Beaded Buffalo

“We need wilderness because we are wild animals. Every man needs a place where he can go to go crazy in peace.”  ~ Edward Abbey, from The Journey Home

It was our first night out in the Kalmiopsis Wilderness, a rugged, dense-brush patch of southwestern Oregon that’s spitting distance from the Pacific. Earl, who’d struggled all day with his over-stuffed, leather-strap rucksack, noticed with some disgust the purple stains and residue on my new boots — the result of stepping in too much berry-laden bruin sign on the narrow trail.

“Why do you do this?” he asked while rubbing his shoulders, his tone steeped in bewilderment. “This” was wilderness camping, which I’d persuaded him to try — just once, as it turned out. After unloading our packs and bedding down under a watchful owl, I offered the usual reasons: to get away and relax, to breathe clean air, to see wildlife and sunrises and sunsets, to fine-tune my backwoods skills. But the same reasons hold true for dayhiking, hunting, fishing, birdwatching and even picnicking, all of which can be enjoyed on a pleasant day, then you return home in the evening to sleep in your own bed.

So why then do some of us venture off into wilderness on foot, carrying everything on our backs like pack animals, or in a canoe? Who are we who turn our backs on societal niceties, and set off down paths and rivers?

I’ve yet to find a definitive answer, but the search has yielded some interesting clues. Dave Foreman, for instance, author, former Wilderness Society staffer, hard-core environmentalist, and someone who’s dedicated his life to understanding and preserving wildlands, says we’re a “community linked by a sense of belonging not familiar to all.” Rather than basing our existence solely around technology, we instead occasionally “turn to craft and to being”– backwoods skills and experiencing the wilds, in other words.

“We recognize we are part of the natural ecosystem in which we dwell, even if only temporarily,” he says. We enjoy “going back to the woods and a primitive state of mind. We seek old, traditional ways of organizing ourselves and our lives, turning away from hierarchy to tribalism.”

We are a tribe.

Webster’s defines “tribe” as “a group of persons having a common character, occupation, or interest.” Although in our case, better to modify the definition by saying we’re uncommon characters whose common interest is our passion for places others consider no-man’s land.

“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot,” naturalist Aldo Leopold noted. We cannot, so we venture deep into the wilderness — “sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing,” Leopold offered in Sand County Almanac. “I suppose some will wish to debate whether it is important to keep these primitive arts alive. I shall not debate it. Either you know it in your bones, or you are very, very old.”

We know it. We know the strength that courses through flesh and bone when standing at a trailhead or river put-in, ready to set out and practice our primitive art. The anticipation and wondering what’s around each bend still sends shudders down my spine when I’m about to light out.

Then again, maybe this attraction to wilderness is genetic. Foreman, during his tenure with the Wilderness Society in the early 1970s, asked some cohorts what attracted them to wildlands preservation. “Sadly, we could discern no common strand that pulled wilderness freaks to the wild.” Some cited childhood or parental influences, others mentioned a vague connection to all things wild and free.

Then one colleague jokingly suggested that maybe it was a “wilderness gene” that stretches back into our evolutionary history. If so, it’s a recessive gene that pops up only now and then. How else to explain the one redhead in a family of brunettes? Or Muir, or Thoreau, or Abbey?

Are we genetic misfits then? Perhaps. After all, we do speak our own language, referring to thing s like eddys and gorp and switchbacks and mare’s tails. We know that rivers sing, that land can tell tales, and that silence can speak volumes about who we are.

So why do we spend time in the wilderness? In the end, the answer is as unique and individual as each of us. For me, it harkens back to 1654 when a Pilgrim described the untamed New World as a place of “hideous Thickets” full of “Wolfes and Beares.” The simple truth is that I feel more at home in “Wolfe and Beare” territory than I do in the city. I’d rather bushwhack through a “hideous Thicket” than thrash through a mall on a Saturday afternoon.

In the wilds, I can be selfish and have mind-bending experiences that will forever be mine alone:

• Solitude so utter and complete in South Dakota’s Badlands that I can hear wind sifting through a raven’s wing feathers.
• The midnight sky over Wisconsin’s Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, alive with liquid rainbows as the northern lights perform their nocturnal dance.
• A terrifyingly exhilarating “whoof” from dense trailside brush in Canada’s Kootenay National Park, and never knowing whether it was bear or moose.
• Staring in –10°F wonderment as an avalanche, bathed in light by a full moon, roars down a distant valley in Rocky Mountain National Park.

But that’s just me. I’m sure you have your own reasons for why you go Out There, and they override differing views we may have on politics or religion. In the backwoods, we share ties that bind, a big one being our inordinate strength of spirit. How else could we journey into places and conditions that leave us tender and vulnerable; where birth and rebirth, survival and death and transformation are all daily events; where we witness firsthand nature’s heartbreakingly beautiful cycle of creation and destruction. To do so requires a special kind of person, someone willing to follow a seldom-used route, who likes to seek out the unpredictable.

That’s you. Welcome to the tribe.

A variation of this article appeared in Backpacker Magazine.