becomes a dumping ground for our household waste such as old tires, discarded furniture, toilets, shopping carts, and other candidates for landfills. Black Creek hasn’t suffered this fate yet, but once we turn our backs on these small everyday resources it’s easier for people who have little regard for them in the first place to use them as their personal dump sites. Once this attitude strikes a stream or wetland, it is abandoned, marked as wasteland, and forgotten, forever losing its natural appeal. If we don’t appreciate these common, undeveloped natural places we lose them. And it’s our own fault.

(To view previous blogs click on 2010 archived bogs)