Wilderness is a State of Mind

By Hillary Rosner, 12-07-05

I just returned from two weeks in New York City, where “wild� refers to the crazy all-night party you went to last night. There are pockets of wildness in the city, like the High Line: the remnant sections of elevated rail tracks in downtown Manhattan that were abandoned decades ago and now teem with their own grassland ecosystem (and which are in the process, after a long campaign to save them, of being turned into a greenway). But otherwise New York City is a highly unnatural place, one that I can now—after three years of living elsewhere—see in a way I never could before. I love the city, and would consider moving back if I had $10 million in the bank to buy a few floors with a garden in a West Village brownstone. But it’s sort of sad there, nature-wise: lone trees planted in little fenced-off dirt islands amid the concrete, dogs quietly coveting them as they dutifully pee on lamp posts instead. (Some New Yorkers--like my parents, who walk in Central Park virtually every day and can tell you where all the secret outposts of nature there, like the decades-old wisteria vines that grow several inches thick, are--would certainly disagree.)

My dogs, one of whom was a city dweller before we moved out West, went crazy. They forgot how to walk on their leashes, lunging and barking at every passing dog. One even jumped up—twice—on women in fur coats. (My naughty sister patted him on the head and gave him a biscuit.) Their only release was in the dog runs, many of which are lined with pebbles that make running painful. And one morning we made the long walk to Central Park, where, miraculously, dogs can run free before 9 a.m. They had a blast, but the whole time I felt like I was doing something illegal, like at any moment a cop was going to appear and hand me a ticket.

So after two weeks trapped in the man-made landscape of New York, Boulder seems so wild and natural to me that even the fields at the local high school look almost like wilderness. The trailhead at the end of my street is like an exotic doorway to another world. The Front Range is the most populated and least wild part of Colorado, and to Westerners in parts of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and elsewhere, it’s about as wild as Brooklyn. But to me, now, the whole of Boulder is my personal wilderness.

Obviously, I know it’s not wilderness in a way that anyone else would recognize. But it really drives home for me the idea that wilderness is subjective. Whitman didn’t need the Grand Tetons; he only needed a little pond and some second-growth forest that obscured the nearest village. Guy Waterman, in Chip Brown’s Good Morning Midnight: Life and Death in the Wild, eschews massive-scale natural settings like Alaska for the relatively manageable mountains of New Hampshire. That landscape is all the wilderness he needs.

Which does not mean we don’t need places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or a corridor from Yellowstone to the Yukon. It just means that small wild places are just as important on a personal, if not ecological, level. What is “wild,� anyway, if not a subjective designation of something we can’t control?

On a side note, I just read that nature writer Ted Kerasote is working on a new book about about the shifting line between wildness and civilization, focusing on a feral dog who was his sometime companion in Wyoming. Sounds fascinating; can’t wait to read it.


[End of article]