It began a few months ago really, this meandering mental meditation on nature as medicine, on the power of unchanged places, and it hasn’t let up, not yet. We were driving northbound towards Great Falls, a neighboring town about an hour and a half drive away that I’ve made more times than I can count over the years, when it truly hit me.
I15 takes you due North, then slightly East and passes through staggeringly beautiful country, starting with sprawling sheep ranches at the foot of the Sleeping Giant and the Gates of the Mountains wilderness. Soon after, you wind your way through Wolf Creek Canyon and watch as the road follows the path cut eons ago by the Missouri River, towering cliff walls hugging the highway, warning signs for falling rocks every few miles. It’s right after the canyon ends when it starts to settle into your mind, it’s when you, high above the Missouri pushing its way over stones that have been singing millions of years, look out over the serpentine ribbon of blue and realize that this land is as it’s always been, that you’re looking out at the exact same view that Lewis and Clark found, over 200 years ago.
Save a few ranches, a few homes scattered about in the far-off distance, this land is the land they saw from canoe and riverbank, those hills, those land-slipped mountains, those strange buttes and mesas rising like altars out of the sanctuary that is the wide open plains surrounding them. That sky that gave this state our nickname, The Big Sky State, are the same, stretching across like the glass dome of a snow globe, waiting for us to be shaken up within.
This is it, I thought while hurtling down that highway, arrow straight after the twists and turns from the canyon, this is it:
It is medicine wandering into a world that humanity hasn’t yet completely touched.
We’ve touched this land, sure, we’ve forced an entire group of people from it as Manifest Destiny forgot that other people might have a destiny too, and theirs shouldn’t be tragically cut short by our own egotistical view of our entitlement, but largely it’s the very same. I find my mind often wanders and imagines teepees on the little cul-de-sacs of land where the river meanders, it sees buffalo sprawled out to the horizon, miles and miles away. I imagine the grandeur of finding this place before industrialization and commercialization, I wonder of the deer, of the bears, the wolves, hell, the bugs that once flourished here, the flies hatching just above the surface of quiet waters, the fish that rise to catch them, and I feel the sorrow for their fading.
It’s medicinal, yes, but some pills are so very hard to swallow.
To seek these places of unspoiled nature is to accept the medicine into your soul. It’s to remind yourself of places before humanity infused itself onto it, into it, beneath it as it reaps all it’s ever sowed. To put miles on your boots to find them is the stirring of the solution, to sweat and bleed and reek of your efforts is to prepare the vial, to stand atop some mountain peak, to wander across some stream, to feel your feet sink beneath bog and marsh and heather and moss and sand and silt is to tip your head back and swallow it.
Then it stirs, then it finds its way into your bloodstream and it scatters through the center of you, pulses out to your fingertips, the edges of your eyelashes, and something strange happens…
You heal.
You heal, and that healing becomes a contagious thing, spreads to those near you as the life force within begins to leak out and stain their skin, too. Your light becomes their light and then they’ve enough to give it to someone else, too. This is the way of things, this is the medicine that gives and gives and gives but only if we allow it the grace of staying and staying and staying.
It’s only the untamed, it’s only the unspoiled, it’s only the wilderness left wild, and it only comes when we remove ourselves from it, when we refuse to taint what should not be tainted. We’ve Midas fingers, we humans, except in place of gold is rust, and we needn’t rust the whole of this place.
Find them, friends, and bow in your appreciation when you do. You needn’t travel far, I have found magic in the miles behind my own home just as potent as that found on a strange spit of land in the Inner Hebrides, on the fringes of the Irish Sea, in the jungle of Belize. It’s here as it is there, it’s within eyeshot of Interstate 15 as we race towards a high school track meet in Great Falls, Montana, just before you get to the stretch where nuclear warheads are sunken in silos beneath the soil. It’s everywhere, and if we squint just enough, if we imagine it just a bit, we can see it.
Then, more, fight to keep more land this way. Conserve, donate to groups doing the same, and protect the medicine our ancestors failed to acknowledge as such. Protect the medicine, and the medicine is the wilds, is the land we try so hard to strip.
Heal the land, heal ourselves, this is the way of things. This has always been the way of things.
It’s medicinal
wandering into a world
unchanged by our hands.
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