An excerpt from Edwin Way Teale’s “Walk Through The Year,” written close to 50 years ago today. And more relevant than ever:
JANUARY 5. Snow-covered trails lead me to the summit of Old Cabin Hill. Where I have stood amid the green of so many summer days, I stand amid the white of this January afternoon, looking down at the rude rectangle of stones that once supported a dwelling. Now vines mound over one end and the trunk of a good-sized oak lifts within the rectangle, perhaps where a chimney once rose. In the deeper soil and more abundant rainfall of this region, rooted growth unremittingly overwhelms all. Our trails fill in; the edges of our fields are transformed into sproutlands; the woods eternally come creeping back.
But in my mind there are pictures of drier, harsher regions we have visited, desertland and tundra, where growth is long drawn out and scars heal slowly. We have seen the tracks of covered wagons still traced across arid stretches of the Oregon Trail more than a century after their westward progress ended. We have seen a patch of cleared ground on a desert hillside standing out distinctly in the distance. It had remained without visible change while three generations passed.
The impact of human visitors on such easily damaged environments is now a cause of increasing concern. During my lifetime, and especially during these latter years, I have watched attitudes toward nature change, an appreciation of wild areas grow, a surge of interest build up in experiencing such things, firsthand, as the wilderness, the remoter mountains, the untamed rivers.
Contact with primitive nature has become more prized in a time of urban pressure. All this is good—immensely good. The value of wildness is coming into its own. Yet it is becoming increasingly apparent that out of this expansion of interest a new danger is rising. The more wildness is appreciated, the more it is experienced, the more people visit it, the more it is in danger of losing its character of wildness.
Half a million people in a single year now descend the Colorado River into the Grand Canyon, tracing on rubber rafts the route Major John Wesley Powell followed with so much hardship and peril only a little more than a century ago. Even if no litter is left, no intentional changes produced, just the impact of so many human beings where virtually none had been before is altering the environment. Park officials are already troubled over the effect of visitors to the remote and untouched beauty of the Brooks Range region of interior Alaska. Its tundra conditions can sustain relatively few visitors without lasting damage.
Here at Trail Wood our tracks are soon obliterated. But in many places, places more remote, places especially attractive to those who love the wilderness, a major threat is coming from the ones who enjoy the wildness most. The sudden growth of interest in primitive nature, the swift multiplication of travelers to remote areas, has produced the paradox of a need to protect the wilderness from those most deeply concerned with its protection.
Edwin Way Teale,
Trail Wood,
Hampton, CT
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