Golf course on the left, wilderness on the right - it looks like a quiet sort of place, hardly emblematic of tension, conflict and controversy. Yet there is hardly a better symbol of man’s conquest of nature than the golf course. Nature, “red in tooth and claw” finds itself bitten and unable to respond.

Here in Forest Park, America’s largest urban park, the struggle between enjoying nature as it really is and modifying it to suit man’s vision of the ideal (think garden, athletic field, museum, parking lot, superhighway, etc.) has been at the forefront since the park’s inception over 130 years ago (there was, for instance, a lot of people opposed to cutting down so many trees for the 1904 World’s Fair).

I wandered the west side of the park today, and looked at the “rooms” I found there. A small group of pine trees that deposited a comfortable carpet of needles and made walls and roof of their boughs. A meadow of grasses that reached to my shoulders, dotted by trees that towered into the sky. A forest, dark and thick, populated by wild things whose furtive movements only hinted to me of their existence. And the Golf Course: the brainchild of man, a garden dedicated to sport, highly tamed, trimmed and cultivated, yet retaining a few wild spots here and there as decoration. There the most sophisticated and dangerous of all the creatures roams, sometimes in secret (I found a nest littered with beer cans) and sometimes boldly, in motorized carts.

I looked and listened for birds as I roamed, but today they were silent and invisible. Likewise the mammals, reptiles and insects that are so common in the park at other times of year are still hanging back, laying low in their private places, waiting for warmer weather.

So there I was, looking all around, seeking shape and contrast, color and pattern, hoping to find newness in the familiar.