Everyone needs a Wild Place. A Wild Place isn't wilderness*--there isn't anything like that here in the city. It's just a place where, temporarily, at least, humans don't rule. A Wild Place isn't mowed, watered, fertilized, manicured or planned; it just happens. It is a place to experience nature unkempt. I have several wild places: Hockomock Swamp is the biggest and wildest, but it's a little out-of-the-way so I probably only go there a few times a year. MY Wild Place, on the other hand, is very small and non-descript--just a fifty-foot bit of scrubby and slightly trashy woodland where our property meets several others--but it's MINE. I would love to visit wilderness, and would like to soon, but that would be a trip rather than a being-in-place. So even my humble, postage stamp Wild Place remains important.
*It's easy to misread Henry David Thoreau's quote, so read it slowly: "Wildness is the salvation of the world."
I try to take the same photos of my Wild Place once in a while to see seasonal
and longer-term change. (More are below.) The 15 inches of snow a couple days ago has settled,
temperatures have ranged from mid-twenties to low teens, jumping to fifty Fahrenheit today.
My Wild Place in January, five years ago. (I watched the dead tree on the left fall
soon after, joining its brother.) Then my Wild Place in July of the same year.
*It's easy to misread Henry David Thoreau's quote, so read it slowly: "Wildness is the salvation of the world."
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