Walking the Line

How living near wild (and wildish) places has shaped my thinking about the complex dance between wilderness and civilization

I was fortunate to have an abundance of wild and semi-wild places nearby to explore growing up. From the patch of New England woods behind my grandmother’s house with a path cutting through it leading to a beach on Cape Cod Bay to the mountains marking the eastern rim of the Great Basin towering above my house after our family moved west, the untamed was usually just a few short moments away from the front door.

This proximity to wild places, large and small, was not fertile ground for ideas about sharp distinctions between the human and non-human environment to grow. The journey from one to the other was too short and the boundary between them too fuzzy for my young eyes to leave room for consideration of such ideas. Even from the comfort of home, for most of my childhood on into adolescence, the promise of wilderness, both as legally and conventionally defined, was literally visible through the living room window.

After moving to Utah from Massachusetts when I was about five, it was a couple of years before my parents finally bought a house and settled down for good. When they did, we were much closer to the mountains dominating the valley than we had ever been before. They cast a long shadow in the summer that did not fully recede until mid-morning. In the evening, the setting sun would slowly retreat up their slopes, giving the impression that days lasted a bit longer than the usual 24 hours the higher you climbed.

We were living just beneath the shoreline of an ancient lake, ancient by human standards anyway. A horizontal line marked the lake’s former high-water mark on virtually every mountain in western Utah, southern Idaho, and throughout most of Nevada like a bathtub ring. Some of these mountains had once been islands. Others, like those towering high above our house, marked the boundary of the old inland sea.

Preparing the backyard garden in spring inevitably meant digging up and removing rocks deposited over millennia by the strong regular effusions of snow and ice melt produced during the last ice age, no doubt often supplemented by heavy summer rain. I built small piles of…

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