. . .would begin with an image so startling and lovely and wondrous
that you would stop riffling through the rest of the mail, take your
jacket off, sit down at the table, adjust your spectacles, tell the dog
to lie down, tell the kids to make their own sandwiches for heavenssake, that’s why god gave you hands, and read straight through the piece, marveling that you had indeed seen or smelled or heard exactly that, but never quite articulated it that way, or seen or heard it articulated that way, and you think, man, this is why I read nature essays, to be startled and moved like that, wow.
The next two paragraphs would smoothly and gently move you into a
story, seemingly a small story, a light tale, easily accessed, something
personal but not self-indulgent or self-absorbed on the writer’s part,
just sort of a cheerful nutty everyday story maybe starring an elk or a
mink or a child, but then there would suddenly be a sharp sentence where
the dagger enters your heart and the essay spins on a dime like a
skater, and you are plunged into waaay deeper water, you didn’t see it
coming at all, and you actually shiver, your whole body shimmers, and
much later, maybe when you are in bed with someone you love and you are
trying to evade his or her icy feet, you think, my god, stories do
have roaring power, stories are the most crucial and necessary food, how
come we never hardly say that out loud?
The next three paragraphs then walk inexorably toward a line of
explosive Conclusions on the horizon like inky alps. Probably the
sentences get shorter, more staccato. Terser. Blunter. Shards of
sentences. But there’s no opinion or commentary, just one line fitting
into another, each one making plain inarguable sense, a goat or even a
senator could easily understand the sentences and their implications,
and there’s no shouting, no persuasion, no eloquent pirouetting, no
pronouncements and accusations, no sermons or homilies, just calm clean
clear statements one after another, fitting together like people holding
hands.
Then an odd paragraph, this is a most unusual and peculiar essay, for
right here where you would normally expect those alpine Conclusions,
some Advice, some Stern Instructions & Directions, there’s only the
quiet murmur of the writer tiptoeing back to the story he or she was
telling you in the second and third paragraphs. The story slips back
into view gently, a little shy, holding its hat, nothing melodramatic,
in fact it offers a few gnomic questions without answers, and then it
gently slides away off the page and off the stage, it almost evanesces
or dissolves, and it’s only later after you have read the essay three
times with mounting amazement that you see quite how the writer managed
the stagecraft there, but that’s the stuff of another essay for another
time.
And finally the last paragraph. It turns out that the perfect nature
essay is quite short, it’s a lean taut thing, an arrow and not a cannon,
and here at the end there’s a flash of humor, and a hint or tone or
subtext of sadness, a touch of rue, you can’t quite put your finger on
it but it’s there, a dark thread in the fabric, and there’s also a shot
of espresso hope, hope against all odds and sense, but rivetingly
there’s no call to arms, no clarion brassy trumpet blast, no website to
which you are directed, no hint that you, yes you, should be ashamed of
how much water you use or the car you drive or the fact that you just
turned the thermostat up to seventy, or that you actually have not voted
in the past two elections despite what you told the kids and the goat.
Nor is there a rimshot ending, a bang, a last twist of the dagger.
Oddly, sweetly, the essay just ends with a feeling eerily like a warm
hand brushed against your cheek, and you sit there, near tears, smiling,
and then you stand up. Changed.
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