Handmade Wilderness

by Don Schueler

Handmade Wilderness, by Don Schueler, reminds me a little of the All Things Great and Small series by James Herriot. It is anecdotal, often funny, sometimes poignant. But I like it mostly because it's another example of what any of us who live in middle-class America can do, if we really want to.

Schueler and a friend named Willie Brown, in the late 1960s, went looking for some wilderness. "We would settle not just for any second- or third-best land, but for as much of what Willie called 'the least worst land' we could afford to buy." They bought 80 acres in the backwoods of Mississippi, one white man and one black man, 80 acres of what they came to call The Place.

We were lucky. We couldn't know it at the time, but those first eighty acres contained a microcosm of virtually all the ecosystems that the Mississippi sandhills had to offer... To be sure, it was all battered, chewed up, scorched, and generally much put upon, but... given half a chance, it would show a Southern Baptist a thing or two about being born again.

Its anecdotal nature leaves the book a little lacking in focus, I think, but that may partly be because not many people's lives really have an overall focus, and this book is a story of 30 years of living. And there are enough stories to make you laugh, and cry. Shortly after Brown and Schueler bought The Place, for example, and the day before a surveyor was to come, they found a still, fully functional, on their land. Which was then, and probably is even today, no small concern in rural Mississippi.

Most of their neighbors turned out to be nice enough, but there were occasional run-ins, as with the fox hunters who let their hounds run loose at night:

Then, suddenly the pack was in view, swarming up the slope - an eerie loping drift of about a dozen gray-white shapes, howling their heads off. Schaeffer [Schueler's great dane] waited until they were perhaps a dozen yards below him. Then he launched himself from the ridge and came down on them like the proverbial wolf on the fold...

"Oh no," Willie cried. "He's gonna get all torn up!"

Before I got anywhere near him it was all over. The hounds, fixated on the hot scent of the fox they were running, had been taken by surprise and utterly routed. They scattered in all directions, yelping with a a hysteria that, even granting Schaeffer's huge size, struck me as a bit excessive.

In the preface to Handmade Wilderness, Schueler writes, "If Willie and I could do it, just about anyone can." Handmade Wilderness is not a how-to guide - it is a demonstration.

There are millions of acres of least worst land available in this country, much of it within reasonable commuting distance of large cities. It is land that wears the heavy scars of human abuse, land that is not near coastal beaches or pretty inland lakes... It is the stony gray hills of the Northeast, covered with thin third-growth woods... the near desert of expired sheep ranches in west Texas and New Mexico; the dry scrublands east of the Cascades. It is the sort of land that has to be envisioned in terms of what it once was and could be again. The sort of land that desperately needs to be loved and protected, and rarely is.

Schueler and Brown ultimately donated 240 acres of land they bought to the Nature Conservancy, with a lifetime tenancy provision, creating a Preserve of increasingly rare habitat: pitcher plant bogs, live oak stands, upland hardwoods, and bottomland swamp. If they can do it, just about anyone can.

latest update: May 30, 2001
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