It’s been one of the snowier winters up here that I can remember in recent years. It’s kind of thrilling. There have been so many winters when snow is slow to arrive, or only stays ephemerally, and those are the winters that can be especially hard to get through—it feels like the darkness seeps into the ground, making it even colder and dark— as if hollowed out, exposed with no benefit of reflected light off a ground covered in snow. By this time of year, the snow that arrives feels full of light—the brightness reflected through the house, finally after the darkness of November-December-January.
I’m often surprised at how much the landscape takes up space in my thoughts when I sit down to write—often unintentionally. But the latitude and elements don’t recede politely into a horizon—they are indifferent, but ever-present, almost demanding attention at times. It’s uncanny really, how quickly the landscape seeps like a dye into a text, a musing, a poem.
I’m gently annoyed with it because I’ve grown a bit weary of writing that is about Alaska—about the beauty, the extremeness, the mountains, the animals—writing that is so often labeled “nature writing.” What bothers me is how it upholds the persistent assumption that ‘nature’ is an entity separate from ourselves—we get lulled into upholding the belief that ‘nature’ is separate from ‘culture,’ i.e., society. People.
It is often by the best-intentioned writers, in awe and appreciation of the animals, mountains, sea, around them. And that’s beautiful and is worth thinking about, unquestionably. But I worry that what gets lost is the bleed of it all, the diffusion and reality of well, life. There are no easy boundaries. And as it intrudes on my thoughts as I sit down to write, I get reminded of that—that there is nothing separate about what is happening outside my window and within my room. The woodpecker knocking on the house is less than a foot away from me as I write, and we’re both breathing air in virtually the same space. So have I drifted into nature writing by detailing his presence? Are we truly existing in different environments—am I culture within doors, nature without? Is the house wall between us that powerful?
‘Nature’ is all a part of ideas and structures we are told exist—nature, wilderness. But these are simply words that continue to prop up a colonized, frontier-settler ethic. It’s language that erases people from the landscape.
I’ve especially been fascinated, living up here, by the idea of ‘wilderness’. The myth of it. It’s a myth that persists so fervently and yet it is so tied to a legacy of colonization, oppression, exclusion, exploitation, depletion, excuses, exile. It’s an American myth, a created idea of places that the country has determined is “untrammeled by man1,” pristine, untouched. The word is thrown around so often without an understanding of what is really meant by it—and it ignores that people have lived within ‘wilderness’ for millennia.
Wilderness has never been a reality—it’s a heavily constructed temple to the nation’s belief in rugged individualism—the legacy of a western colonizing erasure of people from nature.
Last week I came across this thread about Chris McCandless—the young man who died alone in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan ‘wilderness’ in 1992—and whose story was made famous in Jon Krakauer’s book (and later a film) Into the Wild. McCandless would have been 54 this week.
When M and I first moved up here in the early 2000s, there were a lot of opinions and judgments made by Alaskans about McCandless—comments about how stupid he was, how naive, how ridiculous, how precious people are about his story. I’d read the reviews or would hear the comments and was always stunned by the vehemence people felt about his story.
He died. He was trying to do what the romantic ethos of rugged individualism has been telling white American men, particularly, to aspire to. And I was—and still am—struck by how little compassion Alaskans (in particular) held for his desire to leave society behind, to find something true about himself, no matter how foolhardy or naive. The language of the Wilderness Act presumes we all wish to do exactly that. Hell, the settling of Alaska as a frontier was—and still is—so much about that. For many, it still serves as a place of ultimate escape—a place far from the crowds of a city, society, history, family, a crime. The fucking “last frontier.”
I’ve always felt some compassion for Chris McCandless’ story because he was responding to those self-reliant myths of individualism, absorbing ideas about finding truth through ‘exile from the world’—the alluring transcendental tropes of self-reliance, strength, spirit—what so many hero stories are about—go elsewhere, away from everyone, test yourself against the ‘elements.’
McCandless tried to survive the solitude of being alone—alone in the ‘wilderness,’ alone to test his life—his “inner resources” as his sister described it—against an idea of wilderness that American society tells us we are separate from. McCandless tried to live in the ‘wild,’ but didn’t realize or recognize what millennia of people have known about living in Alaskan ‘wilderness’—that no one survives alone.
I always thought one of the most tragic parts of the story is when Chris shot a moose, and realized it was spoiling before he could consume it. He needed to know of the history of that landscape, of how people have hunted in that landscape for ages, and that a moose is a large animal for one person. And shooting one in summer is hard to preserve. Moose are meant to feed families, communities.
McCandless wrote about having immense shame when he realized that he had killed an animal that he would not be able to fully consume, that would cause such tragic waste. Waste of life. It made me feel compassion for someone who was trying to teach himself how to hunt without a mentor, recognized he was failing, and that by his ignorance he had failed to honor the landscape, the moose, which was the opposite of his intention. His grief at that loss gave me more compassion for his story, for his own recognition and growing awareness that he had been chasing a lie, and knew nothing of the wild he was seeking.
I recognize that there is an impulse to judge, to point out the foolishness of someone’s failure to live the rugged individual lie. It’s also a sort of spell, to speak out loud a confidence that we would do better, to reassure ourselves for our own sense of control that we would never be so naive, so foolish—that we would never be so caught off guard—we would know how to be prepared going into the wilderness. We would know better.
I wonder if we thought of wilderness as something we create for ourselves, rather than something that is without that needs to be controlled, if we could be more generous, more compassionate about the fate of others—especially those who do get caught off guard, who may be naive but are still out there trying to find a different way through the myths we’ve been told to follow.
As the pandemic has placed in sharp relief, we’ve separated ourselves from one another, from our landscapes, our places, our histories. We do need solitude, but we also need others. We need the care of others in our solitude, to be reminded that our connectedness doesn’t end when we are alone. And we need one another in order to understand if our ideas, thoughts, and experiences have weight beyond the borders of our own skin, if there is meaning beyond our inner landscape—the more accurate wilderness of our minds.
It was as if we gain our sense of self from our interaction with other people; from the reflection of ourselves we see in the eyes of another. Alone, there was no need for identity, for self-definition…By the third year [his journal] is no more than an almanac, marking the turn of the seasons…I am an absence, a void, I have disappeared from my own story.
One of the most well-known things that McCandless wrote in his journal echoes that realization:
Happiness is only real when shared.
Anne Dufourmantelle, in her book Power of Gentleness, writes:
Paradise is always already lost as it is measured against the origin, and this observation does not belong only to the melancholy. Living is a conquest wrenched from this passion of loss, a passion that is also an illusion reminiscent of epics, narratives, myths. We must have the courage to not consent to this lost paradise because it is a terrible mistake; it will open the door to all future resentments. It will justify the sacrifice.
There’s a difference we so often mistake between the words solitude and alone, using them interchangeably. It’s a lazy language—it creates easy myths that society wants to follow like a religious cult, desperate for absolution.
Dufourmantelle continues:
Gentleness invents an expanded present. We talk about gentleness, acknowledging it, delivering it, collecing it, hoping for it. It is the name of an emotion of which we have lost the name, coming from a time when humanity was not disassociated from the elements, from animals, from light, from spirits. At what point did the human race become aware of it? What was gentleness opposed to when life and survival were merged?
McCandless—like all seekers—needed to find life and survival merged, needed the gentleness of others to remind that the boundaries of the skin are not absolute, that the boundaries we continue to create are non-existent. We are all living and surviving in a landscape—among and with others.
What’s truly tragic about such stories is that they persist—that people still believe in the American settler fantasy, the false creeds of Thoreau, the drumbeat narrative of self-reliance and ‘wilderness,’ and make the same mistakes, elicit the same resentments. We justify the sacrifice. We place relics of such failed followings in museums, and try to recreate the siren call of self-reliance. We make a false nostalgia of a false, constructed idea.
The vehemence or veneration for stories like McCandles’ shores up the idea that an individual is only responsible for themselves—both their foolishness or their bravery. It’s a refusal to acknowledge that our lives respond to the environments we live in. Continuing to believe-follow the self-reliant myth, or judge its failure, keeps the myth alive. By lauding or condemning, we contribute to the myth of the individual’s responsibility for self, and continue to ignore the connected networks of place, experiences, histories, peoples. We ignore that the myth of rugged individualism is a horrible, failing social failure, not an individual one.
Dufourmantelle addresses this, writing:
Gentleness is primarily an intelligence, one that carries life, that saves and enhances it…It is an understanding of the relationship with the other, and tenderness is the epitome of this relationship…It takes into account cruelty, the injustice of the world. Being gentle with objects and beings means understanding them in their insufficiency, their precariousness, their immaturity, their stupidity. It means not wanting to add to suffering, to exclusion, to cruelty and inventing space for a sensitive humanity, for a relation to the other that accepts his weakness or how he could disappoint us. And this profound understanding engages a truth.
There is nothing (and no other) to conquer—we are all just trying to find a way for life and survival to be merged.
The 1964 Wilderness Act’s definition of wilderness is boggling in its insistence on separation of the land from people:
“(c) A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this Act an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation…”
dear freya, hoping to send you feedbacks and comments, I still keep on reading you, I ve got plenty of troubles affecting my pleausure to write and read..however it 's my intention to reorder my soul and mind to start writing again....how many things I could say about this matter..SNOW amd LIfe!..hold on Freya..,expecting a new life!!!!
"am I culture within doors, nature without?" - this line is sheer flow of your being. It speaks of the oneness of your consciousness with your environment. When you write about Alaska, you write with awe arising from an inner place of deep now. You write from your inner truth and immediate knowing. Although I have never been to your beautiful state, I feel homesick for it when I read your newsletters. In fact the first time I learned about Alaska was through McCandless's story. Thank you for bringing into my consciousness this beautiful meditative piece.
Never stop writing about your home. It doesn't limit you as a nature writer. There is a sentimental authenticity in your experiential narratives. I love that about your newsletter.