Wild And Otherwise, It’s One World

The other night I was lying in bed with the light on reading about wilderness.

The wilderness is a trendy place right now, hotter than ever before in American history.

A century ago, the vision of wide open spaces with few signs of man raised an uneasiness in pioneers.

Back then the wilderness experience, as the Bible often reminded frontier families, was barren, desolate, and definitely not a place to take the family.

No more.

Today, the wilderness experience, whether rafting through Central Idaho, hiking the back country of Glacier National Park, or even climbing Mt. Everest at $100,000 a person, stands high on the list of life-affirming experiences.

I paid bills earlier in the same evening I was home reading about wilderness.

One check went to the YMCA’s wilderness rafting trip, which my daughter will sample later this month.

This trip and hundreds of others like it have given the Pacific Northwest a booming travel industry built around the idea of a wilderness experience.

Another check went to a big sports outfitting company that sold me a tent. The idea of being in or near the wilderness has put serious legs beneath retailers like REI and Spokane’s Mountain Gear.

I could have sent a check to one of a number of wilderness protection groups that regularly solicit support.

The political and species protection arms of the wilderness have become growth industries, too.

The night I was reading about wilderness and paying the wilderness-related bills, I began to think how the idea of wilderness as it is conceived today requires people living in cities, paying bills and reading by electric lights.

Precisely because so many people go off to work in an office, punch a computer, and often are surrounded by a crowd, the idea of visiting and preserving wilderness seems comforting and rooted in the ideal - far from air-conditioned city apartments.

This visiting and observing wilderness, of course, requires big metal vehicles riding on asphalt highways.

Once the cars and tour buses have taken us close to wilderness, most people will want to take a picture of the beautiful, untouched scenery. The film will be processed with the help of silver.

If wilderness worshipers happen to spend a night in a tent near their sacred ground, most will carry a flashlight with a tungsten bulb.

When we awake to brush our teeth by the pristine wilderness river, we will look up at the mountains and brush with a paste containing calcium carbonate and a bit of clay.

The metal for the car, the asphalt for the roads, the silver for the photographs, the tungsten for the flashlight bulbs and the calcium carbonate for the toothpaste neither grew on trees nor were invented in the supermarket.

Base materials that make visits to the wilderness all the more wonderful mostly are mined out of areas that don’t look all that different from wilderness itself.

Men and machines go to open, natural places, push around dirt, dig holes and extract raw materials for automobiles, computers, tents, flashlights and toothpaste.

Wilderness, and the comforts of home, all come from the same world.

We often don’t see it that way. Wilderness has come to occupy some fantasy land, a place devoid of a relationship with the rest of humanity, a refuge where we might escape, might go back in time.

Then the phone rings, the fantasy fades, and it’s time to pick up the kids across town and the traffic is bad.

My night of reading about the wilderness included an essay from the William Cronon book, “Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature.”

With the assistance of my tungsten filament lightbulb I read this from Cronon’s ink on paper book:

“Our challenge is to stop thinking of things according to a set of bipolar moral scales in which the human and the nonhuman, the unnatural and the natural, serve as our conceptual map for understanding and valuing the world.

“Instead, we need to embrace the full continuum of a natural landscape that is also cultural, in which the city, the suburb, the pastoral, and the wild each has its proper place, which we permit ourselves to celebrate without needlessly denigrating the other. We need to discover a common middle ground in which all of these things, from the city to the wilderness, can somehow be encompassed in the word home.”

Of course we need wilderness.

But we need a warm, dry place to live, a car that runs, and a flashlight, too.

For this, we must recall the need for balance in thinking of the place called wilderness, not just fantasy about a wilderness where mankind does not reside.

, DataTimes MEMO: Chris Peck is the Editor of The Spokesman-Review.