The Green World
What we talk about when we talk about nature
Due to a series of circumstances too boring to go into (and too enmeshed in the general idiocy of the airline industry), our plans to travel to Italy this past week were cut short. Fortunately, thanks to generous EU regulations on our flight cancellation, we were able to redirect our travel budget to the great expanse of rural landscape and small towns across the Vermont-New Hampshire borders. We walked in the woods, scooped tadpoles from streams beneath covered bridges, cupped fireflies between our hands. It was a far cry from drinking espresso with a view of the Arno, but it had its transformative power all the same.
In his 1862 essay, “Walking,” the writer Henry David Thoreau once observed that “in wilderness is the preservation of the world.” As one of the leading thinkers of the transcendentalist movement, Thoreau believed that a life lived in nature, immersed in the natural world, was the best means of recalibrating human experience. Thoreau’s decision to live more than two years in a cabin near Walden Pond (on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson) was a gesture toward self-reliance, a claim to live outside the bounds of polite society and to total subjection to the laws of nature. Though he was barely 2 miles outside of the well-populated and amply stocked town of Concord, and only half a mile away from the train station (a harbinger of industrialized doom, he feared), Thoreau presented his life as almost monastic, a way of excavating his truest self. “I went to the woods,” he wrote, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” (I do wonder what Thoreau would make of Walden: The Video Game.)
Thoreau’s notions harken back to a longstanding mythology of the transformative power of the wilderness, what the literary critic Northrop Frye called the “green world.” Frye coined his term after observing the role of the forest as a play of escape and freedom in countless Shakespeare plays, but he also built upon the foundational concept of the wilderness as a type of Edenic retreat that also awakens us into a greater consciousness and, as Thoreau put it, a deliberate way of life. As long as human beings have meditated on their lives in literature, they have expressed a desire to “get back to paradise,” to a place full of possibility and free of societal constraints. Natural landscapes allow us to be who we truly are; Frances Hodgson Burnett meditated on this at length in her 1911 novel The Secret Garden, a walled space reserved for wilderness within an English manor, one that allowed the children that entered it to become emotionally and physically well. Only once one enters the “garden” can one become the fullest expression of oneself. That the wilderness becomes the projected site of these desires is no surprise, and our idea of what “nature” promises us is a creation entirely made in the industrial age. As the environmental historian William Cronon wrote, “Ideas of nature never exist outside a cultural context,” and when we find ourselves in an mindset that treats “nature as essence, nature as naive reality,” we ultimately “see nature as if it had not cultural context, as if it were everywhere and always the same.” After reading those words, every trail I walked down suddenly seemed rife with wishful thinking—nature was not a crystalline glass through which I could encounter reality, but rather worked as a mirror that reflected back my own fantastical longings. (One of the unalloyed joys of graduate school was getting acquainted with Cronon’s brilliant work, so pick up a copy of Uncommon Ground, stat. Also the terrific work by Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden, which sheds some much-needed light on Thoreau’s anxiety around the railroad.)
At the outset of his project, Thoreau feels confident in retreating to the woods in part because he assumes that they will always be there—they are unchanging, unlike everything else he experiences. His ultimate reflection, however, is not to say that the woods gave him all the answers, or even taught him how to live, but to be conscious that his way of living in the “civilized” world was only one option, one trail that he might or might not follow. “We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests,” he wrote, and yet recognizing that almost nothing is triable to the point of certainty. “How vigilant we are! Determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties. So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre.” Living simply allowed Thoreau to see the complexity of the world, and to see that what he had once held dear as indispensable “necessaries of life” was just one of the many social constructs he would have to assess and either adopt or disdain. “Man has invented, not only houses,” he wrote, “but clothes and cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity to sit by it.” Indeed, Thoreau seemed to foreshadow the s’more, or at least the primordial pleasure derived by it.
When I watched my kiddo enjoying nature this weekend—running through a forest canopy walk and jumping into a spider web 43 feet above the ground; cradling a tiny frog in her cupped hands, then nestling it back into the leaves; picking striated stones out of a brook—I kept wondering if she took on these tasks because her parents were marveling at them with outsized enthusiasm, or because she was genuinely finding joy in the tiny miracles of nature. As a semi-urban kid who ran through an open fire hydrant before she ever went on a hike, the landscapes that mean the most to her may not be the most natural or most “wild.” Indeed, her Eden may have more skyscrapers than meadows. However, in shifting plans as quickly as we did, I hope we carved out a bit of space for the pleasures of the unknown and the beauty of the wild world, for her to see it as it is in this moment, and not as we might imagine it to be. A few moments in the “woulds,” indeed.
Recommended Reading: I’d normally drop a book or article suggestion here, but since we’re on the subject of tourism, there were a few three-dimensional cultural experiences that I hope all New Englanders check out next time they venture north on I-89. The Montshire Museum of Science was a great stop with more than 150 hands-on activities for kids and adults, as were the Upper Valley Aquatic Center (great kid-friendly indoor swimming space) and the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Park, which houses a great deal of artwork from the relief sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (creator of the Shaw Memorial on the Boston Common).
The Perfect Bite: Truth be told, we could’ve been a bit more deliberate about our eating choices on this trip. (Or perhaps they were always going to automatically pale next to that of the Puglia-Florence trip. Ah well.) But the blueberry milkshake we picked up from the Skinny Pancake outside Quechee, Vermont, made with fresh blueberry compote and vanilla ice cream, was well worth a stop.
Cooked & Consumed: It’s a truth universally acknowledged that, when one returns from a trip, even for a few days, one’s culinary ambitions become unnecessarily outsized. So it’s no surprise that for our first home-cooked dinner back, I made my first attempt at japchae, a delicious Korean dish of sweet potato glass noodles, stir-fried beef, and vegetables. Using this recipe from Maangchi as a guide, I sliced up some boneless short ribs and marinated them in sugar, soy sauce, and sesame oil (very much to taste, as you get to adjust sweet and salty throughout the dish’s preparation) for a few hours, then tossed stir-fried carrots, snap peas, and purple cabbage into the noodles and the cooked beef. With tons of flavor and very little effort, it was a lovely welcome home to my kitchen.