Don Wildman: Off Limits
May 16, 2011, By Craig J. Heimbuch 5 comments
Don Wildman doesn't like fences. He doesn't like being told he can't go somewhere. It's not that he has anything against people protecting their property, it's just that he doesn't like it when people are prevented from exploring the world around them. You might expect that, with a last name like his, but he's made a career out of exploring those places you pass by every day without knowing they are there.
As the host of History Channel's "Cities of the Underworld," he turned his gaze down and explored the past by digging under the present. But with his new show "Off Limits," which premieres tonight (Monday, May 16) at 9 p.m. on the Travel Channel, Wildman is climbing fences and peering around corners, acting as a surrogate for the curious who may have always wondered what was on the other side of that wall, what's below that manhole cover.
"You do these things in life you really believe in," says Wildman. He's on a cell phone, in the back of a car snaking its way through LA's morning rush on his way to a radio interview to promote the show. "I care about history, the unknown history of this country, and I feel very lucky to be able to explore that unknown history and compile it into a really interesting way to look at a place."
It's not hard to tell that he's being genuine. He speaks with the energetic fervor of a street preacher, impatient to get the next line out before it slips his mind. You can tell this guy is an explorer, imbued with those duel qualities of curiosity and wanderlust that make it hard to imagine him doing anything else - especially sitting at a desk eight hours a day. He can't sit still, not even in the back of the car. I can hear him shuffling, offering the driver directions. This show, this opportunity, has him too excited.
Wildman is one of those guys who looks familiar when you see him, but you can't always place where you know him from. He's got one of those faces. He grew up in south Jersey, in a town of about 10,000, went to a Quaker school and, eventually, trained at The Drama Studio in London. But it's hard to imagine him as an actor, tough to picture him playing Hamlet. Indiana Jones, maybe. He's done some time on soap operas and even appeared on Martin Short's "Primetime Glick," about an obese movie show host with serious personality problems. But if every career has a cornerstone, Wildman's was set on ESPN as the host of "Men's Journal," an adventure show that aired in the 90s. He went from that to "Weird Travels" on Travel Channel before settling into his groove on "Cities of the Underworld."
That show was tailor made for a guy like Wildman - an explorer at heart, the kind of guy who likes to get his knees dirty crawling through the mud and muck of a place's history. It's a different kind of TV show, a different kind of journalism. Far removed from the stock footage and meandering voice-overs of other programs, "Cities of the Underworld" seemed to target the blue collar academic, the kind of viewer who showers after work before settling into a book about Thermopylae. Wildman seems to leap at the thought of prying back a stone and seeing what lies in the caverns behind it. He prefers to participate.
"It's amazing what you can do in this country if you're willing to sign a waiver," he says. He's talking about "Off Limits." The premise of the show is to give access to the now inaccessible, to take viewers to the urban places that once defined this country, to give a glimpse into that which was once designed to be gazed upon. "After 9/11, so much of this country has been cut off for security reasons and so there is so much that people can't see."
As an example, he offers a reservoir on top of Tennessee's Raccoon Mountain. The lake was built to power generators down slope, which in turn power nearby cities. It was built to be looked at, gazed upon. There's an overlook near the reservoir and the machinery of the pump station was painted in primary colors to make the process of moving water and making power easier to understand for school children. 'Look at that purple pump' or that 'yellow turbine.' But, with increased security concerns, Raccoon Mountain and hundreds of other places just like it are no longer open to the public. As such, a major part of our nation's history, indeed the things that make this nation work, are cut off. Out of sight, out of mind. And Wildman thinks that's a shame.
He's excited about this show, to say the least. He is both star and executive producer and, to hear him describe it, you get the sense of a man satisfied, of a lifetime of experience culminating in this moment, this opportunity. He's always had the itch to explore. As the youngest of five, the only son, Wildman admits he "got away with murder" growing up. It was not unusual for him to pack a bag and step onto the shoulder of the road, thumb out looking for a ride at an age when most of us were adapting to life in high school. "At 14," he says, "I would hitchhike up into Pennsylvania coal country." He'd tell his mom he was going and go. He just had to know what was there, had to feel the road moving beneath him.
There were other early experiences that brought him to this point. He remembers family vacations, he, his four sisters, mom and dad piling into a drag behind trailer and hitting the road. His dad, a history teacher, was on a hunt for a college job, but that thought only occurred to Wildman in retrospect. What he remembers are battlefields and college campuses, history. Couple these trips, these explorations into the past, with his natural vim and "Off Limits" seems like a childhood fantasy brought to life.
"I always felt like I was trying to track how it was before," he says. He speaks like this. He talks about strip malls and highways lines from the perspective of someone hundreds of years from now. "These are our modern hieroglyphics," he says without the slightest hint of irony or salesmanship. This is just who he is - a guy who understands that everything is temporary and in transition. It's best to try and explore it now, while you have the chance; to witness it before it's too late.
"I envy kids growing up in America these days. There's this sense of freshness," he says. He's a child of the 70s, a time when the sheen of post-war America had worn thin; a time when the Rust Belt and blight were born. But now, he says, things are being remade. Old, once-proud buildings and places are having new life breathed into them. It is gentrification, sure, but also renewal.
"I believe it's important to link those places that are being turned into condos with why they were there in the first place," he says. And that, in a nutshell, is the point of "Off Limits." It's a glance into the past so that we can understand the role it plays in the present and what it might mean in the future. It's the city beneath the city; the power plant on Mount Ranier that has been pumping electricity into Seattle for a hundred years; the POW camp in San Francisco; the proud heart of Buffalo that's been covered by time and a skin of rust. It's the sewer in Boston, buried deep beneath the surface to protect Colonial residents from cholera and continues its duty today, unknown to most of the people who live there.
"'Off Limits' is authentic," he says. "A lot of it is 'show up and see,' which can be a nightmare for production, but is also exciting. I love the challenge of telling these stories."
Yes, it's a challenge, but exploring America's cities is also a dream. It's a job without end. There are always more places to see, more stories to tell, more history to explore, more waivers to sign.
There will always be more fences for Don Wildman to climb.
"Off Limits" premiers at 9 p.m., May 16 on the Travel Channel.
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