Nursing
Portland Magazine
June 9, 2020
By Nina Ramsey
Illustration by Mia Nolting
BECAUSE WILDERNESS CAN BE a balm for the pain in every human heart.
Because we can quiet our minds and our voices and listen to the sounds of the trees, the rivers, the wind, the rain.
Because my father and his father hunted mallards, and we wept as we watched drops of water bead up and run off the iridescent blue and black feathers of a dead drake. As my father, as his father before him, tried to demonstrate his own awe of the wild, by cutting through and slicing apart and examining the wonder of layers of duck down, all we could think about was death.
Because John Muir said, “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness,” and what can that possibly mean? Did all life begin in the universe? In stardust and intergalactic duff? Were we born in the death of a sun?
Because we don’t yet know what it might mean if there were no longer any wild places left on our aching, polluted planet Earth.
Because standing in the tree well of a giant sequoia or at the base of a two-thousand-foot granite wall, glittered with feldspar and quartz, reminds us we are but a small speck in a much greater whole.
Because humanity needs to hand over its hubris.
Because the only way into the wilderness web of life is to inhabit the wild. Kick over leaf litter to find the brilliant society of sowbugs, snow fleas, earwigs, centipedes, leopard slugs, soapberry bugs, and panda snails. Find a trail of porcupine quills leading to a porcupine skull and know there has been a fisher about—a rare, three-foot-long member of the weasel family and killer of porcupines. Climb a snowfield to find the horns, hooves, and clods of fur—all that is left of a bighorn sheep— surrounded by bear tracks. How else are we to realize that we are one of many forms of earthly life and nowhere near the top of the food chain?
Because at one o’clock in the morning, we hear barred owls and wonder at their linguistics—the inflections, the syntax, the short-short-short, the long, and the gobbling vocalizations. Their warning calls and their morning songs.
Because we, as well, are capable of warning calls and morning songs.
Because in the wilderness, we can get wild ourselves. Skinny-dip. Climb into the Douglas fir’s sticky-with-pitch branches (pitch that is a medicinal balm for skin irritations). Butt-glissade down a snowfield. Howl at the moon. Klack back to common ravens. How can we tell how feral, how wild, how uncivilized we are if not in the wilderness?
Because we can clean our teeth with a twig and wipe our bottoms with a leaf.
Because peeing on a boulder in a subalpine meadow makes a good salt lick for deer, mountain goats, and bighorn sheep. But peeing in the dirt in a subalpine meadow can bring ruin to feathery mosses, yellow buttercups, purple lupine, white avalanche lilies, and orange columbine as the ungulates will tear them apart to dig up all trace of you.
Because young wild animals, like human children, play. Marmot pups wrestle. Yearling deer leap and buck. Bear cubs chase each other up trees. Young goats head butt, bleating; they run up a snowfield and leap down that snowfield.
Because where else can we experience the fear reactions that are hard-wired into our primitive lizard brains? A crashing in the bush and our hearts stop—a grizzly bear? A cougar? A long thick stick in the dirt seen out of the corner of our eyes and our blood freezes—an adder? A rattlesnake?
Because mother love exists across species. A pronghorn antelope doe cries over her dead fawn and refuses to leave it. An elk cow chases down a coyote getting too close to her calf. That mother elk’s deadly hooves could have crushed that coyote’s skull. Did the coyote need that elk calf to feed her hungry, growing pups?
Because we consider coyotes and listen to their howls in the dawn, which reminds us of their wolf cousins, which reminds us of our dogs, as all descended from wolves; which reminds us to wonder what would have become of our primitive human societies had we not been helped by the generosity of the wolves, who remembered humans were a reliable source of food, and so gave themselves over to domestication. How would we have survived?
Because the conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote, “Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.”
Because 64 million years ago, dolphins evolved from the sea to the land, where they lived as creatures similar to wolves but with hooves, before returning to the sea and evolving back into dolphins but with gigantic brains. What did they learn as land-dwellers that drove them back to the sea?
Because it is an atrocity to domesticate a dolphin and name it “Flipper.”
Because we must resist our compulsion to humanize wild animals and claim dominion over the wild. Resist digging canals and damming rivers. Resist carving our initials into the bark of a hemlock tree. Resist blasting into Earth’s crust to extract silver, copper, iridium, gold. Resist giving names to the Rufus and Anna hummingbirds that frequent our feeders—Rusty, Greenie, Brownie, Jade; Buzzbomb, Peabody, Scarface, Bill.
Because poet of the wild John Haines wrote, “I need to concede a considerable area to what I don’t know and can’t know, and perhaps don’t wish to know. Only to understand in a way I do not quite understand.”
Because we all, at some time in our lives, feel like a voice in the wilderness.
Because wilderness need not be branded as uncultivated, uninhabited, inhospitable, a banishment to a no man’s land out of which we must spend years wandering. If in wilderness we feel ourselves to be in the heart of the world, we might experience a deep sense of belonging.
Because included in the lyrics of a hymn by Maltbie D. Babcock, which Lutheran children sing at Luther Land, a Bible camp in the woods, “This is my Father’s world, and to my listening ears, all nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres.”
Because in the silence of wilderness, the nocturnal hoofbeats of a mule deer sound like a procession of club-footed clowns. How can a creature so delicate be such a clodhopper?
Because we can test our strength and our endurance. Slogging twenty miles in sixteen inches of wet spring snow. Breaking camp in five minutes when a storm approaches. Hiking twelve miles of a high elevation section of the Pacific Crest Trail while suffering from positional vertigo.
Because in wilderness, we can closely observe the boom-and-bust nature of the predator-prey cycle. In the Cascade Mountains, pine martens will correct an overgrowth of golden-mantled ground squirrels. Without coyotes in our suburban neighborhoods, we suffer an overgrowth of rabbits and rats.
Because we need to understand the endless, slow grind of geological time—fossils 240 million years old; igneous rocks forty millions years old; layers of geological time demarcated in sandstone canyons.
Because wilderness will live on long after our species is extinct.
Nina Ramsey is a psychiatric nurse practitioner and writer in Seattle, WA. Her work has appeared in the North Dakota Quarterly, Farralon Review, Signs of Life, and Portland Magazine.
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