The sludge is cold, 41 degrees if I had to guess, and it is currently migrating through a hairline fracture in my left boot that I have ignored for 11 weeks. I am crouching in a concrete culvert beneath Interstate 91, waiting for a ghost. In my hand, a thermal monocular vibrates with the pulse of my own shivering. Above, the rhythmic thrum of semi-trucks passing at 61 miles per hour creates a localized earthquake every 21 seconds. This is the office. This is where the maps of human progress meet the messy, desperate transit of the wild. I am Ahmed M.K., a wildlife corridor planner, and I have spent the last 31 hours questioning if I am actually a prison architect.

The Leaking Edge: Embracing Imperfection

The structural rigidity of our thinking is the problem. We build for permanence and clarity. Even when we look at the literal foundations of our built environment, we seek perfection. When we restore old urban structures, we look for the expertise of Repointing company Hastings because they understand how to make a wall stand for another 101 years through proper brickwork and repointing. That is essential for a human home. We need our walls to be solid, our mortar to be tight, and our lines to be straight. But a wildlife corridor shouldn’t be a piece of masonry. It should be a leak. It should be a porous, failing, messy edge where the human and the wild bleed into one another until neither is quite sure where the boundary lies.

I think back to the 41 jars of spices in my kitchen. They are contained. They are safe. They are sterile. If I dropped a jar of Cloves, the mess would bother me for 11 minutes until I vacuumed it up. But the ‘mess’ is where the ecology happens. In my work, I have started advocating for ‘shaggy’ corridors. I want downed logs, stagnant pools, and invasive brambles inside my tunnels. I want the light to be patchy. I want the floor to be uneven. My colleagues think I have lost my mind. They want to see 501 data points showing a clear path of travel. I want to see a bobcat stop in the middle of a tunnel and hide for 31 minutes because it feels like it has a choice. If there is no place to hide, it isn’t a corridor; it’s a pipe.

“We are so afraid of the ‘fragment’ because we equate it with brokenness. But sometimes, isolation is a form of protection.”

We are so afraid of the ‘fragment’ because we equate it with brokenness. But sometimes, isolation is a form of protection. There are 21 small populations of amphibians in this county that have survived specifically because they are cut off from the diseased populations on the other side of the ridge. By ‘connecting’ them, I might be the one who delivers the pathogen. I might be the one who facilitates the invasion. This is a difficult admission for a man whose entire career is built on the word ‘Linkage.’ I have to admit that I don’t know the full outcome of every connection I forge. I am a cartographer of the unknown, trying to draw lines for creatures that don’t recognize the concept of a line.

The Failure of the Straight Line: Grid vs. Presence

Last month, I visited a site where 111 saplings had been planted to ‘guide’ elk toward an overpass. They were planted in a grid. A perfect, 1-meter-by-1-meter grid. It looked like a graveyard. The elk, naturally, avoided it. They walked 41 miles out of their way to cross a dangerous two-lane blacktop instead. Why? Because nature doesn’t grow in grids. A grid is a signal of human presence, and to a wild animal, human presence is a signal of danger. My alphabetized spice rack is a signal of my presence. It is the sound of my obsessive-compulsive nature trying to drown out the fact that I cannot control the weather or the way the soil shifts under my house. We are trying to domesticate the wild by giving it ‘permitted’ routes of travel, but the wild is not a commuter. It is a presence that exists in the margins.

I remember a specific mistake I made early in my career, about 11 years ago. I was working on a project in the high desert, and we had $171,001 to spend on a series of desert tortoise fences. I designed them to be perfectly straight, thinking that efficiency was the same as efficacy. I didn’t account for the way the wind would pile sand against the mesh, creating ramps that the tortoises-bless their stubborn hearts-would climb to fall onto the highway. If I had built the fence with a bit of a curve, with a bit of ‘give,’ the sand would have dispersed. But I wanted order. I wanted the line on the map to match the line on the ground. I spent 81 days watching those tortoises fall, and it changed me. It taught me that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, but it is also the fastest way to a disaster.

Now, as I sit in this culvert, I am looking at a spider web in the corner. It is not symmetrical. It is anchored to 11 different points on the concrete wall, stretching and sagging where the dampness has weighted the silk. It is a perfect corridor. It allows for movement, but it also provides cover and a means of sustenance. It is adaptive. If a truck vibration breaks 1 strand, the web still functions. If I break 1 strand of my ‘perfectly designed’ corridor-say, by allowing a single developer to build a gas station at the exit-the entire system collapses. We build fragile systems because we are obsessed with the appearance of order.

Maybe the relevance of this goes beyond the woods. We design our lives the same way. We want a ‘career path’ that looks like a 101-page business plan. We want our relationships to follow a predictable trajectory from point A to point B. We alphabetize our expectations. But the most important moments of my life didn’t happen in the corridor. They happened when I got lost in the fragmentation. They happened in the 11 months I spent unemployed after that desert project, when I had to figure out who I was without a title. They happened in the messy edges where I wasn’t ‘connecting’ to anything, but I was finally present in the space I occupied.

The thermal monocular finally catches a heat signature. It is not the bobcat. It is an owl, perched on a rusted rebar spike that I forgot to report for removal. The owl doesn’t care about the rebar. It doesn’t care about the concrete. It is using the human failure as a hunting platform. It is 3:01 AM, and the world is moving. I realize then that my job isn’t to build the perfect bridge. My job is to provide the materials and then get out of the way. I need to stop being the architect and start being the gardener. I need to accept that I will never see the whole picture, and that is okay. The bobcat will come, or it won’t. The spices will stay in their jars, or they will spill. The mortar of our lives will crack, and something green will grow in the gap.

I stand up, my knees popping with a sound that feels as loud as a gunshot in the confined space. I have 11 miles to drive before I can sleep. I leave the culvert as it is: damp, dark, and slightly broken. As I climb the embankment, I look back at the interstate. It is a scar of perfect geometry across the rolling hills. It is efficient. It is fast. It is 101 percent human. But down there, in the mud, the wild is waiting for me to make another mistake so it can finally find a way through.