I really want to write about nature, but I have no reason to. Because I don’t spend any time in nature. I spend time at cafés, and in my car, and on the sidewalk, and at the park, and in random buildings, and on air mattresses.
But not in nature.
I plan one day to return. Tomorrow, in fact. Tomorrow I think I’ll return. If only for a bit. With my friends. We’ll go to the beach.
But that’s still not exactly what I’m talking about. I want to dig a little deeper than the beach. I want to be more like a Steve Irwin kind of guy. I want to be intricately bound to nature. I want my life to depend on it.
This doesn’t mean I want to be far away from human beings. I love human beings. And, admittedly, there are things about urbanity that I enjoy. I enjoy pools, and surpluses of high-quality restaurants, and seeing beautiful people all over (not that there aren’t beautiful people out in the boondocks!). I enjoy going to church, and just how close everyone is, especially in this city I’m in . . . In this city, too, I enjoy the fact that nature is so close.
Here in Charleston, you see, I get the best of both worlds.
Still, though, I think my life right now is leaning a little too much towards the concrete. I want there to be a little more grass, a little more salt, a little more silence, a few more good smells, and a few fewer bad ones.
I want to wake up to the smell of wood marinated in dewy moonlight.
I like what I’ve got right now. I don’t think I could be more blessed. I mean not to complain here. Life—I should take more time to acknowledge—is about as good as it could get. For me to think otherwise, for me to place my eyes hopefully on the horizon, would be, I don’t know, shortsighted?
And I’m not so sure, anyway, that I’d love being away from people, out there in the wilderness. I mean, definitely for some time, like for a fishing trip, but not forever.
I might think differently about this if I had a family of my own and all the money in the world. I could get a homestead, and grow my own food, and raise chickens and shit . . .
I’m not wishing away what I’ve got—I’m just saying my perspective on things might change if I had some guala1 and a wife. Because I’m not in this city to build a life. I’m here for the opportunities. Not the job opportunities, of course (‘cus I’m a bum), but for the people opportunities.
And the wifi.
If I could take all the people I loved and ship them out to some wood cabin village on the coast, a village in which we all rose with the sun and ate food and drank water that came only from our immediate environment, and had campfires and invented our own games, I’d be pretty happy.
Of course, half of us would probably die of some godforesaken disease, and we’d probably have to wage war against other “tribes”—I really wouldn’t love to catch a spear in my abdomen—and we’d probably have to be much more careful about where we walked, or else risk being mauled alive by some monstrosity.
But, I mean, it’s a nice thought . . .
Yes, I had this thought recently. It was this weekend, as I was driving a catering delivery out to John’s Island.
John’s Island is a beautiful place, an island next to James Island, which is an inlet over from downtown Charleston . . . Indeed, the fact that John’s Island is but a 20ish minute drive from the city is to me the most unbelievable feat, having come from the suburbs of Chicago, a seemingly endless expanse of subdivisions and municipalities.
On this island are pastures, and horses, and cows and goats and chickens, and salt marshes, and trees older than this country, and vast expanses of God’s creation.
I wish I had taken more pictures, but here is one:
On this island, too, is a real-estate development (the destination of my delivery) called the Kiawah River project, “a green, conservation agrihood centered around farming and employing state-of-the-art principles of sustainability,” “situated in South Carolina’s legendary Charleston sea islands with breathtaking marsh and river vistas, populated with ancient maritime forests.”
The place is quite simply unbelievable, a luscious neighborhood in basically the middle of nowhere, with a farm in its neighborhood, alligators in its ponds, and the ocean at its doorstep. It is, practically speaking, a wood cabin village right there on the coast.
I’ll bore myself trying to depict it, so here’s a map:
And so, as I said, I had this thought . . .
I’m not sure I’d ever do it myself, or if this is just something I’ll write about and let the ambitious licensed professionals attempt—but after seeing what’s going on out there, I am inspired by this idea of a sustainable, nature-oriented real-estate development . . . building a society in which nature is integrated, rather than separated, as it is in most parts of America today.
What this entails in my mind, though, is far less of some sort of expansion—some new project in the middle of nowhere—and far more of, as I said, integration. Rewilding is another word. Bringing nature to the city, where the people are.
If I were put on earth to do something, or a few things, this is one of them.
Obviously, I am a writer, not a real estate guy. I’m not so sure I’d enjoy giving even a single ounce of my time to what this company is doing on John’s Island . . . But it is something I would like in some way to be a part of.
What I think I’d really love to do, rather than starting projects anew, is find a way to work with what we’ve got already.
This isn’t a new idea by any means. I’ve been thinking about it for a while (plenty of others have, too). Maybe even my whole life. Especially with the neighborhood I grew up in. But the Kiawah River project is the first real-world attempt at this dream I’ve witnessed.
There are certainly some things I’d change if I did it myself. Maybe plant some fruit-yielding plants along the streets and in people’s gardens—I’d aim for practicality rather than that cookie-cutter aesthetic . . .
From what I’ve experienced, however, this would be incredibly difficult to accomplish, with even a solitary property. Not just because it’s expensive. But because people don’t want to change. They like their mowed lawns, they like their prim and proper-looking landscapes. Any time I mention this rewilding idea to my Illinoisan townsfolk, they react like I’ve just blasphemed the Lord. “HAHA! You want to do what? Don’t be ridiculous!”
People quite simply do not want to let their lawns turn into wildflower fields. Because, you know, where the flip, then, would they put the lawnmower?? And what the flip would the HOA say??
If I’ll have any hand in this rewilding dream of mine, it would be in two ways:
The first is by changing people’s opinions—i.e., writing about it. Hence, what I’m doing right now.
The second would be to amass so much money that I could just make the changes myself, if only to a select area. I figure such a feat would not only institute some sort of real-world change but would act as an example, a practical blueprint, for others.
The thing about this all, though, is that I’m happy with the way the world is.
We’ve been made to look down upon the world . . . We’ve been made to think it’s all fricked up, and that we might as well just torch it all and extract what resources we can because it’s a lost cause anyway. And while there are plenty of things I think we could do better, there are far more ways in which we could be going wrong right now—something we hardly give ourselves credit for.
I want to enjoy the world. Because there is plenty to enjoy. I don’t want to give my life away to trying to play God.
I know that if I want nature, it’s a short drive away. I know that if I want real, local food, almost every town nowadays offers farmers’ markets. And I know that there are some things, as I said, that I do love about those oft-unholy places that harbor human beings.
All I can do right now is control what’s in my control. I’ll have that homestead one day. But not today.
I do not see myself in the near future getting a real estate license. I think I’ve made the mistake many times before of trying to pursue something in an effort to change the world rather than simply becoming the most capable version of myself in the way I’m designed, in turn affecting the world in ways I could never have imagined.
Everyone says the world is going to shit, that we’re all going to be cooked like bacon in an oven beneath all these greenhouse gases. And that very well may be the case. But there’s nothing I can do about it.
I’ll return to nature one day in far more of a full-time, forever kind of way. And there will come a time for me to plant fruit trees along the streets. But for now, I’ve got to keep writing.
The beach will have to suffice.
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RB
Slang for “money”