Wilderness
Strolling the Montreal streets today, my encounters were all with human beings in sleek coats and boots, and perhaps a few cold pigeons. Not much wildlife around these parts, and I kind of miss the animals I grew up with in the country–our pet cats, of course, but also the raccoons in the yard, the rabbits in the orchard, the snakes in the greenhouse, and the various species of birds in and around the pine tree.
Heck, some days I miss the bats that got and subsequently resided in my brothers’ closet, well over 60 of them–Dad and I stood out on the porch one night and counted as they flew out until we were too tired to count anymore, and they just kept coming. Some days I miss the squirrel that snuck into Dad’s office and dodged, bouncing, every attempt to chase it out with a broom. Recalling our visit to Florida and the tourist trap where we’d watched gators be made to jump for chickens suspended above them on a stick, Dad dubbed it “The Squirrel Jumparoo Show.” I don’t miss the skunk that got into the basement and had to be lured out with a trail of dry cat food, its way out blocked off by bales of peat moss, my mom crouching behind them in fear and occasionally popping her head up to check if it was gone yet. But I do recall that day with fond amusement.
It is easy to forget that we are animals, especially when we find ourselves trudging through malls and up streets that like to pretend fauna and flora don’t exist. It is easy to keep forgetting when we seek our “back-to-nature” downtime in botanical gardens that cheerily mingle plants from disparate continents as if they coexist in some natural habitat, somewhere. It is easy to forget when we’re theorizing the world. But animals we are.
I wish I could say that the “authentic encounters with the wilderness” in my life have reminded me of this. I wish I could put on my Wordsworth face and claim that they opened floodgates of perception. They didn’t. What they did was cause me to pause for a little while, to be reminded that “MY places” are not “human territory”.
If our ways of categorizing, of thinking “myself” separate from “other”, of dwelling on the space rather than the proximity and overlap between these points of reference, is what keeps our consciousness fenced off from experiencing wilderness (and it is surely not the only thing), then what are we missing? What is “wilderness” anyway? Don McKay, a contemporary and remarkable Canadian nature poet, offers a definition that (in my opinion) says more about what wilderness is not than about what it is. Perhaps that is the best that can be offered, since it is a trick of language, itself a medium more of describing than existing, that “being” is impossible to articulate.
McKay:
By “wilderness” I want to mean, not just a set of endangered spaces, but the capacity of all things to elude the mind’s appropriations. That tools retain a vestige of wilderness is especially evident when we think of their existence in time and eventual graduation from utility: breakdown. To what degree do we own our houses, hammers, dogs? Beyond that line lies wilderness. We probably experience its presence most often in the negative as dry rot in the basement, a splintered handle, or shit on the carpet. But there is also the sudden angle of perception, the phenomenal surprise which constitutes the sharpened moments of haiku and imagism. The coat hanger aasks a question; the armchair is suddenly crouched: in such defamiliarizations, often arranged by art, we encounter the momentary circumvention of the mind’s categories to glimpse some thing’s autonomy–its rawness, its duende, its alien being. (Don McKay, Vis a Vis: Fieldnotes on Poetry & Wilderness, p. 21)
