A Gaggle of Ill-Natured Goofs on the Loose?

I just read an essay by David Gessner, as yet unpublished but on the docket for inclusion in the anthology Between Song and Story: Essays for the Twenty-first Century, edited by Sheryl St. Germain and Margaret Whitford and due for release by Autumn House Press in Autumn 2011. It's titled "Sick of Nature" and it's a deliciously messy piece that advocates the destruction of the quiet, Sunday school constraints of nature writing in favor of the less than gentile antics of the wide and scary world. Gessner paints a hilarious scene of nature writers fighting big business. "The standard response to this unfairness of things is to curse and wave our little fists . . . Assembled we'd look like a reunion of Unibombers: solitary, hollow-eyed, scraggly-bearded characters ranting against progress. Likely our strategy would have been to abandon the phone lines and take to the beaches to wander, alone and aimless, in search of terns and profundities."

But no more, he cries out to everyone who has the gumption to follow him. It's time to end all this passivity and politeness and turn to the nitty-gritty reality. Why can't nature writing embrace all aspects of nature, even the less than seemly ones. For instance, sex. What's more natural than sex? Do you think Thoreau never had sex? he asks. Even if he never did, we can pretend otherwise and move on.

Though Gessner admits that he rates about a 7.3 on the narcissism scale and could quite possibly be losing his grip, he rants that assuming the pure mantle of the nature writing genre is enough to make anyone long for a beer, scratch his stomach, and start a chat about the last Celtics game. And that, damn it, is precisely what nature writers should do on occasion. They should not only do it, they should be recorded as doing it instead of looking like a gaggle of ill-natured buffoons on the loose. He further declares, "Though it isn't fashionable to admit, I wouldn't have made it through the fall without television," and soon confesses to a nature writer's greatest heresy. Acting on his dream of "getting away from it all," he discovered that "Nature became, if not a malevolent presence, at least an irritating one. Gulls shat on my back deck, raccoons rummaged through the trash cans, and the power post beetles (close cousin to the termite) drilled into the beams day and night with a sharp tcckkk tcckk tcckk noise that made me feel as if they were burrowing into the meat of my temples."

Good humor and apt points course throughout this essay but what is perhaps most masterful is his reliance on nature to prove that genre writers need to stop being so shy and stuffy. He argues, "Fear has always led to the taming of diversity and wilderness" and points to the words of a fellow naturalist to help him. "Gary Snyder wrote that those who are comfortable in wilderness are often comfortable in their own subconscious." Well, who wants to admit that he's uncomfortable in the wilderness of our his subconscious? No nature writer, that's for sure.