Sketchbook: Nature Everywhere You Look
with poems by Kay Ryan
Some days I want to be Beatrix Potter wandering acres of farmland in the Cotswolds with my sketchbook.
Other days I subscribe firmly to the motto of poet Kay Ryan: I always go out into nature and it’s always a mistake.
One thing I tell my students in the Nature Sketchbook Club is that nature is everywhere. When you don’t know what to sketch, look out the window. Draw your pet! Go into the kitchen and find an apple or a houseplant. Or, venture outside for a few minutes and see what happens.
A couple of weeks ago my husband invited me to go on a morning walk down to our little neighborhood pool for an early swim. I thought about using the old housekeeping excuse, but it was a Beatrix Potter kind of day.
The pool was clear and beautiful. We waded into the cool water in the shade of several palo verde trees in full bloom. After floating for a few minutes in the petaled water, I noticed something swimming toward us frantically from the opposite edge. I recognized the shape of the nose and the way it was paddling furiously with its front paws.
“It’s a rat!” I said, realizing how wrong I’d been about the kind of day it was. As I ran as fast as I could in the water toward the steps, Kenneth the Brave moved cautiously toward the thing and then rushed to get a net.
“It’s a baby bunny!” he whisper-shouted in my direction. Normal people were still asleep. I watched with a hand over my mouth.
Trying hard to evade the net, the bunny began to lose strength. It started to sink and for a moment became still enough to be scooped into the air and deposited onto the cool grass. We stood watching for a long time.
“We can’t leave it here,” I said. We’d seen bobcats, coyotes, javelinas, owls, and rattlesnakes inside the fence.
Ken wrapped the little desert cottontail into a towel and held it close as we walked back home. Its body was rigid. It hardly moved.
I found a box in the garage and carried it upstairs with our new charge. I set the box on the floor and looked closely at the ratlike snout. I pulled the blanket back to reveal his giant ears. Suddenly, he was cute.
Even in the warm towel, the bunny’s body remained stiff from the cold swim and in shock from the brush with death. We didn’t know if he would make it. His eyes were sleepy. Once in a while his nose would twitch.
I talked to him and nudged him gently when he started to close his eyes. His heart was beating fast. We decided to let him rest and went into the kitchen to have some breakfast.
We’d been talking at the table for over an hour when Ken saw something dash past the doorway. “He’s up!”
For the next six hours we watched the bunny explore the cool, carpeted world into which he’d been teleported. He went into every room in the house. I followed close behind, coaxing him out and gently closing each door behind him. He loved being under any piece of furniture, but being under the couch was best. After a while it started to seem normal that there was a rabbit under the sofa and we tried to go about our day.
I couldn’t focus. I worried. What if he gets lost? Or stuck? What if he hurts himself? What if we can’t get him out? What if he hides and we can’t find him? He was so utterly quiet.
I got to work in the kitchen washing lettuce and slicing strawberries.
I set a shallow lid with some water and some treats in the middle of the living room to see if he would eat. As I set up a makeshift barrier to keep him out of the kitchen, the little guy found the courage to come out from hiding and try some of the strange new food. He slurped an entire lettuce leaf like a noodle and looked wistfully out the glass door.
I opened the door a little bit to see if he wanted to be outside. To keep him from falling off the second-floor balcony, my son lodged a brick in the opening to the storm drain. It was almost 100 degrees outside by that time, but we didn’t mind leaving the door open to see what he would do. He was like a puppy that couldn’t decide if it wanted in or out. Eventually, inside won. That’s my bun.
We knew we couldn’t keep him, but he was so small. How could we turn him out into the world just for some snake to pounce? I worried that if we kept him much longer, he might get used to being served strawberries and cold lettuce and forget how to forage. I knew the longer we kept him in unnatural surroundings the more difficult it would be for him to return to his natural home.
It took 45 minutes to capture him. He was stealthy and quick. My son named him James. Bun….James Bun. We moved the sofa out from the wall and with some cleverly placed pieces of cardboard he had no choice but to run out onto the balcony. We thought we had him, but he could not be caught. He was fast. I came up with a plan. I set the box on end just inside the door so that if he ran in, he would run right into it. I opened the door just enough and it worked. We walked with him slowly down the path toward his home saying our goodbyes.
We knew that James was ready to go back to his family, but it was difficult to let him go.
At sunset we took him back to the patch of rosemary, sage, and brittlebush where we’d seen a few cottontails days before, hoping he had learned his lesson about going near the water. He heard the sound of the waterfall and froze. Then, he scampered under a rosemary bush.
We returned to the house to find our life turned upside down–the sofa pulled out from the wall, cardboard barriers at every doorway, the towel, lettuce and strawberries strewn across the living room floor. I went for the vacuum.
We visit the briar patch every day with an apple or a bit of lettuce. We’ve seen James several time since.
The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, by Kay Ryan (Grove Press) won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011.
Kelly Houle Gallery of Original Fine Art
After 24 years in Tucson, I took one look at these photos and sketches and recognized Arizona. And I loved hearing the story of James' brush with danger.
This post is what made me subscribe. It's terrific and I hope more like it will follow.