Sublime

In only three generations, children in the British Isles as well as the United States have lost their freedom to roam, their independently explorable territories shrinking from hundreds of acres to the dimensions of each child’s own back yard. This is not an accusation toward parents; their decisions reflect their judgments about their children’s s

She would like to believe there will be a place, again, where the streetlights end and wilderness begins. The wolf border. And if this is where it has to begin in England, she thinks, this rich, disqualifying plot, with its private sponsorship and antiquated hierarchy, so be it. The ends justify the means.

She reads Thoreau over wood fires at night.

Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man? According to Liebig, man’s body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm less.

She scooped up the child, tucked him under her arm, and half ran and half stumbled toward the roaring sea. “Oh, mother! No! Don’t leave me!” Ooruk cried. And at once you could tell she wanted to stay with her child, she wanted to, but something called her, something older than she, older than he, older than time.

Her public reputation, like Demeter’s daughter, crawls back up from the underworld.

I asked him five years ago, on finding him outside Fort Yukon surreptitiously heading for the forest. I can’t hear anything here. I can’t see anything either. Too much chitchat, too much comfort, too much family, and not enough of anything else. Too much fuss! I am off to dream farther away.

Before walking toward the forest’s edge, I offer a silent goodbye to the gray-green waters of the Pacific.