Happy Googles to You!

Who knew that nature sucked?

I sure didn’t.

I mean, I knew that I liked being indoors. I knew that I’d miss air conditioning and the internet, but I thought nature would be all right. It was just for a weekend anyway – actually a four-day weekend, but I survive five days of school each week, so I didn’t think it would be a big deal.

I mean, four days of nature couldn’t be worse than school, right?

Wrong!

If I’d known how wrong I was, I would have told my mom I had a sore throat. I’d have come down with sudden violent constipation. I’d have faked seizures. I’d have done something – anything! – to have gotten out of this stupid field trip!

Trust me, national parks suck. I know that now. It’s too late for me, but if you find yourself with the choice of hiking to a waterfall or spending the day at school, pick school everytime.

Don’t go on the trip.

Trust me.

See, I didn’t know. No one told me. I fell for the hype: “Think of it, class! Two days out of school! A four-day weekend! You’ll get to share a tent with a friend and go canoeing! We’ll see the highest waterfall in the state! We’ll explore a cave with three species of endangered bats! You’ll reconnect with nature!”

Blah blah blah.

Mrs. K. might as well have added that we were going to dress like 1920’s flappers, smoke dried banana peels, and discover our animal spirit guides. I wouldn’t have cared. She had me hooked with the two days out of school.

Big mistake. School is so much better. Even right now – I’d be in Keyboarding, but I don’t care. That’d beat this by a long shot. I need some technology right now, even if it’s with Mrs. Crowell. That’s how much nature sucks.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t have anything against waterfalls or against nature in general. I’m not a tree hater. I don’t abuse animals. I always throw my trash in the trash can. I recycle when I remember to. I don’t start forest fires. I’m taking environmental science as an elective. I think nature’s cool.

In theory. From a distance.

But up close, in person, for an extended period of time? Trees all are looking alike. Kids are getting excited about chipmunks and caterpillars. Lungs are hurting from all the fresh air. Sinuses are itching from pollen and God knows what else I’m breathing. Brain is shutting down from inactivity. I probably going to slip into sleep mode and roll back down to the trailhead.

And the packed parking lot, let me add. That’s right – packed. And not with motorcycles or little cars either. We’re talking other school busses, tour busses, church busses, busses from old folks’ homes, SUV’s the size of busses, enormous hummers seating ten or twenty probably, ancient station wagons, minivans with campers – not a two-seater in the bunch. Some major car pooling was going on to protect the ozone, I guess.

It’s got to be all the stuff on the news about the greenhouse effect. Everybody’s rushing out to blow their CO2 on the trees and suck up all the oxygen while it’s still free. My sister’s really into all that conservation-ecological crap. She’s always bookmarking environmental sites and downloading signs to hang in her bedroom or on her locker. I have to fight to get time to level my Warcraft toons or download new music for my iPod.

Oh yeah, this is great trip, Mrs. K!

I’m really reconnecting with nature here! Yeah, me and about a million other people.

We’re all pitching tents and singing “This Land is Your Land”, snapping digital photos of anthills, and looking up the types of bark in our free field guides from the welcome center. What a fantastic wonderful time we’re having standing in line watching moss grow! We’re making memories that we can treasure forever!

I’m being sarcastic, of course. I can reconnect with nature way better in my bedroom. Link to the park’s virtual tour. Watch a Photobucket slide show. Eat some trail mix. Even read a book. All way better than standing for an hour on a nature trail just to see a freaking waterfall!

Stand in line for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? Probably.

Stand in line for Guitar Hero III? Definitely.

Stand in line to ride the Kingda Ka? Of course!

Stand in line for Bloodhoung Gang tickets? Absolutely!

Stand in line for a waterfall? No way! We’re talking cruel and unusual punishment there! And probably against the Geneva Convention, now that I think about. Prisoners have rights, too, you know. I’ve read blogs about Guantanamo Bay.

But not Mrs. K, I guess. She’s oblivious, and here I am.

Me and just about a billion other people all here on the same day, all doing the same thing. All lined up down a nature trail just to watch what basically goes on in our bathroom showers. And back home, I only have to wait on my sister to get finished.

Not here though. Mrs. K woke us at seven, just so we could come here and wait. It’s been an hour. I can’t see the top of the trail. I can’t even hear the falls yet. My ankles hurt. I’m bored. But I’m stuck.

What other choice do I have? Run off the trail into the wilderness in search of civilization? No way – I’ve seen Deliverance. Email mom and dad? No luck – too many trees, no Wifi, and they were too glad I was getting out of the house. Fake heart trouble because of the rigorous climb? No chance – I wouldn’t get sent home. Mrs. K showed us the emergency first aid station at the campground, and I thought the ranger there looked like a serial killer. No one else agreed, but my luck’s not running so good. He’d say he was driving me to a hospital, but I’d probably end up down a well in his basement having to rub lotion on my skin so he can do his little kooky dance.

Nothing to do but stick it out.

And record everything. So in a few hours when I go Donner Party and start eating the kid in front of me, the police’ll find my Blackberry and know the reason why.

I was just reconnecting with nature, officers. Survival of the fittest. Circle of life. Nature of the beast.

Sucks, doesn’t it?

Pop Goes the Google

On the edge of the village, right next to the deep forest, an old woman lived in a tidy little cottage.

Her name was Maigret. She had been married once, to a fine young woodsman, and they had two handsome sons. When a terrible fever raged through the village and snatched away her family, Maigret made a place for them in the center of her flower garden. Within a circle of tall sunflowers, their tombstones were there, wreathed in blue flowers and curling ivy, and so was a little wooden bench. Maigret sat on its worn seat every dawn and every dusk to tell her husband about her dreams and to sing to her children. Her only company was a fat toad that lived beneath the bench and a pair of doves that nested in the ivy. The creatures did not fear her. The toad would hop out and rest on her foot. The doves would fly over to perch on the stool beside her.

All the animals in the village and in the nearby forest loved Maigret. She was a gentle woman, and the beasts knew that she loved all living things both little and big. She never spoke too loud and frightened them. She never moved too quickly and disturbed their homes. She never shooed them away. When she learned that the rabbits and the deer were nibbling her lettuce, she planted some closer to forest just for them. When the mother crow nested in her chimney, Maigret ate cold meals and slept with an extra blanket until the babies could fly on their own. When the village miller tied up his mouser’s kittens in a bag and left them in the forest for the wolves, she rescued them and suckled them with a twisted cloth dipped in milk until they were strong.

The animals saw these things, and in their simple ways they returned her many kindnesses. The deer and rabbits let her garden grow unmolested, and the crows ate everyone else’s corn but hers. The cats, once full-grown, kept the weasels and the skunks from her chickens, and the grateful chickens laid their eggs right on Maigret’s porch. Her garden prospered more than any other in the village. She could have sold the extra vegetables and eggs at the market, but she always chose to share with her companions in nature. She had such a kind heart that she even set some eggs and vegetables far out in the woods for hungry creature too scared to seek near the village for food.

Other than her family, her garden, and her animal friends, Maigret’s other love was for weaving. Each night, she spun her own yarn from flax she grew in her garden, measuring it off click by click on her spinning weasel, and then by candlelight she wove blankets and fine linen fabric until her tiny bed finally called her to sleep. In the winter months, while the garden took its rest, she colored her cloth vibrant dyes she had made from flowers and berries and then sewed shirts, aprons, and dozens of other useful items. The only times she stopped her work was to sit with her family in the flower garden – not even the coldest winds and deepest snows could keep her from that daily visit.

And like the extra produce from her gardening, the fruits of her spinning could have made her a small fortune, but Maigret had no wish for profit of that sort. Some cloth she offered to the doves, to the other birds, and to the little mice and shrews in the wood to line their nests. Colorful rugs softened the wooden floor of the cottage porch for the cats, and even the fat toad had a little blue pillow under its wooden bench. The rest she would take late at night and leave on the village church steps for the parson to hand out as he saw the need.

Yes, Maigret had a beautiful, loving heart, and she was a blessing to her animal neighbors, who blessed her in return.

But Maigret’s beauty was all on the inside. Sixty years of bending and kneeling over her flowers and vegetable plants had hunched her over and left her crooked. Spinning and weaving had also bent and gnarled fingers permanently stained black from fabric dyes. Squinting at her sewing in candlelight had also changed her from the comely blacksmith’s daughter she used to be also. Her face now had as many wrinkles as the fruit she strung and hung to dry from her cottage ceiling. Her voice, too, after the decades of singing and speaking in all types of weather to her husband and children’s graves. Her speech was deep now, rasping and cracking, like the trees that creaked from root to branch tip on windy nights.

So, Maigret’s kindness and beauty was hidden inside a crooked body that seemed to twist in on itself like a briar. And like a briar as well, her voice scratched and scraped at her human neighbors’ ears. The villagers avoided her as surely as they would have if she had surrounded her cottage with a mighty wall of thorns. They whispered ‘witch’ and ‘demoness’ when her garden plants grew greener and bigger than any of theirs. They blamed ‘dark magic’ and ‘devil’s pact’ when the ‘forest vermin’ slew their hens, stole their eggs, but left hers untouched. They shunned her sewing, fearing it unless the parson spoke prayers over it first, and then wearing it only after washing out the fey colors. In their eyes, her cottage and its devilishly plentiful green garden lay far beyond the village’s edge rather than right on it.

So Maigret lived alone on the edge of her busy village, her human family long dead, the animals her only living companions. So it was until one evening, just after dusk, she didn’t get up from the bench after she had finished singing to the two smaller tombstones. The fat toad stayed on her foot and the doves on her lap until she fell to the soft ground. Then, they moved to her side, leaving room for the cats who came to curl themselves around her. The rabbits and deer came next, and with them silently slunk sleek weasels and skunks. Even a limping, gray-furred bear, too old to risk the villagers’ traps but fat from Maigret’s offerings of eggs, ventured out into her garden. The little creatures of the forest were last – crows, mice, shrews, and all the birds – and they scattered over their friend’s still form a shower of leaves, twigs, blossoms, seeds, and little slips of colored fabric pulled from their own little nests. By dawn, a sweet-smelling blanket of their gifts screened her entirely from the first rays of morning.

The sunrise called some away. Others left as hunger or other needs drove them, but they came back. The villagers wondered and whispered but never set foot past her gate. The parson wondered why the gifts of clothing stopped but busied himself with other pursuits and never visited the empty cottage. As weeks passed, they found it easy to forget her entirely and gladly watched weeds and ivy cover her bright flowers and neat vegetable rows.

Only the beasts and birds were true and loyal companions, the toad and the doves more so than any, visiting with her season after season, year after year. And when they passed, their children still lingered in the spot, finding that the garden still provided more than enough for their needs even with her gone. After many years, when the village had forgotten her completely, the deep forest itself moved in to separate the ruins of her cottage in a final leafy embrace. And when the villagers eventually packed their things and moved away, the forest pulled Maigret where she lay beside her family deeper into its loving embrace.

And today, hidden far within the forest’s shadowy edges, a tangle of heavy brush and berry brambles hides a ring of tall sunflowers. And inside that blossoming ring, three ivy-covered stones – one big and two small – stand next to a rounded mound covered in bright flowers of every kind found in the forest. If a person makes it to that mound and stands very still, he would hear something strange indeed. It is the sound of a new generation of toads and doves singing, in their own voices, the forest’s praises of a beautiful friend that hasn’t been forgotten.