"Wilderness is Home"

Photo by Christina Kohler

In class the other day, a young woman whose name I do not recall said something that struck me: "Wilderness is home." We were discussing our responses to our professor's prompt, "How do you define wilderness?" This particular student associated the feeling of wilderness with the feeling of home.

Living in the wild can really bemuse your conception of home. There you are, lying on the cold Earth, without a roof over your head, without a mattress to sleep on. Yet, you've never felt a greater sense of belonging. There is something terrifying and also comforting about living wildly and freely. 

But this notion of wildness does not necessitate ditching society for the woods. We don't all have to be Thoreau-level deliberate. In fact, I think it is more of a challenge to seek the wild in a concrete forest. 

Anyway, I thought I would share my definition of wilderness, in hopes that it will help you feel more at home if you find shelter in the shelterless, like my classmate. 

The Wilderness Spirit

            The wild yields something sacred and unknown:  a secret that cannot be quantified by ecologists and geologists.  In the wilderness, intangible feelings and unanswerable questions whisper through forest winds and chant in our thoughts.  Wilderness refers to unexplored territory:  a terra incognita in the land and in our minds.  As Roderick Frederick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind conveys, wilderness is a state of being lost. 

Paradoxically, the wild ravages with harsh danger while simultaneously maintaining nonreplicable beauty.  I have experienced wilderness in both contexts on several occasions.  At one point last summer, as I made my way around a seemingly endless set of narrow switch-backs, I found myself in a wax with the natural world.  It was the twentieth mile that day and I dragged my feet and my pack along like a pudding-footed horse.  My head fell back and my disgruntled shriek shivered through the treetops. The forest trapped me on the trail and treed me in my thoughts.  In this way, wilderness is being lost, tired, and alone. The very same summer, I watched my friend burst into cathartic tears upon seeing an untamed elephant in the wild for the first time.  These moments remind us of the opportunity for wild discoveries, within and without.

Wilderness exists in all of us constantly, regardless of the landscape that we inhabit. Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost explains that wild moments live in the city.  The wild dances through the sold-out concerts that we sneak into, it speaks in the cab ride conversations and in the inconclusive academese coffee shop chatter, it slowly sinks with our descending bodies while bridge jumping into the Huron.  The wild can be enthralling, painful, mysterious, and intimidating.  It can bring us to tears and it can fill us with excitement.  The wilderness in our hearts unleashes during the wildest moments of our lives—when we are lost and when we must look within ourselves to be found.