I spent many years of my life doing things outdoors, structuring my life around wild open spaces. Now I’m older and I live in a city. I have a job that requires looking at a computer screen a lot. I have a wife and a baby and all of us are living lives that aren’t readily spent in the wilds. I miss feeling that mix of wonder and danger that you find in an untamed place.
I live in San Francisco. Thankfully, on its peninsula regularly subsumed by fog and laced with fault lines, this city will always have some wilderness in its heart. Close to the geographic center of the city is a cluster of tall hills: the two knuckles of Twin Peaks, and forested Mount Sutro a little to the West. Twin Peaks is a popular instagram spot, usually covered in tourists getting out of cars and tour buses. But Mount Sutro is often spookily deserted. It can take some time to learn all the paths that twist through the creaking eucalyptus, switch-backing up and down the steep rocky slopes. I run those single-track paths often, and for as long as I can stay in the forest, I enjoy an easy antidote to wilderness withdrawals. There’s the dazzling shimmer of thousands of leaves fluttering above, all those layers of tree trunks, some of them listing, some of them forking, some of them pole-straight. The paths are often muddy as the trees comb moisture from the fog, and footing can be tricky.
Wilderness is a human creation. It’s a zone we fence off and leave alone, a relic of what the planet felt like before all our terraforming and construction, mining and farming. To experience Mount Sutro as a wilderness is a particularly ironic exercise. The Eucalyptus forest was planted in the 1800’s to help curb erosion, and it was subsequently logged for decades. The top of Mount Sutro housed a Nike Missile launch complex in World War II. The land is not technically designated as a wilderness, either. But it serves the purpose. You can feel lost in the trees. You can feel a sense of danger. You can feel a presence that isn’t entirely under human control. For a parcel of land in the center of a significant city, this is truly a gift.
—Ian Tuttle. October, 2018.
