Berry speaks about a trip he makes into the woods for a weekend regularly. Once out there, everything seems so much slower to him. It's peaceful out there even though he can still here the sounds of civilization. When he spots someone's name carved into the rock from 1903, the timelessness of the place really strikes him vividly. He imagines that it would look the same no matter what past time period it was. But even there were everything living and dying contributes to the sustaining of the habitat, there is still almost a human threat hanging over it. You can hear a highway in the distance and you know that even this beautiful patch of land may eventually be sacrificed for the sake of civilization.
When I read this passage, it reminded me of my classes Senior Wilderness Trip at the beginning of the year. The purpose of the trip is to try to take our class out of technology and the trappings of the world to the wilderness for a time so that we may try to become closer and overcome difficulties for our final year of high school. For some classes, nothing changes but it did work for our class. When we went on this trip, we drove way into a national park. Though people were camping in the parking lot where we were supposed to park our cars but were unable to, we still did not see any people once we walked so far in. We couldn't hear any cars. We couldn't see any houses. There was nothing but the random pop of something. It may have been illegal hunters and we weren't sure so our guide was more careful with us than normal. But being out there was wonderful in a way. Everything seemed so simple to us, including overcoming all of the hurts that our class spent years accumulating.
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