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Whither Wildness?
by William Homestead

It was raining when I arrived at the trailhead in Gorham, New Hampshire. My first thought had me waiting in the car for the rain to stop—sheltered, safe and removed—but with my second I was splashing through puddles while stinging droplets hit my face. I was soon jumping off large boulders, with 50 pounds of gear and Kraft macaroni and cheese on my back, and then landing with both feet together, leaving behind dual footprints on the muddy trail. My shorts and T-shirt were soaked, but carrying extra weight kept me warm, and I was becoming entranced by the rhythm of my steps and the curious smells of my new surroundings. The scent of pine was pungent; the wet, cool air conjuring up the palpable presence of growth and decay, the cycles of abundant life and death that civilized culture obsessively attempts to hide.

It was August 1988, and I was just beginning a 350-mile hike of the Appalachian Trail in New Hampshire and Maine. My previous hiking experiences were restricted to day hikes and overnights, and I hoped a lengthier adventure would expose me to deeper wilderness, shedding light on Thoreau’s enigmatic aphorism: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”

After three days of leaving daily cultural habits behind and discovering nature anew, I made my way into Maine and the most mountainous section of the more than 2100 miles of trail. I often hiked one peak after the next, covering little total ground. Although a mere twenty-eight years old, carrying fifty pounds up and then especially down the numerous slopes gave me stiff, achy knees. It could have been worse. I met a young hiker who stopped hiking because he was too sore. He lay in a trail shelter, huddled in a ball like an old tabby cat, barely able to move a paw.

But the effort it took to climb a mountain gave rewards. I focused all my physical and mental energy upon each step. When I reached a summit the faraway landscape rushed my senses, causing my awareness to expand outward into the vast terrain of open space. After two weeks of alternating between intense focus and expansive vistas, my perception became clear, acute, and receptive.

At one point, I became entranced by a small piece of moss I encountered along the trail. The sunlight danced upon it and I was dazzled by its bright, verdant green. I was so mesmerized by its beauty that I kneeled down, turning my head in all directions in search of someone with whom I might share my discovery. I was the only human around, but I did not feel alone; everything was alive with presence. I remained on my knees, as if encountering the divine, with a single thought: “My God, I’m losing it over a piece of moss.”

A few days later, I was sauntering along the trail with my head down. When I looked up I saw an immense creature with full antlers standing ten feet in front of me. I had never seen a moose before, and I was dumbstruck by its long tree-like legs and huge head and body. And those eyes. I never imagined such large and captivating eyes. I was entranced again, without fear, and lucky that the moose didn’t attack. But the danger of the situation never entered my awareness, and I sensed that it never entered the moose’s awareness that I was dangerous. I’m not sure how long we stood there—time was no longer a construct of work weeks and time cards—but I eventually moved off to the side and proceeded on my way, grinning, and then contemplating my encounter with this wild, other-than-human life form with whom I was somehow kin.

My hike ended in early September after ascending Mount Katahdin in Baxter State Park. My thirty days on the Appalachian Trail hardly represents the longest of wilderness trips. Many have gone on lengthier hikes, ascending death-defying peaks in the far wilder American West and numerous beautiful countries. Still, my month-long hike—with occasional town stops—took me away from the “civilized” world. Or did it? One of the lessons from the trip was that there was no getting away. The mountain vistas occasionally included clearcuts off in the distance, and during one of my town stops I saw a weather report that included an acid rain index.

I also carried $1000 worth of camping technology on my back, and brought along a Walkman and a few tapes for occasional musical interludes. Shutting out the sounds and silence of nature is un-wild-like behavior, but like my moss and moose experiences, dancing on the top of mountains while listening to the bright sounds of Pat Metheny also induced peak moments of freedom and joy.

*

In Henry Thoreau, biographer Robert D. Richardson, Jr. states that Thoreau made two memorable trips to Maine, discovering an untrammeled wilderness of uncut forests, lakes without cabins, and undammed streams in the northern portion of the state. His experience of nature in Concord was far more pastoral. His cabin at Walden pond was only one and a quarter miles from town, and Concord itself was a mix of farms and burgeoning industry, a mere sixteen miles from the expanding city of Boston. Two-thirds of New England, excluding Maine, was cleared land by 1837. Industrialization was creeping forward, displacing nature’s web with an interconnected web of railroads. Concord was a pleasant place to explore, filled with pastures, meadows, swamps, and woodlands of six to ten acres each, but Thoreau wrote in his journal that it was impossible to walk in the woods during the day without hearing the chopping of an axe. And he could see railroad tracks from his cabin, providing a constant reminder of a world transformed by the dictates of man.

Thoreau climbed Mount Katahdin long before hikers with Gore-Tex boots, Helly-Tech rain jackets, and who-knows-what-tech thermal socks and underwear had reached its summit. To his knowledge, only two or three other parties had made the excursion previous to his own, and what he experienced on the rocky peak permanently altered his vision of the natural world. The ruggedness of the terrain confronted him with indifferent nature, open to death and life, where humans are not warmly welcomed. The majestic Katahdin widened his view of nature to include darkness, primitive power, and awe-filled wildness, going beyond his previous understanding of nature as harmonious and benevolent. His response, in The Maine Woods, was a euphoric howl: “What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come into contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?”

I did not experience the wildness that Thoreau encountered. The marked and well-worn trail up Katahdin even had metal steps to help hikers maneuver over the rockiest terrain. Still, I had transformative experiences with the mountains, moss, and moose, discovering expansiveness, timelessness, deep connections and radical otherness. And I questioned my habitual life, eventually discovering a calling to teach and write about environmental ethics. But were my experiences wild enough? Certainly my experiences on the trail were compromised by culture and technology. After all, during a quick town stop in Caratunk, Maine, I ran into a general store, bought a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch ice cream, and then kept hiking while I shoveled the sugary mixture into my mouth with a plastic spoon. 

*

I’ll never forget one of the hikers I met on the trail. He was a fifty-year-old vice president of a bank who had been out in the wilderness for over four months (with periodic town stops). I asked him what he was going to do once the trip was over. He responded in a serious tone that he was going to start getting rid of stuff because “you just don’t need it.” Apparently months of carrying everything he needed on his back had cured him of his addiction to over-consumption.

But not all my meetings with fellow hikers were so profound. I stopped hiking early on my fourth day out, just shy of the Mahoosic Notch, a half-mile rocky gorge that many consider the most treacherous section of the trail. It was around five o’clock when events took a strange turn. I thought I was going to have the trail shelter to myself, but then an Outward Bound counselor arrived ahead of a group of eight urban-dwelling teenagers. She immediately sat down next to me, claiming that she was desperate for some adult conversation. It seems that one of the kids had stolen their collective lunch, leading to a lengthy afternoon powwow.

While we were chatting, two army-fatigued, non-English-speaking Italians strolled into camp and attempted to ask for directions. Then a dazed, sixty-or-so-year-old gentleman hobbled in from the Notch, proclaiming that he was the oldest of a church group of six, “two ministers and the rest regular folk.” Into this mix entered an American soldier, who informed us that he was on joint maneuvers with the Italians—a kind of military exchange program—and he quickly led them off amid smiling goodbyes. Not long after they left, more Outward Bound groups appeared filled with teenagers out in the woods for the first time.

The hobbled gentleman struggled to prime a camp stove he insisted he knew how to operate. I tried to help, but he refused. He did need a match, which I gave him, but I became alarmed when he placed the stove inside the shelter. I suggested that it might be better to light the stove on the ground, as far away from me as possible, since it reeked with the smell of fuel. He dutifully placed it on the ground and put a lit match to its base—two-foot flames shot straight up, knocking him on his ass. Meanwhile, the entire troop of Italian and American soldiers marched through camp with plugged rifles, the Outward Bound gang complained about the outhouse, and a large, long-legged Jackrabbit hopped up to the base of camp, causing one of the ministers to scare it away with a camera attached to a foot-long zoom lens. I wondered if I had been transported inside the pages of freakish fairy tale. But the older gentleman brought me back to reality when he began cooking his food with bluish-white flames shooting up the sides of the pot and circling over the lid. The Outward Bound instructor got her burn kit ready just in case.

*

Thoreau knew that he was not braving deep wilderness at his Walden cabin, but conducting an experiment in simplicity and self-reliance. He moved to Walden Pond to confront the vital facts of life, write, and avoid finding at his death that he had not really lived. Thoreau wrote about transformation, aided by the glory and grace of the natural world, because he knew that the sanity of the burgeoning industrialized world would depend upon it. His experience of wildness atop Mount Katahdin did not undermine his Walden experience, it simply added a realization: there are limits to man’s control. We are part and parcel of nature, but not its lord and master. He now placed the nourishing and connecting aspects of nature within the context of humility. Nature’s power must be respected.

But what of the parade of humans who graced the Mahoosic Notch campsite? Do they also deserve respect? The psychological experience of wildness—discovered via the palpable presence of life and death, the expansive rewards of effort rather than comfort, encounters with nonhuman others marked by beauty, awe, and freedom, and the embrace of humility and respect for nature’s power—would go along way toward preserving the world, but how can the world be preserved when wildness is increasingly tamed?

Night eventually fell, and I lay in my sleeping bag with my muscles tired from the day’s hike but my brain wired from the evening’s show. It wasn’t a fairy tale. It was more like an absurdist drama by Ionesco or Beckett. I kept looking for a point to it all, to a lesson behind the gathering of this strange group. Who are we? Where are we? I hoped my fellow hikers just hadn’t been out in wild nature long enough to benefit from its experience.

I fell asleep waiting for God, or a piece of moss, or anything to explain it all to me. But now, all these years later, I wonder if the point is simply this: the experience of wildness has power because it is a transformative force, and it is this force, even when concealed by culture, technology, and human frailty and fallibility, that preserves the world we create. We may or may not find it on the Appalachian Trail, but it is there, and it is here, in our daily cultural lives. It is everywhere, when we practice a clear, acute, and receptive perception.