I lost the wild sometime after 1956.

My grip on it loosened. I let things slip away from me. Bob-o-links in the wet bottom land below our house. The jerky Chipping Sparrows bouncing up and down along the rusty old barbed wire fence near our back door. Chipmunks, Ground Hogs, Deermice, Milkweed, Flowering Judas, Painted Trillium, and a lot of other things that were growing, slithering, and flying around the woods and fields around where I lived.

Their presence vanished abruptly from my life and I was intolerably quiet about their demise. I was in my early thirties when I finally comprehended how my friendship with such an immense nature could have passed away.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I spent most of my childhood of the 1950’s on a small farm on the outskirts of Buckhannon. Buckhannon was (and still is) a small sized college town in north central WV and not a very noisy place – especially after about ten o’clock at night. Back then the only natural calamities I cringed at were the sight of road kills or when our Dalmatian, Cindy, dragged in baby Cottontails with their intestines dangling out. I didn’t know that all those awful brooding carved off hillsides along the roads meant anything. They were just there, the everyday geography of time and place. There was no larger picture.

I believe I was a very privileged child, because I could claim a demesne of nature that was limitless and reckless. As far as I was concerned, the woods in back of our steep pasture went forever. It was where an Indian tribe lived, I was sure. And so when my friends would make an appearance in the field, we would work ourselves up into believing that the warriors were trying to leave us feather and footprint signs and other clues of their existence. We looked everywhere for the evidence, always feeling a little closer to discovering a real Indian than we had been the day before. And I knew that there just had to be bears lurking around in there, too. So we were always on the lookout for the gleam of an eye or the flash of bared teeth in the dark recesses of rock ledges and hollow logs.

But as I look back on things now, I believe that I first began to grasp that I had forfeited these wonderful imaginings when I was a college student.

At that time, I took a summer job working as a counselor for a Methodist summer program for children in Baltimore’s inner city. During one of the weeks, we herded a group of kids into a yellow school bus and went off to stay at a rustic church camp in rural tobacco growing region of southern Maryland called Camp Lothian - which early on in the week we quickly transmogrified into "Camp Loathful".

Massive thunderstorms boomed and roiled their way in almost every day. The incessant rains came down in Niagara torrents, in no time at all turning the place into a mucky, oppressively humid rain forest. Before long, we began making runs on a daily basis out to a local laundromat in one counselor’s (literally) wired together Volkswagen Beetle to dry out anything made of cloth. Two of the cabins leaked because the roofs had apparently been used as target practice for several loads of buckshot. The cook harped day in day out (over the quavering screams of preacher whom she had tuned into on her radio) about the children getting "fever chills," the kids viciously fought and scrapped constantly, everything was overgrown with either briars or thick shiny luxuriant clusters of poison ivy, and mosquitoes and bees underwent a population explosion that should have been cited in the annals of Ecology. And leaving was out of the question, because the charter service had all their buses in use, and wouldn’t be back until Friday afternoon.

And so we just had to make the best of it.

This was also the week that the first U. S. Astronaunts touched down on the moon. When the news came over the cook’s radio (thankfully interrupting the preacher), I momentarily thought about the dry dusty glare of the moon above the thick dripping torn clouds hanging ominously over the camp, and then forgot about it.

One afternoon, however, there came a break in the weather, and the sun poured through – drawing out peals of joy and dancing and jumping up and down everywhere. The boys in my counsel group had been pestering me all week to go and wade in a little stream that flowed near the edge of the camp property. I didn’t waste any time in getting there, either. I wanted them to have some fun before the week was over, and this might be the only opportunity we had.

The dry weather thankfully held for the rest of the afternoon, and so my group sat around quietly and talked outside the dining shelter right before supper. (On the other days, because of the rain, we had to seat everybody inside around the tables to wait for their supper, and Pandemonium would soon break loose no matter how many songs we sang). Some of them even wanted for it to start raining again so they stand there and get their clothes soaking wet like they had down at the stream. This really boggled me. But I didn’t dare make any comments. Let sleeping dogs lie, I thought. And I went inside to let them be.

Then an even stranger thing happened.

I saw two of the boys crawl under the building, which sat on cemented concrete block pillars. I was about to tell them to get out from under there when they reappeared dragging with them a discarded refrigerator tray. They all talked for a while and then began to fill it up with the sandy coastal plain soil. Then they scraped out a small channel through the center, which they filled up with water. After that, they carefully patted the dirt into what looked like rolling hills. Then they stuck in clumps of grass, leaves, and Shortleaf Pine twigs they found lying all around them. The final touch was a kind of miniature hut right in the middle - that they very carefully built up with the twigs.

I decided to go out and ask then what they were doing. As they continued to put in twigs, one of the boys answered me, without even looking up, "This be camp!"

But to me it also looked like something else.

It was the river village described by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness. I don’t know why this came to mind, but it just did. Then it fleetingly occurred to me that the landscape they had created in the refrigerator tray might be some other place and time that was whispering to them. Maybe not. But I sensed there was a fidelity to something more than a mere replication of the camp. Most of them were Black and probably had origins in West Africa. And it seemed to me they that they were creating a habitat of remembrance, a dimly perceived kindredness of land and soil that was suggested to them by cues which they had become attuned to that afternoon along the stream and which they could hardly explain.

Then I had a passing recognition of something else: in another place I, too, once had a patch of ground which I left behind.

I was eleven years old when I left that patch. In 1956 my family moved out of Buckhannon to Cumberland, then the large industrial town of western Maryland, as a result of my father being reassigned on his job. The announcement by my parents and the move came quickly --- too quickly for me to get my bearings. The haymow and Meadowlarks, the heavy warmth of snows, the moist soily smell of the woods in April, the stars flaming in the cool blue night, and all the people we knew who were one in the same with that rolling country suddenly were no more in my life. I went packing off, and that world stayed in place.

We spent the first year in Cumberland in a third story apartment. No more farm and no more baby rabbits. And Cindy was consigned to a doghouse in the backyard to which she was roped to keep her from roving. Away from the manure and Peach blossoms and the Honeysuckle of the farm, I became somebody else. I had to ban any thoughts of that place from my life. If I couldn’t be lavished with it, I just wouldn’t admit that it had ever existed. And I simply erased it from my mind.

But when I had that conversation with the campers, who had perhaps put their memories of race and earth into a refrigerator tray (who knows?), I could not help but remember that I, too, had an ancestral ground to account for. Exile is exile. And in those few moments the awareness of that whole other history of myself rose up. A history that was secreted away in the forests of another earth I had inhabited. The old blood was aroused.

These feelings fermented a long time, and it wasn’t until some years later I acted. I began trying to locate people I once knew who were still living in or around Buckhannon. I was finally successful with this and was welcomed back for visits there with true West Virginia hospitality after an absence of about twenty years. As far as these folks were concerned, I had just come home.

But as soon as the very real happiness of this reunion had settled in, a bone deep disappointment began to well up. It had to do with the landscape. One of the first things that I noticed when I started to make trips back to Buckhannon was that I could not discern the town/country boundary as easily as I used to. This once clear line seemed to be blurred by residential developments, which were beginning to uncoil their way out through the hills, a few small shopping centers here and there, and a halting punctuation of fast food stops along the highways leading in and of town. Stuff I was used to in Baltimore where I was living at the time. But here it made no sense at all.

(And latest thing in this depressing process, by the way, has been the construction of the western end of Corridor H – which has visually sheared off the town from one of its largest and most picturesque cemeteries, sending the dead into a kind of permanent exile, interrupting some undefined, yet vital, flow of meaning and remembrance between the living in the town and their ancestry).

Simply put, Buckhannon was not Buckhannon anymore. The place that was so indelibly etched into my young bones. This evoked a terrible sadness in me. But I had a very clear feeling then that there was something more than an upwelling of nostalgia, more than the yearning for lost childhood, at work here. It was something about the earthy past of human makeup, rooted down deep below the finite sprout of my own life time, that tugged away at my insides when I saw the edges of the town becoming so ragged. Coming back to Buckhannon had in some ways raised more questions for me than it answered. There was some other task here that needed to be completed. But I didn’t know what it could be. So in the busyness of my life, I just didn’t give it any thought for a while.

My story picks up again in the early 80’s when the social and spiritual promises of the wonderful revolution in thinking of the late 60’s and the 70’s began to wear thin under the weight of Reaganomics. I had been swept up in the redemptive power of the changes born of Vietnam and Civil Rights and the Greening of America and free love. This is where my energies and all my cautious hopes had been placed. And now it seemed gone.

To comfort myself, I began to hike – the Shenandoah National Park, Catoctin Mountain, the Appalachian Trail – wherever I could get to to forget and feel some peace. I also joined the Sierra Club and soon became an addicted Backpack leader. These little weekend pilgrimages seemed to do me good, and they were a lot more fun than when I was in the Boy Scouts in Cumberland and always felt sort of clumsy and inept in the out-of-doors.

On one of my early Dolly Sods trips with the Sierra Club, I agreed to take along the fourteen year old son of some friends of mine in Columbia, Md. I will call him Matt.

As I remember, we camped that night along the Big Stone Coal Trail in an area known to those who tramp around up there as the "Pine Tree Hilton" -- the result of an energetic reforestation effort that was then apparently aborted. But the little grove of trees provided a perfectly soft bed of pine needles to sleep on in an otherwise knotty landscape -- and a copious supply of dry firewood, to boot. You couldn’t ask for better anywhere.

After supper, Matt wanted to go for a walk through the rest of the pine plantation. It wasn’t very long before he discovered the clean bones of a fawn, half buried in the thick cover of needles. We pulled the bones out, shook off the dirt, and handled them, trying to identify the various parts. I told him that I thought the winters up in this 4400 feet tableland were probably pretty severe, and maybe the little animal had been one of the casualties.

"But it was a natural death, " he said.

And a kind of gentle death, too, I thought -- in the soft snow and needles under those White Pines. The snow was gone now, but it seemed to me that the ghost of the deer inhabited every green needle. And because of that deer and many like it dying under the pines, the soil had been made all the richer and the trees perhaps more lovely. I felt the presence of it everywhere. I had a powerful sense at that moment that, in the woods, life is never lost. It is just transfigured.

Transfigured.

Matt, who was still holding onto the blanched bones while I was lost in these thoughts, suddenly turned to me then and said, "Y’ know if I died today or tomorrow, it’d be alright – because I was here."

Yes, now I had come back home. And Matt had found home. All in a moment.

The campers with their miniature village, and later, that time I spent bone picking with Matt up in the Dolly Sods, were invocations to a kind truth, I think. For after the Sods trip, something awakened in me. It was like Service Berry and Dogwood and Flowering Judas slowly adding color and revelation to the gray Alleghenies in early April – until one day everything just swells into a tender and effusive calamity of life.

The things of the wild had inhabited every space I roamed in once. They had watched over my comings and goings, they had been my very own language, and it was in them that I came to know the home of inwardness that I called myself. And nature had been taken from me, yes. But the truth was that I had abandoned nature - in all of its here and now inexhaustible presence of pure being - just to preserve the sweet grief of the wound.

Living in the moment of the wild, in all of its turnings - and trying to honor it in the way I make my life choices - has now become my single most important reference reality.

Most people are not as abruptly yanked away from a natural life as I was. Nowadays it is more likely to be the vacuous rituals of TV and the materialistically permeated technosphere which efface the tracings of the earth from our inner workings. It has crossed my mind more than once that the reason why the cold fluorescence of a vacuum tube can be so addicting, so all consuming, it that it is a deceptive substitution. An electronically contrived replacement for the hypnotic glow and hissing of campfires which once burned in the regions of trees and bears, which flickered in the night in places where gods and terrors once ignited dreams – and where there was also a peace which linked us with eternity and with everything of the earth and enchantment.

In a sense, I was lucky. Because I at least had a memory to nurture me. I had been there. But the children of the Age of Information (or as Bill McKibben has more appropriately called it, the Age of Missing Information) have no such delight to draw upon. I think that they are robbed of even knowing what they yearn for.

And yet an experience happens that is unequal to anything else when a child first allows an insouciant millepede to glide up an arm. He or she gains a sense of origins, the realm that has been disappearing, thanks to their elders. But some of that world is still left (owing to the perseverance of organizations like the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy), and the more people of all ages are encouraged to learn of it and keep fooling around in it, perhaps the planet has a better chance. This is why it so crucial to transfuse learning with the wet and windblown, the sunbaked and slimy, and the creepy and crawly. This is why parents need to spend time with their kids looking at and caring for living things.

It is so important now for people, and especially for children, to enter deeply and dance with the parts of the natural world that still exist – in wildlife preserves, public forest lands, wilderness areas, patches of tall prairie grass hiding in a forgotten lot somewhere, and in all the other scattered remnants of the once Great Wild.

Done often enough, perhaps we can articulate those isolated provinces into a new continent within our minds, a mainland of feral blessing that is larger and more sentient than the pale technology that has so dismembered and disfigured the earth. In such things there is hope. We can renew our relationship to the earth in this image. Time may still be on our side.

We have to take our kids out into the woods and fields again, so they can claim for themselves the flame of Azaleas, the sucking and oozing of black swamp muck underfoot, the shock wave of a Ruffed Grouse whirring out if the bushes, and all the other inheritances of the old, rhythmic land which are still around somewhere to be touched. For the return of nature is, in reality, our own return to ourselves in nature. To reforest the forest, we have to first reforest our minds.

The world renews itself from the inside out.