Lent: Wilderness

There's not much wilderness out my front door these days.

It was a different story four hundred years ago when the first waves of white settlers started arriving on these vaunted shores. In those days the Midatlantic region and the Northeast were covered in a forest, and settlers claim there were flocks of birds overhead so vast that it could take days for them to pass.

To visitors from Europe, where hills, valleys and moors had long been denuded of their ancient forests, it seemed like a goldmine. There were woods to be felled, land to be plowed, animals to be trapped for pelt or meat, and plenty more.

Not so much these days.

I've got a red oak growing on my property, and there are squirrels that run around the yard; but the birds I can hear at any time can be counted with one hand, not two. You can smell out a skunk at night sometimes, and hear the coyotes yipping in a nearby park. Once I saw a fox trit-trotting up the street like nobody's business, but the wildest this city gets is at the nightclub downtown on weekends.

Paradise has been torn to pieces, and we were the wolves that did it.

That's an idealized view of the wilderness as Eden. There's another, older view, that views the wilderness with caution if not outright fear. In the old days, people didn't go into the forest for a weekend of camping, it was something they avoided. If you had to go in, you went in quietly, to avoid being noticed, or you went in with a small army, to be ready.

The wilderness was a hostile place, without the creature comforts of home, like food, roads, cisterns, city walls and gates that closed at night. It was a liminal place filled with fairies, lawless humans, and wild beasts. The ancients believed it was filled with pagan gods, and as late as the 17th century the Puritans told stories about the Scratchman waiting in the forest outside town, willing to make deals with anyone who'd sign their name in the book he kept.

So take your pick. We tore down Paradise and in its place built a new wilderness of pavement and steel, and filled that wild place with monsters of our own creation; or we pushed the wilderness back, hedged it in and tamed it.

Either way, something else is true. Neglect a farm, a shopping mall or an entire city for long enough, and the wilderness creeps back in. Flowers grow in the cracks of a parking lot, then brush springs up in odd places. WIthin twenty years trees have appeared and ten years after that, the forest is back in business.

No matter how you look it, the wilderness returns.