Wild and Free?

Under other circumstances, I might not have given a second thought to the single word "free."  After all, it was used in a common type of statement:  In an anthology of nature-writing, Words for the Wild, the editor Ann Ronald introduced an essay by Loren Eiseley, saying, "Loren Eiseley's wilderness differs somewhat from others' in [this anthology], but it is no less the terrain of what is wild and what is free."  Somehow my mind paused, and I began to ask questions about what it means to be free, and what might lie behind the appeal of a freedom that wilderness seems to offer.

I say "seems to offer" because wilderness and wildness can be idealized.  A predator in the wild might appear "free" to us, but how "free" is the prey that is being chased?

Alexis de Tocqueville
(1850)

Today in the U.S., we often associate getting out into the open spaces of wilderness with freedom, but that has not always been the case.  When the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, eager to see the American wilderness, visited this nation in 1831, he concluded:  "In Europe people talk a great deal of the wilds of America, but the American themselves never think about them; they are insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature...."  The reason for such an American attitude at that time was primarily practical:  The hardship of merely surviving apart from the support-system of civilization made living "in the wild" anything but a pleasant getaway.  It would require the construction of mapped roads connecting towns, along with a change in attitudes, before Americans could resonate with Lord Byron's idea of "pleasure in the pathless woods."

We humans, like all living beings, depend upon other entities.  Despite that dependence, every living being -- if its life is able to reach a fullness -- must still obtain a type of freedom from something in its past.  A chick needs to hatch and leave its shell behind.  So also must adolescent humans find some separation from their parents.

That ambiguity regarding freedom can lead to human hypocrisy.  De Tocqueville made a wry observation about American society.  He said that when Americans are criticized for their behavior, they protest, "I have a right to do so" -- whereas when they see someone else doing something they do not like, they exclaim, "There ought to be a law!"

Paradoxically, we can find a kind of release, a kind of freedom, when we yield to some forms of dependence.  The bird finding the breakfast upon which its life depends is simultaneously gaining a temporary freedom from hunger.  And vice versa:  The being that is finding a new form of freedom is at the same time developing new relationships with new forms of dependence.  That young adult moving out of its parents' home now depends upon friends or a job to sustain the newfound freedom.

Self-actualizing is an ever-ongoing combination of freedom and ties, ties and freedom, all in motion.  We might employ that word "wild" in a slang sense by remarking upon what a "wild and crazy" kind of life it is to exist on this planet!

~~~

What do you think the purpose of freedom should be?  Can you give an example?

(The Ronald quote is from Words for the Wild, ed. Ann Ronald.  © 1987.  p. 237.)

(The Tocqueville quote is from his Democracy in America, as quoted in
Wilderness and the American Mind by Roderick Nash, © 1982.  p. 23.)

(The quote by Lord Byron is from his poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto IV, st. 178. [1817].)

Bears: Too Much and Too Little Like Us

The history of humans and bears has been a love-hate relationship.  Or to put it in a more historical order, a hate-love story, because it has taken time for our fear and hatred of bears to subside and our fondness for them to grow.  In past centuries, bears were nearly expunged from the Mideast, Europe, and the U.S.  Today, polar bears on notecards tug at our hearts, trying to persuade us to preserve their homes.  From fear to love.

Given that order of events, it interests me that a child's first encounter with bears usually comes in a loving, not a hateful way. Our societies may have had a hard time coming to delight in bears, but a child can delight in them early in life upon first being read "Goldilocks and the Three Bears."  As a child's reading level advances, bears can be stepping stones -- from Paddington Bear to Winnie the Pooh to Smokey the Bear with his instructions.  (If, as a young adult or adult, a person makes their way into Tolstoy's War and Peace, that person even encounters a young pet bear being among the guests at a drunken party Pierre attends.)

Despite our childhood intimacy with fictional bears (all the way down to teddy bears), real bears in the wild prefer to keep their distance from humans.  Bears prefer running away over attacking. Thus, one of the greatest delights of tourists in national parks is having the good luck of sighting a bear (safely, of course).  I remember my wife and I sitting eating lunch on a gentle wooded slope in Sequoia National Park when a brown bear quickly passed us, running over the hilltop to keep its distance from people on the other side, paying no attention to my wife and me.  We were also lucky in seeing a grizzly bear in Yellowstone when we were on a somewhat remote trail.  Almost beyond our range of sight, we watched the grizzly through binoculars.  It was standing watching us, keeping its distance, evaluating I am sure whether we were going to leave the trail and come closer.

That standing pose and their taillessness are reasons people have thought bears to be like people.  The native American Mewuk even have a story about bears "dancing."  The bear-human resemblance has, however, sometimes been an endangerment to bears' freedom, such as when they have been pressed into service riding bicycles in circuses.  Even today, people too easily think they understand a bear's emotions, even though bears' facial expressions are not like our own.  Such misreadings have resulted in injury when bears have been approached.  National park rangers exile any bear that hurts a person.  We protect them by keeping our distance.

An inordinate fear of bears in Western culture led for centuries to the cruel entertainment of bear-baiting, in which dogs were set upon a chained bear to attack it  In the 19th century in the U.S., the nature writer John Muir appealed for compassion for bears.  He did so by pointing out additional similarities to us:  "Bears are made of the same dust as we, and breathe the same winds and drink of the same waters.  A bear's days are warmed by the same sun, his dwellings are overdomed by the same blue sky, and his life turns and ebbs with heart-pulsings like ours, and was poured from the same First Fountain."

~~~

Do you have any memories of a real bear?  What about a bear in a book, or a stuffed toy?

(The Muir quote [1871] is taken from

 A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations, ed. Barbara K. Rodes, © 1992.  139:22.)

(The first two pictures are in the Public Domain because their copyrights have expired.)

(The last picture is by A. N. Komarov and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license)