I drifted in my kayak, listening for small sloshes and hushed voices behind me: the sounds of my college students launching their boats in the dark. The night was intensely quiet and dark, like a campsite after the fire goes cold, but the moon was preparing to rise over the mountains in the east, and the lake showed a slick of silver.
I began to see the boats on the lake, scattered shadows floating: two kayaks, a canoe, a raft, a dory. One after another they turned east, stirring silver rings in dark water, until each boat pointed to the cleft in the mountains where the moon would emerge. In time, the top of the moon bulged between the black peaks, swelling upward. Then the whole creamy white orb lifted away from the mountains and floated free. When I looked behind me, the lake was dotted with uplifted, moonlit faces.
They were still for a very long time, the young people in their little drifting boats. Finally I heard oars splash, and the dory moved slowly up the bright pathway toward the moon and disappeared into the mountains’ shadow. Then they rowed back again into the moonlight. They rested a moment in the glow of the moon; then back they went into shadow. At first I didn’t understand what they were doing. Eventually it dawned on me: Each time they went into the darkness, the moon appeared for them to drop back behind the mountains. And when they returned to the light, the moon rose — setting and rising, setting and rising, this great enlightenment, over and over again.
As the moon sailed higher in the sky and the night grew colder, the boats came in one by one, oars thumping damply, voices whispering good night. Allen would spend the night in a canoe, floating on that skim of moonlight. Jenna would spread a sleeping bag in the meadow. Walking back to my tent, I passed Alicia wrapped in a blanket, ankle-deep in shallow water, looking at the stars. My God, that water must be cold, I thought. By morning there would be frost.
It was a long time before the dory came to shore. I lay in my tent and listened to voices murmuring on the lake. “So what is nature?” one voice asked. “And where is it?” the other replied. I smiled.
This was Philosophy 438, Philosophy of Nature. Every year in September, before the semester begins at Oregon State University, I bring this class to the mountains for a week. The students come from all majors: marine biology, political science, geography, forestry, a very few from philosophy. We camp on a little lake in a forest of subalpine fir and white pine, just under the broken talus slopes of a jagged mountain.
The morning after our excursion on the lake, we all sat in sunlight that made us squint, reading Henry David Thoreau. In the meadow where we had convened, frost glittered on each seed head and blade of grass, and mist rose in ribbons from the lake.
A person “needs wildness the way a garden needs its load of muck,” Thoreau wrote, and none of us disagreed, there in the meadow with dragonflies clattering past and a great cloud of mayflies rising into the sunlight for one ecstatic day of flight. We tried to imagine what Thoreau’s metaphor meant exactly. What is muck? How and when is it best applied to a garden? If plants need muck in heaps at their roots, where they live and grow, what is the significance of this for those of us who live in cities, far from wildness?
Thoreau went on: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” But, the students noticed, he didn’t waste much time defining wildness. He talked instead about what the muck of wildness nourishes in people: energy, strength, courage, independence, alertness, a way of seeing that penetrates ordinary expectations, joyous gratitude that goes beyond mere gratefulness. If the natural world is to be preserved, he implied, it will be because of how wildness transforms us.
My students thought they knew pretty much what Thoreau meant, because for five days they had been gorging on wildness, swallowing it in great gulps, as if they were starved. Each of them had been transformed that week into the sort of person who canoes on a wilderness lake late at night, in the silence, in the presence of the moon. They knew that expansive feeling inside. They knew that gratitude. They knew that connection to the moonlit night, the joy that can’t be distinguished from love.
So here is what scared me: The next day, the students would come down from the mountain to the first day of classes on a state-university campus going through fraternity and sorority rush. The cars they’d left in empty parking lots would now be shoulder to shoulder with other vehicles, and the bookstore clerks would be harried and cross. Voice mails would spill invitations, and parties would thump long into the night. And when they called home to say they were safely out of the woods — yes, it was awesome, yes, yes — what would they be able to tell their parents about the experience, as the cellphone signal went in and out and somebody’s car alarm beeped and the line for registration pushed out the door?
The question I now asked my students was: Could we bring the values of wild places with us when we drove back down the mountain? Could we hold on to them in our neighborhoods? This was not an idle question. What if it’s true that we need wildness the way a garden needs muck, that the preservation of the natural world depends on wildness? Most people don’t, can’t live in the wild anymore. What, then, will nourish and preserve us?
William James noted that war, for all its hideous effects, sometimes brings out characteristics that we value: it can make people brave and selfless and gather them together to serve a common purpose. He searched for something that would bring out these characteristics without the necessity of bloodshed: the “moral equivalent of war,” he called it. Wildness, too, changes us in ways we value. We return from the wild “restored,” by which we mean filled with new stores that will nourish us, new sources of strength and peace, or maybe with new stories of who we are in relation to each other and to the moon. What we need in the cities is the “moral equivalent” of wildness. But what would that be?
When the discussion ended, the students wandered off in small groups to try to answer my question. Carrying notebooks and steaming cups of tea, they hiked down the trail past green moss heaped in a black-bottomed spring. I watched them talk among themselves, their heads bent together. Between their leaning bodies, light glittered on the lake.
No sooner had the students left than I started to wonder whether I’d given them the right question to ponder. I’d been presupposing that wildness is something we find in the mountains and not in the valley, something we might transport from wilderness to town. But maybe I was wrong. Isn’t there night in the city? Doesn’t the moon rise over the sororities as surely as it does over the howling hills? Doesn’t mist lift from the broad lawns and catch on the eaves of the library, and doesn’t that damp air smell of the river and the sea? And when the students are sleeping in various combinations in pizza-box-strewn apartments, isn’t the moon still there, in the dark outside the window?
Maybe wildness isn’t something we need to bring down from the mountain. It’s true that legally designated “wilderness areas” are distant from our daily lives. Cartographers can draw lines around this wilderness. But there are no real boundaries to wildness. In the warm afternoon, carbon dioxide from the cities creeps up the valleys and lifts into the clouds. In the cool night, the air drifts down again, the smell of pines lingering between the Chevron and the 7-Eleven, whispering through the valves of our hearts. We are wildness: soil, water, oxygen, sunlight. Wildness is all there is.
Maybe I should have asked not how we can bring wildness into our lives, but how we can remember to notice the wildness in every sweating pore, every stewed carrot, every solid step; in the morning air noisy with rain; in the reeling stars. Or maybe this is the question: How can we live always as we do in the wilderness, with that same respect and care for what is beautiful and beyond us?
After dinner the campfire pulled us all in. Flashlights moved randomly around in the dark like fireflies as students gathered up their books or retrieved an extra sweater from the tent. In the firelight a pair of hands flicked chords from a guitar. One student taught another how to put out a flaming marshmallow without slinging it across the fire ring into someone else’s chest: the first lesson of the evening.
To be honest, I’d been doing very little of the teaching on that trip. One afternoon the engineering major had taught us why waves curl around a rock. The geography major tried to teach the botany major how to read a map. The forestry student helped us recognize firs by the silver stripes under the leaves. For reasons I still don’t understand, the philosophy major wanted to teach everyone the words to a Barry Manilow song that started, “Her name was Lola.” It’s important, I think, that students do most of the teaching.
The conversation turned to the questions the students had been thinking about in their groups that afternoon: What do we value in the experience of the wild? What is this nourishing muck Thoreau talks about? Can we find an equivalent in our nearby lives?
“Some of it is silence,” said Stephen, a tall English major. “Wildness is a kind of silence, and silence is wild. You can bring silence down from the mountain, or you can find it in yourself — either way. The importance of silence is that it allows you to hear.”
As I understood him, the wildness value that Stephen spoke of was a kind of awareness, an intense listening, a way of really feeling your connection to the great out-there.
Stephen leaned toward the fire. “We’re going back into a noisy place, and it isn’t going to be easy to find silence, so we should practice,” he said. “Our group has decided to ask everyone not to speak for a half-hour. Starting now. You’ll know when the time is up.”
The students were startled; silence is not their forte. But they were game. Some wandered away from the campfire and made their way to the edge of the water. Others linked arms and leaned their heads on each other’s shoulders. I sat at the base of a pine in the dark and watched the firelight play on the students’ faces. A breeze pushed through the pines, reached into the fire pit, and lifted a spray of sparks toward the stars.
At first I wanted the time to pass quickly: we had material to cover. Then I wanted it to last forever: maybe this silence was our most important material. Finally, from the lake came a lamentation, like the sound the mountains might make if they found a way to express the experience of a million years. It was Thom, who’d packed bagpipes among his essentials, marking the end of the silence. The students reassembled by the fire, still silent. “Time’s up,” Stephen said. “You can talk now.” But for the longest time, nobody did.
“This is a story my father gave me,” Carrie said from the darkness beyond the fire’s circle of light. “His grandfather gave it to him. Now I am giving it to you: A long time ago, the people were asleep in their village when they heard a great crashing in the forest. The warriors leapt to their feet, and the children hid in their beds. Everyone was frightened by the sound: a strong wind, the cracking of branches, thunderous thumping. In the morning the men of the village went out to see what had happened. They found a long trail of broken branches and upended soil. All the cottonwoods had left the forest and marched to the edge of the river. That’s where the men found the trees in the morning. And no one knows why.”
The students stirred in their lawn chairs. The fire popped and released a stream of sparks.
“So,” Carrie said, “what’s the most important part of this story?”
I didn’t know. I was afraid to guess. A botany student began to explain the relation of water to plants on the “riparian edge,” but his words soon trailed off.
“The most important part is the last sentence: that no one knows why the trees went to the river. It’s a mystery.” Carrie paused. “Is mystery a good thing, or a bad thing?” she asked.
Silence.
“I believe mystery is a good thing,” Carrie went on. “The great mystery isn’t an enemy to fight or a hole to fill. It’s a source of strength and comfort. The existence of so much that we don’t understand is a gift to us. That great mystery is what wildness is, and wildness is a great mystery.”
More silence, but now it was getting edgy. The wind chilled my back, and I pulled my hood over my head. Someone threw another alder log on the fire, sending up a cloud of smoke, and people moved their chairs back a step.
“It’s fine to talk about silence and mystery.” This was Katherine. “But the fact is that what we value about being in the wild is finally experiencing a place that is beautiful and healthy and not all screwed up: a lake that isn’t polluted, and a mountain that isn’t clear-cut, and stars we can actually see, and birds that aren’t full of tumors, and a river that’s not crammed with old tires and shopping carts. So, OK, in one sense, wildness can be found in silence or mystery. But that’s not what people mean when they talk about wildness; they mean a place that isn’t trampled half to death. And it’s not just about beauty. When you destroy your place, you destroy your health, and your hopes.”
Despair in students terrifies me. I never know how to respond to it. “What does this tell us about our responsibilities?” I asked. I was floundering, but I couldn’t leave my students in such a bitter place. “If Katherine is right, and what we value about the experience of the wild is the chance to live for a time in a healthy, clean, bird-filled place, then what do we have to do when we come down from the mountain?”
The question hung for a long time in the firelight. But this was OK with me: at least there was the chance for an answer. Maybe moral resolve is the highest value of wildness, the awareness that the wholeness of the natural world requires a moral integrity as well.
I knew that when we drove down the mountain the next day, we would pass a set of dams that control the Willamette River. My students understood the effect the dams had on the river, even a hundred miles downstream. We’d begun this class on a barren river island that had once been home to a small forest, before the dams held back the sediment that continually replenished the soil. They understood the connection between the near and the faraway.
Between the wilderness and the town, we would drive through a number of different ecological and political landscapes — from the primeval forests, to clear-cuts and tree farms as patchy and tufted as a dog’s back after a child has taken electric clippers to it, on through the laser-leveled agricultural fields, and finally the neighborhoods. On the same journey we would pass through a set of equally distinct moral landscapes. We would begin in patches of wilderness ethic, where people feel a strong obligation to do no harm and treat the land with respect. We would end our journey among hedge-bordered homeplaces, where people care for the land as if it were a child, tending to its needs, making it beautiful and healthy. But in between we would drive through a wide, bewildering swath of moral no man’s land, where the earth is a commodity and people are careless or disdainful of it and use it for their own short-term self-interest. Thinking about the trip ahead of us, I wondered: what sense does it make to live by different moral codes in different places, in a world so ecologically connected?
The campfire discussion went on late into the night — the soft voices, the rising sparks, the stars tangled in the pines like Christmas lights. Near the end, there was a prolonged and thoughtful silence. Finally Marissa, a philosophy major from New Jersey, stood up, and so did the rest of us, until we all stood in a circle around the fire. “I want everybody to hum a note and hold it,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what note. Just start to hum, and don’t stop.”
And so we did, a group of young people and their professor, standing close to the fire, bundled in an odd assortment of coats and mittens, wearing hats we hadn’t taken off for a week. Everybody hummed their own note, and it was a crazy, discordant sound we made. But gradually the voices tuned themselves into a rich, beautiful, lingering chord. In the wild night, in the firelight, the students’ eyes were bright with tears.
“The Moral Equivalent of Wildness” is excerpted from The Pine Island Paradox, by Kathleen Dean Moore. © 2004 by Kathleen Dean Moore. It appears here by permission of Milkweed Editions.
