The Ropes Course

I spent Friday in the tall redwood stands of Sonoma County, thinking about "outdoor education." Among the ideas presented to me were "ropes courses," which forced people into the trees, balancing, earning each step on a thin tendril in the sky. And yet. Is nature meant to be depicted and staged thus? Is nature meant to perform a service for us? What, I wonder, happened to the simple walk in the woods, quiet with one's own thoughts, or better yet finely and keenly attentive, attuned to each small murmuring from the trees. This forest, the site of earlier redwood logging, guessed at 100 years ago, looks like this: five or six new shoots of trees from a stump the width of a tractor-trailer tire. Tree says, what a great idea, to fell one wide single tree and allow six thin descendants to avail themselves of the space.

Wide-open space and how we avail of ourselves of it: On Saturday mornings in Iowa, I walked across the alternately bright or amber fields and hills outside town with my friend Tom, his dog Lucy, and my young daughter. Tom is a retina surgeon and photographer. We met while editors at a small science magazine; Tom was the "medical editor" and I was the "lay person" who made sure the ideas and images were true and accurate on paper that was then fastened together each month and sent out in the mail.

Tom takes pictures now of Iowa, its aging barns and lavender sunsets and long cast shadows in early October, air a little hint of winter to come. He still cuts into eyeballs to help people see better.

I have never understood how anyone can cut into eyes for a living and then wander the world looking into people's eyes and not feel some peculiar disconnect. I don't know how Tom does it. He addresses this question by saying, no surgeon would think like that!

Iowa, its fact and reality vs its mythos, still occupies my mind. It is one of the most altered landscapes on the planet, vying with New Zealand, another place I have lived. In Iowa, the tall grass prairie no longer exists as a force of nature. Now it exists as pockets of "rehabilitated" land. Instead, the miles stretch in all directions with corn and some soy. Small towns slowly die in their midst, people pushed out and deconstructed by corn they themselves planted. Corn takes over Iowa: Film at 11.

Another Iowa friend, Sasha Waters, has made a documentary about a version of these ideas and sent it to me last week in the mail. My daughter and I watched it and she said, hey mom, I remember how Iowa looks different from San Francisco. Sasha's film, This American Gothic, looks at life in Eldon, Iowa, where Grant Wood painted "American Gothic." We were surprised to learn that Midwesterners thought the painting was making fun of farmers. Like they were all somehow lesser beings.

So. It is Saturday and we are in San Francisco and our day is clear and the air cool. Tom and Sasha are in Iowa on this October day getting a look at red and yellow leaves, days of singular clear skies.

In Iowa I adapted to the habitat thus: If you simply refuse to look at the corn, or if you squint, you can almost see what is described in the diaries of women who migrated westward on Conestoga wagons, called prairie schooners, tall grasses, 200 or more grass and plant species per acre, grass moving in the wind like great waves across the sea.