A thought about Canadian Geese. On the days I have to walk to pick up my daughter from First Creek Middle School I can't help but notice the goose droppings, large dollops of greenish mush. There is a "sensitive area" under a small stand of trees where they gather by the school and forage from there out onto the grass. I'm not bothered really by them or their poop. I do wonder whether they are bothered by us though, do they feel crowded out.
I was on the bus the other day and found myself quite literally crowded out of the bus. I got off the #1 early at Pearl Street to catch the #10, fearing that I would miss it at the TCC transit station because of all the passengers. Standing by the bus stop I saw a goose sitting nearby, almost as if on a nestegg. I got out my (TESC's actually) camera and as I neared him cautiously, I realized he was injured. I called 911. Yes, I dialed 911; and they did not chastise me over it. They take that kind of call. Anyway, I guess I wonder whether he was picked up or not. Regardless, my having been crowded off the bus to such an event leaves me feeling a little deserved discomfort, and that perhaps I should take this feeling and make something bigger out of it. A blog will have to do for the moment... but I suspect it's a step in the right direction. And in fact, stepping, traversing this earth is exactly what I do quite a bit of now (having had to sell my car a few years ago). But not nearly as much as i'd like, I mean: not in the way I'd prefer: walking just to walk and see what there is to see.
So, to continue, I was just reading Barry Lopez's Crossing Open Ground and came upon the following, in reference to Carl Sauer: "The idea of bioregionalism, as it has been developed by his followers, is a political concept that would reshape human life." Lopez had just described previously a "great swath cut through the spruce forest" which delineated a borderline where the Yukon crossed into Alaska. "What a waste of trees," he says. But he goes on about Sauer and the bioregionalism concept... "It would decentralize residents of an area into smaller, more self-sufficient, environmentally responsible units, occupying lands the borders of which would be identical with the borders of natural regions---watersheds, for example." Then it hit me... a map I had noticed in a book on the shelf at a local store which showed evidence of early Tacoma property size. There were perhaps eight or ten large plats along the Narrows abreast the Tacoma shoreline extending south from Point Defiance (which was military land) at least as far south as Titlow Beach. The plats were very large plats. The type was too small to read, but surely I could find record then of settlement or land use! I'm wishing I had purchased the book. But to get to the point, I read on... and sure enough, Lopez saunters right into my path again and in a big way. He mentions a bluff where he finds hundreds of feathers, "evidence of their residence and passage is everywhere[...]" [migrating birds]. And finally I realize the significance of the Goose poop. It's evidence of another mode of being on this earth, evidence of migration, a way of life I will never know, being so drawn down by my personal relationship with gravity and winglessness. Suddenly, I am struck with compassion for the wounded goose... and yet he's still been places and seen the world in a way that makes him invincible in another kind of way, makes him symbolic of just how truly sensitive the few spaces are that we've managed to preserve, and how badly we need to stop developing. Land can 'develop' and create 'usage' all by itself quite nicely. We just have to slow down and look a little harder for the 'signage.' Yet, not to wring this narrative of any remaining flow, having read David B. Williams I am confused further having discovering that I can not assume that this "residence" even is natural; that their flyways may have been effected by human involvement. And not only that I have to consider the great possibility that I sealed the final deliverance of that goose, that really my haste to get home brought me his way and thus hastened his demise at the hands of some mandate for extermination. But, while "stepping in poop is not a call to arms," [Williams] it is a reminder that my own poop is concentrating elsewhere and probably doing far more ecological harm.
