What's the nature of nature?

In keeping with our tradition of reading hair-raising tales of arctic near-death experiences in the Wisconsin winter, The Drinking and Reading Society this month is reading The Final Frontiersman by James Campbell. The story’s subject, Heimo Korth, lives in a way none of us can imagine. Here’s the opening to the book:

I arrive at Heimo Korth's cabin on the Old Crow drainage in the far northeastern corner of Alaska in early January 2002 after a three-hour, 300-mile flight from Fairbanks. Only thirty minutes outside of Fairbanks, Rick, the bush pilot, and I had left behind civilization. For the next two and a half hours, there was not even a building to mar the harsh beauty of the Alaskan winter, and I had the feeling that I was being transported straight back into the nineteenth century.

"Heimo and his family are the only subsistence family I know," Rick said as we crossed Stranglewoman Creek. "'Subsistence' gets a lot of lip service in Alaska, but the Korths live almost strictly off the land. You got to respect them for that. Hell, their closest neighbor is a hundred miles downriver on the Porcupine."

Looking out the window at the endless sweep of land, at the trees bent double under the weight of snow, and the cow moose bedded down in the frozen creek bed, I tried to imagine it: New York City to Philadelphia; Chicago to Milwaukee; Los Angeles to San Diego -- not a soul in between.

Campbell’s tale is sympathetic. He’s Korth’s cousin, as he tells us early, and is a friend to the family as well as an observer.

But he asks tough questions about trapping and killing animals, questions Korth is not oblivious to, but which he resolves in favor of himself and his chosen way of life.

In a larger sense, Campbell raises the question about the place of humans in the wilderness. Is wilderness someplace separate from humans, where only a few may visit, but none may stay? Or are we part of wilderness, as Bill Cronon wrote in The Trouble with Wilderness: or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature? Cronon argues that our duty in these times is to find a way to live with nature, not outside of nature.

Certainly humans throughout the last few million years have both been in nature and observers of nature. Cronon was the first to shatter the myth of a pristine North American wilderness with his book Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England. Charles Mann expanded that vision to all of the Americas in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus.

Heimo Korth and his family live in the tradition of the pre-Columbian natives, although Campbell makes it clear that the natives do not share Korth’s vision of wilderness as a place to escape to. But in that sense, he reflects the mainstream of American attitudes about wilderness. Even if we only drive our 4x4s to the supermarket, we still want to believe that we could chuck it all and lite out for the fronteer if we wanted to. Korth’s life fulfills that romantic vision (if your idea of romance is eating caribou steak at 40 below for weeks on end).

But Campbell points out that the romantic vision works best when it’s just an idea, not when lots of people try to practice it.

Our current notion of wilderness preservation – setting aside chunks of land so some future generation will be able to screw it up themselves – is at odds with the American myth of the frontier and also with historical reality.

I’m not sure we’ve come to grips with that contradiction very well, but The Final Frontiersman certainly does ask the provocative question – and it provides some genuine chills along the way.