Nature and Me: A Short Autobiography
by Nowick Gray
I grew up in cities until I was six. “Nature” to me then was a postage-stamp back yard, a thimble plastic pool. In my later youth, in a small Allegheny mountain town, I delighted in roaming the woods and fields, playing army, hunting crayfish, damming creeks. Then, on to the suburbs for my teen years. Nature there meant sports: swimming in Long Island Sound, baseball in red sandlots outside Atlanta, training for track on wintry Illinois roads.
By the time I was twenty, poetry, drugs, and the New England woods had opened the doors of my perception (with a nudge from Huxley) and I was able to see past the recreational uses of nature to its nurturing, superordinate beauty. The silent, downy nightscapes of snow; the flowering liquid essence of spring; the dry basking animal heat of a summer day; the crackling colors of rainbow fall leaves. Music streamed through it all like nature’s ingenious soundtrack.
The literature and arts of the Romantic period stoked the fires of my newfound passion. My appreciation had become at the same time more direct, and more comprehensive of the organic spirit at the heart of creation, whether natural or human. Yet, when I reached the threshold of leaving this fertile womb, the question of basic survival loomed largest.
I jumped cold-turkey from the academic hothouse into the granitic soil of New Hampshire, one of North America’s most economically depressed areas. Land was cheap because the former generations of farmers had given up and moved on. A fellow ex-student, lured by the grail of rural self-sufficiency, had sunk his borrowed fortune into a large chunk of wooded hillside for a cooperative homesteading venture and was seeking willing bodies to help flesh out his vision. I came full of theories about gypsy economics, constructive anarchism and apocalyptic survival. I had no money, and no useful trade.
I took a job on the district highway crew, manning the street sweeper unit which the old boys dragged over the undulating roads of the county. This device of blue-collar initiation spewed me with muddy grime, head to toe, for $2.17 per hour. I drove to work in a yellow lemon of a Karman-Ghia that I bought from a fourteen-year-old boy for $140. My first car, it worked fine until I decided to treat it to a quart of high-quality detergent oil. The detergent action dissolved whatever carbonaceous glop was holding the pistons together and the car promptly died. It was a sign. As were the eleven days and nights of rain that dismal spring, which I counted off like Noah watching the end of the world.
Lacking the fortitude for the full forty-day deluge, on day twelve I left my drenched dreams behind and took a ride in a friend’s Beetle for California with thirty dollars in my pocket and another gleam in my eye: the promised riches of the sunny, booming West. I figured that with a big bank account, I could better cushion the rocky landing of my next journey back to the earth.
The California cities, I found, were not made of gold. After two years of odd jobs as an unskilled urban laborer — housepainter, clerk, gas jockey, parking valet — I dreamed up a new way to get back to nature. I would go back to my books and find nature in literature. The bonus? A paying job, a career as a teacher. And I might even find a nice pastoral place to settle down. According to this latest conception, nature was mostly a state of mind, an aesthetic quality of life; “self-sufficiency” was confined to the status of financial equilibrium.
Drawn by the remote and rugged beauty of the Northwest, I arrived in British Columbia for graduate study. The setting proved apt for delving into the rich natural resources of Canadian literature — an entity which, until registration at the University of Victoria, I didn’t know existed. Upon completion of my thesis two years later, I discovered that a master’s degree in English is worth about as much as the paper spelling it out. Nevertheless, I finally landed a job in the midst of a nature more vast and remote, yet also more human, than I had imagined.
Along with my girlfriend from UVic, I was hired by the school board of Northern Quebec. I ended up learning more in that Inuit village than I could ever teach to my junior high students. Jeanne and I shared the intention of one day investing our newfound wealth in a back-to-the-land dream, complete with solar house design, microhydro system, 4WD truck. The people in that wild, white world had made choices not altogether different, in embracing prefab housing, shotguns and camp stoves, and powerful snowmobiles within their traditional lifestyle. More compellingly, they survived by virtue of an attitude, a history, a culture based on living with nature, in nature, of nature. This is not to say that they were in any way “primitive.” Their own human nature was warm, friendly, infinitely patient and optimistic — above all, adaptable. Their history is all about change, of making practical use of what is at hand — from whalebone, to steel knives, flour and tea, aircraft and development corporations. With every innovation has come a compromise with a former, “more natural” way of life.
The Inuit are no longer self-sufficient, in material terms. Yet in bearing, in outlook, in grounding in the matter of survival in an always challenging environment, they are supremely self-reliant. I learned that when I saw the hunters using knives to operate on skidoos in open-air surgery at forty below in the middle of nowhere.
Not exactly in our element in a culture and geography so foreign to us, Jeanne and I left the North after three years with a new appreciation of what it means to live on the land, and the capital required to fund the venture. We bought a share on a land co-op in the interior mountains of BC and set to work.
Giving urgency to our private vision was the growing specter of global catastrophe. Reagan’s election in 1980 promised to escalate the nuclear arms race, and my partner and I both wanted to increase our chances of survival with a functioning homestead, far from the vulnerable urban centers. At the start our skills in the basics of rural living were negligible. Tapping neighbors for help and advice, we cleared a driveway and laid a waterline; cleared space for a garden, orchard and house; built a woodshed and temporary chicken coop number one. Then came housebuilding, a project which would take seven years.
Jeanne grew disenchanted early on, leaving for the city even before the foundation was poured. I spent the first three years of the building phase living in a tipi. During this time another partner came my way, who matched my commitment to building a life on the land. By our first summer together, when we adzed the logs for the floor joists, Sarah was pregnant.
For those first three years of homesteading, I paid little attention to making money — the endless schemes which preoccupied many of my low-income neighbors. When my savings account finally ran dry, and Sarah and I brought home a baby daughter to a half-finished house, I had to start hustling. There were a few useful trades I’d learned by experience, and some others I had to learn from scratch. I began hiring myself out as a carpenter, stonemason, firefighter, treeplanter.
Now money earned meant time spent away from family as well as from the lagging house construction. Sarah and I both began to look closer at ways to work at home: both to generate income and to produce what we would otherwise have to buy.
Short of pure self-sufficiency, we found instead a place in a fabric of interdependence. It seemed neither possible nor desirable to produce every food, every tool locally — whether on the homestead, or in the nearby community. Barter, home business, homestead production, and paying jobs all played a part. It is relatively efficient, for example, to grow all one’s vegetables, plus extra garlic, and then to sell the garlic and buy grain, which is not so easy to grow in a mountain valley. Another example: Sarah designed box labels in exchange for the products they advertised — apples and a kitchen stool. And after gaining experience building rock walls for our own house, we were both hired to build a rock-walled flower planter for a local artist who’d received a bed-full of lilies in trade for a painting.
Sometimes the transactions were inefficient, sometimes unexpected. Take the case of the ducks. We ordered ducklings from a distant supplier to raise for eggs, manure, and slug-control. Instead of being shipped direct as arranged, they had to be rescued from town, two hours away. I drove, let’s see, truck number four (we went through seven in all), and on that trip the transmission disintegrated, losing its last gear at the foot of the driveway on the way home. Those ducks lived on to trample the garden, before succumbing to hawks.
Then there’s the story of the donkey we bought to save on truck use. Several months later we watched in complete surprise as she gave birth. The next year we recovered mama’s original cost by selling the young jenny — or rather, trading her — for two ducks, some truck repairs, and a bit of cash.
Living on the land doesn’t pay well, but then it’s more than an occupation. It’s a relationship with the natural world that takes a commitment to a lowered level of consumption, helping to reduce the human impact on the overburdened planet. It’s a learning process which is gradual and endless. If the homestead books didn’t quite balance, we would keep tinkering with the equation, seeking the right combination of ducks, trucks, bucks, and whatever volunteers we could pull from the compost, while keeping the larger balance at heart.
Throughout the decade of the 80s, another force was intruding upon the landscape: the politics of survival. In the process of establishing a life largely dependent upon homemade shelter and homegrown food and subsistence income, I felt obligated to do my part in addressing perils in a wider sphere of influence. Grounded in the active nonviolence of Quakers, I first educated myself as a researcher, then reached out as a speaker and trainer in the disarmament movement. Later, closer to home, I became active in local groups seeking alternatives to pesticides and logging in community watersheds. Both pursuits demanded unnatural expenditures of time and energy.
This drain on the home scene, while seeming necessary at the time, further called into question the viability of “the homestead economy” as a self-sufficient enterprise. Win or lose, we felt the impact of the struggle. But if we lost, and our worst fears came to pass, all the efforts to make a natural life work would be wasted. A radioactive or chemical cloud, a landslide or drying up of our springs, would render the land dead and useless. So the political work had to be done.
Eventually the political struggle, for me at least, ran its course. On some issues, such as the spraying of pesticides in local forests, community action won long-term success. On the fatally divisive issue of logging, market forces prevailed, with minor concessions to watershed protection. The international arms race and geopolitics were issues of another order, impossible to gauge for any effect from individual or grassroots activism. In the end Voltaire’s advice held sway: “Tend your garden.”
Sarah, for her part, did turn to market gardening as a means of establishing a viable way of life. This proved a hard path to pursue, after several years of development — fencing, pigs, digging rocks, raising beds — with a small local consumer base and the nearest town costly to reach by truck. Eventually the pressure to convert compost to cash and the grueling, day-in, day-out labor wore her down. She sold the business and turned to other odd jobs, cone-picking and construction, along with part-time work in the very garden she had built up upon forest duff and gravelly soil.
My own departure from work on the land, and from the politics of nonviolent action, took me toward African drumming, and work as a writer and editor. While on the surface, these pursuits appear to have separated me further from my chosen environment, they also allowed me to dwell in peace with it. No longer cursing the killing frost, the marauding weasel, the isolation from spare truck parts. Developing economic viability through an Internet-based business allowed me to continue living in a rural location, when otherwise I might have felt compelled to move in search of work. I entered into a new relation with the nature around me, as a spirit-partner.
Moving back to the city of Victoria after twenty-five years, I lay in my sterile apartment, gazing out the window to bare branches against the bright blue sky… and caught a glimpse of beauty that gave me an answer to the question my new partner posed: “Do you miss wilderness?”
“No,” I say, after some thought. “Not really. I have it, can find it within me now, within my experience, my memory, having lived there so long. It’s become a part of me. The places and scenes that became so familiar are familiar to me still.”
There is a larger question now, which seems well answered by this window-framed beauty of light and form. It’s the same question and answer that confronted me in this same city so many years ago.
I had arrived fresh from my star-spangled journey through the Cascades and Olympics, asking at the time of university registration: “How do I study nature — I mean, the relations between humans and nature?”
I explained that I was not satisfied with the environmental studies approach, with its emphasis on the sciences and social sciences, biology labs and data sets. I knew my true home in the humanities, language and literature.
The English department chairman confirmed my inner leading with a simple suggestion: “Study Canadian poetry. And probably American poetry too.”
A quarter of a century in and beside the wilderness had cured my compulsion to steep myself full-time in nature’s own element. I tried even to beat her at her own game, survival, and learned my limits from the challenge. Now it was enough to appreciate immediate contact, in small doses, even right here through this city window. Nature’s primary meaning became for me (once again) spiritual and aesthetic, a quality of experience that is personal and direct and not dependent on a planned harvest, a bargain rewarded. I could have more of a sense of the limitless in nature in this framed microcosm of branch and sky, than I would if I were in the middle of some wooded hillside in, say, northern Ontario, with nothing but the same view ringing the radius of a thousand kilometers.
There I would be wondering what to do next. Should I keep walking, find the nearest road, look for something to eat in the forest, start farming, or what? Here, there is nothing, in this moment, to do, but savor that still perfection of branch against sky…
“Ah,” says the poet, “but there is something to do.”
Nowick Gray now lives on Salt Spring Island, BC, where he writes and edits, plays flutes and drums, and enjoys hiking and kayaking in nature. “Nature and Me” is an excerpt from My Country: Essays and Stories from the Edge of Wilderness (#1 in Kindle Free — Nature Writing; and available as an audiobook). Visit NowickGray.com featuring his memoir of the baby boom, My Generation. Two excerpts from the memoir also appear on Medium: “Woodstock on the Beach” and “The Day Kennedy Died.”
