Misdeeds in opposition to nature bother this scientist years later

A few years ago, I attended the reunion of my small high school class. Seeing the faulted mountains, sage flats, and rangelands where I was raised prompted some reflection about how the geography of that place formed my concept of the sacred.

Thinking back on some of my experiences growing up, I was reminded of the poetry of Rilke: the gods of nature are wild, some are beautiful and some are terrifying. There seems to be a constant tension between the terrifying and the beautiful in nature.

I grew up at a time in eastern Oregon when the hunting culture was even more pervasive than it is today. I remember hunting deer with my father, ducks and geese alone, and pheasants and quail with my friends. Often on the first day of hunting season, school was let out because so many of us would be out hunting.

When times were hard my father, a sawmill worker, poached deer so we could eat. The economic culture was extractive.

For a time during and after World War II, the Ponderosa Pine forests were overcut and were producing more lumber than the much wetter forests on the west side of the state. Since the settlement of the area by Irish sheepherders and cattlemen, the rangelands were overgrazed. Only the intervention of the federal government that owned much of the land eventually led to more sustainable use.

On my trip to the reunion I realized that my life on the Oregon desert was by turns extractive and violent, but I also realized that the beauty and mystery of the desert had led me to know a numinous dimension and impulse in nature that as a scientist I could not explain, but as a poet I could attempt to describe. Nature is in a tension between the violent on the one hand and nurturing, even loving, on the other.

These two impulses are not in tension like two ends of a spring, but perhaps more like a symbiosis, or even a quantum entanglement where one atom can change its spin at any distance instantaneously when its original partner changes its spin. Maybe Rilke was right: are beauty and terror the same, two faces of the same reality?

I learned about violence from another experience from my youth. The Forest Service had decided without evidence to put a bounty on porcupines.

Our scout troop was driving home from a camping trip when we saw one at the edge of the road. The troop jumped out, picked up rocks and began stoning the porcupine. The porcupine began screaming and crying just like a human baby in distress. I will never forget the sound of the porcupine pleading for its life, or the sight of blood seeping from the mouth and ears of a helpless being.

What impulse in us allows us to kill living things without thought or shame? I have never been able to forgive myself for what I did to the porcupine that day.

Acts10:6 “Peter became hungry and wanted something to eat, and while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its found corners. Ii contained all kinds of four–footed animals as well as reptiles and birds. Then a voice told him, “Get up Peter, Kill and eat.” Surely not. Lord! Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.”

The voice spoke to him a second time. “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”

Melvin Adams is librarian-resident poet at Northwest United Protestant Church in Richland and a retired scientist. Qfuestions and comments should be directed to editor Lucy Luginbill in care of the Tri-City Herald newsroom, 4253 W. 24th Avenue, Kennewick, WA 99338. Or email lluginbill@tricityherald.com.