Maya Genis

"Columbus would never have made it to Asia, which was thousands of miles farther away than he had calculated, imagining a smaller world. He would have been doomed by that great expanse of sea. But he was lucky. One-fourth of the way there he came upon an unknown, uncharted land that lay between Europe and Asia--the Americas. It was early October 1492, and thirty-three days since he and his crew had left the Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Now they saw branches and sticks floating in the water. They saw flocks of birds. There were signs of land...So approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians, who swam out to greet them. The Arawaks lived in village communes, had a developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals...bits of visible gold in the rivers, and a gold mask presented to Columbus by a local Indian chief, led to wild visions of gold fields" (2-3)

- A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present, by Howard Zinn

"But nothing yet accomplished would rival in importance the discovery, colonization and eventual democratization of the New World. Yes, America would become what de Tocqueville described as the 'total package'...In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue...and discovered America. Now, some have argued Columbus actually discovered the West Indies, or that Norsemen had discovered America centuries earlier, or that you really can't get credit for discovering a land already populated by indigenous people with a developed civilization. Those people are communists. Columbus discovered America" (17-18).

- The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents- America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction
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October being the month when school children stay home and commemorate a certain infamous explorer who liberates them from Monday classes, I thought it was appropriate to note the not-so-liberating aspects of this country's oft-celebrated "frontiersman," Christopher Columbus. Fortunately his name is especially relevant when discussing the idea of wilderness, which we can particularly recognize in what Greg Garrard notes as a staggering omission from American environmentalist writing, namely, that it has "until recently tended to stress the spiritual and moral, while neglecting the ways in which wilderness is a site of class and gender struggle" (77). Although this idea took up about a couple of sentences in his entire chapter, Garrard rightfully articulates a major problem in "nature writing," in that its authors often compose in a historic vacuum in which they appear as isolated explorers themselves, leisurely excavating in solitude the untraversed lay of the land. To put it another way, "wilderness...erases the social and political history that gives rise to it..." (Garrard 71). The first quotation I included unearths this lapse in historical documentation when it comes to the wilderness. Zinn, shatters the elementary textbook mythology of a groundbreaking Columbus peering through the curtains of the world and finding an uninhabited continent, up for sale, so to speak. Zinn takes note of Columbus's difficult journey at sea as well as the accidental and not divinely-sanctioned landing at the coast of America. Furthermore, we see that there are vividly industrious communities on this land, contradicting the epic ideology of the vacuous wild awaiting civilization. To the chagrin of Columbus and his sailors, there was more to meet the eye than just the luminous ocean and the collective of birds. The existence of the Arawak settlement puts a strain on the ideology of exploration and discovery rooted in the West. The wilderness, frontiers, the "promise land," "streets paved with gold"--many names have been given to spaces waiting for human arrival. Although the first two often have more of an environmentally pure connotation, while the latter two make us think of prospering industry, they all appear to speak about the same space in different stages of commodification. The wilderness, in the traditional history book context, then seems to be the landscape equivalent of the uncivilzed barbarian. Wild is a contrast to Tamed or domestic, both of which imply human influence. Do we deem everything before humankind as a marker of wilderness, or does this term only bloom from an opposition to civility? The second quotation, as a humorous appendage to Zinn's deconstruction of the Columbus legend, cynically embraces the US ideology of discovery (which we can see by the oft-favored allusion to the ultimate "wild/tame" binary of communism/democracy). Together, the two texts offer sobering and appropriately ironic gazes on the Western legend of Columbus. We need more historical narratives antithetical to those praising the appropriation of "raw" land in the name of exploration. As Zinn notes, Columbus's serendipitous confrontation with the Arawak settlers led to "visions of gold fields," a sign that it was not such a wilderness site after all, considering that he only discovered the marketable good through his interaction with the indigenous community, and not through the lone-man excavation we often associate with lauded explorers. The wilderness, as we come to see, is never barren, even though many paradoxically believe so. However abundance and desolation are subjective terms, even as we see them authoritatively espoused in history tomes and political filters. Perhaps we shoud veer away from thinking about wilderness in terms of relative fullness or depletion and instead refocus our gaze to the intrinsic value of the spaces beyond our comfort zones. But then again, I might just be a Red.