Wild Things

Lately, I’ve been walking at night. It’s cold, the streets are empty, and my thoughts abound. For the past few months I have been undergoing what I’ve half-jokingly dubbed my mid-life crisis. As a college senior, I’m bombarded with questions about the big “F.”

The future.

What will it look like? Where will I be? What will I be doing? Will I be happy? How can someone who enjoys writing make a living?

So, I make plans. I research. One day, I’m picking fruit in Australia. The next, I’m exploring Antarctica. The next, I’m hiking mountains in Montana.

I’m a poet, a dreamer, an environmentalist. I’m a teacher or a librarian or a journalist. I’m sleeping in a tent in the middle of nowhere or looking down the busy streets of the Big Apple.

I’m everywhere and everything, constantly in motion, constantly in flux.

This is me in the future, where all possibilities can be found.

But then, the phone rings, the clock ticks, the pot boils and I’m back in the ho-hum present again. Back to that place I so eagerly escape from.

As a writer, I live in a world of stories. I see beginnings, middles, and ends, all jumbled up in time and space and I want to snatch those narratives up into the palm of my hands, releasing them onto paper and the world.

So, I dwell in the past as much as the future. It’s the only way I can make sense of it all.

I can’t rightly claim Thoreau’s assertiveness when he exclaims that he lives for the present, but I try. I think that though he might not have acknowledged it himself, he was just as whimsical in this sense as any of us. I know this because he wanted contact. He wanted moments of time where he could stand in his bean field or by Walden Pond or in his log cabin and declare proudly: I am here. I am life. This moment is real and these clothes are dirty with the sweat of my labor and this pen is wet with the ink, which darts across the page at the command of this, my brain.

In much the same manner, I too, demand these life moments. Sometimes it’s camping out in the desert among sagebrush. Sometimes it’s that precise instance in the turning point of a movie when soft music plays and suddenly everything has a meaning that’s connected to my own life and humanity at the same time. Sometimes it’s visiting the grave of a grandmother I loved.

But Thoreau struggled with this concept of the present and I do too. In the introduction to his journal it reads, “Thoreau’s Journal had become a way of keeping time in two senses: it could vividly mark the rhythms of life and nature because its observations were always made in the present, and it could preserve such moments for later consideration” (11). We are writers and thinkers and people guided by their hearts. This means that we wish to bottle these moments and keep them forever. We want them readily at our sides so that when we need them most, we can simply unscrew the cap and breathe them in again. We retreat to these memories and live inside them, and we imagine our future bottled moments in our daydreams.

In Walden’s conclusion, Thoreau famously writes:

“I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six ears since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressionable by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now” (302).

I think this passage exemplifies the “wildness” that Cronon discusses. Thoreau asserts that people are too concerned with movement…to preoccupied with seeking travel as a means of fulfillment. He demonstrates how a simple pond can be so much more than a simple pond when examined with the right pair of eyes.

However, Thoreau does make a move. He moves from Concord to his small cabin and he fails to recognize this change being equally as important as any sailor going to sea or explorer heading over the mountains. Going into the woods suggests an acceptance of wildness. He confronts it. He makes contact.

But such contact can occur in any number of ways, because ultimately I think we must recognize Cronon’s words when he explains that wildness is a condition of the heart.