where the wild things are

The water pools at my ankles, icy cold and glacier fed. It’s still early in the day, but the summer sun is high, the view expansive: Mt. Baker is just visible beyond the ridge we’re scaling, the boulder field below gives way to forest at the tree line. My husband stands with one of the dogs, waiting on the opposite bank. I take another step deeper into the current, and my sandal slips against the wet rock. Panic washes over me, radiating out from the pit of my stomach and tingling down my arms and legs. I freeze, unable to move forward or to turn back.

On the surface, the nature of my fear is easy to understand: the rushing water, the jutting rocks, a single misstep, and incapacitation could easily ensue. Not solely a fear of physical danger, my streamside anxiety has more to do with faulty interpretation. Habitat shapes human society, but culture just as surely creates nature and the systems for relating to one’s environment. I am no less a weakling in Kansas, no more capable of coping physically with a sudden blizzard or hailstorm, but I have absorbed the life experiences and social interactions that render the plains comprehensible. In this mountain stream, by way of contrast, I am patently out of my element.

Kansas, like the Great Plains in general, is best known as a place of transit, typified by generic remarks about “fly-over country.” Much of the area is too arid for traditional agriculture, and the indigenous inhabitants lived off the region’s iconic herds of bison. As European settlement advanced westward, the plains saw traffic along the California, Oregon, and Santa Fe trails, and new travelers seeking fortune beyond the western mountains; only later did people come to try their hand at agriculture. The plains, however, are not a place given to permanence. Tornadoes, prairie fires, hailstorms, swarms of locusts, and the incessant wind impressed upon these settlers that their existence was fleeting, their material presence upon the plains transitory. Today, many a former homestead site is marked only by a lonely stand of trees, a vain attempt at endurance, that remains long after the house has fallen to ruin.

If physical structures on the plains are fleeting, social ones are enduring, developed over generations as a buffer against the real dangers and the sense of isolation induced by the vast expanse of treeless prairie. There are stories of solitary homesteaders going mad listening to the wind in their dugouts, and of wayward children becoming lost in blizzards and freezing to death just outside the door. Inhabitants of the Great Plains tend toward the taciturn and the practical, and they gather to themselves the folds of family and community that make life there possible.

These regional differences strike me as I reflect upon that moment of panic, stranded midway across a mountain stream. Nurtured in a social environment composed of people who made a living off an arid, often inhospitable land, I grew up believing in the American myth that nature can be conquered. In Kansas, this conviction takes shape not so much as reliance upon technology but upon collective faith: in fences, in neighbors, in the future, in belief itself. Tractors and irrigation equipment domesticate the landscape and render it usable, but it is shared customs that provide solace against a bitter winter or a drought-stricken summer. Stripped of my frame of reference for comprehending nature, wilderness seems that much wilder, Washington that much riskier.

In the end, however, I made it across the stream, aided by two kindly fellow hikers who rigged a rope line to help me cross. Neither Midwesterners not Westerners, they were from New Jersey.