Jack Turner’s The Abstract Wild is a complex argument that discusses many issues and
ultimately defends the wild in all of its forms. He opens the novel with a narrative story about a
time when he explored the Maze in Utah and stumbled across ancient pictographs. Turner tells
this story to describe what a truly wild and unmediated experience is. The ideas of the aura,
magic, and wildness that places contain is introduced in this story. Turner had a spiritual
connection with the pictographs because of the power, beauty, and awe that they created within
him upon their first mysterious contact. Turner ruined this unmediated experience by taking
photographs of the pictographs and talking about them to several people. His second visit to the
pictographs was extremely different- he had removed the wild connection with the ancient mural
and himself by publicizing and talking about them. This is Turner’s main point within the first
chapter. He......
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