I came across the famous image above years ago when a worker in the university civil service system in charge of the huge serial collection in the University of Illinois Library’s main stacks. Astonished at the obvious prowess of the teamsters able to cart white pine logs like that from the original forests in Michigan, I remember how the photograph triggered a recurrent feeling, on the other hand, of sadness and longing to know the great American forest in its “original” state. This is a series of three posts that chronicles a road trip last month along Michigan’s “Circle Tour” route in search of a meaningful encounter with the state’s ancient forest of white pine. More poignantly, it’s an episode in a life-long quest to resolve that recurrent feeling typified by my reaction in the Book Stacks Office long ago.
There is often something special about long-lasting things that are “all original.” That intriguing quality is due to the things somehow escaping the human hand of alteration over their entire life span.
For example, the antique jelly cupboard in my dining room is all original. Made around 1880 out of poplar and pine, it’s never been stripped and refinished. It sports its original red paint with a rich patina deepened by over a century of oxidation. All its back dust boards are intact. Places where people pawed, including door latches and the areas surrounding them, are still darkened by years of handling. The square-cut nails and door hinges that fasten together its parts date to its origination in some kitchen cabinet maker’s shop. Such integrity promotes perpetuity and commands my admiration and respect.
When applied to nature, original usually means, “untrammeled” or wild. Such places keep their “natural” quality because they’re usually far away from our domesticating hands. They’re over there in the “wilderness.” Wilderness has always maintained an ambivalent status in the western world. Historically, it has been either attractive and enchanting, or repelling and loathsome. Environmentalists canonize its spiritual and ecological values, while moralists denigrate and warn against its pantheistic properties, and capitalists calculate its monetary and utilitarian potential. It either must be delivered with the zeal of a moral imperative or must be conquered and pillaged of its treasures with an equal zeal of a moral imperative. The battle over its status and its fate in the American landscape and in the American mind is legendary. And in my case it’s a personal one.
For me, wilderness has always been the ancient forest. I have marveled and mused about forests beginning with winter camping as a Boy Scout in the Laguna Mountains of San Diego County and backpacking in Sierra forests at the age of fourteen. I remember 
There has always been a tinge of tarnish to the quality of my experiences tromping through the woods, however. It’s because all forests are in someone’s ownership and control, even if that includes the public. And ownership begets alteration, subduction under the utilitarian hand of some form of management. We put our hands all over the things we own. It means, historically, that American forests were conquered and appropriated long ago, starting with the tall white pine in the north woods of New England for ship masts, proceeding to the great white pine belt of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula for building up Chicago, burnt to the ground in 1872, and ending with the grand Douglas fir forests of the Pacific Northwest for house framing and the coastal redwood in California for decking and grape stakes.
I have felt sadness and longing for the original, unaltered ancient forest on this continent all my life. It too once possessed an integrity and self-managing perpetuity that commands my admiration and respect. I’m a member of the generation that inspired Joni Mitchell to pen the Woodstock anthem that includes, “And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.” The ancient forest is for me the Garden of ancient biblical verse. Modern psychology posits how we have an evolved cognitive ability to figure out how to turn its resources into benefits that fulfill our honest survival demands. Biblical myth posits how this knowledge also banished us from being an integral part of the garden because it contributed to our self-aggrandizing and secularizing power grabs leading to complete autonomy and lordship over all, symbolized by acquisition of power through eating from “the Tree of Knowledge.” But we’ve not forgotten its original state. Neural networks preserve an ancient memory of these kinds of places and nowadays spark a synaptic wistfulness to somehow see the wild places again and learn what they have to teach about the nature of ourselves and the world.
Seekers include Cincinnati artist friends of mine who trekked to the Black Forest of Germany for inspiration to depict what dark woods can do now to synaptic patterns in the brains of modern type folk who are long since divorced from them by the inexorable process of taming and civilizing the wilderness. Their project, called Maidens of the Cosmic Body Running, is a result of their explorations. “The maiden is one of many reoccurring characters throughout the work,” my friends write, “characters who are attempting to reach a primal and blissful state of being that evokes a sense of drama and mythology.”
Once a natural state, it must now be sought after. Providing the context and impetus to their searching for nature, literally a natural state, is the forest. In June of 2011, I saw their last big project It employed videos, futuristic geometric architecture, and various fiber-arts elements to invite me to become physically involved in a series of installations called “relaxion stations” as a metaphor for an inner psychological journey. I was made to exchange my shoes for a pair of wool felt slippers and ritualistically reconfigure myself, which included taking in a hypnotic video of a dark forest that was projected onto a set of curtains. My mental alteration would allow the Maidens to take control of my journey. The series of exhibits was an artistically mischievous, witchy, and ecstatic depiction of nature meant to show that, as a culture, we can’t easily define what nature is anymore. Manipulators, we have restructured nature for own purposes. The Maidens say this includes, for instance, romance. “Working in well-managed parks and planted forests, (the Maidens) exploit the artifice of those environments,” turning them, with a sense of mockery and defiance, into vehicles for romance. More than a literal representation of the wooded outdoors, forest images they used symbolize our psychic, complex self and how civilization has removed us from once spontaneous human intuition and impulse. Changing the forest physically changed the human changers psychologically.
Forestry got its start in Germany. The original hardwoods of the Black Forest are now mostly pine. Change began when the first German tribes fought the dark, howling wilderness, beating it back and away from their homesteads down to uprooting the stumps for farm fields. It was a moral imperative that they win this fight. The German terms wildnis and wildor signify wildness and wild game, respectively. The sources for our definition of terms having to do with the wild and alienating places and their contents are in Northern Europe, which was once heavily forested. Inhospitable “wilderness” thus had specific reference to the woods.
Much of the oral tradition of the forest dwellers preserved by the fairy tales of Brothers Grimm retain vestiges of the crusade to subdue and domesticate it and enduring lessons projecting from the enterprise. One outcome was a two-fold meaning, depending on one’s point of view, to the term wildnis. It could mean alien, mysterious, and threatening. It could also mean, on the other hand, beautiful, friendly, and capable of elevating and delighting the beholder.
Bruno Bettelheim, famous director of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago, where my daughter attended all of her high school, suggested in his book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales that these traditional stories, often set in the forest primeval, with the darkness of abandonment, death, witches, and injuries, allowed children to grapple with their fears in remote, symbolic terms. They are generally about the individual's responsibility to the community and specifically about parent’s responsibility for their children and the loving yet embattled interactions between them. Problems are often due to failure of community member’s duty, despite the best intentions. The witch character who figures so prominently isn't just a scowling old hag, but a key symbol of moral ambivalence. Primal forest set the tone for primal human instincts and behaviors.
European immigrants brought their instincts and behaviors to the fight for survival in America. The dark, sinister wilderness once again had to be conquered. They succeeded. Anymore, we must look hard to find wildness in the low places where rich soil stews in summer, where water slows as it finds its low point, and where warmer temperatures all combine to guarantee high enough productivity for humans. All such lands were long ago stripped of their original forest cover and taken over for farming. The grand expanses of the wilderness in the western regions of the United States are nice, but they’re mostly found high up in the mountains in the midst of bare rock and ice where productivity for human consumption would be reduced to a minimum because of the hostility of climate and terrain. Where is the wilderness of the low lands, the unplowed tall grass prairie in Illinois where I live, and the vast uncut swaths of white pine in Michigan?
19,000 acre expanse of Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie Park in NE Illinois, once an arsenal, now slowly being restored to its “orginal” state
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