Joel Achenbach

Joel Achenbach Photo by Mark Thiessen.

I do a lot of commuting to the wilderness. Drive, hike, drive. The hiking part is rather brief and efficient, in contrast to, for example, the earliest pioneers and frontier travelers, whose forays to the woods might well be a journey of no return. Not me. I do a lot of drive-by wilderness hiking.

It’s a behavioral pattern born of the complex relationships among solitude, time and gasoline. Despite horrific gas prices, the stuff remains cheap compared to that more precious commodity, time. Blasting up MacArthur Boulevard, heading toward the woods near Great Falls, Maryland, or the obscure Turkey Run Park, I know that for roughly a dollar’s worth of refined hydrocarbons I can find serenity in the forest. I’m contributing to air pollution by driving, but I’m not going very far. (It’s not like I’m driving to a real wilderness in West Virginia.) Here, practically within shouting distance of the Beltway, you can hike along a path for an hour and encounter no one, just the webs from spiders that have labored during the night. There are no houses, no concessions. The only signs are those that a hunter might read—the tracks of deer, or fur snagged on a branch.

The modern person tends to live a life out of balance with what his spirit needs. Many of us somehow wound up in offices, working in front of a computer. We are appendages of a vast technological conspiracy of sorts. Notice, by the way, that to a remarkable degree our offices and workstations and computer monitors and keyboards do not appear in our dreams. In dreams we go home, to the woods, the mountains, the desert. In dreams we are outside, unconfined, free.

The singular hallmark of American society is that everyone is in a rush. To be successful in America is to create an environment for yourself that is borderline unmanageable. You’re a slacker if you’re not wildly overextended. Culturally, we are bad at saying no. Technologically, we are increasingly unable to unplug from the Matrix. We have completely lost the ancient skill of dawdling. If we stray more than four hours from our e-mail accounts, we get messages like the one from the editor of this magazine, waiting for this tardy essay: “Don’t make me slit my wrists.” Without resorting to hyperbole, I can testify that I’ve been behind in my work since 1991.

And thus is invented the surgical strike into the wilderness, the microwaved retreat to nature. If you do it right, you can fit it into your schedule in such a way that no one notices. It’s just a mysterious patch in the day, after you drop off the kids at school and before you’re truly needed at the office. But you should avoid walking into work with muddy boots.

Drive-by wilderness adventures are, of course, a form of make-believe. The places I hike are Potemkin wildernesses, thin stretches of woods, protected by national and state governments, that to a remarkable degree offer the illusion that you are not immersed in a metropolitan region with upwards of six million people. It is hard not to have a love-hate relationship with such places. The wilderness in the Potomac Gorge is a bit like a creature in a zoo. It’s wilderness in captivity.

But at the same time, we can cherish these woods, for they’re a good place to think. They detoxify the soul, clean out the brain, open up the imagination. Maybe it’s something in that tree-scrubbed air, or maybe it’s just the endorphin rush from working up a sweat with a fast-paced ramble. Things become clearer when you’re surrounded by nature. Without getting too much into politics in this election year, let us ponder the possibility that the greatest issue of our time is one that gets remarkable little attention from national leaders. “The environment” is typically something that fits into a long list of topics, like education and health care, that any good candidate will want to mention, but it isn’t a wedge issue, or a matter of intense debate. It’s not Iraq.

Even during a drive-by visit, the woods offer us a chance to recalibrate our own issues, to remember what we care about, what really matters. And then it’s back to work.

Joel Achenbach, a writer for The Washington Post, also has written for National Geographic, Smithsonian, and other publications. His newest book is The Grand Idea: George Washington’s Potomac and the Race to the West.