The School of Wild Places

The wild places that he writes about are different from the ones I am familiar with. Embedded in the differences, nestled between the individual threads that create the obvious visual appearances of the fabric, rest a lot of familiar similarities.

Robert Macfarlane is a brilliant writer. He is an accomplished artist that paints with words. To say that The Wild Places is an excellent read is a limp understatement on my part.

His world of wild places becomes my own world of wild places. Not so much because of the natural wild scenery that he sees. More so because of the deep natural essences inherent within the scenery he describes … the deep personally felt experiences experienced within the obvious seen experiences.

Those of us that are familiar with the work and writings of Horace Kephart like to toss around something that he said … In the school of the woods there is no graduation day.

I think, more often than not, we are referencing the idea that there is always something more to learn in regards to outdoor skills and the environment where we practice these skills. There is no error in this referencing. There is a lot to learn in these regards.

I do believe that, if Kephart took a stroll among us here today, he would tell us something more about what he meant in that coined phrase.

That something more, in my opinion, is that we use the tangible to reach the intangible.

We use what we can experience with our natural senses to get in touch with and understand who we have become as individuals as a result of our ingrained indoctrinations, personal life experiences, and modern cultural grooming. Without experiencing the intangible, we can never overcome our biases, preferences, and prejudices.

Every age and era, every life for that matter, is rife with tragedies and crises of one sort or another. It’s the price we pay for being humans and participating in a world where humans often tend to live inhumanely toward others … and, worse yet, toward their own selves.

The school of wild places is a difficult school.

The greatest difficulty of this school is that it possesses the potential to make us see the reflection of what life without it has made of us and to recreate and stabilize us as individuals. The remotest of the wild classrooms offer the greatest potential for remedial illumination and opportunities for the application of the salve that generates and restores our human sanity … if we are open and receptive to it.

It’s a big if.

I did not know this if for the greatest part of my life.

Probably because there was nobody around that knew it or had ever heard of it.

This admission doesn’t mean that I was unfamiliar with being outdoors.

I’ve spent a lot of time outdoors doing outdoorsy stuff. Even as a small boy I was going solo into the woods. The woods, for me as a small boy growing up between two sisters, offered me a place to retreat to where I escaped the harassment of my sisters. This retreat was a key player during my elementary school years. Those years were a constant barrage of humiliation generated by class peers and social class. (I was one of some small few dirt-poor farm boys from hardscrabble farms forced to attend school with the offspring of well-to-do farmers and townie socialites. I have never once considered attending any of my High School Reunions.)

Afternoons after school, and on weekends and holidays, I fled to the woods to escape and discover solace. I can now, in retrospect, see that if was there in the woods but, as a child, the reality of if was far from my perception.

It was on the prairie of Northwest Kansas, shortly after the change of the Millennium, that I began to perceive something of this if.

That was a tough season.

I was in a clergy profession dealing with a bad lot of difficult and aggressive personalities. I tossed the profession and walked away. Then there was the weight of another divorce on my shoulders. I was in the middle of the country … almost the exact geographical center. Alone. No family. None that I could honestly call friends. And add to the weight the hopeful but fearful mixed emotions of a budding relationship.

I rode a lot of prairie dirt roads.

I camped in the prairie heat and cold prairie winds.

I watched the tumbleweeds rolling in the wind.

I watched the prairie grass and the fields of grain rolling … wave after wave.

I sat in my truck on a dirt road and watched an approaching storm. I watched a number of storms. This one was different. Half hoping a tornado would take me out of my troubles. Half hoping nothing cyclonic would come my way.  I sat and waited and watched … almost paralyzed by the excitement and anticipation. The wind was blowing like crazy. The sky dark and full of prairie dust. When the storm arrived, it rained a heavy layer of mud on my truck and everything around me.

It was soloing out there on the prairie where I began to sense something of this if. It was there that I began searching for that small person inside of me that was covered over by the layers of life-concrete that had been dumped on me the first forty and few years of my life. It was there … on the hard and harsh prairie … nearly twenty years ago … that I began to recognize and experience the remedial power of the school of wild places.