Wandering Home

Wandering Home by Bill McKibben

Another in my Wilderness Studies reading list. I have to say, I enjoyed this much more than I anticipated. It is McKibben's account of a walk he took from his home outside of Middlebury, Vt., to his home in the Adirondacks of New York. So it's a rich guy going for a walk.

But McKibben has some interesting things to say on this walk, particularly about wilderness and its definition. After a rumination on snow geese, for example, he writes, "If we're going to talk about wilderness...we ahve to face the truth that it's a little hard to separate out the natural and the artificial, a little hard to figure out exactly where we're planting our feet" (68). Exactly. I appreciate an author who is more about questions than answers.

Part of what keeps the book interesting is the cast of characters with whom McKibben makes his march. One portion of the hike he completes with the founder of the magazine Earth First!, a militant pro-wilderness publication. After years out west, this individual found his wilderness in the east: "I'd been in Tuscon five years. I was starting to really miss fresh water..I have the Eastern forst in my bones...wilderness [is] not just a Western thing" (79).

So maybe that struck me because I am in the midst of the eastern forest and often find myself pining for Western wildlands. But it strikes me, too, because I think it strikes to the fact that this elusive thing we call wilderness is really just a construction of our own minds. Wilderness is where we find it.

Case and point: In early August of this year, I was out on a pre-dawn jog on the dirt roads above our house. I was preoccupied and before I knew it I had stumbled on a steepish downslope, my shoulder had connected rather perfectly (or imperfectly) on a rock, and I was screaming in pain. In the suburban neighborhood where I'd grown up, my howls surely would have elicited some response from someone. But not here. I was in the woods. And they weren't woods that would fit the definition of wilderness in the Wilderness Act of 1964, But that didn't bring anyone to my rescue. So I started to walk out, every step sending a jolt of very strange pain up my arm.

To me, wilderness has always had a tinge of danger to it; it was a place where I wasn't in complete control. And it turned out, that place was far closer to my home than I thought.

The Solace of Open Spaces

 

The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich

This slim volume is a continuation of the Wilderness theme that has been dominating my reading for the past few months. It contains a series of essays, more or less chronological, from a New York City transplant to the western side of the Bighorn Mountains.

I was drawn to the book because of its title. That solace mentioned is certainly something I have felt many times during my wanderings out west. That the book was set in one of those stomping grounds was a happy accident I discovered in its first pages. It was pretty great to be reading about familiar places -- Shell and Sheridan, for example -- that I'm hoping to visit next year.

But knowing those places also made it hard to read. There is always some discomfort in reading someone else's description of a place you love. In this book, that was compounded by the author's citified background and with the authoritative way she writes about the place. She seems to insist that her truths are the truths of the land, which makes me suspicious. For example, after complaining of the way culture has romanticized cowboys, she writes, "Because these me work with animals, not machines or numbers, because they live outside in landscapes of torrential beauty, because they are confined to a place and a routine embellished with awesome variables, because calves die in the arms that pulled others into life, because they go to the mountains as if on a pilgrimage to find out what makes a herd of elk tick, their strength is also a softness, their toughness, a rare delicacy" (53). Seems to me she's replacing one romantic vision with another -- and no romantic vision can be particularly accurate.

In the end, though, it was a passage near the end of the book that wound up coloring the whole experience for me. It came as the author was describing a sacred Native ceremony she had been invited to attend. After being approached by some young males, she writes, "...they flirted with me, then undercut the dares with cruelty. "My grandmother hates white tourists," the one who had been eyeing my chest said. "You're missing the point of this ceremony," I told him. "And racism isn't a good thing anywhere" (114). Her response to this situation strikes me as incredibly tone deaf and ignorant. First, she was a white tourist. But more importantly, the author participates in the Great American Myth of Racism, which is that it consists of actions and words. It's not. Racism is a system, one that creates institutions that privileged one group of people over all others. It's pretty clear that Native peoples are not the beneficiaries of American institutions. There is a reason that Ehrlich can easy move from New York City to Shell, WY, where she is free to write about a culture she barely knows, but Native populations have a hard time making the transition from the Spokane Indian Reservation to Spokane proper. Erhlich's comment in this situation demonstrates how unaware she is of her own privilege, how little she understands the role of race in our country, and how much she is willing to ignore about the past to celebrate the present moment in which she finds herself. How can we trust someone so willfully ignorant about such a fundamental fact of American life?

The Monkey Wrench Gang

The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey

This year I'm launching a new elective at my school called Wilderness Studies. In addition to helping students deepen their thinking about wilderness, I'd like to connect them with literature about the outdoors. So many students read Hatchet and love it -- but never find another outdoorsy book they connect with as much. I read this one back in college, and thought it might be a good option for students.

The best part of the book, in my mind, is its opportunity for catharsis. It tells the story of three New Mexico strangers who meet on a raft trip down the Grand Canyon and who are drawn together for their disdain for modern encroachments into wild lands. So they decide to take action. They topple billboards, sabotage road-building equipment, and blow up bridges, all the while brilliantly evading their hapless pursuers. Their dream -- and I won't reveal whether they reach it -- is to topple the Hoover Dam, thus restoring Glen Canyon to its original beauty and rewilding the Colorado River. It is wonderful to see people fighting against modern consumerism and laziness and thoughtlessness and arrogance in such a brazen, successful way. I myself would love to blow up Rte. 107/12 between Pittsfield and Bethel and return the White River Valley to its wild state. What fly fishing it would be! Hayduke lives!

But I will say Ed Abbey has some strange ideas about wilderness. For the characters, and one can only assume Abbey himself, wilderness seems to be a place of unbound recreation for them. After all, they declare their love for littering roadsides with beer cans. Why? They don't like the road. And yet they love roads, as long as they are rough enough to keep their pursuers at bay but not so rough as to prevent their passage. It seems like a pretty selfish view of the wilderness.

The nail in the coffin for the book, at least for its inclusion in the course, though, is the way Abbey writes about the lone female character, Bonnie. She is, throughout the book, treated as an object. Abbey mentions her looks nearly every time she mentions her: "She looked lovely that morning: fresh as a primrose, the large violet eyes bright with exuberance and good humor, her mane of hair fragrant and rich, brushed to the gloss of burnished chestnut, glowing with glints of Scots copper" (165). Right. There is even a moment in the book when Hayduke rebuffs Bonnie's advances because he wants to ask Doc his permission to begin a relationship with her. As if Doc owned her. And all the while Bonnie knows these men are more or less bumbling idiots, she just can't resist them. She is definitely a figment of Abbey's imagination, his dream of a woman irresistibly and unquestionably drawn to his curmudgeonly self. I couldn't put the book in front of students without lots of discussion of this serious flaw in the book. And since these book clubs are meant to be more or less self run, that wasn't happening.