An In-Depth Look at Wilderness

Humans retreat into the wilderness because they do not feel like they belong in the civilized world. Chris McCandless retreated to Alaska because he was sickened by human society, including his dad who had “been a bigamist at one time and that kind of went across [his] grain” (Krakauer 346). Stuckey’s use of the word grain is symbolic because cutting wood across the grain is very difficult and often leaves rough edges. By leaving society McCandless is attempting to start anew and let nature cut him going with the grain to reshape him into a new man. The Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda uses a similar tactic when they recruited boys by “killing the parents of young males before their eyes…before pressing them into service as child soldiers” (Siebert 533). Both McCandless and the young males are being shaped, but while McCandless is being shaped to rid himself of the wilderness of society, the young males are being shaped into a form of wilderness. Therefore, wilderness is not a location; instead it is a mindset in which the wilder and untamed side of a person’s personality is put into practice. The self-centered behavior described by Siebert is also apparent in Abram’s essay when he illustrates how the “expressive and sentient landscape slowly faded behind [his] more exclusively human concerns” (19). In this case the wilderness is not being expressed as a carnal and savage behavior, but more of aloofness to everything and everyone else in society. From Abram’s perspective the emphasis is not on the living and breathing outside, but instead on the emphasis of individual needs. Through his continued exposure to a self-centered society Abram loses his wonder of nature. It is this mindset that alienates idealists from human society because they cannot find a place for themselves in an uncaring society.