This past week Douglas Todd wrote succinctly on seven issues he believes arise in the work of some diversity journalists. He was responding to a CBC piece exploring why minorities are not likely to pursue outdoor recreation. Also this week, The Guardian published the stories of three African Americans who have faced their dread of “hiking while black.”
My reflections follow Wendell Berry’s observations of entering the “big woods.”
“Always in big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into. You are undertaking the first experience, not of the place, but of yourself in that place. It is an experience of our essential loneliness, for nobody can discover the world for anybody else. It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that it becomes a common ground and a common bond, and we cease to be alone.
And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home.”
— Wendell Berry, The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky’s Red River Gorge
To enter the wilderness is to embark on a spiritual journey.
When we enter it, even when the territory is familiar, we enter into the danger it possesses, a danger that may be masked by our familiarity. As one friend cautioned me soon after moving to British Columbia in 1994, “Always respect the river. Always respect the mountain.”
The wilderness exposes us to elements beyond our control. And here in BC we can get into the wilderness quicker than we realize.
All spiritual journeys generate anxiety. The moment we realize we have stepped out of cell range, may be the moment of intense relief, or perhaps its one of severe anxiety.
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
I have a friend who trains for marathons on the trails of the North Shore Mountains. One morning he almost kissed a bear. He turned the corner and there was the bear, large and menacing on the trail. Amazingly my friend had the presence of mind to take out his phone and record the bear as it lumbered towards him. My friend retreated slowly. On the video you can see the bear coming toward him and hear his soothing words being offered between shallow breaths, “Whoa bear. Whoa bear. That’s a good bear. Whoa bear.” And then when the bear turned away and moved off into the bush, he turns the camera to himself and says, “That was close.”
Ridiculous right?
I asked him, “Why did you take the phone out and record the moment?” He laughed and said, “I wanted to make sure that if the bear did something to me, my family would know what happened.”
Does the wilderness contain a real and present danger?
I grew up in the foothills of Appalachia and was a frequent visitor to the valleys and towns seen from the Appalachian Trail’s ridges in Georgia. I don’t remember being anxious that my mere presence on the trail would invite violence. However, as an adult I have learned from black friends that they would never venture alone or without the company of another white person through those places, even today.
To enter the wilderness, an unfamiliar territory, is to enter into what Wendell Berry calls “a little nagging of dread.”
But, what if the wilderness magnifies a dread fomented at home in urban and even rural landscapes? What if it calls out a dread that always lurks around the edges of one’s psyche? What if your body has a history of attracting domination and violence that strives to eliminate you from certain spaces? What if others have turned your body into a permission slip to question your right to be “there?”
Then, as you might see we do have a problem in the wilderness. And I say “we” purposely. When my family hikes, we hike as a racialized family. But my concern on the trail is the same concern I have for my daughter on Fraser street or even at her school — will she be respected by others as a person?
Really I can’t imagine the full extent and the awful pain a full-bodied dread curated since the slave ships crossed the seas can create.
But I do know this: such dread is real enough for the souls who venture out. The fear on the trail then, is not that we might meet a bear. Well honestly, I don’t want to meet a bear and if I do, I want to be prepared. The fear, hanging just behind the joy of being in God’s creation, is that we might meet some de-humanized folk for whom the great outdoors is a space in which they feel free to act cruelly without restraint on their baser, yet finely nurtured, racist impulses.
And then, who would be there to help us?