I spent the weekend trailing in Sipsey with the Outdoor Recreation Center. Hiking, or what I called “trailing” back home – feeling the weight of simplicity on your back and placing all your trust in a single path. In England, there are beautiful moors and castles to see yet we have no “wilderness.” The country is simply too small for you to wander off into the map of illustrated trees and melt completely off the radar.
Over the years, the idea of the American wilderness, with its mysterious dark attraction, has developed into something of an ideal rather than just a place. It began with nature itself: animals, looking for the best route through the forest, would track their way through the dense woods. Years later, the Native Americans began to hunt and used these trails as their own way of navigation. When the Puritans arrived, they adopted this “wilderness” for themselves, appropriating stories of captivity under the Native Americans and using the very idea of running off into the forest and surviving the violence of the Natives in the harsh landscape as Christian propaganda. They tested the elite members of their communities, “the elect,” on their worth and connection to God by the measure of the outdoors and the people who lived so very intertwined within it.
As time has gone by, Americans, dreamers and searchers, have long harbored this idea that somehow the wilderness can cleanse them, and that reaching back to a primitive existence is more than just a test for the body – it is one for the soul.
As we marched through the foliage, we passed people on the road, living out of the back of an orange van, an old throw-back from the sixties, still living by the campfire flames which licked the banks of the crystal creek. We saw ex-military men camped high on a ridge and wondered how much their past was affecting their present. They were talking in loud voices late into the night. And then there was us, a group of college kids, a few of whom, including me, had forgotten tent poles, not even having enough direction in our life yet to fully form a bed for the night without ropes and trees and the help of others.
Of course, there are those who arrived fully prepared, backpacks full of cooking equipment and first-aid kits, those who get a thrill out of their own ability to survive. For them, this landscape is a challenge, a hobby and a test of their preparations and abilities. But for others, it is a symbol of the destination they are trying to find.
So many people have lost themselves in the idea of the answers it might provide. And, in a way, we are no different than the animals that first discovered it – reduced to a primitive way of living and surviving. But the human consciousness and constant search for meaning have adopted the landscape into mindscape and the wilderness becomes more than just a place to some. It is an embodiment of what it means to look for an identity and prove your own self.
Lucy Cheseldine is an English international exchange student studying English literature. Her column runs on Tuesday.
