Squirrels, A Student, and My Next-Door Neighbor

I am often diverted from my oatmeal breakfast watching squirrels make their way across the tops of the towering elms and maples that line my backyard. There is drama as one gingerly edges toward the end of an impossibly thin twig of a branch of a limb, eyes the span of space between it and the impossibly thin twig across from it, leaps, hurling itself over the chasm of air, and lands, clutching the twig, the branch plunging slowly downward—surely it will break from the force of the squirrel’s weight, surely it will snap, sending the squirrel into an 60 foot freefall—but, no, the branch rights itself and the squirrel scampers off, perhaps to fling itself outward, over empty space, several more times before reaching home.

There is comedy, too, as two squirrels, defying the stern physics of gravity, chase each other, spiraling with dizzying speed up and down a tree trunk, two compact bundles of energy with enough wattage to klieg light even the darkest night sky. And there is mystery as well, as a squirrel, in its mid-branch meander, suddenly halts and chirps and begins to undulate its tail, the successive waves looking surprisingly like a series of semaphore-flashed question marks.

I’d like to think that the drama is a leap of faith, performed, like an Angelus, morning, noon, and night, but I know the squirrel is guided by the keen surety of instinct. I’d like to think the comedy is a raucously exuberant game of tag or hide and seek, but I know mating, not play, is propelling a male to chase a female, or to chase off a rival for her affection. I’d like to think the question-mark tail signals a metaphysical moment, an interrogation, perhaps, of the Rodentia condition, but I know that chirps and tail movement are the grammar of squirrel discourse.

I know that a walnut-sized brain cannot possibly support the interiority, the purposeful agency and mindfulness, that I have imagined. I am suborned by facts. Still, I find myself leagued with Robert Frost, who says, “I have a mind and recognize/ Mind when I meet with it in any guise.” And with Walt Whitman, who says animals “bring me tokens of myself.” The impertinence of facts is no excuse for an abridged imagination.

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Last spring, a student in my Introduction to Mass Media class told me, with not a little pride, that he had never in his life read a novel.

“You’ve never read a novel?” I asked, unsuccessfully suppressing my incredulity.
“Nope.”
“Why not”
“I don’t like to read. It’s too slow. And anyway, it’s fiction,” he said, emphasizing “fiction.” “It’s just made up stuff; it’s not real life.”
“So, how do you spend your free time?”
“I do Facebook or I hang with friends. We work out or watch movies and play video games.”
“But movies and video games are fiction,” I point out. “They’re not `real life.’”
“Yeah, but they’re more interesting, and, besides, I can do them with my friends.”

He is an intelligent young man, I have no doubt, but he is irredeemably social, unable or unwilling to expose himself to the slow-pulse experience of himself, to enter the cloister of his own uninterrupted thoughts. Having never read a novel, he has never inhabited, fully and particularly, a time or place different from his own, has never brought an other’s mind or heart close enough to sympathize and understand it, has never wholly imagined something other than that which he has always known. I worry about his success should he come to a span of space requiring a cognitive or emotional or imaginative leap. I wonder what, if anything, he will question.

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My next-door neighbor bought the property after the previous owner’s house burned down. The first thing he did, once the charred debris was removed, the small cellar was filled in, and the land was graded, was hire surveyors to determine the exact line that separated our lots, a line duly marked by buried iron pins, a paint line on the sidewalk, and a stake tied with a pink ribbon, a kind of fence, I suppose, to make us good neighbors. The second thing he did was hire a crew to remove half a dozen old-growth maples. “They don’t fit my vision of the yard and the house I’ll be putting in,” he told me.

For over 90 years those maples had softened the blow of the hammering southern Iowa sun in the summer. For over 90 years they had blazed scarlet, deep orange, and gold in the fall, a talismanic thrum of beauty, perhaps the best approximation of grace and benediction we can experience on earth. They were balm for my eyes and heart each time I turned the corner onto our street. I looked forward to that turn, that sight. In a matter of days, though, they had sunk to grief under the implacable buzz of chain saw and stump grinder. And the new owner’s vision of yard and house responsible for this massive gesture of exclusion? A denuded, indifferently green square and a nondescript beige-sided oblong. He is a man of geometry, of austere lines and angles; a man whose doing leaves little room for imagining; a man more given to the what is rather than the what should or could be.

I hope the squirrels he evicted when he removed the trees found shelter in mine. I’d guess he makes no leaps of faith, or leaps of any kind. A retired farmer, his feet are firmly rooted to the earth. No ragged hem of doubt or supposition will edge his day. I’d guess he is immune to unchecked caprice, that he plays no games except the zero-sum kind, and that he seldom, if ever, seeks to tag his hiding self. And I’d guess that rarely, maybe never, does he feel an inarticulable desire, or an indefinable promise, or the need or necessity to question the cocooning certitudes within which he lives and moves.