Funny, the lessons we learn from animals. Recently, facing a captivating combination of snow, rain, wind, and flooding, local animals were put to the test, along with local humans. The winner was self-reliance.
While humans turned to generators, chainsaws, four-wheel drive, canned goods, and common cause, local animals showed their own version of resourcefulness – can-do-because-must-do – in other ways.
As the snow, rain, wind, and water did their thing beyond my windows, the two dogs watched, somehow crediting me with this rare display – and imagining I would, just as I fill their food and water bowls, turn it off for their walk.
When that did not happen, they seemed at first to blame me, since holding the government accountable for not changing weather is in vogue – apparently – across all species. But soon enough, they toughened up, saw the adventure, and reveled in it.
Walking in this wild weather, I was put in mind of Henry David Thoreau, who wrote a whole essay on “Walking,” spent time in these same Maine woods, no doubt experienced similar weather, and seemed to like it as much as my dogs.
Thoreau, a student of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who penned those lovely “Essays on Self-Reliance,” spent two years living on “Walden Pond” and dismissed the world.
He did not have a dog but later walked a neighbor’s dog, and he loved cats. Wrote Thoreau, “I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.”
Well, “spirit” would have hit him at our door in this recent weather, quickly putting him in mind of his tutor’s essays, since “self-reliance” was the order of the day.
With a lake at the door, my dogs decided this was a watering bowl, so drank often. Now and again they bounced about like fawns, taken with the wildness. Wrote Thoreau, “Life consists with wildness… the most alive is the wildest.”
More fitting: “I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor.” He would like my dogs. They would like him. Some days, he could have them.
So, “alive” we were and self-reliant, not to mention wet outside, quick to shake inside, and glad for warmth. What the dogs – domesticated as they are – taught me was that there is some wildness, a jumping fawn, and a love of adventure in us all.
Outside, the local animals were more surprising. Why? In the high winds and flying water, all birds hunkered down, even the eagles. No birds for three days.
During the flooding, which saw water exceed the shore by several hundred feet, one saw the real meaning of self-reliance – and how it, too, crosses species.
My favorite scene was an intrepid squirrel, not undone by any of it. Like Bullwinkle’s “Rocky,” he was self-reliant in the extreme and did not resent Noah for leaving him behind.
As the water rose, his tree was quickly surrounded. What was more, his leafless tree was disconnected from others close to the house, which were themselves soon inaccessible by ground and too far to leap trunk to trunk.
For a day or so, he was content to hold his tree, observe the storm from that lofty perch, and keep his nest dry. But after a while, all the flooding got boring. He obviously wanted to get on with life and go to a local acorn mound, or higher ground.
He would come down the tree trunk, clinging to it, head down and tail twitching, then back up his tree, look around for another trunk, and finding none, back to his nest.
Finally, at about Day Five, he got fed up with all this weather, irked that his acorn stashes were underwater, not clear how the ground got rolled up while he slept, and he resolved to do something about it.
As my eyes watched, he descended the tree he called home, to the water line. He now started to pace the trunk, vertically, as if considering something important.
Then, in a mad dash, teaching me something I did not know – he leaped into the water and began to swim. Squirrels can swim. He swam to the next tree, paused, and did it again until he was finally on mounded ground.
I was in shock. If necessity is the mother of invention, self-reliance born of need, even a squirrel will dare the unthinkable for some seed.
Who says we do not all have more imagination than we give ourselves credit for, especially when a good flood forces our hand, and makes us long for dry land?
A final Thoreau gem: “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor,” so “go confidently in the direction of your dreams … live the life you have imagined.”
If a squirrel can, we can too!
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.
