Justine Parsons

I KNOW A FEW PEOPLE the floor space of whose houses is about one-third closet, technically speaking. Often the closet area is an entire room of its own, perhaps a former pantry or sewing room convenient to a back or side door. This space may be called, a bit shamefacedly, the "mud room," perhaps to explain why a portion of it is devoted to sticks the dogs brought home. Usually I find this room more congenial and affecting than any other in the house. I have a weakness for the ambiguous, the neither-nor; this room is not outside, of course, but neither does it succeed as the kind of indoor space in which most people would actually want to be. Years ago I sometimes had fun in rooms like these, sitting on stacks of firewood and drinking shots of whiskey with friends. The comfort a mud room offers, however, is hard to appreciate sober. Such a room is meant for passing through, not staying in. In the war between indoors and outdoors, rooms like this provide the buffer zone.

Houses that don't have catchall closets or rooms in which the inhabitants can dump outdoor stuff always seem sinister to me. You see these houses more and more in movies nowadays, usually with Michael Douglas living in them, plotting hard-to-follow financial crimes. When I reflect that most of the kids I know would be happy to live forever in these houses watching TV and playing video games and fooling on the computer, I fear for the world outside. Sure, the kids hear about the environment every other day in school, and they know polluters are bad, and their fruit-scented shampoo has pictures of endangered species printed on the bottle. But if the Everglades, say, disappeared under a giant parking lot tomorrow, are these kids really going to care?

Well, the Everglades themselves probably wouldn't care either. They can afford to overlook such details, extending as they do so far beyond us in time. It's a fact that while we can destroy plenty of beautiful and irreplaceable parts of nature, we can't do much about its mess. Pave the unruly swamp, and it reappears as the brown water rising in your basement, the rare African virus borne by mosquitoes in the park. However we attack it, the outdoor world will always have the advantage of its messiness and its size. And no matter how high-tech and convenient and comfortable and wired our indoors becomes, the mess and the size out there will lure us, and we'll keep tracking our muddy, unplanned boot prints across the floor.   

Contributing editor Ian Frazier wrote about night-fishing in the October 2000 issue. His most recent book is On the Rez.