Churchill Abbye - A wilder life: a season-by-season guide to getting in touch with nature

A Wilder Life

A Season-by-Season Guide to Getting in Touch with Nature

Celestine Maddy

with Abbye Churchill

new york

Contents

Introduction

It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While its still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.

Edward Abbey (19271989)

Ask anyone who knew me in my early twenties if they could have imagined Id grow up to be a champion of the great outdoors. Not one would say yes. I have a feeling a few would laugh. I wouldnt fault them. I am a lover of the city life, a fast walker, a loud talker, a night owl, and an urban devotee. I want all the amenities and experiences. I want the most of everything and I want it all the time, right now. Its one reason I love technology. Its instant gratification. I often have a hard time choosing between an evening spent surfing the Internet and one spent playing a video game.

Until a few years ago, the natural world felt like an abstraction to me. I thought of nature as only those places featured on cable programs narrated by a rich, booming voice that I would later learn to cherish as David Attenboroughs. Nature was in the pages of big, heavy books and thin magazines laced with lifestyle ads. It appeared on screen savers and outside car windows, whizzing by on one of my rare half-day Fridays when I would escape the office after working twelve-hour days several days in a row.

But in my late twenties, things changed. I began to cultivate a part of myself that had remained undiscovered. I had just moved in with my then boyfriend, now husband. He was the proud renter of a diamond in the rougha brownstone with a backyard. I found a new kind of peace among my freshly planted hostas and toad lilies. I could exhale and be still. I went from sweating it out on the front stoop to spending hot afternoons knee-deep in soil and confusion. I drowned plants; I forgot to water others. I killed countless innocent seedlings in my mission to connect and comprehend nature.

That plot of land off of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn helped me move nature from the esoteric to the very real. I realized that nature is everywhereits where we live, breathe, and eat. Nature is on my friend Johns rooftop and in my mothers suburban backyard. Its a few feet away from you when you step out your front door, and its a few hundred miles away, too, when you travel afar. Its where our food is grown and where we go to take a dip in cool waters on hot days. As we move farther from the green bits (the bright flowers, the big trees) and closer to the bytes and our glowing screens, I think we all find ourselves searching for balance between these seemingly oppositional worlds.

Wilder, the magazine, began in 2011 as a place to connect the dots between twenty-first-century living and the slow pace of the great outdoors. Over the years of publishing the magazine, we have redefined the conversation to focus on the growing and natural world. And A Wilder Life is a companion to that experience. Abbye Churchill, Wilders editorial director; Molly Marquand, Wilders horticultural editor; and I, the founder of Wilder, have pooled our collective experience to give you the basic knowledge you need to move from bystander to doer, at home and in the wild.

The book is organized by seasonspring, summer (my personal favorite), fall, and winterand gives you appropriate seasonal activities for each. In order to help you navigate the 272 pages of essential knowledge in A Wilder Life, each season has been further separated into five categories of knowledge: growing, cooking, home and self-reliance, beauty and healing, and wilderness. Each section begins with a checklist to help you prepare for and enjoy the season, ranging from tasks to do in the garden to how to stock your pantry to create the seasons culinary delights. From here, you can discover the joys and the nuisances, along with the good-to-knows and the how-tos that make each season a unique pleasure. Learn to craft with the bounty of the wild, take a trip to some of the most inspiring gardens on earth, make your own perfume, build an outdoor shelter, or navigate by reading the stars. A Wilder Life contains recipes, DIYs, skills, and guides that we consider the foundations for amazing natural experiences. Weve also asked experts like auteur David Lynch, beauty expert Brenda Brock, and our own mothers for their tricks and tools for making the outdoors your very own.

My hope is that this book finds its way off your coffee table and into your backyard and your backpack. Use A Wilder Life as your tool and as a guide. Move beyond what you know and into your own exploration of the bright-eyed world all around you.

There are photos, empty matchboxes, flyers from shows, mementos, and memories pinned across my bedroom wall. As we were putting this book to bed, I added the galvanizing words of Edward Abbey, noted American author, naturalist, and environmental activist, to the collection. He wrote and said a million wonderful things, but my favorite energizes me upon each reading. I hope this book does the same for you.

Spring

The first hint of spring makes you rejoice.

The snow begins to melt away. The sun becomes less of a savior from bitter winds and freezing fingers and more of a cheerful companion ushering us into a bountiful season. The spring equinox brings with it the early blooming flowers, such as the iris and the hyacinth. The warmth of those first days also brings worms, bugs, and bees to life.