Working in the wilderness could not satiate my intellectual impulses. But for the protagonist of Hothouse Bloom, the binary between mental and physical labor is what calls her.
Working in the wilderness could not satiate my intellectual impulses. But for the protagonist of Hothouse Bloom, the binary between mental and physical labor is what calls her.
A shepherd reading, by Johann Heinrich Roos (1631–1685).
The first time I killed a deer, my uncle field-dressed it for me. He showed me how to press the tip of the knife into the animal’s soft belly hard enough to push through the skin and fascia but not so hard that it pierced an organ and made a mess. He sliced from the pelvis to the base of the rib cage. He reached in past his elbows to pull out the viscera. They lay bluish and steaming on the soil. Next time, he said, it was up to me.
The year was 2006. I was in Jacobson, Minnesota. My friends had all read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I got the gist: Most of the food in the grocery store is made from corn. “Free-range chicken” is a lie. We are alienated from what we eat but don’t have to be.
I was 23. If I was going to eat meat, I thought, I should know what it felt like to kill an animal. I decided to join the rural side of my family for the annual deer hunt. My grandpa gave me one of his rifles and taught me to shoot. He gave me a knife to gut with. I thought I would do this annually: stock my freezer with venison.
I haven’t shot a deer in 20 years. My grandpa’s gun is moldering in the crawl space beneath my house. I lost the knife.
It might be closer to the truth to say I hunted deer for a woman. Jaclyne was a wilderness guide with a big laugh who wore Carhartt and stood several inches taller than me. In northern Minnesota, we taught kids to identify trees and read tracks in the snow. She pulsed with esprit de corps. On weekends, she organized cross-country-skiing expeditions for the staff of the outdoor education center we worked for. We would sit midday in some distant silent wood and start a fire and drink whiskey and eat sandwiches. Once, we skied into the wilderness and built a quinzee (a snow hut) on a frozen lake and slept in it—or tried to. If we don’t die from hypothermia, I thought, it will cave in and we’ll be asphyxiated. I was in love.
In October, while the tamaracks blazed gold, we carried shotguns and stepped quietly through the woods, alert for grouse. We waded into bogs and foraged cranberries. With gifted wild rice from nearby lakes; we had dinner. But a grouse isn’t much for two hungry people. So I thought: I should kill a deer.
Come summer, I followed Jaclyne’s lead and became a wilderness guide. Each May, wealthy kids streamed in from the country’s outdoorsy colleges like Bowdoin and St. John’s, the University of Montana, and the University of Puget Sound to lead trips for Twin Cities youth. An essay by the scholar William Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness,” which argues that “wilderness” is man-made by regulations and fantasies and the expulsion of Indigenous peoples, circulated in the camp like samizdat, photocopied and stapled and passed from hand to hand.
“The Trouble With Wilderness” was published in the inaugural issue of Environmental History in January 1996 and has since been cited by scholars more than 7,500 times. In it, Cronon says that “we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires” when we look at the wilderness: the sublime and the frontier. The sublime is the divine other, the sense of God, however secularized, that makes us feel small. The frontier is the edge of civilization where we test our grit, are rejuvenated through a healthful primitivism, and feel big. However intoxicating the wilderness is—and Cronon does not deny its power—it is “insidious,” he writes, and represents a “flight from history.” Wilderness serves the soothing pretensions of wealthy urbanites. The environmental movement must instead recognize the porousness of the wild in every human cranny, in our cities and our backyards.
We read this, then paddled into the wilderness. As for me, each time a group I led arrived at a campsite, I tried to teach them, young teens, the trees—ash, birch, cedar, fir, maple, pine, or spruce. I pointed out the remnants of ramps in the water from the logging era; noted the Ojibwe who lived here then and before. I said this was our home, if only for a night. We were in history! They just wanted to know if we would see a moose.
After the summer, Jaclyne and I bought one-way tickets to Buenos Aires: We wanted to hike new trails, see the Southern Cross. We bused to Tierra del Fuego, then worked our way up the Patagonian Andes. When we ran out of money, we moved to Mendoza and taught English. I was so bad at it that I was fired. When we heard about a farm that took volunteers in exchange for room and board, Jaclyne suggested we go.
Finca el Peregrino was a permaculture farm an hour south of Mendoza in the Uco Valley. It was run by a couple in their 60s and their adult children, who had left Mendoza because the children were allergy-ridden and ill, and they wanted to live as vegans, which was difficult to do in Argentina. The farm they bought was mostly an apple orchard; they were carving out space for vegetables. They were poor. They lived the first few years with a tarp for a roof. Their oven was wood-burning, as was the water heater. Their scrappiness was a marvel: After they built a roof, they laid the tarp over a pit, channeling hot air up to a tall box with mesh shelves; the rising air dehydrated fruit. They built natural structures—seed banks, compost toilets, barracks for volunteers—with scavenged materials. One morning, we went out in the pickup and harvested hundreds of young, supple poplars from the roadside with machetes. These we wove around thicker trunks to make walls for the barracks. We filled the wide parts of the weave with glass bottles, then built up the walls with adobe we had stomped into the right consistency.
It was, as farming famously is, hard work. We planted; we weeded. We sorted apples for farmers markets. The irrigation system was rudimentary: Municipal water flowed downhill through the farm weekly. We built a system of earthen dams that channeled the water through the rows and watched the water reach the end of one row, then spill over a dam and start the next. At day’s end, we ate a communal dinner. I played chess with Ignacio, the patriarch, and two other volunteers, Antoine from France and Bertrand from Belgium.
