Genesee Greenway Exploration

 

The air was cold and the skies were a dreary gray as I got out of my car to venture onto the Genesee Greenway for the first time. I was in the small rural town of Mount Morris, parked right off the main road, and I was intrigued to discover how this nature path would mesh with the immediate civilization that surrounded it. As I set out on the trail, my senses were immediately hypercritical of the place, as they picked up on the old beer cans and fast food wrappers mingled in with the trees and the sound of a nail gun intermingled with a distant bird call. The trail wound itself right through the edge of town, passing in close contact with the backyards of homes, war memorials, bowling alleys and laundromats. At some points, the houses were so close to the trail that I had a lingering feeling I was trespassing,  as I walked past mobile homes and easily peered into the small and cluttered kitchens. At one point along the trail, large concrete foundations of an old home sat on the side of the path, and I thought about whether the building of this trail uprooted these people from their home, in an ironic human-induced version of nature’s take-back of civilization.

I imagined this place in the spring, when the sun would shine through the full, green trees, blotting out the nearby street and the small, rural poverty that ran alongside it, and I imagined that this trail could present some kind of elusive escape from its immediate surroundings, but today with the bleak gray February skies and the bare trees, the harsh reality of the trail’s surroundings really challenged my thinking of this place as nature. To see nature as a thin line intruded upon by an all-encompassing human society was difficult. To me, this trail reminded me of a good place where teenagers could go to hide from their parents and smoke cigarettes and drink stale beer, rather than a place to find solace and experience the outdoors.

I departed from this first section of the Greenway in search of something more familiar and suited to my expectations, and I drove in the direction a county park in the area, parked my car, and descended a very steep, slippery hill to find the path crossing through the trees of this park. A steep hill covered with trees and leaves ran along one side of the path, concealing the houses above and the sounds of the street, while farmland ran alongside the opposite side. I heard the wind rustling through the trees and the sound of water melting and dripping in the swamp-like area that ran immediately on one side of the path. As I was walking, a bright red male cardinal chased a female cardinal across the path.

In this place, all seemed right and aligned with my ideas of nature, yet it bothered me why these disparities between the two parts of the trail existed and why I could not reconcile the first part of the trail with the idea of nature. To see this trail as continuous rather than in discrete parts could offer an analogy to the acceptance of nature and society as ends of continuum, in which the majority of our world today lies somewhere within the middle of these two ends. In a world that is decreasingly less wild and increasingly more civilized, it seems like places like these might offer a solution as to how we can alter our stereotypical view of nature in order to make nature more accessible to the variety of places in which we occupy.

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