On a summer afternoon when restlessness nudged me from my vacation cabin, I hiked into the forest, taking no compass or map or GPS or cell phone, and without informing anyone, including myself, of where I was headed or when I expected to be back. About an hour later, I spotted a small stand of old-growth timber that I’d never noticed before and hurried toward it, as if to overtake the hemlocks and maples before they could flee, and then to another such stand, where again I gazed upward with the awe I usually feel when in the presence of old trees. While departing the second stand, I realized I had lost my bearings and didn’t know the direction back to my cabin. As if I were Jonah and the six million acres of Adirondack forest a leviathan that had swallowed me.
It wasn’t the first time this had happened. Every so often, on impulse, I enter the wild unprepared. My passion for the great outdoors is rooted in a 19th-century American view of wild places as versions of prelapsarian Eden. In landscape paintings of the Hudson River School, nature often emits the radiant light of divine immanence. Many of the painters associated with the movement embraced transcendentalism—“a para-religion,” writes art historian Barbara Novak, characterized by a belief in a trinity of nature, God, and man. It’s hard for me to resist the call of divinity. Yet when I’m lost in the wild, I’m merely a vulnerable creature. And God circles me hungrily.
Remnants of transcendentalism, evident in the eternally sunny work of some contemporary landscape painters and photographers, captivated me during my youth, but I’m now skeptical of all varieties of spiritual reductionism. And I wonder how many artists of the Hudson River School ever got lost in the woods. My skepticism might be a consequence of my too-frequent experience of losing my way. Or maybe it springs from the knowledge that death is a fact of nature that’s now near enough to have come into my focus. Probably both. Whenever I lose my bearings in a large forest, even if briefly and even if I do have a compass and map, I understand why Joyce Carol Oates declared, in her essay “Against Nature,” that nature “has no instructions for mankind except that our poor beleaguered humanist-democratic way of life, our fantasies of the individual’s high worth, our sense that the weak, no less than the strong, have a right to survive, are absurd.”
The day I lost my bearings in those stands of old-growth timber, I reached my vacation cabin in the fade of evening. The landscape had digested my wanderlust and had regurgitated me. I had muddied my pants to the knees in a beaver channel, and since I felt too exhausted to remove my oozing boots, brackish water puddled on the floor around me. I did manage to light the oil lamps and grab a bottle of whiskey from a cupboard. One of my conflicting conceptions of the Adirondacks, one contrary to transcendentalism and evident in my decoration of the cabin interior, failed to comfort me as I sat abashed in a rocking chair near a pair of moose antlers propped atop a cabinet. The alcohol soon helped, though.
My cabin décor includes a fly rod, a wood-framed fly-fishing net, a hardwood pack basket, and a pair of rawhide-latticed snowshoes, none of which are of any use. And photographs and drawings of moose and deer, two taxidermy mounts of deer heads, and the shed antlers of both a moose and an elk. An antique crosscut bow saw, a tin advertisement for Wenonah canoes, a tanned beaver pelt. A bear trap. Salt and pepper shakers in the shape of bears standing on their hind legs. An art print of four 18th-century Mohawks and their two birchbark canoes at the start of a portage. A black-and-white photograph of a 19th-century wilderness guide and several of his “sports,” which is what Adirondack guides called their clients, posing before a lakeside log cabin, two of the sports holding up a stringer of trout. My display of these objects suggests that in my view, nature exists for human harvest and amusement—an outlook that vanishes, as does my attraction to transcendentalism, whenever I am lost in a forest or caught in a storm while canoeing a lake. Or when my roof leaks.
On most days, like many other Americans snug in their dwellings, I can pretend that I have the ability to escape nature, or at least to control it as easily as I can switch channels on the TV back at my house in southwestern New York.
To the extent that my cabin décor is cohesive, it inadvertently tells a tale of nature lost in translation. When I am hiking in a forest or canoeing on a lake, my idea of nature can differ greatly from the utilitarian one displayed in my cabin. On such occasions, the wild sometimes feels holy. Once, at the edge of a cliff on Mount Frederica in the central Adirondacks, I heard a fellow hiker exclaim, “This is like seeing the Almighty.” I think she meant, “Here, I am one with God.” I suspect—or I project—that for a moment she felt immortal, dissolved in an ancient, protected landscape but somehow still herself. We nature lovers seem to believe in an animistic afterlife. We request that our cremated remains be poured into a beloved lake or scattered atop a mountain we once climbed, as if the ashes will be transfigured, our souls dwelling eternally in the natural world, swimming with trout, cavorting with fawns, taking flight with eagles. It is said that Edward Abbey requested that his body be buried in the desert of western Arizona; a portion of Marlon Brando’s ashes were scattered in Death Valley and the remainder in Tahiti; Kurt Cobain’s were spread over the Wishkah River. We fail to consider how our afterlives will fare if, as Bill McKibben contends, we are nearing “the end of nature.”
Standing on the edge of Mount Frederica, I felt the same as my fellow hiker about the shimmering lake well below us, the undulous and conifer-serrated mountains in the distance, and the sunlight that brightened the landscape and us seemingly enlightened hikers: we were one with God, whatever God might be. Centuries before Romanticism was rechristened as transcendentalism, St. Bonaventure wrote of St. Francis, “He tasted in each and every creature—as in so many streams—that Goodness which is their source.” There on the Mount, I was certain I tasted divinity.
Yet when I lose my bearings in the forest, I tend to make foul use of the word God. Unmoored from civilization, adrift on a baffling landscape, I fear that my life is subject to complete indifference. Does this mean that the Adirondacks and other wild regions are reflections of an unfeeling universe? Of a deistic creator? Absurd existence? Perhaps all of the above—though of course none of the sentient creatures in a forest are indifferent to their own being.
In The Maine Woods, Thoreau describes wilderness as a place where “horse nor cow, nor vehicle of any kind, had ever passed.” In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard contemplates microcosms of the wild in a somewhat tame stretch of water close to her home in Virginia. Both writers recognize that nature has no care for any individual life, but both share an “instinct with deity”—as John Muir characterized the reverence for nature he observed in the Tlingit people of Alaska. Thoreau and Dillard detect scattered intimations of mysterious divinity in woods and waters. I too have epiphanic—or perhaps illusory—moments of sensing the creative presence of ineffable divinity in nature.
Yet I also see a destructive presence. Can the quotidian horrors of the natural world—a hawk plucking the feathers of a pinned and struggling jay, for example, or a fish swallowing whole a smaller fish—suggest sublimity, let alone anything sacred? It can seem so to me. Not sacred in the transcendentalist way of nature, God, and man, but in the universal cycles of life, passage, and death. These patterns somehow comfort me when described in poetic language but frighten me when I am lost in the wild. Thoreau is on an inhospitable slope of Mount Katahdin in Maine when he imagines that nature is dismissing him: “Shouldst thou freeze, or starve, or shudder thy life away, here is no shrine, nor altar, nor any access to my ear.” He has a better imagination than mine: when I am lost, I never suppose that nature has anything whatsoever to say to me. As probably is the case with any other animal when it is under threat in the wild, inarticulate yearning for survival is all I know when I first realize my life is in danger. I panic until I force myself to sit on a fallen bole and think about how to reach safety by using methods I gathered from books.
I am not foolish enough to suppose that nature complies when humans wish it to pose and smile. In Yellowstone National Park, my son once saw several cars stop on a roadside, tourists flinging open doors and jostling for position to photograph and video a female grizzly about 50 feet from the gravel shoulder. She was hunched near the base of a tree and clawing the ground, jaws clacking and dripping saliva, her cubs clinging to the trunk several feet up. My son urged the onlookers to get back into their cars. They ignored him, except for a woman who assured him that she was safe because she had bear mace in her purse. My son called a park ranger, who sped out and ushered the blithe photographers into the imperfect safety of their vehicles. I suppose a few of the pictures they took might have been good enough to frame, works of art that now hang in their homes, as if to say, “I know the wild.”
It is difficult for art to evoke the contiguous supernal beauty and infernal horror of the natural world. And yet—the sentimentalism of some visual artists aside—painters and photographers, unencumbered by limits of language, tend to be better than writers at capturing the actuality of nature. On a wall of my cabin bunkroom, and in counterpoint to the single dimension in the rest of my cabin décor, hangs a print of a Winslow Homer watercolor. Titled An October Day, it depicts a white-tailed deer swimming across a wild pond glowing with autumn, a scene so alluring that at first a viewer might fail to notice the deer hunter and his hound in the background across the water, seekers of nourishment, harbingers of death. A print of another Homer painting, Old Friends, hangs in my home, some 250 miles from my cabin. In it, an elderly man, Adirondack guide Rufus Wallace, is gazing up along the thick trunk of a dead tree, his raised right hand on it, perhaps caressing it, a life and death linked to another life and death in an uncaring, unforgiving and yet cherished wilderness—perceived in paradox and oxymoron that a lesser artist would distill into clichés.
A few mornings after I had gotten lost in the forest, I strapped a solo canoe to the cap of my pickup and drove from my cabin to a launch on the shore of South Inlet, a tributary of Raquette Lake. I took a daypack containing a waterproof map, waterproof matches, a small packet of kindling, a thin plastic poncho, a plastic cup, a compact bivy, two granola bars, and a can of soda. I wore an inflatable life jacket. A baseplate compass hung from my neck. I paddled the wide tributary upstream with little resistance from the flow, though occasionally I noticed thin waterweeds bent in the current below me, as if they were searching for something lost on the gray bottom. I had an odd notion that they did this only when a human was present.
After I had paddled about two miles, the forest on my flanks began closing in as the stream narrowed. I departed the stream at the base of a small cataract and took a short hike. Back in the canoe, I began my return trip.
When a half-mile or so from the road, I rested in a bend shielded from the strengthening breeze. I set the paddle over the gunwales, stretched out my legs, and leaned my back against the upper edge of the low seat, my head on the thwart. I saw in the distance, somewhere over Raquette Lake, which by then would have been lambent and wavy, a bald eagle as it looped in a figure eight, hunting fish and waterfowl, head and tail feathers winking white in the sunlight. On each side of the stream, wildflowers splashed white and yellow on the marshy shoreline. Fir and spruce and the occasional pine leaned toward the water, streamside limbs and branches grasping at unfiltered light. The pines were taller than the other species of trees and misshapen from decades of wind, tops bent and knobby like the arthritic fingers of my maternal grandmother. I could smell but not see cedar, reminding me of the closet off the bedroom in her farmhouse, where I had spent a night after Grandfather died.
The canoe drifted into shoreline sedges while I continued to rest. Somewhere nearby in the forest, a raven uttered croaks. A splinter of blue darted by my head. I assumed the dragonfly was hunting for a smaller insect to devour, but it returned with an iridescent companion. They hovered nearby with a faint clattering before landing on the bow of the canoe with their arched abdomens joined together in a single loop of being. As if lost somewhere outside myself, I was left in a partial daze when the dragonflies uncoupled and flew away. The remainder of my paddling and the drive back to the cabin are now forgotten.
On the porch of the cabin, I became myself again. I took off the life jacket and water sneakers and returned to the ice cooler the unopened can of soda. I toted the daypack with its remaining contents into the building and dropped it and the compass near the cold woodstove. I was fatigued from my dawn rising and four miles of paddling. I climbed into a bunk to nap, but before I stretched out on the mattress, I paused to look at the Homer print on the wall at the foot of the bed. The hunter and hound in the background of the painting made the deer and pond in the foreground appear all the more beautiful, and yet, when finally my head was on the pillow and my legs and torso under the sheet and blanket, a somewhat distant danger made it difficult for me to fall asleep.
