My first time on the mountain, it was August; relentless heat, bright sun beating down, no place to hide. I was surrounded by the frenzied growth of a meadow that had been left to its own devices for years: endless fields of yellow wildflowers taller than I was, bumble bees zigzagging past my head, butterflies fluttering about, and ticks climbing up my socks. I was bombarded with impressions, and with little context for interpreting or understanding what I was experiencing, it was all I could do to take it in.
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I hiked along a narrow path that was mowed only days before to allow space to walk, and within a few minutes I felt like I was submerged in a sea of plants, invisible. I stumbled on a vine stretched like a trip wire across the path and sidestepped coyote dung, a fancy maneuver that would eventually become second nature. I reached the highest spot on the mountain and turned in circles, every angle its own scenic vista. The Blue Ridge was laid out like slices of layer cake across the west and southwest horizon, the foothills of the Virginia Piedmont to the south and east.
I’ve hiked on countless trails in countless places, from teenage misadventures in woods where No Trespassing signs clearly should have been heeded, to moonlit rainforest, to jagged lava field, to the other end of the spectrum—timber-lined mulched trails where I could still hear the traffic on the interstate, and where a public restroom (sometimes clean) waited at the end. But this is different, hiking where I’m the only human I can reasonably expect to see simply because this is now “my” place. But I don’t think of it as mine as much as a place I’m now sharing with the creatures that were already here.
It’s the realm of the bee and the beetle, the raptor and the songbird, the snake—venomous and non—the frog and the coyote, the turtle, the tick, and the turkey. And it’s the realm of a thousand plants, both desirable and not (depending on your point of view), many of which grew here by chance, brought by these same animals and birds, or brought here because of choices made by humans who were here a long time before me, and who knew more and less than I do and had disparate goals. Those people undoubtedly believed they were making the right choices at the time, based on what they knew. Will future inhabitants look back at what I do here with dismay and incomprehension, with relief, or with indifference?
If I’m honest, I’ll say I’m most alive when I’m trying to fix something, trying to solve a problem.
I’d come here in part because I wanted to plant a meadow. I thought planting a meadow was a way to save native wildlife, which I’d wanted to do, and tried to do in small ways, my whole life. When I was a kid, on summer trips to Rehoboth Beach, I tried to rescue horseshoe crabs that washed up on the sand by transferring them to the bathtub in our hotel room, as if I could create a new home for them there. I’d failed at that, the same way I’d failed to save my pet praying mantis from being run over by a lawn mower. As an adult, I’d tried to save a fledgling robin from broiling on my suburban driveway during an unusual spring hot spell. I watched the bird all morning, knowing that I shouldn’t interfere, but when it keeled over in the heat, I laid it carefully in a shoebox and brought it to an animal shelter. It was dead before I arrived.
And then there were the frogs. More than a decade before I knew this mountain existed, I purchased a terrarium and tadpoles for my kids. We watched with anticipation as the tadpoles grew into tiny grass-green frogs. I went to the local pet store and brought home batches of live crickets to feed them. The crickets were not very smart: the moment I released them into the terrarium, they hopped from the fake lawn into the tiny pool of water and drowned. The frogs, for their part, would only eat live crickets. And, for some reason, the frogs didn’t hang out in the water as much as I’d expected. Maybe all those dead floating crickets? I kept adding crickets; the crickets kept drowning.
Even though I provided plenty of food, it wasn’t long before the frogs died, too. One at a time, over a period of weeks, I woke in the morning to discover their stiff little desiccated bodies. I never figured out exactly why they died. Was it the limited food supply? The dry air? Disease? Was it a loud household of people, vacuum cleaners, trombones and trumpets, leaf blowers outside the window, plus the inept person who didn’t know how to keep crickets from drowning? I could only guess. They were trapped in the terrarium, restricted to the nourishment and atmosphere I could provide. Whatever the cause, the frogs had gone extinct in their environment, and I’d played a role. Once they were gone, nothing came along and replaced them, because there was no nearby habitat from which other frogs could migrate to fill the gap. I wasn’t about to buy more tadpoles and risk killing them again; it was too heartbreaking for everyone.
Not long after, we came into some hermit crabs left by a friend who was moving away. One of my kids asked, if we don’t kill the hermit crabs, then can we get a dog?
Am I just terrible at saving creatures? Would I be any better at saving places?
Now it’s my turn to decide what will happen on this mountain. What’s at stake? Only a mountaintop. Only all the living things that call it home. What if I screw it up? Given my track record, there’s a strong likelihood that despite my best intentions, I’m going to screw it up.
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It seems like just yesterday I was reading Edward O. Wilson’s Diversity of Life to one of my kids as a bedtime story. (My son may have been the first preschooler to learn about the volcanic destruction of Krakatoa; I think he’s forgiven me.) And then, a few years ago, my kids were launched into the world of college and beyond. As a midlife empty nester, my time became more flexible, and I was determined to more actively pursue my longtime avocation, by rescuing a small corner of nature that needed help. I figured I knew more now and could do a lot better than dragging unsuspecting horseshoe crabs off the beach and pouring table salt into bathwater as a substitute for the ocean.
I’d recently read Isabella Tree’s book Wilding, about her years-long project of returning her thirty-five-hundred-acre farm in Sussex, England, to a more authentic wild state. It was the most exciting conservation project I’d heard of in years; I couldn’t get it out of my mind. How amazing, how rewarding that must be, to make a difference in a place that large—to rescue not only one creature or one plant, but whole communities of creatures and plants.
What if I could take a piece of land and restore it to a more natural condition? What if I could create a home for birds and other creatures that are losing more habitat every day? I’d researched it, and I thought I knew what it took to plant and maintain a meadow. What if I could do even a small fraction of what Isabella Tree had done? Wouldn’t that be something? One of the first things she did was plant a meadow. I could do that—I’d take two or three acres, four at the most, and create a native meadow with wildflowers to attract pollinating insects and local wildlife.
The more I learned, the better I could imagine the potential of this place, and the more I felt committed to repairing it.
The question was how, and where, would I come up with these acres? My longtime home in the Washington, D.C., suburbs had a standard-size lawn that was regularly trampled down to dirt by our standard-size poodle and her daily zoomies. My husband, B., had planted and landscaped wherever the trampling was less energetic, but there wasn’t room for much of a meadow.
As it happened, my desire to plant a meadow coincided with the escalation of our long-running search for retired farmland in the countryside, where we planned to spend the next phase of our lives. After years of being limited to sporadic country visits, we were more than ready for a big change. We wanted nature at its most, well, natural; an outdoor life, where B., an Eagle Scout (once an Eagle Scout, always an Eagle Scout), could go on hikes and unwind by a campfire, and where I could grow vegetables and continue to find new creatures to study—and now, I hoped, plant a meadow.
I pictured an old hayfield, a broken-down barn, an old farmhouse that needed fixing up. I pictured a writing studio in the middle of the meadow I was going to plant, where I’d watch flowers shift in the breeze while awaiting inspiration. But our quest so far had proved inconclusive. Like the Berenstain Bears’ search for their perfect picnic spot, from one of my favorite children’s stories, I thought we’d never find the right place. My dream meadow plan was destined to remain a dream.
And then one day, here we were, standing on top of a mountain. This was it, and like so many “perfect” places, it turned out to be nothing like what I’d pictured. It was, for sure, an old cow pasture that had not seen cows in years, an old hayfield that had gone to seed. But it was far more than that. (And far less—there was no old barn or old farmhouse for me to fix up; there were no buildings at all, broken down or otherwise.) This was more than a few acres. It was over two hundred acres on a mountain, more than a third of it rolling open meadows—the former cow pasture—some of it quite steep, surrounded by even steeper sloping forests that spilled down the hillsides. A place where hawks circled, voles tunneled, deer wandered, and bears and bobcats lurked, where trees and grasses were bent by wind, where the sky changed every moment; a landscape of preternatural beauty and drama—and a massive tangle of weeds.
Perfection was too much to expect, right? This hoped-for country paradise turned out to be full of what I would eventually learn were invasive plants. For me, it was still a paradise. If I’m honest, I’ll say I’m most alive when I’m trying to fix something, trying to solve a problem. (Why does that have to be true? Can’t I sit back and enjoy things as they are? Evidently not.)
The more I learned, the better I could imagine the potential of this place, and the more I felt committed to repairing it. And, the more I learned, the more I had to face that, in this job I’d volunteered myself for, total control was impossible and my definition of success would be, necessarily, elastic.
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From Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop by Paula Whyman. Copyright © 2025 by Paula Whyman. Published by Timber Press, Portland, OR. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
