The Goose Poop Conflict

Nature versus the wrath of soccer moms

Something truly horrible happened last week in the little prairie town in which I live on the Great Plains of Turtle Island. When I read about it in the local newspaper I was shaken to the very core of my being.

First, some backstory…

I never in a million years ever wanted to live in a place like this. I am a mountain person. For most of my life I have lived near mountains and to not be able to see mountains leaves me in a state of quasi-seasickness. The land here is endlessly flat. Living here is like being on a tiny raft in the middle of the ocean, with 360 degrees of identical flat horizon. It is difficult to orient myself without mountains to look at.

I never would have planned to live here but through a series of unfortunate, tragic-comic events I found myself living here six years ago. The events are not important. I was here and I did not have the means to leave. I was stuck.

And I am still stuck here six years later. But in the the last six years I have learned a very valuable lesson. I learned that the term, ‘paradise,’ can be applied to every square inch of the planet. Whether we see it or not is a result of our individual perception.

I learned that this seemingly inhospitable, endlessly flat, almost-treeless arid and barren wasteland is actually teeming with life. This discovery has been what has saved me from the men in white coats.

This little town of 8,000 humans is surrounded on all sides by endless corn fields. If there was no corn this town simply would not exist. In its place would be a seemingly endless sea of prairie grass with seemingly countless bison munching on that rich, nutrient-dense grass. This is what it was like two hundred years ago before the White immigrants showed up.

Now, instead of prairie grass, there are miles of asphalt streets and cement parking lots, cookie cutter suburban homes, strip malls, fast-food restaurants, gas stations, and an incongruously large amount of churches. (Not to mention the center of all activity; Wal-Mart.) Instead of buffalo herds there is now a seemingly endless armada of pickup trucks with their gun racks and Trump bumper stickers (some of them fly confederate flags).

I had cheated death and woke up in this godforsaken place. It was like I had died and gone to hell. Except that I didn’t really die. I was still alive and I needed to rejuvenate myself but I found myself in an environment not very conducive to that. It seemed hopeless until I found my salvation in nature.

It turned out that this little culturally dead mid-western town has several parks. It even has a delightful, yet short, nature trail. I learned that, without leaving the town-limits, I could actually go out into nature and be surrounded by nature without seeing or being brought down by humans and human activity. I found that there were a few places I could go and not see any evidence of humans. I could be immersed in nature, surrounded by trees and grass and wildflowers and birds and animals, and I could feel that I was actually in a paradise. This is what saved me.

Of the numerous parks this town maintains, the largest is a park on the southern edge of the town. At the northern edge of the park is a soccer field (the only sports facility in the park). The entire center of the park is like a nature preserve. It consists of four fairly large ponds surrounded by a tiny forest. At the southern end of the park is the vestige of a river (aptly named the Republican River). Thanks to dams upriver the river is really nothing more than a creek now. The ponds are man-made; catching the rain runoff from the town before it empties into the tiny remains of the river.

These four ponds are like an oasis in the desert. They and the surrounding mini-forest are teeming with wildlife…. especially waterfowl.

Ever since I was a kid I’ve been a bird lover. I am most emphatically NOT an ornithologist nor a birder nor a birdwatcher. I am just a bird freak. I love birds. (Given my name how I can I not be?)

Once I discovered this park with four ponds I began going there every single day no matter the weather. It became my refuge. It became my medicine.

Back in the middle of the last century the Canada Goose was in trouble. Previously numbering in the millions, their population declined to only about 10,000. What few birds remained were located in a few wild places in northern Minnesota. Their population was drastically reduced due to excessive hunting, habitat loss and the use of lead gunshot (also one of the reasons for the decline of the bald eagle). Thankfully, numerous American and Canadian conservationists got together to collectively save the Canada Goose. Thanks to conservation efforts their population is now once again in the millions. It’s one of the best conservation success stories of our time.

Well, I quickly learned that my little Bible-belt town’s little park with four ponds is the home to about 300 to 400 year-round resident Canada geese! In the middle of winter that population reaches around 1,000 as Canada Geese from the Dakotas and Minnesota come down here to winter. I look forward to Spring every year so that I can go down to the park and see all the mama geese with their gaggles of babies following them around. Baby geese are so freaking cute!

(If you ever want to see the ugly side of “Mother Goose” just approach a mother Canada Goose with 8 or 10 chicks under its supervision.)

It’s utterly amazing how quickly those little goose babies grow up. By the end of spring they are flying and by early summer they have flown away to northern climes. Yet the year-round population stays so the ponds always have plenty of geese. And there are also plenty of ducks and white pelicans and inland seagulls and the ever-spiritual great blue herons, not to mention woodpeckers and countless songbirds.

The ponds have a yearly population of between two and six great blue herons. These are the birds that truly changed my life. A photo I took of one of these great blue herons graces the cover of one of my novels. While in the midst of what appears as a hopelessly depressing place my heart was re-awakened by these incredible birds. They truly possess very powerful mojo.

So anyway, I was reading the local newspaper last week and I came across an article that encapsulated everything that went on in the last city council meeting. After reading the article I was devastated.

Our local city counsel has voted unanimously to stop stocking the ponds in my favorite park with fish. Their reason was two-fold. First of all, last summer after they stocked the ponds with fish there was a massive fish die-off. According to city engineers this was because of pollution. The ponds receive rain run-off from the city and so many home gardeners and landscapers use toxic pesticides and herbicides and the run-off from that has polluted the ponds, killing the fish.

Secondly, the city counsel announced that it was trying to reduce or eliminate the waterfowl population that had grown to call the ponds their home. They even suggested the use of ‘noise cannons’ to scare away all the geese and other waterfowl.

What?!!!! Why the hell would they want to do that?

As I continued to read the article I learned that the city counsel had been besieged with complaints from soccer moms about their kids coming home from soccer practice with goose poop on the bottom of their soccer shoes! Those darn Canada geese had the audacity to poop on the soccer field!

So their obvious answer was to get rid of the geese!

What would my answer be? It would be to move the goddam soccer field to one of the other city parks (all of which have plenty of room and better parking).

But, apparently, that would be too much trouble. It is apparently easier just to get rid of the wildlife.

This, right here, encapsulates everything that is wrong with America today. Nature is something that must be shoved aside to make room for the American ethic of competition. We must never work with or around nature. Nature must be subservient to us. Hundreds of Canada Geese and ducks and herons must give up their home so that Trump-voting soccer moms don’t have to deal with goose poop on the bottom of their children’s soccer shoes when they come home from soccer practice.

That, in a nutshell, is what America has become. Just a half-century ago we were doing everything we could to save endangered species and protect and nourish nature but that is all gone now and we are headed back into darker times.

I have an acquaintance who I speak with once or twice a week. He is in his seventies and is an extreme pro-Trump fan. I am a little younger and am an extreme anti-Trump fan. We came to blows during the election cycle and didn’t speak for about a month.

But we kept running into each other and finally we spoke but I emphatically refused to talk about politics. Taking my cue, he stopped talking about politics, too. To our surprise, we learned that we had so much to talk about. We have become much friendlier since. We talk about art, music, movies, writing, ancient history, and a seemingly endless supply of topics. But we always avoid politics. We’re on the verge of becoming friends.

But then the other day I made the mistake of bringing up the topic of the eradication of waterfowl from our lovely park. To my horror, this near-friend vehemently disagreed with me. With a vein throbbing on his forehead he asked, “What are you? Some kind of Democrat or something?”

Seriously? Caring about Mother Nature and the environment makes me a Democrat? There was a time when caring about the environment and nature was a non-partisan issue. It was a HUMAN issue. It was a survival issue. It was an issue about living in harmony with our environment. It was an issue about caring about the future, about our progeny.

This near-friend brought up the ‘fact’ that soccer was important because it instilled in future generations the importance of competition. We must always care only about winning and having ‘feelings’ about the losers was a sign of weakness — even if the ‘loser’ was something as conquerable as nature. How can we become true American billionaires — the only virtuous goal — if we care about some dumb animals? The only true goal is to win, win, win. And soccer, or any sport, is the avenue to instill this in future generations. We cannot win unless someone else, or something else, loses. And Mother Nature is an easy target. Our kids playing soccer without the annoyance of goose poop is far more important than some dumb birds and the Democrats who notice and love them.

The newspaper article, along with my conversation with my near-friend, has led me to think that human beings will never continue to evolve until we go beyond polarizing ourselves into either Democrat or Republican. After six years of visiting the ponds I have realized that not a single one of the countless birds that call that park their home is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. They all belong to the same party. They are all part of the party of life.

There is competition in nature. But it is a very different kind of competition than what humans embody as the end all and be all of life. We could learn a lot from nature if we would only stop eradicating it long enough to feel it and understand it. There is never a time when I feel more peaceful than after having taken a nature walk around the ponds. My heart will be broken and it will seem like there is no point to life once the birds are gone.

I am so profoundly disillusioned with Trump-voting soccer moms. You are throwing humankind down into the abyss from which there is little hope of escape. Go spend some time alone out in Mother Nature. You may learn something about being a true mother.

I also realize that I am swimming in the same pond that all other humans swim in. In nature, geese or ducks or other animals will occasionally come to blows. They will fight but the fight rarely lasts more than a minute or two. The birds will shake themselves off and continue on with life. Unlike humans, birds and other animals don’t hold grudges and resentments. They don’t divide themselves off and polarize into ideological factions. They don’t lose the one-ness that binds them all. They don’t destroy the entire pond in order to make themselves ‘right.’

I live in a town full of humans and I interact daily with those humans. To find peace, however, I go to the ponds. I pray to God that is not ruined.

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