Comment▼ The woods n her powerful essay “High Tide in Tucson”, Barbara Kingsolver relates how the Tonono O’Odham tribe in Arizona bury the umbilicus of a newborn close to home and plant a tree over it in order to hold the child in that place. Today, there are powerful new forces in our society that are pulling us and our children away from our native land and each other, and we must find a new way to define our home and ourselves if we are to find peace, stability, and happiness. When I was six years old, my father told us that he was leaving us to find a new job and he would call for us when he could. Many years later, I realized how much courage that move required, for it was still depression days in the United States, and he did have a job at the time, poor as it was. Two years later, we joined him in Dallas, Texas, and he told us again that we were moving, but this time only across town. In Sherman, the small town in North Texas where I was born, such a move was not a big thing. But in Dallas, across town was a world away from our little rented house with the big tree in the backyard, in an apartment complex that was called by its residents “The Projects”. It was a low-rent complex with red brick buildings that were all alike, and hot as hell in the Texas summers—so hot that we children took our mattresses out into the small shared backyard and tried to sleep through the hot nights. Dallas also opened up new worlds to me in those days during and after World War II. In one direction, it resembled a western movie, especially on Friday and Saturday nights, when men would come falling out of the doors of the saloons four blocks from our house, swinging, kicking, biting, and rolling in the dust with each other until finally they quit or someone broke up the fight, usually not a policeman. In the other direction from The Projects was North Dallas, and just beyond that Highland Park, a land of the gentry with which the Glazes were unfamiliar. Just across the street from our building in The Projects was a small farm with an unfenced open field that was almost always grown over with tall Johnson grass. Behind the field was the entrance into what we called the “woods”,
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© 2002 American Chemical Society
actually a part of a large estate, I believe. I don’t know what drew me into these woods, but it was there that I discovered that I liked to be alone, and much more. It was there that I fished in the little stream and caught one sunfish after another, putting them all back and, over time, preferring to watch them in the shallows and to leave them alone. It was there that I began to know plants by their flowers, leaves, and smells, and birds by their songs as well as their silhouettes … waiting many times to see the large owl leave his perch to return to hunt the woods as dark approached. Many times, I climbed the three-inch diameter wild grape vines wound around tall oaks to get the sweet and sour fruit that was suspended far above my head. For three or four wonderful years, I walked through that grassy field into the woods as often as I could, not knowing that the experience was changing me irreversibly, planting the seed for another change that would take place in the late 60s and early 70s when I was drawn from chemistry into environmental science. Only later did I realize what was pulling me into my new research specialty was not the new science or the new environmental politics, but the power of those experiences in the woods where I had been changed forever. Many years later as a young professor at North Texas State University, north of Dallas, I appealed to the planning groups of Dallas to save such green places for the young people to come, knowing full well that I was speaking mainly to people who didn’t give a damn about saving land for anything other than more houses, apartments, or shopping centers. Now, of course, the woods are gone, but somewhere in that ground is my umbilicus. I cannot leave it.
William H. Glaze, Editor (
[email protected])
AUGUST 1, 2002 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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