Me and Chee and the Garden and the Woods

There's always another stage

Author note: This post contains an audiobook version narrated by yours truly. Enjoy!

---

“I had come to this garden much like what I found in it. I was a mess, a disaster in need of a reckoning. That backyard was my perfect mirror, and the dream of the garden was in its own way a dream of myself. I arrived there after many years of self-abandonment, sure only that I did not know myself, but certain that I needed to believe I had a future. I did not know what the garden could do, and I did not know what I could do. If my garden was a messenger, the message was in the silent moments when I was sure I could hear it growing toward me through the earth. That more was coming. But I did not know this then. I knew only that it was time for me to leave. I had done what I came to do.”

That was a passage from “The Rosary,” a personal essay by the novelist and essayist Alexander Chee and a chapter in his wonderful collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.

I am a firm believer in the New Age sentiment that in life you are only ever given the information which you are ready for. I apply that idea to my coming across this essay for the second time recently. Its topic is something that I have taken interest in, as of late; you might even say I’ve caught the bug and it happened only this year (next spring will determine just how green is my thumb).

I had zero interest in gardening when I first read Chee’s book years ago and so I only vaguely recall reading this chapter the first time around. But the chapter was an assignment in a class and now its wisdom has returned to me. I’m ready to listen to what it wants to say.

I am still unsure as to where this newly kindled passion for flowers and shrubs is going to lead me. At my wooded property there are many nooks and spaces that serve as potential planting areas. I am confident that, as soon as I start seeing growth, I will be impelled to the next stages. Fences will go up. Mulch will come in huge bags. I will start wearing that apron gardeners seem to need in order to hold their pruners. I may not know where all this is going to take me, but it’s coming for me, of that I’m sure.

So far, gardening feels like an outgrowth of my longstanding passion for the outdoors. In it, I see the same dynamics, though on a completely different scale, as in the recreation of hiking and backpacking in wilderness spaces.

The garden is a celebration of life as the object of control and stewardship. So is the wilderness, but from a totally different vantage point.

You could say that the wilderness is actually one gigantic garden and that the regulatory apparatus that stipulates all of the bylaws that govern those spaces, the enforcement of stewardship with which all of the rangers are tasked, is a version of the implements of control and governance that are much more tangible in the world of gardening.

Trafficking in the wilderness is as if you turned into a beetle in your garden. The beetle roams around and climbs up and down all of the pebbles and stems. This is basically what you do when you go backpacking. So, when you are in the wilderness, your proportionality shifts to that of a bug’s in a garden and, as the beetle, you can avail yourself of all of the control measures that have kept this “garden” in place.

This smallness of the backpacker is what drives so many of us to go out into the woods.

There’s no more hallowed feeling with which I have experience than the sense I get when I have been hiking far enough from civilization that it is no longer possible to get back to the trailhead before nightfall. It is as though some curtain, or some invisible gate, closes. The “shop” known as civilization—or, in backpacking circles, the “frontcountry”—has rolled down its gate, locked it in place. You’ll have to come back tomorrow to hear the cars go by, to be able to plug something into a wall. Until then, through a quiet, fire lit evening, you will need to make do with nothing but the trees and the rocks. You will need to feel small.

This feeling is so distinct it is unmistakeable. Some sort of finalizing current overtakes me and I almost become a greater ally to the natural processes around me, the rushing streams, the chipmunks, the cawing of the bluejays. With any hope for an evening hamburger deluxe, or even a comfortable chair, dashed, I find myself in a powerful embrace, as all of these seemingly disparate elements of the wilderness congeal into a unified totality.

I call it “falling into the stomach of the whale.”

The best part is when the actual vegetative wilderness character shifts, when you can see and feel how insulated from normal human traffic and normal civilizational influence are the flora surrounding you. Chances are you’re higher in elevation and this, too, shifts the character of the trees and the shrubs and the mosses, which all now seem to comport to some more extreme condition of survival: they are wetter, denser, thicker, shinier.

At much higher elevations you have the striking krumholz, gnarled, shrub-sized versions of spruce that survive some of the coldest temperatures on earth during the winter. Each hunches over the rock in an eccentric crouch, as though the winds had sculpted them into permanent submission.

Not all of the life out here is as extreme. Lower down, the vegetation seem to cover over the rocks and the trail with a joyous elegance. It’s impossible to simply take a stroll into the woods and come across this level of finery, where carpets of moss look like Mother Nature has rolled out a green rug. It is almost as if some higher paid interior designer dispatched by God works here, away from it all, willing to share his services only to the intrepid who thirst for more recondite adventures such as these.

Surely, all of this would fall into disrepair, would submit to the destructive force of ungoverned impact, if the regulatory apparatus that “gardens” the wilderness were to suddenly disappear. Aside from the obvious necessity of this apparatus, it points to a curious fact: that there really actually is no wilderness left. In the same way that a garden is some teleological experiment, the result of some visible hand, some intelligence, the gardener’s, and as such not anything that could ever exist without human intervention, so is the wilderness the result of a kind of proactive stewardship around the edges. The encroachment that cordons off the wilderness from all that is not wilderness is what preserves it. But this is more teleology.

I think it is difficult to speak of a truly wild place at this stage of the game. We are a people that has so conquered our environment that we must invent laws of governance over these spaces in order to preserve their characteristics as simulacra of the untouched.

Within that deeper place, miles from the nearest road, where the silence is so profound, where the wind that rustles those branches is crisper and more musical, it is as close as you can possibly get in this life to what it was like before we all got here. But it isn’t exactly like it and I don’t think there really is any place on Earth left that does not bear our stamp in some fashion, imperceptible or otherwise. Maybe only parts of Alaska, Siberia, parts of the Amazon, Antarctica, but that’s probably it.

I think even a place that has never known a human footprint, like some far off basin in the Sierras, still is probably not exactly what it was like before the industrial revolution. Whether through some osmosis of pollution or a strange kind of pressure system that, say, changes the weather, a cascade effect has probably done something here.

And what of Chee’s therapeutic model of gardening, the garden as teacher, as gatekeeper to a deeper truth already lying within, but unreachable until the cathexis of some object, like a garden, is encountered and then later jettisoned?

I take this as encouragement, for I have already known such a cathexis in the wilderness and, culminating over the span of ten years with a trip to Alaska in 2022, have, like Chee, “done what I came to do” (though I’m still not sure about the whole leaving part, I still love going out into the woods!).

The wilderness offered me the same sort of container Chee’s urban garden offered him, a prism through which to resuscitate a foreclosed interiority. Over the course of my active career as a musician, I had abandoned myself many times over and had experienced within this chosen industry of exploitation and spectacle the vulgar rewards of the casino, with all of the aleatoric danger one risks—in fact, wants to risk—standing by the roulette wheel.

I had chosen vice and had nearly destroyed myself. But the wilderness then restored me, just as Chee’s garden restored him.

If I am to take anything from encountering Chee’s touching, delicate prose at this moment, if I am to make anything out of the “coincidence” of coming across his essay again at the start of my entering the world of gardening, may it be that it lies in accepting the challenge of letting whatever this is show me what I don’t know right now, but what I very much need to know. I have one example in my life already of the fruits of such humility.

---