Out of the Wilderness
A Story about Restoration
“It’s time to come in out of the cold.”
“Is it?” Russ greeted the visitor’s statement. The flinty man stared at the newcomer suspiciously. His weathered face showed neither frown nor smile.
“I’ve come here to tell you that it is. It’s been a very long journey, but I’ve come to fetch you. To bring you back. I’ve come to tell you that a new day is dawning.”
“A new day or a very old day? All days are new and yet no dawn is new, for every day for all time has begun with the rising of the sun and every day for all time will begin with the rising of the sun. All days, then, are unique onto themselves and yet all days have the same natural structure and rhythm and ordering – though seasonal variation does provide some change to that pattern.”
He looked out of the window where the cold frost of early March had given way to warm flowers and cool shade, green leaves where once were buds, green grass where once was grey. The morning sun lit up a blue sky and the world seemed to have grown younger.
The traveler grinned. “Yes,” he said. “I meant to say that, too. An old day. It has been a long time, perhaps too long. But there has been a change. Well. That is. A return, I suppose. A natural variation, if you will.”
“You mean that in the natural rhythm and course of events, truths which were forgotten have been remembered or uncovered, because their very nature and the very nature of mankind requires that there will always be a remembrance – when the experience of folly has endured for long enough that even the most stubborn of fools must reckon with the failure of mankind’s experiments.”
The traveler, who was on the younger side, grinned again. The older man seemed to take that as a sign of his youth. The young man’s face wasn’t youthful, but it did not yet bear the scars and lines of age. Though his face was already showing hints settling into a world-weary set, and his eyes were beginning to take on something of fatalism, he retained a buoyancy and a haleness.
“You have come quite a very long way on your own to tell us this,” said the older fellow.
“Yes,” the younger man said with a toss of his head, as if to indicate that, though the journey had indeed been perilous and the winter snows had indeed bitten his hands and the winter winds had indeed tried his mettle, he wasn’t proud. “But the way back, we will be together.”
“Perhaps,” said the older man, as if he doubted what he perceived to be an unfortunate optimism. “If what you say is true and they have come to their senses, why are you alone?”
“I believe him,” cut in the young woman sitting to their side, who was probably the older man’s daughter. Her face was young, but it had a maturity and a poise – there was almost an aristocratic quality to the line of her jaw and her nose and her shoulder-length hair. “I will go. I will return. I believe that what this man says is true and it is time. It is the time that we have been waiting for.”
Her voice had had a musical quality and there was life in her eyes. She smiled when she spoke, like the traveler. She had waited up to now to speak, but her words were clear and direct and she seemed at once both on her father’s side and yet unafraid to correct him.
“That is because you haven’t waited long enough yet. You still expect our time to come any day. I have waited my whole life. It was my grandfather who went to the wilderness when he was your age. My father waited his entire life and died waiting.”
“I’ve heard stories about your grandfather,” said the young man with a smile.
“Have you?” asked Russ flatly.
“The legends aren’t hard to find if you know where to look.”
“And those legends led you out here, did they?”
“The signs were there for those who knew how to read them.”
“Indeed.”
“Father, you know as well as I that the signs and legends were left on purpose in order to bring about this very moment. At last, we are to return. Civilization is calling its defenders home for one more battle.”
The young man smiled at her. She turned to look at him as her father continued to display obstinance. “What is your name?” she asked him.
“Rone,” he told her.
“I’m Astor,” she replied.
At that moment, a hard-faced woman with black hair beginning to show the first signs of grey came into the room. She looked to be the young woman’s mother.
“This is the messenger, then,” she said, although she hadn’t known of Rone’s arrival until that very moment. “The one we have been waiting for.”
“So he says,” said the old man.
The woman, presumably his wife, reprimanded him. “If he says he is then he is,” she said. “It’s a thousand miles back to the kingdom’s nearest border. To come this far, to find us, he had to know what he was about.”
“What’s the guarantee that he isn’t some fool who thinks the moment is ripe when the moment is not ripe and may, in fact, never come?”
“There is no guarantee. There is no guarantee of anything, as you well know. But a young man who could decipher the signs and to understand enough to come and look for us, and to want to come and look for us, to have come all this way and survived in the wilderness for some many months, can’t be a fool.”
“What if it’s a trap?”
“Blast it, Russ, can’t you see beyond the pessimism of your years? You’ve given up already and that’s one thing your father made us swear never to do.”
The old man looked at her for a long moment. “Very well,” he told her. “Gather the others.”
“You’ll go?” asked the young woman, standing up out of her chair and smiling at her father. Her eyes were shining and Rone realized for the first time that he hadn’t seen a young woman his age in half a year. For that matter, he hadn’t seen another person for half a year.
The old woman nodded at her husband, then turned and left the room.
And so they set out, the men and women of the wilderness – a firm band of some few hundred, their faces set, their backs to the rising sun – to return to the cities of men. Some worried of what they would find there, but Rone reassured those he could that many in the cities had grown tired of folly. They wanted civilization, and they yearned for a time when men and women could be free.
At night, he would walk among the campfires and tell stories to those assembled. “They aren’t sure exactly what they want,” he said, “but there is a readiness among most to throw aside the obscurantism and petty envies that have served them so poorly. There is a memory among the older subjects that life was not always this bad, that their parents and grandparents had told stories of a time when the kingdoms of the world weren’t weak, when the bridges in the cities weren’t crumbling, and when bandits didn’t prey upon travelers in daytime less than a day’s ride from the gates.”
“What do they know of such times?”
“They know that the possibility of a better life is within the reality of this world, and they believe that they have lost or forgotten something, something which if they find it might help them to gain that possibility for their children and grandchildren.”
“And you were sent to find us?”
“So, to speak.”
“Just you?”
“There are a few in that land who have discerned the truth and I was among their number. Many are older and in ill health and I was chosen to go and to go alone because I was young and healthy and hearty enough to withstand the journey.”
“A few who discerned the truth? A boy and old men?”
“The people aren’t ready for the truth. But they are ready to give up on these novel ideologies and social experiments. They are ready for a return – they want the old and tested, and they wish to be rid of the new and untested, but they need someone to teach them the old ways again.”
Rone found that many of the women and some of the older men were more skeptical of his reassurances than the younger men. Among the men closest to his age, and especially among the children and boys, there was an eagerness, an earnestness that Rone already found himself to be losing. For his whole life, people had told Rone that he was an old soul, and he had felt that he must be. But now, he began to feel old. No longer could he share in that eager earnestness, save for brief occasions. Perhaps it was his long journey alone and now the rigors of the return journey and having to reassure so many men and women older than himself, but he felt tired. A weariness was settling upon him and a touch of sadness. He realized how long and hard the fight would be upon their return to the cities of men, and he realized that no such battle was ever won, for there ever existed in the hearts and nature of men envy and a desire for security. Mankind would never be free of the temptation to meddle in things that were going well, when those things should be left well enough alone. It wasn’t natural to the human mind to believe in order that created itself and managed itself and ran itself without any help.
But the weariness left him and the eagerness returned whenever he saw Astor. She smiled at him whenever she saw him and there was a buoyant quality to her. Over the journey, Rone would come to know that this wasn’t born of a youthful naivete or a natural optimism, but of intention.
On one particularly tiring day, Rone asked her how should could maintain such good cheer. “Are you not weary?” he asked.
She looked off into the trees and then back at him and her eyes had dimmed slightly, though they maintained a wryness.
“Of course I am, Rone,” she said, “but why should that mean I need to let it wear me down?”
“You are always in such good spirits,” he said. “It makes me feel better just to see that.”
She gave him a knowing smile. “It makes everyone feel better to see someone in good spirits, someone who has managed to keep the journey and the uncertain prospect of success and the uncertain welcome awaiting us from getting him or her down,” she said. “It lets people know what is possible for them.”
Rone stared at her. “So, you are saying that it’s on purpose?” he asked. “Is it hard sometimes?”
“Of course it is hard. Why should that keep me from doing it when it has such good effect?”
“Well, I don’t know. I just wonder how you do it. I know I’m very tired and your father is and so many of our fellows are very worried about what is to come when we arrive. How are you always able to be so calm – and to smile so much?”
“Because I try,” Astor said. “There is little a man or a woman can do concerning much of what happens in the world. All that is given to us to control is that which is very particular to our own selves, but within that sphere one might be surprised at just how much control is possible if one applies effort. You could learn to smile when you do not feel like smiling, and to be cheerful when you do not feel cheerful.”
Rone stared at her for a moment in silence. “When I first met you,” he said, “you seemed very young. And now you sound very old.”
She laughed. “I’d say the same of you.” And Rone laughed, too.
Rone and Astor began spending more time together, walking alongside one another during the day and talking about the future. They talked about what would need to be done upon their return, how the work of rebuilding might go, what challenges might arise, what a project of restoration would have to entail, the need to be clear-eyed about the unlikelihood of success, the need to put down roots, and the need to raise a new generation to carry on the work – which would continue long after they were dead and buried.
“That doesn’t bother me,” said Astor, who Rone could see had something of both her father and her mother in her. “All work that is worthwhile in this world was begun far before we arrived here and will continue long after we are forgotten. For a time, our work sent my people to the wilderness and now it brings us back. You and I are but players in a process that evolves independently of our actions – not pawns in some grand design, but agents whose decisions will have ramifications we do not intend, characters within a story that has no conscious design or intention, a story we can shape, a story we share, but a story that is more than the sum of its characters’ actions. Our role is to carry on the work, to honor those who came before and to pass it on to those who will come after.”
“You say it much better than I can,” Rone said.
“Yes, but you mostly had to learn it on your own,” she replied.
Each already felt that the other might be a partner in a world that was at best curious about them, and at worst suspicious of them. Neither was willing to give voice to this yet, but each held out hope that the other might feel the same.
One night, as Rone was making what had become his customary rounds among the fires to reassure the doubters and the complainers – of whom there were many in that company of old souls and pioneers embittered by the hardships of the wilderness – he encountered the stiffest resistance he ever had. At one particular fire, some of the old men whose names he still did not know loudly gave voice to defeatism.
“We will surely fail,” one said. “Perhaps it would have been better had we stayed in the wilderness.”
“They drove us out once. And now they will welcome us back? If they remember our grandfathers at all, they will remember them as obstacles who stood in the way of societal projects, men who called out to stop the march of what was being called progress, old men and women set in their ways, who could not bear the new world and so fled from the kingdom.”
Many others began to gather around the fire. Rone grew dismayed for he felt unsure of how to answer this.
“We were doomed from the start,” said another. “Men do not want to be free. They do not want to remember. They do not want to believe the hard truths of the world – that there is so little that we can accomplish together, and that our efforts often fail. They would rather hear the sweet words of those who promise them all good things while plotting to use them. Our project can never persuade.”
Rone opened his mouth to speak, but a clear voice spoke first.
“Have you such little faith in the truth of your own ideas? Have you such little faith in yourselves?”
He turned to look. Astor had moved alongside him and she was smiling yet again. He wondered whether, at this moment, she smiled because she felt like smiling, or whether she was as tired as him, and was smiling anyway because she knew it calmed people.
“I have little doubt that we might fail,” she said. “But I also know that we might succeed. For we do not know the future yet, unless we have given up already and resolved to make it what we fear. What is more, I believe in tradition. I believe that what we have been given, what has been handed down to us is true, and that because it is true our cause has a chance. If you believe we will fail because we are so small and our enemies are so many, if you believe that we will fail because they are so strong and their project is all but a surety, you have already accepted their premise.
I do not. Their premise is false, and because it is false they must fail eventually. It may not be today, and by no means does their failure guarantee our success. But the nature of human beings is too stubborn and cannot be molded or shaped. If human action at scale is systemic and evolutionary, if grand direction cannot help but fail, then the vast forces arrayed against our success cannot be so strong as we imagine. And freedom is always only one step away.
If Rone is correct, the kingdoms that our grandparents left behind have fallen to serfdom and foulness. There is warring between the many new fiefs and duchies. Gone are the prosperous towns and the productive farms. In their place, there is squalor and famine. These are the fruits of our enemies’ strength. This is the work that they have done. You say that people may not want to be free, not really, and perhaps that is so. But one other thing is so. Neither do they wish to be slaves.
We do not know that the serfs will rally to our cause. We do not know that we will encounter success. For all we know we will all be killed and our project will be ended. But if we are correct that our ideas are true – our ideas about what human beings are and what the world is – then our lives are irrelevant to the success of the truth, which will exist whether or not we succeed in convincing our fellow men and women of it, and which will always be there whenever men and women look for it.”
She paused, closed her eyes, opened them, and spoke again. “It may be that we are wrong,” she said very slowly, still smiling. “It may be that our project is doomed and no one will remember our names. It may be that the human race will see a thousand years of serfdom, and a thousand more. But if that is to be our fate, it will not be for our lack of trying.”
Several people cheered, a couple of the old men nodded, and one of them said, “Very well then.” Rone took Astor’s hand and whispered in her ear to thank her. She met his eyes and nodded.
The next day, he recognized the mountains ahead and he knew they were mere weeks away from the kingdoms. As they neared the lands their grandparents had fled, each of the men and women and children in the company began preparing. They did not know what fate would await them, but there was an expectancy among them. Very soon, they would finally arrive. Each member of that company fervently hoped that their preparations all those many years in the wilderness would be enough.