Man Versus Wilderness

"A Wild Scene" by Thomas Cole

Could you survive in the wilderness? Without the support of modern civilization, could you make your own way successfully in the naked wild? Most people cannot. They are essentially at the whim and mercy of the modern system. The vast majority of people would not survive very long without the support of modern production methods in agriculture, mechanized distribution networks of cargo transport by rail and road (and by ship and plane in the case of internationally shipped food products), and shelter crafted by a systematized engineering and construction process. And of course, if anything breaks down then they will need the services of a multitude of specialists (unless you happen to be a master electrician, plumber, carpenter, HVAC technician, and already possess all of the required tools and machines). Most Americans like to make the blind claim that we are an independent, individualisic people. In terms of looking at our general national character you could say that there is a strong strain of individualism that exists, but when it comes to the arena of being dependent versus being truly independent, we are actually incredibly reliant on others for just about everything. If you were to journey out into the wild right now (and I am not talking about the local zoo), could you face off against the forces of the natural world and win (and winning in this case would be to survive)?

We all descend from savages. Each and every one of us is a direct descendent of caveman types. You know what I am talking about, those thick-muscled smelly guys with the protruding foreheads, unibrows, and big fluffy beards that clubbed each other to the shouts of "oogaah! boogaah!". We would like to think that we are better than them, being positioned at a later stage in evolutonary history. We like to believe that we are so much more developed. We have so much more advanced technology after all. We certainly have a better sense of hygiene than those half-apes, right? Yeah that is true. But guess what? Those stinky cavemen guys who didn't even know how to tie shoes or how make cafe au lait would run circles around us if they were still around and we were to enter into their domain, into the wilderness. So who is the evolved one here? The guy who has to rely on a small electronic gadget to get himself up in the morning, or the guy who can bring down a deer and carry the carcass on his back while running the distance of a marathon to his camp? Not so clear cut anymore is it, hmmm?

I think every man needs to go out and experience the wilderness once in a while. It touches some primordial piece of you when you go out into an area with so few people, and you have all of this land and sky and air around you to take in. The sun goes down, and you can look straight at it because it is dusk, and Nature can really hit you with her beauty and her ancient, eternal splendor. I have personally had what I could best describe as a spiritual out-of-body experience one time when I witnessed a sunset. There was nothing around me but my own solitude, the universe, and then somehow my mind blended into a complete oneness, into a holy infinite eternity of space and time and Nature. It was a transcendent experience, like I left the world for a while and was taken to a another place somewhere out there in the depths of cosmic space for a few moments. It was incredible. I really felt the splendor and majesty of something greater than myself. I felt Nature. It is hard to describe the full sensation to someone unless they have had a similar experience, I think.

Anyway, it is really necessary for the benefit of your soul in my opinion to go out there into the wilderness once in a while and connect back to those ancient days and nights under a free sky. There was a time in the age of man when you truly were free, and could really be independent, much moreso than the notion of freedom and self-reliance that we have come to delude ourselves into believing that we possess in the modern age. In the ancient times, we were much closer to Nature. But nowadays, I think there exists a kind of seperation from that oneness with the earth, a seperation from the splendor and majesty of the natural order. We have made progress when everything is taken into account, I suppose, from the times of the savage stone age. But at what cost?