Notice: The wilderness is under new management

With spring in the air, browsing my Gmail inbox reveals a proliferation of advertisements from hiking and camping programs. These are programs designed to expose cloistered and fragile city children—my earlier self, and, somewhat more tragically, my current self—translucent from the eerie glow of the computer screen to the rugged and exciting world of the outdoors.

You may ask why these people have my email. As it turns out, I went camping for a month in the Pacific Northwest through just such a program during the summer after my freshman year of high school, which clearly sold my address to 20 or so other like-minded organizations that now voraciously try to make contact with me over the Internet.

I am not interested, and it’s not because I’m too old or too apathetic. In fact, if the opposite of “apathetic” is “pathetic,” then I am completely pathetic to climate change, making an earnest effort to recycle where possible—the caps go in the other bin—and to conserve electricity. Preserving the environment will always top the list of my voting issues, and I question the sanity of those who profess not to believe in global climate change—as if the matter belonged in the hazy religious lexicon of “belief” and “disbelief.”

Despite the best of intentions, I must profess that I think our generation—and perhaps our progeny even more—has been betrayed by a concept of wilderness that set us up for disappointment. The idea of the wild appeals intrinsically to children, and, practically since birth, our imaginations are fully steeped in its visions.

In 1963, Maurice Sendak published “Where the Wild Things Are,” a children’s book that has recently enjoyed major motion picture-dom at the hands of Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze. The simple plot complicated as it stretched to fill the space appraised at $7 to $12, but the underlying principles ring true. Young Max seeks refuge from the parental punitive structures in the smothering social system of his childhood. And where does he find it? In the wild! This is a wild synonymous with, “go wild!”—an environment where the rules are inverted, allowing Max to take on qualities of independence and self-determination, barred from his wee age demographic in the wild’s mundane antithesis: reality.

Francis Spufford named “Where the Wild Things Are” “one of the very few picture books to make an entirely deliberate, and beautiful, use of the psychoanalytic story of anger.” Max, consciously or subconsciously, is angry at the societal structures that sent him to bed with no dinner, and responds in a very psychologically normal—and visually interesting—way, with his escape into the wild.

Next came “The Lorax” by Dr. Seuss, a short story featuring a furry, yellowish creature with a large mustache, who objects to the deforestation of Truffula Trees. Truffula Trees are lush and soft, like palm trees made of brightly colored faux fur. “The Lorax” paints industry in stark opposition to the beauty of nature, encapsulated in these trees. On the page, the thick Truffula fronds seemed almost tangible—reading the story, I could taste them on the tip of my tongue like cotton candy. The wild became not only a stage for liberation, but also a world of immense beauty accessible through the senses.

A few years later, Huckleberry Finn and Jim would escape the society that held each captive in his own right, fleeing into the wilderness of uninhabited islands on the Mississippi River. White Fang and Robinson Crusoe followed close behind them. Another few years, and Thoreau abandoned the comforts of urban life for Walden Pond, where his writing would become the manual for self-sufficiency, resourcefulness, and independence.

However, on a camping program, the message to children is not “go wild!” but rather, “don’t pick the flowers, don’t leave the path, and don’t touch any plants—it’s all poison ivy out there.” The wild has been made a highly regularized, rule-governed parent-space. Our paranoid culture of lawsuits and intimidation has legislation to match. Reserve your campsite online, bring portable stove tops for fires, no fishing or swimming. With good intentions, I’m sure.

But through generational memory I recall a time, within the span of my father’s stories, where hikers bushwhacked, built lean-tos and campfires, and tasted wild blueberries.
The wild has become a museum, and, I suppose, retained a museum’s good qualities. But Max’s parents own it now, and I don’t know if I can forgive them.

Amanda Gutterman is a Columbia College first year with an intended major in anthropology or comparative literature and society. The Far-Side runs alternate Tuesdays.