Wildness Emergent
Many of my days are spent in a complex of modern buildings located at the top of a hill on the northeast side of Iowa City. The campus is exquisitely landscaped. There are bronze statues and native grasses. There are walking trails and a secluded pond, sometime respite for migrating waterfowl in spring and fall. There are decorative grasses and lilies and cone flowers enough to give every season its own characteristic hue. There are picturesque locust and aspen trees that offer welcome shade in summer and welcome perch to cedar waxwings and American robins in winter.
For all of the campus’s very fine features, however, it also has a giant scar of a lawn. The thing is meticulously kept, watered and fertilized in early morning, mowed all day, prodded and plugged in the evening to prepare it for its long, dormant winter. Groundskeepers drive John Deere machines over it at all hours, mulching its edges, ensuring that no blade of grass is out of place. And the lawn is a museum piece: no one but the groundskeepers ever set foot on it. We who spend our days here aren’t immune to walking, but we walk on the campus’s wide sidewalks, rarely if ever venturing off path.
That the grass is kept off of has long perplexed me, especially here:
At the bottom of the image is one of the largest parking lots on campus. It is also one of the least used because it is farthest from all buildings. For those of us who arrive late, the lot is our punishment. The closest sidewalks arc illogically away from the lot, meaning that to stay true to our civilizing, we must walk well out of the way to get from lot to building. And for at least the five years I’ve been there, we have all done just that. Perhaps a few intrepid hikers have done the efficient thing and crossed the lawn as the crow flies, but those daredevils have been both rare and careful. They’ve left no trace of the trails they’ve blazed.
Until this winter. This winter, whether because more people are trudging in from the far lot, or because more of us who do park in the lot have found that following lines is tedious, or because we have yielded to the subtle Magnetism in Nature and divested ourselves of the paths that confine us, a trail has been pounded across the grass. It is beautiful.
