Wild Life in Charlottesville

As I drove down Route 250 to town for my Monday job, a grown bear ran across the road in front of my car, This happened in a suburban area near Ivy.  The bear ran fast.  I had seen only three other bears this year, all in a more expected rural setting.

Out in the country where we live, we often see deer.  The young bucks have grown their furry summer horns and the deer are now turning gray for the winter.  

 A month ago I went into the back garden of my studio in Charlottesville to feed the goldfish.  The back garden is surrounded by a sturdy chest-high fence.  The gate to the garden was open.  A handsome doe was munching some trumpet vine in this enclosed space.  I talked to her softly.  She froze anyway.  I moved away from her and from the gate, supposing that she had come by the gate; she might want to leave the same way.  Without fuss, she sprang easily over the fence into an overgrown alley behind my neighbor’s house.  I wasn’t surprised to see a doe in Charlottesville; I had seen one across from the Quaker Meeting House earlier this summer.  I was just surprised to see the doe in an enclosed yard.  I thought my doe and the one on Forrest were only occasional strays into the city until today, when I saw a doe walk down the St. Clair Avenue sidewalk from Hazel Street at noon. I now suspect a herd lurks somewhere around here.

Besides these rare large city mammals, Charlottesville holds a variety of wild things. Skunks are all over the place, rarely seen, but often smelled late at night. In the early mornings I often saw a raccoon family walk down Locust Street, a main thoroughfare, when I lived in the city,.  A neighbor once worried after she saw an opossum on my balcony.  On my walk to work I saw a rabbit at the corner of Kelly and Farish Streets every morning.  I have seen another rabbit hop into my yard a few times.  

A woodchuck patrols the neighborhood now.  I saw him waddling across the wilder back area of my back garden.  A neighbor says that the woodchuck eats the tomatoes near the bottom of her plants. I walked down an alleyway one day recently and came upon a tall woman in an animal control uniform with a holstered pistol.  She asked me if I’d seen a woodchuck; someone had called to complain that a woodchuck was behaving oddly.  Just then a woman in gardening clothes poked her head into the alley and said, “I called; I’ll show you where he is.  I left; I didn’t want to know what happened next.

Hawks, drawn by birds at feeders, soar overhead and sometimes pose on tree limbs.  A group of birds arrange themselves on the electric lines over Locust Avenue at the top of the bypass ramp to look like notes on a musical staff.

It is wonderful and heartening that animals have learned to survive in the middle of this small city.  We have busy city streets, very little cover or water, and sometimes hostile property owners. We paved over the animals' habitat and wrested the land from them to begin with.  The flourishing of Charlottesville's fauna augers well for us all.

The Invisible Woman

In my aging in place group, a friend remarked on how annoying it was to be ignored because she was getting old.  She said that young people looked through her.  A man I know complained that now that he was old, the workers in his doctor’s office just didn’t see him, although his doctor eventually did.

Dorothea Lange was a great photographer.   Her pictures of the people of the depression, and the interned Japanese knock my socks off.  In a recent PBS American Masters special about her, Lange talked with enthusiasm of her role as an invisible woman.  After recovering from polio as a girl, Lange walked the streets of Hoboken with a limp and a camera; people became so used to seeing her that she became invisible to them.  She embraced two aspects of her invisibility – people’s acceptance of her as a part of their landscape, which made them unself-conscious, and the suspension of her own self-consciousness so that she became only an eye.

In a room full of words clattering off the walls, I often find myself contributing to the noise.  I attribute this to the middle child in me wanting to be heard; I am always embarrassed after I’ve flapped my gums to be one of a group.  A problem with compulsive talking is that one misses the sense of what other people are saying.

I’m with Lange.  It is a gift to be unseen and to see.  It is a gift to be silent and to hear.  The greatest gift of all is to lose the self-consciousness that interferes with connection to the creative Spirit. For me this invisibility to myself only happens occasionally; it is always welcome.