It is important to remember that Thoreau said "In wildness is the preservation of the world," not in wilderness. Wildness is the capacity of plants and animals to be natural. Wilderness is an originally natural place. It is a place of uninterrupted wildness. Wildness, however, can occur in a place that has ceased to be wilderness. Most of the great eastern wilderness is gone, but wildness remains wherever animals and plants restore natural functions to the land. Such wildness can occur in ditches by the road, in cracks in the sidewalk, in the edge of the windowsill, in the rain gutters, in the mold on the foundation and the mildew on the walls. It also occurs in the lawns and gardens, backyards and wood lots, highway medians and storm sewers. Some inhabitants of urban high-rise towers have discovered that it only takes a small ledge as a nesting site for a peregrine falcon to restore a dramatic wildness to the cityscape. The world doesn't cease being wild just because we don't notice it or because we surround it with the artificial world of human boundaries or structures. Such piecemeal wildness is not wilderness, but it is wild.
Important zones of wildness frequently occur in the fortunately inefficient siting of buildings on the landscape or in our inability to perfectly groom road margins and oddly shaped intersections. About a decade ago, commercial development began to proceed north along the Dinah Shore Boulevard in Winchester. A new Kroger "superstore" was built and several restaurants began to backfill to the south toward the original Winchester Wal-Mart location. The expansion of the Wal-Mart store, along with the building of McDonald's, a gas station, and a Shoney's restaurant, created an isolated tract of about five acres that was bulldozed down raw soil. This tract is bounded on the east by the parking lots of these businesses and on the west by Blue Spring creek which is nearly invisible once it enters Decherd. Since the original clearing of the site, it has healed itself and lacking any use or apparent commercial value has reverted to a wild thicket. It is now a haven for birds, small mammals, snakes, and insects. It also acts as undesigned but effective catchment basin for the parking lot runoff from the nearby businesses. The site also acts as a small flood plain for Blue Spring creek during heavy rains.
The site has a few open, weedy areas but it is largely covered in a nearly impenetrable cluster of scrub trees, vines, and briars. A few minutes observation will reveal a dozen or more species of birds at work feeding and nesting. About two dozen species of trees, none yet dominant, occupy the site. Probably no richer location for wildlife exists in such close conjunction to major traffic flow and commercial development in Winchester or Decherd. A similar, younger and smaller wild place can be found near the intersection of old highway 41 through town and the new connector road terminus south of Winchester. The building of the road and the relocation of an older intersection created an unusable zone that is becoming a wild place. Corners and pockets like this can be found all along the new connector road and in many other developed locations around the towns of the county. There is a particularly "ugly" but rich wild place in Cowan where Boiling Fork creek intersects Railroad Street and passes under the railroad. An equally ugly but important wild place occurs in Monteagle immediately south of the Hardee's restaurant property. In Sewanee in the tiny space of a polluted runoff stream within three feet of a road and heavily travelled sidewalk, two very large turtles feed and shelter unobserved by hundreds of passersby each day. Their wild place is about twenty-four square feet. These wild places function like the lanes and fencerows in creating important, but generally overlooked, zones of habitat and diversity for wildlife.
Some pictures of wild places