I almost called this entry “as a Polish person who grew up in Manhattan, I really like nature a lot.”  But I decided to go with the Thoreau quote.  I’m the creative force around here, so you know.  What I say, goes.

I come from a family of city people.  My dad grew up in a small Polish city that isn’t a metropolis but is also not rural.  My mom and I are from Lodz, the Manchester of Poland.  Industrial, decaying and so would say, ugly.  Well a lot of people say ugly.  A LOT OF PEOPLE.

Growing up, there wasn’t a ton of money around but my parents did try to make it that I got to experience some nature.  I remember being on a hiking trail at Bear Mountain in the Hudson Valley and seeing New York off in the distance, rising like Gotham in a Batman movie.  

We did go on two trips to Colorado that I really loved.  We went skiing in Steamboat Springs, which of course I loved the first time we went.  I got on skis for the first time and utterly fell in love.  The second year we went to Keystone and Breckenridge.  My mom tells how I was disappointed that it wasn’t as easy going on the skis the second time around.  But I loved it regardless.  

Before we left, we went to this little information center to learn about Colorado.  A man in the information center showed me some pyrite, fool’s gold.  And he gave me a pin with the Colorado flag on it, which I still have.  When I went to Utah last summer, I remembered how much I loved the western part of the US, a love that started with that visit to Colorado.

Unfortunately trips like that were a special privilege, which I appreciated.  So I’m only slightly exaggerating when I say that Central Park was about as far as we went nature wise growing up most of the time.  I frequently tell people I come across that my little elementary school, PS 183, used to take us there and say “look kids.  TREES!!!!”  One year they decided to teach us about ice safety.  I remember watching Everybody Hates Chris, which is the only show I have ever watched that actually portrayed growing up in New York accurately and there was an episode where they start a neighborhood watch and one of the members, played by Whoopi Goldberg, suggests they need it because one of them might go to Florida.  Everyone on the neighborhood watch looks at each other quizzically.  Chris Rock, the narrator says “Florida????  Most of us weren’t going to end of the block!!!”  My elementary school wasn’t quite like that, but pretty much everyone was probably going to stay in the city or move to another big city.  Ice safety wasn’t exactly on our minds.  

As concerned nature too, there’s the legendary story of how in our class on the East River house boat, we were visited by a guy totting bags of reptiles.  Just writing that sentence made a chill run down my spine.  I mean some life choices were made when a person decides to pursue a career in herpetology, rather than I don’t know being an accountant or something.  But we’re not here to drag this man’s life choices.  I’ve spent the last 16 years occupied with things like finding inventive ways to teach paraphrasing and teaching gerunds and infinitives, which should be considered some kind of human rights violation.  Anyway, we’re not here to debate our questionable career choices.  We’re here to talk about more important things, like why would a person travel with bags of reptiles?  Well, this man was doing this because he wanted to show these city kids nature.  Poisonous nature.  Predatory nature.

So the reptile bag man comes into our house boat classroom and starts talking about snakes.  I love that for him.  For me, not so much.  He started saying that he had a boa constrictor in one of the bags.  At this point, I kinda started to freak out a bit.  A boa constrictor was about to emerge from one of those bags.  So I politely turned to one of the teachers and said I was scared and excused myself.  I sat outside with the teachers and I still remember I was given a chocolate chip macaroon.  I wondered for years why they did this.  Wasn’t the narrative that being afraid of things was BAD, and how we had to teach kids not to fear things?  Well, somehow this was welcomed there.  Now that’s I’ve been in the classroom for almost two decades, I realized why they were so happy.  I prevented there being a crying, scared kid in the class.  

Soon after, we sailed directly into the heart of darkness.  OK I mean I shouldn’t make it out to be that grim and I still got to experience a lot of nature.  A fact that wrestle with a lot with is that our lives before we lived in this place was pretty much erased.  I had loved Colorado and skiing and that was gone.  Our humanity was taken away from us, replaced by the need to be concerned with the lives of these incredibly mediocre people.  

In the midst of that, I did get to visit Zakopane in Poland with my cousins, when we climbed the highest mountain in Poland, Giewont.  We took family vacations to Cape Cod, where we visited Monomoy Island, near Chatham at the elbow of the cape.  The thing was that I didn’t really appreciate this at the time.  We would also occasionally take these nature hikes that to me were incredibly boring.  Trees.  Who wants to look at TREES????

In college, I had almost no exposure to nature, but during the wilderness years, I got to see a lot of beautiful places on those crazy backpacking trips I took with my cousin and her boyfriend, but again, I had no real appreciation for what I was seeing.

This is my favorite shot I got during that time period. Mind you the guy was talking to us in this sort of Polish-Czech meld language and smoking a cigarette while he was steering the boat:

For a long time, I completely lost touch with nature.  For a while, I lost touch with everything.

I remember the exact moment when the nature caught me for the first time.  I was skiing, going up the mountain after a great day and I looked over and everything was covered in snow.  It was this incredibly surreal scene.  Now I understood why people loved nature.  Why they hiked.  Why this was such an important part of people’s lives.

In a way, moving to Boston made me appreciate nature more.  I remember noticing trees on Riverway and thinking that in New York, that would never happen.  There would be a concrete barrier, but never a row of trees.  I always say that the more time I spent here, the more I fell in love with this place and this is completely true.  The more I looked around, the more nature I saw, the more I realized that the people who run this city were actually making an effort to make this a better place to live.  

My real desire to see major league nature started with skiing.  I remember one day I was skiing at Stowe, and I looked over and saw Mount Mansfield with the snow coming down on it.  I could not believe how beautiful it was.

Here’s a shot I captured of it, but in my memory, it is much more beautiful:

Over time, I started to be intrigued by unusual nature.  Snorkeling in the Cayman Islands showed me the insane world of under the ocean’s surface.  I remember thinking there was science fiction going on under the surface of the ocean.  The more nature I experienced, the more I realized its effect on me.  It amazed me, it calmed me down.  Cathedrals, amusement parks and castles are man made structures, beautiful of course, but incredibly man made.  Nature though, somehow just appeared out of necessity, out of climate, because of God.  

Here’s some shots I’ve taken underwater over the years.  It was incredible the first time I swum around a coral reef.  Absolutely incredible.

I started this entry wanting to write about the set of pictures I’ll share below, but really I’ve sought out some really beautiful examples of nature over the years.  I keep thinking this that I spent this day in Salt Lake City in August and I have not forgotten about it, partly because of the beautiful nature surrounding the city.  In New York, you look off in the distance and look — more concrete.  Don’t like concrete?  Here’s more concrete for you.  In Salt Lake City, you looked off in the distance and you saw the Wasatch mountains.  The city is at elevation, so the air is different than in a place like Boston.

I posted most of my views from Salt Lake City in my massive entry about the massive Latter Day Saints structures I visited in the city.  I didn’t post this great view I got at the LDS visitors center that I had to zoom in and crop because that part of the roof deck was roped off.  

As I detailed in my other entry, I visited the monolithic headquarters of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  Marble everywhere, skylights that rival any Scandinavian airport, a six foot portrait of Russell Nelson, church president who was a turning a century old.  I don’t have a joke there.  The man is a century old.  Props.  I did read in the man’s Wikipedia bio that he stopped skiing at the age of 90.  Which gives me hope.

I haven’t written about my experience seeing the nature around Salt Lake City.  As we drove further and further out of Salt Lake City, everything around me started changing.  From city sprawl to a landscape of all of these yellows and greens to a landscape that resembled I don’t know, Mars or something.  To say I was transfixed by this is an understatement.  Again, it was then when I really understood the power of nature.  I also like the feeling when I travel that I am far from everything, that I am in a world that is really different from me.  I’ve had this exact experience three times in my life.  The first was when I was 20, walking to Red Square the first night I was in Moscow.  Red Square looked like a hologram.  It felt like I was walking through a post card.  Red Square didn’t even feel real.  The second time this happened was funnily enough in Gaffney, South Carolina with Herman when we went to the see the Peachoid. I remember the feeling of that really thick grass under my feet, kinda letting me know I wasn’t back east anymore.

The third time that happened was when I was sitting there on Antelope Island, staring out at this Martian landscape. All of it together was so overwhelming and just powerful. I cannot describe it another way. I remember looking out and seeing the Great Salt Lake, sort of off shimmering in the distance, motionless.

Of course I took a ton of pictures, but part of me feels like I’ll never actually capture what it really felt like to be there. Oh and we met some bison. Met in the sense of stayed safely inside our van while the beast itched itself on a rock. They are very itchy animals, apparently. Pretty pictures and fun facts. My favorite kind of trips.

Well, you made it this far. May as well reward you with some pretty photos of the aforementioned Martian landscape of Antelope Island: