That first juicy bite, with sharp teeth sinking through delicate thin membrane;
the skin is a fragile protective layer. It holds in the flesh full of delicious juice now
squeezing between molar and jaw. Teeth grind down searching out sweet meat
between skin and core. Without the skin’s protection, the open cavity of flesh hemorrhages.
Nature is wild and unforgiving.
It does not listen to the pleading of the prey.
Life feeds on life.
It tastes best when fresh.
At first bite the interior begins to oxidize. Pale flesh tans, beginning decomposition upon exposure. Where teeth rip open the skin, meat begins to rot. I circumnavigate the open cavity and chew my way around the core. Swallowing life, I think of zombies. I reach the epicenter and expose the potential infant forms of life to be. They are poison. I throw the skeletal leftovers over the railing. One life sacrificed for another. The remains will complete their disintegration in the grasses below. Perhaps an apple tree one day shall grow.
Amid the urban landscape, nature embeds herself in all corners. Our backyards are a wilderness of beauty and danger. Nature, in all its transition and splendor from micro to macro, continually sacrifices one life for another. Death is the biggest contributor to the living. Everything must eat. Something must always die. Nature offers no gentle explanation, nor does she need to.
I step outside to speculate the changes.
I begin to realize how deeply I dwell in an urban wilderness. On the surface it appears gentle, but the closer I look, the more brutal it becomes. I watch the habits of a bunny and notice the routine visits of an alley cat named Smokey. The rabbit sits like a stone amongst the tall grass nibbling away. The cat is a silent hunter. She stalks mice like a gargoyle at the edge of an unkempt garden. Dark skeletal remains of last year’s mammoth sunflowers tower the yard. Weeds of unknown species entangle a jungle over an attempt at a strawberry patch. A knot of clover has encapsulated the single tombstone at the garden’s edge. The white words “RIP Baby Bird” are no longer visible.
Within the wilderness of the garden, mice have made a home under a wooden crate where a television sits like a headstone. Its channel is always black. No need for a remote. It’s the best channel around and doesn’t cost a cent. The best part of it is there are no commercials. It is a 24/7 live nature station: eat or be eaten, live or be sacrificed to the living. Even the carrots were an offering to the worms, as were the raspberries unwillingly succumbed to the beetle’s little white larvae.
The rabbit I almost ran over with the lawn mower at infancy is always at bay. It crawled out from a shallow hole like a hairless mole scurrying from the blade’s roar. Its mother lost her home during the great storm this year. With the ground soggy from days of rain, the tree was an easy victim to the wind. Capsized, now the roots reach towards the sky pleading to be buried again.
Vines climb up concrete walls suffocating homes. Plants attempt to swallow the structures we’ve made. Humans have placed themselves outside-inside nature. They have established a captivity within-without nature by creating cities and civilizations; this attempt to conquer and separate from nature is only an illusion. They think they have found a way to live beyond the wild and the savage. But, I argue not, and suggest otherwise. Nature can not be defeated. We are deeply buried, twisted in her knot of life and sacrifice. That is why I say we attempt to live outside, yet still remain inside. It is impossible to be separated from her. Though appearing tamed, nature finds its way to penetrate the urban landscape: weeds grow through cracks, birds nest in the eaves of homes, hornets swarm over doorways, squirrels become undesired roommates, and the occasional sewer bandit pays a visit. We may try to eliminate their presence by destroying their homes, and killing their young, but they will always return, next week, next season, next year.
I begin to parallel my backyard experience with the story of Thoreau’s wilderness neighbors in his essay “Brute Neighbors.” I watch as the natural world plays out its performance in my backyard just as he witnessed a heroic battle of ants. It is a theatre of predator and prey, wilderness and weeds, survive or be sacrificed. Centipedes scurry along the wall like mechanical hunters. They are insect machines designed to eat each other. A spider sits at the edge of a web waiting for a meal like a fisherman at a pond. Does it spool its web to eat, or does it eat to spool its web? In its art the spider has purpose. Life feeds on life in the comfort of my backyard. It is an epic battle of survival. It is the natural order of things. It is wilderness.
Suddenly, I am acutely intrigued by the life of the cicada. A beautiful creature we hardly see except during certain years when their buzzing is endlessly heard from treetops. I have often thought of the cicada as having a short life span only to emerge from the ground for a period of time to breed. Their seventeen years underground of silence, solitude, and utter darkness sucking on the nutrients of tree roots goes unnoticed. What a strange life that would be to crawl out from the soil, hatch from hideous exoskeletons, grow wings, and finally sing in the white blinding light. Nature has its infinite beauty and destruction in its infinite details every inch of the Earth. And then the bird eats the cicada, crunching wing, and sap, and song.
