Thoreau’s “Walden,” while it has chapters on “Economy “ and “Reading,” is organized around the annual cycle, to humans the most innate, natural and pleasing of all arrangements. Margaret Renkl writes of family, politics and nature. This new book is strictly nature, and organized into four seasons, beginning with winter. In fact there are 52 chapters, which might be savored a chapter a week, but not by book reviewers.
In any case, “The Comfort of Crows” is, like “Walden,” a highly observational book and, rather than a large pond and a big piece of woods, the nature being observed is in Renkl’s backyard. Much of this happened during the enforced seclusion of the pandemic, but that doesn’t matter. Close observation is always Renkl’s forte. Throughout the book she quotes from her favorite nature writers. For example, Mary Oliver tells us, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” And Margaret Renkl can really pay attention.
What she sees and feels as the seasons roll along, starting with winter, is varied and strong. Each season has its particularities. In winter there is more life around than you might think. Spring and summer, obviously, teem. Autumn has its beauty. She reminds us of the fragility of nature. Habitat is being lost, often through expansion of housing developments. That is bad enough. But lawns infuriate her. In American suburbia, she writes, “homeowners are still in thrall to a status symbol invented by English nobility … enraptured by the idea of a lawn as a rolling carpet of grass.”
Nothing much else can grow in a lawn, especially when it is sprayed with poison, a particular horror for Renkl. Renkl describes a fox, made unhealthy because poisonous spray, which gets into insects, then mice and birds and so on, can finally sicken the magnificent creature. Much of the natural world is endangered or gone entirely. She quotes Wendy Williams: “The world is fast disappearing, but it’s not gone yet.” And Richard Powers: “You can’t come back to something that is gone.”
What we are doing to the natural world infuriates Renkl and brings her to tears. She also is dismayed by the savagery of the natural world, the endless display of “tooth and claw,” but it can’t be helped. The answer, for her, is to do what she can. The Renkls have very little lawn. She plants milkweed for pollinators, courts butterflies, refuses to kill anything. At one point she approaches the Hindu, is reluctant to take a walk through a mountain cove. “I worry about stepping on a fragile, irreplaceable snail or lady’s slipper. I am content to sit on the porch and listen to the crows calling.”
All the while, however, she celebrates the beauty of the natural world, in every season, from the fungi to the crows, the rabbits and the foxes, hummingbirds, bugs and blue jays. All beautiful and all needing our help.
