Jess Zeglin
Headwaters of the Rio Grande, SW Colorado
Headwaters of the Rio Grande, SW Colorado
September 9, 2018
I love camping. So do many of you. The sunsets, the stars; the mists rising over calm lakes; the animals, lichens, mushrooms, trees, skies, clouds, rains, rainbows; the chance to take a psychological breath outside of our rote realms of expectation and existence.
But – you knew there was a but coming. But – I feel the need to disabuse myself, and possibly some others, of a few notions.
First: camping is not glamorous.
Second: you’re not getting away from a darn thing.
Third: we cannot go to the wilderness.
Fourth: let’s try it anyway.
1.
Camping is not glamorous. It is not more moral than any of our other current forms of life. It does not connect you with an essential purity that cannot be found anywhere other than in a sparkling sunrise over a clear river. It does not increase your spiritual nobility or gain you superiority over anyone else.
We attribute to camping – at least, in my particular experience of this set of American cultures I’m embedded in – an idea of pure romance, of beauty, light, and truth that can only be accessed through getting back to the woods, back to nature, back to a REAL reality experience. However, beauty, light, and truth – not to mention oddity, tension, and conflict – are everywhere, you just have to care about looking for them.
What camping does do is allow you to be in a place. That’s it. To be in a place where you haven’t been before, to experience its rhythms, sights, sounds, smells, beauties, and inconveniences first hand. This is powerful enough in itself, without the trappings of mysticism and romance. To be in a place, at a time and a season. That’s all. Thanks, camping.
2.
We do not leave society behind when we camp. We bring it with us, in our families, partners, and camp mates; in the books we read or pretend that we’ll read; in the thoughts spinning around our own heads.
We also do not leave technology behind. Do you feel like you’re getting back to some more primal, primitive existence when you camp? It’s unlikely. Rather, we are swathed in layers of technology that protect, gird, and allow us to temporarily cultivate spaces that enable our unique human existence. This runs from clothing – long underwear, hats, down jackets, and belt buckles – to the polyester and aluminum tubing of tents and shelters, bottles of combustible fuel and batteries, trucks, cars, vans, bicycles, canoes, hiking boots, trekking poles, sunscreen, bug spray, spam, lighters, tarps, radios, and flashlights that accompany us on our journeys. A plethora of technology shields and shelters us. These technologies are products of centuries of human labor, invention, extraction, and ingenuity which allow our presence outside of our more developed shelters such as cities and homes.
A bird on a branch must glance down occasionally at our campsite and wonder; what the heck is all that stuff for?
Lest you think I’m railing against a new kind of high-tech camping in particular, let me also say – any stick that you pick up from the forest floor to help you walk and balance is a technology. Any clothes you wear on your body, or even skins, are based on technologies developed centuries ago. Perhaps you gather firewood and dry leaves and strike your fire with flint – still a technology. Technologies are not evils, they are simply the tools that we use – and we are certainly not the only animals to create and use technology. What seems obscuring, to me, is overlooking our uses of technology and instead granting ourselves a belief in our superhuman abilities of exploration and noblesse, when we are counting very much indeed on the generosity of the world around us and the inventions of generations before us to help us survive.
We are humans, hominids, social animals. We are clothed in the knowledge and development of generations before us, and the actions we take cannot be divorced from that context. We are campers – proud in our Tyvek wraps, tending to our cast irons, looking occasionally up at the sky, always a part of the societies that wrought us.
3.
Others more wise and poetic than me have written better and more extensively on this topic, but to reiterate: we cannot go to the wilderness. We contain within us cultural memories of times long past when human societies were fewer and farther between and felt more deeply the vulnerability and risk of existing on this many-specied planet – when the idea of wilderness held a beautiful fear and shimmering possibility. However, as I write this bizarre little essay in September of common era 2018, the internet, that many fingered artifact of our collective consciousness, tells me that there are between 7.4 and 7.6 billion humans currently living together on this planet, which is a number that I can’t truly comprehend. Collectively, our terraforming, willful and unwilful, has affected every life cycle, nutrient cycle, water cycle, and energy cycle on this planet; interacted with and caused migrations and extinctions among humans and animals; and affected everything big and little that exists around and within us, from the bark beetles of the Rio Grande headwaters to the microbes in my gut.
We cannot go to the wilderness because it is not separate from us.
What we can do is create situations where we call to the wilderness in us and in other species; in rocks, woods, and skies; in skyscrapers, concrete, and garbage patches; to investigate what wildness can still mean, and how it can flourish on this one beautiful messed up planet we all share. Maybe it’s through camping, or maybe by walking down your city block, hanging out with your pet dog, cat, or burro, reading poetry, not reading poetry, talking, listening, committing to building and maintaining something long term, politics, health care, or even a little bit of romance. Let’s figure out how to keep and care for our wilderness, our wildness, and ourselves. We could all use some help.
