Frontiers and TrailBlazers

        The imagery conjured up by the mention of America tends to lean towards the wild vistas painted by the lyrics of America the Beautiful, “O beautiful for spacious skies,/ For amber waves of grain,/ For purple mountain majesties/ Above the fruited plain!” Katherine Lee Bates, the lyricist of the song, showed the tremendous influence of wild Nature in the icongraphy of the ideal America, an influence that affects people within America and around the world. Today’s advertising and marketing continues to co-opt the image of American Nature in brands and commercials. Another figure that heavily influenced the image of America as the unspoiled frontier of Nature was Henry David Thoreau, due to Walden, his 1854 novel in which he recounted his experiences on Walden Pond, far from civilization.
        Nature was very important to Thoreau since he was a student of the Transcendentalist movement; a protégé of Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the founding philosophers of Transcendentalism. At the heart of Transcendentalism was the idea that Nature was the gateway to the understanding of the universe and one’s self. Isolation was required to avoid unnecessary clutter in the quest for understanding. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” Thoreau wrote, “to front only the essential facts of life...” (1692).
        In Walden, Thoreau wrote many scenes detailing the surroundings in which he was living in. This book, which later on was widely circulated, provided many people with the image of ‘unspoiled’ wilderness, perpetuating the idea of American wilderness beginning since the 1700’s such as in Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer. “Here man is free as he ought to be... [M]any ages will not see the shores of our great lakes replenished with inland nations, nor the unknown bounds of North America entirely peopled” (906).
        Thoreau took painstaking care to describe his natural surroundings, to show the magnificence of Nature, helping the reader understand what he was talking about when he began expounding on Transcendentalist concepts.
        “For the first week, whenever I looked out on the pond, it impressed me like a tarn high up the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle” (Thoreau, 1689).
        The graphic imagery should be able to strike a chord in all readers, for all readers most likely have seen a similar scene at least once in their lives. The pond’s reflection, mentioned above, is also repeated several times by Thoreau. Another reference is when he spoke of the calm after a rainstorm when “the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself” (1690). The reflections in the water subtly bring to mind Thoreau’s task at the secluded location, time spent reflecting on Life and Nature and himself.
        The metaphorical use of mist as ghosts could be interpreted in different ways. One is almost literal: Walden Pond was two miles away from Concord Battle Field, site of a Revolutionary War battle. Another interpretation is almost the same: the ghosts were the past manifested.
        Thoreau’s mentor, Emerson, stated in his essay Self-Reliance, that “corpse of your memory” had to be set aside in order for an individual to be able to understand himself and move on into the future (1560). Thoreau could be using the ghost metaphor to represent his own past.
        Also, the ghosts possibly could be the ghosts of others’ pasts- the pasts of people who had once lived there. The occupant of an apartment or old home could be oppressively aware of the fact that someone else once lived where they are at. These ghosts could be escaped by settling at a place far from civilization, a place where no one has been before. Thoreau emphasizes the isolation of his surroundings by comparing the location of Walden Pond with spots in constellations, such as places “near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair... or at an equal remoteness from the life I had left behind” (1690).
        This kind of imagery and language gave rise to the idea that for one to really enjoy life, it had to be lived in the wilds, as close to Nature as possible and as far away from people. The last new frontier, readers could conclude, was in new America, as promised by Crèvecoeur and described by Thoreau. Acres and acres of land were available for people to own and live on, close to true Nature. That was what Thoreau did in a small hut by Walden Pond. Nowadays, that hut has probably been paved over to make a parking lot for rows of sport utility vehicles and other automobiles bearing names that invoke American Nature, such as Liberty, Frontier, Mustang, or TrailBlazer.
        As mentioned earlier, today’s advertising takes advantage of the deeply ingrained image of the wilderness of America. On page 2, section E of the Dallas Morning News’s auto classifieds, the lists of automobile names read like a list of natural wilderness buzzwords: Cherokee, Wrangler, Pathfinder, Blazer, TrailBlazer, Escape, Explorer, Excursion, Expedition, et cetera, ad nauseum.
        The denotations of the names are straightforward. However, the fact that Americans have a cultural history of the American wilderness, as established by writers like Thoreau, Mark Twain, and others, it is almost impossible to avoid the intended and uniquely American connotations of the names. Wrangler brings to mind the cowboys roping cattle. A car named TrailBlazer certainly should be able to drive where others can’t drive. The branding has already been done for the advertisers, since the 1700’s.
        Car marketers don’t rely on words alone to invoke the traditional imagery of unspoiled Nature. Print ads and television commercials show the vehicles driving over rough terrain, canopied forest trails and rocky mountain roads, with nary a sign of civilization in sight.
        One particular advertisement for the Jeep Liberty casts the vehicle’s name in an differing allusion to an American ideal. It shows the vehicle parked atop the Statue of Liberty’s upraised hand, replacing the golden torch. This is a visual example of articulation. The denotation of liberty can be broad: freedom, no restrictions, freedom of choice, etc. This applies perfectly to the untamed American landscape. However, the combination of the vehicle and the statue makes another American connotation of liberty unavoidable, the liberty of American democracy. Ironically, the statue is the product of France.
        The aforementioned ironic digression aside, ironies and paradoxes do abound in this method of advertising cars and trucks. In today’s society, there are less and less pristine lands untouched by humans in America. Inversely, the desire to ‘get away from it all’ has increased due to the stresses of everyday life. However, when everyone wants to get away, they all go to the same places- South Dakota, Yosemite Park, Big Bend Forest, or South Padre Island. They drive in their gas guzzling and carbon monoxide emitting vehicles, named Explorer, Blazer, or something else suitably rugged, polluting the air as they go. They drive on a network of gray and black highways, created by bulldozing through amber waves of grain, tunneling through the purple mountains’ majesties and draining inconveniently located ponds. Thoreau would be aghast.
        Another irony is that Thoreau and Emerson were against the concept of travel. “Travel is a fool’s paradise,” Emerson wrote in Self-Reliance (1569). Thoreau wrote in Walden, “If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails... but go to tinkering with our lives to improve them, who will build railroads?... But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads?” (1693). To their transcendental philosophies, travel was a waste of time, time better spent on one’s self improvement.
        The ideal of the rugged Nature of America continues in today’s society, over a hundred years after Thoreau epitomized it in Walden, although the reality is that what once was abundant from sea to sea, is less available. This fact doesn’t stop automobile manufacturers from continuing to capitalize on American Nature with well chosen iconic words for their vehicles.

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