A Blessing
by Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver has a way of cutting through the universal in short bursts of light. She published her first collection in 1963 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for American Primitive. The below is an essay originally published in the book Blue Iris Poems and Essays given here with permission by the good people at Beacon Press and Salky Literary Management. It holds many things; the excitement of travel, the despair of deforestation, the freshness of youth, kindness, and hope.
At the bravo age of sixteen, just able to drive a car, I and a high-school friend began to spend our summers in a tent of World War vintage—I’m not sure which war—in a state park near Clarion, Pennsylvania. We lived there for weeks, in a lavish forest and near a river neither too harsh for wading nor too tame to be a fascination and to have, as rivers do, richly elaborated shores with shrubs and grasses and wildflowers. There were a few islands in the river and there were, in the park itself, some stands of first-growth trees, white pines. It was and is one of three small areas, two in Ohio as well as this one, that retained a more northern climate as well as one or more extremely deep and cold ponds, or, as an alternative, a river, after the retreat of the last glaciers. Imagine an iceberg left in the earth to melt slowly, and you have a sense of the ponds, and the influence of what thrived there. These strange and wonderful places kept a cooler temperature and an ecology of more northern places in part at least due to these chunks of ice—it is possible for an iceberg to be the size of Manhattan—left underground.
And this is where we lived, my friend and I, due it is proper to say to the leniency of our parents, who were used to our explorations nearer to home, and were willing to let us put our wings out, and drive off in my father’s old, second car. It was a blessing.
Our little home in the forest was in a camping area which, heaven knows why, was never crowded. We chose to pitch our tent as far away from other tents as possible, and under sweetly heavy-leafed maples. Our possessions, along with the tent, were two cots, blankets, a box each for clothes, a few books, and writing materials—to accomplish much in the direction of becoming writers was the ambition each summer—and a third box in which to store food. We cooked on an outdoor grill. If it rained, we ate what could be eaten raw. In any case our fare was simple, running down and out except for potatoes (we ate them endlessly), oranges, and candy bars. We slept peacefully or woke to the rustlings of wandering animals, once the rarely heard scream of a great horned owl. The only time we didn’t clean up and put away our few dishes after dinner (potatoes, potatoes) the raccoons carried them away. It took more than one search to bring them home. So we learned some things about living in a forest: to be caring, to be tidy. The sight of a dirty plate among the tender ground cover shamed us. The forest was lovely, in our tiny quarters we became conscious stewards of moss and leaf, keeping to a minimum and if possible hiding every sign of our occupation.
And yet one day, driving out of the park and only a few miles from it, we came upon another landscape, a furiously shocking scene. Acres of land had been devastated. Had been, for some reason, destroyed, and, unrepaired in any way, had simply been left. It was, to our minds and eyes that were full of the lush and the fine if cool fevers of life in the park, frightful, and at first we did not realize what it was. We thought we had come upon the result of some terrific accident. A flood, a tornado, a meteorite landing— all of these together perhaps might have created such a landscape. Except that then there would be random pieces of land that for whatever reason had received good luck, or grace, and had been spared. Here, however, nothing had escaped. Some dreadful rake separated earth from life with hideous care. Then we understood.
We had heard of strip-mining—heard the word, at least, at school, and thought we knew what it meant—a way to harvest the coal that kept us comfortable in winter, arriving in our driveways in a burly truck and sliding down the chute into the coal bin. This we knew. But we had not at all imagined, or been led to imagine, what it did to the land. Language is a fair art-strip-mining is an accurate description. Acres and acres, whatever had been there before, were now nothing.
We were youngsters, and even if adventurous and endlessly curious we were not really knowledgeable. Yet we were certainly correct to realize that no life could exist in such a place, and we saw none. It was all rut and parched clods; no flower, no leaf or blade of grass existed anymore to rise and hold the soil in its place, or to store the rain in various rootlets—to keep the dampness and goodness of the earth in place. It was a washout. We walked a long way, in every direction, but we were barefoot and the hard ground was burning hot. We understood, not a sparrow could survive in this place. People could not survive in such a place.
We drove, like scared rabbits, back to the park, to our peaceful tent under the lovely trees. We went on with our daily walks, to the place in the woods where the towering white pines stood; we wandered along the edges of fields full of summer blossoms, thick grass, and sometimes saw a doe with her spotted fawn, or alone, browsing-and, once, in the evening light, a black bear. We cooked our food on the outdoor grill and tossed bits of food—Spam, the old-fashioned kind! —to the young skunks who came to beg, and licked our heels and kept their manners in excellent order. We climbed the rocky hillsides and, once, heard a strange, utterly dry rattle and so stopped in time to watch a rattlesnake make its way across our path. We paused to talk to a sleepy saw-whet owl, almost but not quite hidden, in a young tree on the side of a hill; with serious eyes it clapped its beak and we walked on. We ran out of money and reported a falsehood to our parents, and went on with our potato, orange, candy-bar diet, and felt utterly wonderful.
We took the long walk down to the river and waded out to one of the small islands where we found—I had never seen it before and only rarely since—the extraordinary cardinal flower, red and blazing—a total excess of beauty in that place where few human eyes ever came, which told us, in the nicest way, that beauty was not only for us.
Though I say now that some of the trees, the pines, were first-growth, I don’t remember that in those summers we used the term, or even knew it. They were the tallest and mightiest of trees to two Ohio girls; they were thick and healthy; we could not imagine climbing into their crowns. We sat underneath them. And sometimes we thought of the strip-mined area and were aware of a conflict that was still in the distance then, but now is so close to altering the world irreversibly. The absence also of the small and the sweet in that disfigured place stayed in our minds, a fact so ugly and so near the park. They too, or rather their absence, haunted us. Life was perfect, yet there was a sound, a woeful drumming of machines and commerce, of taking and not giving back, in the distances around our charmed lives.
Neither did we know many of the names of the flowering plants. But one doesn’t need to know the names to feel the presences. I say this without any leaning against knowledge. But I say it with a passion for the worth of feeling — the simple, powerful response to beauty. And we spoke the names listed in our dog-cared field guide as though the flowers, whether in their found or their pictured loveliness, deserved capitals: Bouncing Bet, Butter-and-eggs, and Cloth of Gold, Evening Star, Heart’s Ease, the Justice Wand and the Lion’s Tail, and Patient Lucy and Touch-me-not, and Queen of the Meadow, and Lizzy-run-up-the-hedge.
Some are native to our continent, some came from Europe (and are called “alien!”) but one may meet them anywhere. For flowers, like people and birds, are travelers, and will leave a garden if they can.
What we saw filled our minds. What we saw made us love and want to honor the world. And dear readers, if anyone thinks children in these difficult times do not need such peaceful intervals, then hang up the phone, we are not having a conversation. Without doubt those summers changed my life and my friend’s. Whoever I am, and whoever my friend is now, fifty years later, we are both still part of this feast of the past. Happiness and leaves— they went together. The tender dripping of water on the tent roof, from the maples or, once, the realization that a baby skunk had taken to one of the cots we slept on and was, on a rainy morning, in a sound sleep. What could we do? Think of us—or think of your own children—in a tent that leaked only a little, and then from the beautiful rain and the elegant maples—think of us watching that very little skunk curled in the best blanket, opening its eyes sleepily and then closing them again; think of our silent and entirely happy laughter as we too went back to sleep.
