Prologue:
I am traveling in the northernmost reaches of South Korea, along the DMZ, and a friend has given me a kind of special task: To visit the area he worked in as a young Lieutenant after entering the army in 1964 for what would become a long and fruitful career. The area was given an American code name, Spoonbill, and the Internet has told me it isn't too far east of the Visitors area of the DMZ. I find myself, after waking up in a Love Motel, which seem to exist almost everywhere in South Korea that you could possibly need a room at good rates, chatting with a group of South Korean soldiers manning a checkpoint on a bridge over the Imjin River at Jangpa-Ri...
The Imjin is the major river that runs along the Western DMZ from up into North Korea at it's headwaters. It divides the two countries for about a quarter of the border, and joins the mighty Han, the river of Seoul, downstream from Seoul to flush into the Yellow Sea near the now famous Inchon. The soldiers are a genial bunch, and the one who speaks English, a recruit Corporal or Sergeant ( I can't totally tell their ranks), still in his required time but doing well, is quite smart. He had spent two years in college in the US before returning home for his military obligation, and his almost accent-less English is fluid and disarming. They are all modern children of Korea, grew up with conveniences and a good education, movies, music, phones and books, but they are soldiers, and you can tell they can be tough underneath by the standards of modern teens. It becomes clear that my little quest might end here. The bridge, where my friend has described his base being about a half mile across, is what is called the Civilian Line of Control, and without a permit, not hard to obtain, or without being a farmer working in there, I can't go any further... they couldn't be nicer in explaining this, and submit to me asking questions about the area and telling me stories.. it's morning on guard duty, and there don't appear to be any North Korean hordes coming anytime in the next half hour. it's not on the daily bulletin anyhow... our conversation is broken by bouts of patriotic music, and a group of former comrades in arms who come up to say hi to their old unit, now just an hour away from their cushy modern life in Seoul. it's fun, and I can see they care about their work and each other. As I speak with them, watching the bridge, and the river, and the wild bluffs on the other side, I see waterfowl and wonder about clams on the bottom of the river. it looks like the Hudson in late fall, or a smaller river, the Housatonic, or any number of Appalachian Rivers, and it feels strangely peaceful despite the North Korean presence hanging 3 or 4 kilometers north of us like a Damocles Sword.They talk of their role as a speed bump to these hoards, humorously, proudly, and nervously. Their forward Platoon gets locked in for a month at a time, and is a success if it slows the DPRK advance by something like 5 minutes. The rest of the company guards this bridge and patrols the area with the meticulousness of newly minted men, and their stories are interesting, but it remarks to me what they find remarkable.. not much happens, but there was a time when some guys from their company, including one of the guys who just showed up to visit, captured a North Korean defector and got two weeks leave... but another story struck me even deeper, showing how basic training does not make a country boy, cannot compensate for life in the wild, interaction with true nature. They talk of the rumors of Tigers in the DMZ jokingly, but they tell me a story that they find dramatic: On guard, they are watching the actual DMZ, the open territory between the posts, and a civilian enters. They watch him with interest.. this could be a portent of any number of things, and anything happening at all in that zone is a big deal.. the North Korean man has a rifle, but he isn't there to hunt people. They watch with almost horror through sophisticated night vision equipment as the man stalks a deer, takes it, and drags it back to the North Korean line.. he then appears to gut it, and begin selling the meat to the guards on that side.
By Korean standards, this area is a wilderness, and to these products of urban south Korea, where even a farm town has high rises and a modern town center, this is behavior that does not exist in their modern lives. Hunting no longer really happens in South Korea.
I head east from here a few villages for another night, and am pleased to find my friend had patrolled through the area I end up in as well, as well as had spent time in the village above the bridge where I stopped for lunch and paused for photos, so that I am exploring his experience. I climb up on a ridge that feels like a managed forest, but with trenches in place an strung with communications wire almost everywhere I look. I peek north from high points near a cemetery, into and across the DMZ to forested ridges beyond, and ponder how wild it might be in the places I can't visit. I resolve to at least take the DMZ tour, see what I can learn. I hitch hike and take buses back to Munsan and arrange for the next day.
Most people would think I was joking if I said we had something to thank North Korea for. It's a lonely position to be in to say anything good about the world's last Stalinist dictatorship, which continues to outlive almost the word it's self, since Albania, whose dictatorship crumbled back in 2005, was the other last place where communism and the bizarre led to some externally sad but internally horrifying situations like this.. North Korea is now 'Sine Pare', without equal. I guess we just got a taste of the collapse of dictatorship in the Ukraine, in the hard fought spring of 2014, but while it was weird, the guy had one heck of a house, no-one would call it Stalinist, which is a term really reserved for oppressively dictatorial, cult of personality based and genocidal left wing regimes... but here it is, 2014, and the wall came down in 1989, and by 1990, many of the other Stalinist odd balls like Romania and, well, Albania, (it's kind of a short list, Belorus is a dictatorship, but the guy plays hockey, it's kind of just a local arrangement, and Cuba certainly ain't all right, but it's not really Stalinist either, and Yugoslavia was liberal despite the reign of Tito, and even China loosened up from Stalinism after the death of Mao), had given up and gone democratic as quick as you could get there in high tops and a track suit. North Korea is in a unique position, It's quite.... 'Ronrey'...
Now imagine Korea if you will. These are an industrious people. They have been living on this peninsula for thousands of years developing a distinct culture and even cuisine and language from either of their bigger neighbors, China and Japan, despite subjugation by I believe Japan for a good 40 years at the beginning of the last century, and some domination by China I suspect. they are like Asian Arcadians, or Kurds, between a rock and a hard place. They formed alone, on this rugged 100 and something mile wide peninsula, that feels like Western Pennsylvania or West Virginia. The mountains aren't too high, the highest peak in the country being a 9000 ft volcano, I believe with a lake, on the Chinese border, but near the DMZ, which runs near the highest mountains in the south it's still about 6000 to the summit of most. But they seem to go straight up and straight down wherever you look. They actually cover most of the country except for some alluvial planes on the West side of both the north and south nations, where both their capitols lie. Before I visited Korea, the word 'Rugged' felt like a descriptive Cliche. Now that I have been there, I can't think of a better word. And it's people, the older the more so, have this rugged resilience.. the are the kind of people who smile when they fall down.. laugh when they make a mistake, and keep at it. it's a tough, pretty little place. But population growth, war, and poverty took their toll. Dominated by Japan as a Colony for so long, mistreated, and then, just 5 years after liberation, launched into a great civil war which ranged almost the entire land, from the Pusan Perimeter in the very south to the Yalu River in the north. A more wide ranging civil war could hardly occur, as if the American Civil War were to Range from Miami to the St Lawrence, leaving only Maine and the Florida Keys untouched. And while every social class has it's consequence on the Environment, that of the poor tends to be the most immediate and visible.. they gobble up everything useful within a days walk for firewood, growing, and other immediate needs. I know someone who described South Korea for me in 1964, when he fought there with the lid on the war, but the pot still occasionally boiling over. He said the ridge lines were denuded and not much nature was left, between the war and peoples appetites. to visit the South now, some 50 years later, is to see much progress in this respect. While it's not natural progression, they planted tree's along all the ridge lines, and guard their forests as national assets, many as parks, some as strategic resources, others as strategic hiding points (lined with pre-dug and radio wired trenches I will add, since almost every time I went into the woods I felt like I bumped into a prepared infantry position of some sort, inevitably oriented towards the north), but the point remains, while almost every flat spot in the nation is either inhabited or farmed, just about every hill has a tree growing on it in South Korea in the Teens of the 21's Century. And they are even wise about urban growth.. almost every town, no matter how small, has a high rise to preserve the farm land. They work hard to survive.
Now not having seen the north (other than from Binoculars on my DMZ tour, and in literature and film), I can only go with what I hear and can see from satellite photos, but the jist is that outside of some major National Parks that the DPRK displays with pride to anyone who will come visit and listen to their loony justifications, the state of their nature is that which you would expect from a very poor country. They farm any good land they can, they eat any animal not tied down, and they are so short of petroleum products, that like Haiti or Zimbabwe, their forests exist but are hard hit and nothing close to complete food webs. So this brings us back to the DMZ and my Thesis.. there is one place that man can only walk but not linger in the whole country, with 3 notable exceptions, and that is the DMZ. And while the DMZ was designated in negotiations to be 4km wide, and 250 km or 160 miles long, running east to west about half way down the peninsula, (roughly where the front line settled in the last two years of the very hot war after the Chinese entered and chased the UN back south from the Yalu), it is in effect wider, since the South has instituted something called the Civilian Line of Control, which tends to sit about 3 mile south of the center line, and the north no doubt has some similar arrangement to, ahem, maintain security, and not as you might assume, prevent people from flooding south in untold numbers so they can get a decent plate of Bulgogi for the first time in their lives (instead, they head to the Chinese border for that, where they then travel all the way to Thailand in many cases, seeking asylum in the Korean embassy there). So we are left with a 6 mile or so wide strip of land more or less across the whole peninsula, which does contain some military installations, more than a few mine fields, some guard posts, and even some now famous tunnels, but on the whole, it's left to it's own devices naturally, and has been since about 1953, 61 years and counting.
Now it's not managed as a park, for obvious reasons. It can be assumed that the soldiers, North, South, American, thousands of them concentrated here you must realize, clear their fields of fire, and they patrol pretty constantly. There is a fence from what I know that runs the length of the actual middle line, but despite all that, there is a green strip visible on satellite running from the Han River to the Sea Of Japan coast over the mountains to the east.
This is not to say i'ts perfect. There was a tradition of burning the land near Seoul on the DMZ by the north to make it easier to see people coming, but hopefully this practice is dying. but burning natural lands is still mare natural than settling it thickly.
If you take the DMZ tours that are pretty constantly peddled to foreign travelers in the hotels and traditional hostels of Seoul, you will go to the same 4 or 5 places, the Peace Village, the Peace Park, The Peace Industrial Park with the Toothy Smile of George W Bush hanging over it, complete with a train station waiting for the day North Korea decides to give up and send commuters to Seoul, the Invasion tunnels so shockingly but determinedly dug by the ADPRK, the hilltop observation post looking off to the north, and maybe Panmunjom it's self (you gotto book early for this one!) but if you have time to think about what you are seeing, and aren't overwhelmed by the recent human history around you, you start to notice that it's a pretty chill place. It feels like you are off in the forest from the moment the soldiers step on to calmly, officiously, but not intimidatingly check your name and welcome you over the Civilian Line of Control and into the DMZ on the bridge next to the peace park. Once through, it's like the land of the lost, like a forgotten part of perhaps West Virginia or Eastern Kentucky, with some well maintained roads and a few soldiers hanging about, jogging or playing volleyball even. it's a temperate deciduous forest, and it doesn't necessarily impress from what I saw with the size of it's trees, the grandeur of old growth, but it's nonetheless established and growing nicely, uniformly with the exception of some scattered fields. I can now imagine this growing all the way to the Sea of Japan, and what we have then is a greenway to begin with. Imagine if there was a 6 mile strip of land from Maine to Puget Sound along the US Canada border, or the Scottish-English Border along Hadrians Wall, and that is what we would be talking about. The border running along the Han River, with it's highway to Seoul from up north, might be a bit like where the border runs along Puget Sound or the Great Lakes, and while it doesn't preserve forest, it does preserve the river, which seemed to have no economic activity at that point.. I start to imagine the clam beds present now, right under the noses of the endless guard towers unpleasantly sandwiched between the river and the highway (they have to be dreaming that Kia or Hyundai starts making an electric car!).
If you begin to look at the numbers, it's startling.. there is a huge abundance of biodiversity cited by many sources.. it seems like almost every manner of flora and fauna that could or should be growing along that strip from even the days before the industrialization of Korea (supposedly commencing with the Japanese Takeover in 1905) is present. Many of them are for obvious reasons endangered or threatened due to the growth of populations and the various economic activities on both sides of the DMZ.
It's a fascination of many a person, and often times a used and abused symbol by organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund, to fetishize, kind of Disney market, the apex animals and predators. This has more than gone on in the fascination with this particular unintentional Preserve. It appears there is one guy who is obsessed with proving that there are Tigers in the 'Z' along with the countless species of tree, shrub, fungi, bird, rodent and apparently even The Asiatic Black Bear (for whom it would almost take an army for him to avoid being served up for his bile to cure some Rich Chinese Businessman's Gout) and an almost extinct goat species, The Long Tailed Goral, for whom the DMZ is home to 100 of it's perhaps 1000 or so surviving numbers. it's almost like a seed depository of the whole Korean Peninsula, the fauna and flora are so complete except for perhaps a handful of apex predators, like the Tiger, Amur Leopard, the Wolf, and Brown Bear. It's almost a distraction from what is there to call it incomplete, but perhaps it is, the way Yellowstone was before the Wolf came back. Since no one quite does sensationalism and awkwardly misses the point quite like CNN, I will allow them to demonstrate what I am talking about:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/science/05/09/tiger.tracking.dmz/
Here's the hitch... since it isn't a national park, it's a highly fortified borderland, the idea of reintroducing tigers doesn't quite makes sense, because it's tricky enough for American and Korean Soldiers to patrol worried about stepping on a mine or getting shot, let alone worrying about becoming a Tiger Meal..
But there is a persistently optimistic group that sees a day when the razor wire disappears, and the land can become a park, a friendly vestige of past insanity, with a happy ending... The DMZ Forum: http://www.dmzforum.org/
This a group dedicated to the nature of the DMZ and it's preservation. The older generation of Koreans are joiners... they like walking clubs and eating clubs and clubs of all kinds, and this is right up their alley. no one bowls alone in Korea.
It somehow strikes me as distinctly South Korean, heck, Korean period, to have such optimism that despite almost 70 years of separation, the end to all this fratricidal madness will be over soon, so we should energetically plan for it.. they have this persistence.. and the South Korean Government, which has been over this problem for a long time, but still has to deal with it daily while they create a modern society and a manufacturing if not cultural powerhouse, and act soon to be two time host of the Olympic Games (not too far from the beautiful mountains that are the east and wildest end of the DMZ!), likely supports this activity as they maintain this kind of open arms policy for the north, like leaving a bedroom open and a bed made for a runaway child...
http://www.dmzforum.org/aboutus/ref_eco.php
Anyhow, until that runaway child sees the light and returns home, or recruits it's brother to the south into it's Utopian Worker's Paradise, we have this situation, and this time capsule of sorts to an even older Korea, an almost pre human habitation Korea as time allows the strip to mature.. and with these eager hands ready to make the most of it, to treasure this ecological treasure no matter what happens, it is a treasure to all, and a fortunate accident indeed, perhaps the only way one could save such a swath from such determined hands as a united Korea would industriously be... the spirits work in strange and mysterious ways, don't they? and they seem to be at work here...
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