My profound appreciation for the writings of American naturalists and transcendental proto-hippies Emerson and Thoreau is sometimes stifled by my equally profound distrust of the wilderness in general. It is not without a tinge of jealousy that I read through Thoreau's Walden or Emerson's Nature, books predicated upon the experience of solitude in nature, on becoming simultaneously everything and nothing through bearing witness to the spectacle of the forest, knowing that I can barely sit in my backyard for five minutes without getting bored. However, I can find solace in the fact that I am at the forefront of the next step in transcendental literature; just as those writers abandoned the city for the country, and their subsequent heirs, the Beats like Ginsberg and Kerouac, abandoned the country for the city, I abandon both for the sublime joy of the town.
You see, though the signs that lead to my current locale may say "Welcome to the City of Chico," Chico is by no means a city. The tallest building in town is Whitney Hall, that bastion of freshmanliness on the CSUC campus. There are still ordinances in place allowing tractors to drive unimpeded on city streets. You can still drive five miles in more or less any direction and end up in relative rurality. Though it may not last for much longer, for the time being, Chico happily occupies the happy medium between smallville and metropolis. It is within these confines, where the dirt and pavement still mingle in relatively equal measure, that I find my inspiration.
Even on my daily two-block journey from bed to desk, there is ample fodder for contemplation. Like my friend the tree in the cage. His plight ranks with Sisyphus, Tantalus or Prometheus, who was cursed by the gods to be chained for eternity to a rock, where each day an eagle would eat his liver from his stomach, only to have it grow back the next day. This tree has positioned itself in such a way that every touch of a breeze grinds its flesh against its iron cell, the audible moan reporting the wound. And though the tree grinds away, its remaining livelihood forces it to grow still in the same direction, constantly pushing itself forward onto its tormentor's dull blade.
Around the corner is a more uplifting daily scene. It has previously been established by a leading aviculturist (me) that pigeons are the parrots of America. Though many never take the time to look, a discerning eye reveals that, like their more exotic counterparts, Chico?s parrots do come in vast and varied colors and patterns. There are the grays, the blacks, the whites and many hues in between, all coexisting in harmony. The king of all these however, is the Golden Parrot. Not a touch of gray nor black graces his plumage. Rather, he is adorned with an auburn iridescence framed by milky white. He, of course, makes his home on the grandest of Downtown buildings, the majestic pink Waterland-Breslauer building on the corner of 4th and Broadway, where he patrols the perimeter of his kingdom gracefully with his beady-eyed gaze.
Of late, he has been involved in a communal nest construction, occasionally contributing a branch or two to the labors of his comrades. This very morning, however, all was not well in the land of the Golden Parrot. I watched as a crow marauded the eave on which the Golden Parrot?s nest had been constructed. Though my view was obscured, the violent gyrations of the crow ?whose head could occasionally be seen bobbing above the edge of the eave?made it readily apparent that any heirs to the throne of the Golden Parrot who may have recently came forth into this world were no more. I use these examples only to prove that one need not spend two years on Walden Pond, or a week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers to gain insight into the nature of things, or even the nature of nature. Nature itself is, in the common vernacular, a misnomer.
Though the trees, forest and the life found therein are certainly nature, the streets and sidewalks of a town such as Chico are equally alive, both literally and figuratively. Webster's defines nature as "the external world in its entirety." The wilderness has been explored, as has the so-called urban jungle. Now is the time for the semi-urban forest.
