Not totally undone, I revised and recently offered a reading-only course – Wild Lit - to the residents at Westminster-Canterbury, a local retirement community…without the experiential piece or the journaling, of course. I met Burkholder and a new cast of students again this year along a trail in Dolly Sods North and shared my plight and plan. As an experiential education proponent, I don’t think he was encouraged.

But, the Wild Lit or wilderness literature course was a huge success. What made it work so well was the history, the perspective, the years of experience and wide knowledge base this group of ‘students’ brought to the discussion trough.

From wilderness as the evil, feared unknown to be tamed, eradicated, used and exploited solely for the benefit of man, to wilderness as an ideal, a sought after simplicity, providing distillation necessary for the soul, to protecting and preserving it, to the primal source for exploration and adventure for proving oneself, we took a more or less historical approach. And where did we start? Right here in the colony of Virginia. Written in diary form in 1728, but not published until 1841 as part of the Westover Manuscripts, The History of the Dividing Line is William Byrd II’s account of surveying the Virginia-North Carolina border. It is often riotously funny - particularly his account of the habits of North Carolina families, their lazy living style – perhaps from eating too much pig. But it is also a keenly observant record of local grasses, varieties of pines, bushes, fruits and birds such as the now extinct Carolina Parquet. It took a Virginia gentleman schooled in England, perhaps acquainted with the Romantic Movement, to acknowledge appreciation and wonder at local wilderness, rather than treat it as the Devil. Though lengthy, take a look at this electronic edition. It’s an amazing account.