Call of the Wild Things

A personal essay by Lauren Nelson

"And the walls became the world all around." -Maurice Sendak, 'Where the Wild Things Are'

It was 10pm on a Thursday when I found myself racing down Provo Canyon. White lines ticked past until eventually I wasn’t in the Canyon anymore. Mentally picturing the piles of work awaiting me in my apartment, I reluctantly pulled off the throughway and turned around in the Heber City Walmart parking lot. It was time to head back.

Three years ago I was in the Nxai Pan. I was three hours over lumpy, sandy, dung-beetled roads, two hours and fifteen minutes from the last time I saw goats in twig fences. A national park in Botswana, the Nxai Pan was the flattest, most remote place I had ever been, a full four hours from any recognizable civilization. On the drive into the wild, I suddenly found myself surrounded by fifteen giraffes all dotting the circumference of my horizon.

The smell of clean, dry dirt filled my nose as it billowed out behind the bakkie. Gazing out into the tannish green wilderness, all I could see was land, stretching on, infinite, beneath hooves of mulling zebra herds and grazing springbok. I smiled as I stared out past the long car shadow racing over newly nibbled grass, my eyes peeled for the wild things of Africa.

That night I camped in an open grove of trees. There was no fence around the site, not one thing separating me from the unrestrained grasp of the untamed wilderness. I was right smack-dab in the middle of it.

Moans of invisible lions rebounded like sonar through the newly cool air as I made my way through the cement maze path and barbed wire fence meant to keep them out of the ablution block full of fresh water. By the time I washed up, the full moon had risen and I went with a clean face to sit on the cement stoop out back of this miniature human enclosure.

Moonbeams cast sharp shadows of each blade of grass, and I counted them in time with the steady beating in my chest. There was a slight breeze, or rather, a slight something in the air that told me it was moving. Birds and beasts and nameless wild things called out their lullabies as I sat solitary on the cement, drinking it all in like a survivor in a desert. Cool, grassy air filled my lungs again and again as I listened to the ancient night-noises of the wilderness, to the song that exists without civilization. Everything, including the moonlight, was living, and yet, everything, including me, was still.

There, with the lion sounds and grass shadows and infinite land, is where I belong. Out past the cusp of the unknown, I am filled with purpose and contentment. I have long since dreamed of the Nxai Pan, the endlessly changing horizon, the great wide unknown. For what else slumbers in the soul of womankind if not the dream of exploration and the pull of discovery?

And yet now I live in a basement apartment and ride in a black Mazda, not a bakkie. I sleep on a hard, college bed, not a buoyant, camping cot. No moonlight filters down through this dirty window-well, and no sunlight comes streaming through these musty, deep-set windows. I do not hear lions or elephants, or even squirrels or pigeons. When I occasionally venture outside, my horizon is an endless barricade of fast-food restaurants, low high-rise apartments, and cheaply made, architecture-less buildings. What’s more, I know each evening that I will be going to bed in the exact same place, and each morning that I will be arising in the exact same place.

Looped in this translucent lifestyle, I shove down the call of the wild. It will keep, as it has kept, for a long while yet. Like Tennyson’s Ulysses of old, I think, “How dull it is to pause, to make an end, / To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! / As though to breathe were life!” (Tennyson).

In the cement box of my apartment, my breath, at times, feels stifled. It is difficult, at times, to not feel trapped in the monotonous routine of this stable, stationary existence. After all, how often in the dead of night do I console my adventure-aching soul by pretending that my private, basement room is an AirBnB in the Swedish countryside, in a quiet Hungarian town, in some obscure village in Italy?

How often, before my eyes close out the day, will I fixate on the sights I have not yet seen, the memories I have yet to make? “Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ / Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades / For ever and forever when I move,” and no matter how much I try to heed the wild’s clarion call, there is still a horizon, and still my “spirit [yearns] in desire / To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought” (Tennyson).

Before I turned around, I drove past Deer Creek Reservoir. Its opaque depths and its proximity to steep, plunging hills reminded me of lochs, I thought. And so, as I drove on the canyon road, I remembered Scotland.

Last year I came to know ancient, wooded, well-trod paths that crisscrossed and looped and led me up steep, slippery hills, past dark, amber eddies, out into the open. Grassy, sodden moors raced out and on until embracing sister-sky. Decades-old trees grew in sidelong arcs, twisted and gnarled by an enduring wind. Between those crippled branches, among the racing fields, I could make out the lowest touches of the Highland hills balancing on the precipice of the horizon, held in place by descending clouds, soft and grey, that blessed every inch of land in that emerald country.

Immersed in this memory, I feel, as I always felt, that it was a holy land. Maybe it had something to do with the crisp, thick air saturated with smells of fresh rain, clean mud and new oxygen. Or maybe it had something to do with the generous scope its wide-open spaces gave to my imagination. I know, though, that it definitely had something to do with the rain.

Always the rain: sometimes a light misting; sometimes a consistent, throbbing hum; sometimes silver rain laying down on saturated hills in horizontal sheets. Even when it was ice cold and I was soaked right through my three layers of mud-ringed socks, even when it seemed to come up from the ground itself, the rain was always for my benefit, like some sort of natural baptism. Even sopping wet, I felt pulled to be out in the middle of it all, surrounded by soggy, sacred paths that led on endlessly into the trees.

Whether I am driving down deserted roads or lying motionless in my barren room, I still feel that pull. After all, “The very basic core of a [woman’s] living spirit is [her] passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun” (Krakauer).

Krakauer’s words resonate in my bones. They are familiar, not because I have read them before, but because they give body to my spirit, my thoughts, my soul. How often have I dreamed of the “endlessly changing horizon?” How often do I feel the pull of adventure?

This year, stuck in this plastic-and-cement world, I have often escaped into the mountains, into adventure, into the wild. My thin, brown hair is always held up in a tight ponytail, held secure with two hair bands. I double knot my laces to mitigate the risk of disrupting my rhythm. Steep climbs strain my legs and mind, and rise up before me in a narrow channel of gracefully arching trees.

Out there, I am skin and muscle, inhale and exhale, synapsis and grey matter. A pine is a pine, and when I am under its shade, I am me. The pine and I simply exist in the mere fact of our existence. We just are. This is why I answer the call of the Wild, this is why “I cannot rest from travel,” this is why I will always seek out adventure and “drink / Life to the lees” (Tennyson). This is joy. The call of the Wild, of adventure, of the unknown, is a call to be “a part of all that I have met” (Tennyson). 

Walking with the wild things, as a wild thing, is only possible in the wild, in the great wide unknown. Freedom exists inside the self, outside of any civilized constraints. There is freedom to be found in the wild. There is joy to be found in the wild. There is joy to be found in the magnificent anonymity of simply being. There is healing to be found in dirt and oxygen and silent photosynthesis. There is freedom to be found in the endlessly changing horizon.

Before passing Deer Creek Reservoir, and before getting to Heber and turning around at Walmart, the idea to drive the canyon had been an impulse. It came up as quickly as the red stoplight. I took my bearings while sitting in my Mazda, waiting for the light to change: a left turn would take me back to my apartment, the road ahead would take me to the mountains. Instinctively, I chose the latter. I thought that maybe I would drive to Colorado. Maybe I could camp in my car. Maybe I could keep going and make it to Canada.

It seems I cannot give up the search for new and different suns because, like Ulysses, there is something deep within my bones that whispers, “‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world” (Tennyson). The call has always been there. The Wild Unknown still beckons me, always beckons me, and I cannot help but notice that,

“there lies the port; the vessel puff her sail: / There gloom the dark, broad seas. . . . For my purpose holds / To sail beyond the sunset . . . Of all the western stars, until I die” (Tennyson). 

 

Images Credits: "Backpack in the Drakensberg" by Lauren Nelson, "Sandy Nxai Pan Roads" by Lauren Nelson, "Burning Africa Bush" by Lauren Nelson, "Green Tuscan Hills" by Lauren Nelson, "Emerald Scotland" by Lauren Nelson, "Fairy Pools and Misty Mountains" by Lauren Nelson, "Rocky Mountain Vista" by Lauren Nelson, "The Dark, Broad Seas"  by Lauren Nelson