Wild Lands

      I spent about one day in the last week or so exploring and looking for old time Ogam carvings under sandstone rock overhangs, which are generally weather protected. Ogam is an Irish Benedictine Monk invented language used around 700-800 AD, and there is some around 25 miles (40 Km) from here, so that was a good enough excuse for me to go out and about. Think of these monks as Catholic Church recruiters at the outset.

            While I did not find any Ogam, I have begun the process of informing many of the hunters and cave searchers around here of what it looks like, and if there is any Ogam, they will probably find it first, probably mixed with Indian carvings, old European carvings, and modern redneck carvings.

            Now people have been around here a long time. My oldest identified arrowhead is 9,500 years old, or so I am led to believe from two independent references. And during the last Ice Age, this area was south of the ice line, like not under the ice, but probably still was pretty cold. Everything I read and have studied suggests the ice line was maybe one to two hundred miles north of here, like in Kentucky or Ohio. Nobody knows for sure.

            And let me define "wild lands".  If I drop dead, my carcass may not be found until I start stinking next spring when things warm up. And there are plenty of wild critters who will probably eat some of me, too. Talk about recycling. Said another way, a lot of land around here is rough, remote, and with few people living in the remote areas. Little of it is virgin land, having been in agriculture and grazing as recently as a century ago, but for sure is forested land now. It's main use is periodic timbering, like twice a century, and hunting, mostly for deer and turkey around here.

            All the big game species, like Eastern Buffalo and Elk and the prairies they fed off of, are also long gone. So the local deer and turkeys have been reintroduced around here decades ago. There are even black bears around here, too. The native bears I think we pretty much ate them all, so the ones around here, including where I live, are probably reintroduced. I have an 1879 Maxwell House Christmas menu that includes leg of Cumberland Mountain black bear, by the way.

            So I usually explore with a partner for safety reasons. On my own land, which is pretty wild, too, if I don't have a partner, then I usually leave a map of the area I am going to be in, with departure and estimated return times, too. I know it is conventional wisdom, and a pain to do, but sure will help searchers if I get hurt or die. It was so much easier in the USA military, expecting medevac if I got hurt.

            Anyway, I have always been taught, and even by Hollywood movies, led to believe, that all rough and wild lands in the USA are in the Rocky Mountains or the Sierra Mountains, but even my time both in the military and the sport of orienteering,  know there are many wild lands around the earth. Bamboo vipers always worried me in Asia, for example. And DB Cooper disappeared into some wild lands in the USA, too. Even a friend of mine had to evade KGB helicopters while mapping an oil line in wild Siberia.

            At one older time, believe it or not, where I live used to be called the wild west.

            And several old jokes still apply, I think. For example, this land is so wild even the Bobcats hunt in packs. And this wild land has few roads, so generally people drive between the trees.

            Anyway, one "wild land" in the USA is in east Tennessee on the Cumberland Plateau and the Plateau edge areas, all east of the Mississippi River in the USA.