Stories We Tell Ourselves January 13, 2025 First snow on the Absarokas, from our cabin. Why this wilderness? Here in our town on the banks of the Yellowstone River, bar or party conversation eventually turns to the question of how you got here. While the stories vary, almost all of them touch, at some point on how beautiful it is, how we’re surrounded by a large tracts of wild country from the Absaroka Wilderness Area and Yellowstone National Park, to miles and miles of national forest, BLM and state lands. The Paradise Valley is nearly 50 miles long, and on either side rise mountain ranges. There are elk and antelope and two species of deer roaming the valley floor. There are bald and golden eagles, swans and geese, ducks and whooping cranes. There are foxes and coyotes and up in the mountains, wolves. There are bobcats and mountain lions. In the winter, there are bison between Yankee Jim canyon and the park boundary. We routinely see mountain goats, way up on Emigrant peak above our cabin. There are also cattle. The valley still has ranches, both working ranches and big conglomerated rich-guy ranches. There are are sheep, fewer of those, and on smaller parcels. A few horses. And more and more houses, on inopportune 5 acre tracts, as people move here to stake their claim on their story, their version of the Western dream. There is cowboy cosplay, and mountaineer cosplay and real ranchers, and of course, guys in matching fly fishing shirts. They each have their story of what they’re doing here. Most of those stories are heroic. To themselves at least. Coming into this new year of essays, I’ve been thinking a lot about wilderness — both as a physical place, and as a concept. It’s a core metaphor for the book I’m working on, and one of the things I’m trying to do is parse my passage through the wilderness of grief, in a place where I’m surrounded by actual wilderness. There is the metaphorical bear of sorrow and then there is that bear, over there, standing on a game trail above you, making “huff huff” sounds as you try to call your dogs back, while hoping it is “only” a black bear and not a grizzly that’s about to rip your scalp off. And you choose, over and over again, to stay here. The idea of wilderness The idea of wilderness has always been at the heart of the American project, from the first settlers’ attempts to “conquer” it (and the native peoples who they saw only as extensions of that wilderness, a wilderness they were determined to eliminate). As with many things, it was only when wilderness began to disappear that it came to be seen as something worth saving. In the 19th Century, wilderness narratives start showing up in American fiction in the work of writers like Melville and Hawthorne and Cooper. By 1862, Thoreau was declaring that “in wildness is preservation of the world” and John Muir was declaring the Yosemite valley to be finer than “any Heaven he’d ever heard described.” A generation later, we find Aldo Leopold rejecting the utilitarianism of established land management standards and declaring that “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Sand County Almanac, his posthumously published collection of essays proposes a land ethic, that “…enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals . . . [A] land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it.” Read moreThe Second BodyWhen I did field biology as an undergraduate, the key binary everyone was exploring was preservation versus conservation, that is, the difference between the 1964 Wilderness Act with it’s emphasis on lands “untrammeled by man” and the efforts of say, Ducks Unlimited who preserve wetlands to increase waterfowl populations because they like to hunt them (my dad and brother were both members when we were kids, and one of the few activities my dad regularly did with my brother was to take him duck hunting on weekends in central Illinois). Both approaches, however, remain anthropocentric, even as some areas and species benefit. By the time I got to grad school, interest was shifting. If older positive conceptions of wilderness had hinged on qualities important to human beings including it’s beauty and the ways that spending time in the wilderness was seen as an ethical and physical good – building stronger and more moral human beings (think of this as a kind of spectrum with Teddy Roosevelt on one end, and my lovely all girls, 8 week summer camp on the other), then the new work being done by thinkers as diverse as Gary Snyder, Donna Haraway, Michael Soulé and William Cronon sought to define what an ecocentric approach to nature and wilderness would look like. This shift in thinking got all tangled up for a while with postmodernism, as evidenced by the outrage that greeted Cronon’s essay The Trouble with Wilderness. Looking back 30 years later, it’s hard to remember how shocking it was at the time, the idea that wilderness was a human construct, an idea we’d made up. While Cronon is careful to note that wilderness is an enormously useful idea, and that preserving large chunks of land is a good thing, especially for those wild animal populations that do not thrive in too close proximity to humans, nonetheless, it took a while for people to come around to the idea that wilderness was not, after all, a timeless good, and that the ways we’d been thinking about it did carry certain problematic elements of what we’d now call “settler colonialism.” Parsing these ideas was the core academic part of my Phd work, and while I didn’t remain in academia, I have continued following the evolution of both nature writing as a genre, and the theoretical discussions around the concept of the anthropocene, and what it means both on a practical level, and on a conceptual level that we live in a world now where humans have changed the atmosphere, the climate, and have entered the geologic record. These couple of paragraphs are necessarily only the highest-level summary of these strands of thinking, but as the year progresses, they’re the basis of the ideas I plan to keep unpacking, and turning over, and thinking about in these little essays. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep. Lately I’ve been thinking about older stories about wilderness. Wilderness as the place where terror lives: the wild place where witches and wolves lurk in deep forests that will swallow you. In the old dark stories, the forest is a place of fear and confusion, a place where children get lost, where brigands hide out and live. Depending on which side you’re on, whether you’re a good citizen or the other, you’ll value these unclaimed spaces differently. The good citizen is afraid of the dark woods, the places where their rules don’t apply, the places where their upright bourgeois values no longer hold. The dirtbags, well, the dirtbags will take to the woods, looking for a corner to hide out, a cabin, a shack, an old wall tent where they can take shelter. The dirtbags show up when say, a freight container arrives, with the furniture your friend inherited from her grandmother in Europe. The dirtbag asks if they can have the container, that nice wooden box. They haul it into the woods, live in it for the summer, perhaps longer. For many of us, this was the lure of wilderness. That we could escape our bourgeois suburbs, our parents who wanted us to behave, and take shelter out there. That we could escape people, with their problematic malice, the physical and sexual violence that particularly stalks any of us who are a little different, or who are just girls. Blair Braverman writes about this in Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube. It’s the subtheme of the whole book. That given a choice, risk of the natural violence on the dogsled trail — moose, avalanche, falling through the ice — feels far less threatening than the violence that men pose to those of us who present as women. For me, the allure of wilderness was the people, the people who wanted to be near it, who wanted to go into it, who wanted to make it their life. The most interesting people I knew were working as raft guides and wilderness EMTs and lift operators. They were not only extraordinarily competent in the outdoors, not only capable of leading mountaineering expeditions to the big peaks of the Himalaya, or safely hang gliding off the end of the Telluride box canyon, or guiding trips through the Grand Canyon, but they played music, or wrote poetry, or took photographs of the beautiful places we’d moved West to live among. One ski bum I hung out with in Telluride had a stash of record albums, Dylan Thomas and TS Eliot, reading their own work. Another guy I dated briefly lived on a platform he’d strung across a creek way back in a holler in North Carolina, and built gorgeous wooden canoe paddles to make money. These were all people who had zero interest in moving to the suburbs, in being “normal.” They’re still out there, the dirtbags. They’re fewer and farther between, especially since these wild places have been gentrified, and commodified, and turned into luxury goods over the past few decades. As the year goes along, I’ll be doing a deeper dive into wildness as it shows up in some novels, and perhaps using this space to expand on contemporary thinking about both art and wilderness. They’ve always been intertwined for me, and I hope you’ll keep me company as I try to follow the game trails of these ideas as they wind through both theory, and fiction.
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