Pilot Rock at sunrise. From "Wild Transit," not up at Oregon Humanities:
"Buses made my first memories in the mountains possible, and buses would help form new memories and a new life in my mid-thirties. I wonder about what might be possible for so many others as well, if we could only break out of the stranglehold that car culture has on our collective imagination, so that the words transit and buses aren’t automatically equated with urban and cities.
There’s more at stake than any one individual’s ability to go hiking. The culturally reinforced habits of thought that link transit with urban spaces and cars with wild spaces also map onto the false dichotomies we’ve made between human culture and the natural world. These days, more Oregonians are trying to break down these manufactured distinctions, as more of us understand the extent to which the forests in Oregon that settlers claimed were “uninhabited wilderness” were in fact maintained, cared for, and lived on by the land’s Indigenous peoples since time immemorial. We’re getting clearer on how it’s not an absence of people that makes a place wild, but that wildness comes in part from how we as humans show up there, how much we let our presence be felt in the more-than-human world. What if one of the ways we begin to renew our care for the wild, to have a lighter impact while still being present, is to reduce the number of vehicles we cram into such spaces? What if part of rewilding is remembering how to migrate from village to mountaintop, not in isolation, but in community? What if the most wild way to show up in the woods is not in a 4x4 truck, but on a bus?"
Read the whole piece.