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K and I rounded out our August Challenge this past Labor Day Weekend just spending time here and there reading in the park, heading to the beach with friends, and simply thoroughly enjoying the perfect weather the weekend afforded.
If you haven’t read about it already, the August Challenge was a challenge K and I put to ourselves to spend August Saturdays outside in an effort to get out of the climate controlled boxes of the workweek and to experience what is actually happening in the world around us. While our expectations of the challenge were varied, it became clear through writing about the experience that the challenge to get outside led to an exploration of place.
In going to Humbolt Park, a few different stretches of beach along Lake Michigan, and a suburban farm last month, I noticed differences in how people choose to interact with the natural environment of a place. In Humbolt Park, the designers attentively preserved patches of prairie and designed structures to interact with the natural scenery; on the stretch of beach in western Michigan where I was raised, the ecosystem underwent changes despite human interference to stabilize the landscape; in the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, industry flanked 15 miles of ‘protected’ lakeshore despite the impact that industry might have on the surrounding environment; and surrounding a suburban farm we visited was a homogenized design and lifestyle that did nothing to take into account how the design/lifestyle would interact with the landscape.
In every action we take, we make a decision about how we will interact with the people and the place around us. We can choose to take nothing into account about our surroundings like the developers swallowing up all types of land for the same purpose, or we can take a thoughtful look at our surroundings and then slowly move with constant reflection of the both the positive and negative impacts of our involvement with our surroundings.
Per our August Challenge, K and I spent six hours on Saturday outdoors. Before leaving in the morning, we both expressed a vague discomfort at the idea of spending most of the day outside. It was supposed to be a mild day, and we had no other plans, but something about the prospect of being outside for such an extended amount of time made it seem like such a better idea to stay in and tackle some projects around the apartment we’d been putting off. We did manage to get out the door, though, and we made our way south to Humbolt Park.
At the park, we wandered around the beautiful lagoon, then walked around the perimeter of the park, eventually finding a small wetland area where we sat on a bench to read and just appreciate the gorgeous day and the nature around us. We saw many birds and watched the plant-life of the marshy area. There was a gentle, warm breeze and we were shaded from the hot sun that shone through the mostly clear blue sky by the overhanging branches of a tree. The park is large enough that we were mostly sheltered from the sounds of traffic, and we got to hear, instead, the rustling of the leaves in the trees, and the sounds of the insects in the marsh. Humbolt Park is only about a mile’s walk from our apartment, and we wondered at how we hadn’t done this more often throughout the summer and why we had initial anxiety of leaving the indoors for this great experience.
We later ate lunch in the outdoor patio area of a nearby restaurant before heading to the much smaller Wicker Park where we set out our blanket and rested under a tree. We had been outdoors for nearly four hours at this point, and we found we were getting very tired. This was in part, I’m sure, because of the drain that the hot sun has on the human body, but in part too, I think, because we had been unplugged for the day from the computer, TV and radio – normal parts of our regular Saturday routine that we had left instead for our own thoughts and the decidedly low-tech activity of reading. Though we had wanted with our challenge to replace an eight-hour workday with eight-hours of time outdoors, we decided that a shorter first time would be alright and made our way back to the apartment. We stopped on the way for some iced drinks that we enjoyed at a sunny table, and returned to our apartment six hours after we had anxiously left in the morning.
The whole experience on Saturday was very rewarding. Though difficult to depart from our normal information feed, it was refreshing to have time and quiet for our own thoughts and observations. I was glad in the park to be spending time so close to the plant-life that has been so widespread replaced by buildings, roads, etc.; I wondered at how much of that nature is needlessly replaced, and for what? We so often take for granted the habitat in which we live, viewing all areas of the world as equally inhabitable with a bit of human intervention, but on Saturday I felt very much an inhabitant of the prairie; I joined the long grasses, the birds, the insects and the trees which have been a part of this prairie ecosystem for years, and began to listen to their quiet summer song.
