This is College Park and I’ve gone with my family every year since second or third grade to celebrate our annual family reunion. This place holds special meaning to me because it’s where all my family from around the United States come and gathers to eat, celebrate family, and enjoy nature. We take pictures together and reminisce about our lives throughout the year and talk about what we hope to accomplish in the upcoming school year. I get to hear stories about my older relatives that have passed away and about my mom from when she was growing up. When you drive up to get to the pond the cell service becomes faint until finally, it vanishes. A couple of years ago when I was old enough to start driving my brothers and me, I got nervous because I wasn’t able to rely on the GPS. I got so accustomed to relying on a GPS.
I thought I didn’t know the direction to a place that I have gone to a thousand times. That’s when I realized the internet wasn’t an advancement but a crutch to forgetting how nature is the ultimate compass. “I consider myself lucky beyond words to be able to go to work every morning with something like a wilderness at my elbow. In the way of so-called worldly things, I can’t seem to muster a desire for cellular phones or cable TV or to drive anything flashier than a dirt-colored sedan older than the combined ages of my children.” (Kingsolver 11) I think that she makes a valid point about how when you emerge in nature the materialistic world fades away. When my family is at the pond no one is worrying about their sending text, streaming videos, face timing, or any other modern convince. People are playing in the water, throwing the football around, playing in the same, and just enjoying the nature around us.
Williams’ bedrock of democracy “Once strengthened by our association with the wild, we can return to family and community. Each of us belongs to a particular landscape, one that informs who we are, a place that carries our history, our dreams, holds us to a moral line of behavior that transcends thought.” (Williams 19). College pond functions as my bedrock of democracy because it’s the land my family adopted as our place to celebrate nature and life. This is the place my family always tries to leave cleaner than we left it and preserve the beauty of it for future generations to come.
I agree that we do need wilderness. I believe that we need water because it shows us our past and our future I remember going to college pond as a child every year and when I went back as an adult it’s like nothing has changed it’s still the same parking lot it’s still the same one slope down to the beach and the picnic tables which are still next to the grills. The trees still stand tall protecting me from the sun’s rays. The reason we need nature is that nature never forgets. Nature is a screenshot of the places you’ve gone to and the places you have seen. Nature in the wilderness is consistent for the most part unless man decides to destroy it. Nature will always be there even after we’re all gone. “My great-grandfather grew up in the next valley over from this one, but I didn’t even know that I had returned to my ancestral home when I first came to visit.” (Kingsolver 3). I think that nature will always allow you to find your home even if you don’t know it.
I believe that city dwellers can still achieve the same type of connection to the wilderness. I think that they have to look for it. They can still have the same connection, but they’ll experience it differently. When they see a tree or the grass growing in the playground, they are still experiencing nature but in micro dosages. Nature is everywhere you just have to be open to experiencing it because nature will always return to grow over manmade challenges like grass and flowers growing in a crack of concrete.