I ran across this on a hike today. Someone, kids, perhaps, had scratched spirals in the ground at the base of a tree, and then filled them in with pinecones and twigs. The sight of these pinecone-twig spirals made me smile—a response that was entirely unlike the angry visceral reaction I had to the gratuitous stacks of rocks that I came across on the trail the other day.
And I need to figure out why the difference.
Maybe it has something to do with placement. Most of the cairns were above ground, on top of tree stumps and logs, outside of a rock’s natural habitat, so to speak. By contrast, and ignoring the spiral pattern, the pinecones and twigs seem quite at home on the ground at the base of a tree.
Maybe the dramatic difference in my reactions is partially due to aesthetic differences in the two cases. While some of the rock stacks have a kind of pleasing and unexpected symmetry to them, there is not much else about their form or arrangement that I find appealing. They are just individual rocks piled on top of each other. On the other hand, the pinecone-twig spirals are compelling beyond just a surface symmetry, and as soon as I saw them I was reminded of Bonnie, my very good artist friend (the word good applies to both artist and friend) who makes extensive use of natural forms like these (see the cover art for my books Stones and Born Expecting the Pleistocene for examples of her work). The spiral forms lightly scratched into the ground are a kind of fractal mirror of both the structure of pinecones and the needle patterns on the twigs.
I strongly suspect, however, that the difference reflects something about me that has changed since I first ran across the cairns on the trail, something about my way of thinking about these acts of forest vandalism.
In her reply to my post about the rock stacks, Ria suggested that interacting with natural forms in this way is a clumsy attempt to fill a void. Civilized humans are drawn to re-embrace their wild nature, but don’t know what to do about it. Like a 4th-grade boy who has a powerful crush on a girl, so he pulls her hair and calls her names.
We are born carrying the active residue of several million years of evolutionary preparation for life entirely immersed in the natural world as a foraging species of social primate, and at least 250,000 years of genetic fine tuning for a life in small, self-contained, nomadic or semi-nomadic, and intensely egalitarian gatherer-hunter bands. The gulf separating (so-called) life in civilization and our inborn physical, psychological, and social expectations is an ever-widening canyon. Yet, on some level at least, we can still feel the other side, and stacking rocks and arranging twigs and pinecones in a spiral pattern might reflect trifling but legitimate attempts to make contact.
Rather than become angered that people are compelled to leave their mark on natural spaces, perhaps I should celebrate some of their unconscious motives for doing so. The fact that the impulse to interact with the natural world is still present is a sign of hope. It is a sign that civilization hasn’t completely snuffed out our wild human nature. After all, someone took the time to search out these pinecones. They carried them against the skin of their hand and felt their texture, and they could smell the woody musty scent of the earth beneath the tree as they bent down to arrange them. And, maybe, for a fleeting moment, they got a tiny glimpse of the other side of the canyon.
