“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness…” So wrote Henry David Thoreau in his vital 1862 essay “Walking,” the nation’s first unabashed apologia for an untrammeled American wilderness that was even then fading away. Since that time we have largely failed to regard our wild lands with anything approaching the mystical awe espoused by Thoreau and his apostles. Quite the opposite. But prescient legislation, spearheaded by citizens motivated more by natural piety than economic gain, has preserved at least a scattered semblance of the green new world that greeted the first European explorers—noble tokens of a national heritage now sadly reduced to besieged islands in a roaring sea of humanity.
For hundreds of thousands of years, the great Eastern forests stretched ancient and unbroken from the shining Atlantic to the mud-blooming Mississippi. A squirrel, it has been said, could cross half the continent without ever setting paw on the ground. Climax stands of might deciduous trees 12 feet and more across—chestnut, oak, hickory, beech—towered high over dark leafy floors where roamed wolves, bear, elk, cougar and bison. And Indians, whose antecedents had eons previously crossed the miry land bridge from their Siberian homeland to the happiest hunting grounds the world has ever known.
Change in this primeval environment was slow in coming; not since the long withdrawal of the glaciers and the coming of the first Stone Age hunters (accompanied by the sudden demise of such Pleistocene megafauna as mastodons and saber-toothed cats) had anything of radical import occurred, just the unhurried ticking pulse of evolution, of life struggling with life, of wildfire and regeneration, of storm, and starshine, and the slow wheeling seasons.
The people who lived here then had no concept of “wilderness” apart from the setting of their daily lives, the woods and wildlife simply all that existed outside the transient clearings and stretched-hide houses of their villages. They worshipped utilitarian deities, gods linked to the hunt and the harvest, gods of rainfall, fertility and war. Theirs was a life of difficult abundance, of effort and observation. They walked carefully through their world, knew its cycles intimately, and were long sustained by its saving grace.
The first Europeans on our shores came seeking gold, glory and God. But unlike the Spanish who had preceded them to the New World, the early English settlers found no gold and few opportunities for glory, and the God who walked these shadowed forests at dawn was one they had long forgotten. The newcomers brought with them preconceptions of wilderness inherited from millennia of urban civilization, of a deliberate, agonized distancing of man from nature. The vibrant immediacy of primal Celtic and Germanic cultures had long since been obliterated by the metropolitan seductions of Roman and then Christian acculturation. Since the Neolithic Age, which blessed mankind with urbanization, agriculture, hierarchical religion, caste, class and standing armies, Europeans had lived in cities and towns or in villages surrounded by miles of cleared farmland; the wild wood was seen as something to be held at bay, a malign redoubt of dangerous beasts and malevolent spirits.
With this worldview firmly entrenched in her foreign conquerors it is easy to discern the plain reason underlying the decline of the American wilderness: her forests were quickly colonized by an ambitious iron-wielding agricultural race shorn of the natural values that time and necessity had implanted in the natives.
Thus the engine of empire, after a bumpy start those first long winters of starvation and despair at Jamestown, rose up, gathered its strength behind the Alleghenies, and leaped across the continent with startling speed. Thomas Jefferson had doubted that the new Americans could colonize the breadth of the trans-Mississippi region within two hundred years; it took mere decades. Things picked up even faster after the War Between the States: forests were annihilated, wildlife hunted out, mountains pulled down, rivers dammed and poisoned, cities stretched like stains across the stripped contours of the landscape, and eventually the world’s weather itself fell victim to the blind hunger of industrialism. Modern man at last looked back from the Pacific shore over his continent’s smoke-shrouded skeleton and concluded, not without reluctance, that the frontier had indeed expired. Mission accomplished.
~
Hindsight, as is often the case, brought with it retroactive protection for some of the sad parcels of native American still left standing. The federal Wilderness Act of 1964, which defines wilderness as “… an area where earth and its community are untrammeled by man, and man himself is a visitor who does not remain,” was a revolutionary, epochal piece of legislation, in fact the spiritual cri de couer of a civilization whose very wealth and power had been wrung from their land’s natural resources. With so much of the country reduced to cities and suburbs, highways, farms and factories, the Wilderness Act valiantly declared that a few survivors of our growth mania would be spared chainsaw and dragline, asphalt and ATV. As the most successful destroyers of wilderness the world had ever seen, so could Western culture act as its greatest benefactor, setting aside for permanent protection certain (albeit marginal) lands solely for their ecological and recreational value.
It must be made clear that rather than being somehow a denying or negative force, wilderness preservation is instead one of the highest demonstration of humanism ever realized, recognizing as it does that without silence and solitude, without occasional interaction—be it via binocular or bow—with out fellow animals, without some avenue of escape from our crowded techno-industrial kingdom within which we have walled ourselves, the entire modern human enterprise must be called into question. As Thoreau said, referring as much to humanity as to nature, “In Wilderness is the preservation of the world.”
Under the original Wilderness Act, designated wilderness areas would be comprised of 5,000-plus acre tracts of roadless, publically owned landscape devoted solely to recreation, science, education, aesthetics and the preservation, in perpetuum, of native ecosystems. Given the lesser population densities afflicting the American West, the Act was initially applied to semi-virginal Western lands administered by the US Forest Service, National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management. Eleven years later another statute was adopted specifically aimed at protecting the deflowered regions east of the Mississippi, lands slowly recovering (when left unmolested) from deforestation, draining, farming and early settlement.
It is important to recall that almost all of Virginia’s timber that was accessible by man and mule had been logged, generally by clearcutting, between the Eighteenth and early Twentieth centuries. Realizing that the austere requirements of the Western-oriented Wilderness Act could not be realistically applied to the overcrowded and manhandled East, the Eastern Wilderness Act of 1975 provided that marginal wilderness areas lying within “sight and sound” of even dense urbanization could still qualify for permanent protection.
Seeking more localized action, Virginia’s congressional delegation worked to bring about the Virginia Wilderness Act of 1984, which set aside several areas within the Commonwealth’s national forests. These included Beartown, Kimberling Creek, Lewis Fork, Little Dry Run, Little Wilson Creek, Mountain Lake, Peters Mountain, Ramsey’s Draft, Saint Mary’s and Thunder Ridge. Four more areas were protected in 1987: Barbours Creek, Shawvers Run, Rich Hole and Rough Mountain. The Virginia Wilderness Act of 2000 added The Priest and Three Ridges areas to an expanded Virginia Wilderness Preservation System.
All of the above—totaling 100,434 acres—are located within the George Washington or Jefferson National Forests in the Allegheny and Blue Ridge Mountains, some of the largest blocs of public land in the East. In addition, Shenandoah National Park has designated 82,260 acres or 42 percent of the total acreage as wilderness, while the state’s North River Landing Nature Preserve and the Virginia Coast Reserve, the latter administered by The Nature Conservancy, are the only protected wilderness areas along our densely populated coastline. There remain around 420,000 acres of national for land in Virginia as yet unscarred by road construction but lacking any form of legal protection, and it is toward the inclusion of these neglected areas that wilderness advocates are currently directing their attention.
~
“Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most alarming of them all—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape.” Thoreau spoke from the secure vantage point of the mid-nineteenth century, when the country, even along the Eastern seaboard, was still open and decentralized enough to allow wilderness appreciation to simply mean the immediate absence of farmers, loggers and “manufactory” workers. When these eager constituencies inevitably showed themselves in the remoter forests and mountains, Americans in Thoreau’s time always had the option of simply going westward to seek fresh vistas of new, unspoiled wild lands, possessed as they were of the enormous freedom to simply move on, like Daniel Boone, whenever the claustrophobic smoke of some new neighbor’s cabin was seen rising over the far hilltop.
Today, with the frontier buried for over a century, we no longer have the luxury of simply marching off toward the West whenever our favorite wilderness area is targeted by the extractive industries, and the alarming resort of politics must be employed, skillfully and consistently, to guaranteed the needed protections afforded by our beleaguered environmental laws. National organizations such as the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, regional outfits such as Wild Virginia, the Dogwood Alliance and the Southern Appalachian Forest Council, and many local hunting and fishing clubs are regularly involved in the tedious politicking that in a democratic republic is the only way of getting things done.
Wilderness advocates have arrived at a cogent set of principles for conduct in our fragile roadless areas. First and foremost, simply obey the law. No ranching, mechanized logging, exurban development or mountaintop removal, please. No mechanical vehicles of any kind—ATVs, SUVs, motorcycles, hangliders, mountain bikes—are allowed into wilderness areas. Horses, mules, llamas, yaks, camels and people on foot are welcome. Hunting and fishing is generally allowed in accordance with local regulations.
To preserve the character and experience of wilderness adventure, thoughtful hikers have devised additional, voluntary measures for responsibly enjoying these remote areas:
Know your limits. Don’t overreach your physical capabilities in such way that others will be forced to risk their own necks saving yours.
Hike on the trails, camp at the campsites. Bushwhacking may seem glamorous but it is exhausting work that greatly increases your chances of getting lost. In addition, the lives of wildlife that may be accustomed to seeing occasional hikers on the trails will be disrupted by folks noisily plunging through the brush, stomping on the undergrowth and generally making nuisances of themselves.
Utilize propane stoves rather than build extravagant campfires that scare off wildlife and spoil the starry night you’ve come to enjoy.
Pack out what you pack in; bury human waste deep and far from water sources. Take only photographs, leave only boot prints—and then only on the trail.
~
“We need the tonic of wildness, to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and marsh-hen lurk, to hear the booming of the snipe, to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground … We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.”
Saint Mary’s Wilderness in the George Washington National Forest southeast of Staunton is composed of 10,000 acres of oak-hickory forest, steep and rocky ascents and plenty of runs, rills and small creeks feeding the eponymous river that drains the area. American chestnut trees, long stunted and shrunken by an alien blight, occasionally bear nuts in autumn, though they more typically die back before fruition. One sunny afternoon in October I found myself several miles deep in the woods, atop 3,645-foot Cellar Mountain, unpleasantly confronted with what certainly felt like a torn cartilage in my right knee.
The circumstances of the injury were unremarkable. I’d simply slipped climbing one of the many trailside rock ledges that abound in this location; my cheap “cross-training” shoes had failed me at a critical moment. My jolting unplanned and brisk plunge from near the summit of the ledge had gone as well as could be expected until the final dozen feet when I had bounced off an outcrop, lost physical contact with the slope itself, and freely fallen onto a pile of broken limestone at the base. There was no immediate pain, generally a bad sign of things to come. When I staggered to my feet there it was, a rush of hot nauseous throbbing coming from an already gimpy knee. It had taken me three and half hours of leisurely climbing that afternoon to reach my present elevation, and I’d have to begin my descent immediately if I hoped to regain my truck by nightfall.
The next several hours of pained lurching and sliding down the precipitous slope with the aid of a chestnut snag were memorable only for a single and persistent thought I reluctantly entertained: nobody knew where I was (a wilderness no-no), and as merely inconvenient as my injury had become there was no one to help should I suffer some latent disaster in the murky twilight and be rendered wholly unable to walk. (In the spirit of Thoreau’s Luddite puritanism I’d left my phone in the truck.) Thoughts of compound fractures of the femur followed me doggedly down the mountain as I guessed myself about three miles from the trailhead and my vehicle. What was it Thoreau had said about our need for wilderness adventure? “At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
Right. During my frequent stops to tighten the t-shirt I’d bound around my stiffening knee, to catch my breath and curse my general fortune, I could hear nothing but the cold evening wind sighing in the tree around me, the eerie nocturne of a distant barred owl, and the thudding rhythm of my heart. The empty oceanic sky offered no assistance, was neither hostile nor benign but serenely indifferent. One lean vulture rode the dusk’s last updraft into the bloody arms of sunset.
All this too is part of the wilderness experience, I reminded myself as I stumbled forth into the gloaming. Even if my relatively minor wounding warranted it, would I really want a medevac copter to come clattering over yonder ridgeline like a floating bonfire, bathing me and my surroundings with a cold blue blaze of electric light, terrifying the interested animal companions I could now hear following stealthily at my heels?
No. To appreciate the full implications of wilderness we have to occasionally get far out in the backcountry, away from the civilized niceties we take for granted, and while we’re there nothing is guaranteed. It can at times be damned inconvenient and even a little frightening. But to wholly connect with the natural world we must be prepared to enter its untamed precincts on their own terms, to accept the consequences of the inevitable dose of bad luck or poor planning, to struggle, to think our way through, and to gain from even the most trying or painful experience. We do not journey to the wilderness to find security, comfort or certain results—we go for the elemental thrill of meeting the primal that still remains both without and within us.
The stars were looking kindly down as I staggered in an agonized torpor into the weedy parking lot of the trailhead, covered with dust, blood, bruises and sweat. After I pried off my traitorous shoes and eased shivering into a sweatshirt I rested for a while, sitting on the hood of my truck listening to the night world around me, looking up at the swirling chaos of suns, moons, galaxies, and counting my blessings, the foremost of which was that even in a country as congested and brutalized as ours there were yet patches of genuine wilderness that we’d had the courage to save from ourselves. Some day, perhaps, when modern civilization has backed us into a final corner of electronic surveillance, plastic food and a tattered atmosphere, we will recognize the preservation of wilderness as being the central contribution of our national experiment.
Late that night, in bed, I opened Thoreau one last time:
“So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as a bank-side in autumn.”
For hundreds of thousands of years, the great Eastern forests stretched ancient and unbroken from the shining Atlantic to the mud-blooming Mississippi. A squirrel, it has been said, could cross half the continent without ever setting paw on the ground. Climax stands of might deciduous trees 12 feet and more across—chestnut, oak, hickory, beech—towered high over dark leafy floors where roamed wolves, bear, elk, cougar and bison. And Indians, whose antecedents had eons previously crossed the miry land bridge from their Siberian homeland to the happiest hunting grounds the world has ever known.
Change in this primeval environment was slow in coming; not since the long withdrawal of the glaciers and the coming of the first Stone Age hunters (accompanied by the sudden demise of such Pleistocene megafauna as mastodons and saber-toothed cats) had anything of radical import occurred, just the unhurried ticking pulse of evolution, of life struggling with life, of wildfire and regeneration, of storm, and starshine, and the slow wheeling seasons.
The people who lived here then had no concept of “wilderness” apart from the setting of their daily lives, the woods and wildlife simply all that existed outside the transient clearings and stretched-hide houses of their villages. They worshipped utilitarian deities, gods linked to the hunt and the harvest, gods of rainfall, fertility and war. Theirs was a life of difficult abundance, of effort and observation. They walked carefully through their world, knew its cycles intimately, and were long sustained by its saving grace.
The first Europeans on our shores came seeking gold, glory and God. But unlike the Spanish who had preceded them to the New World, the early English settlers found no gold and few opportunities for glory, and the God who walked these shadowed forests at dawn was one they had long forgotten. The newcomers brought with them preconceptions of wilderness inherited from millennia of urban civilization, of a deliberate, agonized distancing of man from nature. The vibrant immediacy of primal Celtic and Germanic cultures had long since been obliterated by the metropolitan seductions of Roman and then Christian acculturation. Since the Neolithic Age, which blessed mankind with urbanization, agriculture, hierarchical religion, caste, class and standing armies, Europeans had lived in cities and towns or in villages surrounded by miles of cleared farmland; the wild wood was seen as something to be held at bay, a malign redoubt of dangerous beasts and malevolent spirits.
With this worldview firmly entrenched in her foreign conquerors it is easy to discern the plain reason underlying the decline of the American wilderness: her forests were quickly colonized by an ambitious iron-wielding agricultural race shorn of the natural values that time and necessity had implanted in the natives.
Thus the engine of empire, after a bumpy start those first long winters of starvation and despair at Jamestown, rose up, gathered its strength behind the Alleghenies, and leaped across the continent with startling speed. Thomas Jefferson had doubted that the new Americans could colonize the breadth of the trans-Mississippi region within two hundred years; it took mere decades. Things picked up even faster after the War Between the States: forests were annihilated, wildlife hunted out, mountains pulled down, rivers dammed and poisoned, cities stretched like stains across the stripped contours of the landscape, and eventually the world’s weather itself fell victim to the blind hunger of industrialism. Modern man at last looked back from the Pacific shore over his continent’s smoke-shrouded skeleton and concluded, not without reluctance, that the frontier had indeed expired. Mission accomplished.
~
Hindsight, as is often the case, brought with it retroactive protection for some of the sad parcels of native American still left standing. The federal Wilderness Act of 1964, which defines wilderness as “… an area where earth and its community are untrammeled by man, and man himself is a visitor who does not remain,” was a revolutionary, epochal piece of legislation, in fact the spiritual cri de couer of a civilization whose very wealth and power had been wrung from their land’s natural resources. With so much of the country reduced to cities and suburbs, highways, farms and factories, the Wilderness Act valiantly declared that a few survivors of our growth mania would be spared chainsaw and dragline, asphalt and ATV. As the most successful destroyers of wilderness the world had ever seen, so could Western culture act as its greatest benefactor, setting aside for permanent protection certain (albeit marginal) lands solely for their ecological and recreational value.
It must be made clear that rather than being somehow a denying or negative force, wilderness preservation is instead one of the highest demonstration of humanism ever realized, recognizing as it does that without silence and solitude, without occasional interaction—be it via binocular or bow—with out fellow animals, without some avenue of escape from our crowded techno-industrial kingdom within which we have walled ourselves, the entire modern human enterprise must be called into question. As Thoreau said, referring as much to humanity as to nature, “In Wilderness is the preservation of the world.”
Under the original Wilderness Act, designated wilderness areas would be comprised of 5,000-plus acre tracts of roadless, publically owned landscape devoted solely to recreation, science, education, aesthetics and the preservation, in perpetuum, of native ecosystems. Given the lesser population densities afflicting the American West, the Act was initially applied to semi-virginal Western lands administered by the US Forest Service, National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management. Eleven years later another statute was adopted specifically aimed at protecting the deflowered regions east of the Mississippi, lands slowly recovering (when left unmolested) from deforestation, draining, farming and early settlement.
It is important to recall that almost all of Virginia’s timber that was accessible by man and mule had been logged, generally by clearcutting, between the Eighteenth and early Twentieth centuries. Realizing that the austere requirements of the Western-oriented Wilderness Act could not be realistically applied to the overcrowded and manhandled East, the Eastern Wilderness Act of 1975 provided that marginal wilderness areas lying within “sight and sound” of even dense urbanization could still qualify for permanent protection.
Seeking more localized action, Virginia’s congressional delegation worked to bring about the Virginia Wilderness Act of 1984, which set aside several areas within the Commonwealth’s national forests. These included Beartown, Kimberling Creek, Lewis Fork, Little Dry Run, Little Wilson Creek, Mountain Lake, Peters Mountain, Ramsey’s Draft, Saint Mary’s and Thunder Ridge. Four more areas were protected in 1987: Barbours Creek, Shawvers Run, Rich Hole and Rough Mountain. The Virginia Wilderness Act of 2000 added The Priest and Three Ridges areas to an expanded Virginia Wilderness Preservation System.
All of the above—totaling 100,434 acres—are located within the George Washington or Jefferson National Forests in the Allegheny and Blue Ridge Mountains, some of the largest blocs of public land in the East. In addition, Shenandoah National Park has designated 82,260 acres or 42 percent of the total acreage as wilderness, while the state’s North River Landing Nature Preserve and the Virginia Coast Reserve, the latter administered by The Nature Conservancy, are the only protected wilderness areas along our densely populated coastline. There remain around 420,000 acres of national for land in Virginia as yet unscarred by road construction but lacking any form of legal protection, and it is toward the inclusion of these neglected areas that wilderness advocates are currently directing their attention.
~
“Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most alarming of them all—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape.” Thoreau spoke from the secure vantage point of the mid-nineteenth century, when the country, even along the Eastern seaboard, was still open and decentralized enough to allow wilderness appreciation to simply mean the immediate absence of farmers, loggers and “manufactory” workers. When these eager constituencies inevitably showed themselves in the remoter forests and mountains, Americans in Thoreau’s time always had the option of simply going westward to seek fresh vistas of new, unspoiled wild lands, possessed as they were of the enormous freedom to simply move on, like Daniel Boone, whenever the claustrophobic smoke of some new neighbor’s cabin was seen rising over the far hilltop.
Today, with the frontier buried for over a century, we no longer have the luxury of simply marching off toward the West whenever our favorite wilderness area is targeted by the extractive industries, and the alarming resort of politics must be employed, skillfully and consistently, to guaranteed the needed protections afforded by our beleaguered environmental laws. National organizations such as the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, regional outfits such as Wild Virginia, the Dogwood Alliance and the Southern Appalachian Forest Council, and many local hunting and fishing clubs are regularly involved in the tedious politicking that in a democratic republic is the only way of getting things done.
Wilderness advocates have arrived at a cogent set of principles for conduct in our fragile roadless areas. First and foremost, simply obey the law. No ranching, mechanized logging, exurban development or mountaintop removal, please. No mechanical vehicles of any kind—ATVs, SUVs, motorcycles, hangliders, mountain bikes—are allowed into wilderness areas. Horses, mules, llamas, yaks, camels and people on foot are welcome. Hunting and fishing is generally allowed in accordance with local regulations.
To preserve the character and experience of wilderness adventure, thoughtful hikers have devised additional, voluntary measures for responsibly enjoying these remote areas:
Know your limits. Don’t overreach your physical capabilities in such way that others will be forced to risk their own necks saving yours.
Hike on the trails, camp at the campsites. Bushwhacking may seem glamorous but it is exhausting work that greatly increases your chances of getting lost. In addition, the lives of wildlife that may be accustomed to seeing occasional hikers on the trails will be disrupted by folks noisily plunging through the brush, stomping on the undergrowth and generally making nuisances of themselves.
Utilize propane stoves rather than build extravagant campfires that scare off wildlife and spoil the starry night you’ve come to enjoy.
Pack out what you pack in; bury human waste deep and far from water sources. Take only photographs, leave only boot prints—and then only on the trail.
~
“We need the tonic of wildness, to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and marsh-hen lurk, to hear the booming of the snipe, to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground … We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.”
Saint Mary’s Wilderness in the George Washington National Forest southeast of Staunton is composed of 10,000 acres of oak-hickory forest, steep and rocky ascents and plenty of runs, rills and small creeks feeding the eponymous river that drains the area. American chestnut trees, long stunted and shrunken by an alien blight, occasionally bear nuts in autumn, though they more typically die back before fruition. One sunny afternoon in October I found myself several miles deep in the woods, atop 3,645-foot Cellar Mountain, unpleasantly confronted with what certainly felt like a torn cartilage in my right knee.
The circumstances of the injury were unremarkable. I’d simply slipped climbing one of the many trailside rock ledges that abound in this location; my cheap “cross-training” shoes had failed me at a critical moment. My jolting unplanned and brisk plunge from near the summit of the ledge had gone as well as could be expected until the final dozen feet when I had bounced off an outcrop, lost physical contact with the slope itself, and freely fallen onto a pile of broken limestone at the base. There was no immediate pain, generally a bad sign of things to come. When I staggered to my feet there it was, a rush of hot nauseous throbbing coming from an already gimpy knee. It had taken me three and half hours of leisurely climbing that afternoon to reach my present elevation, and I’d have to begin my descent immediately if I hoped to regain my truck by nightfall.
The next several hours of pained lurching and sliding down the precipitous slope with the aid of a chestnut snag were memorable only for a single and persistent thought I reluctantly entertained: nobody knew where I was (a wilderness no-no), and as merely inconvenient as my injury had become there was no one to help should I suffer some latent disaster in the murky twilight and be rendered wholly unable to walk. (In the spirit of Thoreau’s Luddite puritanism I’d left my phone in the truck.) Thoughts of compound fractures of the femur followed me doggedly down the mountain as I guessed myself about three miles from the trailhead and my vehicle. What was it Thoreau had said about our need for wilderness adventure? “At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
Right. During my frequent stops to tighten the t-shirt I’d bound around my stiffening knee, to catch my breath and curse my general fortune, I could hear nothing but the cold evening wind sighing in the tree around me, the eerie nocturne of a distant barred owl, and the thudding rhythm of my heart. The empty oceanic sky offered no assistance, was neither hostile nor benign but serenely indifferent. One lean vulture rode the dusk’s last updraft into the bloody arms of sunset.
All this too is part of the wilderness experience, I reminded myself as I stumbled forth into the gloaming. Even if my relatively minor wounding warranted it, would I really want a medevac copter to come clattering over yonder ridgeline like a floating bonfire, bathing me and my surroundings with a cold blue blaze of electric light, terrifying the interested animal companions I could now hear following stealthily at my heels?
No. To appreciate the full implications of wilderness we have to occasionally get far out in the backcountry, away from the civilized niceties we take for granted, and while we’re there nothing is guaranteed. It can at times be damned inconvenient and even a little frightening. But to wholly connect with the natural world we must be prepared to enter its untamed precincts on their own terms, to accept the consequences of the inevitable dose of bad luck or poor planning, to struggle, to think our way through, and to gain from even the most trying or painful experience. We do not journey to the wilderness to find security, comfort or certain results—we go for the elemental thrill of meeting the primal that still remains both without and within us.
The stars were looking kindly down as I staggered in an agonized torpor into the weedy parking lot of the trailhead, covered with dust, blood, bruises and sweat. After I pried off my traitorous shoes and eased shivering into a sweatshirt I rested for a while, sitting on the hood of my truck listening to the night world around me, looking up at the swirling chaos of suns, moons, galaxies, and counting my blessings, the foremost of which was that even in a country as congested and brutalized as ours there were yet patches of genuine wilderness that we’d had the courage to save from ourselves. Some day, perhaps, when modern civilization has backed us into a final corner of electronic surveillance, plastic food and a tattered atmosphere, we will recognize the preservation of wilderness as being the central contribution of our national experiment.
Late that night, in bed, I opened Thoreau one last time:
“So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as a bank-side in autumn.”
