The Sky So Blue: Wilderness and the Art of Introduction

Cross Currents, Fall, 2001 by Carol Dysinger

To study the Buddha Way is to study the self To study the self is to forget the self To forget the s elf is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.

Why's it so hard

to sit in the yard

and stare at the sky so blue?

John Prine

We are so under fire in this life. Our senses are barraged with images, text, noise, and speech. Much of the world that we think we know we don't know from direct experience. If we do not make a conscious effort to remain extremely aware, reality becomes a wash of other people's experiences refracted through the business needs of a media company. How much of the natural world have we seen through someone else's eyes? The idea that wilderness equals freedom is used to sell everything from antihistamines to monstrous earth shattering SUVs. But it's a wilderness without reality; an imaginary freedom. How many times have we seen the photo of a person standing alone on an impossible peak with clean hair, shorts and a tiny rucksack? No evidence of the community effort and hardships that it took to get there. Not one hint of the cost to the body and soul of that person, not to mention the person taking the picture.

It is easier to see the grand vistas in our minds than to think of turning our feet off the path and, ducking branches and skirting poison ivy, head into a pathless patch of deer gnawed young oak. Or in the city, how do we shift our awareness so that it naturally lands on the spindly tree struggling in front of us and not on the billboard of a magnificent oak that has the idea of life insurance attached to it? Wilderness has come to mean some grand other -- other than this body in this apartment, on this subway, at this computer. The natural world, the environment, wilderness -- let's face it, reality -- is being deeply abused. And our minds go with it.

How did we all get so far away? How did I? And how do we return? Why return? Return to what? What is returning? It is everywhere, but it is hard to see, hard to grasp. Understanding the self in the woods and on the water sounds big, but it is a surprisingly personal thing.

In my childhood the woods belonged to men, especially my father. He loved the rivers and bays of Maryland where we grew up. He was a brilliant scientist, I am told, but my experience of him was best when we were out of doors. He gave us ducklings at Easter (instead of the sad, dyed chicks of the time), which we would raise in the backyard and then release at the river when they were grown. My most cherished memory of loving him was seeing him, jacketless, tie flapping, running out into the snow under the picture window to scatter bird seed so he could teach me the names of the birds: scissortail swallow, junco, grackle. He took us canoeing and swimming in Chesapeake Bay, teaching us the intricate art of dodging jellyfish. His lore of the water and the woods was given him silently by his father and his mother's father, who, family legend has it, walked home after the battle of Fredericksburg. His knowledge of this country's woodlands tied him to generations of men before him and he began to pass it to my brot her and me. But he had inherited the pressure to be the imperious white man of good education and family, and he cracked up, left and stayed gone. He left to live a very different life, wandering from motel to motel, and I saw him a handful of times after that, and never in the woods or on the water again.

The chain of transmission had been broken as it has been breaking all over the world. Our relationship to nature is specific and familial, just like our relationship to food. This world of markets has infiltrated those relationships and the loss of wild areas has made our homes houses and not places where certain things grow. Why do we have a state bird and a state flower? They are relics from a time when a black-eyed susan could make someone homesick for Maryland. We decry the rainforest tribes leaving their ancient traditions, without acknowledging that we let ours go only few generations ago.

Here is a big and simple truth. We do not go wandering into the woods to become one with the great mother, as the ads suggest. Wilderness is not a thing we travel to, plonk ourselves down in the middle of and be in. We have to be introduced. We have to be brought, and shown and taught things, one thing at a time. This is what has been lost. All that old knowledge that we used to learn, like brushing our teeth and washing our hands. When the cows lie down, it is likely it will rain. Where the water is dark, the current is deep.

My introduction had barely begun, and without realizing it I had been waiting for my father to return from his madness to finish it. I had been waiting for him or a man like him. Waiting for a man because it was a man's place, not a likely admission from a feminist, but true. A few years ago he died, suddenly, at the Cinderella Motel in Los Banos, California. He had bought an RV and not gone anywhere. He had gotten himself stuck in the preparation to move, and had not.