The youthful desire of trying out new experiences and living thrilling adventures for sparkling a life full of adrenaline is what drove Peter Fromm to go into the wilderness, spending seven winter month in Montana/Idaho snowy surroundings. Fromm perceives wilderness as a novelty, as a challenge and as an adventure. He is eager to experience this adventure for living on his own the charm and other particularities of wilderness that he only read about in books that romantically describe the living in the wildlife. In a way, “Indian Creek Chronicles: A Winter Alone in the Wilderness” tells the autobiographic story of a boy that takes a seven month journey to discover his manhood. He discovers what it means to live in the wilderness at each step of his adventure in the solitude of the Idaho winter and he learns to cope with it, to embrace and to love the wilderness by accommodating to the new situations that he faces. He learns to hunt, to skin, to cook the animals, to build dens, to climb trees to see a dim light of the sun, to develop his orientation skills, becoming every day more connected to the wilderness. It can be stated that for Fromm, living in wilderness had the purpose of making him a man, teaching him how to adjust to difficult, challenging situations. In the same time, the purpose of wilderness for Fromm was also related to his mountain wilderness story-telling, as living in the solitude of the Idaho’s wild mountains in the winter time provided the author plenty of resources and time to write, analyzing and elaborating his experiences. This experience has taught Fromm how to respond to different difficulties of life, by provoking him to use whatever scarce resources to make his way into the wild. The man did not outsmart the nature, but he made it his friend, being open and actively listening to the nature’s stories, learning how to interpret the signs it offered him in order to understand it and to explore its resources. However, outsmarting the nature does not seem to be one of Fromm’s purposes in taking on the challenge of living in wilderness. He was successful in accomplishing his purpose of learning how to live in the wilderness and in solitude. This was a big change for the man, who was used with a modern social life of partying and drinking and spending time with lots of people. Nevertheless, he learned to adjust and to overpass the solitude of the winter mountain existence by exploring and comprehending his surroundings. He replaced his friends and his social life for new phenomena and experiences lived in the middle of the nature. Fromm also succeeded in accomplishing another purpose, managing to write and to publish an appreciated book, representative for the western wilderness biographies.
Regarding the hunting, Fromm received harsh critics from the environmentalists, who argued that the writer demonstrated his manhood with a gun, killing animals for fun and as a way to pass the time, more than for strict survival purposes (Amazon Review).
Compared to Fromm’s youthful desire to experience the wilderness as an once in a lifetime adventure, in “Desert Solitaire”, Edward Abbey’s purpose in exploring the wilderness is to escape the modernity and the “cultural apparatus”, showing a disgust for the civilization and a clear intention to undress the clothes of a social life.
Just like Fromm, Abbey embraces the nature, but unlike the first author, the second goes on his journey to the desert by knowing the supremacy of the nature, not discovering it gradually as Fromm did. Another similarity between the two writers’ attitude towards wilderness is that they both find the modernity unnecessary into the wild. However, unlike Fromm who only perceives this aspect of the usefulness of modernity in the wilderness when he is obligated to think and to act as a primitive man for surviving, Abbey is already in a strong communion with the wilderness, speaking it its name. “this desert landscape is the indifference manifest to our presence, our absence, our coming, our staying or our going. Whether we live or die is a matter of absolutely no concern whatsoever to the desert” (Abbey 267).
Abbey values wilderness because it allows him to be real, away from hypocrisy, from superficiality and the solitude of the wilderness allows him to focus on the matters and values that mostly preoccupy him, such as the environmentalist and ecosystem causes. “I remain part of the environment I walk through and my vision though limited has no sharp or definite boundary” (Abbey 13). Just as Fromm, Abbey returns to the primitive man, finding his wild senses and adjusting to the wilderness, making it part of his life. The author values the purity and the transparency of the wilderness, comparing it against the urban existence, wherein everything is hidden, nothing seems to be real. Wilderness is, for Abbey too, the return to innocence, a place from where the modern society has departed a long time ago. Abbey criticizes the modern living by observing that modern people have become unaware of the natural beauties and ignorant of the natural dangers and threats, while searching to expand their urban living into the wilderness. The writer sees the purpose of wilderness as preserving real values, wherein ecosystems can harmoniously continue their millenary, unchanged existence. He sees the purpose of wilderness as the place to retreat for escaping the mass culture, advertisement, political propaganda, consumerism and industrialization.
Depicting a different type of wilderness, Abbey writes about the desert area that he explored while living in Arches, Arizona, with the purpose of translating the romantic existence in the wilderness. The author succeeds in presenting the authenticity of the wild desert life, wherein everybody lives individually, yet, in harmony with the others, wherein everybody and everything can be at the same moment predator and prey. Such accounts have romantic accents, reminding of Jack London or Thoreau’s adventurous writings. While describing the life in the desert, the author succeeds in crafting a romantic story telling. However, the author mostly shows his despise for society and modern living in his “Desert Solitaire”, as the main purpose of his writing seems to be to show the blunt comparison between the industrialized modern urbanization and the deserted, solitary wilderness. He shows his contempt for the modernity, which captures a lot of his attention in the pages of his writing, with the purpose of augmenting the greatness of the wilderness.
Critically analyzing the depth of Abbey’s writing in “Desert Solitaire” Farnsworth (106) observes that the autobiographic author is driven into the desert’s wilderness by a philosophical quest of loneliness, of a solitary life, for finding its meaning. By exploring his personal reflections to the solitary wilderness versus the vicious modern society, the author succeeds more in developing a psychological analysis than a philosophical one.
Fromm’s book presented a non-romantic, but insightful perspective on wilderness and on the human-environment relationship. The inner senses are more important than the available man-produced resources for dealing with the unknown of the wilderness and learning to interpret the nature’s signs can be crucial for surviving in extreme conditions as Fromm did. Regarding Abbey’s book, sometimes I find myself in his reflections and desire to escape the modern mainstream, manipulative culture. I only want to take my dog and my guitar and to go somewhere where nobody can find me, where I can build a nice tree-house and go fishing when I’m hungry. I share Abbey’s view of environmental protection and his contempt for the modern capitalism avidity of taking on new, wild territories for expanding the modernity and gaining new territories to exploit for the purpose of rapid economic growth. Although I find Abbey’s book more mature, in the same time it is also more romantic. Fromm’s writing is visibly more touched by an energetic fever of the youthful adventure search and he explores the wilderness in a more realistic manner. The accommodation is the key in Fromm’s autobiographic account and the author confirms the Darwinist principles of the survival of the fittest. His writing made me perceive wilderness differently, not like a friendly place, but as a spectacular space wherein everything can go wrong at each step and one can only survive by learning to predict the unpredictable. Fromm and Abbey’s stories changed my perspective about human-environment relationship, as it made me understand that into the wilderness you can be both prey and predator, because the nature does not care whether you live or die.
Works Cited
Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire. New York: Touchstone. 1968. Print.
Amazon Review. Available at http://www.amazon.ca/product-reviews/1558212051. Accessed 13 October 2014. 1999. Web.
Farnsworth, John, S. “What does Desert Say? A Rhetorical Analysis of Desert Solitaire” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies. Vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 105-121. 2010. Print.
Fromm, Peter, in Schmidt, Gary, D. & Telch, Susan, M. Indian Creek Chronicles: A Winter Alone in the Wilderness. SkyLights Paths Publishing. Print.
O’Farrell, Maggie. Indian Creek Chronicles by Pete Fromm. Available at http://leafingthroughlife.blogspot.ro/2009/08/indian-creek-chronicles-by-pete-fromm.html. Accessed 13 October 2014. 2009. Web.
