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VIEW FROM THE PEW
What was that scary movie with those kids running in the forest trying to escape something awful and the trees and bushes seemed ominously reaching out to grab them? I saw it years ago and it replayed as a dream on a recent hot windless night maybe triggered by an overhanging branch scraping my roof.
Why would you be worried about a forest, I grumbled, awake. We don’t have snakes and tigers and bears to fear. Look at you, you couldn’t trot down a hiking trail if you wanted to! I tried to shut down my brain’s pondering-in-the-dark-hours mechanism but I figured it might be recent information turning into figments of imagination. There was the harrowing news of a Maui woman missing in the mountain rainforest that absorbed us for weeks before it ended well. Or was I thinking of the neighbors off to camp in an Australian wildlife preserve and so concerned about telling their young kids to beware of dangerous wild animals and plants which we don’t experience in Hawaii. Or maybe it’s just a wake-up call that it’s time to get a tree-cutter to deal with that pesky branch.
Next, I was awakened by a shama thrush singing his aria to the dawn. I’m pretty sure it’s a thrush translation of Psalm 118: “This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad.” I sorta sang along with my serenader in the English translation. And I’m all good with loving the forest again.
A few days later I found myself belting out an ode to nature which has been in my mind ever since. About 200 family and friends of Raymond Barona sang “How Great Thou Art” at his funeral Mass which was truly a celebration of the life of a man who was all a Christian should be, devout, humble, hard-working, humorous, living out Jesus’ teaching within his family, community and parish.
My tears flow whenever I hear or sing that great hymn; that’s all about remembering a man, cut of the same cloth as Raymond, whose faith and life affirmed the song.
“When through the woods and forest glades I wander, and hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees; when I look down from lofty mountain grandeur, and hear the brook and feel the gentle breeze. Then sings my soul, my Savior God to thee, How great thou art. How great thou art.” That verse might well have been written by my Dad, John Francis Adamski. We sang it at his funeral, too, more than 30 years ago, and it was part of my solitary Father’s Day observance in the privacy of my lanai, tears included.
A Wisconsin conservation warden, he spent much of his adult life in the woods, observing the natural world in all its glories and policing humans who damaged or disrespected it. I’m not sure that he sang the hymn during his workdays in the woods, but I’ll bet he could recite it. He was a product of that old school education, when they memorized poetry and other stuff which we now just grasp from an online source. “This is the forest primeval,” he’d say, as he led his three children into the woods on a learning expedition. (Thanks to Google, I reminded myself that line is from “Evangeline,” a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem about the pristine American wilderness before Europeans arrived and began to despoil it.)
Uncovering tiny blossoms
Though I could fill this page with my tales of the woods, I’ll just share a couple of experiences. In the spring, Dad would have us carefully clear dead leaves and residue of snow carpeting the forest floor to uncover tiny hidden white arbutus blossoms, one of the first annual miracles of renewed life. We did not pick a bouquet, we just enjoyed the endangered bloom and covered it back up to protect it. One day, we watched a hawk rise up with a bunny in its claws and at least one of us freaked out and wanted Dad to save little Fuzzy. But no. That was a lesson in how complex the natural world is: all creatures have their roles in it, they need to eat and feed their chicks, they’re not meant to live forever and they’re neither good nor bad when they live out their nature. I wish his lesson could be absorbed by people who want feral cats and chickens to live forever, but that’s another story.
Finally, I remember how wonderful it was that Dad knew places where wild blueberries and blackberries grew. And how inconvenient it was that they had to be picked one by one from prickly branches amid mosquitos, bees and other wonders of the insect world. And that being a whiney, “really tired” kid was not an exemption from the family effort to gather Mother Nature’s goodies and turn them into jam and sauce, saving summer bounty for winter use.
By the way, back to that beloved hymn, through the wonders of the internet I learned that a Swedish Protestant churchman wrote the words to “How Great Thou Art” one day in 1885. Carl Boberg described the experience in later writing as related in Wikipedia: “It was that time of year when everything seemed to be at its richest coloring; the birds were singing in trees and everywhere. It was very warm; a thunderstorm appeared on the horizon and soon there was thunder and lightning. We had to hurry for shelter. But the storm was soon over and the clear sky appeared. When I came home I opened my window toward the sea” and heard church bells.
So he memorialized that day’s experience with this, the first verse:
“O Lord my God! When I in awesome wonder; Consider all the works thy hand hath made. I see the stars, I hear the mighty thunder; thy power throughout the universe displayed. Then sings my soul, my savior God, to thee: How great thou art, how great thou art.”
It was set to the melody of a Swedish folk song, and has been translated into many languages, including Hawaiian. Thanks to a later verse about when “Christ will come … and take me home,” it is a favorite for funerals but I wish we’d bring it out every other Sunday.
I know that I have a lot of company on the planet, including Pope Francis, who wish that people would follow Boberg’s example and use their words and actions to celebrate God’s creation. As opposed to trampling those natural wonders while trying to “collect” them in a trophy photo.
“People are loving nature to death” is an expression so widely used that an original author is untraceable. Pope Francis developed that theme in his 2015 encyclical on the environment: “Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home.” Look for it on usccb.org, the website of the conference of American bishops, which says the pope is addressing “everybody living on this planet … to acknowledge the urgency of our environmental challenges … and join him in embarking on a new path.”
It would be hard to convince those #hashtag hordes of selfie collectors who just have to prove they’ve seen the most fabulous view by sharing through social media. They made the news with a May stampede to see wildflower fields in Carlsbad, California, leaving crushed blossoms in their wake. They are the very opposite of our arbutus expedition to admire the blossom then leave it alone.
Actually the pope has faced much more dangerous pushback than the #hashtag hordes. Industrialists, developers, investors, representing capitalism at its worst, want to use and change the natural world without restraints and don’t appreciate the pope’s encyclical. You know, the same guys who deny climate change because it could curtail their pollution or cut profits. Many of those wealthy and greedy people identify themselves as Catholics. And that’s another story, bigger than I can tackle.
Loving nature to death
“Loving nature to death” was the theme of a June 18 program on Hawaii Public Radio. It was an “On Point” segment by the Boston Public Radio station WBUR.
The participants chronicled the environmental crises in places such as Horseshoe Bend in Arizona, “one of the American west’s most celebrated overlooks.” A few thousand people would visit it each year until 2010, the year Instagram was launched, when 100,000 flocked there, overwhelming the facilities, leaving a dump of debris from food and other junk. This year, the visitor count is expected to reach 2 million.
The report told of a current effort by the travel and tourism board in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to get visitors to stop “geotagging” photographs on social media in an effort to protect the pristine lakes and forests of that federal wilderness area.
Those anecdotes certainly ring a bell in Hawaii, where residents want to close public roads to overwhelmed beaches and the state attempts to limit the number of daily visitors to mountaintops and hiking trails. If only those people who seek beauty would embrace it quietly — as we did about our secret berry bushes — not need to brag and thus lure hordes of other manic despoilers. Go ahead and sing its praises, write a poem, keep your photos on your phone.
My health care provider seemed to be reading my mind in its glade and forest fantasia phase. Up popped an email advisory about “forest bathing: what it is and why you should try it.” Whaat?! Surely not promoting swimming in streams tainted with animal droppings and pesticide runoff!? Nope, Kaiser is advising us to pursue “shinrin-yoku,” a concept developed in the 1980s by the Japanese government. Scientists have proven that spending time in the midst of the natural world, even in an urban park, can lower blood pressure, heart rates and stress. The advice is to step away from the artificial man-made world of bright lights and flickering screens, TV, cell phone, video games, driving in traffic jams, surrounded by concrete. “Focus on what your senses are taking in, whether it’s the scent of clean ocean or a chorus of chirping birds,” was the oh-so-serious health directive.
I especially liked the advice that a leisurely walk will do, it’s not an endurance test or a race to be finished fast. Staring at trees swaying in the wind or waves curling toward shore are encouraged; that, anyone can definitely do.
With ocean and mountains all around us and in a climate where we can be outdoors all year long, you wouldn’t think islanders would need that advice. But as I drive through my Palolo neighborhood, where yards full of fruit trees and flower bushes are being replaced with huge houses surrounded by paved parking and nary a blade of grass, I’m afraid we do.
Cringing at one particular architect’s shame, I thought about the words from the story of creation in Genesis: “And God saw everything that he has made, and behold, it was very good.” I’m not seeing that humans can make the same claim, despite the pricetag developers, and governments, might put on their monstrous creations.
As for that branch that wakes me in the night, and the mostly unwelcome shrubbery on the slope threatening to swallow my house, I’m rethinking my plan to have it all demolished. I’m so lucky I don’t have to wander beyond my back step to consider “all the works thy hands have made.” The shama thrush is a cousin of mocking birds, able to change its tune. I’m hoping that if I whistle “How Great Thou Art” often enough, the bird will sing along.
