Wilderness Among Cities in North America

Upon exiting Penn Station in Manhattan, one enters a very urban environment of concrete, tall buildings, and hordes of people coming and going.  One can see one of the great capitals of the world of finance, culture, and transport, in many ways the sum total of what we have made for ourselves.  Easily impressed by the hustle and bustle around them, most people will not notice what the horizon terminates on down west 31st or 33rd street. The street vistas end at the Hudson River, but rising above the river is the low rise of the beginning of the Hudson Palisades, a remarkably undeveloped set of cliffs that run parallel to the river and give an often ignored scenic backdrop to New York's skyline, if viewed from down below in the streets.

Likewise, out near another packed metropolis, Los Angeles, are towering mountains somehow still largely covered by forests and chaparral, the Santa Monicas and the San Gabriels, despite every other nearby inch of available land being developed as thickly as possible.  Surrounding and even within Chicago, amazingly, are patches of tallgrass prairie that once dominated much of central and northern Illinois.  And perhaps most amazing of all, near the very spot where the United States traces the start of its modern lineage to, stands a forest of pines, cypress, and tupelos, the very same mysterious forests that greeted the first Virginians coming ashore.

Today these wild lands stand close to one of the larger complex of cities in Virginia that surround the mouth of the James River and Chesapeake Bay, seemingly unfazed by the intense development that has transformed the east coast of the United States in the centuries since the founding of Jamestowne.  Perhaps these sorts of places get unnoticed by most people.  I remember taking a course on Greek history back in college, where on the first day of class the professor asked us all "how many of you have ever even been to a farm?"  Aside from the professor and myself, no one else raised their hand.   I would imagine the same response would be true if he had asked which of them had ever taken a walk into a forest, to say nothing of into a forest off of a path.  Then again, perhaps these places do get noticed by most people, and they exist even if we can't quite figure out why.   The same people would gladly raise their hands if asked if they would support preserving the forest or even help save the farmlands from being turned into mini-malls.

This seems to be an weird sort of dualism in the North American consciousness, that we feel the necessity of wilderness, or at least something rural, even while we enjoy the rush and comforts of the city.  Canadians are proud of their vast northern expanses of nothing but tree after tree, Americans are absolutely enamored of their National Parks, and Mexicans love their native forests and deserts, a love which in recent years has transformed into a broad cultural movement of gardening with natives.  At the same time, we love our convenient highways, our manicured lawns, our benefits of civilization.  We started down in Mexico by draining Lake Texcoco to start farming its muddy remains.  We hacked our way into those swampy tidewater forests we see above to farm tobacco and re-create something of the England we left behind.  We divided up the land into thin strips that marked ownership of the forests that flanked the St. Lawrence River.

We made our way up the rivers and along the bases of mountains further into the wild-lands in order to settle and transform them, and yet the burning desire that propelled this expansion was not so much a steady steamrolling of development, but a thrusting into an exotic frontier that always made us want to see what was behind the next ridge or further upstream the river.  If this were not true, we would not have moved so quickly into lands as distant as California or Alaska.  Eventually, we would recognize this fascination with the world we were transforming and make parks, preserves, and help restore what we had changed back into something more... ancient?  Pure?  Mysterious?  No single reason can explain why we have such a subconscious fascination with our beginnings, but the truth of the matter is that we do have a fondness for our heritage, cultural, natural, and both in relationship with one another.  Heck, I was crazy enough to make a blog about this sort of thing, right?