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Thoughts on Nature, Culture, Wild and Tame

Arboretum and Wild Space

This article contrasts two landscapes, the Arboretum at Flathead Valley Community College and the wild expanse of Glacier National Park, to explore concepts of nature, wilderness, and human interaction with the environment. Through a personal narrative woven with ecological and historical insights, I reflect upon the cultivated serenity of the Arboretum and the sublime wilderness of Glacier National Park touching on the complexity of these landscapes as sites of beauty, history, and conflict. Through visits with family and solo explorations, I contemplate the ways in which these spaces are experienced, perceived, and valued differently by visitors, highlighting the interplay between personal experience and broader environmental and cultural narratives. The piece serves as a meditation on the role of human activity in shaping natural landscapes, and the power within landscapes to shape and define the human. It is my belief that we must continually find new ways to understand, define, and experience the world around us.

The Arboretum

It is early morning on a particularly cold and lifeless day in November when I visit the Flathead Valley Community College’s Arboretum. As I drive the familiar road at a familiar hour, I am brought back to my years at FVCC and the bright beacons of welcome that the artificial light pouring from the buildings created during the cold winter months of early classes. I pull onto Grandview Drive at the light off Highway 93 N and then left into parking lot F situated between the new Nursing and Health Sciences building to the West, The Childcare Center to the South, and the new College Center to the NE bordering the Arboretum. I graduated from FVCC in 2013, and despite the growth and change on the campus, it still creates a sense of safety and home for me, an oasis of academic thought.

There are three of us, my daughter and the daughters of my daughter, three generations of wildness, and it is the first time any of us have been to the Arboretum grounds. With a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old in accompaniment and I’m reminded of the difficulties and lack of freedom that motherhood brings in the early years. But as we are walking down the trail toward the trees, Roma (3) is speaking about the adventure as if she is an explorer ready to take on new trails and experiences, walking head held high and answering back to the raven flying overhead and to the trees whose voice only she can hear, and I’m reminded of the other ways of seeing the world that a child gifts to anyone who notices. We have brought lunch and snacks, a thick blanket for ground sitting, and are armed with mittens and hats and warm winter boots, and when we enter the grounds of the Arboretum, I am taken aback by how vast 7 acres can feel.

There are wide open spaces of frozen grass between tall Ponderosa Pines, and as we move further in, the raven’s call becomes more insistent as it flies overhead to the East. I leave the three for a bit as I follow the call and find that the arboretum is bordered to the East by the Stillwater River. I slide down slippery dew and frost-covered grass to stand at the river’s edge and watch my breath hang in the air above the moving body of the river. The raven sits atop a Ponderosa on the other side, calling continuously as if describing the life of this place to me. There are a few people: a couple walking hand in hand, a woman carrying pieces of apple into the trails, I watch them pass, spend some more time amongst the trail that follows the river, and then turn to meet back up with the girls, the two smallest of which have been running with ecstatic joy and laughter in the wide open spaces beneath long cinnamon brown trunks with the canopy far out of reach.

We start our exploration in earnest; when I’m with my granddaughters, I use the words “noticing” and “listening” as ways to stop and engage our senses with our surroundings. Roma is so familiar with these that she will stop and say, “Let’s do a listen! What do you hear?” “Let’s notice! What do you see?” We find Cleaver, Windswept Broom Moss, Smooth Brome, Marasmiaceae mushrooms, spotted knapweed, Nodding thistle, Kinnikinic, Sweet Wormwood, and Yarrow on the forest floor. We listen to the sound of the cars on the highway, and to the occasional interruption by the raven. We notice the ways that the moss covers the many jagged tree stumps left from fallen trees and the ways that mushrooms dance in fairy-like formations near visible roots. The Arboretum was designed and created in 1997 by the Montana Native Plants Society to recreate the Palouse Prairies Habitat of NW Montana. Palouse prairie habitat is traditionally thought of as being found in Washington, some parts of Idaho, and Oregon, but lesser known is that the montane regions in NW Montana are also Palouse terrain.

I notice that while beautiful (and I imagine even more so in the spring and summer), it is evident that it is a cultivated space, perfect for short breaks between long classes. The spacing of the trees looks wide and deliberate. I think about the ways in which forests can sometimes feel confining, almost claustrophobic. I have hiked in locations that have left me longing for a glimpse of sky due to the close spacing of the trees and the interconnection of the canopy. The spacing of these trees allows for breath and sky both. I see only Ponderosa Pine and many of those with blue-painted bands around their bodies. The bands are likely markings for trees that are, like Ponderosa all over the Flathead Valley, succumbing to a widespread infestation by the Western Pine Beetle. FVCC has created a citizen science project to track the infestation throughout the valley. In the Summer of 2022, the Flathead experienced a storm of record-setting severity; all the windows in my home were broken on the South facing side by hail the size of the palm of my hand, and valley-wide trees were damaged, as were roofs, windows, and cars. The aftermath has been a boon for roofers and auto body repair, but for the Ponderosa Pine, the damage was enough to cause the tree’s “immune systems” to fail, allowing for a takeover of the beetle. There are no signs to mark the arboretum trails, to name plant species, or boundaries, and the webpage is ridiculously unhelpful, but it does state that there is an interpretive guide on Wednesday evenings in June.

               Roma “helps” me over logs, shoulders held high. Dahlia nurses as her mom carries her, one blonde head turned toward sustenance and safety, the other tipped toward the treetops. I photograph the three along with plants and trails and ravens and sky. Ariel sighs and repeats how grateful she is, expressing her love of the trees, the sky, the air, and the trails in a way that only a mother confined by her most beloved beings can express. We see apple pieces set atop rotting logs and get “lost” a few times in the trees. The wind is cold, and our cheeks are red; lunch is a hurried and chaotic event. I think about the cultivated nature of this space, about the lives of the plants and animals that inhabit it alongside a campus full of humans partaking in cultivated knowledge just a few feet away. I think about the ease of accessibility, the ways that those who cannot escape to places farther away can come and breathe, the ways that the Palouse is disappearing, and the way that there is so little knowledge or notice of the arboretum, even though I attended the campus for 4 years, I didn’t know it existed. I am simultaneously in love with the space and at the same time left with a feeling of an emptiness I can’t quite name. Something is missing, and maybe that “thing” is Spring. But maybe it is the sense of the artificial, of confining wild things to tame places, of attempts at recreating a landscape the way a painter brushes her canvas, and I wonder why I might feel differently about this than I do about my garden or the maples that line the boulevard and I realize that I have assigned designations to certain species–this one wild, this one tame–and that I’ve assigned those same designations to different geographic locations. It feels lonely and confined, as if my body wants miles instead of acres. I reflect on the way that my daughter is experiencing it in a wildly different way than I am, and I recognize the importance of green spaces, free of charge, easily accessible, and with some semblance of “natural.”  It is through visiting this space that I begin to think about William Cronon, Donna Haraway, Anna L. Tsing, Chaia Heller, and others who have contributed to the body of literature that holds other ways of seeing and defining nature. It is this visit in November that informs much of my journaled experience that I had in September in a much “wilder” space.

 McGee Meadow, Huckleberry Lookout Trailhead, Glacier National Park

“One of the best proofs that one had entered a sublime landscape was the emotion it evoked.”

William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness

Late September, sixty degrees, exquisite blue sky, vibrant yellow larch, golden aspen, empty roads, and carrying the invisible wounds of a broken heart, my visits to McGee Meadow Fen and Huckleberry Lookout in Glacier National Park (GNP) were quite different than that of the Arboretum. There is something about GNP and the surrounding area that is sublime for me. Just passing underneath the picturesque stone railway bridge to enter West Glacier lifts a heaviness in me that I hadn’t known was there. I am relieved of a burden. I am escaping from the mundane and entering what I have thought of for over 20 years as sacred space. But, this place, too, is created space. It is stolen space. It is occupied space.

“The removal of Indians to create an “uninhabited wilderness…”

William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness

I grew up wandering this landscape with its invisible boundaries, bathing in its waters, sleeping on its floors, and it has always been this place that I have called home. This is a conflict that I allow to live inside of me in a way that I do not recognize with such immediacy in the Valley, which is also an occupied and stolen space.

“To this day, for instance, the Blackfeet continue to be accused of “poaching” on the lands of Glacier National Park that originally belonged to them and that were ceded by treaty only with the proviso that they be permitted to hunt there”

William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness

Glacier National Park was named in 1910 by Taft after some in the Blackfeet nation sold the land for 1.5 million dollars in 1895 due to mass starvation of the Blackfeet people caused by the eradication of their primary food source. I contemplate the ways in which I sometimes, conveniently, forget these details. I knew them but did not know them. In the creation of this paper, I have read and listened to the Blackfeet people in a way I had not truly done before, I will no longer be able to relegate the details of the acquisition of this space in which I find peace and home, to the background. To the Blackfeet, the Kootenai, the Ktunaxa, and the Salis, GNP was, and is, sacred space. There is a series of videos on the GNP history page with interviews of tribal elders, leaders, and members. In the videos, some feel that, in the end, it was a good thing to have sold the land in that the land is still protected. Others speak with anger and feel that they have been excluded and cheated.

               When I stand on this land, I feel a presence. The sublime, yes, but I think it is more than that. In my younger years, I attributed that presence to the genius loci in a way that I did not have the language to define then. This place has always felt different, felt alive somehow. I have visited national parks and wild spaces across this continent, and yet it is this landscape that has fulfilled a need for connection, belonging, and transcendence and has always been perceived by me as sentient, long before my awareness and knowledge of the indigenous experience of this place. What is interesting to me is that the indigenous people who inhabited and danced upon, gathered, hunted in, and prayed on this land, according to their descendants, felt the same way

I question, then, if landscapes might hold imprints of memory, like repositories of the encounters that have occurred within them, and while we can dance around this understanding academically, we may not be able to address it with the rigor demanded of Western science. Could what I feel be a bit of the cultural biography of this place in a stretched definition of commodity, pieces of the history, story, and emotion of those who have interacted with and lived on this land, with these plants, with these trees, long before me? Perhaps it is both a mingling of the genius loci that was itself “special” to begin with, which may have been one of the reasons the indigenous tribes chose to hold their ceremonies here.

The flora and fauna here are abundant. Interwoven. They live amongst each other, with each other, despite each other, over, under, together, and apart in a thick and complicated fabric of the seen and unseen. While the space is created in that it has borders and is slotted into the National Park system, and while it has paved and unpaved roads to accommodate car, horse, bike, and foot travel by visitors, and while it has designated camping areas and pullouts and turnarounds, and while it is maintained and preserved, it is otherwise left to itself. Only it isn’t, because here I am, and here also were 3 million people (about the population of Arkansas) last year, driving in, wandering, photographing, talking, drawing firearms at each other over limited parking spaces, coughing, riding on wheelchairs and bicycles, hiking, packing, playing, renting kayaks and horses and bear spray and eating ice cream and pitching tents, silent in awe, crying and laughing, grieving and celebrating, and sleeping in small houses with generators and flushing toilets that they drive in as if it were the right thing to do.

               There is no one here now, one other empty car in the parking area. This is the gift of summer’s end, and I feel alone in the universe. But if the memory of the land carries the lives of the Blackfeet Nation, it must then carry the lives and interactions of the millions upon millions of visitors. And while this particular location isn’t often visited the way that Going to the Sun is, there is still an increased influx of human activity. As I interact with the pine, the multiple varieties of fungi, moss, lichen, and grasses, and navigate around the bear, moose, deer, bobcat, and lion scat, I wonder at Camas Road that separates the fen from the lodge pole pine forest, and in particular, I’m curious about the man-made scar between what was once a contiguous landscape, a scar made from the echoes of prehistoric plants and animals that scurries humans back and forth in metal machines powered by the same echoes, and I am curious at how this scar changes what I see, and what the beings that live alongside, inhabit and pass-through this space see and experience. How and in what way is the scar interpreted?


               I pay particular attention to the disrupted space at the edges and the ways in which the landscape pauses, collects itself against the difference, and then moves away on each side to be what it is: flora, fauna, earth, and water shifting and adapting itself to its new reality. Is it wrong to call it a scar? I have no way of knowing what this place was like before the road, but I can imagine. Huckleberry Lookout and the peak of the Apgar Range tops at 6593 ft and slopes downward over 3 miles to the fen at 3868 ft, according to my AllTrails app. There is lodge pole pine at the far Eastern edge of the fen and a 60-foot band of the same at the Western edge near the road. This band of pines gives way to edge grasses and fungi for the last twenty feet before meeting Camas Road proper. Once across and then down and up a steep ditch, lodge pole pine stretches again for a mile or so before giving way to huckleberry and other low brush at higher elevations. Without the road, the fen would have been nestled between uninterrupted pines, its water table still feeding the tuft grasses, inviting birds, and the relationship with the peat and minerals dictating what grows in its midst. And what else?

                I lay on my back in the middle of the forest. Silence. And yet, I know I am not alone. This trail is rated one of the most dangerous in the United States for the sheer number of grizzlies that visit, especially at its higher elevations, to partake of the huckleberries in the frenzied hyperphagia of autumn. It is the site of the Night of the Grizzlies, when, for reasons still mostly unknown, but likely human interference, grizzlies mauled sleeping humans in a horror that still permeates the place. The wind moves the pine tops against the fading light of the sky, clouds move swiftly far above me, and I watch a small woodland spider wrapping its dinner as the last rays of the sun highlight the intricacy of the web. A large branch cracks somewhere to the North, then more stillness. The sublime moves through me once again, even here at my desk writing this. The way that it is the intermingling of the present and past, history and future, with my material, transient, changing body, a multispecied ecosystem of its own. This is Anna Tsing’s “assemblage” ripe with “indeterminacy” in action. Outcome unknown, still transforming, still taking shape. I have escaped grizzly attack or mushroom poisoning and avoided twisting my ankle on a fallen log (as if indeterminacy can only be realized in harm), but what academic alleyway will this encounter pull me toward? I think about those who do not get to, or who do not want to, experience this. The phrase from Cronon’s The Trouble with Wilderness, “contested moral terrain” comes to my mind; As Haraway said, everything is only a partial perspective, a situated understanding.

“The environment is a social construction: a product of cultural responses to specific historical circumstances which give rise to shared sets of imagined landscapes.” 

William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness

A raven calls far above me. What do I imagine of this landscape? What does it imagine of me? I think about the two experiences of the ravens, one calling me toward the wild that existed at the edges of the tame, the other reminding me that as much as I do not belong here, I do belong; that most of the wild is some sort of tame in disguise. In this stillness, where history whispers to me through the tops of the pines and where at dusk the land seems to hold its breath, I find that I am straddling worlds, the world I have known and the world that has always been beyond my knowing. The imagined and the real. I am holding many things at once.

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