As our perceptions of wilderness evolve, so can our enjoyment of these special places

“Hey,” Christine said in a strained voice from where she followed close enough to run into me when I stopped. “Don’t you think we need headlamps or something? I can’t see anything,” she said.

“Can you see me?” I asked with a grin as she stared at my face.

“Don’t be smart, yeah I can see you, but I can’t see much farther.”

“Just go with it for a bit and you’ll find you can see fine.”

“What if something gets me first?”

“Given the conversation we are having, and that our snowshoes sound like the apocalypse on this crusted snow and that it is 10 below zero so sound carries on forever, I’m fairly sure anything that might get you is fast running the other way. Course a tree might commit suicide to fall on you and get you to shut up.”

“Seriously, you don’t have a light,” she said as I shook my head no.

This scene happened early on in our partnership. Christine loved the outdoors and spent a lot of time outside, but she lacked my advantage of having grown up where if you waited until light to start a day, you may as well not. As a kid, I wandered the country at all hours. We didn’t have luxuries like flashlights or headlamps. She didn’t grow up with the assurance that nature wasn’t dangerous and had fond memories of a backyard floodlight.

“Well this is a wilderness area, you told me, so it seems like maybe you would be a little better prepared for it.”

We were in a part of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge designated wilderness, which meant that things like chainsaws, snowmachines, power ice augers, and bicycles, are prohibited. Entering these areas was for foot traffic with minimal impact on the environment.

I chuckled to myself, thinking if I could get her to hang in there for a while, there would be an awakening that would forever change how she viewed the world.

I told her, “If you can steel yourself against the notions running around in your head and stay with me for a couple of hours, I promise I won’t let the wolves get you (thinking we should be so lucky to have some come around) and you will find that you will hear better, your sense of smell will come alive, and your night vision will amaze you. The other option is we go home and never speak of this again.”

I felt comfortable saying that. Christine had proved she was no quitter and rose to every new challenge she met in my relentless pursuit to be out in the territory.

“Fine,” she replied, “but if I get eaten, it’s your fault.”

“You won’t, but if you do, would you mind if I kept your skull, assuming it isn’t damaged? You have a lovely round head, and it would complement Filthy Herman.”

She laughed, “You are the strangest person I’ve ever met, and evidently I must be a bit strange myself to go along with these celebrations of yours.”

Perception it seems, fosters so many of our behaviors and reactions when encountering nature. Given the early history of the Anglo-Saxon perception of the wild, it isn’t surprising that folks shudder in terror at the concept of “wilderness.”

The journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark no doubt contributed to the earlier perceptions of the perils of traveling across the continental divide in search of power, money, and territory at the behest of President Jefferson. Other explorers around the globe were no doubt instrumental in presenting the wilderness as a dangerous place where only the best of men could survive.

Inheriting a voracious appetite for the written word from my father, I spent the hours when confined to a building by my mother, reading everything available to me. Some from books Dad had, some from the very small school library, and some from a paternal grandmother who lived in the enormous metropolis of Fargo, North Dakota, would check out books for me at the much larger library there.

Most of the books were of course, on the topics of hunting, trapping, and exploring — fodder to fuel a lifelong love affair with all things wild. Some might say, and my mother would have been amongst them, that dimwittedness left me with no fears of the “wilderness.” I prefer to think not, and perhaps a quote I recently discovered by Chief Luther Standing Bear says it well, “For the Lakota there was no wilderness. Nature was not dangerous but hospitable, not forbidding but friendly.”

That quote explains much of my perception of wild places. Nature has no value judgments; respect begets respect, it is that simple. Refrain from conquering, and things will work out just fine. Which of course has been a problem for our dominant culture for hundreds of years. Fear plays a part, attempting to destroy the object of fear so that it can’t hurt you. That theme is sadly rather consistent with the settlers arriving from the “Old World.”

While reading these old accounts of hunting and exploration, dimwitted as I may be, the one constant when exploring the “wilderness” was that Indigenous folks were already living perfectly happy lives there. For these people, it was home and it seemed to me that saying it was “wilderness” was a stretch.

Things had grown quiet during that snowshoeing trip to a remote lake that promised fish untrained to the ways of the artificial lure. The crunch of snowshoes and the occasional snap of trees cracking from the cold were the only sounds in the darkness until Christine broke the spell.

“I’m impressed,” she said, “It is amazing how well I can see now that my eyes have adjusted. I love how crisp and loud every sound seems, the smell of the trees, and I think I might smell what you have always said is moose?”

In anyone’s book, that dark morning was a win. In the ensuing years, Christine has perhaps become more attuned to nature than I am. She often mentions how being in such places takes her out of her head and puts her into her senses. Perhaps more.

Our perception of still-wild places is not of “wilderness,” but, as we like to call them, places we have chosen to be kind to. With Alaska being unmatched for undeveloped land, where we have so many places that we are kind to, no other place is suitable for the likes of us.

It is the last place to get it right, and by any measure, our public lands that are still wild are a priceless gift to the nation.