Got Wildness? by Bonner McAllester

Have you ever heard of Christopher Manes? He’s written a book called Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization. I recently read an interview with him in which he refers to that famous quote from Henry David Thoreau, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”

I used to think that what Thoreau meant by this was wild nature, the wilderness, the pure and “untrammeled” (to quote the 1964 Wilderness Act) landscape you can still find in some places. I figured we do need it for lots of reasons and though I wasn’t sure exactly how it could preserve the rest of the world, I was willing to hope, to intuit.

Now I’ve read Christopher Manes who says “…when we talk about wildness, we should consider not only the wildness of nature and the wonderful blossoming and efflorescing of life that goes on around us, but also the wildness Thoreau speaks about in our own lives, the independence, freedom, and deeper emotional participation that our overwrought and regimented culture can’t tolerate.”

So I went to Thoreau myself and read his essay Walking. I discovered that when he speaks of “wildness” he means the whole nine yards, inside and out. There are the swamps and the wild weather but there is also the wildness within each of us, the way we are not separate from Nature (Thoreau uses a capital N) but a part of it all. This begins to feel like That Which Cannot Be Spoken, or Written, but because we are human we do keep on trying. We also keep hungering for the wild, any way we can get more of it. As scrubbed and presentable as we are, as fenced and trimmed and regulated as our lifestyles have become, the wild within is like some compass needle always pulling us to Thoreau’s Nature. Even when we don’t have the right jacket or footgear, even when we are afraid we could get stomped by a moose or bit by a tick, we still veer toward Nature as well as we know how.

This can take the form of buying the automobile or even the cigarette that is advertised to us in a glorious untrammeled setting, or wearing the big hiking boots to walk across campus to science class (this was me), keeping our fantasy options open for a wild mountain to spring up next to the library.

Loch Wade, writing in the April/May 2008 issue of The Canyon Country Zephyr leads us through the etymology of “Wilderness.” (In “Do We Really Need Wilderness?” pp. 18-21.) He says it is a combination of two ancient Germanic words meaning “the wild deer place,” which was a place to which anti-social types were driven off to live. It was wild humans, as much as wild deer who could be found in this place. Wade says our word “wild” has the same origin as “wool” which means untamed and unshorn. The same root, “ghwelt” and its cognate “ghwer” give us the Latin ferus and our words “feral,” “fierce” and “ferocious.”

The makers of language found the untamed land beyond the city limits to be dangerous. Europeans moving west across the Atlantic felt the same way, and yet they came and they came, just the way college students will always go up mountains in their big boots. What draws us? We build the boxes and move into them, go down the road in them, thinking this is what we want. But something always calls to us and is reinforced by each wild moment we get, every time we lose track of ourselves in our clothes and our boxes. It could happen in a storm, right in the back yard. It could happen on a beach, under a windy sky with salt spray in the air. It could even happen in a living room chair, with a cat on a lap and the feel of that Other—fabulous pelt, raucous purr, deadly claws, lithe body just an instant from the hunt.

We may be fitted into boxes, but we’ve all had our moments. We know we still have our senses, and I don’t mean our civilized ones. These are the ones Thoreau meant, I now realize. These will be the preservation of the world because these are our strength and our powerful connection to the world, outside the city limits with the other wild things. It would be best for us to leave the city, but we don’t really have to, as long as we can still hear the moose within. Or the dragonfly, the bat, the ring-necked snake.





This essay originally appeared in the July 2008 issue of The Monterey News.