wilderness

Sun, Nov 9, 2008

Every so often the topic of Wilderness and what it is crops up in the outdoor press and increasingly the blogosphere and this month seems to be another resurgence in the debate about how one should interact with, or resonate, to use the more exotic terminology of the outdoors press, the wilderness. TGO arrived on the doorstep and there was Mr. McNeish, duly reflecting on what wilderness is. I agree it’s not a physical state of the land and McNeish puts forward the idea that it’s a state of mind:

“it’s a place where we can re-create without undue influence from all those things that are man-created”

That sounds admirable but coming from a magazine which last month exhorted its readers to rip up sphagnum moss to clean greasy bacon-soiled frying pans whilst enjoying their “wilderness experience” and who’s editor, after pronouncing on wilderness as above, goes on to rate the antics of a woman who carts ceramic balls to mountain lochans and leaves them there, floating, as “I loved it”, I think I can put to one side this source of opinion.

Jim Perrin, in his inimitably impenetrable way stands up against the actions of those who would descend en-masse upon the hills but I had to piece it together as by the time I’d reached the article the magazine had disintegrated, again. Seems it’s not just the opinions contained therein that are loose and disjointed.

Martin over at Summit and Valley has been thinking about wilderness too. With a dictionary definition along the lines of a place that hasn’t been destroyed or changed beyond recognition by man, that’s easy to satisfy. An iceberg. I dare say one could camp on the larger ones. But no-one in their right mind would do that. But why not? Well, it’s too far away, too expensive to get there and far too dangerous. Surrounded by all that Southern Ocean with its 100 foot waves circling the globe and hurricane force winds. Wilderness is easily defined and easily found. So why are seekers of the wilderness experience never to be found on an iceberg?

It’s undeniably wilderness. Anyone who refuses to camp on an iceberg (the vast majority of humanity I suspect) has to then answer the question, what do they want out of wilderness? Must it be cheap to get to, easy to get away from and with little objective danger? Subjectively, one may make it as dangerous as one likes, here be dragons and all that but in all probability, confronted with the choice of “real” wilderness (our iceberg friend) and “managed” wilderness (Fisherfield), everyone, bar a handful, plumps for the latter. Seems we want to experience wilderness but not so much that it detracts from our everyday lives, our relationships, careers and aspirations. Those who do are labelled cranks, until they come back and write a book and everyone then tries to apply the crank’s experiences in real wilderness to their experiences in managed wilderness. Bushcraft in southern England strikes me as this kind of thing. Of a weekend, one may see huddles of smoky crafters boiling their billies round the corner from Tesco. A copy of “I ate my granny on an ice floe” in their camo-sac.

You see this all the time with gear nomenclature. Sleeping bags called “adrenaline”. Shoes called “extreme” and so on. I mean, who wants to wake up in the middle of the night screaming “we’re all going to dieeeeee, aaaargh”, as you writhe in a lather of fear induced sweat, which is the image that “adrenaline range” sleeping bags conjures for me. Why not call them “CosyNight-WAF (warm and fluffy)” instead? Well, it’s to do with the hard man image of wilderness that’s prevalent in the outdoors press. Unless you’re exhausted, frozen, hypothermic and terrified, you’re just not experiencing wilderness correctly. To do so, one must first wedge one’s hand in a crevice, wait several days, then hack off the semi-gangrenous appendage with a tent peg.

I suspect however, that those who cannot imagine wilderness as an iceberg, cannot really understand the reason and results of real wilderness experiences, involving years of isolation and living at the edge of reason. Society, rather, focuses on the more tangible events such as “wow, he hacked off his leg and ate it! How cool is that?”.

Wilderness, I think, doesn’t exist. Humans project their personalities on their environment. Where one man sits and contemplates floating ceramic balls on a remote mountain lochan, another may disturb his peace, as he runs screaming through the landscape, arms flailing, lungs bursting, manically pursuing that next control point on the race course. And while Ceramic Man frowns disapprovingly, Half Naked Man may walk past chewing on a twig and stop to preach against the appearance of ceramic balls in a pristine landscape. Before you can quote from John Muir, human nature comes to the fore, a fight breaks out and wilderness is forgotten.

For me, “wilderness” is the act of observing without interruption. Imagining moss growing on a rock. Watching a beetle doing what a beetle does. There’s no higher reason to contemplate. The beetle does as the beetle does and I’m content to watch. The beetle has no higher cognitive function that drives it to chastise his beetle neighbour who has arrived on the scene with a little beetle jacket on. “You’re too soft for this wilderness lark, mate”, won’t be heard from the beetle. To me, it’s all about contained solitude. One can indeed loose the shackles of everyday drudgery in an accessible wilderness such as Fisherfield. It’s the fallback of containment that allows us to do that. There is no containment on the iceberg.

So if you’re Half Naked Man and you come across Ceramic Man, or Screaming Man in your wilderness. Think of it like this. They’re just plugging in to the energy underlying the landscape. An energy that can interact with higher cognitive functions available to humans (though who can say what the bettle knows). It’s just that in each of them, a different bulb lights up.