The notion of wilderness has long held a powerful grip on the human imagination, and its power is likely enhanced by the fact that few have ever truly experienced it on more than a casual level, whether in person or more likely seeing it on some National Geographic Special. Maybe you’ve even camped in the woods, or driven to a wilderness area and had a good time driving or walking around, gaping at glorious vistas and savoring the serenity of the woods and afterwards spending a pleasant night in a lodge without wi-fi (talk about roughing it!). But was doing that an authentic wilderness experience?
Backpackers might make the best claim for truly having “been there”, which in many cases means spending the night in a tent or under the stars and having to take genuine precautions when it comes to bears or cougars or snakes or other non-human threats, and the vast majority of us who’ve never done this should admit we’ve a much less valid claim. The wilderness has much to do with beauty but part of the package includes mystery and the unknown and maybe a little bit of fear, because at some level it is a place that was never ours and never will be.
Wilderness at its most basic means a place devoid of human habitation or influence, but on a deeper and more poetic level the proper name for it might be something like The Forest Primeval, as in what was here before homo sapiens had even appeared on stage, back when wilderness was all there was. It seems doubtful other species – even those far smarter than us – have any such concept. By the time our kind finally showed up, the place was full of lions and tigers and bears, and wolves and scorpions and tsetse flies and oh so much more, and before we started eliminating all the competition there were many centuries where we barely held on. Of course this process has now reached the point where a strong case can be made that there may be no “true” wilderness left, with nature persisting on a grand scale only in pockets and corners and a few larger landscapes, like Siberia and Borneo or parts of the Amazon basin. Resource extraction, if nothing else, is making short work of whatever wild might be left.
The title of this post comes from a Eugene O’Neill play, the man’s only comedy (it ends on an upbeat note, unlike Long Day’s Journey into Night and all the rest). Ah, Wilderness! is about a small town and has virtually nothing to do with what has been discussed thus far. He actually lifted the title from a line in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, “Oh, Wilderness were Paradise Now!” and one might say that guy stole a theme from that book that claimed humankind got its start in a garden. A garden, for God’s sake! Talk about fanciful! Which in fact is what a lot of that particular book was, but the less said about all this the better.
The topic at hand here has less to do with wilderness as a big concept and more with the bits and slivers of wildness that have endured despite civilization’s mighty efforts to eliminate every last bit of it. Wildness might be found anywhere. There is a recent book, Islands of Abandonment, that reports on places totally destroyed beyond any visible means of supporting life, to the point where even humans have abandoned them. Think of poisoned places like Chernobyl or the Salton Sea or brownfield sites in Detroit MI and Paterson NJ, and how this amazing thing has happened whereby life has returned beyond all expectations, to a state where a kind of neo-wilderness has been re-established. The notion that nature abhors a vacuum might come to mind at this point, but watch out, as that phrase was attributed to Aristotle and he was referring to abstractions about matter and atoms and the stuff of physics. Here we’re talking about plants and animals making a most unexpected comeback.
Of course none of us is about to schedule a field trip to Chernobyl, but if you do, please tell us all how it goes and please be careful and for Godssake take your geiger counter! But all of us might witness now and again nature sort of hanging in there, despite the unlikelihood of this. A good example is the comeback of the piping plover, a cute little shorebird species that is making a comeback on Massachusetts beaches, due to efforts to protect the nesters when they show up on a beach shared with the usual hordes of bodysurfing Frisbee-throwing trashy-novel-reading humans. Parts of the beach get roped off, which always annoys a few territorial folks, though most go along with it. Many of the beaches in question are in holiday places or on shorelines far from big population centers, so would you believe that the most successful site in these efforts is at Revere Beach, one of the most crowded beaches in the state in summer, lying just a few miles from Boston in a very dense urban suburb? One can, in fact, reach it on Boston’s Blue subway line, as it has its own stop. Take the train! See the plovers (but keep your distance)! Talk about hanging in there!
It’s now time to drag in that famous quotable figure from local history, Henry David Thoreau, and his immortal line “In wildness is the preservation of the world”. There are several reasons to do this: first, because many think he said “wilderness” and quote it that way, and you should know that’s incorrect and not do the same, and second, we’ve moved on to wildness which is a somewhat different thing, only remotely related to the grand stuff of wilderness. Wildness is not always grand, though it can be in its way, especially when one chances upon it unexpectedly. Which brings me to the Cape Cod Canal, the town of Bourne, and the Herring Run Motel.
This humble lodging, a mere hour from our house, was off our radar until recently, when we needed to do a bird excursion meetup at 6AM at the Bourne Bridge, and in no way were we about to get up at four so as to leave the house by five to get there by six. The bridge exists because of the Cape Cod Canal, a construction from around 1910 which eliminated the need to ‘round Cape Cod if you were a boat coming up from NYC and points south. The downside is that the incredible hordes that travel to the Cape in summer now get squeezed onto two bridges and it ain’t pretty. What is important, here, is that US Route 6 parallels the canal, a mighty highway that traverses our entire mighty nation, all the way from Provincetown MA to Long Beach CA. Or at least it did once.
That is, US Route 6 originally started on the west coast in Long Beach, when it was built as the Grand Army of the Republic Highway in 1937 and was for many years thereafter the longest highway in the US. In 1963 California changed some road numbers to better fit the new Interstate Highway System, which led to the GARH losing a bunch of miles and turning over its claim as longest to US Route 20, the Lincoln Highway, which now wins by a lousy 165 miles. Today Route 6 in CA begins in Bishop, up in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and runs only a few miles from there to the Nevada border. All the proud admirers of the original road with its #1 status could only say “we wuz robbed!”, as they indeed were.
What matters most here is that Route 6 along the Cape Cod Canal is a miserable, high speed narrow four-laner-with-stoplights where everybody races along bumper to bumper through what was formerly idyllic Bourne countryside, back when Cape Cod was more like that Patti Page song aptly titled “Old Cape Cod.” The whole region has since experienced exponential growth, both residential and tourist-oriented, and for some MA old-timers it’s all a bit sad. There are still some vestiges of the vibe Patti sings about in the song, and the Herring Run Motel is one of these, could be a piece of preserved nostalgia straight out of 1957, when the song made the Hit Parade.
The HR Motel sits all by itself on a stretch of Route 6 just down from the Bourne Bridge – which is exactly why we chose the it, nostalgia having nothing to do with it – and other than finding the road altogether unpleasant if not somewhat harrowing, the last thing we expected was to find, running down the hill behind our room, a fully functioning herring run.
As in, full of little fish meandering downstream in a concrete culvert that runs under the highway and into the canal and from there out to open ocean, having started in Foundry Pond up the hill. Wildness at its best, right there under the monstrosity of Route 6! Unexpected wildness is very special, indeed.
The friendly guy in the motel parking lot seemed to know a lot, showed us the culvert with its fish ladder they use in the spring, and explained how herring are like salmon, one of the few fish that live in the ocean but return to their fresh water breeding places after so many years. And in the case of the Herring Run Motel, they’ve been moving from Foundry Pond up the hill and back down to the ocean for God knows how long, maybe since before the canal was built and the waterways in these parts were very different. For now the answer is shrouded in mystery, though somebody at MA Fisheries and Wildlife might have an answer, if one knows where to find them, which we don’t.
Of course we were only there for one night and left the next morning. The pictures of the herons sitting on the culvert come from the display on the wall of our room, along with the images of family fun. The friendly guy told us the place draws lots of hungry birds when the fish are especially numerous, in season. Maybe we’ll be back.
I have also included a brief study of motel room decor and artwork, allowing one to compare Bourne MA with lodging in Cooke City and Bozeman MT, as well as Arctic Finland and Norway. All motel room artwork is special, in my opinion, and the Herring Run Motel’s appears to be original, though the artist is unknown to us. There was no motel gift shop where one might’ve shopped for other works by the artist, not even a t-shirt with a print, which is kind of a pity when you think about it. Then again, I have way too many souvenir t-shirts.
