Well, this past week I was looking down into the holler toward Webb’s Creek thinking about how nature is natural, unnatural …and supernatural. “Natural” has a lot of different meanings, but mostly it means that nature, not man was involved in the deal. For example, national parks want to remain natural so the National Park Service is very careful to protect nature from humans. That is why there is not a sno-cone salesman at the end of Abrams Falls Trail or a hotdog stand at Clingman’s Dome. Humans are allowed to hike through the park and perhaps eat a pimiento cheese sandwich at a picnic table, but strict rules regarding plants and wildlife were established to protect the natural environment from the human species. Over 10 million people invade these mountains each year to get a free sample of fudge, a T-shirt with a message and to visit our little half million green acres of natural stuff in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We should all give ourselves a big hand for protecting nature from ourselves. Way to go “Ourselves!”
There are also unnatural things in nature. For example, it is common knowledge that you can irritate the heck out of an oyster by sticking a grain of sand inside its shell. The oyster will grow a pearl around that tiny grain of sand to protect itself from the irritating uninvited guest. Since you were the one who irritated the oyster in the first place it is an unnatural pearl. The people who own jewelry stores had a hard time on Mother’s Day selling beautiful strings of “unnatural” pearls with matching “unnatural” earrings so they were dubbed cultured pearls. Pink dogwood flowers, “cultured” pearls, golf course greens and those fantastic bags of tiny hamburgers you can buy at 2:00 a.m. are all unnatural occurrences in nature. Unnatural… is “different” not “deficient.
Supernatural is the only appropriate word when something clearly beyond our visible knowledge and understanding is involved. Nature is packed with the supernatural and if you are ever just a bit shy on “faith” in our creator just remember the lodgepole pine tree. Lodgepole pine trees grow two kinds of pine cones. One of them drops to the ground and opens up to release the seed and a tree grows….that is incredible enough in itself. But it has a second pine cone that is truly “supernatural.” That special pine cone will sometimes wait patiently for more than a 100 years because it requires the intense heat of a forest fire to open the cone and release its seeds. It waits for a forest fire. Out west you can find mountain horizons filled with lodgepole pine forests in which all the trees are exactly the same size. Millions of waiting pine cones all released their seeds at the same time following a devastating forest fire!
Someone said that life should be measured… not by the number of breaths we take….but rather by the number of times our breath gets taken away. I have stood in breathless awe in front of lodgepole forests and that supernatural lodgepole pine cone beats out the pink dogwood and the irritated (though cultured) oyster pearl every time. That is just how it looks from my log cabin.
John LaFevre is a local speaker and co-author of the interactive national park hiking book series, Scavenger Hike Adventures, Falcon Guides, Globe Pequot Press. Contact John at scavengerhike@aol.com or at his blog at Falcon.com. Artist G. Webb lives in Pittman Center, Tennessee. Gwebbgallery.com.
