During aimless wanderings in the woods, while on the verge of becoming lost, I have often wondered what we mean by the word wilderness. Is it only so many square miles of uninhabited territory set aside by some government, or, as my dictionary would have me believe, a relatively large parcel of land left undeveloped? Neither of these definitions holds up very well under careful scrutiny. A place hardly becomes a wilderness just because some legislature has declared it so, and the mere absence of human activity in an area doesn’t mean that it’s completely free of human influence. We think of wilderness as a vast, pristine region set apart from humankind, but such places do not exist anymore; perhaps they never did. Humankind has exerted its influence everywhere on this planet in a process that began many thousands of years ago when the first inventive hominid harnessed fire. Nothing is pristine in the strictest sense of the word.
I’ve always been a bit suspicious of signs along trails announcing that I am now entering such and such a wilderness — as if the wilderness needed some sort of introduction. Granted, such boundaries often separate old-growth forests from their more developed environs, but I’ve traveled trails through such forests all day without being able to escape jabbering hikers for more than a few minutes at a time. On the other hand, I’ve visited places where human industry once thrived — places now abandoned and overgrown — and wandered there for days without hearing or seeing anyone. Although the untidy remnants of past inhabitants often scar such places, when you’re completely alone in deep forest those remnants hardly matter. The wild is alive and well in such places, perhaps more so than in designated wilderness areas.
Wilderness is one of those concepts, like truth or love, that are easy to talk about in general terms but not so easy to pin down. Nearly everyone harbors some vague notion of what constitutes wilderness, yet who can clearly state its telltale feature? Can we create a wilderness, or do we merely stumble upon it somehow? Does the presence of a single human being in a wilderness taint it? Can wilderness be managed if the very word wild implies something out of control? Is wilderness something worth protecting, or is it a hostile environment in dire need of domestication? All this depends upon how the term is defined. But defining wilderness is a tricky business, indeed, and fundamentally a philosophical endeavor — one intimately linked to how we define ourselves.
Few things are more difficult to describe than a wilderness experience. To someone who hasn’t encountered wilderness firsthand, such descriptions sound like only so much mumbo jumbo — similar to the ravings of self-proclaimed prophets who insist they’ve had mystical experiences. That’s because a wilderness experience, like a mystical one, is altogether subjective. It doesn’t translate well into words; it’s not just a product of the environment. Two people walking through the same forest can have two entirely different experiences. One may encounter the wild, while the other may not. A wilderness experience depends as much upon the walker’s frame of mind as upon the place itself. But what, precisely, is a “wilderness” frame of mind?
It would be foolish to expect a wilderness experience while standing in the middle of a city. It’s not solely a question of attitude — certain conditions must exist. But what are those conditions? I can speak only from my own experience. Large tracts of unspoiled land often do the trick, but I have also encountered the wild in the middle of a lake at night, atop mountains with cities in full view, and upon trout streams no more than a couple of hundred yards from a farmhouse. The wild is likely to crop up at any time, anywhere. All you have to do is get away from other people.
After reading Loren Eiseley, I’m convinced that the wild can be found in caves. Saint-Exupéry assures us that he’s found it in the blue sky overhead. The wild may well be as pervasive and insidious as weeds growing in an abandoned lot, or industrious little insects crawling across a kitchen floor. I have often seen the wild in the eyes of otherwise domesticated cats and dogs. More surprisingly, I’ve caught glimpses of it in my fellow humans — even in that face staring back at me in the bathroom mirror. At times the wild seems to be everywhere.
Environmentalists are afraid the wilderness is vanishing, and the fact that the wild is closer than we think, that it may even exist in our everyday life, does not diminish the legitimacy of their concern.
Undoubtedly, the last relatively pristine regions of the world are being systematically destroyed for short-term economic gain. “Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?” Aldo Leopold once asked. We are on the verge of learning the terrible answer to that question. Blank spots on maps keep us honest by giving us something to which we can compare ourselves, our industrialized culture. Without them, we are likely to forget what we are and where we stand in relation to the world.
Still, the essence of the wild may not be as tenuous or as distant as we think. It lurks in the ditches along highways, patiently awaiting the day when it can reclaim what rightfully belongs to it. Is it not presumptuous of us to think we can completely vanquish the wild, hold it back indefinitely, or even suppress it? After all, the wild reigned supreme on this planet long before we arrived on the scene. And it will probably reign supreme once again after we are gone.
Around five hundred years ago, when the first Europeans landed in America, the wilderness was something to be feared. The very word wilderness conjured up for them images of savages and terrible beasts, as well as a host of other mysterious, unchristian forces lurking in a dark, foreboding forest. Oddly enough, however, there have always been a few adventurers who haven’t hesitated to enter such places — to seek them out, in fact. And civilization, in whatever dubious form it takes, has always been right on their heels.
Humankind is not of one mind about wilderness. To some, it’s a dreadful place to be avoided; to others, it’s merely another business opportunity, a resource waiting to be tapped; to others still, it’s a powerful force tugging at irrational desires. The very thing that fills more-pragmatic, hearth-bound folk with dread makes others see dollar signs, and they, in turn, dangle the unknown in front of dreamers like a carrot, whipping them into an exploratory frenzy. Why are our reactions to wilderness so extreme? What is it about wilderness that incites such powerful feelings of dread and desire? What does wilderness promise? What does it threaten to take away?
It should come as no surprise that Henry David Thoreau claimed, “All good things are wild and free.” But it’s somewhat shocking to read later in the same essay: “In literature, it is only the wild that attracts us.” Surely, Thoreau can’t expect us to take him seriously on this count. What’s more civilized than literature? After all, we think of literature and the other arts as byproducts of civilization — the crown jewels of collective culture.
Yet there is a certain logical connection between this seemingly rash comment and his previous statement, that “all good things are wild and free.” By linking creativity to freedom, Thoreau remains faithful to the most fundamental tenet of his worldview: it is the individual who thinks, not society; the individual who creates, not society. As Eiseley pointed out in his essay “The Mind as Nature”: “Sometimes the rare and beautiful can only emerge or survive in isolation. In similar manner, some degree of withdrawal serves to nurture man’s creative powers.” Eiseley’s insight gives every artist, every freethinker just cause to conclude the worst: in a culture as antagonistic toward the wild as our highly consumptive, industrialized one, how much room is there for true art or creative thought?
In a strictly religious context, the word wilderness conjures up images of long, solitary tribulations, of prophets and madmen, of wanderers on vision quests. Laotzu, the father of Taoism, imparted his wisdom to a border guard, then wandered across the Chinese frontier, never to be seen again. The great shamans of Native American tribes encouraged their young braves to travel the full circuit of the medicine wheel, through unknown parts, in order to find their place in the world. Jesus went into a desert wilderness for forty days before he began his ministry. “What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote,” says Edward Abbey, and anyone who has ever been tempted into a wilderness has a pretty good idea what he’s talking about. The wilderness experience is so like the mystical one that they might as well be considered identical. In both cases, the wanderer establishes a certain intimacy with something ineffable; in both cases, all matters are eventually reduced to a single burning question: How far am I willing to go?
There are innumerable reasons people give for venturing into terra incognita. Yet, beneath the lame rationalizations, it all comes down to a single desire — “the long desire,” Evan S. Connell called it in his book by the same name. The pretext is often gold or some other tangible icon of power, but there’s always a much more vague longing behind any true quest. Sensible folk stay home and get rich; those afflicted with “the long desire” seek something else — perhaps a power over oneself or the world at large. It’s a desire that reaches beyond words. Perhaps it is pure longing itself — the human condition reduced to a single gut feeling. Perhaps it is only the desire for absolute freedom, with no specific object in mind. No matter. The wild draws this feeling out of a seeker, and those terminally afflicted become hellbent upon seeking out wilderness wherever it may be, in whatever form it takes.
“Trench says a wild man is a willed man,” Thoreau wrote in his journals in 1853. The point is quite clear: those in positions of power have always considered freethinkers dangerous — and rightly so. In his deceptively casual way, Thoreau reveals why: wild minds think what they will, and, consequently, will what they think. If knowledge is power, then creative thought is the most potent exercise of that power. Utterly out of control. Completely wild.
Within the framework of a tightly controlled society, free thought is difficult to cultivate. By contrast, a wanderer, traipsing alone through a wilderness for days on end, finds the free association of ideas hard to avoid. As one’s body wanders, so does one’s mind. The wilderness of the mind and the wilderness of oceans, forests, mountains, and deserts are inextricably entwined.
The wild has no place in a tightly controlled society because it cannot be managed. Even in a utopian state (where, ideally, everything would be allowed), one cannot think completely freely without upsetting the apple cart. A freethinking wanderer is a barbarian at the gate. If the utopians let such a person in, things will change and their perfect world will be lost.
Humankind being what it is, we have conflicting interests: a desire for freedom and a need for security. It seems we are forever having to choose between the two, or at least to compromise. It is never easy. Perhaps we have leaned more toward freedom in the not-so-distant past; perhaps we lean more toward security these days. How much easier it is to make the world a safer place than to protect something as vague and intangible as freedom. All too often we choose the path of least resistance.
Yet, even if the wild mind were banned by every government in the world, it could never be wiped out entirely. Even when every square mile of the planet has been harnessed, and every man, woman, and child subjugated to the collective will, the wilderness will continue to thrive as it has for eons. The wild thrives in our hearts as much as it does in the planet’s countless nooks and crannies. It plays the waiting game. It will ultimately win. The question is: Will humankind win along with it, or will we engineer our own demise instead?
“The Wilderness Within” is excerpted from Elemental Surprises (Great Elm Press). © 1996 by Walt McLaughlin.
— Ed.
