My Green Manifesto (13 page)

Which is why I continue to stress the word
wild
in these decidedly un-wild times. I stress it because it is vital, because without it all is lost. It is the wellspring, the unnamed, the ineffable, the slightly crazy, the fickle, the joyous, the strange, and the creative force behind so much of what we feel and do. I stress it because, no matter how we plan or make things-to-do lists, and no matter how we try, valiantly and importantly, to control events, every great act depends on something beyond our control, something unpredictable and wordless. In short, something wild.

If we don't acknowledge this, if we don't believe this,
then there is no real reason to stop stamping out the wild. There is no reason not to continue to make our world as predictable, efficient, virtual, and calculated as possible. And there's no argument against the logic of the assembly line or the music of automation. If we don't believe this then taking any action to protect the wild is just another logical decision: Why, yes, I think it makes good sense to save the rainforest just in case there are unknown plants there that could provide medicines to cure human illnesses.

Screw that. Of course there isn't anything wrong with finding medicines, curing illnesses, recycling aluminum cans, twisting in light bulbs, attending meetings, putting a stop to the local cement plant, and printing on both sides of the paper. In fact there's a whole lot right about these things, and they are necessary in this time of crisis. All I am really saying is that there is something else that is important as well, something deeper, something not just right but joyous.

When we set out this morning, Dan thought the land next to Long Ditch would be a good spot for the night's camping. Long Ditch is an artificial tributary of the Charles which was excavated by citizens of Dedham in 1654 in an effort to reduce flooding of the town's lowlands.
¹²
As we approach, the ditch looks, to my eye, very ditch-like: The mucky banks lead up to chest high grasses, which I imagine are filled with ticks.

I suggest we camp in the woods nearby.

“The woods aren't safe once you get this close to the city. We're better off on state land—no one comes here.” He explains that the land is owned by the DCR, the Department of Conservation and Recreation, the organization that he
works for, and is separated from the parklands by the moat of the ditch itself. Then he adds: “This grass is too high for ticks.” I'm not so sure about that but we tie up our boat to the root of a willow tree and then Dan charges into the grasses using his oar as a machete to hack clear a place for our tent.

We set up camp and celebrate with beers in the matteddown front yard of our temporary home. The beer works its everyday magic. We lie back on the grass despite my worries about ticks and an odd rustling sound nearby in the higher grasses.

Dusk is approaching and, with our camp set up, we climb down the muddy bank to our boat. Our first job is bailing and we scoop out the stinking water. Then we climb back into the stinking boat in our stinking clothes and we paddle out of the ditch and onto Cow Island Pond. We work our way east across the pond, into the wind, toward the far end where the river intersects with Route One. The work is somewhat grueling, after a long day already, but the destination is a noble one: The Olde Irish Alehouse, a rickety wooden building. As we approach, it looms above us like a decrepit barge, seemingly ready to tumble into the river. The building is a kind of kitschy monument, dotted with leprechaun trinkets and crowned by a wooden sculpture of two swans that appear to be making out, but at least it, unlike so many of the nearby buildings, has not entirely turned its back on the river. The people dining two floors above us look down through the window and wave. We tie up to a tree root and scramble up a dirt bank near a dumpster and into the parking lot, observing multiple signs of civilization, including several gas stations, a Dunkin' Donuts, and an “Entering Boston” sign. We enter the building in
our mucky clothes, but no one knows we have come by water. Inside we devour mashed potatoes and dangerously undercooked steaks and top it off with vodka gimlets.

I like traveling with Dan. He is a good guide and a lot of fun, but there's something else that puts him above other co-pilots. He provides a relief, maybe even an antidote, to the tone of environmentalism that makes me want to thumb my nose and turn away. What continues to bug me, when it comes right down to it, is the sheer earnestness of environmentalism, the conviction that the world is doomed and the compulsive need to share this cheery news. If there were environmental weather reports, they would go something like this: “Gloom expected today . . . more doom tomorrow.”

Of course the world is doomed. Human beings cover the earth like maggots, species are wiped out daily, land is gobbled up by developers, the great migrations are dying out, the world is warming, sea level rising. All true. And then throw in the fact that while all this is going on most people seem less concerned with the fate of the world than with the fate of the latest starlet to enter rehab. Nature writers are accused of being apocalyptic, but the facts themselves are pretty dire.

Which tends to have this result: Human beings, most of whom are not really very good at dwelling in hopelessness, turn away. Maybe it's just too much for the human mind to live in a constant state of world anxiety. It not only doesn't help the mind much; it only rarely helps the world. Yes, there are some great, galvanizing, world-saving personalities—we live in desperate times and it's true
that desperation can sometimes energize. But hopelessness, as a rule, does
not
inspire. We are not very good at fighting apocalypses. We are better at fighting for our neighborhoods or for sections of river we've grown up on. And most of us need at least a dollop of hope to nudge ourselves into action. Again, I'm not talking about Disney hope here but a practical hope, hope in the face of reality.

It does seem hopeful to me that, paddling into a city of over four million, we can still see a deer on the banks, a sharp-shinned hawk in the canopy, stripers swimming below. And it does seem hopeful that imperfect human beings, crazy eyed, former deadheads like Dan, have fought to correct our mistakes and redeem something that seemed unredeemable, like this river. It's not the ultimate answer, but it's something. The beginning of something. Something to create momentum, to fight inertia.

Whenever I think of small fights, I think of the writer Joy Williams, and what she did with her home in Key West. She bought a house there decades ago but before long a suburb sprung up around her: manicured lawns, sprinklers, the works—all very “civilized.” Joy, however, let her plot of land grow wild, as it always had, with vines and trees and lizards and snakes and ferns. When the neighbors started to complain she simply built a fence around it, making her last stand there, letting her tiny ecosystem thrive. When Joy and I first met she was staying at a beach house on an overdeveloped coastal town in North Carolina near where I teach, and sitting on the front porch of that house, I noted that there was a single undeveloped plot across the street where green herons had clustered at dusk. It might have been the very last undeveloped plot on the whole island, the last bit that wasn't concrete, and I
started to make a point of studying it, noticing that migrating birds seemed to know just where it was; this was their stopover point. It occurred to me that while we need people to fight for millions of acres in Utah, we also need people to fight to save that single plot, that tiny wilderness.

I know that while a glimpse of a leaf through the bars of a jailhouse may be a form of wilderness, it is not one that would satisfy many of us. But I also find it hopeful that even in this wounded landscape there are still delights to being alive.

After more gimlets and dangerously raw meat, we finally pay the bill and say goodbye to the Alehouse. Sliding down the muddy bank, slightly unsteady, we clamber back into the canoe and paddle home drunk to our murky campsite lit with fireflies in the ditch. More lights come next. We stare off toward town, where someone has decided to set off a fairly impressive display of fireworks one day early. “A warm up,” Dan calls it.

We sleep well despite a strange rustling from some creature in the tall grass that brings the movie
Alien
to mind
.
I wake early and discover that someone has left a huge hobnailed boot on our campsite doorstep, footwear that looks part angler's wader and part hooker boot. I am not sure when or how it got here, but I know it was not here when we arrived. We have truly entered the urban wild.

This is my wildness. A trashy ditch with a hooker boot for flora. Maybe that's a good thing. Sometimes I don't think people value wildness because they believe they have to
hike to the top of a mountain in Alaska to find it. I have traveled all over the world to experience the wild, but some of my wildest moments have been closer to home. On Cape Cod, on the same domestic beach I've returned to all my life—where the summer is all kids, umbrellas, and beach balls—the winter cold clears it of people and its character changes. From the rocks at the end of the beach I once watched hundreds of snow-white gannets dive from a hundred feet in the air, plunging into the freezing winter ocean like living javelins. Then, as the birds dove down, something else dove up: a breaching humpback whale rising as it herded the same fish the gannets were diving for.

“In wildness is the preservation of the world,” wrote Thoreau, but as many others have pointed out, people often get the quote wrong and use “wilderness” instead.
¹³
While
wilderness
might be untrammeled land along the Alaskan coast,
wildness
can happen anywhere. Wildness is unplanned, unpredictable. You can't put a fence around it. It can happen in the jungle or on a city river. It rises up when you least expect it.

It is of vital importance that we not define this wildness as wilderness, that we not construct intellectual walls between the natural and the human. In fact, it was while observing my own species, my own family, that I experienced the two wildest moments of my life.