The human and non-human worlds are becoming one
Animals are moving into the city, emboldened by quiet and clean streets
As we get ready to go back out into society, albeit in a cautious, masked fashion, I have been thinking about some of the benefits of having been inside my house and neighbourhood for weeks now.
(Firstly though, I have to acknowledge how lucky I am to have a place to shelter — many don’t, and to have that place be a safe space — many aren’t.)
Having lived in my house for over a decade, I am familiar with the views from every window, but when I was spending hours just staring out, I realized that I didn’t know everything that I was looking at. So, I decided to practice a sort of “isolation botany,” where I attempted to identify all the trees I could see from my house, making a map and tracking them down through the neighbourhood.
This led to my seeing all the gardens that people have been making — all the furiously constructed raised beds, piles of fresh earth mounded optimistically in driveways. Garden centres, one of the first businesses allowed to open here, have quickly run out of pots and seeds. People are improvising tomato cages from coat-hangers because there does not seem to be a single tomato cage left in this city.
While there is a lot of activity in front and back gardens, there are fewer cars and people on the streets, so the birds are flying lower. The natural world is moving easily into the spaces we have vacated. For the first time ever, I saw a fox walking casually down my street one morning. There is now a rabbit that sleeps under my car out back, because I am using my car so much less now. Everywhere in the world, it seems, there are reports of wildlife moving into cities. A friend in New York says she can hear birdsong in that city for the first time. My mother, returning from the UK at the start of the pandemic, told me how beautiful London was when it was deserted of people, how it was the first time she had breathed clean air there or seen the sky so blue.
But while wildlife is moving into cities, in the wild places around Kingston where people are going now to exercise, the wildlife has retreated — alarmed perhaps by the hoards of purposeful walkers, or the brightly painted inspirational rocks that have appeared at the base of every second tree. I used to see an owl every day during my early morning walk, and now I am lucky to see even a chipmunk in the woods. And where I once had the trails to myself, now there are dozens of people already on them when I arrive in the parking lot at 6:30 a.m. None of the “regulars” I used to meet are on the paths. They have been replaced by grim seniors in Lycra and little knots of families, each group trying to avoid the other.
Where once I could have let my dog off leash for some of the walk, now there is no chance of that, and because she is a puppy and has relentless energy, an hour after we’re home, she’s ready to go out again.
I didn’t mean to get a dog during the pandemic. I got her in December, before I’d even heard of coronavirus. She became a pandemic puppy by default. All attempts to give her the regularized puppy life have failed. Her obedience classes were cancelled at the halfway point because of the virus. I meant to do more training with her in these endless at home hours, but neither she nor I seem to have much interest in this. Sometimes I throw liver treats at her to lie on the floor, or sit for longer than five seconds, but it’s pretty lacklustre. We’re both turning a little feral, and I rely solely on her bond with me for any chance of obedience. Realistically this only works 50 per cent of the time, even though we’ve been together for every second of every day since I brought her home in December, and she is so worried about being apart from me that she shrieks when I take the garbage out.
But I have enjoyed spending so much time with the new dog, and this is the exciting thing about these past few months, for me, the way the human and non-human realms are moving closer together. Perhaps this will be something that lasts beyond the pandemic? Perhaps the people in my neighbourhood will continue with their gardens, and the fox will regularly stroll down the sidewalk at dawn. I hope so.
I have been talking on the phone these days, that beautiful comfort of human voice to human voice. Recently I was talking to a friend who lives in an American city where there are a lot of positive cases of coronavirus and very little testing and contact tracing. She has been indoors for months, afraid to even go outside to her yard. She told me how she was in her bedroom one day and noticed a barred owl sitting on her window ledge, trying to peer into the room. Later, the owl was on the kitchen window ledge, again trying to look inside the house. She realized that because neither she nor her husband were venturing outside, they were no longer filling the bird feeder in the backyard. The owl probably relied on the bird feeder to provide a meal of blue jay or cardinal, and had come to find out what was going on with the people in the house, why they weren’t behaving as they usually did, why they weren’t keeping the bird feeder topped up with seeds.
We laughed on the phone, thinking how the animals in the woods most likely watched for us the way we watched for them. We laughed, and then my friend said, seriously, “You know, the person who has cared the most about my welfare during the pandemic has been the owl.”
Helen Humphreys’ latest book, “Rabbit Foot Bill,” is coming out in August with HarperCollins.