My Dayton Creek

When I was a young lad growing up in the suburbs of Dayton Ohio, I directly lived next to a shallow creek and a dense forest that I once called “my piece of nature.” It was a place I would go to too get away from family issues, homework, and from society in general. Everyday after school was out, my friends and I would head to the creek to catch crawdads, toads and small fish, and to splash and play in the steams of the creek. I used to pretend that I was a Cherokee Indian living off the land and feeling one with nature. I would find feathers in the forest and place them in my hair, and use the stones in the creek to create tools for fire and weaponry. During autumn, when the leaves were darkening and the when the pumpkins were ripe, I would hide in bundles of leaves as if I was a pilgrim just out of Europe. My little piece of nature was my own area where I thought no mankind has touched, and no man has altered. But as I grew older into my early teens, I began to realize that the creek and forest that I thought was so pure and natural, has actually been tampered and altered by human beings for decades. In fact, I was never one with pure nature and wilderness, but rather just another component of man-made habitat.

This realization came to me one spring morning when I was traveling alone through the creek. I went further down the creek’s path than I have ever had. I was compelled to escape as far as possible from society and enter into a place where no man has gone. I traveled miles and miles down the old creek. I remember thinking that eventually I will come to an untouched lake in a dense forest where no man has seen. I was looking for my own Walden Pond. But when I finally made it to the end of the creek, my heart was shattered like dumped virgin, and my faith of ever finding true nature evaporated. At the end of the creek was a large tube that dispelled water and pink toxins into the creek. The tube was surrounded by water bottles, junk food wrappers and cigarette bugs. Pollution was pouring out of the tube mixed with water into what I thought was a natural creek. Over the horizon I saw a paper factory spilling white heavy gases into the blue clear sky. From then on out, I knew that true nature was virtually impossible to find.

I can fully relate to Bill McKibben’s critique in The End of Nature, on our lifestyles when he states “ The temperature and rainfall are no longer to be entirely the work of some separate , uncivilized force, but instead in part of a product of our habits, our economies, our ways of life. Even in the most remote wilderness, where the strictest laws forbid the felling of a single tree, the sound of that saw will be clear, and a walk in the woods will be changed-tainted-by its whine.” Due to mankind’s constant desire to create wealth by exploiting the Earth’s resources for centuries, the tundra’s, jungles, forest, oceans, lakes and even our national parks are haunted with the imprints, impressions and traces of mankind. You, me and everyone else cannot drive up the street to a local forest and expect to be truly in nature. The soil we walk across has chemicals in it from the rain. The lake has pollution all throughout it due to the local factory, and the trees are constantly being outnumbered by hungry humans who need their wood.

Humans and all animals need a dwelling to reside in, but animals don’t absorb unnecessary resources unlike humans to do this. Birds create small nest in trees out of small twigs and branches. Bears live in caves, and squirrels live inside the holes of ancient trees. But mankind demands for more than just the simple dwelling. Mankind has used every tool and resource to make life as comfortable and effortless as possible, regardless of what environmental and physical damage it has on the Earth and the Ozone layer. In Linda Hogan’s book called Dwellings, she gives an antidote that discusses how people cannot live among nature and other animals, but instead must live amongst themselves. She explains that a man wanted to live in nature alone in solitude, so he found a cave to live in. After some time, he became lonely, so he went to the city and find a wife. His wife didn’t like living amongst mice and bats, so they built a door in the cave to keep the animals out. The door changes the room temperature which then results to them purchasing a heater and so on. Just adding one luxury to their lives made them want to completely separate themselves from nature.