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OhOff the coast of California, two miles downstream, there is a thermal reservoir: a gathering of tens of thousands of small octopuses, each the size of a grapefruit. It is known as pearl octopus (In the mighty octopus), gather around hydrothermal springs that heat their eggs, allowing them to hatch in less than two years (in cold water it takes 10 years). When I want to calm down, I think about these gatherings, this octopus factory powered by the power of the earth that lives quietly far from our eyes, and perhaps never easily found. How many other countries are there?
The bottom of the ocean is just one place in Cal Flyn’s novel, The Savage Landscape, an amazing journey to discover and understand the wilderness. It is an amazing and detailed work that takes us from the bottom of the ocean to volcanoes and glaciers, and a journey into our imaginations, and the stories we tell ourselves about the “wild places”. Above all, it is a reminder that places we may think of as empty or empty are not; that in the deserts there is much life, both human and non-human.
As Flyn points out, interest in wilderness is widely shared across cultures. Sumerian epics can be read as “desert epics”, with heroes banished to distant lands as they face dangers and temptations; similarly, the Toraja people of Indonesia perform an annual ritual in which they run into the forest at night and “become one with the wilderness”. In a way, Flyn is the latest incarnation of this desire. He likes to walk in the mountains, and receives food and comfort from the wild places (towards the end of the book he writes about going to the mountains after his father died). While there, he experiences a “thinning of the skin”, a “feeling of contact with all that is not human”.
Like many of us, I share a quest for wilderness and skin-thinning, and I doubt that fantasy can inspire the same kind of excitement. And yet, when I read Flyn’s writings I often gasped in amazement. Consider this description of a dead animal at the bottom of the sea that has been turned into a feeding ground: “Whales fall into the water with life, like streams of water in the desert, the slopes of the desert.”
Of course, the whole idea of untouched wilderness is a myth, a product of our imaginations, and Flyn constantly pulls the rug out from under our notions of purity, wildness and isolation. At the Monastery of Saint Paul the Anchorite, in the eastern desert of Egypt, he talks to a Coptic monk who has devoted himself to a life of seclusion and prayer, yet keeps his eyes on his mobile phone. While on a ship in the Southern Ocean, Flyn admires the falling icebergs, “a silent display of great decline”, just thinking about the mess left by tourists and scientific explorers on the Antarctic soil; according to another group of researchers, only 31% of Antarctica can now be considered “bare”.
In Transylvania, home to Europe’s largest brown bear population, he explores the tragic stories of humans and wild animals in conflict. Bears and wolves thrived in Europe until the destruction of their habitat in the Middle Ages forced them to integrate with the local population. These creatures can be brutal, and Flyn doesn’t spare any detail in his depiction of the damage they can do to the human body, but the most dangerous creature in the chapter is neither an ursine nor a lupine: it is the local sheepdog, a tame animal whose punch is “a pure noise of pure violence”.
And yet the idea that the wilderness is an area “unspoiled by man, where man himself is an absentee guest”, as the 1964 US Wilderness Act states, is being exposed as a dangerous delusion. There are few places that can meet this definition, and Flyn describes the plight of indigenous peoples, who are often removed in the name of a higher sense of security, or because of the cynicism of those who want to gain wealth. At the beginning of the book, he travels to the Brazilian rain forest to visit the Yanomami people, who are described in an argument by anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon as “noble people”. The title begins as a Victorian adventure, but soon transforms into Chagnon’s fascinating imagination, as well as ours. When Flyn’s translators negotiate with the Yanomami to help him find it, they first ask for a familiar item: a roasting pan.
Perhaps the only true uninhabited desert is found in the material that defies any form of stability: molten rock. In Iceland Flyn sees a volcanic eruption and beautifully captures all the allure and fear of lava; he describes “rivers of thick magma” that “emerged from the vents and cracks, slowly and gelatinous like icing from a cake, a gray skin forms, and then it is crushed to reveal a soft orange, burning in the bottom metal”. He stops talking politely, mentions the Romantics, but for me the topic is not the poetry or the paintings of the 18th or 19th century, but the wonderful writings of Sara Dosa of 2022, Fire of Lovewhich tells the story of volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft and their passion for volcanoes. Like the story of the film, Flyn seems to be drawn to go to the volcano valley on foot, however, unlike the Kraffts, he returns to tell the story; perhaps there is something dead in our longing for the wilderness.
In 1937 the anthropologist Tom Harrisson published a book about the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) an area that was once thought to have some kind of ancient forest, and was said to have been inhabited by cannibals. Its name, Savage Civilization, was deliberately catchy. Like Montaigne before him, Harrisson did not oppose cannibalism; he saw missionaries and Europeans who lived as a problem. Similarly, Flyn’s text is full of contemporary examples of industrial exploitation in remote areas: mining companies mapping the ocean floor to extract minerals; security forces are extorting local people in the name of clearing the desert; rich hunters who will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to shoot a tiger, rhino or lion. What is the difference between the two?
Chainsaws aside, it’s to native cultures that Flyn looks to escape that are sometimes promoted by conservationists or experts. He travels to Nepal to meet the Bon people of Dolpo, who live in a very harsh environment without much natural resources. In their culture, there is little talk of desert mapping or scientific management, instead of gods and spirits that live in springs, forests and rocks, and should not be disappointed.
Flyn sees the Bon as very encouraging: “The Dolpo sanctuaries,” he writes, “are the perfect combination of the world’s oldest conservation practices, and there is much to be learned from their longevity.” I do not know how Dolpo’s beliefs and practices can be used under the sea, but Flyn is certainly right: if we want to escape the path of environmental destruction, we will need many stories, like him, that can control the feelings of fear and respect for the worlds we know, and others that are not yet known.
