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On a hill near my home in Northern Virginia lie the remnants of the winter campgrounds of the Native American tribe known as the Doegs. It is easy to see why they chose the site. Large hills all around funnel water into a stream and floodplain there, making it a natural gathering place for wildlife. Deer still come quite often to drink; they are by now so used to the human beings who walk the paths through the woods that does and fawns are not particularly fearful until you get very near. Waterfowl and other game were also once plentiful. Unfortunately, they no longer exist there. Insects are a bother, as they must have been for the Indians. The campground is on top of one of the lower hills overlooking the water, probably for the fresher air as well as for an unhindered view of approaching enemies. Sometimes in the evening, when the sun is slipping through the trees and there are no sounds of civilization, it is not difficult to imagine—perhaps accurately, perhaps not—a kind of peacefulness and simplicity that once may have made up human life in these hills and valleys.
We once had a single-lane wooden bridge across the stream. But because of the traffic that chokes Washington, D.C., and its suburbs, it was replaced a few years ago by a modern multilane, multimillion-dollar road. The old wooden structure got us over the water slowly but surely. The new concrete road is much faster, but it floods over and has to be closed whenever there is heavy rain. Whether the engineers deliberately planned it that way for some purpose, practical or environmental, I cannot say. The only thing certain is that even in the small corner of the world that I know in the most immediate sense, man and nature are still torn between two modes of coexistence. One seems to unite us into something larger than ourselves; the other seems to set us in greater or lesser opposition.
When I walk in the woods, especially with my younger daughter, I sense a reconnection with an origin, a living tie to a world of varied textures and modes of being, more varied in some ways than the houses with computers and cable television that dot the hillsides. Nature in these moments is an "antidote for civilization," as an upscale travel club bills its Caribbean vacations. And that is part of the problem. For lurking within the quite proper sense of ease and sublimity many of us feel in woodlands—the feeling that gave rise to Longfellow's forest primeval and Tolkien's Middle Earth—is the hope that we can escape the bewildering complexity of the human. That is a fantasy only certain people prosperous to the point of having for gotten about the human struggle with nature can allow themselves. As Santayana observed at the beginning of this century, "Nothing is farther from the common people than the corrupt desire to be primitive."
For primitivism, even in small bites, also reminds us of other human longings and fears. Sometimes when I am walking near nightfall in the woods and the bats take over from the birds in keeping the insect population down, a sense of the more threatening and inhuman side of nature comes over me. Then the woods seem not so much an origin enriched with literary associations as a trackless confusion, more like Dante's disorienting dark wood than an uplifting fabric of fellow creatures. At such moments, it is easy to see how the consciousness of another world beyond nature may have grown with the development of language and the creation of safe human settlements. But it is difficult to believe, as some have theorized, that this rise of human culture departs from our better instincts. Built into some of the deepest recesses of the human psyche are instincts about the dangerousness of the world. Few human beings sleep with arms or hands spread out and exposed—they might easily be vulnerable to attacks. Similarly, it appears that the development of human sight was one of the physiological advantages we achieved over animals that sense more by hearing and smell, hence our preference for open spaces where we can see potential threats coming rather than dark jungles where we may be easily outmatched by wild beasts.
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