Experiencing a Feeling of Wildness


Nature writer David Gessner believes you don't have to climb Everest or raft the Amazon to find wildness. It's often found much closer to home, in our backyards and in the experiences of daily life.


I believe in mystery.
I believe in family.
I believe in being who I am.
I believe in the power of failure.
And I believe normal life is extraordinary.
This I Believe.

Today our essay for the series This I Believe comes from Wilmington, North Carolina. David Gessner teaches at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and he has a close relationship with Nature. Here is our series’ curator, independent producer Jay Allison.

David Gessner has traveled to many exotic places for his books and essays on the natural world. Those travels, inform his belief, but do not define it. That definition comes closer to home, starting on the beaches of Cape Cod, Massachusetts where he spent much of his childhood and where we recorded him reading his essay for This I Believe.

I believe in wildness, both in the natural world and within each of us. As a Nature writer I've traveled all over the world to experience the wild. But some of my own wildest moments have been closer to home, on the same domestic Cape Cod beach I've returned to all my life. In summer this beach is covered with kids, umbrellas and beach balls. But in the winter, the cold clears it of people, and its character changes. From the rocks at the end of the beach I once watched hundreds of snow-white gannets dive from high in the air and plunge into the cold winter ocean like living javelins. Then as the birds dove down, I suddenly saw something dive up, a humpback whale breaching through the same fish the gannets were diving for.

"In wildness is the preservation of the world," wrote Thoreau. But people often get the quote wrong and use wilderness instead. While wilderness might be untrammeled land along the Alaskan coast, wildness can happen anywhere, in the jungle or in your backyard. And it's not just a place, it's a feeling. It rises up when you least expect it. In fact, it was while observing my own species, my own family, that I experienced the two wildest moments in my life.

The first happened holding my father's hand while he died. I listened to his final breath, gasping and fish-like, and I gripped his hand tight enough to feel the last pulsings of his heart. Something rose up in me that day, something deep, animal, unexpected, something that I didn't experience again until nine years later when my daughter Hadley was born. Before Hadley's birth, everyone warned me that my life was about to change, the implication being that it would become tamer. But there was nothing tame about that indelible moment during the C-section when the doctor reached into my wife and a bloody head appeared, straight up followed by Hadley's full emergence, a wild squall of life as her little arms rose over her head in victory. And it was somewhere around then that I felt the great rush come surging up. Sure it was physiological, goose bumps and tingling. But it was also more than that, a wild gushing, both a loss and then a return to self.

I believe that these moments of death and life give us a reconnection to our primal selves, a reminder that there is something wilder, lurking below the everyday, and that having tasted this wildness, we return to our ordinary lives both changed and charged. So while I'll continue to seek out wild places, I know I don't need to travel to the Amazon or Everest to experience the ineffable. It is here on Cape Cod, on the domestic beach where I first walked holding my mother's hand and where I later spread my father's ashes that I learned that my wildest moments are often closest to home. And it is where I now bring my daughter Hadley for our daily walk, secretly hoping that the wild will rise up in her when she least expects it.

David Gessner with his essay for This I Believe, recorded on the beach on Cape Cod. At our website, NPR.org/ThisIBelieve, you can find all the essays in our series and send in one of your own. For This I Believe, I'm Jay Allison.

Next Sunday on weekend edition, a This I Believe essay by Michelle Gardner-Quinn , written for a class at the University of Vermont, two days before she was kidnapped and murdered. Her belief is Reverence for All Life.

Support for This I Believe comes from Prudential Retirement.

This is NPR, National Public Radio.