Category Archives: Environment

By Corinne H. Smith

“The question is not what you look at but how you look & whether you see.” ~ Thoreau’s journal entry, August 5, 1851

Henry Thoreau didn’t have to deal with automobiles, highways, and intersections. He was lucky. We who have driver’s licenses and cars, do. And to have any success at getting anywhere, we have to pay attention to everything happening around us. It’s an action with the multitasking demand built right into it.

Here in Suburbia USA, I’ve found some unique road signs that have made me think of Thoreau’s quote about looking and seeing. And they could appeal to his love of wry wit, too.

A major intersection near the site of my weekday job was re-engineered this past year. Now it handles a state roadway that bypasses a small city. It also leads a regional hiking and biking trail across railroad tracks and toward a visitor center. The new traffic signal has to accommodate walkers, bikers, trains, casual traffic, and tractor-trailers that barrel through and head either to a major landfill or to a convenience store headquarters. A lot of movable objects can be present at any given moment.

A small, new sign was installed here as soon as the traffic signal began working. I laughed out loud the first time I saw it.

I had never seen this kind of sign before. Naturally, we’re going to look both ways, no matter what. But this was a subtle reminder to do so, even though a four-way light was still supposedly controlling the traffic. Although we have been skeptical about how this crossing would function, we have yet to see or hear any accidents happening here. So far. I guess everyone is looking left. And then looking right. Or vice versa.

Another intersection a few miles away sits in the middle of farmland and a few small residences with large acreages. But the lay of the land makes it a bit difficult to see oncoming traffic. Installers of a sign here took greater lengths to explain to us what to do.

I laughed when I first saw this sign, too. Is it really necessary? And yet I follow its instructions and look even more times than it suggests, before venturing across.

With so many road signs demanding our attention and commercial billboards admonishing us to buy-buy-buy, it was inevitable that someone would take matters into his/her own hands. That someone had posted an original and handmade directive.

Who said rural folks don’t have a sense of humor? I think Thoreau would have laughed at this one, too.

This is the spring of the year. Birds are migrating north to their breeding-places; the melted snows are escaping to the sea…The element of water prevails…What a conspicuous place Nature has assigned to the skunk-cabbage, the first flower to show itself above the bare ground! What occult relation is implied between this plant and man? Thoreau, Journal, 4/18/52

Nearby, a needle-softened slope under big pines tips just so to the south; it cups the March sun, and, after the ice vanished one night from the pond it fronts, I’ve been watching that slope. There, today, a few days early (and before the weekend’s once predicted snow), I saw spring. Or at least one of Henry Thoreau’s favorite signs of the season.

Skunk cabbage grows to be large, green and glossy, but when it first peeks around above ground, it’s hard to spot. Often it shows one or two little horns above the mottled leaves of last year, and those horns have a rich green redness that blends well with the dun ground.

What will follow? seems the question of all first shoots, and in years past, at bog’s edge, I’ve seen a whole green village of cabbage. But here, near the equinox, somehow the future seems an open question; there’s no guaranteed answer. We could tip back to winter; we could go headlong into spring; we could for a while balance in the even light, warm on one side, cold on the other.

I kneel to look and imagine the body below the horn…or it could be a nose, or even a thumb… its imagined face looks up, feeling perhaps the new warmth on this sun slope. Nothing moves visibly. “What occult (Cramer translates as hidden or inscrutable) is implied between this plant and” me?

But now the sun has warmed my back, and I feel the fibers of cloth stir; unrooted animal that I am, I grow impatient, get ready to move on. It’s all about (to) change. For both of us.

Amusing myself by getting the ‘horns’ to perch on top of a “shady.”

coda: after a few photos, I break a tip from one of the horns and rub it between my fingers, and I find the distinctive scent’s not yet taken hold either; the cabbage hasn’t risen to ripe. That too seems assigned to later.