Raising Wild Read online

  There are plenty of smaller brute neighbors, too. Our home ground is also residence to California and antelope ground squirrels, kangaroo rats, pocket gophers, broad-footed moles, grasshopper mice, and that most amazing of desert rodents, the bushy-tailed pack rat. Snakes are common, and while most are Great Basin gopher snakes, I once discovered an eleven-button rattler shading himself in our garage. It seems that a scorpion hides beneath every rock, with plenty left over to inhabit the ductwork of our house. One year hordes of shield-backed katydids (a large sagebrush-country insect often called a “Mormon cricket”) invaded, blanketing these hills so thickly that their mushed guts rendered the paved roads slick as ice, even prompting the closure of a major highway. Whenever we get a big rain after an especially hot summer day, the western harvester ants whose colonies dot this desert sprout wings and rendezvous to mate at the highest point in the local landscape, which is the top of our chimney, on top of our house, on top of our home hill. From there they descend the chimney in untold thousands and writhe in a foot-deep mass behind the glass doors of the wood stove’s firebox. Our shared life on this isolated patch of high desert has provided an unbroken string of such challenges.

  If this place doesn’t sound like paradise, then perhaps I’ve taken the wrong tack in describing it. Maybe I should say that this is an open, wild country of extreme beauty, that its undulating, muscular hills hide life-giving springs and seeps, that these canyons and arroyos wind sinuously between knobs crowned with palisades of granite slung gracefully between ridges of sand and sage. Perhaps I should mention that the western horizon is etched by the serrated ridgeline of our spectacular 8,000-foot home mountain, which conceals a soaring split summit brimming with tangled stands of mountain mahogany and rolling meadows flowing in lavender waves of wild iris. Maybe I should explain that the elevation and aridity here create a sky bluer than any imagining of it could ever be. This landscape has a clarity and presence unmatched by any other I’ve experienced, a quality of light that keeps the hard splendor of the world before us in high relief. This is the place where the moon draws your long shadow across snow and granite, the place where the forking path of the Milky Way seems always within reach.

  I could offer a great deal more in this lyrical vein, but I don’t want to do that. I’d prefer to return to a celebration of our home landscape as vast, alien, and fierce. This place is not remarkable in spite of its blizzards and droughts, its fires and floods, its rattlers and scorpions. It is astonishing because of them. This is a landscape so full of energy, surprise, and struggle that it constantly challenges our ideas about nature and about ourselves. To dwell in this vast desert requires that we relinquish any pretense of control over the circumstances of our wild existence. Living here offers the salutary reminder that control is nothing more than a human idea, an abstract concept that this marvelous landscape is under no obligation to recognize. It is the fantasy of control that is itself most vulnerable, because in this land a humbling corrective is only one fire, blizzard, or rattler strike away.

  The passionate desire to inhabit this extreme landscape is not easily explained, even by those few of us who have been so rash as to act upon it. Yet harder to explain is why anybody would choose to raise their children out in this open wilderness. This is a question I am still trying to answer, one that I find intriguing and useful even after a decade of meditating on it. I could, of course, point to the exquisite beauty of the high desert landscape, to the way a single glint of alpenglow on a distant snowcapped desert peak sweeps away all doubt. Or I might claim that there is a certain resourcefulness or strength of character that develops in those who struggle to make a life in this unforgiving place. I could say that our geographical isolation has strengthened us as a family, providing opportunities to bond deeply through shared experiences that other modes of living do not provide. I could suggest that for kids, outdoor adventure and play are essential forms of engaging with the world, and I might offer a corollary lament that for many of us grown-ups the thrill of adventure and the joy of free play have by now receded into the ghostly world of memory. Speaking as a man who is still learning to be a father, I could share my deep belief that this wild desert is teaching my daughters things that I cannot.

  These sorts of claims point to a deeper issue concerning the relationship between domesticity and wildness. Wilderness, and the wildness it both embodies and expresses, has received eloquent praise within American literary culture. In many ways the flight to nature in order to transcend the perceived limitations of the domestic world describes the arc of the quintessential American journey. Consider Lewis and Clark hunting their way across the broad continent; Herman Melville’s Ishmael bolting to a life on the high seas; Henry Thoreau retreating to his writer’s shack at Walden Pond; John Wesley Powell shooting the rapids of the uncharted Colorado; John Muir riding out a windstorm in the tossing crown of a towering Doug fir up in the nearby Sierra; Mark Twain’s Huck Finn rolling on the big river and then “lighting out for the territory”; the heroes of Jack London’s tales answering the call of the wild western wilderness; my fellow desert rat “Cactus Ed” Abbey soloing across the glowing red-rock mesas of the Colorado Plateau. Even those who never returned tell a similar story: Everett Ruess vanishing into a labyrinth of canyons in southern Utah’s Escalante or Chris McCandless perishing in the sublimity of the Alaskan wilderness.

  While plenty of counterexamples might be cited, the dominant narrative of engagement with wildness in American culture has been one that features men, often operating in solitude, removing themselves from the sphere of home and children in order to enter a distant green world where opportunities for heroism and adventure abound. To judge from the mainstream of American environmental literature, a reader might be forgiven for assuming that the concepts of family and wildness are in fact mutually exclusive. But when we assume that the wild does not exist within the family—or that the family cannot exist within the wild—we radically limit our conception of what wildness means and so also limit what it can teach us.

  In perpetuating an understanding of wildness that depends upon the far-flung exploits of men heroically working alone (or with other men), we overlook the wildness that is inherent both to parenting and to children. The wildness of conception and birth only initiate young lives in which a spontaneous wildness is strikingly apparent. I am keen to avoid romanticizing the relationship of children to nature, because to do so often leads to a self-indulgent, Wordsworthian sentimentality that is rife with problems. That said, anybody who has attended carefully to how a young kid’s universe operates can’t help but notice the many ways in which children appear to be more like wild animals than human beings. Watch a kid climb a tree, build a shelter, dig a tunnel, imagine and then inhabit a magical forest or underwater hideout or secret desert cave, and you’ll witness a visceral form of animal engagement. Children’s stories are so often framed as animal parables, not only because we grown-ups aim to use all those rabbits and coyotes to impart moral lessons but also because children are already in such close communication with the animal world. Of course we grown-ups are animals too, but we’ve had the time and training necessary to forget that, while our children have not. In this sense our kids are the keepers of a wild flame that may be nearly extinguished in ourselves; they are emissaries between the adult world and the wild world from which we emerged and upon which we have so often turned our backs.

  This book’s title, Raising Wild, is intended to suggest a very different approach to how we conceive the relationship between wildness and domesticity. We tend to think that something that is “raised” cannot also be “wild” and that something that is “wild” must not have been “raised.” (Think salmon here.) But rather than figure the wild as other than and apart from the family, this book explores the ways in which living as a family in a wild landscape reveals the wildness at the heart of both childhood and parenthood. Raising daughters in this amazing place has tested many of my own assumptions, leading me to question
our culture’s association of wildness with adulthood, masculinity, and solitude. Some of what I’ve gleaned from my experience appears in the following dispatches from our remote home in this high desert wilderness.

  The complete text of W. S. Merwin’s elegant little poem “Witness” reads as follows:

  I want to tell what the forests

  were like

  I will have to speak

  in a forgotten language

  I am moved by Merwin’s suggestion that the language we use to express our understanding of nature is itself the fruit of nature—and also by his warning that an ancient connection between words and world is weakened when the world upon which language depends is imperiled.

  Among the innumerable joys and challenges of parenthood is the recognition that kids often speak in this forgotten language. We see in them some glimmer of how the natural world once appeared to us: immediate, new, strange, funny, waiting to be touched and played with. While it is we who teach our children the names of things, it is they who engage the things themselves, often spontaneously employing modes of perception, imagination, and intimacy that are no longer immediately available to us. If it is a truism that children can teach as well as be taught, it is equally certain that in order to fully communicate with our kids we’ll need to remember some of what we’ve forgotten about how we once saw this world. While some might argue that a language, once forgotten, is destined for extinction, my experience suggests that substantial relearning is not only possible but necessary to parenting, especially in this wild place.

  I do not subscribe to the notion that wildness is reserved for adult male adventurers who are defined by their escape from the constraints of home and family. Instead, I have come to view childhood as a valuable repository of wildness from which we grown-ups might derive insight and draw inspiration. As the father of daughters, I am also convinced that our association of wilderness and wildness with masculinity is not only archaic but profoundly misinformed from the start. And I am troubled that the so-called retreat narrative—a stylized way of telling the wild that valorizes solitude as the correct mode of encounter with the natural world—authorizes a view of wildness that necessarily excludes children. It is certainly not that I fail to appreciate the value of solitary wilderness experiences. Since the day of that first epic hike over Moonrise, Palisades, and Prospect—those three ridges still unnamed on every map—and up to the forked summit of our high home mountain, I have walked more than 13,000 solitary miles in the desert hereabouts (during which I encountered a grand total of two recreational hikers). Having logged so many miles in all seasons and all weathers, I’ve witnessed miracles and wonders too numerous to tell. Nevertheless, I have found the experiences I share in nature with my daughters to be instructive and liberating in ways that my solo hikes are not.

  I too have retreated to the wild, but I have retreated with my family, rather than from them. In so doing I have discovered wildness in my children and in myself, as well as in the remote hills and canyons of the high desert. This experience has been more fascinating and valuable than any heroic male wilderness adventure could possibly be. Here, in the wildness of home, Moonrise is our Everest and our Denali.

  One of the most surprising and useful things I’ve learned is that inhabiting the desert and raising children have many things in common. Both enterprises begin with genuine passion, but it is a passion born of an uninformed idealism that blinds us to the challenges and blessings of the actual condition we’re about to enter. I look back on my pilgrimage to this desert place in much the same way I view the fact that I once read how-to books to prepare myself for fatherhood. Even as a confirmed bibliophile, I now freely acknowledge as laughable the idea that anyone could become prepared for fatherhood by any means other than being a father. So too with this hard, bright landscape: language can only obliquely approximate the experience of it. One must be immersed in desertness to have an inkling of what ennobling challenges full engagement with it might offer.

  Eking out a living in this unforgiving landscape requires a high tolerance for frustration and failure, for this is a place that, if it is not exactly hostile, is impressively indifferent to human ambition. Parenting can be similarly exasperating, because, like the desert, it constantly forces upon us an awareness of our limitations. In this sense, both raising children and dwelling in arid lands help us to acquire a necessary humility, an acknowledgment of our weaknesses, without which either enterprise would be perilous. Both experiences strip us of superfluity, deprive us of naive assumptions about ourselves and the world, render absurd any coveted delusion that we are superior to our kids or to the nonhuman natural world. Self-congratulation is an affectation that neither parents nor desert dwellers can long sustain.

  Making a home in the high desert and making a home for children also have in common that they entail a constant process of self-examination and growth—one facilitated by the enforced humility I’ve described. Raising Wild shares the story of how my girls’ intuitive understanding of self and nature has provided a profound challenge to my own. In their disarmingly honest approach to me and to their home landscape, Hannah and Caroline have innocently exposed many of my unquestioned assumptions about myself as a man, a father, an environmentalist, and a lover of wild places. My shared experiences with the girls have often forced me to admit the absurdity or hypocrisy of my own values or actions, ultimately helping me to revisit core questions about why we engage both children and nature as we do. Even my most cherished self-image—that of an independent man whose journey to this remote place was motivated by a passion for galvanic, unmediated contact with wildness—has been sorely tested, as I have confronted both the daunting realities of desert living and also my own weaknesses as a man who is still learning how to be a good father.

  “As soon as you have made a thought, laugh at it.” So proclaimed Lao-tzu, who understood that humor is an inevitable and redeeming by-product of humility. Laughter is the sound we make in the moment we acknowledge, perhaps even begin to accept, our own mistakes or inadequacies. A laugh is a marker of recognition, a sign that we have momentarily seen ourselves in some new light. As the humor theorist Gina Barreca puts it, “Humor, like shame or wisdom, is a product of understanding.” My efforts to make a home in the high desert and to become a good dad have been so riddled with missteps, absurd inconsistencies, and failed grand plans that I couldn’t survive a day without humor. For this reason, Raising Wild often approaches the braided challenge of parenting and environmental engagement in comical ways that differ considerably from the solemn attitude often adopted by environmental writers. Unfortunately, a great deal of writing about nature (and, for that matter, about children) is humorless and predictable, relying on threadbare tropes that give readers the false impression that the writer’s relationship to nature is a fait accompli—a static achievement that can be used to manufacture calculated epiphanies celebrating the sacredness of nature. But those of us who care deeply about the natural world have good reasons to laugh, because our relationship to nature is often inherently comical, and also because humor provides a sustainable form of resilience that we desperately need in this trying time of environmental crisis. James Thurber was right in identifying humor as “one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost.” Humor is also an essential element of parenting, because laughter generates the flexibility and acceptance that are necessary for one to develop patience and express love. I have found that, even in its most earnest moments, parenting is very much a laughing matter.

  Much like living in the desert, becoming a mindful father requires an ongoing and often chastening process of attempt, failure, insight, and growth—and then, ever and always, attempt. Practice does not make perfect but rather makes more practice, and it is this practice of reflective parenting and attentive dwelling in place that has led me to discover enriching forms of intimacy within my family and within the wild landscape we inhabit. There is no place I love more tha
n this high desert, no people I love more than my daughters. And yet there is a wonderful sense in which I do not know them yet. Even in the open desert much remains hidden. Hannah and Caroline too are deserts—each an exquisite mystery I have not yet solved. I need one more day, or year, or another decade; just one more walk, another mile, then 13,000 more. I am still learning to pay attention.

  Parenting, like walking in the desert, is a meandering art of improvisation. The adventure never turns out quite as we planned it, the inner and outer weather remain unpredictable. We are in sympathy but never in control. We take conditions as we find them, putting one foot in front of the other as we navigate a topography of uncertainty, trying to make the most of each day’s pilgrimage back to the heart and to the land. We carry water toward our lovely garden, but end up using it to put out a fire. We set out for the spring but follow pronghorn tracks instead, intend to witness the rise of the crescent moon but are drawn to the huddled glow of the Pleiades. We search for ways to reshape our experiences into narrative, to transform a shared life into a story that can be given to our children, mapped onto the high, dry landscape of their only home.

  In this wide open desert there are no trails, which is to say that any route you choose becomes a trail only as it is walked, becomes a story only as it is told. Before our children can fully engage the world they must first learn to walk. As a father I am still exploring the hard beauty of this wild landscape, learning slowly, with the help of my family, how to walk with and within it.