“There is a patience of the wild – dogged, tireless, persistent as life itself.” ― Jack London
I grew up on the northern edge of Appalachia and though my home town seemed quiet tidy and civilized I was later to learn when I went North to college that the places I had grown up - a town named after a novel by Sir Walter Scott and another larger place, a small city in the heart of Appalachia, that was the big city for the Hatfield and McCoy clan battles - were actually on the edge of the wild but not part of the wild. Our local vision looked to farms and libraries and automobiles and B-52 bombers flying at 45,000 feet leaving the white trails of their engines over head as a constant reminder of the twentieth century and its destructive civilizing power.
Growing up I did not know about Asperger's. It had been named but the name had not reached us and was the currency of psychiatrists which we new about but never saw. I did not know that my shyness, my sense of isolation and, looking back, my inability to be social was tied to that condition. All I knew was a loneliness that I fought through reading and long walks in the farm and woodland around those two towns, one a village and one a city in a rural part of America I did not know was known for its poverty. I did not feel poor and did not know I was as emotionally isolated as I was physically isolated.
In the mid 1960′s I was an active member of a boy scout troop. That was an effort by my family to engage me in some sort of social life. Unfortunately they did not understand that part of being a boy scout was an interest of the parents - an encouragement so to speak to achieve awards and merit badges. I readily did the learning and the skills for merit badges but never took the tests, being to shy or fearful and rebellious. I was much the failure as a Boy Scout even though I did manage to eek out a first class rank. No one warned my parents that scouting is social organization and required social skills that as a boy I did not have due to what I later learned was a combined impact of whatever psychiatric social dis-ease I had and their alcoholism which created a childhood PTSD. I memorized the Boy Scout handbook but simply added it to my lonely skill set as I wandered wood, stream, “holler” and field.
At some point in the mid nineteen sixties the scout troop was on a mission to plant trees in order to earn a forestry merit badge. We were actually doing a favor for the local agricultural extension agent on a property he own miles deep into the hills. So that day I learned the back breaking work of planting what would in time become a lofty pine wood lot which was the retirement fund for the agricultural agent. At least that is what I though at the time already well experience in youthful cynicism about the motives of other people, especially adults.
When we broke for lunch we were treated by an eight point buck white tail deer and a doe jumping the long abandoned fence rows. In the afternoon the troop was loosed upon the hills. Initially I tried to blend in but there was simply too much noise. When we found an old railroad line the troop went cackling and shouting off along it and I turned and went the other way aware that I could find my way back easily when the time came.
I arrived at a turning point in my life as a passed through a tunnel much like the one pictured. Once through the tunnel there was silence and a sense of the wild that all my ramblings around my towns had never given me. No car sounds, no voices or hum of people in the distance - just the smell of pine and hardwood and grasses on a hot day and a stillness that matched the stillness inside of me and on that day I stopped feeling lonely. Like Buck In Jack London’s Call of the Wild I felt the ancient primordial.
“Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest.” ― Jack London, The Call of the Wild
Later they sent out the troop as a search party. It was not much of a search in that the other boys knew I headed the direction opposite them and they found me sitting on the side of a pine covered hill simply listening and breathing, for the first time in my life feeling a real part of something. And needless to say when we got back to the tree farm I was thoroughly chewed and humiliated by the adults while the boys sniggered and, I supposed, feeling quiet superior in that they were seen as my rescuers. They already had me pegged as weird and an outsider anyway and equated outsider with incompetent.
But that was the day I no longer felt broken and out of place in the world, how I felt in society was another issue. That day however, I started gaining confidence that there was a place for me. How I ended up becoming a psychotherapist instead of a game warden working in the wild is a long story and much blame lies on my efforts and my therapists efforts to domesticate and socialize me. But that is another story.
When I saw the picture of the tunnel, so much like the one I passed through that day the story came flooding back.
I have come to believe that understanding the “healing” to PTSD and Asperger's ( which is no longer called Asperger's but has been medicalized into Autism - just as the writers of the DSM have de-medicalized aberrant and self destructive emotional conditions such as transvestitism) is a struggle between the need to integrate into a society that is in direct conflict with the basic needs of some who need to leave domestication behind and live in the clarity of the wild - a place where one can live without the cynicism that civilization requires to even exist.
There are some people, men and women, that the call of the wild, the clarity of silence, tooth and claw, of the shadow of danger and he heartbeat of the planet are required for peace of mind and soul. Domesticators will never understand this about their fellow humans. We really as a species are not that far from the foot of the glacier or the open game filled savannahs of our origins.
For some of us we are only truly alive in a place where we can feel the chill of death's shadow casting over us from that primordial silence, a place where the energy of life is not muddled by the cackling of boys, cars, B-52s and the million things human monkeys create to reassure themselves they are safe from that chill shadow.
“It was an old song, old as the breed itself - one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad. It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear any mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. And that he should be stirred by it marked the completeness with which he harked back through the ages of fire and roof to the raw beginnings of life in the howling ages.” ― Jack London
