An Ode to Bowdoin Street

There’s a wooden bench, on Bowdoin Street, where you can sit and talk to trees. There’s never a better time than the end of fall, when the leaves reach the beauteous warm hues I’ve come to love. With three hours of free time, I ate lunch and charted a course to Bowdoin to be immersed in nature for a while. I had planned to work on the outstanding assignments that were starting to scare me, but I couldn’t help but satisfy my inner explorer.

I walked. Walking and biking around campus are fundamentally different. Biking brings efficiency; it sends you from A to B with streamlined speed. Walking has its own charms though. You can look around the road you’re traveling on and appreciate it more. Around trees, you can stand under the treetops, you can run your fingers through the branches, you can nudge the fallen leaves with your shoes… Walking beside trees is its own refreshing journey. 

When someone tells you, You should see Bowdoin Street, you don’t know specifically where they’re directing you. But you know that you’ll know it when you see it. Directions only go so far, but our empathizing brains can reverse-engineer the awe in a person’s voice and know we’ve arrived when we feel the same resonating wonder. For me, Bowdoin Street is the little bench on the sidewalk past Pine Hill Road where you can sit across the red-leaved tree shaped like the cross-section of a mushroom.

How do we interact with trees? I ask myself. You can’t network with them, walk with them or pet them. We mostly interact with the afterlife of trees: the firewood in the fire pit when we cook s’mores at Lake Lag, the wooden tables on which we sit plates and superstitiously knock on, the colorful paper posters we tape around campus. But when a tree is simply its living self, how do we appreciate the tree for what it is?

I find joy in personifying them. I hold up the longest strands of my pink curtain bangs and hold them up to the bright red leaves. We both dye our hair, I tell the tree. The tree strikes a pose and I take a picture. Or two, or five. Then I sit across from the trunk and hold a staring contest. 

The trees of Bowdoin street are refreshing, spreading their love into the atmosphere in a photosynthetic harmony I join by breathing in. It’s beautiful. It makes me wonder where beauty comes from.

Maybe beauty is social. I watch the other photographers hold Nikon cameras that click and buzz. Maybe beauty is mathematical. Circling the trees, I find the best angle where the sunlight reflects the glowing redness of the leaves. Maybe beauty is mental. There’s a point among the flora when I forget that I have classes, club meetings, Hell Weeks. Life gets as simple as a girl, a bench and the scenery. Or maybe beauty is something transcendent. Maybe we can lose ourselves in the beauty of bigger things like nature yet not understand it completely.

And connecting with nature is beyond finding its beauty. For the most part, we live in a world of our own design. I work in an air-conditioned room, pondering the color schemes I picked for my bedsheets and listening to the playlists I curated myself. It’s a kind of authenticity, the kind where I give an unadulterated testament to the world from the nature of my soul, but I can’t dismiss a limiting familiarity. There’s another authenticity to savor in this world, an expression of an unadulterated nature with its own soul, a testament to the unlimiting unfamiliarity of things the world already gives. Nature is authentic, and it is inviting. It’s beyond beautiful.

Maybe you’re looking for a beautifully authentic nature, or maybe you’re chasing an authentically natural beauty. Maybe you want to take a break and breathe fresh air. Whatever the case, you can find what you’re searching for on Bowdoin Street, sitting on a little wooden bench, where the trees are waiting for you to wait just one second.

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