“No doubt, humans will do a lot of damage before we ultimately destroy ourselves.”
–Zeena Schreck, Beatdom #11: The Nature Issue
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Dolly Sods Wilderness, West Virginia
Once in West Virginia, there stood a primeval forest. In the Allegheny Mountains, spruce trees towered until logged to bare earth from 1899 to 1924 to sate humanity’s desire for lumber. When the trees were gone, the soil dried, and when the soil dried, wildfires charred the landscape.
Given the landscape now lay charred, the US Army used it for artillery training to further scar it with their shelling. Today, signposts warn of possible live bombs in the area.
The Wilderness grew back in a twisted way. Plains of scrubs and flowers replaced the spruce thickets, and shorter, newer trees have grown from rocky earth. This complete change is welcomed by hikers and backpackers who frequent Dolly Sods. The new landscape looks like one you’d find in the Pacific Northwest, maybe Alaska. People camp in the meadows and the fresh woods to see the stars when fog hasn’t consumed the sky.
The effect of humanity on Dolly Sods has not dissipated. My last visit, cars crawled along the road for half a mile where they were parked. An attendant stood at the Bear Rocks Trailhead to hand out maps and urge visitors to stay on the trail. Late spring weather sprung mud from the paths, so hikers had been cutting their own paths around the ones meant to follow.
In some places, that trail was wide as a city street from hundreds of shoes marking their reckless human aversion to dirt at the expense of the scrubs and grass.
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“But life will continue without humans. New forms of intelligence will emerge long after this human experiment is over.”
–Zeena Schreck, Beatdom #11: The Nature Issue
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On Shengshan Island in the East China Sea, a fishing town was lost. Houtouwan once held over three thousand residents in little box houses, behind stone walls, on paved streets. The town’s remoteness led to issues with education and food delivery. Residents began to leave in the 1990s. By 2002, Houtouwan was officially depopulated. A blanket of greenery has descended on the town since.
The cliffside landscape is dystopian. Ivy crawls from every wall, every balcony, every street. Plants push up roof tiles and slip out windows. Houtouwan is a town consumed. In the houses, there are shoes, bottles, foil pill casings, all left over. But soon, those will disappear beneath a rising sea of leaves.
Nature reclaims.
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Chesapeake Bay, Baltimore, Maryland
In summer of 2017, campers at my sleepaway camp rode out to Baltimore on a school bus for Tikkun Olam. Meaning “repairing the world,” Tikkun Olam was a day at camp during which we left it to help in the outside world. We arrived at a charter school closed for the summer. Right outside the school was a thin ribbon of water snaking its way to the Chesapeake, Baltimore’s main natural feature. There for hours, we had the choice of cleaning classrooms, picking up trash, or organizing care packages.
Picking up trash was done outside, in the garden and in the stream. We carried garbage bags and these grabby tools and wore thick gloves. The stream contained its own ecosystem of waste. In it swam candy wrappers, bent straws, broken glass, chip bags, plastic shopping bags, soda bottles—as well as something our supervising counselor called a “balloon” in a transparent euphemism—in a vast array of colors.
There was too much to get rid of. We left when our garbage bags sagged with litter and the stream’s tainted water to enter the school’s air-conditioned walls and eat sunbutter-and-jelly or cheese-and-mustard sandwiches. The rest of the trash remained to soon be swept out into the depths of the Chesapeake. It would not arrive there alone. Between 2014 and 2021, 1,608 tons of trash were collected in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.
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Ivy climbs up the yellow brick wall of a building off Craig Street.
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Shenandoah National Park, Virginia
Before the establishment of Shenandoah—but after its Indigenous people were forced west to reservations—people referred to as “hollow folk” populated what is now a national park. They were farmers, people we might deem “hillbillies” today. Many were loyalists in the American Revolution who fled after the war. They paved their red coats into the mortar of their new houses and shed their old lives. They cleared woods to farm the land; still, the oaks and hickories they severed have not returned.
Their graveyards are still there, maintained by their descendants. In the middle of the Shenandoah woods, the Cave Cemetery rises. I visited its stone and wood grave markers, most bearing the surname Cave, last summer. Silk flowers lay before some of the more recent graves. One’s neon yellow petals stood out, unnatural against the dusty ground.
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A town rose from the sand.
Established for diamond mining in Namibia, it burst into life where before had only been desert and rocks. There were many houses, inhabited by prospectors, painted bright colors to stand out against the dull hue of the sand. Blues, yellows. They had windows and doors and multiple floors.
In under fifty years, the town of Kolmanskop, Namibia rose, then peaked, then fell when there were no more diamonds to be found. By 1956, it lay completely abandoned: a ghost town in the desert.
The sand came to reclaim Kolmanskop. Just as the town rose from the sand, it began to descend back in. The town sinks. Time let in the sand. It pushed open doors and windows, and the sand seeped in, the same way water slowly fills a tub. Every second, the sand gathers. The sand rises just as the town once did.
In the middle of the desert, Kolmanskop drowns.
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Beach 137th Street Beach, Rockaway, New York
My grandparents will move in less than a month from their house in Queens. It was my grandfather’s parents’ before theirs, and it is where my mother and her siblings spent a large part of their childhoods. I was stunned by their decision to move, but my grandparents wanted to live closer to their family here in Pittsburgh and they didn’t think they could withstand another Sandy.
In 2012, Hurricane Sandy swept up the east coast all the way to New York. It rained hard in Pittsburgh for days, but in Rockaway, only two blocks away from the shore, Sandy stole the first floor and basement of my grandparents’ house. It took another two years for everything to be fixed. Years of my mother’s childhood once stuck in their basement were lost to the sea.
My grandparents’ friend and neighbor, a defense attorney with an affinity for collecting, spent her time after Sandy scouring the remains of the beach. In England, they call this mudlarking, except they scour the banks of the Thames. The attorney gathered all the shards of pottery and other interesting splinters she could find, then glued them into elaborate mosaics, which she showed me when I visited her house.
It is estimated that there are currently 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the ocean. Sandy added a new slew of human detritus into that tally for my grandparents’ friend to find. Every consecutive year, I’d feel more plastic bags and wrappers slither past my legs when swimming at the beach.
After the hurricane, new barriers, dunes, and seagrasses were added to Rockaway Beach.
Can a natural place still be natural if so much has been added to it to make it seem more so?
They added new jetties to the beach made of vast boulders placed in lines reaching far into the sea. I got to see them once, in what might have been my last time in Rockaway with my grandparents leaving. It was winter break, so I did not swim. Still fresh and not yet smoothed slick by waves or ocean plants, I walked the whole length of the jetty out into the ocean until I reached its end. Emptiness opened before me where the sky blurred with the sea.
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The Kudzu House lives on Fifth Avenue. I see it when I pass by on the morning bus. In it I discovered a perfect haunted house, one I only see through the bus window as it passes through Uptown. No one else on that bus—most days before seven in the morning—seems to notice the house. I make sure to find it every time. I find its crumbling stairs, red brick walls, its turret—all obscured by ivy and foliage—before the bus drives past. It is my own Houtouwan, my own piece of humanity left abandoned and gone to leaf. I ask the Kudzu House for luck on test days. I wonder if I am wrong to wish on a shell of what was once a dwelling, if its once-owners would appreciate that. I wonder if it holds any humanity left to reclaim. Kudzu tendrils drag the house ever downward. I would not be shocked if one day the Kudzu House did not appear in my bus window, the earth having swallowed it up.
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I began this essay with what I thought was an “interesting take.” We all know humanity has inserted itself into nature with as destructive of a force as possible, but nature too inserts itself in humanity and human spaces, even if only a dandelion appearing from a sidewalk crack. Nature reclaims. I sought to divide different instances I found into these two sides: humanity in nature and nature in humanity.
What I found instead was a cycle of the struggle between human and Earth for power.
With every location I chose, there was more than one side. Power slid from plants to people back to plants and to people again. With Kolmanskop and Houtouwan, tourists have returned where people once fled to disrupt the nature that rose from these ghost towns once more. In Shenandoah, time and weather has eroded human dwellings so that they have completely vanished or now only consist of a single wall or chimney, and yet cabins and lodges were built in the park for visitors to dwell in again. Even the Kudzu House, I am sure, will soon be bulldozed to make way for the construction of some new storefront or condo complex.
The world is not so black and white. And even if it is, that black and white is layered—in this case again and again over top of each other over decades and centuries of struggle—to make some cloudy gray. This world and its places are cyclical. Nature will reclaim what humanity has taken, then people will seek to reclaim that, and then nature again; reclaim, reclaim, reclaim.
