WILDERNESS
My earliest visions of wilderness were Biblical ones. Israeli tribes trekking through unforgiving rock and searing sands for decades in sandals and bare feet. Saints retreating to the driest, prickliest places on Earth to do penance, wilderness that always seemed to be the desert. So, wilderness was a barren, inhospitable, waterless waste where wanderers went thirsty, ate an unleavened concoction with no known ingredients, and locusts - a place you really did not want to go unless you had the fervent desire to emaciate yourself into sainthood. Years later an old desert rat’s description of the desert was right on when he told me, “It’ll either sting ya, stick ya, or bite ya.” Tru’ dat.
Speaking of which, let’s digress and talk about that rat for a minute. Actually, he was an old prospector. My theory was his brain had been baked from too many years under that brutal desert sun. However, that’s where the gold was, and he was sure he could find it. I can’t remember his name, but he knew damn well the Lost Dutchman gold mine was out there in the Superstition wilderness, and he knew just as damn well that he was gonna find it. Right this second, as I type, I’m looking at a piece of genuine gold ore he gave me. We’re not talking about a polished ingot here or a shiny nugget the size of your fingernail but a piece of craggy, nondescript rock with the girth of a grapefruit and a dirty, yellow-ish tinge. Still, holding such a thing is a rush. Wow. Shoots right up your arm.
He had a tendency to rant.
“My old lady, she said I was crazy. You ain’t gonna find jackshit. I told her I know what I know, and she said I know what I know, too. You ain’t gonna find jackshit. Like I said, I know what I know, and I kept at it tunnelin’ like a Goddamn mole. And you know what? Do you know what? Well, I’m gonna tell you what. One day I come home, and I says to her, 'Honey, hold out your right hand.' She did, and I counted one hundred one thousand dollar bills into the palm of that hand. After I said “one hundred” I looked at her and said, 'Honey, we're officially retired, and you can shut your big, wide open mouth.' I rest my case."
By the time I was Bar Mitzvah I knew there was more to the wilderness than the Bible’s version. There was and is nothing barren about it. Hebrew school was not having the influence on me that my parents had hoped. I have never come to think of the wilderness as a place of penance or a place of evil or danger, danger, yes, maybe, but not that much. I’d say I left the Biblical version behind, but it crops up yet again in the psalms wherein the psalmist says, “I lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help….” It ends with, “The sun will not harm you by day nor the moon by night.” Mind you, I’m not looking for anything supernatural. For me, the mountains have become my wilderness, but my idea of wilderness is Eden, just the opposite of barren and dangerous. It's a place of abundance. If you know what to look for it’s all there. To know how to look for what’s there and why it’s there is damn near impossible, but y’gotta try because that’s where the answers are. A droplet sits in the crease of a leaf by design. Trees communicate through their roots underground. Leaves twist specific ways to catch the wind. I think of what I’ve learned in my search - so much to add to my miscellaneous collection of random facts. It takes microscopic and telescopic observation to fully capture the entire creation. For millennia humans have learned how to live with what’s around them, but I’m not just talking of material things like food and shelter, clothing, tools. For me - for me - there is an abundance of peace, of belonging, a stripping away of time. Alert and relaxed are one and the same. I understand that I don’t need to understand. I’m not at all like Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown who goes into the forest only to discover all his neighbors are in league with the devil, the place where he loses his innocence. I don’t think of forests and woods as places filled with evil although so many people do, yet I am not such a romantic on this subject as to believe in absolute goodness. Of course, there are risks: you can break an ankle, get bitten by a rabid fox, catch poison ivy, get stuck in the mud - I know a guy who was bitten on the hand by a copperhead as he hopped over a log - but, like Shakespeare’s forest, I’d rather think of them as fanciful. Dragon flies as sprites and beetles as toy tanks. I once saw a kangaroo rat hop on two legs across my garden, and they’re not even supposed to be here. Still, fanciful or not, you don’t want to cross a moose or a bear. I don’t think of forests as grooming transgender wolves pretending to be grannies or witches who eat children. Bountiful is what they are. They are not awesome because they’re awesome (like the Rockies) but because they are so beautiful and dense with life, both body and soul.
My mountains have a certain mystery. Rip Van Winkle roamed them. Ichabod Crane made his home here, and the headless horseman terrorized the place. Johnny Appleseed transformed pies into patriotism. These are the Catskills, not the Rockies, and there is a big difference. The Rockies have been thrust out of the depths of the earth by tectonic forces. The Catskills were carved out and molded by glacial melt, rampaging water that sliced through tons of earth for millions of years. There is danger and excitement in the Rockies, that’s for sure - the wildlife, the geothermal activity, the musculature of the mountains, the breadth of it all - but there is no mystery there. Not for me. Problems to be solved are not mysteries. Excitement titillates but it is not mystery. Muscles are awesome, but they do not hold secrets. A ghost ship is mystery. Little men who get an addled fellow drunk and bowl ten pins in the mountains are mystery. A horseman without a head is mystery. When the mists rise from the pockets of these mountains I stand and wonder what if this were ten thousand years ago, and I were standing here, what would I be thinking? That there are trolls out there roasting rabbits for snacks? That demons are leaping free? That nameless little men in strange hats are dancing around a fire? Or would I simply look out over my valley and be happy I lived in such a place?
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