The spires of a weather observation station can be barely seen at the summit of Mount Washington, N.H. (Jason42882 / flickr) http://www.flickr.com/photos/jason_burmeister/ / CC BY 2.0
If I could commission a poll to ask Americans whether they believe we have real wilderness, my guess would be that the results would vary between East and West. To the East, a majority would say “no,” while our countrymen and countrywomen west of the Mississippi would say that “yes, America has true wilderness.” That’s my theory.
“Genuine wilderness survives, perhaps, in Alaska, but not here in the lower 48, particularly not in the East,” said Chuck Bonner of New Hampshire yesterday in the comments section of Tuesday’s “Let’s Get Wild.” “So we say, ‘Wilderness is a state of mind.’ I suppose I agree, but it feels like a compromise that is forced upon us. We can no longer experience genuine wilderness as our forebears of past centuries did, so we ‘pretend.’”
Our Mount Washington may be home to the “world’s worst weather,” but it pales in comparison to the awesome presence of Mount Rainier, Wash. Pennsylvania’s Pine Creek Gorge has been labeled the state’s “Grand Canyon,” but Arizonans might scoff at such an obvious tourist moniker. Henry David Thoreau and Theodore Roosevelt may have found their wilderness spirit on Katahdin in Maine, but it’s John Muir – and Muir standing with President Roosevelt with Yosemite Valley spread out behind him – that’s the iconic American image of wilderness leadership. And plenty of outdoor magazines feature western icons on their covers, rarely anything in the east.
A view off the summit of Mount Mansfield, Vt. The view in the opposite direction is of radio towers and a parking lot. (Compass Points Media / flickr) http://www.flickr.com/photos/compasspointsmedia/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
The Appalachian Trail, the most famous of all long-distance trails, runs barely half a day’s drive from almost every major metropolitan city on the Atlantic Coast. Few trails are more than 10 miles from a road or town. Several high peaks – Mount Mansfield, Mount Washington, Mount Mitchell – have roads, parking lots and observation decks at their summits. Backpackers in the Adirondacks Forest Preserve, more than 2 million acres constitutionally protected by the state of New York as “forever wild,” are forced to carry burdensome canisters to keep black bears from getting at their food.
How can a place be considered “wild” if black bears are so used to human presence?
And yet … if I took my neighbor here in small town Lititz, Pa., left him on Mount Bond in the middle of the Pemigewasset Wilderness, N.H., and said: “Spend the night here and then find your own way out,” my guess is the neighbor would say the experience was “wild.” I’ve slept in the middle of the Adirondack High Peaks waiting for one of those bears to stick his nose into my shelter. I’ve been pinned down in a single-person tent in the lee of Mount Hancock, N.H., during a 13-hour sleet storm several Februarys ago. And I cannot tell myself that I wasn’t in the wilderness.
Taylor Caswell, who maintains the “nhclimber” Twitter, said a human presence in the backcountry may be the only way to save it.
“Is what we have pure wilderness, as in no signs of human existence? No,” he said. “But I would not say that should be what we want. In my opinion as a lifelong outdoorsman and naturalist, no wilderness ‘state of mind’ can exist without the existence of actual physical wilderness. If there were no human knowledge of true wilderness, then how would we appreciate it, treasure it, experience it, or protect it?”
Responses? Comments?
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Interesting.
Not to be too self-serving about it, I’m inclined to respond by saying, “my response is in my book.” In “Noticing Nature,” I describe encounters with “wildness” in very ordinary things. This is not my ideal of “wilderness,” but it is a necessary phenomenon for us humans which teaches us that we are not all there is.
I’m reminded of something in Thoreau’s “Walden,” where he describes an urge to kill and eat a woodchuck, “Not that I was hungry, except for the wildness that he represented.”
A woodchuck? Wildness?
Yes, a woodchuck represents wildness, but only if we take a moment to consider how it goes about its life. If we try, we can see it not as a pest in our garden, but as an independent creature shaped in its body and in its instincts and behavior by untold eons of evolution which drive it to eat our seedling green beans. Yes, it is a pest in our garden, and it is also a wild creature. The difference in our perception of it is in our state of mind.
Similarly, as I describe in “Noticing Nature,” wildness can be observed in pigeons. We tend to regard pigeons with disdain on many levels and in many ways, but they are still wild things living their lives in ways we do not control.
When I observed pigeons mobbing a young eagle, was that an experience of wildness? Absolutely! Was I “in the wilderness?” No, I was stuck in traffic on one of the most heavily traveled roads in New England! Yet even in a rush-hour traffic jam, I was able to experience a “wilderness state of mind.”
Dang! Didn’t mean to write another book here! I think you get the idea.
Chuck