wildness

One percent of the land in the lower forty-eight states is what might be considered "wilderness." Ninety-nine percent is utilized in some way for human profit-urban areas, suburbs, logging, mining, grazing. In 10,000 short years we humans have found ways to extend our shadow over the whole reach of a peopleless continent.

One of the most complex films of the year opened in the area last week. No, it's not another Spiderman remake or Adam Sandler comedy with adolescent slapstick humor. This one's about adolescent longing. There's no sex, very few drugs, and the only rock and roll is Eddie Vedder's soulful sound track.

It's five a.m. and I'm in Valdez, a small fishing town and the southern terminus of the Alaska Pipeline. When I walked outside before disappearing into the stuffy one-room business center to complete my weekly column I could see three hanging glaciers around the head of the Valdez Arm. It took us a full day to get here— two hours by car from Seward, and six hours on a slow ferry from Whittier, a town at the end of a 2-mile tunnel through high ragged mountains. We worried we would hate Valdez. An oil terminal, though an important part of Alaska's story, was not something we wanted to explore. We were looking for another part of the story: Alaska's legendary wildness. Betsy wanted to see a wild moose. I wanted to feel, as the painter Rockwell Kent once did, at the top of the world and miles from nowhere.

This week we've been practicing our wild food gathering skills on our evening walk. It's an August ritual. All along the road we've started seeing muscadines, or "fall grapes" as the locals call them, ripe and ready for eating.

Every morning at 8 A.M. our dog Toby gets off the couch and starts bugging me to go out. He's a creature of habit, and our habit, rain or shine, is to take a ritual morning walk.

"Into the wild," I always joke as I head out the side door. Our walk is "off-road" on a narrow trail. I guess it's a little less than a mile. Though not a trip into the Alaska back country or even the Chattooga Wild and Scenic River Corridor, our morning walk is often the wildest portion of a normal day. The weather is out of my control, the footing is a little uncertain, and turns in the trail are full of surprise and delight if I pay attention.

For the last two weeks I've been seeing the monarchs migrating through. No, I don't mean that convoys of kings and queens have been trucking down the interstate. I'm talking about the most royal of butterflies, the orange, black, and white monarch.

I don't spend much time channel surfing, but the other morning I was stuck in the house waiting for the cable man, and I wandered into a program on ANIMAL PLANET called "Backyard Habitat." I'll admit I was fascinated. On the program a perky former Miss Florida in khaki pedal pushers and a friendly naturalist from the National Wildlife Federation fly all over the country helping families revamp their old-style yards into little pieces of territory friendly to wildlife. It's a sort of "green eye for the normal guy."