The Healing of America
The Call of the Wilderness

Douglas Milburn

1. Backstory
Even now we barely inhabit America (though we think otherwise). From the heart of any urban center it is still possible with astonishing ease and rapidity to put yourself back into unspoiled wilderness.

Given the degradation of our righteousness by unbridled greed and compulsive consumerism, our own best efforts will probably not be enough to save us as we near the edge of the abyss. If salvation is to come, it will surely arise from those best efforts supported invisibly and inexplicably by that vast landscape out there which from the beginning has formed the one firm, true foundation on which everything else in the United States was built.

With the westward expansion, American artists in their own diverse ways responded to the unavoidable, saving infection of the irresistibly insistent vast fullness of this great outback. Thoreau got it first, along with Emerson (sort of). Then came Irving in the Catskills. Thomas Cole came, looked, and managed to repeatedly paint what he saw, clearing a visionary path for other seers that would extend to the West Coast with Bierstadt et al. and well into the 20th century with Ansel Adams et al. Twain renamed himself in homage to the navigators of the great river and eventually set his two greatest characters afloat on it. The verdant sub-tropical hum that underlies Flannery O’Conner’s struggling marionettes burst into full-flowering prose-poetry with Tennessee Williams: mired in culture gone awry his people in extremis sing, in chorus with old Walt his own self, the wilderness, a song that reached an unlikely late visual apotheosis in Mark Rothko and a late verbal apotheosis in Cormac McCarthy.

2. Interlude
Once long ago, driving from Houston to Los Angeles, I went way out of my way to see Las Vegas. Up to Colorado then across Utah onto Interstate 15 for the last run into Venturi’s nightmare. After miles of wasteland and barren scorched mountains, I mounted a rise… and pulled over on the shoulder to stop. Before me the land dropped away into the vast basin of the Great American desert. On the far horizon, 75, 100 miles away were snow-capped mountains. Between me and them was nothing. Wait. I squinted my eyes and saw off toward the southwest a tiny black smudge, a fly speck on the desert floor: Las Vegas. The vacation dream of millions, billions maybe. Altar and holy icon for armies of khaki-slacked architects burbling over with words of many syllables about its wondrous ironies. But, I saw now, a fly speck of the greatest insignificance in the American wilderness. A nanosecond flicked by and the greed that is Wall Street, the ambition that is Washington, the vanity that is Los Angeles—not to mention the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome, etc.—vanished. Earth unclad, unblemished (almost).

Yes, we have hurt—are hurting—the planet. But in the long, long run, the wilderness wins. Our only choice, our only choice is to embrace it, nurture it which gave birth to—and nurtures—us, or to be banished into nothingness, leaving behind only so many short-lived human specks.

3. Onward
The call of the wild is the figured bass, often barely heard if at all, the ground on which American civilization rose and one which it still rests. Nurturing, patient (maddeningly so at times), immovable, unstoppable, it has shaped us from the beginning and still does. Kudzu its outward and most visible sign, the sequoias its sentinals, the Everglades the most apparent of its many wombs, the prairie grasses its coat, the Grand Canyon its most stunning character mark of advancing years, the Great Lakes it cradle, the great river its aorta.

No matter how deep we live our way into urban canyons, no matter how skillful we become at canoeing concrete rivers, no matter how clever at pandering to pixels, that whole, natural vastness is always out there, waiting, calling.

Drowning in the despair of utter ephemerality? The American answer is simple: go wilderness. Not to escape, not to remain, but to heal, to be healed, to let your deeply wounded, forgetful self be repaired, to reunite with the one source of strength.

From the many, one. From the many trees, one tree. From the many trails, one trail. From the many rivers, one river. From the many mountains, one mountain. From the many canyons, one canyon. From the many swamps, one swamp. From the many lakes, one lake.

From the many wildernessess, one wilderness. The misguided uproot it, exploit it at Mammon’s bidding. The guided embrace it, celebrate its infinite caresses, welcome its infinite solace.

Let the healing begin.

END

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