The Wilderness is an interesting place. It is the line between civilization and the unknown. When I think of the Wilderness I think of a lush green rain forest in the middle of the Amazon. Birds are twittering, insects chirping, and the place feels alive yet untouched. It is a place where Man has not stepped foot in since before my great-great-great-grandfather was alive. Sometimes I will think of the caves yet to be uncovered, lurking in darkness with treasures untold. Even down to the outfits people where when they go out into the “Wilderness” it’s all so interesting, and it seems so fantastical compared to the hum of modern-day life. 

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My first encounter with the Wilderness was when I was in seventh grade. I was on a class trip to Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. It was our third day there when we actually went into the caves, and I remember being in a dusty navy-blue jumpsuit. My class was 400 feet underground, wedged in between the ceiling and the floor with just enough room to army crawl on our bellies. It was one of the most suffocating things I had ever done, but I look back on it now with a sense of nostalgia as if it were my glory days to be gritting through it towards some success. 

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Some people see the Wilderness as a place that needs to be conquered. In the days when America was just a young nation, the wilderness was seen as a vast plane with riches untold. I can think of countless times during my ninth grade U.S. history class where I was told about how we would buy huge swaths of land and then send people to settle and tame it. The brothers Lewis and Clark are the most notable to me and how they went over the newly grabbed Louisiana Purchase to map it and tell the government about all they found. They traveled for months to find something in the great Wild West, and later people would follow in their footsteps to uncover the Oregon Trail.  

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In the 1970’s the game Oregon Trail was made to recapture that nostalgia of conquering the Wilderness and finding new lands. My mother showed me this game when I was in eighth grade, and I loved to play it. It taught me that anyone could conquer the wilderness with just the right materials, and that if you had enough money, you could make it anywhere, do anything. It makes me think of my Aunt Kimberly and how she has enough dried food in her basement to last ten people twenty years if the world were to end tomorrow. 

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Sometimes I wish I could escape into the vast nothingness of the wilderness. Not to say that there is nothing there in the wilderness, it’s just right now, the people who live in the wilderness are in tight knit communities spread miles apart. In the continental U.S. it almost feels like there is no true Wilderness. The wilderness spaces we have are commercialized national parks or human-caused trails. I think of National Parks like Yosemite, Yellow Stone, and the Grand Canyon where people pay to visit and drive right on in. Massive roads carve their way through these parks to let people visit “rare sights” that have been photographed millions of times. While it is definitely nature, I think the wilderness aspect of it is lost. 

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When I think of the Wilderness I think of that unknown: the exclusivity of it. How like the colonists, inventors, and explorers before me, I was one of the first few people of the modern world to discover this “new” thing. New in the sense that I was one of the first people from my country to discover it even though there may be people who already know about this place. Like with Mammoth cave, and how when it was first discovered in the modern era, they found Indigenous people’s cave paintings and carvings in the caverns. It shows that while, we as the United States still saw it as wilderness, it was already found and made home for someone else. Another example would be when digging up fields in the country side, artifacts can be found, whether it be old coins or arrow heads or scraps of shattered pottery. It provides us with the knowledge that someone lived here before us, and they conquered this piece of land. I don’t think there will ever be a true, untouched, wilderness in our day and age. Humanity has been alive for millions of years, we have had so much time to explore every facet of the Earth and claim it as our own. 

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There was a post on Facebook I saw a while back. It was actually a screenshot of a Tumbler post that had said in Antient Egypt they had taught classes and people had jobs to discover about their Antient Egypt. The Egyptian empire had been around so long that they were rediscovering things about themselves to show to future generations. It makes me wonder if the wilderness is really just the absence of modern life. What if one day, the place where I sleep is considered the wilderness because trees have overgrown and spit apart my house, so nothing stays?  

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Is the wilderness just a lack of what society considers the default for its people? If I were to ask someone living in a community in the middle of a rainforest if they were in the wilderness, I think they would say no. That place is their home, and it is familiar to them. They would know their patch of the rainforest like the back of their hand. Maybe they would call a city like New York or Los Angeles the wilderness because of a lack of familiarity.  

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At the end of the day, the Wilderness is a place untouched by humanity. A place like that no longer exists on this earth. In every way we have touched this planet with our hands and feet, eye and ears. We’ve explored the highest mountains and dived into the darkest depths. We have seen every surface of her and watched her change under our guiding hands. In the good times we have brought out her splendors and showcased her to other humans, but right now we only cause her pain with the waste we throw into her oceans and deserts. To leave her this way is a tragedy. One day the Earth will heal, and I would hope it will be with us.