Immersing ourselves in nature
like children do. Except that children
don’t do it anymore.
I wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil. Hardly anything gives me as much pleasure as walking in wild nature. I prefer that signs of civilization and human impact be minimal. I have little patience with cities and farms, factories and housing developments, shopping malls and manicured parks. I grow weary of human manipulation, control, and destruction. I covet Henry Thoreau’s “holy land.” According to Thoreau, walk means “saunter,” and saunter’s original meaning was to go to the “sainte terre,” or holy land, as in the Crusades. But for Thoreau—and it’s the same for me—the “holy land” is not the Middle East, but nature left to its own devices, and walking there is what I want to be doing. The replacement of wildness by human activity depresses me.
Whenever I have a chance to be in a wild place, I don’t want to be riding a horse or a bicycle. I don’t want to ski, or run, nor do I want a canoe, kayak, or rubber raft. I certainly don’t want an ATV, dirt bike, jeep, snowmobile, or one of those “personal watercrafts” that whine worse than mosquitoes around any sizable body of water in the summer. I want the freedom and independence of walking.
I would like to convey the joy and sublimity I experience when walking in wild nature. Perhaps it would help to describe a particular hike. Let me try telling you about a recent one in western Colorado, following a trail up
Lipan Wash and, from there, up to the crest of the Book Cliffs. It was a fairly ordinary hike in the overall scheme of things, which might make it a good example. I could tell you about Hidden Lake Peak, or Railroad Grade, or Mount Whitney, or the time the clouds unveiled the Grand Tetons just as we reached the summit of Table Mountain. But the spectacle in those examples was obvious. What I want you to understand is that the joy is not limited to selected occasions.
For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this holy land from the hands of the infidels.
Let me start with my expectations about the hike. I get most of my ideas for hikes from books and maps. This particular trail leads up one of the many canyons exiting from the Book Cliffs. It was said to encounter a thirty-foot dry waterfall where ropes have been installed to aid in climbing. Somewhere beyond the waterfall, the trail would hook back to the south to climb sloping rock layers to the crest of the Book Cliffs, where I anticipated wide-ranging views. As usual, I looked forward to the experience of having maps and words transform themselves into my own experiences and memories. Also, as usual, I assumed that a number of surprises would turn up along the way.
Getting to the trail requires a drive across the desert north of
Fruita, Colorado. The last few miles call for slow and careful driving, the dirt road being badly rutted and studded with rocks. As I moved closer to the Book Cliffs, the terrain became hillier. I looked forward to parking our van and getting out to walk. Sometimes, if I’
ve driven a longer distance, the sense of release on getting out and walking is even greater. I grow restless being in the vehicle, viewing my surroundings through the windshield. I long to get deeper into the desert, mountains, woods, or whatever. On this day, as soon as I put on my pack and started walking, I was in the presence of sagebrush,
greasewood, and other vegetation. Birds flitted away. I inspected the lay of the land and started down a ravine that led to
Lipan Wash. But the ravine was choked with boulders, so I chose an animal trail on the slope of the ravine. So far, there was nothing of special interest, but it was better than being in the van.
What happened next happens every time I leave the vehicle and start walking: an upwelling of sensations—of sounds and smells and textures—even of sights. I had seen things from the vehicle, but now I was among them and closer to them. Laurie and I have often had the experience of stopping along a road to look at wildflowers. I’
ve gotten pretty good over the years at windshield
botanizing, and we stop when I see something interesting or when the number or diversity of flowers becomes compelling. It never fails, on those occasions, that we find a great number of species while walking that we
hadn’t seen from the vehicle. (If I had better notes or a better memory, I could quantify the increase in perception between vehicle and footpath.)
Lipan Wash, when I reached it, was dry, and it wound through foothills below the Book Cliffs. I followed it upstream, enjoying the changing scenery as I walked. The wash followed a winding course. Sometimes, there were views out of it to nearby hills or to the Book Cliffs rising to the north. Other times, the walls closed in. In places, they were
shaly and almost black. Some people are good at sitting still on a clifftop, say, or beside a creek, and they wait for and watch whatever comes their way. I’m not good at that. I’m too restless. I want the scenery to change and would rather meet whatever comes along than wait for it. But I like the pace of walking because it not only allows the scenery to change, but does so slowly enough that I don’t miss much. Underfoot, where the clay of
Lipan Wash was dry and hard like concrete, I discovered multitudes of tiny craters left behind by raindrops that had splashed onto the clay during some summer rainstorm. The clay was fairly much moon-colored, and the little craters reminded me of nothing so much as photographs of the surface of the moon. There were ATV, dirt bike, and perhaps mountain bike tracks in the wash, and I wondered if any of those people had noticed the little craters.
When the canyon deepened significantly after I passed the face of the Book Cliffs, the scenery continued changing. The canyon walls were higher now, formed of multiple layers of tan and beige rock
interlayered with stony slopes, and the layers—as always with the Book Cliffs—were tilted upward from north to south—in other words, upwards behind me. Views up and down the canyon changed as I walked, and there continued to be details to watch for and pay attention to. In places, overhanging ledges that I walked beside were intricately eroded into miniature alcoves and windows.
As on many hikes, there were also disappointments. I had already noticed that the air was hazy, so the views from the top of the cliffs might be disappointing. In addition, the constant tracks of vehicles in the wash diminished the sense of wildness by reminding me of the noise of machines.
The gorge narrowed immediately below the waterfall, which descended in two tiers of polished grooves worn into the rock. The rope was there, as promised. I gave it a half-hearted try and retreated in order to follow a bypass trail that climbed past the falls. Views into the gorge below the falls were fairly impressive. Above the falls, the wash narrowed and became
brushier.
Eventually, the trail left the wash to the right and made a winding climb out of the canyon. The trail conformed to curves made by bikers—graceful, but telling of the movement of machines rather than people on foot. The trail climbed through a forest of junipers and a few
pinyon pines, and I soon noticed that many of the junipers were truly impressive. They were old trees, large for junipers, and they possessed character and dignity. They were also close together, and I loved the way the trail wound among them. Like the little raindrop craters, this was another of the hike’s
unexpected pleasures. I did, however, think of dirt bikes coming up or down the trail, shattering the silence that the trees seemed to deserve.
The trail soon adopted the general slope of the rock layers and climbed at a steady grade until it arrived at a jeep road along the crest of the book cliffs. Here were the views that I anticipated. The air was indeed hazy, and I noticed a thicker bank of haze or fog at the foot of the San Juan Mountains,
a hundred miles to the southeast. I followed the jeep road east until it climbed to a high point, and then turned around and walked west until the road ended. Along the way in both directions, I checked out various viewpoints. Despite the hazy air, the view of the Grand Valley was impressive. It seemed vast. My location was, in fact, near the northernmost point of a big sweeping curve made by the Book Cliffs, so that my views followed the Grand Valley southeast toward the San
Juans and southwest into Utah. The
Uncompahgre Plateau rose across the valley, and—still farther away—the tops of the La Sal Mountains were visible in Utah. Both left and right, the layered and indented face of the Book Cliffs swept away from me, with red color here and there brightening the
beiges and tans.
Once, where I left the jeep road to climb to a high point, I
couldn’t help but notice the way dirt bikers had
ridden to the high point. Where the jeep road ended to the west, additional vehicle tracks extended in various directions. It seemed as if the drivers or riders
couldn’t bear the thought of parking their vehicles and walking. It seemed pathetic. Was it too painful to walk? Too humiliating?
On my way back down the trail, scrutinizing the complicated topography behind the Book Cliffs, I was startled by two mountain bikers coming down the trail behind me. They were nice people, as mountain bikers almost always are. Even
ATVers and dirt bikers are nice people. I hate their machines, but, even when I expect to dislike the riders, I never do. A few minutes later, down in
Lipan Wash, I met the mountain bikers again. One of them had bent some part of his bicycle’s gears. In trying to straighten it, he needed a tool that was “long and skinny” to poke through the spokes, and I loaned him my walking stick. I don’t think it was actually helpful, but I rather liked the symbolism of using a walking stick to repair a bicycle.
I’
ve watched mountain bikers and tried to envy what they’re doing, but I can’t do it. I don’t have to load and unload bikes from a rack on my car. I certainly don’t need the trailers that many people use to tow their ATVs and dirt bikes. I hardly need special equipment at all. I hoist my pack on my back, grab my camera and walking stick, lock the van, and I’m on my way.
No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence, which are the capital in this profession. Once in motion, it’s true that I have to watch where I’m walking, but mountain bikers move faster than I do. It appears to me that they need to pay too much attention to where they’re going and too little to ancient junipers or the marks of raindrops preserved in hardened clay. As for the motorized machines, their noise alone is enough to repel me. The only use of one that I can remotely imagine is to ride along a bad road in order to get to a place where I can leave the racket behind and go for a walk.
I fear that walking is disappearing as a human activity. The pleasure of walking is too deeply
ingrained in my psyche for anything to discourage me from doing it, but sometimes I feel like an eccentric old man. No one else seems to be walking like I do. If I meet other people, most of them are mountain biking, horseback riding, or running. If they’re walking, they have a dog with them. I sometimes think that, if it weren’t for dogs,
nobody would walk.
Before 1800, says
Rebecca Solnit in her fascinating book,
Wanderlust, only paupers walked in public. “Travel itself was enormously difficult until the late eighteenth century in England. The roads were atrocious and plagued by highwaymen and their pedestrian equivalents, footpads” [
Solnit 2000: 83]. People who lived in castles, palaces, or mansions sometimes walked indoors for exercise. As early as the sixteenth century, “galleries—long narrow rooms like corridors, though often leading nowhere” [86], were a part of residential design. Gardens were also walked in for exercise, and
Solnit notes that “some kind of pleasure must have accrued there” [86]. Out in public, however, only necessity compelled people to walk. A vital precursor to walking for pleasure was the development of painting and poetry with nature or landscape as the subject matter. “Until the surroundings became important, the walk was just movement, not experience” [87]. The English poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were among the first to walk on roads, fells, and byways for pleasure. When English people were forced to do more of their traveling at home during the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, they “traveled by coach, then train.... And when they arrived, they walked. Originally, the walking seems to have been incidental, part of the process of moving around to find the best view. But by the turn of the century walking was a central part of some touristic ventures, and walking tours and mountain climbing were coming into being” [96]. People had always walked, says
Solnit, but walking now became a noun. For the first time, people “took a walk” or “went for a walk” [101].
There followed what
Solnit acknowledges as a “golden age” of walking, lasting from the late eighteenth century to about 1970. Guidebooks were published, and “[s]
ome of them—notably the work of the clergyman William
Gilpin—also [told] how to see…. A taste for landscape was a sign of refinement, and those wishing to become refined took instruction in landscape connoisseurship” [95].
Solnit thinks the golden age peaked around the turn of the twentieth century, when “North Americans and Europeans were as likely to make a date for a walk as for a drink or a meal, and walking clubs were flourishing” [249].
When Laurie and I first became seriously interested in hiking in the late 1960s, I remember reassuring myself that it was something we genuinely enjoyed doing. The possibility had occurred to me that we were simply following a fad, and I wanted to be sure that our interest ran deeper than that. Now, when I think back on those times, it’s hard to believe we ever thought of walking as a fad.
Solnit writes: “Perhaps 1970, when the U.S. Census showed that the majority of Americans were—for the first time in the history of any nation—suburban, is a good date for the golden age’s tombstone. Walking still covers the ground between cars and buildings and the short distances within the latter, but walking as a cultural activity, as pleasure, as travel, as a way of getting around, is fading, and with it goes an ancient and profound relationship between body, world, and imagination” [249-50].
In his book aptly titled
Last Child in the Woods, Richard
Louv [2005] laments the fact that young people these days watch television or play video games instead of walking or playing in the woods or other wild places. There are many reasons for this.
Schools seldom take kids on field trips to natural areas or offer courses about local flora and fauna. In the words of one educator interviewed by
Louv: “Even in the sciences, where nature could play such an important role, the students study nature in a dry, mechanized way. How does the bat sonar work, how does a tree grow, how do soil amenities help crops grow? Kids see nature as a lab experiment” [135]. Students learn about the environment, but more often about threats to the rain forest than about anything local and nearby. One educator says “nature has disappeared from the classroom, except for discussions of environmental catastrophe” [135]. In theory,
Louv says, students will learn that “they can help save the planet” and will “grow up to be responsible stewards of the earth” [133]. But it’s also possible that, just as children who are abused physically or sexually may turn off emotionally in order to protect themselves, children depressed by information about environmental damage might do the same thing. “My fear,” says the educator, “is that our environmentally correct curriculum ends up distancing children from, rather than connecting them with, the natural world’” [133-34].
Meanwhile, summer camps have evolved from places “where you camped, hiked in the woods, learned about plants and animals, or told firelight stories about ghosts or mountain lions” to places that that nowadays are just as likely to be “a weight-loss camp, or a computer camp” [2]. Organizations like Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, faced with rising concerns about liability and desiring to be “relevant” and “up-to-date,” devote proportionately less attention to nature-related programs. Girl Scouts in
Louv’s hometown offer programs on tolerance, tobacco prevention, golf, self-defense, and financial literacy [152]. Even parks increasingly have rules against camping, fishing, and other activities that might attract young people. Columbia, Missouri, where Laurie and I lived for three years, maintains several parks that are essentially woodlands left wild, but most city and suburban
parklands are devoted to manicured lawns and picnic areas or
playfields for organized sports. That’s certainly true in our current hometown of Grand Junction, Colorado.
Louv cites research showing that children, “when left to their own devices,” frequently choose the rougher edges of such parks for self-directed play [117].
“Ordinarily,” says
Louv, “the first physical entry point into nature is the backyard; next come adjacent natural areas, if we’re lucky enough to live near them” [169]. When I was a kid growing up in northwest Indiana, I walked north on a lightly traveled road and then across fields, through woods, and along the banks of Salt Creek. There were paths there that I followed and that other local kids also utilized. Who created those paths and who, besides us, kept them open, I have no idea. But, a few years ago, I went back there after an absence of forty years, and those paths
weren’t there any more. In the little town of Sweet Springs, Missouri, where my mother used to live, I once walked behind Wilbur and Katy Scott’s farm implement store to explore Davis Creek, which flows past the town. I thought I’d find paths there, kept open by the town’s young folks, but there were no paths. It was a lovely place—a potential asset for the little town—but it seemed that no one went there.
Louv: “[M]any parents who live next to woods, fields, canyons, and creeks say their children never play in those areas—either because of the parents’ or child’s fear of strangers, or because the kids are just not interested” [169].
“My unscientific hunch,” says
Louv, “is that since 1980, fear of strangers—and beyond that a generalized, unfocused fear—has come to outrank the fear of traffic” [124]. He quotes parents. One says: “Guns and drugs are the reasons that we say no to things that our kids would probably like to do. There are a lot of lunatics out there” [124]. Another: “Both of my kids have heard my preaching that the world is full of crazy people. And it is. There’s nuts running loose” [124]. It’s true, of course, that the fears are exaggerated. Louv: “In Los Angeles, coverage of violence overwhelmingly outstrips the incidents of violent crime—by a factor of as much as 30 to 1 in the case of murder” [127]. One exceptional woman whose children play in a canyon behind their house laughs about her fearful neighbors. “I haven’t seen a snake down there in twelve years,” she tells Louv, “but custodians kill them over at the middle school playground regularly” [130]. She goes on to relate a time when her youngest son stepped on a rusty nail, necessitating a trip to the emergency room and a tetanus shot. “But other than that,” she says, “my kids’ injuries and their friends’ injuries have occurred playing organized sports” [130]. Louv notes that the Environmental Protection Agency ranks indoor air pollution as a serious threat to health and that indoor play, along with fast food, is a factor contributing to an epidemic of childhood obesity. “So where is the greatest danger?” he asks. “Outdoors, in the fields and woods? Or on the couch in front of the TV?” [131]. Unfortunately, of course, the dangers, though exaggerated, are nonetheless real, and I would have a hard time telling a parent, “Oh, don’t worry about it!”
Additional obstacles in the way of children’s access to wild places include property owners’ fears of liability—Luov says it “ranks right behind the bogeyman” [235]—and the failure of parents to serve as role models. When parents neither enjoy time spent in wild nature nor demonstrate an appreciation of such activity, there’s little reason to expect that their children will. As for changes over time in the significance of property owners’ liability, it occurs to me that I don’t even know who owned the property where we walked when we were kids.
What do children lose when they lack contact with wild nature? Researchers have found that children with play areas dominated by
“natural settings” as opposed to
“play structures” demonstrate higher levels of language skills, creativity, and inventiveness [87]. By contrast, play areas with play structures are more likely to reward physical prowess. Such findings could be interpreted in two different ways: Either natural play areas encourage creativity, or children who are already creative choose natural play areas. Either way, as Louv notes, there’s a good argument for the provision of such areas. Other research reported by Louv indicates that children with more access to nature near their homes are less likely to suffer from behavioral conduct disorders, anxiety, and depression, and were also likely to score higher on measures of self-worth [49]. In another study, parents or guardians of children with attention disorders reported that outdoor activities tended to relieve their children’s symptoms, and that settings “with trees and grass” were especially helpful [104-05]. By contrast, indoor spaces or outdoor ones “devoid of greenery” left their children worse off. “By this line of thinking,” Louv concludes, “many children may benefit from medication, but the real disorder is less in the child than it is in the imposed, artificial environment” [108].
Young people participating in wilderness immersion programs along the lines of Outward Bound have reported to researchers that “just being in nature was more restorative than the physically challenging activities, such as rock climbing, for which such programs are mainly known” [102]. Evidently, “just being in nature” promotes “involuntary attention,” or “fascination,” as opposed to “directed attention,” which activities such as rock climbing require [102]. Directed attention can produce “directed-attention fatigue,” which is “marked by impulsive behavior, agitation, irritation, and inability to concentrate” [102]. Louv recalls that school programs in the arts have been shown to stimulate the learning of math and science, and wonders if it wouldn’t prove equally true that “nature education stimulates cognitive learning and reduces attention deficits” [137].
Of course, it’s not just children who fail to walk in wild nature. “Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail,” writes Bill Bryson, he and his companion “walked farther than the average American walks in a week…. On average the total walking of an American these days—that’s walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls—adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day” [Bryson 1998: 128]. Bryson says he knows a man who drives six hundred yards to work and “a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space” [129]. The energy expended in gyms instead of out on the trails is one of the hardest things for me to understand. Laurie tries to explain it to me, but I still don’t get it.
For the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours, but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.
Rebecca Solnit compares the use of gymnasium equipment to rowing, pumping water, or lifting bales, and wonders:
What exactly is the transformation in which machines now pump our water but we go to other machines to engage in the act of pumping, not for the sake of water, but for the sake of our bodies, bodies theoretically liberated by machine technology? … The body that used to have the status of a work animal now has the status of a pet: it does not provide real transport, as a horse might have; instead, the body is exercised as one might walk a dog [263].
Observing that prison treadmills used to produce power, but the new ones consume it by having two-horsepower engines, Solnit muses:
Once, a person might have hitched two horses to a carriage to go out into the world without walking; now she might plug in a two-horsepower motor to walk without going out into the world [265].
Even aside from those adults who avoid the natural world because they simply have no interest in it, many others remain too attached to their vehicles. The jeep, ATV, and dirt bike tracks on my hike, climbing to the highest viewpoints and pushing farther into the woods from the end of road, bespoke people who were reluctant to give up the vehicle. Indeed, “reluctant” is too mild a word. They seemed determined to
never do it—in perfect contrast to the relief I often feel when I can finally park the vehicle and begin walking. I guess there’s a challenge that some people love in getting a vehicle to attain remarkable places. We once encountered two young men with 4x4 pickups, one of which, with roaring engine, was trying to scale a rock ledge a few feet high. When the second young man walked over to meet us, I’m afraid I was disrespectful by asking, “Is there a point to that?” “Yes,” he replied brightly (undeterred by my disrespect). “It’s a challenge!” I resisted the impulse to walk up the ledge and demonstrate that it was no challenge at all.
I realize that machines can enable people with physical handicaps to see things and get to places that would otherwise be denied to them. I recently encountered a husband and wife on motorcycles in one of our local canyons, and, in talking with them, came to understand that both of them had knee problems. The husband was obviously a lover of the machines themselves, but his wife said at one point, “I hate these things,” and I’m pretty sure she meant the motorcycles. She had acquired one reluctantly (much to the delight of her husband) simply because she was tired of not being able to see the places that her husband was able to get to. I can sympathize with stories like that and would have a hard time demanding no motorized access anywhere. What burns me up is the insistence on motorized access “for the sake of people with handicaps” when you know bloody well that most people who want the access don’t need it for that reason. I’d be happy to tolerate use of the machines by people who need them if I could be relieved of the noise and the assault on the land perpetrated by those who don’t.
As annoying as the “off-road” machines can be, the automobile is probably the most common prison. Once upon a time, while traveling from Evergreen to Boulder, Colorado, with Laurie’s mother, we decided to drive through Rocky Mountain National Park, thinking Laurie’s mom might enjoy the ride. As it turned out, I don’t think it was much of a highlight for her, and it was positively depressing for me. Along Trail Ridge Road, many of the wildflowers had faded, and the weather was uncertain at best. Thunder rumbled and streaks of lightning were visible when we stopped near the road’s highest point. But the weather wasn’t the only problem. A Park Service exhibit pleaded with visitors to refrain from feeding the wildlife and showed pictures of an unhealthy coyote and of trash removed from the stomach of a deer. I had already been looking at the tundra as we drove and wishing I could be walking instead of driving. The exhibit reminded me of the level to which natural history interpretation fell when the parks had to deal with the clientele they got. Instead of edifying people anxious to learn about the natural world, the Park Service struggled to make them behave. More than that, I was depressed by the traffic, the cars and campers parked at the overlooks, the families snapping pictures, and the golden-mantled ground squirrels and Clark’s nutcrackers. Driving through a park like this, stopping with crowds of people at the overlooks, watching the panhandling wildlife, and passing up the hiking trails felt like being subjects in a sensory-deprivation experiment. It reminded me of Edward Abbey’s comment about writing for
National Geographic: it was like jerking off with your ski mitts on [Abbey 1994: 316]. What really depressed me was the thought that such an impoverished experience was all that many travelers ever had. I thought of William Saroyan’s comment about a motor trip in Michigan: that he was mostly in his car and “only incidentally in Michigan” [Jakle 1985: 191].
John Daniel, writing about the limits of sightseeing, tells of a trip with his mother and aunt by sightseeing bus in Yosemite. A man in front of them kept saying, “Look at that. Isn’t that a sight. Isn’t that a sight.” But, says Daniel, the man said it “listlessly, like a recorded message” [Daniel 1994: 37]. Daniel reflects that, years earlier, when he had climbed the rocks they were now looking at, the rocks weren’t “sights” but “presences” [37]. Daniel compares sightseers to television viewers, who “give up the active movements of awareness—glancing around, comparing, looking long or only briefly—to the autocratic screen, reducing themselves to mere absorbers of the presented image” [40]. In viewing a wild landscape, the sightseer misses “the unframed sensory texture of the thing itself—the scale of the trees, the pervasive stillness and the filtered ambient light, the dank smells of moss under their feet. They will miss the varying rhythms of their walking and the unconstrained movements of awareness in such a place” [41]. With Edward Abbey, Daniel says tourists need to get out of their cars: “We must take the time to enter the natural world, to engage it, not just run our eyes along its surfaces but to place ourselves among its things and weathers—to let it exert, at least for intervals in our lives, the ancient influences that once surrounded us and informed us” [44-45].
Daniel wants people to perceive nature “as a living system of which our human lives are part, on which our lives and all lives depend, and which places strict limits upon us even as it sustains us” [43]. He tells of learning from rattlesnakes that “the natural world did not exist entirely for my comfort and pleasure,” from thirst that water sets limits on the possibility of life, and from old-growth forests that healthy natural communities conserve and recycle their nutrients [44]. All of that sounds good, but I don’t find Daniel’s examples as persuasive as the rest of his essay. I want, as much as he does, to believe there’s a connection between walking in wild nature and becoming a committed ecologist, but I fear that the connection is considerably more complicated and tenuous than Daniel indicates. I can’t imagine any of us very often drawing ecological lessons so directly from our natural history experiences. On the other hand, I certainly do believe that walking in wild nature—in contrast to windshield sightseeing and mechanized recreation—creates
at least a possibility that “ancient influences” will “surround us” and “influence us.”
A major barrier to such influences is the frenzied quality of many people’s everyday lives, which compels them to use nature for solace or relief rather than inspiration. With only precious weekends to get out on the trails, people race their machines or push their own bodies to the limit as if releasing pent-up frustration. By the time they’ve let off enough steam to be able to let something come in, it’s time to go home and get ready for another work week. I struggle to be tolerant of the hikers, runners, skiers, mountain bikers, and others who remind me of John Ruskin’s mountaineers, of whom he said they were always doing things instead of letting beauty come to them [Noyce 1959: 216]. Just as Ruskin wanted people to “rid themselves of the habit of regarding mountains chiefly as places for gymnastic exercise” [216], I want them to slow down and pay attention. I want the world around them to be more important to them than their own bodies and what they’re capable of doing. But, of course, I’m not them, so I don’t really know what they’re getting out of their experiences. In reference to skiing, our nephew Matt once assured me that he and his friends often pause simply to enjoy the scenery, and I can appreciate that someone running for exercise might rather do it in a beautiful natural setting than on a cinder track or a city street. They might be absorbing as much from their surroundings as I am, although I find that hard to believe. In any case, I know their approach doesn’t work for me. I gave up cross-country skiing many years ago because the challenge of staying upright distracted too much of my attention from the glory of the winter woods around me.
Laurie and I don’t have children, so I don’t worry about our own kids’ involvement in nature. I read books like
Last Child in the Woods because I want young people in general to care about nature and wildness and the environment when they grow up. What is it that might get more kids back into the woods?
One thing that Louv makes it clear they need is adult role models: “The most effective way to connect our children to nature is to connect ourselves to nature…. If children sense genuine adult enthusiasm, they’ll want to emulate that interest—even if, when they’re teenagers, they pretend to lose it” [Louv 2005: 164]. He tells about walking with another man and their respective children. “What impressed me most about Jerry Schad was not his formidable knowledge but his infectious enthusiasm” [164]. Louv also recommends reading about nature with your children (for “environmental educators and activists repeatedly mention nature books as important childhood influences” [165]) and letting them show you their special places. If a child hasn’t discovered such places, he suggests “form[ing] a joint expedition into the small unknowns—not a forced march, but a mutual adventure” [172]. Louv reports taking his own sons “on hikes in the Cuyamaca mountain forests or the Anza-Borrego desert, and let[ting] them run ahead while I purposefully remained just at the edge of sight and sound” [176].
Parks with more natural areas, and perhaps also with some relaxation of the rules, would be another asset. My first thought in regard to children playing in the wild areas of parks, even in parks that are close to town, was that Laurie and I have rarely seen that happening. Oh, there have been a few exceptions—one that I remember being a kid that I met who wanted to show me his “secret place.” And did. But, overall, I realize that we might not see kids at play in wild parks simply because they don’t do it along the trails that we walk. More likely they do it away from areas of significant public use and, perhaps most likely, on edges of the park closest to their homes. I have wondered, in fact, if the worst rule for the sake of children’s play in natural settings isn’t the one that says “Stay on the Trail.”
Schools could do more to teach kids about their local environment, and to take them on field trips and involve them in outdoor research. Louv says a lot about such possibilities, and tells of teachers and students creating their own nature preserves adjacent to their schools. All of that seems like a good idea to me. We certainly didn’t have things like that when I was in school. And, given my predilections as a child, I would have been immensely interested. How I would have loved to learn about the beach ridges left behind following the ice ages around the southern tip of Lake Michigan! One of them accounted for the sand hills where we used to play, but I never knew that. Imagine being taken on a field trip to the dunes and being shown how Professor Cowles of the University of Chicago developed the idea of plant succession there! And why did I have to live forty more years before learning of the remarkable plant diversity in the Indiana dunes, including representatives—
which we could have gone and looked at—of northern, southern, eastern, and western plant species?
I do worry a little, though, that school programs, even ones focused on the local environment, can impose too much structure. We’ve already seen that too much “directed attention” can have negative results. I suspect that kids need time on their own in wild places. They need to be “fascinated,” and to follow their fascination. Moreover, I suspect that some of their exploring needs to be done alone. I know that I valued time by myself along Salt Creek just as much as I did the time that I spent with my friends. Louv includes two poignant quotes in his book: A twenty-year-old says, “It was when I was by myself that the environment meant the most to me. Nature was the one place where, when everything in my life was going bad, I could go and not have to deal with anyone else” [Louv 2005: 50]. And a man whose father was killed in an auto accident when he was fourteen says: “I would find solace by walking by myself to an area of coast oak woodland” [51]. Unfortunately, in these fearful years in which we now live, I can’t imagine parents letting children play alone in a wild place, but my own memories tell me what some of those kids are missing.
I suspect also that there might be great value in helping to link kids’ free exploration and “fascination” with the structured learning that they do in school. I know I would have benefited from that. I was sufficiently interested in wild stuff to have made a leaf collection, and to learn the names of the trees, even though I don’t think that was ever a school assignment. I also have a hazy memory of wandering off the school grounds at Crisman Elementary, into an area of sand hills and oak woods, and being late to class after recess. Knowing me, that must have been mortifying. I have no memory (may have repressed it) of what transpired between me and my teacher, but it’s a hundred percent certain that she didn’t say: “That’s wonderful. Such an experience in a place like that is an important part of your childhood.” As far as I know, schools are no better now than they were in my day at making connections between students’ personal encounters with nature and the larger lessons that science—and the arts and humanities—could teach. We don’t learn how to make those connections as kids, and we don’t know how make them as adults. Consequently, science remains a distant abstraction that doesn’t seem relevant in our everyday lives, and I’m afraid that nature seems the same way.
One day in Ithaca, New York, on a noontime walk shortly before I retired from the faculty of Cornell University, I made a bushwhacking climb out of the gorge of Cascadilla Creek. It was during a week when many parents were on campus, and, when I emerged on Hoy Road, I had a vision of some of the parents seeing me. If I had introduced myself as a faculty member and told them what I had been doing, it was a hundred percent certain that they wouldn’t say, “That’s wonderful. Such an experience in a place like that is an important part of your adulthood.”
I also have some reservations about gardens and pets, which Louv mentions in connection with getting kids closer to nature. He specifically cites the evidence that gardening and pet therapy are helpful for both children and the elderly in reducing illness, speeding up recovery, and lowering stress [44-46]. I have no doubt about the joys and the benefits of both gardens and pets, but I sometimes wonder what children—or anyone—learns from them. Neither gardens nor pets are the same as wild nature—they’re not “self-willed”—and, consequently, caring for them seems as likely to teach lessons about control as it does about respect and accommodation. The same can be true, I’m afraid, of science. Science can certainly be an outlet for curiosity and a source of wonder, but, ever since the days of Francis Bacon, it has also been a primary mechanism in the human effort to control nature. I would like for the principal lesson from renewed contact with wild nature to be that control is neither possible nor necessary, but I'm skeptical that pets, gardens, or science will be very good teachers of that.
One more thing that troubles me is the obvious need for many kids not just to play, but to play actively, in wild areas—to build dams, chop down trees, and to test themselves in various ways. “Being daredevils,” as Laurie calls it. I imagine that most kids would be bored on a hike with me, simply walking, looking, listening, and being as receptive as I can to whatever comes along. I remember building dams, and roads and tunnels in the sand. I climbed trees, and put fireflies and tadpoles in jars. I remember putting out a fire one time that some of us found smoldering through a woodland. I also remember worrying about the fireflies and tadpoles—thinking about how I’d feel trapped in a jar—and letting them go. I knew that other kids fished, but I didn’t want to. On at least one occasion, my dad took me along when he went hunting, but my heart was with the rabbits.
It seems to me that some kids never get past the damming and chopping down—the need to impose themselves on nature. In my case, what I think I retained from the damming, road-building, and fire-fighting was not the desire to dominate, but the
texture, the
feeling, the
intimacy with natural materials (rocks, water, sand, and critters) that we enjoyed then, but lack when we simply look, and tend to lose as we grow up. Some kids give up all interest in nature as they grow older. Their tone is captured in the comments of a ninth grader cited by Louv who says that, on a family vacation, he was initially impressed by the beauty and majesty of the Grand Canyon. “But after seeing the canyon from several different vantage points, I was ready to leave. Although the canyon was magnificent, I felt that I was not part of it—and without being part of it, it seemed little more than a giant hole in the ground” [Louv 2005: 68]. But, later on the same trip, the family visited Walnut Canyon, and the boy described the path, a rainstorm, and Indian caves where they sought shelter and discussed the ancient people who once lived there. “I finally felt that I was part of nature,” he concluded [69]. What I hear in this story is the development of a connection with nature that’s deeper than sightseeing, but different from the aggressiveness and control-orientation of chopping and damming. The critical difference, it seems to me, is that the boy’s family
went for a walk.
Our nephew Matt visited recently, and one day he and I walked to a coffeehouse about a mile away. When we headed down a path through the badlands behind our apartments, Matt commented that Laurie and I are like kids in the way we use networks of informal paths through the neighborhood. I regarded that as a compliment. We may be eccentric by some standards, but I will never change, nor do a feel a need to apologize.
Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. If children get better access to wild areas, I want to be able to go there, too. If a nature preserve is created at a local school, I’d like to be free to walk its trails. If liability laws are changed so that private landowners allow children to use their land, I’d like to be able to go there, too. Richard Louv says kids need adult role models who enjoy walking, or playing, in wild nature. Well, here I am! I volunteer! I will happily enjoy a wild area and, in the process, demonstrate to kids that adults can do what we’d like them to do. The problem is, of course, that their parents will probably call the police, thinking I’m a sexual pervert or child abductor. To be honest, that almost happened one time. We were visiting friends in Round Rock, Texas, and one day Jacky suggested that I might like to walk down the street to a strip of parkland along a creek in their neighborhood. I had just acquired a new camera and was anxious to try it out, so I had a good time poking along the creek looking for things to photograph. On my way back to the street, I met a man who asked if I was birdwatching. I said, “No, I have a new camera that I’m learning to use.” We talked a bit, and it turned out that he was the president of the local homeowners association, and someone had called him to report a strange man walking in the woods behind their house. I said I was visiting people who lived in the neighborhood and thought it was okay to walk there. He said, “What you’re doing is fine. That’s what the park is for,” and then added: “It’s a sad commentary on our times.”
It
is a sad commentary. It’s sad that people are so fearful, and it’s sad that there are reasons to be fearful. It’s also sad that the sight of a man walking in a woods in search of rocks, water, and juniper trees to photograph is so uncommon that it raises flags.
While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are attracted strongly to nature. In their relation to nature men appear to me lower than the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals.Sometimes I think of things that could be done to encourage walking— such as a new trail, better guidebooks, or sidewalks away from the traffic in town—but then I think, no, it’s not worth it because not enough people are interested. I guess I’ve been influenced by those arguments against wilderness protection that say it’s “elitist” to close an area to everything but walking. As if the simple act of putting one foot in front of another was elitist! But, on some of those occasions, I keep on thinking, and it occurs to me that walking
should be a privileged activity, and one deserving active encouragement even if it’s not popular. The mountain bikers, equestrians, and especially the mechanized recreators, who sometimes annoy me, will say it’s a free country and demand equal rights. I try to be tolerant and not to feel self-righteous. But two persistent facts remain true. The first is that our bubbles are not all the same size. I have this idea that each of us is surrounded by a bubble representing the area around us that we affect in terms of other people’s awareness of our presence. When I’m walking, I have a bigger bubble than a person who’s sitting still. But put me and a dirt biker in the same area, and the noise of his machine will leave no doubt that he’s there, while he may not be aware of my presence at all. If challenged, he might claim that we have equal rights to do what we want to do. I feel that way, too, sometimes, and tell myself that I have no right to resent his presence. But the two of us certainly don’t have equal effects on one another. The other persistent fact is that our society has an obesity problem, and walking is repeatedly said to be good exercise. Whenever the ugly thought percolates in my mind that ATV’ers ought to get off their butts and walk, well, there’s some truth to it. So, to be honest, yes, I do feel a bit self-righteous.
But I don’t walk for exercise, nor do I walk for virtuous reasons like conserving fossil fuels or reducing pollution. Those are useful by-products, but I walk simply because I like to walk. Indeed, I’m sometimes struck by the thought that walking in wild nature is what I’m
supposed to be doing. I’ve noticed that, whenever I do it, it never seems like a waste of time. (Unlike, for example, watching a basketball game on TV.) It never feels like I should have been doing something else, or that I could have made better use of my time. This idea frequently occurred to me during our last few months in Missouri before we moved to Grand Junction. We were living there to be close to my mother during her last few years, and, in many respects, they were not happy times. But Missouri was wonderful. Its woods, parks, prairies, cliffs, caves, national forests, natural bridges, and wildflowers sustained us. After my mother died and we made our decision to leave, I often found myself feeling half-guilty, as if I were being disloyal to Missouri which had been so good to us. It felt as if I had a responsibility to stay there and continue to explore its wild places and to learn from them.
The painter Walter Anderson (1903-1965) had a similar idea. Anderson lived in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and periodically rowed a dinky rowboat
sixteen miles into the Gulf of Mexico to Horn Island where he spent many days painting the island’s plants and wildlife. To be sure, Anderson was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, but it seems to me that, if he was mad, he was mad only in the way that many people have a hard time staying sane in a mad world. Anderson kept a log book, which reads as well as his paintings look. “Why does man live?” Anderson once wrote, and he answered: “To be the servant and slave of all the elements” [Sugg 1985: 28]. According to his biographer, Redding S. Sugg, Jr.: “The service which [Anderson] thought nature chiefly required of him was to help nature ‘realize’ itself. Nature, as he remarked in the log attributed to January 1961, ‘is only too glad to have assistance in establishing order’; she will reward the disciplined and attentive eye with ‘materializations.’ As Anderson saw it, the order in nature was merely potential unless realized by [human] powers of perception and observation” [28], and, at least in Anderson’s case, transformed into a painting or drawing. “One hates waste,” wrote Anderson, “and to have that life and that beauty—that explosion of order—go to nothing is becoming difficult to allow. Nature itself is blamed for the waste—not so—it is man’s relation to nature that is to blame” [29].
I have mentioned my observation that time spent in wild nature never seems wasted to a few other people. And, despite differences among those people, and differences between them and me, I’ve been surprised to hear them say they’ve had the same feeling.
We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. Laurie and I had driven out toward the Book Cliffs, having made the plan earlier in the day, when it was sunny. It had already become a major frustration that, on certain evenings, the light would become spectacular on the Book Cliffs, but we were in town, and there was no way to get near the cliffs before the light faded at sundown. I would look at the cliffs and curse the circumstances that made me watch them from town instead of being out there, in their presence. On this particular day, clouds invaded in the late afternoon, and sunlight disappeared, but we could see a zone of clear sky far to the west. By the time we approached the ATV- and dirt-bike-assaulted BLM land that lies between the city and the cliffs, sunshine was already lighting up cliffs to the west. The light was very dramatic, with gray sky behind the cliffs, and it was moving rapidly eastward to cliffs closer to us. We drove far enough to get fences, vehicles, and the worst of the battered landscape out of the foreground and stopped quickly, fearing that the light wouldn’t last. I snapped a few photographs and then walked farther east, continuing to photograph the escarpment straight north, the sidelighted cliffs back to the west, and views eastward, where the cliffs evolved into a more regular line of palisades. Far to the east, I could see that Mount Garfield was sunlit, as well as Grand Mesa, but only the tops of them were visible. The light faded from the cliffs to the north and the west, and then from Garfield and Grand Mesa. But then it returned.
Now I started running toward higher hilltops to the east, hoping for a clearer view of Garfield and trusting that the sunlight would reach it. I was following one of many vehicle tracks that crisscross the hills, all the while listening to the revving, roaring, and blatting of dirt bikes closer to the city to the south. I did indeed get a clear view of Garfield and Grand Mesa and good light for photographs. Then, as I walked back to the road, the light around me turned increasingly orange and then pink. Sunlit clouds radiated upward from the cliffs to the north, and others did so more dramatically above the Uncompahgre Plateau to the south.
So we saunter toward the holy land till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, so warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.
NOTE
Some readers may have noticed that I’ve plagiarized not only Henry Thoreau’s title for this essay, but also several of his sentences. (I prefer to think I’ve co-authored the essay with Thoreau, but I suppose that’s too pretentious.) The sentences—all of them from the essay titled “Walking” [1862]—are italicized in the text.
PHOTOGRAPHS
Saddle between Main & Coal Canyons, Book Cliffs, CO 3/09
Raindrop impressions, Lipan Wash, Book Cliffs, CO 11/08
Book Cliffs above Lipan Wash, CO 11/08
Reflections of juniper trees in Lake Ck, Round Rock, TX 2/07
Evening light, Book Cliffs, CO 11/07
SOURCES
Abbey, Edward. Confessions of a Barbarian. David Peterson, ed. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1994.
Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods. New York: Broadway Books, 1998.
Daniel, John. The Trail Home. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994.
Jakle, John A. The Tourist. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.
Louv, Richard. Last Child in the Woods. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2005.
Noyce, Wilfred. The Springs of Adventure. Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1959.
Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust. New York: Viking, 2000.
Sugg, Redding S, Jr., ed. The Horn Island Logs of Walter Inglis Anderson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. New York: Dover Publications, 1995.
Thoueau, Henry David. “Walking.” 1862. http://thoreau.eserver.org/walking.html
Wildness
The Age of Discovery
Travelers and Stay-at-Homes
Salt Creek
Houses
Pinnacle Peak
Tropical Hardwoods
Does It Have to Be Difficult?
Mountain Film Festival
Gospel Jamboree
Keep Fishing
Missouri
Living Wild on North 12th Street
Wildness and the Colorado Frontier
Walking
The Eden Temptation
Wild Photography
