Wilderness Re-reconsidered

This week I went hiking with my friend Sarah, who is a bonafide outdoorswoman, a veteran of the Appalachian Trial. I actually had the privilege of picking her up at the end of the trail, near the foot of Mt. Ktaadn in Baxter State park, many years ago. I remember thinking that the experience had changed her: she looked lean and impossibly muscular, and also seemed calmer, quieter, less scattered.

Anyway, Sarah was in town, and I had a couple of free hours, and we decided to hike Bald Mountain. In once sense, it was plainly not a solitary walk. In another, it was the most solitary I’ve been in months. As we neared the summit we could see mountains in all directions -- our own Mt. Blue the closest of a series of frozen waves that receded, green to dark and then lighter blue against the sky. We stopped there and were quiet for a while, and the silence around us was a kind of small electric shock that went on until we spoke. There was just the wind, the bare rock face of the mountain, shrinking, like all the mountains of the east, which are among the oldest in the world, at its mountain pace. No meaning, no words, just the mountain being a mountain and a world being a world, no need for us, no need for interpretation. After a while Sarah said, “Wow – no road noise, You hardly ever get that anymore.” We could see road, snaking down along the foot of the mountain, obscured in places, but we couldn’t hear it.

Berry, like Cronon, is suspicious of this experience, the awe we feel at the top of a mountain, the vastness of the landscape around us – he is more interested in the way the human and the natural world can live together. Cronon’s critique of “Wilderness,”  which Berry shares, runs like this:

This, then, is the central paradox: wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural…To the extent that we celebrate wilderness as the measure with which we judge civilization, we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles. We thereby leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like.

And, yes, I think, yes . As the ecocritic John  Elder  insists, the best hope for our future as a species lies in finding that “larger grammar in which the words culture and wilderness may both be spoken.”

And yet. Isn’t there something essentially salutary in making the effort, at least on occasion, not to speak the word culture? To try to stop hearing, at least for a moment, its endless vibrating ringtone -- even if it such efforts are doomed to failure (the road, afterall, was still there, and would have been even if I couldn’t see it)? Is the feeling of what I can only call spiritual health that I have at the top of a mountain really only cultural conditioning, as Cronon suggests, or does it go deeper? I certainly can remember having it as a child, when my conditioning was presumably much less complete: this sudden and overwhelming sense that who I thought I was, my “identity” -- comprised as it was and is of petty achievements and failures, complicated relationships, all the typical human stuff – was, in the larger scheme of things, wonderfully and terrifyingly irrelevant to the wild, slow receding of the mountains and the wild, slow turning of the earth.