Due to road construction where my usual bus stop was, I’ve had to walk to a different stop to catch my bus to work every day since mid-April. Great exercise! (A bit of sarcasm) My route follows a tree-lined, residential street with Victorian-style houses mixed with contemporary, vibrant green front lawns and vivid gardens. Sprinklers snick water across the sidewalks. Because the road construction had closed the surrounding streets to traffic, the neighborhood has been much quieter than normal. Usually, we have an influx of visitors during the summer for the activities at nearby Lake Harriet. Not this summer.
Mother Nature has enjoyed the sparse vehicle traffic. For example, last week on my walk to the bus stop, a flash of white darted from behind a soaring beech tree on my right to cross the sidewalk in front of me. The white froze on the lawn, turned sideways to reveal an albino squirrel that regarded me as if I were an alien from another planet. Its bushy tail twitched and it scampered away toward the house’s garden. I’d heard an albino squirrel lived in the neighborhood, but I’d not seen it before. It clearly wasn’t as impressed with me as I was with it. We have more than our share of gray squirrels that cavort through the trees, across power lines, scavenging in dumpsters, and chasing each other around the houses. They are acrobats in the trees. They are the bane of electric power, gnawing on the power lines and frying themselves, leaving us in darkness.
I much prefer chipmunks. Their population in the neighborhood has enjoyed a resurgence. I’ve seen more of them since the streets closed sprinting across the streets. They’re shy, though. Another population that has been more visible is the rabbits. It’s astonishing the number of bunnies I’ve seen this year. One day after work as I walked home from the bus stop, I spotted a heather brown bunny on the front lawn of one house after another as if they were the homeowners come out to watch the people traffic on the sidewalks. They sat motionless, their large dark eyes staring, even after I greeted them. They have neon white tails. The apartment house I live in has its own bunny I’ve seen often. The bunnies and chipmunks love all the dense green bushes and gardens in the neighborhood where they can hide.
In March 2020 when the Twin Cities went into pandemic lockdown, the wildlife came out. Coyotes, wild turkeys, raccoons, even deer, appeared within the city limits, joining the city squirrels, chipmunks and bunnies. The raptors, including the bald eagles, that hunted along the Mississippi River enjoyed good hunting that spring. I remember watching them soar on the updrafts above the river while I ate lunch at work – the office was near the river. A general warning was issued in the neighborhood to keep small pets inside because a coyote had been spotted traversing the back yards. A black bear was spotted in one of the northern suburbs. Mother Nature came out to play.
Minnesota enjoys a reputation for frigid arctic winters, and I believed they would translate to cooler summers. When I moved to the Twin Cities, I was ignorant of the power Mother Nature wielded over the state through weather. Tornadoes, for example. I was shocked to learn that tornadoes hit Minnesota every year, although not often in the Twin Cities. And the second shock to me was how blisteringly hot it gets in the summer. We are landlocked in Minnesota, stuck in the middle of the country, with only Lake Superior to moderate our weather over the Arrowhead (the northeast triangle) and around Duluth. During the winter, our weather comes from the north in the form of Arctic air masses, sometimes Siberian air masses (remember the Polar Vortex of 2014?). The northwest wind clamps down on the state, freezing the lakes, rivers, and the skin of bipedal wildlife. I’d grown up where winters rarely dove south of zero and when they did, it was short-lived. Minnesotans pride themselves on their lack of fashion during the winter months in order to stay warm and how the bipedal wildlife pursues all manner of outdoor activities, even eating ice cream outdoors on subzero days! Blizzards shut down all activity until they pass. I had no idea what a “white-out” was until one winter when three blizzards hit the metro in ten days. The view during a blizzard? White, nothing but white, the air itself is white. Reminded me of the dense fog bank we sailed through on the Queen Elizabeth 2 in the Labrador Sea and along the coast of Canada returning from Europe years ago.
There’s no predicting the weather, really. We have a saying – if you’re unhappy with the weather, just wait a few minutes. And then there’s the joke about seasons: Minnesota has only two seasons: winter and road construction. The summer of 2023 was particularly hot, the tropical heat and humidity pushing north from the Gulf of Mexico. We set a record for the number of 90 degree days, as well as 70 degree dewpoints. The expectation then for last winter had been for especially frigid cold for long periods with lots of snow and ice. The reality turned out to be the opposite. We enjoyed a much warmer and drier than average winter. I barely wore my snow boots at all. I LOVED it. There was a week in January when the temperatures dropped into the arctic below zero range but that was it. So, what would happen this past summer?
We’d been in an extreme, severe drought in 2023 and throughout the winter. In April, the rains came. It rained and rained and rained. We needed the water, then we no longer needed so much water as rivers and streams raged and flooded and transformed some of the landscape. I remember watching on the TV news one river skirt a dam, carving a new path through the earth on one side and swallowing a house. And the rain brought cooler temperatures. We went above 90 degrees only 7 or 8 times this past summer when the average is 13 days. The heat dome settled over the western third of the country instead of the middle. Then September arrived and with it the beginning of another drought as the rain stopped.
The rain stopped here but the hurricanes began lining up in the Atlantic. Watching the news and the devastation of the most recent hurricane, Helene, a category 4 storm when it made landfall on the north side of the Gulf of Mexico, I really wonder why these storms have become so powerful and dangerous. I thought anything above category 2 was rare. Apparently not anymore. While I agree that weather patterns tend to be cyclical, I also agree that humans have affected the planet in negative ways that can affect the weather cycles. It’s common sense. We are quite quick to take credit for preserving nature in parks so we know our presence does have an effect on the planet. Mother Nature dislikes what humans have been doing to their home and has begun to fight back.
I’ve been thinking a lot about human development over the thousands of years and how Mother Nature has left humans alone to do their thing as they please. She’s not a helicopter mom. Civilization has brought amazing progress – in medicine, for example, in technology, in physics, etc. – and the hubris of humans is believing in that progress to make humans invincible at most, and more power than Mother Nature at the least. We have forgotten an important aspect of life on this planet – all life is a part of Mother Nature. We are a part of something much bigger than us and just as much alive.
I want to conclude by mentioning a 1961 novel by a Polish writer who survived WWII and Stalinist Poland, Stanislaw Lem, one of his best known works, Solaris. Three movies have been made of this novel, the first in Russia by Boris Nirenburg, the second directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972) and the other by Steven Soderbergh (2002). Lem explored contact with alien species in his science fiction, and in Solaris, he sends humans to a planet where the alien is the planet itself, expressed by the ocean that covers it. The challenge is communication in Lem’s story. But I have wondered since reading the novel if Lem wasn’t also thinking about the human effects on earth, seeing earth as a living, sentient being. How do we learn to communicate with it? Perhaps Mother Nature holds the key, and we just need to be more attentive, respectful, and really listen to what she is telling us about how doing our thing has affected her and our planet. Yes, it’s way past time we start listening to Mother Nature again.
Note: Stanislaw Lem’s books are still available, and both Tarkovsky’s and Soderbergh’s movies are available to stream online. The novel Solaris is not very long but packs a punch.
Excellent article and a lesson to us humans of where we should be devoting our time and energy starting today!