Kathryn Aalto - Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks Who Shape How We See the Natural World

writing
wild

WOMEN POETS, RAMBLERS, and
MAVERICKS Who Shape How
We See THE NATURAL WORLD

Kathryn Aalto

With love for
Helen, Joan, and Tess
My grandmother, mother, and daughter

What do we wish for? To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.

Terry Tempest Williams, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert (2001)

Isnt it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.

Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913)

I hope you love Birds too. It is economical. It saves going to Heaven.

Emily Dickinson, Letter to Eugenia Hall (1885)

When I was a child, I ran away from home a lot.

Over my shoulder, I slung a knapsack fashioned from a red handkerchief pulled from my costume trunk of gowns, hats, and heels. Before spearing it with an almond tree branch, I filled that pack with provisions: my toothbrush, a box of raisins, my small silk blanket, and bread pilfered from the kitchen when my mother wasnt looking.

This is goodbye, I would lisp-whisper to my parents.

Okay, Honey, theyd say, watching five-year-old me flounce out the back door1940s earrings clipped to my ears, mangy fur stole around my neckand into the cornfields and peach orchards of our home on Lemon Avenue.

There was never any reason to leave. Ours was a happy home. The culprits for inspiring my wanderlust were books. The whimsical perambulations of the trickster Brer Rabbit from The Tales of Uncle Remus tickled my imagination. I read and reread the blissful overland and underland adventures of Mole, Toad, Rat, and Badger from The Wind in the Willows and pined for the storybook landscapes of England. The darkness of Hansel and Gretel by the Brothers Grimm inspired the trail of breadcrumbs I dropped in the powdery dirt of Californias San Joaquin Valley as I made what, to me, felt like epic odysseys. You never know when you might encounter a cannibalistic witch.

Decades have passed, and the appeal of journeys on foot remains. At university, I read an account by the great naturalist John Muir of walking from San Francisco to Yosemite National Park through the valley where I grew up. It instilled a lifelong interest in narrative nonfiction, nature writing, and the essay. I pieced together nature writing like a puzzle to understand who and what came before and after Muir.