ON WILDERNESS: VOICES FROM MAINE
Edited by Phyllis Austin, Dean Bennett, and Robert Kimber
Paperback
148 pp. Gardiner:
Tilbury House Publishers. $15

Reviewed by Laurie Meunier Graves

Any culture worth its salt will preserve wildness and wilderness because it knows that the richness and diversity wilderness provides is essential to ecological health, which is in turn essential to human…health.
—Robert Kimber

Not long ago, I was listening to the radio, to a show called Radio Expeditions, a nature show produced by the National Geographic Society and National Public Radio. This particular episode featured marine life—penguins and elephant seals—in Patagonia and their uneasy coexistence with commerce—oil tankers and fishing fleets. In defense of the marine life, one of the researchers said, “A life without something wild in it is only half a life.”

I thought of this the other day when I was out in my garden. A hummingbird flew so close to my face that I could feel the wind of its wings on my cheek. It was like being kissed by a fairy, and the memory of this encounter still makes me smile. A hummingbird is not as exotic as either a penguin or an elephant seal, but this little summer visitor is wild all the same and makes my life richer.

Most of us, at some level, like the notion of wilderness and “something wild,” and even confirmed city dwellers are moved by the beauty of Katahdin and Acadia National Park. Indeed, the ever-increasing number of visitors—many of whom are from out of state—to these places confirms that this is the case. However, and this is a big however, for modern society, love of the wilderness is not an unconditional love. We want there to be a wilderness as long as it’s not too inconvenient for us, and heaven forbid that anything should get in the way of making a profit. Even so-called nature lovers usually demand some amenities when they visit the wilderness, ranging from trails and roads and continuing on to cabins, campsites, running water, and latrines.

With wildlife, we are even more demanding; we want it to be sweet and unthreatening. Birds, moose, and deer are acceptable. We are not so sure about bears, foxes are suspect, and in certain circles, wolves are demonized. Because we humans are so dominant, so numerous, our notions, sometimes for good but often for ill, are imposed upon the wilderness. It truly does seem as though we are the bullies of the planet as we chop down forests here and wipe out a species there. All too frequently wild things and wilderness are the losers. It makes me long for a group of Tolkien’s Ents to come set us straight.

Yet, there are those who speak for the wilderness. In Maine, it seems we have our own group of Ents, and they have even come together to publish a book called On Wilderness: Voices From Maine. This slim but nevertheless substantial book, edited by Phyllis Austin, Dean Bennett, and Robert Kimber, is a moving and passionate collection of essays, art, and poetry. (The only disappointment is that most of the art is reproduced in black and white when many of the originals were clearly in color. However, this is a small complaint, and the strengths of this book more than make up for this weakness.) There are more than thirty contributors, and their voices blend into a satisfying whole as they ask us to consider the wilderness in all its aspects—from acres of forests in northern Maine to wildlife in our backyards—and our role in preserving and destroying it.

The very first essay, “Wilderness” by Neil Rolde, explores the idea of wilderness.  “From the standpoint of Maine history, ‘wilderness’ as a concept may be said to have had a checkered career. Among the Native Americans, it can be argued, there was no sense of wilderness as we conceive it, i.e., the absence of human presence….there was no separation between ‘The People,’ which most tribes called themselves, and their natural surroundings.”

Who changed this concept? Why, the English Puritans, of course, “who were to dominate Maine” not only with their bland food but also with the idea that “its vast forests [were] a ‘howling wilderness’ and …an abode of Satan and his minions.” Wilderness, to them, was evil. (While it’s tempting to shake our heads and tut-tut over such arrogance, we should keep in mind that we do so from the comfort and safety of our electrically lit and oil-heated homes.)

From there, Mr. Rolde goes on to ask “what is real wilderness?” Is it miles and miles of “untouched forests?” Is it on a microscopic level as well as on a visible level? Is it under the water? Then, of course, comes one of the most important questions: “Is there space for compromise as the natural world shrinks before the seemingly inexorable rise of the population of the species Homo sapiens?”

Mr. Rolde ends on a note of hope as he writes about how much progress has been made in land preservation since he first came to the state forty years ago. “It may not be enough or as much as we would like, but it is something.”

This first essay sets the tone of the book, and the rest of the pieces and poems, at some level, touch on issues that Mr. Rolde raises. There’s a lovely poem by Gary Lawless that speaks of “the places where the wolves / rest above the ridges, within us, / where the heart wanders, wild.” In “Wildness and Wet,” Frank Graham, Jr. writes of how he is “drawn to the wet places of the earth. Water is the stuff of life...” And in “Not Wilderness,” Mitch Lansky reminds us that wilderness “in the East is made up of previously managed landscapes where cutting and clearing is no longer allowed.”

In fact, there are so many fine essays and poems in On Wilderness that it would be impossible to describe them all. However, I would like to focus on three essays that are, for various reasons, my favorite ones. The first is “Dirty Word” by Phyllis Austin. Ms. Austin writes “In the political arena, wilderness has become a dirty word. The aim of ‘stakeholders’ representing the forest-products industry, sportsmen’s organizations, and motorized recreation is to taint the word so completely that it drops out of common usage, and by extension, out of environmental debate and negotiation.”

The seriousness of this cannot be overestimated. Politicians, dictators, and tyrants have used this method of twisting the truth to achieve disastrous results, and I think it’s safe to say that most wars rely on this sort of distortion. From “ethnic cleansing” to the “final solution,” many who are in power use words in a base and shameless way to manipulate people. And if something is said over and over, people actually believe it, whether it is true or not. In our own country, the far right has done it with various words and phrases, from vilifying “liberal” and “humanist” to the point where they don’t remotely resemble their original meanings to twisting “family values” so completely that the phrase has actually taken on an ominous ring of oppression.

Ms. Austin continues “those of us who love wilderness…must put away our silence.…wilderness by another name is not the same.” Perhaps. But the real harm is done when opponents are allowed to bend words so that they become half-truths or, worse yet, outright lies. Then red becomes blue, and dirty deeds are acceptable—the clear cutting of forests, the extermination of a species, the slaughter of people in a village. However, it gives me great hope to know that there are writers such as Ms. Austin, who has the courage to speak out against these tactics.

The second essay that caught my attention is very different from “Dirty Word.” In “Tree,” Susan Hand Shetterly describes an aged pine tree she can see when she looks out her kitchen windows. Ms. Hand Shetterly’s vivid writing brings life to a tree that, to be polite, has seen better days. “Its long snags once stretched to the west. Most of them have fallen, and [the old pine tree] looks…like a thrust of index finger—fierce and stark….One could say it refuses adornment and disapproves of dancing, that it is an alarming old Calvinist—a most terribly alive dead tree.”

Worried about the old tree, Ms. Hand Shetterly decides to take a closer look and becomes aware of the trauma that has marked the tree’s life. She also gets a sense of its stubborn endurance, of its persistence. Lightening, pine weevils, ants, long-horned beetles, and woodpeckers have bedeviled the tree through the years, yet it has not succumbed. It is still standing. No wonder it looks like an “alarming old Calvinist!”

However, despite its many trials, the tree remains a presence, a force, singular yet part of the vast web of life, some of it hostile, some of it not, but all of it vital. Ms. Hand Shetterly concludes, “I find myself getting up in the dark now to stand by the south windows down in the kitchen, to look into the sky for the tree, to make sure it’s there….Sometimes, as I stand there, I see the moon emerge from behind a cloud to glaze my old tree in clean, cold light.”

“Borealis,” an elegiac essay by Franklin Burroughs, is the last in the book and a fitting ending. In it, he examines the idea of geography and its importance in a culture’s imagination. He writes that he grew up in the South and that “the Deep North was one of the legendary geographies of childhood…Legendary geography nurtures a sense of possibility, escape or homecoming. Children crave it; tourism sells it; most religions offer some version of it.”

Then, he tells of how, in the early 1960s, he worked one summer as a compass man for International Paper in the deep woods in the Province of Québec. The woods seemed endless, and “For the whole of that summer, I never knew what day of the week or the month it was, or cared.” Nobody worried about what was being done to the forests. The expanse of wilderness seemed too vast to be affected by humans and technology.

Except, of course, the Maine woods were once as expansive as the forests in Québec in the 1960s. However, “The present reality of the Maine Woods is hideous swaths of clear-cut. It is log trucks, going from before dawn until after dark…” Logging is not the only activity that adversely affects the forests. Too many people visiting a place can be just as destructive as logging trucks, and the Maine woods “is also assembly line tourism—down-hill skiers, whitewater rafters, snowmobilers.”

Mr. Burroughs reminds us that if the future brings yet more development “it will be the end of the fact and the idea of the Maine woods. And that will have consequences for all of us who live here…[because] North means north of where you are, in a place where life is cleaner and harder, possibly more retro and more macho, certainly freer, simpler, and sparser than it is where you live.”

And what would we do without this notion of North, this notion, if I may borrow one of my own terms, of a hinterland? It’s almost unbearable to think about it. Mr. Burroughs ends his essay somewhat sternly by stating: “All that we can take for granted is our responsibility to it…and to the vision of it as a place we’d rather be.”

Yes, indeed! And this fine book is certainly a step in that direction. I hope it gets the broad readership it deserves and promotes the stewardship of the wilderness, which is vital not only to our physical well being, but also to our emotional health.

 

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