Jack London’s novella remains a reference point for musings about dogs, and animal instinct and behaviour. About the time I was becoming familiar with London’s violent tale, residential dogs were not required to be on a leash in Winnipeg during the 1950s and could be encountered wandering the streets and chasing moving car tires. My later-to-be wife was terrorized by a big free-roaming neighbourhood dog when she was still in her teens back in the mid-1960s.
My own dog Scamp was always leashed in the yard, but once or twice, broke free to run away. Once, I remember not seeing him till the next day, running with a pack of other dogs. I was able, though, to recapture him and he had been baptized by the other dogs, so needed a good thorough bath to return to a quasi-normal state of acceptability. Later, when I was in grade 8, when we were headed to Grand Beach, we dropped Scamp off at my wild grandmother’s—not the most responsible, conscientious person—and, not surprisingly, he escaped for good and was never seen again.
(left: Scamp; right: Pepper)
Later, in my 40s, we had a female miniature poodle which we used to take over to the nearby school athletic field. There, we would occasionally unleash her to run freely which was very exciting for her and occasionally unnerving for us whenever she ran far away. Wildness and the desire for freedom are pretty much built-in to domestic dogs for sure, and cats are well-known for being hunters in otherwise quiet neighborhoods today despite leash laws for them, too, now.
When I was growing up as an only latch-key kid, I believe I experienced much of that same joy and excitement about free to move about (what Wordsworth called “glad animal movements” in “Tintern Abbey”) especially in an undeveloped neighbourhood with Nature everywhere around us. Looking back, I view my then-self as fairly wild and certainly free and mostly unmonitored by parents. I spent much of my time outdoors all-year-long playing football, hockey, baseball, and soccer as well as delivering late-afternoon newspapers 12 months a year for 5 critical years.
And this wildness and freedom happily carried over into my grade 9-12 years as I began to explore having girlfriends more and the extra-curricular possibilities of high school. In grades 10 and 11, I travelled by train with school club friends on spring breaks from Winnipeg to Ottawa (10) and Toronto (11); no adults or teachers with us. In grade 11 and 12 (1965-67), the English class readings reflected much of my interest in Nature and offshoots of the wild. In grade 11, our teacher taught us a unit of Robert Frost poems, which imaginatively/vicariously placed me in the woods and wild in more reflective ways. Macbeth also opened up the wild chaos of Nature especially as it impinges on and influences people; Macbeth and Lady Macbeth perfectly demonstrated the extremes of human wildness memorably.
In grade 12, wildness via literature continued with Thomas Hardy’s powerful Return of the Native set on Egdon Heath; all of the characters—even the minor ones—were affected by the wildness of the heath, and tragedy eventually befell three of the main characters who were destroyed by/in Nature. Of particular interest, then, was the very wild and freedom-loving Eustacia Vye (reminiscent of Norah Helmer in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House) who wanted more than anything to escape the limits of her community and other men. She and Hamlet (we studied Hamlet, too, in grade 12) stood out as strong emotional characters epitomizing wildness, freedom, and individuality. (That/their spirit lives on today in the title of this blog, incidentally, and represents the approach to life I chose from that formative point on.)
(the great Olivier as Othello)
I was marked for life by those works and headed to university where I became an English major and took many courses with readings such as Othello, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Lord of the Flies, Heart of Darkness, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Who Has Seen the Wind—all of which gave further understandings as to the chaos, wildness, and disruptions of Nature and as reflected in those of human nature as well.
At the same time, my own restlessness, wildness, and unconventionality led me to leaving Winnipeg for good, marrying someone of my own choice, and following my bliss for pretty much the rest of my life thus far. Around 40, I felt the call yet again to take a brief break during fall of one school year to travel to the New England states to visit the haunts of favourite authors, many of them associated with the wildness of Nature including Melville, Frost, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Dickinson, and Emerson. Eventually, I would follow my instinct to leave teaching at 52 to have more time for walking, more trips, and projects. Yes, the call to freedom is much like that call of the wild—something innerly/instinctively felt; a force that cannot be denied like the sea in John Masefield’s “Sea Fever”.
Today at 72, looking back, I find that my own life journey and career parallels Jack London’s central theme and my dog Scamp’s desire to go his own way, to be free in Nature, to listen to and heed the ever-present Call of Nature and The Wild that mysteriously infiltrates and directs many of our life choices.
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Sample literary works about The Wild:
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
The poetry of Walt Whitman
The Odyssey
On the Road
Lady Chatterly’s Lover
Frankenstein
Tennyson’s “Ulysses”
Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”
All of Thoreau’s work
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
To the Lighthouse and The Waves
Wuthering Heights
The Last of the Mohicans
Moby Dick
20,000 Leagues under the Sea A Journey to the Center of the Earth
Wild Animals I Have Known
Victory and Lord Jim
White Fang
Never Cry Wolf
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
The Fox
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Life of Pi
The Mayor of Casterbridge
The Old Man and the Sea
Sometimes a Great Notion
The Sun Also Rises
Earle Birney’s “David”
Women in Love
Conrad’s “Youth”
Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom”
Shakespeare’s The Tempest
Sample Movies about The Wild:
The Birds
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Dances with Wolves
Deliverance
Hamlet
The Incredible Journey (1st Disney version)
Islands in the Stream
Jaws
Key Largo
King Kong (original)
Lawrence of Arabia
Lord of the Flies (original)
The Misfits
The Mosquito Coast
Moby Dick
Night of the Iguana
The Odyssey
Paris, Texas
A Passage to India
Persona
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Ran
A River Runs Through It
Tempest
To Build a Fire
The Vikings
Walkabout
Wuthering Heights
More Wild Works:
To say nothing of the Wild to be found in painting, sculpture, music, and, most of all, in Nature.
Thoreau had much to say that is illuminating about The Wild:
“In literature it is only the wild that attracts us…, It is the untamed, uncivilized, free, and wild thinking in Hamlet, in the Iliad, and in all scriptures and mythologies that delights us….A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvellous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.”–Nov. 16, 1850, The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals
In short all good things are wild and free.”–Thoreau’s essay “Walking”
“In wildness is the preservation of the world,” –“Walking”.
Another famous line of Thoreau’s from his book Walden: “We need the tonic of wildness.”
“…we need a post-wilderness concept of wildness. A wild life is characterized by openness, possibility, a degree of choice, and self-determination, in which beings are understood to have their own familial, social, and ecological networks, their own lookouts, agendas, and needs.”
– Rosemary-Claire Collard