Enjoyable Things You Can Do to Lead You Deeper into Your Natural Environs

These are all projects I would like to plunge into if I had more time and more energy, things you might find yourself adequately inspired to tackle someday.

1) I have dreamed of writing “A Natural History of 3500 N. Main St.”, something along the lines of Rev. White’s 17th-century tribute to his hometown of Selbourne in –shire.

This would begin with a few educated guesses about the pre-European setting of our family’s modest acreage in the once-bucolic Soquel Valley in Monterey Bay—maybe a broad riparian parkland with great sycamores and cottonwoods along the bottom, with a steep grassy ridge rising to the east, with some live-oaks, bay trees, and maples, giving way to redwood forest on the inland side.

Then, trying to reconstruct the Mission and Anglo periods from old records, and finally, in detail afforded by living memory, the changes during my own family’s tenancy, from rural/agricultural to suburban, beginning in 1920 with the place even then pretty much the same as I remember it from my own early years—the old two-story wooden farmhouse on its little knoll, set amid its four towering ancient walnut trees, with the massive, mysterious tankhouse looming above and the familiar old lichen-encrusted barns, garages, and chicken houses in the farmyard below, the cherry orchard with its crystal ceiling of white blossoms, the plum orchard, almost as extravagantly clad, reaching up toward the oak-covered hill on one side and the cow pasture on the other, dotted with ancient Bellflower apple trees; the creek across the road, with its promise of flashing little trout.

And of course the meat and bones of the thing—the birds and plants and all the other creatures that made the place their home, and their changing status over the years of our tenancy.

Of course it has become rare for Californians to have anything close to such a connection with the particular spot most of us find ourselves living at.  Still, practically all of us have a family seat in the country somewhere or other from which we are not too long separated, the sort of place where suburbanites go to spend Thanksgivings and Christmases, often as not places now inhabited by the very oldest generation left in the family.

By now of course, it may be that the majority of Californians are truly rootless, the product of all that restless chasing after something better, of postwar diaspora after postwar diaspora.  But still, even those of us with no place to call home, can very well know a place that beckons in some way; some retreat or park or backroad to identify with.  And these secret places can be “adopted” and studied just as validly as any ancestral home grounds.

• bird-feeding
• other enhancements, like nest boxes and bird baths
• gardening, especially for food and wildlife enhancement

• birding (which has become hugely popular in recent decades)
• botanizing (including the “competitive” type—explanation elsewhere)
• mushrooming and other gathering pursuits
• hunting—possibly seen as politically incorrect in many quarters, but a genuine gut-level connecter with nature, time-tested for millenia.