One of my Labradors believes that when she climbs up on my bed she can, by merely closing her eyes, become invisible. I've always admired that sort of belief--that by thinking a situation to be so, it becomes so.
Take the concept of wilderness: what is it really? Is it that little while on a mountain ledge when no jet engine noise is heard, no contrail overhead telling you that other men are passing by? I think so--and, after all, the choice is no longer ours to make. Since the physical presence is obvious, we have to shut it out, turn our back--and close our eyes.
Wilderness can be the chunking of a canoe through the rip of heavy whitewater--even if it's in sight of a highway. Wilderness can be that sudden enchanted muffling of forest sounds that happens with a fresh falling of snow...even when your deer stand is just barely two miles from where you parked your car.
Wilderness can be truly the "back of beyond." Or it can be where church bells are still faintly heard. Working with an ax in my woodlot is a little, momentary brushing with it--the sound of my blade thunking is just as comforting to me as an early Dakota Territory homesteader's was to him. Each of our wildernesses being an act of faith, a belief, a thing of the soul and the willingness to accept it, often independent of the physical removal from the familiar.
As a British scientist (who would agree with us) put it, "If the facts do not agree with the theory, so much the worse for the facts."
We must have our little wildernesses, no matter what size they are, no matter where they would in reality sit on a map.
Wilderness, when you're hungry for it, can start almost anywhere. It's that invisible line we cross from the everyday to the out-of-the-ordinary. It can be seeing, with great satisfaction, the evening gathering of heavy clouds and feeling the bite of a northeast wind as you pile stuff into the car on the way to a duck camp. Wilderness is knowing for sure that the pheasant in your corn patch is absolutely as wild as, or maybe wilder than, its cousins that are still roaming China. Wilderness is the feeling that closes your throat and starts a dampness around the eyes when some big-going Walker or Redbone starts telling you in his ancient language that he's running fox.
Wilderness is that yearning we always get at the calling of flight birds; it's the feeling of incredible curiosity watching the aimless wanderings of a grizzly or the salmon in his death-searching climbing of almost impassable cascades. There we stand, the wilderness-yearning in us wanting to turn us as wild as they are--or maybe back again to as wild as we ourselves once were.
Wilderness is that odd feeling that comes over us, every once in a while, in some quiet spot: a sensation of sureness, of strength, of an almost-forgotten feeling that we could really cope--we could have made it--anytime, anyplace. We could have walked right along with Boone or Clark. We could have stalked the buffalo and then slept in the robe around the same fire with Bridger or Carson--because we can feel and understand the very same things they did.
Wilderness is understanding something in your guts that you can't analyze with your mind; it's understanding the need to hear the wolf call one more time--and answering him with a message from your heart carried by moonlight: "I am your brother."
Wilderness is the strange comfort that comes on us when we're bone cold, and uncertain at the coming of darkness, and then tracking the heavens for the security of the North Star; we think and comfort ourselves that this knowledge is one that we are, right now, sharing with a thousand years of mankind--a common tracking to whatever place it was called home.
I get absolutely starved for quiet, the smell of evergreens, the footfalls and chatter of wild things, the feel of a clean wind. I used to say that I like to go away and solve things, but that's not really so; in truth, I go away to feel...to question.
When I was small I had, like all youngsters, a greater awe or wonder brought on by my little wildernesses--like my three-hour trapline or hunting a bee-tree for Grandpa. I would try to imagine what things that giant Norway spruce had seen. What Indian feet had leapt the brook on the very same stones I used to cross? Who was the very first to walk the path that led to the spring that birthed the brook?
Small thoughts, no doubt, but as universal in their narrow compass as the wonder that drove Columbus and Hudson and the countless others, both known and lost, to take the somewhat larger travels than a schoolboy trapline or lining a honeybee.
The same instincts, no matter the degree of venture, still haunt me now. Does it really matter that our footsteps follow where the earlier adventurer went alone and first? Not if we close our eyes and let those intruding facts and long-lost faces turn invisible and disappear--so we can climb up into our wilderness and see only what we want or only what we need to see.
This story originally appeared in Hill Country by Gene Hill. Copyright (c)1974-78 Gene A. Hill. All rights reserved.