When All the Wild Things Have Gone
ESSAY
The following is a rewritten version of a piece that originally appeared in Foundation Father, a wonderful publication about raising children and being a worthy husband. I hope you enjoy.
My son bellows defiance at the sea.
I watch green glass waters shatter atop him and melt into a rumbling foam carpet that pulls him along the smooth sand floor. He rolls like a rag doll for a distance, little limbs caught in the spin cycle of some great oceanic washing machine.
Then the waters retreat, and he’s back on his feet again, yelling louder than before at waves that hiss defeat. I’m unsure if he knows they’ve only gone for but a moment—sliding out just long enough to gather reinforcements and pummel the beach anew—and him along with it. I’m not sure he’d care if he were aware. This is the arrogance of young and wild men, and it is a thing of great beauty.
Go West, young man. The mountains call you forth. There’s gold in them thar hills. Seek, and ye shall find.
The call to adventure has led to its fair share of horror—to war and pain—to hardship and broken hearts—but it is also the very thing that sets sail across strange horizons. It is the spirit that ropes horizons and saddle-breaks cruel, hard lands into towns and cities, states and nations.
It’s what shot men into the bleak blackness of space and left behind flags and footprints on the powdery skins of distant rocks—and it will do so again. This ancient command shouts across time and rattles young men to their very bones. Some hear it louder than others, and they are the ones who grow itchy and restless in a world gone too familiar.
But where do the wild ones go in a world hell-bent on homogeneity? In a stilted environment that demands complete conformity and state-steered domesticity? Many of them go inward. Some rage outward. Some of them go away entirely. Yet, we have need of them.
Go any way you must, man, but—for God’s sake—whatever you do, don’t stand still! Don’t glue those wandering feet to the freeway modes of being. Don’t lean into contentment and complacency that wraps its soft arms around you in sedating and comfortable captivity.
Live hard. Live fast.
Find yourself a proper adventure to adventure and, once you’ve shattered yourself against the unknown properly, return home, wherever that might be. Then give rise to the next batch of wandering ones, for we have great need of them, but hear my caution well, for when they are yours to guide.
Don’t dare to stamp out their wildness for the sake of the mundane. In service to either safety or the status quo. Don’t presume to file their pointed teeth prematurely into the sterilized smiles of the docile. Don’t trim their claws too flat while they still have need of them. That is not your place.
That is the job of the unknown.
Another wave crashes atop my boy, and something forgotten inside me flares to life, pushing its way out. I look to the people around me, scrolling phones, tapping black glass awake that keeps them asleep, and I close the paper pages of the book that long since been my way to sublimate the call. Go West, young man.
Then, I’m up and I’m tearing my shirt off like it’s on fire and I’m running before it can even hit the ground. The water claws at my ankles—at my knees—my waist. I arrive just as the ocean’s cavalry arrives, just in time to join the battle against countless droplets of an ancient medium bearing down upon me and my son with immortal hearts full of vengeance.
His eyes are as wild as mine as I lift him up, and the water crashes over me, but I stand wide against its weight, though it tries like hell to topple me. The sea swallows me up—hungrily and completely—but not him.
Him, I hold high. High enough that his eyes can catch the sun only now beginning to crack its fiery yolk upon the far horizon—on all those places that he has yet to see and explore—and as the water begins its hasty retreat, I hear the call of the unknown again.
But this time it’s different.
This time it uses not my name, but his. His small yells of defiance at the cowardly water stop short. He pauses. He cocks his head, and I convince myself that he hears it, too.
Where do the wild ones go when all the wild things are gone?
They go to the only place they have left. They go onward. On to the next plain, the next frontier, or even to the next world—wherever the adventure might be—even when the rest of us can’t for the life of us see it.
And I wish them well.