Wilderness or lack thereof

Yesterday was one of those annoying rainy days. Good rainy days, in my opinion, are just rainy the whole day through – maybe not pouring rain, but at least a good pestering drizzle from (ideally) before you wake up until after darkness falls. On good rainy days – and keep in mind yesterday was a Saturday – you can sleep in without feeling guilty. Even the dog doesn’t really want to go out; sure, she may need to relieve herself, but who relishes the prospect of pissing and shitting while you’re getting cold and damp in the outdoors, while your feet are sinking into a coalescing mud? No one, not even a good dog. So she’s willing to hold it in until it’s a necessity, versus her normal desire on a sunny day to get up immediately and enjoy all there is about the world, and also have a good BM while she’s at it. No, yesterday was a lousy rainy day. The dog and I got up early, had a forty minute walk and then it started a half-hearted drizzle and we made it back to the house without too much of a soaking. Then it rained for six hours – from 8am to 2pm – and then stopped. While it was raining it was a downpour, but it stopped quickly.

It stopped in midafternoon, however. Because it had rained cats and dogs, though, you didn’t want to go out – nor did the dog; I’m not just saying this as a wimpy postmodern, postnaturalistic man. The ground took awhile to absorb the 3 or 4 centimetres of rain, and because it is still August, the mosquitoes immediately pounced on the newly non-rainy air. But the dog wanted to exercise, and I did too, so we went out, and got bit, and got our shoes and paws thoroughly soaked, and were miserable. When we got back, though, the air still damp and humid, it was only 3pm, and we both knew we’d need to go back out. She’d need another walk, and I’d want another one too, because we’re programmed to want to move around, and we don’t live in a building with an exercise area (having thankfully left the Futurist absurdico monument in Georgia several months prior).

But when we both woke up at 6am this morning, the air had changed – the front had moved through. It was maybe 15 or 16C, and still heavy with fog, but the wind was starting – you could hear the trees – and the wind was from the west. The west! And breaking towards the northwest! Even the mosquitoes – in the early morning they are just as vicious as they are before dusk – were aware that the quarter had shifted. An autumnal breeze was coming, and by the time we had walked a mile or so, it was in full swing. Even two hours after sunrise, the air was still an almost deep space blue, and the low cumulus clouds scudding across the sky were intensely white on one side but dark grey on the other, the angle of the late August sun creating shadows as if it were November.

We walked along a badly laid out sidewalk through the neighborhood. I live in a strangely in-between spot in Scarborough called Blue Point. Fifty years ago, there were a few streets of small homes for lobstermen, fishermen, and farmers, a village really with a one-room school house, a church, and a couple of shops and two clam shacks serving the summer people driving through on their way to the beach. Now farms are gone, either grown over with birch forest or developed into a series of developments distinguished in time by their design features; the school is now built out but only for three early grades; and the clam shacks are now competing tourist empires.

There’s still the forests and the marsh, though, and on a day like today, with the wind strong and banking out of the northwest, the sun also strong and easily defeating the puffy white clouds being pushed out to the Atlantic, the air just warm enough in waning days of late August, there’s no way to resist getting outside. Well, almost – my son wanted to play Minecraft for most of the day – but the dog and I went out and explored. There are a few abandoned houses in the neighbourhood from the 50s and 60s, and plenty of overgrown fields and forests with enough loose ground to wander around in. We spent the better part of two hours before lunch poking around desolate houses, a forlorn tennis court, happy late season wild blueberry barrens, and then plunging into the forest, exploring non-trails and finding real trails, making our way down to the marsh, listening to the birds (which the dog loves) and the chipmunks and squirrels (not so much), me trying to keep her in sight through the underbrush more or less dense.

At one point we walked by a house – one of a complex which had been left to rot due to an extended probate battle which is the stuff of neighbourhood legend – and I noticed the front door was ajar. I looked around, needlessly, and the dog and I went inside. The kitchen and bathrooms were still intact, kind of – the plaster and lathing in the walls was falling apart – but with the exception of a few beds and mattresses, the proper furniture was gone. There were some books giving clues to the last occupation date – a roadmap with a copyright of 1998, a Dell computer handbook from the early 90s – and through the walls, there was evidence of creature comforts. Fox and squirrel and field mice creatures: piled tufts of shredded paper and plaster, tiny mounds of shell residue, tiny mounds of rodent poo, and interestingly, little spots where clearly many, many tiny creatures had urinated. Apparently rodents and lower mammals also prefer to have a fixed spot for their privies indoors: who knew.

We made it down to the marsh just at the crest of high tide. I took off my shoes and the mud was solid enough – it’s a high high tide right now given the lunar cycle – to walk up to my knees without sinking too much, and the dog waded up to her chest, the wind pushing the tide out with whitecaps in midchannel. The water and air being cold enough to not encourage more of a swim, we went back to the trail, walking up the hill through to the backyard of a friendly neighbor with a dog who immediately jumped out of her pen and tackled my tiny puppy dog, and as they rolled over one another, the neighbor came out, coffee in hand, and we talked about the state of the trails and the result of the prior day’s rainfall. She’s a school teacher and we compared notes on the upcoming intake of children into a Covid-19 social distanced class environment, but we also remarked on the dogs and the air and the breeze and the sky. We shared a mutual love of September through November – Mainers actually don’t live for summer, except to make money off the tourists; we live for autumn, when the bugs go away, the days get steadily shorter but the snow hasn’t arrived yet, and the harvest is at its finest, and also the tourists get the hell out.

This is where I grew up – a land of houses and forests and fields and marshes and tide pools, of birds and dogs and cats and foxes and deer, of people who lived as best they could while the people from away lurked around eating our lobster and clams and driving up the cost of gas and booze, and who lived much happier when the leaves turned color and the population dropped and the kids started inquiring about snow shoveling gigs for the winter.

It is not wilderness.

And that’s what has kept me off balance for a long time. I live in an environment which is, compared to many places I’ve lived, “wild”. Say compared to England. I’ve traveled a lot in Britain and I can say honestly that most of the Maine I grew up in is wilder, fundamentally, than any place in the British Isles. I’ve trekked and hiked hundreds of miles – indeed more than a hundred miles at a time – through Britain but you can never escape a sight of what feels like engineered nature. Whereas in Maine, even this close to the coast – and keep in mind that the neighborhood I live in was first settled three hundred and fifty years ago – the roots of humanity are so shallow that the feeling of non-human nature can recreate itself within a generation of our time. But it isn’t wilderness.

Wilderness is a construct, it’s a human thing. And it pains me to write this because I served on the board of an organization that treasures “wilderness” as a value worth preserving. But if I’m totally honest, wilderness is simply a human construct – like race, like class, like value, like power – and it has no meaning beyond our species. What is “wilderness” to us is “the world” to other creatures… and the human built environment is just part of that world. The fox and the birds on our walk today didn’t really care that there were abandoned houses and tennis courts; they saw those as really strange but still usable environments in a broader landscape of environments that have to be navigated as part of survival. The fact that there was fox scat in one of the abandoned garages showed that some family of foxes had seen this the building as a superior den to the hollowed out granite the dog and I also saw later in the walk. The creator of each – some family several decades ago in the one case, a glacier and a few millenia of erosion in the other – was irrelevant to Mr. Fox and Mrs. Fox. And if no humans had been anywhere, it would not have mattered to them.

Wilderness matters to us but when we think about that, we have to reflect on why that is, and candidly, I think when we do so, most of us come up blank. I don’t actually value wilderness as we define it. I do value the earth, and the non-built environment we find before and around the built environments we create. Today was point set match in that regard: every gust of wind, every goosebump raised by the cool air under my thick cotton sweater, the scents of the drying grass and bushes against the marsh and the animals so close, made me spin with joy. It was almost overwhelming at times: the sky with its blue and white and grey and nothing else reminded me of laying on the prairie in Alberta in late August, the leaves whooshing in a gust reminded me of lying on the dock on Lake Kezar at age 10 during a similar windstorm up the lake, the whitecaps whipping up the marsh just as they did to Lake Annecy as I realized my life was changing, and the sight of my dog leaping into a bush as it stirred in the breeze and releases the scent of prey, of quarry, of berries, of scat – forty five years of memories of fall in places near and far came swirling together today and made me both happy and melancholy and ecstatic (ecstasy not being happiness, not by a long shot), all at once.

But it wasn’t wilderness. All of that renewal, all of that ecstasy and happiness and the melancholy of lost summers and lost friends and memories was just being a part of the world that wasn’t built. That’s everywhere, though. Because there were other memories:

… of New York in autumn, when there was a particularly wretched Christo exhibition in Central Park, which was only redeemed by the weather – autumn, breezy – and the views of the park from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel

… of London, where the hellscape of Canary Wharf only redeems itself when the air clears out in late September or early October, when the first fall rains wash the soot out of the Thames Valley air and at the same time shut down the outdoor bars which otherwise fill the space with obnoxious bankers complaining about their lack of money

… of Chicago, walking down Michigan Avenue as the wind off the lake washes the city clean, springing with anticipation for whatever treasure is held within the Art Institute’s rotating galleries that month

… of a drive through Wyoming. Of a drive through Montana. Or Nevada. Or southern France. Or Switzerland.

The world we have constructed is both a monster, a hydra consuming ourselves, and a thing of beauty and wonder. But it is not wilderness and it never was. The calls to preserve places which are not yet fully objectified are important, but it’s not because wilderness is something other, something non-human. We can de-objectify any space we inhabit, just as easily as we can de-objectify the spaces we do inhabit. In fact, I’d argue, it’s easier to find the nature in the spaces we inhabit than in the spaces we don’t. The “wildernesses” – those places which we haven’t fully imprinted with our building and our stuff and our mental symbols – may be more threatened by our impulse to protect. By making them parks – by making them objects of human consideration – we develop them, maybe not as crudely as we develop a new power centre big box mall, but none the less absolutely as being products of humanity, not a shared space with foxes, and the marsh grass, and the decaying remnants of our own built failures.

In my lifetime, Maine has never been a wilderness, even as we try to imagine explorations into the deep woods which, if we’re candid with ourselves, were strip logged to within an inch of desertification within less then ten generations of those who now claim to preserve something pristine. But more than most places, it’s been a place which has been quiet, and reflective, and ignored enough, to oscillate between building and erosion, between human construction and the non-human environmental power of entropy. It’s a place where we can observe that pendulum in one lifetime, from growing up and clamouring over a century-old dam to swim in a pond that will decline into a bog, from ranging over mountains and granite that still remember their most recent contact with ice and morraine, to walking along a marsh beach barefoot with a dog who mostly wants to find the picnic area with the abandoned lobster shells of tourists who will only carry memories behind.

I’m looking to live in this world, not to carve out a wilderness separate from my home. It doesn’t make me value nature any less – in fact, I think it makes me realize how I am a part of nature even when I’m riding the DLR. Or walking down Park Avenue. Or watching a building fall apart. Or listening quietly to the trees, and the wind, and to a dog chasing a fox.

She won’t get him. She never does.