Chuck Hoffman spoke with Sojourners about living in the remote wilderness during a global pandemic. He and Peg Carlson-Hoffman are executive directors of Holden Village.
“THERE AREN’T ROADS beyond here; it’s trails and wilderness—wilderness that goes all the way up into Canada.
There’s something to the phrase ‘the pursuit of less.’ We try to live close to the land and what the land is able to do or produce; we live within that rather than our own will of what the ‘good life’ is.
We’re closed to the public and new arrivals until at least the end of August. This is providing a lot of reflection time. There are no distractions, really. There’s no TV, no cell phone services—this is a satellite phone we’re on right now. But the trees and the earth and the animals and all those things are very active—and it’s almost like a reversal.
We’re on a site that used to be a mining village, and there’s a big remediation project that went on here from 2011 to 2016. When you hike out east and farther north into the wilderness, you can look back into the valley to see the scar of remediation. It’s always a reminder of the consumption and the world’s depleting the land—it’s not sustainable.
I think about the physical wilderness and navigating the power of the earth, but also the wilderness we’re all in right now, whether it’s the COVID-19 pandemic or the issues of racism that are coming so powerfully to light. That feels like wilderness as well. ‘I will make a way in the wilderness,’ from Isaiah 43, comes to mind.”
Chuck Hoffman is executive director of Holden Village, a Lutheran education center in the Cascade mountains in Washington state.
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