Land of the Free

By Hillary Rosner, 6-10-05

I just returned from eastern Oklahoma, not far from Muskogee. My boyfriend's mother grew up there, and his aunt and uncle spent six years building a house on a steep forested hillside overlooking Tenkiller Lake--a manmade lake fed by the Illinois River. A rocky path traversed by tiny frogs and blue-tailed lizards leads to a secluded beach on a quiet cove away from the hubbub of power boats and jet skis.

The lake is just as it should be (well, except for the small fact of its being technically fake)--cool enough to revive you from the sticky Oklahoma heat, yet without the chill of northern or high-mountain lakes. The water is green and slightly murky, filled with snapping turtles and leeches and fish that nibble at your legs if you stand in the shallows in the evening. Lush trees line the slopes of the undeveloped cove, and the sound of doves and whippoorwills fills the air; with your back to the main waterway and its surrounding houses, you can almost imagine you're tucked away in the tropics.

But things aren't exactly as they seem. Three days into my tranquil Okie getaway, I was reminded of this in an email from an editor at the New York Times. "so i'm listening to npr on tuesday morning," he wrote, "and there's a feature about chicken farm runoff from arkansas polluting...tenkiller lake. it used to be so clear you could scuba dive in it, they said. now it's filled with phosphorous." Enjoy your vacation.

Not that I needed reminding that things are often not what they seem. We live in a nation--or perhaps just a time--of empty rhetoric, where people rarely look beyond the symbol to the contradictions that likely lie beneath. (Like those "Support Our Troops" yellow-ribbon bumper stickers that are made in China.)

Take wild horses, long a symbol of freedom, of "wild and free"--that "American dream-phrase," as essayist and nature prophet Gary Snyder calls it. And yet the U.S. Congress, guardian of freedom, recently passed legislation allowing wild horses to be rounded up and sold for slaughter. On our way home we stopped at a BLM-run wild horse refuge, on the plains just south of Bartlesville, and I couldn't help but wonder how wild and free those mustangs really were as they grazed and frolicked on the tallgrass prairie.

The same holds for wilderness. Just because it looks like wilderness and sounds like wilderness doesn't mean it's wilderness. You might feel miles from anywhere and surrounded by natural processes in a secluded cove, but you're kidding yourself. Or are you? If wilderness is a cultural construct, then maybe it's entirely subjective; wilderness could just be a wooded area where you can't see the road. Or the high-plains grassland filled with wild horses, separated by a wire fence from the neighboring ranch and its herd of domesticated horses. Or the expanse of tundra broken only by a massive oil pipeline. If we call it wilderness, isn't it wilderness? And in any case, will anyone stop to wonder what's behind the term?

In his essay collection The Practice of the Wild, Snyder writes that wilderness is "a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order." But what if they adapt that order to live in a less wild place? At the folksy family resort where we stayed in Oklahoma--a camp-like retreat off the highway, complete with pool, tennis court, arcade, and 33-foot buffet--a swallow had built her nest under the roof of the porch of one of the cabins. We watched her dutifully feed her babies throughout the week, and marveled at how quickly they grew from tiny balls of fuzz to feathered birds ready to fledge any day.

Surely the swallows were wild. But was it wilderness? Do little islands in the midst of civilization constitute wilderness? Did the presence of something wild turn that little corner of porch roof into a slice of wilderness?

Snyder (in his essay "The Etiquette of Freedom") writes of "wholeness" as a characteristic of wilderness--as in the completeness of a fully functioning ecosystem. While "nature" might refer to all of the physical world, not all that is natural is wild. New York City and Tokyo, he writes, are natural but not wild: "They do not deviate from the laws of nature, but they are habitat so exclusive in the matter of who and what they give shelter to, and so intolerant of other creatures, as to be truly odd."

One meaning of "wilderness" that Snyder cites--and my personal favorite--is "a place of danger and difficulty: where you take your own chances, depend on your own skills, and do not count on rescue." Surely, then, the woods surrounding my boyfriend's family's home are not wilderness--at least not for humans. You're never far from civilization and help, no matter how remote it might feel.

But while it's not wilderness from my perspective, it might very well be from the point of view of the animals--deer, possum, frogs--that live in those forested hills, that take their own chances and depend on their own skills. So too for the swallows at the Fin and Feather Resort, whose wilderness involves ball-throwing, tricycle-riding kids who come to stay in the cabin that holds their nest. It's all a matter of perspective, right?

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