Exploration
By: Marian Louise Thorpe
Tags: Landscape, Covid, Childhood, Exploration, Ecology

I am, by nature, a wanderer, an explorer, restless if confined too long. Foot, bicycle, car — any will do, although the scale and focus of the exploration changes with each mode.

Foot was first, and I was closer to the ground then. Cicada shells were at eye height; so were walking-stick insects. Black beetles and four-leaf clovers were easier to find, and toads. Ant hills had me mesmerized. Nor did what captured my attention need to be alive. Pebbles with threads of mica; tiny fossils in limestone; a blue and broken robin’s egg.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

I grew a little older. My world expanded beyond my garden to the farm lanes and woods nearby, back in a time where children wandered unsupervised. I learned paths and ponds, where white violets flowered and woodpeckers nested, and which dogs chased bicycles. I paid less attention to the minutiae of my world and more to a larger scale: moraines and marshes, sandy soils and clay, creek and shore.

Older and stronger, I rode my bike further afield, but still absorbing the landscape, where every road went, what lay along it — woodland, field, swamp; farms, hamlets, cemeteries. Drawing a map in my head, one that’s still there, even though the farm or woodland isn’t. Houses now, the woods only a timeslip of memory.

I had no idea what I was doing, of course; that I was laying down the foundation of a way of seeing the world, the intersection and interplay of environment and habitation; of land and land use; of ecology and exploitation. The car gave me an even larger picture; days and weeks, adding up to years, driving the back roads across every province and territory but one; every state. Birding, but more than that. Absorbing. Dusty desert trails to seeps of water; silent footsteps under redwoods; sliding scree on mountainsides. The sponginess of tundra; the brilliance of fungi in an autumn woodland. Puffins on cliffsides; snowy plovers on beaches, bald eagles on seaside pines. Cresting a pass to see a valley of pastured cows below me; navigating winding lanes into the snow of altitude; reaching the ocean. All of it becoming part of my being, part of my experience of the world.

I don’t know how not to see the world in this way: when I walk on my birding patch now, I see not only the tangles of vines and shrubs along the old fence, good habitat for warblers in migration and nesting wrens, but the fence itself. A fence that tells me of the farm that was here once; if I look carefully at the field on which I walk, it too tells me a story: I can see its boundaries, and the old, spreading trees that tell me it was pasture once, the trees left for shade for the cattle; in another part of the field, the lines of ploughing are still discernable. The woods to the east tell me what was here before this land was cleared, before European settlement; cedar bush and maple swamp, and on the higher ground, oak and elm, perhaps, and beech. Layers of time.

In another life — and perhaps on another continent — I would have been a landscape historian, or landscape archaeologist. Now, in this COVID-constrained world, I can’t (because I am compliant, and careful) go beyond what I can reach on foot or bicycle again, like the ten year old I was more than 50 years ago. I may be taller — and it is less easy to crouch, to look at a pebble, or a violet — but the land I walk on is no less interesting than it was then. In fact, it should be more so: I have five decades of experience to deepen my understanding. I should not complain that my world has shrunk, that the exploration I long for is constrained, when there is still so much to learn so close to home.