Emily Dickinson was right to see that a prairie might consist of only one flower and a bee. When my childhood world was small, a quarter acre vacant wooded lot was a wilderness.
I grew up within the boundaries of a sprawling Alabama city, but I was happiest when I imagined I was surrounded by ‘wilderness.’ In the leafy chaos of empty lots and wooded suburban margins, I was a pioneer. Playing cowboys and Indians in a tiny fraction of an acre of woods, in my mind I was in undisturbed ‘native land’, and felt a bond of belonging there as a native myself.
When I was older, I needed more of the nutrient of wildness than my little neighborhood woods could give. I went to summer camp and my backyard forest was magnified a thousand fold. Living at camp for a week, smelling of creek and woods with a hundred other free-ranging feral children, I felt more connected to the wildlife of the world than I would have after an entire summer of immersion in chlorine-smelling swimming pools or organized, sanitized sports.
I fished to find wilderness. I remember watching tiny sunfish, face-down, through the slats in the pier—jeweled slivers levitating lazily in shafts of light under their dark striped sky. The underwater world was a wild and alien place. Mostly I fished alone walking the shoreline. More often than not, I’d find myself distracted by a little side creek or a rock bluff along the lake and I would forget fishing entirely. It was not the fish I was after, after all.
Like many of my friends, I followed my father onto the golf courses that spread into the countryside ahead of the expanding city. Our dads went there looking for something–to find quiet and be faintly connected to the land perhaps by chasing behind a little white ball. I’d wander off the manicured fairways into the rough, turning logs for salamanders. And I decided that for me, just being out there was the point.
It is not easy these days for city children to know the joys of secret woods. Most of the tiny wilderness sanctuaries of my childhood are paved over now. Locked behind guardhouses of gated communities, they’ve become uninviting, manicured, sadly-domesticated places. The margins and edges of my youth were not far enough away to provide reliable wildness when I grew up. Maybe knowing this has made me long for remoter, unaltered, out of the way places when looking for our true home, a place for roots in our later years.
Now, far beyond the edges of a town so small that there are no spreading suburbs, we have found those roots. A vast forest surrounds me, and creeks flow full of bright fish and sunlight. I have tranquility by the sky-full here, and few neighbors to disturb in my rambling walks.
This little valley headwaters may be the place I knew I would belong to long ago in that half-acre woods. I started my journey towards this very wilderness while picking berries with small hands—at the rough edges of my suburban yard in a secret patch of woods where natives lived.
By Fred First [email protected]