When Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca passed through this part of Florida in late summer 1528, his names and nicknames trailing behind him like soldiers in the van, the haggard band of Spanish soldiers and clerks of which he was a part encountered a country ravaged by storms. He described a “country difficult to traverse and strange to look at,” covered with “great forests” full of “wonderfully tall” trees. So many of these giant trees had fallen, he wrote, “that we had to make long detours and with great trouble” to pass through the country. The trees still standing, he continued in his memoir, were “rent from top to bottom by thunderbolts.” For a man reared on Spain’s rocky, sandstone-colored Mediterranean coast, it must have been strange country, indeed.
Walking in our little corner of the Red Hills in the days since Hurricane Idalia passed by, I’ve been reminded of the old Spanish invader’s experience here. There was a venerable old pine tree that came down up the hill from our place, leaves and sticks and clumps of sodden leaves and moss everywhere, puddles and piles. The most motivated neighbors in our little community set to work right away sawing, raking, grouping, piling, anxious to restore order. Mere hours after the storm, when most of us were only just beginning to open the door and peek outside, these intrepid workers had already mostly finished the cleanup.
People love to set things right like this, but nature prefers chaos. Left to themselves, all these sticks, leaves, and branches will fertilize the earth where they fell, literally becoming soil as the years go by. In the meantime, they swarm with life. Pick up a fallen branch after a few days in the sticky summer heat and you are likely to find a circus of living things—millipedes, roaches, slugs, worms, ants—in the cool, dark depression below. Life thrives in these overturned places.
Over on the other side of the hill, away from the tree felled by Idalia, they cleared a little patch of land earlier this year when a winter storm knocked over a different tree. One day there was a large maple tree standing there, surrounded by shrubs and bushes growing in the shade. A few days after the storm took it down, everything was gone. In its place was simply a patch of bare earth, brown and forlorn, covered with sawdust and drying leaves. Our instinct in a place like this is to stay away. My dog, Penny, snuffled around the patch for a moment and then moved on to the abundantly living places nearby.
Chaos is creative. It gives us new ideas, encourages us to play.
This lonesome state did not last, however. A week after the clearing, there were weeds shooting up all over the bare spot, little clumps of green rapidly colonizing the exposed soil. Vines crept among the clumps of weeds, tentatively, like explorers working across the frontier. A few weeks later, there were little bushes there, a thickening verge of nightshades, kudzu, and wildflowers swarming with bees, wasps, and butterflies. Now, six months later, the little bare spot is wild with greenery, vividly alive with flowers, vines, insects, snakes, mice, birds, lizards, even—oddly enough—a thriving tomato plant.
There are some, I’m sure, who would like nothing more than to rip that little wild spot out, replace it with St. Augustine grass, and turn the sprinkler on it. I pray to every goddess, god, and lesser celestial entity who comes to mind that these people never get their way. Let them have the rest of the world and leave this two-hundred square feet of jungle to itself.
Chaos is creative. It gives us new ideas, encourages us to play. When I was a child, running around the suburban streets of southern Maryland, there was a nice patch of ignored woodlands next to the house. About five acres, hemmed in by roads, apartments, and fenceless back yards, it was densely treed, networked with narrow paths over dry, deciduous hills and down into boggy depressions. There was even a little pond back there, fifty yards across, murky and filmed with white bubbles in the summer but beautifully iced over for a few blessed days in the winter. I spent hours in that little patch of woods, my magic place, roaming the paths by myself or, more often, trooping down the leafy trails with the peripatetic gaggle of neighborhoods kids.
One day a group of us were ducking and snapping through a trackless portion of the woods about two hundred yards back of a kid named Josh’s house when we made a remarkable discovery. We found a place where some trees had fallen together, interlocked like dominoes that tumbled in different directions. One had fallen over completely, roots and all, a giant clump of red earth at the base looming over a deep hole. One kid, an intrepid girl named Katie, shimmied down in to the hole and found a bunch of tightly packed clods of marbled red and brown dirt. We marveled at these for a moment, these little artifacts of a world long-buried beneath our feet, longer than some clumps of dirt probably deserved. Meanwhile the fallen tree leaned at about a thirty degree angle, many feet up, supported by the strong limbs of a neighboring tree that had managed to survive the storm. A kid named Mark balance-walked right up the leaning trunk of this fallen grandfather. Another tree in the middle of these two had not survived, however. Struck by Mark’s fallen pine, it broke off about ten feet up the trunk and fell into the arms of another tree nearby. Together, along with dangling branches, shrubs, and decaying logs, these fallen trees formed a sort of enclosed clearing, like a cathedral in the dense woods. We saw the potential for this place immediately: this was a fort. We gathered the clods from beneath the tree and piled them at strategic locations along the stockade—dirt bombs. We stationed a sentry at the top of the root-ball tree to keep an eye out for anyone coming.
Sure enough, after a couple days, a group of older kids came by and heard us playing back in the fort. They saw the potential too and undertook a siege on our position. We took up our battle stations and pelted them with dirt bombs until one of them told his little brother (Josh, who had learned of the fort when we came out of the woods into his backyard the day before) that he would tell their mom what we were up to back there. This was a compelling argument to Josh, for some reason, and in his sputtering confusion the older kids broke through our defenses. They chased us for awhile before returning to claim the fort for themselves.
In these days after the storm, I remember the fort vividly. I think about the way this place has always been characterized by fallen trees, draining lakes, flooding rivers, raging forest fires. Living things—plants and millipedes and children, too—thrive in the aftermath of these events. Everything is born of chaos and disorder, and everything will one day return there. We may as well climb the trees and make some dirt bombs in the meantime.
C.B. Crenshaw 