Living close to nature or neighbors?
I went last Sunday to the monthly meeting of a local group of artists and writers at the Pine Mountain Club. I would gladly have stayed home and worked in the garden, but my friend was scheduled to read from her new novel and I had promised I would be there if I could.
I’d not yet read her book, though she had read a few chapters of it at our writers’ workshop, her first novel after a string of successful nonfiction books.
The story concerns a town where residents are concerned about the erosion of their quality of life, and since the writer is a licensed psychotherapist, discussion centered on what we expect for our quality of life and why.
Most of the folks there moved to the mountains to escape the stress of vapor lock on the 405, they said, and to reconnect with nature. Some are weekenders, driving the 80 miles or so back to the city on Sunday evenings to work through the week, then escaping to the mountains on Fridays to repair their psyches. There was some discussion about what connecting with nature means. E.O. Wilson’s “Ecopsychology” was mentioned. Also recent research that tracked city people who went on a wilderness experience and found it uplifting only to become depressed just days after returning to the city.
I had nothing to offer this discussion. Even when I lived in the city it was not really “The City.” I mean, Hidden Hills and Malibu aren’t likely to produce the kind of anxiety and isolation they were talking about. And isn’t isolation really just a frame of mind? The reluctance or inability to connect with other people? We used to call that the “all-I-want-is-to-be-left-alone” syndrome.
What baffled me at first was the prevailing opinion that nature was somehow a community thing. The sense of community found in small towns, I understand. But what does that have to do with nature? And isn’t L.A. actually just a scattered group of small communities? A bunch of suburbs looking for a city?
One of my daughters lives in Manhattan Beach, where she has many friends living in a little neighborhood. Though she grew up on a ranch, very much involved with nature, a neighborhood is something she missed as a child. Now she wants this for her 2-year-old. Friends living close by. A feeling of community.
Her twin sister agrees that it might be nice for her kids to be able to walk to a friend’s house to play. She, however, cherishes living out in the hills, closer to nature than to neighbors. Same gene pool. Same upbringing. Same nature and nurture. Go figure.
Nature and community do not easily co-exist, it seems, largely because of the way our neighborhoods are designed. Suburban homes line snakelike streets that end in cul-de-sacs. Or cinderblock walls. Developers and planners have done everything possible to discourage walking, one of the better ways to meet the neighbors, to say nothing of the health benefits. Zoning laws prohibit the mixing of residential and commercial properties, precluding one’s enjoyment of walking to the movies or the coffee shop, or, perish the thought, a grocery store. Not in their backyard. In the great cities of this world these pleasures are taken for granted. And great cities have great parks where one can reconnect with nature, at least to some degree.
Imagine the sense of community you would have if you could walk to work, if you worked in and for the community in which you lived. Malibu is one of the few places I know that manages to have a strong sense of community even though you have to drive to just about everything.
Anyway, the discussion progressed and everyone seemed to agree that nature and community were both important and somehow linked, but they didn’t know exactly how. Then someone said she had moved to the country and noticed older people just standing alone and watching the land and she couldn’t figure out what they were doing. I thought, good grief, that’s me. I spend an inordinate amount of time just standing around watching the land. Noticing the change of light, how the air feels softer just before dusk. Watching the deer wander out of the brush to feed in the cool of evening. But communing with nature has always seemed to me a solitary pleasure. It’s like, don’t talk to me when I’m watching a sunset.
My neighbors who live at the back of our canyon have a small band of sheep. Last week, the critters escaped and wandered over the hill behind our house. Pretty soon our border collie saw them and went up there, and escorted them back home. The neighbors drove down to thank us and to say there was one missing and would we keep an eye out for it. We opened the gate on the fire road so they could drive up to look and said if we found it, we’d get it home. The poor thing never turned up.
It’s sad, but I guess that’s about as close as we get here to combining nature and community.