Choosing Wildness

The call of the wild grows fainter with each passing season, until I wonder at the viability, let alone the value, of wilderness. A wildness within grips my heart, but its clutches do not seem as strong as they once were.

Last night I purchased, online, a batch of flies, but I haven’t fished in months. My patterns have been changing. And though the weeds and wildflowers surround me in my little yellow house on a prairie—a sometimes fortress of thought and anticipation—there is less each day that compels me outdoors, out into the wild that once defined me. When I think about myself, I am surprised how infrequently I enter the actual wilderness anymore, and even the wildness of my soul seems reduced to backyard birds. Is there a cost to this change? What am I spending? Am I accruing a debt that is not payable?

The politics of the day often paralyze me, because it is not really politics that now governs our thought and action. Rather, some degenerate mob violence that seems to rise and swell at the whim of certain tyrannical fools. The loss of honest debate is troubling. The refusal to compromise, the psychotic drive to humiliate others while denying our own culpability strives for normalization.

I have taken a kind of refuge in writing poems, but poetry only goes so far. The images that might point to truth seem to be catalogued like a violin concerto from the eighteenth century. The contemporary already seems outdated, and the dystopian settles like fog.

The role of the artist feels overstated. He is first a citizen, and like any citizen, he can try to ignore, escape into distraction, or buzz on endlessly like a doomed fly against a windshield. Injustice rises like dirty flood water. You can’t survive without being tainted. We are all threatened. To change the metaphor, there are too many holes in our bucket. Anything claimed as good is partisan, and its perceived opposite is demonized.

Everybody knows this. We’ve all said as much in our own ways, in our own echo chambers. Even when we climb to the top of a mountain and look out, beyond, hoping for clarity, seeking reprieve, praying for direction—the oxygen is too thin to last. We gasp as we must descend, head down, eyes inward, sounds dulling with every step homeward.

To keep hope alive is daunting. What am I hoping for? Reconciliation with a brother so estranged he seems cartoonish? For a father to state the obvious? For others to confirm my acumen? To be aware as I am aware? To voice my own concern? To sing an off-key duet with myself in an underground sewer, a place where beauty can never find soil or sunlight?

I began by talking about wildness. Maybe that Nature is our only lasting truth. But if to be wild is to be free, our freedom is tarnished by gimmick and gadgetry. The soul longs for more. The soul longs for so much more. Like a withering plant in sun too hot, in soil too parched, fading color is also part of wildness. A part we don’t like to think about. Thoreau and Whitman excited the senses, but they don’t speak absolute truth. Yet absolute truth punishes the seeker, disqualifies him from the party. In foolish decline we are diminished, and if you are like me, you feel guilty even thinking this way. I should be more hopeful, I think. I should not give way to despair. I should go to the shelf, take down a volume of Wordsworth and read it while a Haydn symphony sounds in the background—sure of itself, ordered like medicine, a prescription that promises a return to health.

As you may imagine, I am unsure how to bring these thoughts to a close. I don’t even know to whom I am writing. Maybe, I only write for myself, for my own distraction. I am not so glib as to suggest the end of all things. I only wonder, and I worry, at the new shapes, the new forms that will take the place of everything I have been. Will I maintain wildness? Will wildness keep me, or will I be tamed, and will the taming ruin me?

Reinvention requires some measure of choice. But to be remade, redefined, recreated may not always reflect my will. I am trying to choose what I will choose.

I am seeing more clearly than ever what I am reluctant to admit: the current political crisis for me is also a spiritual crisis. And for me, spirituality is immersed with wilderness. Like Jesus, and other wild men, I have retreated to desert solitude, and have on occasion, submitted to the eternal voice of wisdom drifting through the thin air lofting over gray-green cholla and yellow chamisa. I have struggled to resist temptations for temporary lust-driven pursuit of power, popularity and pleasure-induced mammon. Increasingly, I realize I must return to the desert. Though it may take more effort now, I must revisit my soul. I must reclaim my contact with truth, restore my lately muted drive to be wind-blown, dust-covered and sprinkled with the quiet stars heaven longs to rain down on me.

Yes, I also realize that I have to be careful about the “log” in my own eye, as much as my brother’s blurred vision. On the other hand, what is it to me if I can’t make a brother see? I’m sure I will continue to read Wordsworth, but these days I am more moved by Beethoven’s response to Napoleon. His disappointment is my disappointment. He was skillful enough to rename his “heroic” symphony, to give his art a new dispensation. But those less masterful, such as myself, struggle to know what forms our expressions should take. How to name the turmoil I feel seems to be a daily struggle that threatens anything beautiful, anything idealistic.

Will I really let plastic men yoked with elongated ties drive me indoors, cloistered in fear, fretting the coming days, worried my grandsons will have to seek a diminishing wilderness of their own in the social context of ideology or prejudice? Afraid I’ll have no pension left to manage, and nothing left over to give? Afraid my words are increasingly irrelevant, that my view of life may become nothing more than a passing thunderhead floating away beneath an all-consuming, alien sun? Still, something else haunts me, tells me I must do my best to patch the holes in the bucket. Even if I cannot patch every leak, I still may carry some water. After all, a leaking bucket is not necessarily an empty bucket. I guess I will have to refill it as often as I can.

The calling wilderness may have to compete with new kinds of noise, but by acts of faith, by willful determination, I can recall its pure sweet whisper. I can remember. I must remember—remember dodging lightning in the San Juan Mountains, sleeping under incendiary stars in Algonquin Park, a soundless place but for a wolf howl and crackling flames in my peasant campfire.

Maybe in remembering, the tenuous voice will be heard again, loud enough stir me to life. I see nothing better than to give myself to what I was going to be. I am choosing to choose. My reading and my artistic responses must accompany my journeys outdoors. I cannot give up a rustic mindset, a self that can never surrender to Caesar, but neither can it be allowed to burn in isolation, dwindling candle wax secluded in a window sill. I will carefully unwrap that box of ordered flies. I will put them with my rod, my waders, my tent, securely in the bed of my old beat-up pickup. I will conjure the necessary gas money and drive to the nearest stream. I will wade across slippery rocks again. I will cast into the wind, I will squint into the sun, set the hook in a wild trout, a glorious fish that will never give up freedom without a fight.

I will turn off the cell phone, turn off the noise, stop reading about bullies trying their damndest to feel important, justifying their myopic treachery against the humble in our land. I will get out of bed, and in the dark watch clouds circle the moon, stand among stoic oaks, listen to geese honk through eternal sky, celebrate coyotes cringing in a world they cannot undo.

By faith, and without apology, I must admire the indigo bunting, worship the flycatcher along the fence-rowed sunflowers. I will walk barefoot among the dandelions, and know their divinity. I will return to the back deck, light a cigar, listen to the night birds join in song. I will offer a sip of bourbon to a neighbor, even a brother, and sit silent in the presence of a decaying elm under falling night.

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