Wilderness

Every cultivated estate needs a wilderness. Early British landscape designers, like Capability Brown, knew this. A “wilderness” features prominently in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, when the Bertram family, poor relation Fanny Price in tow, visit the newly-improved estate of the fiancé of one of the Bertram daughters. After a tour of the house, the visitors find themselves in a carefully marked out, gated, and landscaped “wild” patch on Southerton’s extensive grounds. It is here that the characters manage to trail off in couples, lose themselves, live out a carefully marked out couple of hours of relative, and not always pleasant, freedom. Although it is unclear from the book whether the “wilderness” predated the renovation to Southerton, such a spot was a feature of trendy eighteenth-century landscape architecture, which depended on a careful balance between the wild and the obviously cultivated that characterized Austen’s more famous estate, William Darcy’s Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice.

I think of Capability Brown, of Jane Austen, and Fanny Price, every time I walk from my office building at the center of the Rice campus to the Medical Center on Houston’s highly trafficked Main Street. Maybe twenty steps from my building, there is a path that runs along the side of Weiss, one of the university’s eleven residential colleges. As you pass the college on the left, perhaps pausing to notice a small vegetable garden that has lately been swallowed by weeds, you enter what feels like a liminal space of wildflowers, overgrown bushes, and fallen trees. Let’s imagine that you are walking towards the medical center, perhaps for exercise, or for a doctor’s appointment, or because a friend or a relative is in one of the many hospitals in this facility that is the largest, they say, in the world. Perhaps you have time to stroll, to feel the sunlight, to hear the whir of monarch butterflies or mosquitos, to wonder that sunflowers come in so many sizes, to ponder the question you have asked yourself for thirty years: why is this place here and when will it be swallowed up into Rice’s ubiquitous building projects? Perhaps you are late for a doctor’s appointment that is in one—but which one?—of the medical center’s steel and glass towers, and you are walking briskly in unsuitable shoes, wishing perhaps that you had risked the confusion that comes with the maze of the parking garages and their astonishingly high fees—that you just realized you could take off your medical spending account. Perhaps you are running—this happens—because a friend, who is in one of the hospitals, is dying. The branches of the fallen trees, the tangle of lantana catch at your dress and those unsuitable shoes.

The path can, then, can be painful, even literally. If you are nervous about what you will find—or find out—at the medical center, it can produce anticipatory pain— a shortness of breath even if you are walking slowly. But most of the time, this short journey through the wilderness calms you, lets you breathe. Perhaps it is the flowers and the berries, the pause in the body that greets the sight of even a few trees or patches of open sky. But there is more to this magic, and it has something to do with suspension. Before you entered the path you were a teacher, a colleague, a writer with deadlines. At the end of the path, the very molecules in your body rearrange themselves and you are suddenly a patient, or the mother or friend of a patient. In between, you are nothing, or at least neither of these things. If the path were longer, the wilderness deeper, you might have time to reflect, to be or become someone. But in this foreshortened piece of nature, you are, if things are not too bad at either end, something like a viewer, an eye that takes in what it sees with every breath.

Houston, as even those who love it often complain, is not a walking city. People walk in Houston, of course, but mostly for exercise; they do not walk to travel, walk to get places. Ideally, as a city walker, there would be places to visit—stores, restaurants, galleries—about twenty minutes away, and there would be interesting things to see along the way. Your newish neighborhood almost fits the bill, but to get to places you must pass over long stretches of concrete, featureless streets and parking lots. You try and often fail to find life between places: weeds between the cracks, birds, insects. When the concrete gives way to neighborhoods, you look into people’s yards and sometimes into their windows. The path that begins outside your office building requires much less of you: the life is there to be seen and smelled, and the sense of travel. You are walking in Houston with a purpose but without effort.