Why the Wilds

Right now, I’m sitting in a big house on the coast of Maine. The breeze is coming off the water, and when the tide goes out again, I’m planning to kayak out to say hello to the seals on the nearby rocks.

And, in the meantime, I’m checking the news and seeing nothing good. Charlottesville is happening—I’ve just read about a car plowing into the crowd of KKK, Neo-Nazis, and their counter demonstrators, showing up for equality. One person has died, and more are injured, and it’s only mid afternoon.

Yesterday, the news was full of the President talking about using fire and fury and something even worse against North Korea.

And that this was, again, the hottest year on record. And refugees are still dying to leave their homes, and unwelcome on more and more shores.

The news, my dear, is as bad as I’ve ever known, and this is not the first time I’ve thought so. The weather is hot, the planet is crowded, resources are scarce, and we are all so frightfully on edge that damages that cannot be undone will be, are being, done.

What place, then, do words about seals and terns, stars and pine martens have? The more I know, the more frequently it feels like treason to still love wilderness, to still use the privileges of my skin and geography and lineage and education and bank accounts to go places, to watch for tides and scramble up mountains. Sometimes I worry that caring about the natural world and ecosystems and wilderness is very much rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic—if humanity does itself in with race wars or nuclear explosions or anthropogenic catastrophe, how much will the golden slant of sunset or the relationship between blackflies and blueberries or the calming transcendence of being a wild place matter?

I sure as shit don’t think we need a Wilderness Matters movement. Unless the bears and toads and birches are going to start rioting against the rank injustice of how they’ve been treated by humans, that’s just comparing sunlight and humans—as false a dichotomy as pro-life and pro-choice. Personally, I’m both. I’m for all of it. Sunlight and humans, life and choice, nature and culture, town and country, women and men, white and black and all the shades and variances between all of the supposed end points of spectrums.

A renewed appreciation and commitment to all the things is what I get from being out in the world. The scope and scale of the world will blow your mind—we operate so far from mere binaries and three-dimensionality. Recently an old friend and I hiked in the White Mountains. We passed through three major ecosystems and innumerable microhabitats. We’ve hiked the same trail together several times in the fourteen years of our friendship, and each have hiked it other times, with other friends. Our conversation was thick with their names, with stories and catching up have to tell, with the revelations and inanities that accompany any good hike. In one breath, we talked about the alpine plant community and the ways in which media is improving at portrayals of brown women. We hiked a busy trail on a beautiful summer Saturday and the trail was thick with other folks, all out for something like the same reasons we were, all passing over the same roots and stones with different stories and words and histories. All in the same place, yet each hike was distinct to the hiker.

And that’s just the human aspect. The mountain avens—subalpine flowers with a bright yellow buttercupish flower and leaves like spiky strawberry leaves—experienced the same day however flowers do. Maybe that’s just taking in sunlight and nutrients to pump out buds and blooms and fruit and propagate their species as best they can. Maybe plants do more than that, feel more, but even if not, that’s a remarkable amount of life happening in a little patch of the world.

The water rushing by the trail—frigid at the waterfall we stopped to swim in—all of that gushing and glugging along has little bits of life in it as well. And the rocks that the water runs over, that we clamber over—I draw some line at geologic sentience, but still, glaciers passed over those same stones before we ever did and snow sits on top of it every winter, waiting to hatch the mountains anew each spring. There are layers there.

I know, we all know, that human activities are changing the world, the ph of snow and ocean, the climate that ecosystems evolve with, the creation of trails, the pollution of water and air. And yet, I get great, humbling pleasure out of the reality that the mountains and the sea do not care about humanity. If I have a god, it is the ways in which I don’t matter to the rocks and the sea. The world means the world to me, and it doesn’t know or care what I do.

In the Scientific and Industrial Evolutions, there was an idea that God was nothing but a watchmaker, and that if the world could be picked apart and explored and investigated from the largest cogs to the smallest bolt and screw, the world could be known and Man (never Woman—we were busy with herb gardens and healing and raising babies) would be equal to the Divine.

This, I think, is horseshit. Even if I can think of all the cogs and wheels and layers and threads and fantastical tapestry of a single moment of my hike on that busy trail, if I can contemplate the lives of the seals and seabirds and tidal creatures and plants that I have been kayaking out to each morning while I housesit, my head and heart start to explode. If I add in the lives of all the people on the trails, the summer people owners of the moored boats and summer cottages, the people who live here always and maintain the docks and lobster buoys that I see as I sit as the lone human among twenty seals—well. The world is too big and beautiful to be understood taken apart like a simple watch.

I know enough to know I do not know a damn thing. That variety of ignorance brings me the greatest joy, allows me the space to fall in love with the world and all that it holds. Maybe there is something primal out there that rips a few layers of protection off my eyes, off my heart, but I come back from wilder places more able to see the complexities of life where humans live. And that helps, enormously, when reading the news and trying to figure out how to be in a fraught world.

Pine martens will not stop racism. Knowing the constellations will not erase the American caste system. Watching a seal dive will not calm the political discourse. The smell of salt water, of balsam fir will not stop nuclear proliferation.

What the wilds may do is open your eyes to the world so that you may better participate in the wider world. 

Wildness and Place, Gypsies and Homebodies

“With environmental writing,” I explained to someone recently, “if you’re not writing about climate change and pollution, you’re writing about the importance of Place.”

Truly, those darker options are branches on the same tree—they are the threats and the shadows that seek to erase and ravage the refuge of a right Place.

I used to say that nothing in this world compares to the alpine zone of the mountains of New Hampshire, that up there is my best Place. That, it seems, is not quite true. Whatever the wild and holy thing that lurks in the rocks and krummholtz and ridgelines and alpine plants is undeniably of that geography, but I’ve found fractals of that same sense of wonder and practical sublimity—a wonder that to me feels like my heart opens like a drawbridge to let the greatness of the world pour in and if joy grew feathers, I could swoop around like the ravens—in other quarters, too. I’ve come across that same magic at the ocean, in snowstorms, in being love, in farming, in both the laughter and silence of good friends.

When I go, like a hopeful gypsy, looking for Place, for my Place in the world to send out roots, what I am looking for is some configuration of all that wildness and wonder and love and community.

It is a hard thing to look for and I worry that either it cannot be found, or does not exist, or—most bittersweetly—my expectations have been raised to impossible heights because of the quality of what I have witnessed before.

But that is ridiculous.

When I have been away from the wilds for too long, I begin to think that however wonderful I believe the mountains or the sea or thunder and lightning or the sweetness of a friend or the look of Orion on a cold night to be, absence must have made my heart grow imaginative and too fond. Reality, I tell myself in these dim times, cannot compete with hope and memory. The mountains, they do not really do that to your breath. To watch an osprey dive into the ocean does not make your heart skip a beat, every time. People, even the oldest and dearest friends, change and the next meeting could be strained and awkward. And so on.

I sell myself short. Reality, nearly always, exceeds both expectation and memory. The relief and surprise at this truth is one of the sweetest things I know.

There is nothing I can ever write that will come close to the shivering thrill of being above treeline. No one, yet, has adequately portrayed the comforting, urgent wildness of the sea. And there are no right words for how the kindness of a friend changes the color of the sky. The reason that everyone, for better or worse, writes about love is that it is at once the most important and least describable thing in this world. Wildness—in the sense of being joyfully and fiercely immersed in love when surrounded by sublime aspects of life—is only another iteration of the puzzle and glue of love.

I have come as close as I know how to living immersed in natural wildness, and for all that I ache for and am the best version of myself in places where the stars are clear and the world yawns before me in ridgeline or forest or roiling sea, I recognize that—corporally, at least—it is impractical as a human-mammal craving food, shelter, love, purpose and community, to seek for my home Place in the wilderness.

Perhaps that sense of eternal but impermanent belonging is part of the allure of wild places.

Regardless, it does leave the actual question of practical geographic place to become home Place open to debate.

On that subject, I’ve read maybe too much Edward Abbey and Wendell Berry. They make for a confusing pair—I am tugged one way to be a gypsy wandering in search of moments of wildness and torn the other direction to come and be home already.

I know as well as I know the undeniable alpine zone that I am not alone in this tug-torn struggle.

What, then, I wonder makes the wanderers stop? The troupe of gypsies seems to shrink a little every year. I see people around me settle—in the best way—into good paid jobs or satisfying creative outlets or balancing a beloved partner’s yearnings with their own independence or raising beautiful babies, and so their wandering becomes more complicated, even if pieces of their heart still hunger for different wilds. Or, did they find their Place and all other necessary aspects to their life kaleidoscoped into roots, the sum of all the parts as rich and true as a newly discovered wilderness? Or did everyone just get tired from ripping up roots and setting them down in new soil every few months or years, just dipping in the toes and never committing to the downs as well as the ups?

I don’t know, but I want to know how to wander home to something still wild.

My Place, when I find it, I know will be a compromise and a balance off all the kinds of wildness I love and crave. I do not look for perfection—there is nowhere on earth where I can have the Presidential and Franconia Ridges, the Maine coastline, a New England hardwood forest, a farm with stonewalls, work that satisfies but does not sap my soul, and a town knotted full of people I love all within a few miles.

Now, I don’t know quite where to look, where the found is to my lost, where wild and home and love and Place will lead me or anyone else but experience makes me hopefully believe that the reality can be sweeter than even our wildest imaginings.