Casey Gilfillan

I stop about twenty feet away from a family making a picnic of leaves and shrubbery. The doe and two smaller deer trail slowly through the sparse brush, munching and then briefly pausing to whip their heads around every few seconds. They don’t see me at first; they don’t see me for a while as I sit and stare in stupendous awe. The fawn in the foreground has the most spots, with a white-speckled back and the underside of the tail white to match. The fawn that clings closer to the mother is more uniform in color, brown with small flecks of white scattered around. Eventually I leave, and cross the bridge over the stream as to not disturb their peace. The peace that they have managed to carve out in an unorthodox place, unorthodox only in that it is closer in proximity to housing than to the wilderness.

That is because there is no wild place for them to go, in fact, the place I spotted them is only a seven-minute walk to my apartment in the heart of town. This place also happens to be directly across the street from a strip of larger, wealthy-looking homes (complete with manicured lawns, multiple floors, and slight but apparent spacing between properties). There is a park that can be discerned by pursuing the trail further down from the way I had returned, but the park is small and plastic in a vacant field of grass. Exposed heavily by its juxtaposition against another strip of traffic and homes, it really takes you out of the immersive nature experience. And for those that more intimately depend on this environment, what does in leave behind for the creatures that lie waiting for human inactivity? Nothing except fear of interaction, threat of death by cars, and limited resource supply.

We must give the world back, before humanity breaks it and rips it to shreds of superficial value and papered vice. The deer I had seen were in an even more restricted green space, the triangle cut on the right side of the pathway to the park. In total, the grass expanse – which, on this side, is littered by other walking paths, a gazebo, and a park bench – only stretches about two and a half to three blocks-length. A diminutive area for these tender creatures, all in which they must somehow eat, sustain, and find sanctuary. Less space for us too, the selfish fools who have condemned the lush and natural in idolatrous pursuit of the artificial, commercially valuable, and high profit-yielding.

The earth’s process has been halted, hijacked by the external imposition of acquisition and development. The unfiltered grace of deer in the woods has been diluted to deer covertly foraging in a fractioned slice of the same place that has been dismantled into a human-centric park, a walkable zone, an insufferable and less free world. And for this, we must return the environment to her rightful stewards, the deer and the rabbit, the squirrel and the chipmunk, the fish of the streams and the birds that remain unseen but always heard.