Fire Starters

Place has defined my life. My desire for experience, adventure, for new ideas, new ways of thinking about and seeing life has dragged me around the world. Late in high school I became interested in foreign language, travel, and so during college I lived in Tuebingen, Germany for a year as an exchange student. Total immersion proved to be best way for me and suited my typically modern tendency towards overstimulation. Words cannot describe what that place (and its people) did to me. It changed everything: from the way I use my own native tongue, to how I think about language and culture, to how I see community infrastructure, rural landscapes, education, sustainable living, politics, etc. With Germany as a base I roamed most of Western Europe between 2005 and 2006, a wandering child, ignorant to history, in love with low and high culture, in love with a vague otherness that gave my life a sense of enormity and adventure. At a very young age, I remember, I had already made that determination: to live exceptionally. Apparently, I had also determined live broken-heartedly. Leaving the many friends, the language (now in my blood) and this, the main haunt of my late youth, was excruciating.

Dad, Jace (brother) and me fishing the salt marshes of Louisiana

The wanderlust convinced me later to learn French and spend a summer in Quebec, Canada as a camp counselor and English instructor. There I fell in love again: big skies, big rivers, dandelions and wheat fields, Amelie, Clemence, Cindy, canoes. And my heart was broken again.
These travels helped me to realize that Louisiana, as a place, was deep in my genetic make up. Everywhere I went, it resurfaced. In my dreams, in quiet moments alone, in songs and poetry I wrote. Food, for one, had turned to a great source of pride for me in Germany. I delighted in sharing recipes from home and a love for food and the “family” bonds it builds with others.  It was in Germany, after all, that I began to first learn the names of plants I remembered from childhood. I returned home with eyes wide open, transformed, and could hardly bare the sprawl, the lack of sidewalks and community spaces, the trash everywhere.  Though I finished my degree in creative writing with a focus on poetry, towards graduation in 2009 my writing focused more and more on the importance of place, of natural and cultural heritage, of learning and living through experience, through immersion. I did not want to be a mere spectator, a complacent commentator, an academic. I wanted to get my hands dirty. The first year after graduation, I volunteered for community gardens, coastal restoration, urban forestry, disadvantaged children mentoring, I taught as a substitute teacher.

The next year, after much reading and testing the waters in education and environment, I would leave again, this time to Ohio, to be a naturalist, a teacher. My father had cancer. My mother had passed away the year before.  My family was in shambles in too many ways to explain here. It felt selfish, but I convinced myself that it was necessary. To gather good ideas and bring them back, to make Baton Rouge (and somehow thereby the whole state) a more sustainable, livable and culured place to live. My time at Glen Helen was spent living in a nature preserve, outside everyday, sharing discoveries with children, in love with every little living thing, exploring nature as I never could before. I went to several conferences, workshops and educational programs. I became certified in environmental education through EECO. I soaked up all I could, with the hopes of founding some day a community education center.  Not long after committing to my second year as an administrative intern at Glen Helen, my father passed away.  My father. The man who gave this love of life to me, who dragged me across the south while he worked, camping in parks, swimming along sandbars, beaches, lakes. Though I had come to value living in one place, I had not been able to DO it yet. All my lofty hopes had been reduced by this simple reality. In my second year at Glen Helen, I realized that it was not just place, but relationships, that matter.  So when I say “place” I’m referring not just to land, or cultural and natural history, I’m referring to people. And to a journey shared across time. We are, like all other species, sculptures of the environment and the countless interactions with other living things.

Ohio, and its people, had its own way with me. That is a whole other novel I could not write here. Places get under your skin though, I tell you… into the fabric of who you are. The result, for me at least, has been a constant culture shock, wherever I go. I’ve been hopelessly hybridized. Perhaps you know the feeling? If you have lived in the South, this feeling is compounded tremendously.  More than anything, I miss the kindred spirit I met there, who shared many similar ideas about the importance of education, experience and the landscape.

I returned to Louisiana in June 2012, brokenhearted again, but this time to finally do the damn thing, I’ve been saying I would do. Instead of getting a fancy inter-disciplinary degree in some other part of the country (Lord knows how bad I wanted you, Vermont, Oregon, Minnesota!), I broke down and picked a small graduate program in sleepy Monroe, LA to build a base. I visit my brothers, grandmother, nephews and nieces every chance I get. Trying not to take ANYTHING for granted. I’m still crazy, though. I still want to do nothing less than transform the way we view community, the way we do education and natural heritage conservation. It’s a tall order but things have come together nicely so far. Technology is helping tremendously. As I write you, I have been invited on to the Louisiana Master Naturalist Program state-wide steering committee, the Louisiana Environmental Education Association board, the Baton Rouge Native Plant Society board, and founded the Louisiana Naturalist Network, a new online social-media group on Facebook for promoting a deeper knowledge of natural heritage in the state. At ULM, our Biology Department is on the verge of opening the first Biological Field Station of its kind in the whole state (one of few in the region), to be an outdoor classroom for students at ULM and across the state. This may all sound wonderful, but there is so much work to be done, it is unfathomable. Did I mention I’m studying plant ecology? At times I think of the loved ones who have gone their own ways after Glen Helen, of the places I have loved, and how easy it would be go elsewhere, where there is less foundational work to be done. But then I too would be part of the same vicious cycle of emigration that leaves Louisiana desolate of quality leadership. For those that have remained, cynicism, lethargy and complacency has spread like a zombie infection into most protected fortifications of scientific, non-profit and government programs. So you have to be feisty and agile to remain, making sure you don’t get bit, infected. But perhaps the apocalyptic imagery is not helping. There are in fact many interesting folks out there, most of them are young, and don’t realize how powerful they are. It has become my favorite past-time to find these people and ignite their passion, to tell them yes, you can do this—no, we can do this together. To be a fire starter. So I am glad to join you all around the digital fire. As we look into the flames we must remember how important a task it is to keep the fire alive: if not merely for the stories it incites in us, than for the vital warmth and hope it brings, in helping us survive even the coldest of winters.

This is a cross post of an essay I authored for http://campfiredialectic.wordpress.com, a blog by some dear friends of mine.