Recently we entertained at our house a good friend who is a dedicated outdoor enthusiast, one who is always urging wilderness upon others and dragging them off to remote corners of New England and southern Canada. When he talks about ‘the wilderness experience,’ it is as though it were something one could go out and get, like a marriage certificate, if only one were brave and hardy enough.
Unlike marriage, however, there is no official certification that one has indeed experienced wilderness. If anything, it is more like being in love, in that it is just as vague and protean a concept as that other romantic notion, and just as likely to strike unexpectedly and unsought for. Because we have littered the original unbroken wilderness with our artifacts and technology, we think, and increasingly lament, that we have destroyed it. But wilderness is where we find it, or rather, where it finds us. It remains, lurking beneath the veneer of civilization, and unless we are very careful to keep on our designated paths, it is liable to emerge and surround us with sudden and unmistakably wild contact.
One of the greatest losses of bearings I’ve ever experienced, for instance, was not in some trackless expanse of virgin forest, but in a mere patch of woods, less than two hundred feet across and only a few minutes’ walk from Orleans Center. It was several years ago, when I lived alone in a house that stood on a small hill on a side road just off Main Street. Next to the house was a remnant of scrubby woods that stretched down to the street, and whenever I walked into town, I cut through these woods on a single path that ran through them.
So open was the path and so small the woods that, when I used it, I barely thought of going through anything at all, let alone a wilderness. With the leaves off the trees, houses and power lines were clearly visible on all sides. The bare, spindly branches were scarcely a visual barrier, much less a physical one.
One evening, I think it was in the early spring of that year, I set off through the woods for the library uptown. Ordinarily I took a flashlight with me when I went out at night, but since there was still plenty of light to see by when I left, and since I only intended to check out a book and return, I didn’t bother to take one this time. At the library, however, I fell into a lengthy conversation with the librarian, and it was close to 10 PM when I set off for home.
I walked along under a kind of automatic pilot, my head full of distant thoughts, letting my feet follow the familiar route beneath the street lights. When I reached the woods I unconsciously turned off into them. I was not ten yards along the path, however, when I realized that I wasn’t on the path. There was enough light from stars and streetlights so that I could make out the black shapes of trees and buildings, but not enough to show me the way.
As I tried to proceed, the way got more and more impenetrable. I suddenly realized what a tricky little woods it was in a situation like this, because at night, without a light, its obstructions could not be seen. Hidden in the dark, the lower trunks of the pitch pines were spiked with the broken black stumps of dead branches, jabbing at my head. The invisible thorny tangles of bare blackberry vines and leafless catbriar caught at my sleeves and ensnared my legs, and the spindly trunks and twigs of the understory trees lashed out at me without warning.
Had it been summer, and the woods full and leafy, I probably would have been able to make out the open corridor of the path in the dim light. Instead, I felt like a bird in one of those darkened, experimental rooms, strung with wires, that are used to test night vision in owls and bats. I wandered helplessly in an invisible labyrinth of impediments. What by day had been a route so familiar and benign that I had ceased to notice it, was now all at once menacing and totally alien. Though I was certain I was less than a hundred feet from my house, I felt effectively marooned and blind. I suddenly realized that I did not know these woods at all. It was a face I had looked on for months and months, and yet because I had no cause to see it, I found I had not the crudest notion of its features.
Of course, I felt no real apprehension (though I was careful to keep a hand up in front of my eyes). I could, if necessary, have cried out for help and roused my sleepy, bewildered neighbors out of the dark houses that surrounded me. Or, like a bull, I could simply have lowered my head and blindly battered my way out of there, with probably no more consequences than some torn pants and superficial scratches. But I felt too foolish and embarrassed at being so helpless and lost in the midst of so little.
Eventually I stumbled on a large boulder, which I recognized from having examined its lichen one day, so that I had some idea of how lost I was, but not in what direction to go. I sat down on the rock, apparently stymied, caught in a dead-end tangle with no choice but to yell or plow out or sit there till dawn. In utter frustration I looked upward at the night sky – and saw the stars. There was the Big Dipper pointing its dependable pot at the North Star. I realized that I had gotten turned around and was heading directly away from the house. In years of night hiking all across the country, this was the only time I ever used the stars in earnest to tell me direction. Thanks to them, I reoriented myself and with little more trouble was shortly out of that patch of woods whose length I could cross in less than a minute by day, but in whose unsuspected depths I had been wandering in circles for over a quarter of an hour.
Wilderness is where you find it, or perhaps where you lose yourself.