Wild And Trashy

Welcome to the March 2026 edition of...
What I'm Into, What I'm Up To
#65

Welcome to SPRING (in the northern hemisphere)!

Sunday we went to a place in Maryland called Calvert Cliffs which is a stretch of cliff face on the Chesapeake Bay famous for fossils and shark's teeth and whale bones.

Alas, we found none of those things.

Or, at least, if we did we cannot tell that's what they are for sure. I did find a horseshoe crab shell, which I thought was cool. I brought it home along with some driftwood. I love driftwood.

I proposed the idea of going down there—something I've been wanting to do since we moved up here and I first read about the area—because Sunday was supposed to be sunny and 77℉. A nice, warm day for our first beach outing of the year. Instead, the temp never passed 64 and the onshore winds were cold and constant.

Despite the chilly breeze, one kid recovering from a week-long sickness, and another very unhappy to be at the beach instead of home playing video games, our kids all managed to find their own ways to have a good time. Which is even more impressive considering how few things we took with us—basically just a backpack full of flip-flops, which we did not use.

It always amazes me how easily our kids get caught up in the infinite natural playground that is the seashore, or bayshore in this case, when they have no other options.

This parallels a journey I've been on lately. I mean, I guess my whole life, but more and more as time goes by.

When I was a teenager, I was like my oldest son. Just let me be inside on a computer or in front of a tv or reading and I'll be happy, or at least not angry. Just let me be comfortable. Don't force me outside. Until I and my brother and our friends started surfing, which saved me in many ways.

The older I get, the more the outside calls me. And not just the outside, but increasingly, the wild outside. Which is funny that I even need to specify—first outside as opposed to inside, and second the wild kinds of outside, not the tame kinds of outside.

I keep reading books and listening to podcasts about wildlife and plant life, rivers and oceans and ponds and lakes, jungles and forests and meadows and prairies.

In a world gone mad, there is something very soothing and peaceful about the wild world just beyond human reach. I mean, it's not really beyond human reach, but when it feels like it is, there is a vibrancy and vitality and a feeling of danger that wakes up the senses and pushes everything else from the overcrowded modern mind.

We live next to a park and some of it feels fairly wild. I always walk on the few trails through the park, but I've recently been blazing my own trails, which will be much harder to do once spring really takes hold and everything becomes dense with thorns and green leaves and new growth.

Everywhere I go in the park, I find trash. Everywhere. This town is by far the trashiest place I've ever lived, in a literal sense. It's nice, but also covered in trash. Which I think you only notice when you're walking. The trash is easy to ignore from a car. But even when I go walking through woods that seem like places where no one ever goes, I still find plastic bottles, beer cans, glass jars, grocery bags. It's crazy.

So I've been trying to clean up some of the trash, a little with every walk. I don't know if I'm making any progress, if people are leaving new trash faster than I can pick up the old trash, but I might as well continue. It's very likely no one else is going to do it. And now that I live here, I consider it my park. My neighborhood. My streets. I'm going to treat everywhere I go like my own yard. It's me against the litter.

Anyway, back to wildness.

There's a fox or maybe a few foxes that run around our park and neighborhood. I feel especially accomplished when I spot one of them. There's also a groundhog or two that live in our backyard. I know a lot of people loathe groundhogs and make war against them to keep them out of their gardens or from making holes and tunnels around their home's foundation. So far we and the groundhogs live in peace with each other. Tons of white tail deer, some rabbits. There's probably not as much diversity of wildlife as their should be for the amount of forest and streams and tiny ponds there are around here, but it's more than a lot of suburbs get.

I know I'm getting old because I enjoy close encounters with our fairly common animal neighbors so much. And because I'm gradually trying to figure out what kinds of birds and trees and wild plants I see in our yard. One thing about Americans is we are woefully ignorant, generally speaking, about the trees and animals all around us. I'm trying to learn so I can be more knowledgable and, by extension, a better caretaker and steward of the lands I inhabit.

Books I've finished or started...
Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World by Craig Foster (the main human from the Netflix doc, My Octopus Teacher), A Year Across Maryland: A Week-by-Week Guide to Discovering Nature in the Chesapeake Region by Bryan MacKay, A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams by Michael Pollan, Beowulf: A Hero's Tale Retold by James Rumford, Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It by Samuel Miller McDonald

Movies...
Rango, The Green Knight, The Banshees Of Inisherin

Shows...
Derry Girls (again), Country Music by Ken Burns, Survivor Season 50