The Singing Wilderness
excerpt from Sigurd F. Olson's The Singing Wilderness
"The singing wilderness has to do with the calling of the loons, northern lights, and the great silences of a land... It is concerned with simple joys, the timelessness and perspective found in a way of life that is close to the past. I have heard the singing in many places... I have heard it on misty migration nights when the dark has been alive with the high calling of birds, and in rapids when the air has been full of their rushing thunder. I have caught it at dawn when the mists were moving out of the bays, and on cold winter nights when the stars seemed close enough to touch. But the music can even be heard in the soft guttering of an open fire or in the beat of rain on a tent, and sometimes not until long afterward when, like an echo out of your past, you know it was there in some quiet place or when you were doing some simple thing in the out-of-doors.
I have discovered that I am not alone in my listening; that almost everyone is listening for something, that the search for places where the singing may be heard goes on everywhere. It seems to be part of the hunger that all of us have for a time when we were closer to lakes and rivers, to mountains and meadows and forests, than we are today. Because of our almost forgotten past there is a restlessness within us, an impatience with things as they are, which modern life with its comforts and distractions does not seem to satisfy. We sense intuitively that there must be something more, search for panaceas we hope will give us a sense of reality, fill our days and nights with such activity and our minds with such busyness that there is little time to think. When the pace stops we are often lost, and we plunge once more into the maelstrom hoping that if we move fast enough, somehow we may fill the void within us. We may not know exactly what it is we are listening for, but we hunt as instinctively for opportunities and places to listen as sick animals look for healing herbs.
Even the search is rewarding, for somehow in the process we tap the deep wells of racial experience that gives us a feeling of being part of an existence where life was simple and satisfactions were real. Uncounted centuries of the primitive have left their mark upon us, and civilization has not changed emotional needs that were ours before the dawn of history. That is the reason for the hunger, the listening, and the constant search. Should we actually glimpse the ancient glory or hear the singing wilderness, cities and their confusion become places of quiet, speed and turmoil are slowed to the pace of the seasons, and tensions are replaced with calm.
I remember vividly the first time I heard the music... The first of such experiences, they were the forerunners of countless others and gave me a desire that has led me into the wilderness regions of the continent in the hope that I might hear the singing again. Since those early days I have known the mountains of the east and west, the cypress swamps and savannas of the south, the muskegs of the north. Always there has been the search and the listening, not only for me but for those who have been with me, and I have found that whenever I have renewed in even the slightest way the early sense of communion and belonging I knew as a child, whenever I have glimpsed if only for an instant the glory I knew then, happiness and joy have been mine."