Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 28, 1995 TAG: 9507280046
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LIZA FIELD
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
- David Whyte
I met a woman who cut her walnut grove last week. It got me to thinking about fear, an emotion that seemed to be woven throughout the event.
She was fearful when I came to the door and begged her to spare the last tree. After realizing I hadn't come to rob the house or hand out religious tracts, she cracked the door one more degree, and allowed as how she was scared.
"Of the trees?" I said. They were wonderful old walnuts, shading the creek and filled with birds.
"I just hated that ice storm," she confided. "If we had another, it could be a tree would hit my roof."
I gazed at her, uncomprehending. Ice storm. It was hot July, and we were sawing down shade trees for fear of ice. The trees stood about 100 feet - well over a walnut's throw - down from the house, where they protected the creek, cooled the air, fed and housed woodpeckers, cardinals and squirrels. But we were removing all of it in deference to an unforecast but potential ice storm.
A The notion was weird, but familiar. That is, the notion that trees and shrubs - like animals, weather, vines, anything alive - pose a threat to human life. Meaning, human possessions.
After the same ice storm of two winters ago, hardly a tree in my town was left standing near any house, carport, power line or office building. It was not the storm proper that had removed most of these trees, but the chain saw massacre that followed. Surviving a whole four days without electricity, crazed homeowners cut everything in sight. In case another storm did ever happen, and any tree in the yard did hurl itself at the powerline, chimney or car chrome - why, we'd be safe - along with our lawn mowers. Sawing down greenery was the major activity of 1994; this lady was simply a year slow.
"Maybe God likes the trees," I suggested.
"Well, I like them too," she said. "I just don't want one to come through my roof."
I nodded, confused by a sadness both for this terrified woman and for her trees. "Still, they didn't come through your roof last time," I persisted. "Can't you just ... believe?"
Well, she could not. And as I listened to the last tree coming down, I tried to calm myself with her parting words. "When you're 83, you'll understand." But I reckoned I would not understand - at 33, 83, 103. It seemed to me, anyhow, there wasn't time to wait that long; nature was being sentenced everywhere out of this same kind of fear. Our houses were imperiled. Jobs were imperiled. Moles had ruined the lawn.
It seemed that this woman's fear of her walnut trees was less a product of old age than a product of the age. Surely peoples throughout the millennia would have found it odd that, instead of living off the land, we expend so much energy combatting it with weedeaters, lawn mowers, herbicides, leafblowers, snowblowers and chain saws.
Where do we get this extraordinary fear of nature in an age when scarcely one lonely bear, one bedraggled bobcat survives between the interstate, clearcut and suburb?
It occurred to me that nature-fear, like any other fear, was now entangled in our economy. My neighbor's fear emerged when a man with a chainsaw - who needed work - told her the trees would get her.
For the same reason, fear has become a major U.S. industry. While fear-quelling products take all forms, the sales pitch usually takes one: Be scared; buy this; feel safe. News programs and station breaks attract viewers in the same way: How can you afford not to hear of this disaster?
What used to be a refreshing thunderstorm, hence, has become "A Severe Storm Watch: Tune in every waking moment to WUB-Scared, Virginia!" Rain, wind, fog, pollen, chill factor, sun factor, heat index, bug count - potential hazards of every sort teach the nation exactly what to fear, each day, of the terrible outdoors.
Ads can take things further, as they need not be grounded in fact. A grown man quakes before an animated bug, and declares in a shaking voice: "I don't know its name. I don't want to know" - and he never has to. One squirt of Zapit: no bug.
Such messages are expert at triggering that primeval what-if wire in our lower brains. What if there's a bug in my yard? What if a tree stands higher than I? What if grass grows through a crack in my concrete?
What if life, in other words. The unnamed danger we've learned to fear is, after all, life.
Life is everything beyond our control - and which should therefore not exist. Field mice, bugs, stickers, moss, toadstools, weeds, thunder, groundhogs and wildness. It is that thing we can't manufacture or predict; that mystery which so threatens our grip on the world. It is a walnut tree full of woodpeckers. It is a bat diving for gnats at dusk. It is the blacksnake one must coax into hiding before the neighbors spray something at its head or smash it with a hoe while everyone shrieks.
We have very little time to stop clobbering the world. Recycling cans will not be enough; even scientists tell us we need a drastic conversion of heart. Perhaps we could begin it by ditching our fear of other living things.
Such conversion is not risk-free. What will happen to the consumer index if we love a forest more than furniture? What will we do without fear to keep us scurrying around spraying and buying things?
Who knows: Perhaps we might replace that fear with care - a care less for our possessions than for other living creatures. While our lives may become more interesting than safe, at least we will be alive - along with a mysterious and delightful world that means us no harm.
Liza Field lives in Wytheville.
by CNB