Brittany Wissen -- The Noland Trail

On the Noland Trail for the first time with the rest of the class, I was awed. I don’t usually enjoy nature except on the rare, extremely nice day where it’s acceptable to go to the beach and just sleep in the sun for however long I please, so I wasn’t very confident in what I would get out of the trip. At first put off by the overwhelming smells and the gross dampness under the canopy, but I tried my best to look past that. As we talked about the fallen trees, and what might have happened to them—stuff we will probably never know for sure—I thought about everything else that happens when I’m not looking. Nature is always changing, and though I obviously know that things like this happen, it’s strange to think about things happening in ways that you can’t even see: the subtle changes as trees begin to bloom and then the gorgeous explosion of flowers as they succeed, or the snake we saw. What does it do when we’re not looking? Obviously, there are the mundane things, such as eating or sleeping, but my questions tended to be more specific. I wondered where it lived, what kinds of animals it preyed on, what it did on bad weather days, how often it ventured away from home, and where it went when it did. Rather childishly, I even wondered how it felt about us venturing through. I suppose accepting this kind of openness about my surroundings was a kind of revelation for me, and I’m eager to go back again and see how I find it the second time around.