I’m renting a camp located in rural Vermont. It’s August and I’m on holiday. There is no phone or Internet connection. It’s bucolic splendor at its best. Going from one to ten, Thoreau would rate the camp ten plus.
I’m sitting in a small room at the camp. It’s morning. The windows admit generous quantities of morning sunlight. The view reveals a small pond nestled at the foot of the conifer-laden mountains that surround it. At night, loons cry out with their mysterious incantations. To whom are they speaking? During the day, cloud formations in the sky are absolutely spectacular; slate gray underneath, creamy white crowns billowing upwards, all set against a deep blue sky.
I find myself alternately at peace with the beauty of the stunning landscape, and royally ticked off by four Canada geese that feed every morning on the wide stretch of lawn leading down to the pond. The spacious lawn serves them as a combination eat-in dining room and lavatory. They have serious boundary problems. An Eastern Shore resident for twenty-seven years I am no stranger to Canada geese. However I find Maryland geese more considerate. They stay mostly in the water by our creek or convene in huge numbers on golf courses or farms and chat all night. I neither play golf nor do I farm. Geese at home rarely disturb me except for one night when over a hundred geese landed on the creek near my house, all honking at once, and the raucous camaraderie made it impossible to sleep.
Frankly, the droppings geese generate aren’t fragrant. They do, however, necessitate keeping a vigilant eye wherever I walk. I dare not walk at night. Even daytime I can’t avoid stepping in the droppings. These frequent flyers abandoned this year’s travel plans and hunkered down to feed and luxuriate on the front lawn of the camp, which, I might add, is costing me a bundle to rent.
My outrage is pure hypocrisy, I know that. I like to think of myself as environmentally sensitive, a champion of ecological justice, but not unconditionally. I recycle; use as little electrical energy as possible and I compost. I use herbicides and pesticides sparingly, accelerate slowly when driving and I have even hugged trees. In short, I love Mother Nature but not when her critters eat and defecate all day on my lawn. This is, as Al Gore put it, an inconvenient truth.
The man from whom we rented the camp tried shooting the geese and was fined. I had mixed feelings. In fact – and I’m not proud of this – I blurted out impulsively to my son who told me the story, that the man should have used a pellet gun and no one would have been the the wiser.
We hold nature dear to us except as she requires something from us or offends our sensibilities. Ecological magnanimity and goose droppings don’t square with me. And I suspect in today’s conversation about ecological exploitation that Al Gore talked about some years ago, and more recently the Pope in his “Laudate si,” that inconveniences of mammoth proportions will arise should we tackle ecological issues. The ecological crisis is a variation on the recent conflict surfacing here on the Shore. People, who’d say they champion the underdog, think twice about it when the homeless shelter is to be housed in their neighborhood. Any significant transformation requires a radical change in how we understand the natural world and regard the poor among us. The prevailing mindset governing the ways we understand both is the same. It’s called commodification, that is, value reckoned only by the economic returns it brings. Consumerism is a way of life and our way of life in the western world.
Enough of this ponderous stuff. I still have a goose crisis to settle.
The first three days I fought their presence with any means I could devise, short of shooting them. In the morning they stood defiantly at the edge of the pond, as if taunting me. I walked toward them waving my arms. They slid casually back in the water, but I could tell they were waiting for me to go away. Sure enough, after breakfast they’d come halfway up the lawn eating and well, you know. Next I ran at them yelling and waving my arms, but by then they figured I was a wuss, backed up slightly and held their ground. In the meantime, the soles of my shoes were covered with excrement since I hadn’t watched my step. I returned to the house feeling defeated.
Is this a battle I really want to fight, I thought? They were here long before I was, anyway. They are beautiful birds. It wasn’t even my camp. If I negotiated my steps carefully I could sidestep the guano. Let them be was the only way to retain my equanimity. And so an environmental truce was established. I didn’t capitulate, only accommodated to those critters with whom I share space and who have very different habits than I do.
The art of living, I’ve decided, is regulating differences. That way everybody wins.
N.B. Upon completing this essay I went out to photograph the geese. I wanted a picture to accompany the essay. They were nowhere to be found.
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