Of
all the many things that Henry David Thoreau once said aloud or wrote down,
there is one particular quote that has tormented and spooked the generations of
nature-writers and tree-hunters to come.
In Wildness is
the preservation of the world.
He
wrote that down about halfway through his lecture, Walking.
A
few paragraphs later, he wrote: I believe
in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows…Give
me a Wildness whose glance no civilization can endure.
Just
the other day, I was driving towards Center City and I passed by the same idea,
shouting to be heard.
It’s
an opinion that is and always will be a little outlawed.
Many
people are quick to note that Thoreau uses the word wildness and not the common term of the day, wilderness. He did it
deliberately. He was being
stubborn. He was stubborn, and
deliberate, for a lot of his life.
To
Thoreau, wilderness was something
invented by the Law, governed by a Mayor, a piece of land under ownership of
the State. The modern day wilderness is
paved and permitted, gated up for seasons, open only from dawn to dusk, guarded
by a Police.
The
boundaries of a wilderness are always in dispute. Its title is something that can be repealed,
rescinded or revoked. Its map is
something that can be taken away, written over.
But
wildness?
No
chance, no dice.
You
cannot stop the wilds.
Even
here in Philly?
Yes,
even here in the big city.
To
prove it though, I’ll need to discover and explore Philadelphia for the
palimpsest that it really is.
What’s
a palimpsest? It’s a manuscript or a document that has been
scraped clean and erased, then replaced with something more modern but that
still bears the traces of the earlier work.
Sometimes
in order to read the earlier work, historians and archaeologists need to flash
the palimpsest through ultra-violet light, the only way to see what was written
before.
I
don’t need that kind of technology.
I
just need the right kind of map.
I’ll
use this map.
It
was made by the City Planning Commission in 1934. Using historical texts and field guides, colonial
journals and living memories, it’s meant to depict this city as first seen by the White Men...
…when
Philadelphia was known as Coaquannock, the Grove
of Tall Pines.
“OF ALL THE MANY
PLACES I’VE SEEN OF THE WORLD…”
According
to the map, Coaquannock was one of four circular villages of the Turtle Clan, all
located within the watershed between the Schuylkill and the Delaware River.
There’s
no record, no description of the pine grove that it was named for.
But,
by the coming of the white men, the Lenni-Lenape had already been living here
for thousands of years. It’s quite
possible that they named the town in memorial of the pines, a dedication to the
grove that was standing in some distant bygone era, same as we do now.
What
was it like?
