By Danny Humphrey

I still remember the first day I truly found the wilderness. It was a cool day in July, a rarity for the desert of Los Angeles I call home. I had woken up early that day to go running with some friends, a favorite pastime of mine; our destination was a patch of open space just outside the valley. A long car ride later, I set foot on the Las Virgenes Trail, a rather beloved cat track that led through the open space preserve, eventually connecting with another trail far out into the next county. I didn’t go very far that day – I have done so since and the beauty of it astounded me no less than what I describe now – but as the dirt trail slowly got narrower, the birdsong around me grew louder and the smell of truly fresh air filled my gasping lungs. My watering eyes saw no more city. I had finally, after years, arrived on Earth.

The outside world, the urban sprawl of mankind, seems to me based around the idea of bending the natural to man’s will, whereas once you leave that, once you enter the last bits of open, untouched space in the city, you find an entirely different idea of humanity’s place on Earth. That day as I ran, I saw things I thought only to exist in post-apocalyptic fiction. Rusted water silos from the planning of settlements cut short by new environmental laws dotted the yellow landscape of dead grass. Fields of dead grass are to this day one of the most jaw-dropping sights my eyes have beheld. I mused for a while about what the Native Americans must have thought about the environment I saw, if they had even paid it any special mind. After all, they saw it every day; the natives were as much a part of the ecosystem as the grass was when the Spanish came. As I stood there I realized the rather beautiful idea that brought me to write this today. Nature is the great reclaimer. Once one leaves the confines of the artificial we lock our minds in and sees for themselves the rust on what was once a part of society we realize how temporary our existence is. Seeing a Western Scrub Jay perched atop a rusted silo has a meaning to me I still cannot describe.

By keeping our minds indoors, we keep our souls restrained to the power of places like that. And by keeping ourselves restrained in the house or apartment, unexposed to the outdoors, we are by definition keeping our minds from getting out. I can sit here all day recounting the beauty I experienced by simply leaving civilization for an hour and then returning to exist in the machine we made from the god, but I would rather experience it again. Nature, as well as being the great reclaimer, is the best means by which we can reclaim ourselves. Without it, we are merely asleep and dreaming.

I am a student writer in Los Angeles. I like to write short stories and essays about my experiences in nature, as well as being a human in the modern world. —Danny