The California Chaparral Institute

Chaparralians in the Sierras 1976

On Wildness

"One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourself out. Be as I am-a reluctant enthusiast... a part time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it is still there. So get out there and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains. Run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to your body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators.
I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards."
-Ed Abbey

Photo from "Marshal South and the Ghost Mountain Chronicles."

Marshall South, Nature, and American values

On January 22, 2005, fifty-seven years after his death, Marshal South finally received a marker on his grave in the Julian Pioneer Cemetery. The event has rekindled interest in San Diego County’s most celebrated back-to-nature philosopher. But if we stray too close, the story of his dreams and the sudden destruction of all he held dear challenges us to evaluate our own lives and perceptions in uncomfortable ways. But it can also inspire a more productive path in the ongoing debate between preservation and development, both critical issues for our rapidly growing state.

With his wife Tanya, Marshal South left civilization in 1930 to build a simple home away from it all atop a waterless mountain in the Anza-Borrego desert.  Over the next 17 years, the Souths wrote poetry and philosophy, had three children and lived in a wilderness Eden of their own making. Marshal earned a meager, but sufficient income to buy needed supplies in nearby Julian by writing a monthly column in Desert Magazine about his family’s adventures in living free from society’s conventions and harried routines. They ground wheat to make bread, collected cactus fruit with yucca leaves and wore clothing only when visitors arrived. Using hand made adobe bricks, the Souths constructed a home anyone who longs to escape the madness of civilization would love to own. Unfortunately, their experiment in primitive living was not to last forever. Sometime in October, 1946, Tanya no longer wished to live Marshal’s dream. She abruptly left the mountain, taking their three children to San Diego, while her husband was in Julian painting a frieze in the town’s library. The kids received their first haircuts, were enrolled in school, and tried to adjust to a world they had never known. The oldest boy, Rider, was just becoming a teenager. Marshal died two years later, his world shattered and his family’s home in the wilderness abandoned, left to crumble under the desert sun.

There is something about this story that haunts people. We see photographs of the South’s children, sitting naked on granite boulders outside their home or making pottery under a shaded patio. We imagine them laughing as they hop from boulder to boulder or are all snuggled up under blankets listening to their father’s stories by fireglow. These images tap into some atavistic, inner gallery within our own dreams, calling to us like sirens from a long ago, forgotten time.

Some dismiss Marshal as an idealistic malcontent, a hermit who forced his family to live under unnecessarily harsh conditions. They will visit the ruins of the family’s home and joke to each other about the place being a “real fixer-upper” and take candid photos while leaning against the old, concrete cistern. Yet deep inside their psyche is planted the vision of a man who lived free to create his own image on his own terms, close to nature and loving every minute of it. It gnaws somewhere within the heart, like an ill-defined longing that just won’t go away. The broken commitment to see it through to the end and the sudden interruption of innocence, no matter the reason, hurts inside and disturbs our secret hope that someone somewhere is still able to escape the rat race. If only we could do it for just one year.

It doesn’t matter how accurate the image was that Marshal South shaped for himself. He believed it and lived it. Individualism, living according to one’s ideals, and forming an intimate relationship with the natural landscape are basic American values. They are celebrated in American heroes from Daniel Boone to Teddy Roosevelt. It was self reliance and the ability to read the rhythms of the wilderness that allowed America’s early explorers and pioneers to succeed. “It is to these freedom-loving souls who will not march docilely in the ordered ranks to the piping of those who would sway them, that all freedom owes its life,” Marshal South wrote. “They are the bearers of the sacred fire.”

Every time we spend a quiet weekend in the backcountry or stare into a campfire we are reconnecting with the crucible that shaped us as a nation. Natural open space unfettered by the hum of a nearby freeway or the sight of yet another casino is as precious to Americans as are the hallowed, marbled monuments in Washington D.C. The South’s back-to-nature story makes an impact because it reminds us of our heritage and the ideals we celebrate, but sometimes forget between the demands of making a living and the technology that was promised to set us free. This is why nature in the raw is so vital to our country’s future. It helps us remember who we are and where we came from.

Unfortunately, the importance of nature as a fundamental American value is not properly recognized. Even environmentalists who seek its protection fail to understand its power to unify unlikely allies. Rather than being seen as a shared value that can bring people together in a positive manner, nature is sliced up into a litany of never ending, single issue battles that focus on mitigating loss rather than creating a long term vision of hope for protecting our nation’s natural heritage.

Wildness defines our character as a people. Most everyone can agree that nature is a beautiful thing and there is value in protecting it. Let’s focus on that agreement, stop the bickering, and develop a consensus on how much wild, open space we want. With the rapid pace of growth, leaving the decision up to future generations is no longer an option. The challenge is to preserve enough wild so children 100 years from now will have the space they need to imagine their own Marshal South dream.

-Richard W. Halsey

"Even after years of intimate contact and search this quality of strangeness in the desert remains undiminished. Transparent and intangible as sunlight, yet always and everywhere present, it lures a man on and on, from the red-walled canyons to the smoke- blue ranges beyond, in a futile but fascinating quest for the great, unimaginable treasure which the desert seems to promise. Once caught by this golden lure you become a prospector for life, condemned, doomed, exalted. One begins to understand why Everett Reuss kept going deeper and deeper into the canyon country, until one day he lost the thread of the labyrinth; why the oldtime prospectors, when they did find the common sort of gold, gambled, drank and whored it away as quickly as possible and returned to the burnt hills and the search. The search for what? They could not have said; neither can I; and would have muttered something about silver, gold, copper -anything as a pretext. And how could they hope to find this treasure which has no name and has never been seen? Hard to say -and yet, when they found it, they could not fail to recognize it. Ask Everett Reuss."

A note concerning books on Everett Ruess

"On Desert Trails with Everett Ruess" was first published in 1940 by Everett's family. It contains mostly his own letters and work, but was heavily edited by his mother. If you would like to obtain the complete set of Everett's letters and journal entries in their pure form, it would be best to buy the "Everett Ruess Combination Edition" for $29.95 directly from the publisher, Gibbs Smith. It is a beautiful, hardcover book with a large number of black and white photographs. It combines "Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty" and "Wilderness Journals of Everett Ruess" in one place.

Unfortunately, the binding of the separate book, containing only Everett's letters and an interesting history by W.L. Rusho, "A Vagabond for Beauty," falls apart easily. With the copy I purchased, every page fell out by the time I finished reading it. "Wilderness Journals" does not have this problem and holds up like a good book should.

"Sandstone Sunsets" by Mark Taylor is a great read. Hard to put down. One man's journey to discover what Everett Ruess was trying to say to all of us.

Rimbaud October 1871

Arthur Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud was born October 20, 1854, in Charleville, northern France. He started writing when we was 13. After graduating from school in 1870, he ran off to Paris to explore the world. Later, he set off on foot to Belgium. In 1871 he made contact with the French poet Verlaine in Paris. Over the next year and a half, his life was dominated by his rocky relationship with Verlain and a period in which he wrote some of his most famous poetry. By the time he was 19, he turned his back on his literary efforts with the possible exception of a few Illuminations which were published in 1886 by Verlain. In 1880 he left Europe to find his fortune in northern Africa, leaving behind a legacy that would change poetry forever. He died on November 10, 1891 at the age of 37.

Ma Boheme (My Bohemian Life)

I went off, my fists in my torn coat pockets;
My coat too was becoming ideal;
I walked under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal;
Oh! oh! what brilliant loves I dreamed of!

My only pair of trousers had a big whole in them.
Tom Thumb in a daze, I sowed rhymes
As I went along. My inn was at the Big Dipper.
– My stars in the sky made a soft rustling sound.

And I listened to them, seated on the side of the road,
In those good September evenings when I felt drops
Of dew on my brow, like vigorous wine;

Where rhyming in the midst of fantastic shadows,
Like lyres I plucked the elastics
Of my wounded shoes, one foot near my heart!

Translation by Wallace Fowlie (1966)