My Father Tried to Preserve Nature—And the Best of Him—In His Writing

When you drive to Cape Cod, you can feel the landscape shifting. The trees get smaller, scrubbier, piney; the dirt loosens into sand. The air has a different weight, heavy with salt. Everything seems to be descending to sea level.

Cape Cod is a sandy arm flexed in the Atlantic Ocean. It is famous for its lovely beaches, of course, but it is uniquely water saturated in other ways. It is dotted with ponds—deep, chilled pocks left behind by glaciers and filled with fresh water—and spongy, flower-dotted freshwater wetlands. Its coasts are lined with brackish estuaries and salt marshes. The famous Cape Cod signifiers—the Kennedys, summer homes and summer people, old East Coast money—are unfamiliar to me. This place where I grew up felt more wild and mucky than slick and touristed. The smell of low tide makes me think of the sand bubbling where clams are nestled just below. That wildness is what my father loved about his home. His deep desire to protect its ecosystems never left him, even after his ability to protect himself or anyone else had long passed.

My father was a self-taught wetlands scientist. Much of his work involved finding and delineating wetlands and the endangered species that live there. The back of his truck was filled with stakes and flags, surveying equipment. He’d disappear into the woods and come out, scratched and mosquito bitten, having drawn lines that would dictate where the backhoes could go and where they couldn’t. Cape Cod has some of the strictest development laws in the country, including wetlands protections; each proposed construction project requires a push-pull between the conservation bylaws and the developers’ desires. Someone has to go out onto the land in question and find out exactly what is there that needs protecting before that push-pull can proceed. Some of the high points of my father’s career were instances when he could stop the bulldozers altogether. We’d drive past a pond or a bog and say, “Daddy saved that.”

In 1989, my father wrote a book with his friend and fellow conservationist Jeff Wallner. It is called Cape Cod Wildflowers: A Vanishing Heritage. It was reissued in 2003 by the University Press of New England. Mine is inscribed, “To my wonderful daughter, all my love—Daddy.” And then it is signed with his full name, in his slanting, left-handed script: Mario J. DiGregorio. He has been dead for nearly six years, and I am only now reading his book for the first time.

I am sure I flipped through the book as a child—I was nine when it was first released—but I avoided it as an adult, though I was careful to carry it with me through moves across the country and back again. I didn’t want to read him because I didn’t want to believe him. Reading someone’s writing is a kind of trust: You’re letting them tell you a story. My father lied to me about so much for so long that I resented the very fact of the book, such an obviously beautiful work of nonfiction from a fabulist.

I had believed my father on the mornings after my mother and I fled to a motel in the middle of the night, and I had believed him when he simply disappeared and came back with glib excuses, and I had believed him when he said I didn’t see what I saw. In our town, people seemed to think he was a great guy—charming, smart. I had a kind of double vision: He was a great guy but he was also someone to run from in the dark? For me, his mercurial moods, his rages, his disappearances were frightening, but he never physically harmed me. I also sensed something else beneath the surface, perhaps a threat that my mother carefully obscured from me. I must be wrong, I thought. Someone must be wrong. When I went to college, I started to see more clearly. In my early twenties, I had a terrible therapist who said, “How can you tell an alcoholic is lying? His mouth is moving.” It hurt me to hear her say it, but even worse, I found it useful. Not believing him anymore was a cauterization, a suffocation of something soft. I had to do it.

I came to think of my father’s book as nothing more than a manifestation of his grandiose thinking, his stories about himself—the second coming of Thoreau, a renaissance man. When I started writing as a career, he used to say, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, kid!” which I thought was such a profound misreading of the situation that it was almost funny. If I was an apple, I was rolling away as fast as I could.

But he’s been gone for so long now. There’s nothing for me to escape anymore. So I can more safely approach the dad who played marbles and softball with me, who read to me and made me fried fish when my mom worked late, and who bartered with the lobstermen and pretended to be a seal because it made me laugh. Who told me to mark the first day of school by the flowering of the purple asters. The dad who spent his life protecting endangered species. I opened the book to try to believe him again.

My father walked with his eyes on the ground, tromping into dark thickets and wading up to his knees in murky water in an outdoorsy, high-stakes game of Where’s Waldo. He wrote of his work this way, with his typical flair for self-mythology:

“Imagine yourself slogging through an impenetrable marsh, sometimes falling to your knees in tepid water or clinging muck. Machete in hand, you hack your way through tall reeds, tangled vines, thorny brush, all rising over your head and blocking out the burning sun. Suddenly you stop and there before your eyes is a bower of gigantic hibiscus flowers, each blossom big as your outstretched hand, some with pink petals, others white with cherry red centers, all with yellow central columns that stick out at you like the tongue of so many snakes.”

I can more safely approach the dad who played marbles and softball with me . . . the dad who spent his life protecting endangered species.

Reading this, he emerges in my memory like a Masshole Indiana Jones whose holy grail is some obscure endangered flower. A Vanishing Heritage focuses on individual plants, giving a full page or two of text and a color photo to each one, and is organized by habitat: woodlands, ponds and bogs, sandplains, salt marsh, dunes and beaches. The last chapter is dedicated to rare and threatened wildflowers. Flipping the pages is a torrent of extravagantly delicate things: bog candles, Plymouth gentian, painted trillium, and pink lady’s slippers, which are almost embarrassingly biological-looking—fuschia-veined pouches that dangle from their stems. Of these orchids, my father and Wallner wrote, “They remind us of tropical jungles where bizarre plants climb over each other in competition for light and nutrients.”

The whole book is an expression of delight, of intense love for a particular place and its particular flora, and an urgent warning of the vulnerability of these irreplaceable living things. My father wrote a preface to the new edition in 2003, published fourteen years after the first. In part, it reads:

“Every new development, from a commercial strip mall to a fifty-lot residential subdivision, brings with it short-term consumptive ‘progress.’ . . . Every road improvement brings with it something I call ‘The Green Death.’ This emerald-shaded slurry is technically known as hydro seeding. Hydro seeding involves a green-dyed mush spread over newly installed water and gas lines. The result is a mix of alien and naturalized grasses and ‘meadow in a can’ frauds. Its victims include the yellow thistle. This inconspicuous and overlooked roadside beauty once grew for many years in our neighborhood. After a recent road widening and repaving job, these curious sandplain flowers have vanished beneath the green slime. Who will notice their demise?”

Who will notice their demise? Who will notice what beauty is poisoned, is vanishing?

He wrote this two years after my mother’s death from cancer, which sharply steepened the dive he was already in. After countless arrests for drunk driving and a few for violence, like when he threatened his girlfriend with a baseball bat and bashed up her car. After innumerable rehab stints, psych wards, hallucinations, detoxes and retoxes. After the pain from his Crohn’s disease worsened and his reliance on pain pills deepened. It was after I, his only child, moved as far away as I could get in an attempt to escape the sucking gravity of his self-annihilation. It was just before he acquired hepatitis C and moved to a small apartment where he seemed intent on eating himself alive: dying very slowly from end-stage alcoholism in a cloud of yellow smoke from his clove cigarettes.

And yet here he was, presenting an impassioned and lucid defense of the wildflowers of Cape Cod.

My father’s ability to draw lines, to delineate in order to protect the vulnerable, did not extend to people. It is still irreconcilable to me, dizzying in fact, how the bifurcation happened: How he could have marshaled the best of himself for the lady’s slippers but not for himself, and not for me. Maybe he didn’t think of me as someone in need of protection. My aunt, one of his sisters, often spoke of him as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That’s one way to understand it, but I think that the most frightening thing, the most destabilizing, irreconcilable thing, was that actually he was one person.

It was all true. It can all be true, as they say. But how do you actually live with that?

When my father finally sat down to die in 2016, it was on the nubby gray couch where he read and watched TV and slept. I am sure the Red Sox were on; that night they lost to the Detroit Tigers at Fenway. From where he sat, he could see a photo of my daughter, his granddaughter, whom he had met once, and an encouraging card sent from his sister who had recently stopped talking to him after he attacked her when he was drunk, grabbing her by her hair and throwing her to the ground. She had written to say she forgave him.

His physical therapist found him sitting there the next day, and the police called me. The police often called me about him in those days, so it took a while for me to understand what they were getting at this time. The sound I made when I realized was a wail coming from somewhere else, far away. When I got to his apartment after driving from Brooklyn, I could still see the indent in the couch cushion.

By that time, it had been a year since I saw him. The summer before, one of my best childhood friends was getting married in her parents’ backyard, and so my husband and I packed up our seven-month-old and her staggering array of accouterments and drove to Falmouth. We stopped to have lunch with my dad. He had covered a picnic table with a paper tablecloth and set out lobster rolls, stuffed quahogs, and chowder, because he knew I loved those things. He had gotten a stuffed white beluga whale for my daughter. As always, laying eyes on him made me flinch, like getting doused in ice water. Gaunt and stooped, his eyes sunken, scabbed sores on his arms. Still, addiction hadn’t entirely taken away his good looks—a full head of dark hair, a hawkish and distinguished nose. Still looking at the ground, noticing what grew there.

He had recently ended up in the ICU for the umpteenth time and a physician had called to ask me if he would have wanted a DNR—a do not resuscitate, do not save. I didn’t know. So that afternoon, I asked him. “Don’t be ridiculous, kid!” he said. “I’m getting healthy now. I feel great.” It was what he always said.

It was all true. It can all be true, as they say. But how do you actually live with that?

Before we left, he and I sat together on his couch and I held my daughter and her new whale in my lap. My husband stood in front of us and took some pictures on his phone. The late-afternoon sun was streaming in the screen door and NPR was playing Bach on the radio. My father was sitting in the spot where he would die a year later. This is the last time, I thought. This is the last time I’ll see him. Then again, I almost always thought that.

One of the only things I know about my father’s childhood is that he was always running off into the woods, into a swamp. He was happiest there, so much so that his friends called him Newt. I wonder what the protection of the forest meant to him then. What did he find in the mud squelch and the damp pine needle carpet and the cool slip of a frog and the unexpected shock of color?

He wrote because he wanted other people to see what he saw there: the tragedy of the yellow thistle smothered under the Green Death; the epic journey that ends in the discovery of the crimson beast of a hibiscus. These true stories. Is there anything more fantastical, more wondrous, more devastating, more worth protecting than this, our real world?

Now, I find myself looking down, like he did, examining roadsides, thinking about what my father would have seen: a tiny yellow flower, the cottony puff of a thistle of some sort. I could open his book—a vanishing heritage—where the best of him is preserved, and try to identify some gorgeous, tenacious thing. It’s so hard to love something and to have to watch it disappear. Plants, people, the coast itself. I try to find the part of my father that he preserved, in the pine barrens, the bogs and marshes.

Choose to see what survives, I tell myself. Draw lines around what is beautiful, and fight for it.

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