Women in the Wild - Introduction

by Lucy McCauley

I live about as far from the wild as you can get, in the city, above a busy four-lane avenue. Every amenity of modern life surrounds me: designer coffee shops, convenience stores, a fax/mail place that I call my “office.” It’s all here. Everything, that is, but green.

I crave green—green fields, green woods, green mountains, the aqua-green sea. And it is travel that has brought me opportunities to satisfy those cravings. In Morocco, I climbed tourmaline switchbacks into the High Atlas Mountains. In Panama, I scuba dived among manta rays in an emerald sea. In California, I walked through silent forests, the moist scent of greenery buoying my spirit.

But I have many friends who aren’t satisfied by greenery alone. They crave the golden dust of Southwestern deserts, the rocky brown of the Tibetan plateau, or the blinding white of Antarctica. We all agree, though, that it has been in these places, outside of our familiar contexts, where we have felt the truest sense of freedom—exploring the “wild” in our own natures and foraging the external wilderness in ways that we somehow never manage to at home.

When I first began to bring together this collection, I suspected it would be dangerous. And I was right. As the months rolled by and I read the manuscripts that filled my mailbox, I found myself at various points deciding—and each time adamantly—to hike into the desert and camp alone, to hang glide over Big Sur, and to find Jane Goodall and convince her to let me follow her and her chimps around Gombe. That’s the thing about these stories: they take ideas that would normally seem impossible, crazy, outlandish, and usher them into the realm of the possible.

I think most women instinctively recognize in nature a direct connection to their feminine power. Travel into the wilderness takes us away from modern life, and its ceaseless routines, into our own wildness. There we can affirm our self-sufficiency and creative force as we make pilgrimages back to our own instincts.

The women in this volume do that in myriad ways. They offer stories of high adventure in the wild—rafting a river in Borneo, diving in Mexican cenotes, climbing Mt. Everest. They share with us their journeys into the natural world: a lone hiker trekking the Appalachian Trail, a wildlife worker who is attacked by a hyena in Israel, a traveler who pulls off a gutsy rescue of endangered animals in Vietnam. They give us stories of women exploring the wildness of their own natures—the affinity a mother-to-be feels with skunks, bears, and mice, a woman who confronts her hunter’s instincts while fishing for mackerel in Ireland, another who navigates through the wildish aspects of her sexuality after witnessing a Sicilian tuna slaughter.

These tales transform possibility into reality. They remind us that there is a seasonal longing in our natures—as regular as the tides and the phases of the moon, as mysterious as the cycles that all women share with Mother Earth—to foray into the wild, both within and without. Reading these stories, and feeling the stirrings of my own restlessness, brought to mind something a friend once told me: that envy is a wake-up call, a message to stop ignoring the soul’s deepest longings.

As the couriers of that message, let these stories act as an invocation, calling us all to our own ventures into the wild.

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