The Genesis of Lake Daniel Park

Only fifty yards from the townhouse I share with my girlfriend, below a short grassy hill covered in spiny sweet-gum balls, there is a humble park. Every day, weather permitting, I walk down the hill, rolling the sweet gum balls under my feet like stationary roller skates, I cross the meadow that the neighborhood kids use for soccer practice, and I walk beside North Buffalo Creek. If, on that particular day, I choose to turn right, I will end up at the “park” part of Lake Daniel Park.
A long time ago the park was home to lake called (you guessed it) Lake Daniel. The lake must have made a beautiful centerpiece for the park back when lakes were free to be lakes. But those times have passed and the once beautiful lake has been replaced by a covered reservoir that looks like the Super Dome’s vertically challenged kid brother, and a tiny pool full of koi the size of nuclear submarines. In the middle of the pool floats a fountain; in the absence of the natural water circulation of streams, its geyser keeps the water from stagnating and growing algae. A barbed wire fence that doglegs out at the top surrounds the entire complex, to insure that the neighborhood kids and I can’t get in.
To get to the lake I have to navigate four lanes of Benjamin Parkway traffic thanks to some astute city planner who decided it would be a good idea to run a main thoroughfare right through the middle of Lake Daniel Park. The lake is hardly worth the trouble of crossing the traffic. All I get for my efforts is the privilege of wondering if anything still lives under the Super Dome part of the lake, and the pleasure of clinging to the fence, watching the koi cruise around, trailing their transparent fins like a group of well dressed socialites on downers. If there is life in the water beneath that tarred sheet-metal roof I wonder if it remembers what sunlight looks like.
When I get tired of watching the koi in the pond and wondering whether or not transparent cave-koi live in the reservoir, I re-navigate the traffic, cross another grassy meadow, and I’m at the creek again. If I cross the creek on the foot bridge I’ll be in the honest-to-God park, which is really more like a big Fisher-Price toy that someone fastened to the ground with concrete than it is a park.
The park part of Lake Daniel Park contains a baseball diamond, four tennis courts, an enormous plastic Technicolor playground, and about a dozen mid-sized willow oak trees. There is a rock wall surrounding the swing sets and plastic climbing wall/slide combo that doesn’t look quite right. When I walk up to it and kick it, it shudders and makes a hollow plastic sound –these rocks aren’t even rocks at all. What looks like a rock wall is really a long strip of plastic printed and textured so that I can feel like I’m surrounded by something someone made using rocks from right here in Greensboro. It’s kind of a feeble attempt, but at least the Fisher Price company tries to have their products look like something real that might have a story behind them rather than something that was just spit out by a mindless extrusion molder in China. At least the wood chips on the ground are made of real trees.
Stepping over the “rock” wall and re-crossing the foot-bridge I begin walking along the greenway that follows North Buffalo Creek. The concrete exercise trail following the meandering and well-littered creek snakes along, pausing at exercise stations where the sweaty residents of the Lake Daniel area desperately fight old age, gravity, and the effects of a plethora of fine dining restaurants located conveniently nearby in the Friendly Center.
If you walk away from the tennis courts--towards the power lines and high-rise buildings of the Friendly Center--you can almost miss North Buffalo Creek entirely. It winds along the left hand side of the concrete, shielded from view by a narrow swath of woods and brush that has somehow managed to evade the bush-hogs that have tamed the rest of the park. I walk away from the concrete, across the neatly manicured grass, step into the brush next to the creek, and pick my way down the bank avoiding the blackberry stalks. I find a rock next to the water; I sit down.
Sitting by the water allows the natural order of the creek to come to you. The banks of the stream angle down just enough to shut out the joggers and body builders on the greenway. The creek and its sparse natural surroundings are home to an intensely interdependent web of life. The most apparent fauna of this web are the mallards, but if you sit long enough the rest of the threads show themselves. The water is full of bream and minnows that provide food for a pair of king fishers. Itinerant blue herons drop by periodically for a taste of the creek’s fish, and a woodchuck has his burrow in a thick stand of Japanese knotweed. The Lake Daniel Park flora adds still more threads, weaving what at first seemed a scant web of life into an ornate tapestry. Apple, willow oak, and loblolly pines are interspersed with white birches, honey suckle, an Asian pear, maples and sycamore. The undergrowth is mostly blackberry stalks and Japanese knotweed; it grows thick, keeping all but the most determined visitors to the park on the foot path.
Each strand of this tapestry has been spun by some exuberant Rumplestiltskin god, from the free and abundant straw of pure sunlight creating the priceless gold of life. Without access to sufficient sunlight, there would be no web, no life at all, no trees, no plants, no kingfishers, and ultimately no me. In The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, Thom Hartmann writes that “every life form on the surface of the planet is here because a plant was able to gather sunlight and store it, and something was able to eat that plant and take that sunlight energy in to power its body”(Hartman, 1) Human society has contrived ways to make use of both current sunlight -sunlight that is captured and stored in plants and animals that are alive now, and ancient sunlight -energy that was captured by plants thousands of years ago (i.e. fossil fuels). Hartmann points out that our ability to use both current sunlight and ancient sunlight has allowed human populations to grow far beyond the limits imposed by current sunlight use. Through grazing, global agribusiness, the use of fossil fuels, and extreme greed, we have succeeded in harnessing almost all of the available current sunlight for the consumption of humans alone, not to mention thoroughly exhausting its supplies of ancient sunlight. But the Lake Daniel Park ecosystem is entirely dependent on current sunlight that has been captured and stored outside of the monolithic parameters of agriculture and society. In Lake Daniel Park the Rumplestiltskin god still spins his pile of straw into gold, but his pile is much smaller than it used to be and as a result the gold strands are fewer and farther between.
The sparse tapestry of Lake Daniel Park can be understood as the result of a human society which refuses to recognize limits to its expansion and domination. The only remaining current sunlight that is available for the ducks, wood chucks and kingfishers of the world grows along the banks of streams that could not be diverted or dug underground, along the sides of highways where herbicides and mowers could not reach, and in places too inconvenient for commerce and consumption. The rest of the world’s supply of energy has been enslaved so that six billion people can live on a world only capable of sustaining around five million.
It can be argued that our apparent inability to live within our means can be traced back to the Genesis creation story, which places man as master of his environment and argues for the naturalness of the man versus nature dichotomy. The danger of this story lurks in its interpretations. The literal reading might lead us to believe that mankind was exiled from the garden of Eden where a delicate balance existed, and thrown into a world where there was no state of equilibrium, and given directions to dominate. This interpretation allows for a return to the garden, but only through the death of the body or the return of the historical Jesus.
John Milton writes that “the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” If Milton is right, then the Genesis creation myth must be read as the tale of a change in mindset. The juxtaposition of Lake Daniel Park’s diminutive squalor against the grand excesses of Greensboro’s newest symbol of gentrification (The Friendly Shopping Center) invokes such an understanding.
While the story of Adam’s fall might be taken by fundamentalists to be the literal Truth, one might also read it in search of a more applicable message which, instead of setting our sights on other-worldly salvation, ends by teaching us a lesson about living in the present. As I read it, the message is as follows: Adam’s fall was marked by a stark change in lifestyle. Prior to eating from the tree of knowledge, original man lived entirely according to the limits of the natural order. Dependence on current sunlight was recognized as dependence on God’s grace. These first humans lived by hunting and gathering. The fall, the big mistake, was characterized by the choice to move away from hunting and gathering and towards tilling and grazing. In short, man found that he could exploit the limited amount of sunlight that was available to him by harnessing the sunlight from grass and shrubs that he could not eat, by domesticating animals that could eat grass and shrubs and then eating those animals. He could also clear the land and plant an abundance of those crops he could eat, thus replacing the other species that did not serve his purposes with more “useful” plants.
To extend this message into the realm of culture, one might look to the differences between ancient hunter-gatherer cultures and our more modern, market-based economies. A traditional hunter-gatherer culture would not have grown beyond the limits of current, local sunlight; they would have seen themselves as part of the world, not separate from it. We, on the other hand, have become so separated from our dependence on current sunlight that we no longer realize it at all.
Strip aside the polarizing, man versus nature elements of the Christian Creation myth and we are left with a story of a fall from grace –a change in mindset from one of cooperation with, and dependence on a delicately balanced ecological reality, to one of domination, exploitation and forgotten dependence. Most importantly, the fall from grace was marked by an achieved ignorance of the natural state of equilibrium and of man’s place within it.
Lake Daniel Park and its neighbors capture a snapshot of the results of Adam’s fall from grace. Next door to the park looms the ultimate symbol of commerce and consumption. The Friendly Center is clean, almost immaculately artificial, and fueled in entirety by a rapidly dwindling supply of oil –ancient sunlight. It stands as a testament to living beyond our means. The park, on the other hand, is filthy, neglected, and entirely fueled by current sunlight. But current sunlight persists--both bountiful and free--while oil is limited and only to be had at a significant cost. If we were to learn from the creation myth we would invest in the sustainability of Lake Daniel Park and we would turn our backs on the foolish excesses of the Friendly Center.

As the supplies of current sunlight dwindle due to human exploitation, so do the populations that cannot deny their dependence on this grace. Ordinarily, a creek such as North Buffalo Creek would support far more than the single woodchuck, ten mallards, and pair of king-fishers that it does today; but in the real world, when the land cannot support a given population, that population is forced to die down to the point where it can be supported. Human society is not immune to this reality. All we need to do is look at the third world in order for us to catch a glimpse of the catastrophic nature of our imminent future. In Haiti alone thousands of children starve every day. When a society outgrows its energy supply, the comfort--even the survival--of the few becomes contingent upon the starvation, death, and enslavement of the many. Conveniently enough for us, we are the few who benefit while so many suffer. Yet even when these inequities slap us in the face we deny their existence.
Lake Daniel Park does not slap you in the face unless you let it. This is because it, like everything else in our culture, is treated as a commodity rather than a piece of the grace upon which we all depend. In spite of our fantasies, we cannot live without the web of life. Just ask the Irish. They tried to do away with their dependence on the natural order. They put all of their eggs in the same basket –potatoes. All it took was the failure of one crop to drive an entire nation to starvation. In the same vein, American society is hell-bent on consolidation. Global agribusiness, with its heavy emphasis on genetic engineering, has dangerously jeopardized our planet’s biodiversity. When an entire population depends on Roundup-resistant corn, one Roundup-resistant microbe, insect, or bacteria has the potential to drive that nation to famine. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, whispers the creek. But anyone who might hear its message is more concerned with dropping a pant size than they are with their dependence on biodiversity.
Yet, if you take the time to notice you can see each individual thread that makes up the entire tapestry of life. It becomes apparent that one thread is ultimately dependent on the many strands that frame it, for if one is broken the rest will unravel.
Today I watched the thread of a kingfisher for over an hour. He was perched on a branch of a scraggly white birch that extended all the way from the tree on the south bank to the middle of the creek. I was sitting up the bank from him, at the foot of the Asian pear tree, and as far as I know he never saw me. He just sat there waiting, looking intently into the water. After twenty minutes of intense watching he dropped straight down and plunged into the water with his wings folded back like the v-wing of a fighter jet. A moment later he was back on his perch again, empty-beaked and dripping with creek water, but undeterred. Nature seems to favor her finer threads.
Yet while his fishing was less than ideal, this bird had something I had forgotten: patience and knowledge of grace. The kingfishers need the stored sunlight of the bream and the minnows to survive, and the fish need the stored sunlight of the bugs and worms, which in turn depend on the sunlight which the plant captures for the rest of us. The kingfisher does not master his environment; he understands his dependence on it. This must be the lesson of the tower at Babel.
The biblical story I was taught as a child can teach us a powerful lesson through understanding its metaphors. God was not angry that the people built the tower, nor was he even remotely worried that the tower would reach so high as to actualize their dreams; on the contrary, God was angered that the people were blind to their dependence on his grace. The tower of Babel tells the story of our society to a T. By fostering the illusion that human society exists within a vacuum we come to see ourselves as independent, static, and superior to the natural order. Our artificial order, we tell ourselves, is all that matters, and it is to this end that we attempt to dominate and control the natural order. We aspire to be God. In short, we have forgotten our dependence on grace, on sunlight, on the natural order that pre-exists us and will presumably follow our fleeting lives. But a metaphorical reading of Babel goes still deeper. Just as the people of the world spoke one language, the global economy speaks a universal language: greed, power, profits and the superiority of some humans over everything across the globe. This language attempts to consolidate and control grace. But for all of the advances in technology, we will forever be dependent on and accountable to that which we cannot control. In the legend of the tower of Babel, the consequence of a people’s selfish pride was their downfall. The great civilization of Babel was shattered by God sending a host of languages among them, thus preventing further illusions of grandeur. The people learned their lesson and went their separate ways, knowing that there was something far larger and more important than their feeble cultural enterprises. Today we have, through globalization and selfishness, returned to the blind pursuits of Babel. But God is not far behind and God is the natural order. Whether global warming gets us before we run out of oil and self-destruct is of little importance. What matters is that we recognize our dependence on, and our interconnectedness with the world we live in. We must rethink our societal folly before it’s too late.
I find it difficult to adequately learn the lessons of the kingfisher and of Babel. I have become completely removed from my dependence on this grace for which all of nature waits so patiently. I go to the store where I trade money--our universal symbol of greed, power, and profits--for products. If I have money I feel that I can have anything. I need not understand the world in which I live so long as the things I want can be had for money. All I need to do is learn to live within this world abstractions and illusions which we are all buying into out of “necessity.”

If, after walking down the hill with the sweet gum balls and across the field with the neighborhood kids I choose to turn left, and walk upstream, towards the Friendly Center, I will end up at a bench, next to the intersection of Friendly Avenue and Green Valley Road upon which sits a homeless man. The wooded corridor widens and then ends abruptly, running headlong into pavement.
A few weeks ago I was walking along the greenway and I happened to notice a trail leading away from the concrete and into the woods by the creek. I walked down the trail and discovered a tent, some dirty clothes and a pile of trash in a little clearing next to the creek. I had found the “homeless” man’s home. I turned back towards the greenway, not wanting to disturb him if he was still inside the tent, and stumbled on something else. He had set up, using the supporting structure of the power lines, a bathroom comprised of a mirror, a shallow wash basin, several shaving razors, and a bar of soap, a comb, and a towel. His mirror was lodged between two struts towards the base of the scaffold at about head height. The remarkable thing about this makeshift bath house was the way in which the few necessities which the homeless man had accumulated were framed by a structure that upheld the lifeblood of a hoarding society. God had set a caveman’s knife beside an ATM and asked me to choose between the two. I chose the ATM, but only because I have forgotten how to use the knife.
In his essay entitled “Economy” Thoreau accuses his contemporaries of “making [them]selves sick, that [they] may lay up something against a sick day.” Thoreau’s words imply two oppositional economies; the first--the economy of life-- values the grace of sunlight as its primary currency and acknowledges the fleeting nature of life; the second--the economy of money--values an abstract currency and perpetually attempts to insure a more comfortable future at the cost of the present. To live by the first economic model means to live day by day; to live by the second involves “making yourself sick that you might lay up something against a sick day.” The homeless man lives by the first model. He may worry where his next meal comes from but he does not worry about retirement –he is already retired.
The money economy encourages us to hoard because money can be easily compiled as abstract numbers. However, by doing so, it also encourages us to lose sight of the present by continually stressing that the future is where we might find hope, happiness and health.
Encounters with the homeless man in Lake Daniel Park inevitably lead me to want to sit down next to him on the bench and ask him about his life. The only thing keeping me from doing so is a deep seated fear of strangers, especially homeless ones, that has somehow been conditioned into me. This fear is of course ridiculous but it illustrates just how dangerous our culture views those who reject its abstractions to be.
The homeless man doesn’t play the game of abstractions. As a result he has more free time than anyone could ever use. Whenever I see him he seems happy -at least his smile says so. But his smiling countenance also has an air of insanity about it. I often wonder if their really are bats in his belfry, or if we only see them because they differ from our own bats in our own respective belfries. In another culture he might be a guru, a shaman, or some other respected figure, but in ours where the only value a person has is derivative of how well they play this game of abstractions, people like me fear and avoid him.
The money economy which most of us buy into every time we pay our taxes or bills artificially interprets Real Life. Money takes the place of sunlight as the basis for our web of “Life.” Instead of plants gathering and storing this money we (the consumers) operate as the primary storage and collection units. Like sunlight, money is somewhat of an uncertain enterprise. Few, if any of us, can say with certainty that it will always be available to us, and as a result we try to get what we can while we can. At the basic level then, we are no better than the jar full of baby mantises which Annie Dillard describes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Where the mantises eat each other in order to survive, we view, and ultimately treat each other according to what kind of monetary profit or loss we see in our fellow human beings thus obscuring the actual person altogether. Our bills are our buy in to the game of Life. Without a permanent address, a bank account, a drivers license, a car, a cell phone, and internet access we find it excruciatingly difficult if not impossible to participate in a money economy. Hence we make our mortgage payments, pay our phone bills, taxes and car insurance, all in the hope that we might be happier in the future and not have the life sucked out of us by our fellow humans. But whether or not we succeed, we all die, and we reach the after life (if there is one) realizing that we lived our entire lives chasing abstractions and ignoring the real world in which we lived.

Lake Daniel Park is moving into my neighborhood. Last week an enormous pile of wood shavings showed up at the base of the sugar maple that stands a few feet from my bedroom window. Some industrious carpenter had bored a hole squarely in the middle of the severed limb which the real estate company had removed when it threatened to fall on the house. The tree forks at about head height, with one arm ending abruptly in a stump that might one day save the house and the other continuing skyward and shading my window. Upon inspecting the opening, I found that what looked from the house like the two inch bore of a spade bit widened inside into a rounded, nest-like bowl the size of a basketball. The pair of yellow shafted flickers I later saw in the hole must have pounded their heads against the tree for hours in order to excavate this grotto
The clean white shavings piled at the base of the tree attest to the perseverance of these, nature’s carpenters. I have worked with maple, and I know it to be harder than many of the other woods these birds could have chosen for a home. Furthermore, there is a soft, rotten knothole on the opposite side of the tree that flickers might have chosen to excavate, rather than undertaking the task in the hard, live wood of this particular stump. I read once, that in front and back of a woodpecker’s brain, a soft, spongy substance acts as a shock absorber for its brain so that all the head pounding doesn’t cause brain damage or death. If these birds really did evolve from lizards, there must have been a great deal of death by head pounding somewhere along the evolutionary line due to the fact that most lizards lack brain shock absorbers. I like to think that inside of the birds head the brain is bouncing around like a ball in an intense game of squash. It must be hard to stay focused on drilling holes when you treat your grey matter like you would the contents of a can of paint in a paint shaker.
All things considered, though, a warm, dry hole in a tree, while harder to achieve than a simple nest, seems much more appealing. Looking inside of the flicker’s new home had me wishing that I could live in a home as simple and aptly suited to my real needs as theirs. Woodpeckers stay focused on life; simply by living close to the land, in a home that does not allow space for much more than raising several offspring, they live a fulfilled life. Their life does not focus on filling the nest with stockpiles of the bugs they eat; they live by a simple dependence on grace. Their entire existence -a tenuous strand of life strung precariously between birth and death.
In the gospel of Matthew Jesus says: “do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.” I’d like to write this passage across the inside of the compassionate conservative psyche where it could go about its work of fostering as much cognitive dissonance as possible. Thoreau writes of how we spend our days of health “laying up [treasure] against a sick day” but that in doing so we lose sight of the now. The yellow shafted flicker does not wager his illusions against the realities of life and death, but it lives in a world dominated by those who do.
Those who hoard have gained the upper hand in nature due, in large part, to the fact that human society has hoarded so much of nature’s abundance. Yesterday I witnessed a tragic battle between the hoarders and the flickers. Squirrels, nature’s bankers, decided that they liked the looks of the flicker’s new home and took it by force. The squirrels were simply bigger and stronger than the flickers were. Squirrels like current American society, live by an ethos of domination while yellow shafted flickers still cling to an ethos of cooperation and interdependence.
In human history dominator cultures have consistently wiped out cooperator cultures when the two collide. But dominator cultures are short lived while cooperator cultures offer sustainability. The sustainability movement in America provides a powerful argument for a return to the practices of cooperation, interdependence, and interconnection. Lake Daniel Park and its inhabitants provide a model by which we might observe some of these practices. The kingfisher shows us that to live in cooperation with the natural order requires patience and dependence on grace. The Yellow Shafted Flickers teach us that to live in the present, fully and completely, we must also learn how to fail; and the homeless man teaches that the economy of sunlight can provide a viable and sustainable alternative to our money economy.