Wilderness of the Mind
No man is an island entire of
itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a
promontory were, as well as any manner
of thy friends or of thine own were; any
man's death diminishes me, because I am
involved in mankind. And therefore never
send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
MEDITATION XVII Devotions upon
Emergent Occasions
John Donne
When my grandfather was 92 years
old he met me in the Marble Mountain Wilderness and shouldered his aluminum-frame
backpack into the woods. In and around
Haypress meadows, he marveled at the wild flowers, naming them, identifying them,
remembering them, and saying goodbye. We
slept next to a fire and he warmed water from an old teakettle over the open
flames and made us oatmeal for breakfast.
He had on his old leather corks and blue jeans with suspenders and a
rundown full-brim hat. I was almost
embarrassed by my “fancy” gear. His
knees wouldn’t allow him to hike the ridgelines up into the high lakes. He wanted to go see Big Elk Lake; it is where
he wants his ashes spread one day.
Unfortunately, he will probably never see it again while alive, and he
seemed to graciously accept that as he urged me to go on into the wilderness without
him…and I did.
*
The Wilderness Act turned 50 a few
days ago and I have been thinking about wilderness all summer as I travelled to
a few of them, escaped to their half-frozen lakes, and crossed scree fields and
snow banks. When I had my 4x4 van a few
years ago I was travelling to national parks and wilderness areas and I
actually contacted a few publishers trying to write about all the wildernesses
in America in celebration of the 50th anniversary, but I never
did. The historic September 3rd
day passed without much notice by most people.
I love the history of wilderness in America. Arthur Carhart, as a landscape architect and
city planner recommending Trapper Lake in the White River National Forest to be
preserved for its “scenic value.” Bob
Marshall, who died at my age, was one of the founding members, along with
Leopold, of the Wilderness Society. Aldo
Leopold’s wolf’s green-fire eyes dying and his consciousness rising, a land
ethic developing to “preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the
biotic community.” Sigurd Olson, Olaus
Murie, and Zahniser; Howard Zahniser who authored the Wilderness Act in 1956, struggling
in Washington, toiling for 8 years to pass legislation only to die months
before Johnson signs the bill. But here
it is, “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where
man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
*
I do go and hike for almost two weeks by myself. I ramble my way up and down paths and follow maps to different lakes: Monument, Meteor, Onemile, Cuddihy, Ukonom, Spirit, Rainy, and eventually, Big Elk Lake. I photograph each flower I find to take back to my grandfather and share with him. I stand atop Marble Mountain, remove my clothes and immerse myself in the depth of nature. I eventually hike down back to Big Elk only to find a large group of horse packers. I shamefully hope they weren’t watching me stand naked on the mountain. Maybe, we are never alone.
Wilderness is a social
construction. So much of modern human
thought separates us from nature, creates false boundaries and I am beginning
to grow weary of them. I have learned to
think about our wilderness areas differently.
They are no more untrammeled by humans than any other fence or park
boundary. We have them because early
European settlers were very efficient at killing the people who once lived and
managed this land.
*
It has been a long summer and
school is back in full swing again. Fall
is in the nights, but not the days yet, and Chico and I hike up along the
cliffs of the park to capture time lapses and write, to get away from the
hustle of college students. The haze and
smoke of the valley feels claustrophobic.
We hike out to the edge of the cliffs, the sun still oppressive, but it
keeps others away and we find solitude here.
Rich greens and blues emerge from the miasma in the valley, the last
fires of summer, lightening relaxing.
The sun plunges behind dark clouds, and half the valley is in shadows, the
other half pressed by heat, but as the sun slips down beneath the smoke, the
orange glow creeps back across neighborhoods and fields approaching the cliffs
again. I watch the basking basalt for
more light, watch the tones brighten.
Just as the sun ignites back onto the cliff side, I hear the whine of a
drone flying above me.
It
frightens Chico and he circles against me and looks up to make sure I am aware
of the presence. It flies directly over
us, and across the canyon, turns up the north rim, and heads north. What a beautiful piece of technology so often
terribly used.
*
I used to worship wilderness. When most young boys dreamed of parties and
drinking, and football games, I longed for a river. When I moved to Alaska, I would spend hours
watching eagles dalliance in the thermals from the changing tides in the Karluk
lagoon. In Utah, things changed; I read
deeper. I met professors who studied
these concepts in Africa, where the idea of National Parks and wilderness areas
were exported at great costs to the people living in these areas. I read Cronon’s essay, The Trouble with
Wilderness; or, Getting back to the Wrong Nature where he challenged the long
held idea by Thoreau that in “wildness is the preservation of the world.” And me too.
I had carried a rock to Thoreau’s small cabin. Slid on frozen Walden Pond on my belly. I even argued with an old boss who tried to
show me it wasn’t the wilderness per se.
I used to worship the old mountain men, wrote songs about Kit Carson,
but I knew there was a problem. Carson
was amazing to me. Here was a true
mountain man; he could speak two-dozen native dialects, spent more time
trapping and living off the western lands than any European of the time. And yet, I once landed a canoe on Bloody
Island on the Sacramento River too. I
read about how Carson called it a beautiful massacre. It is disputed a bit, but it is true that he
poisoned wells and killed livestock in order to force Navajo people into
reservations. He wasn’t a nice
person. All that time in the mountains,
along streams, and living off the land didn’t make him peaceful. The wilderness was harsh; death was
imminent. Most mountain men were never
seen again.
When I used
to lead trips into Utah, I fell in love with “Abbey” country. I thought, as Abbey proclaimed, you had to
crawl on your bloodied knees to see the wilderness. You had to sacrifice something to be worthy
of such profound beauty. But then I read
more, listened deeper than the red rocks, about how the cliff dwellings were created
during a time of warfare and scarcity of resources. People fought and killed over dwindling water
and food as the south became more arid.
As Roderick Nash once explained, “wilderness” was not the garden, but
the savage and deserted. Wilderness was
Kurtz’ domain. And our view of wilderness has changed. Wilderness is a cultural
construct. As Cronon explained, culture
shaped these perceptions of wilderness from Wordsworth, Thoreau, to Muir’s
Yosemite cathedrals. I have come to a
place in my world where thoughts and language are not something we posses
alone, but with one another. Those
deepest and most revered inner sanctuaries of our minds are not solely ours. Muir’s thoughts, like those of Leopold and
Carhart, were not their own, but a cultural movement afoot where “great men”
don’t exist out there inventing ideas.
We do it. We all do
it…together. And this divide of human
and nature is killing us, as it does the oceans. What have we learned from Rachel Carson?
We travel out into wilderness areas
with all our costly technological inventions of Gore-Tex, polyester, nylon, and
carbon fiber trekking poles, graphite tent poles, aluminum tent stakes,
synthetic replications of down wrapped in nylon baffles and blow-up
mattress…all of it made by cheap labor in other countries except for those rich
few who might buy custom made bags in America.
It is almost impossible to buy an American made backpack. There is one company I know about. We say we are going to get away from hustle
and bustle of cities. It is a
farce. I do think there is value in
self-reflection and trying to understand the way culture influences. I think we should learn to push the
boundaries of those cultures and communities—expansion, diffusion, and entropy. And nostalgia plays a role in uniting our
past with our present. We must remember,
but understand how memory is false, malleable, and amorphous. The beauty of the land we protect gives me
hope, but I am beginning to realize the real hope for a future is not in
wilderness, except the way wilderness is in our minds.
*
The drone returns along the
southern ridge, and dives along a small arête; it seems to be gliding into
thermals to try and catch winds rushing up these jutting ridgelines where the
entire canyon narrows. The plane begins
to dive and swirl like fighter pilots…like falcons. It crosses back across the canyon and banks
high off the other side, then dives back along the arête towards the river and
zooms up the southern side again. I am
mesmerized by the piloting, by the acrobatic dance of machine and man and
wonder from where the controllers watch and pilot. When I first saw it I assumed it was on GPS
coordinates as some of them are, but this one is flying, and skirts the sky and
wind like a bird with such familiarity, it careens up right over a grove of
digger pines, races out into an open and then begins to spin downward like
eagles fucking and falling; it doesn’t stop.
It thumps to ground and there is silence. The movements were so alive while it danced
in the thermals it makes the silence gut wrenching in the way any death
feels. It is miles from where any people
might easily access it. I kind of
picture Leopold watching the green fire die from wolves. I hate watching death. In Alaska, each day, every day, sometimes
hundreds of fish, I would hold them in my arms, crash large stones across their
heads and feel the spasm of life leave them and I learned to hate it. Once they stopped moving; I could almost
breathe again, swallow a bit, ask forgiveness, but I never understand whom I
was asking. The fish? A god?
The river? The earth? As much as I know death is a natural part of
the system, I don’t wish it upon anything, nor do I wish to hasten time.
I watch
ridgelines to see human motion hiking down to retrieve this alien technology
from alien landscapes, but how often humans have dreamt for wings. I can only imagine the millions of years of
humans watching sunsets as birds ride thermals from the emanating black
rock. Here. Right where I am sitting, surely for
thousands of years people have watched the same sun set across the same valley,
as birds mock our grounded existence in a ballet of movements with the
wind. Do we do anything as graceful?
*
My grandfather is 97 now. We hope he will make his 100th
birthday. He refuses to use a walker or
a wheelchair and gets around on crutches.
I don’t tell him about the trips I do into the mountains now because I
can see the way it disappoints him. He
tells me, soon, as soon as I get this knee, or this hip, or this leg fixed, I
will be back out there. Crutches are
just temporary. Surely, he will be back
out there again soon.
My father and I go each summer now
into the woods together along with my younger brother if he is free. This year we went into the White Cloud
Mountains, east of the Sawtooth Range.
My dad usually picks the routes, and they are treacherous, long,
exposed, perilous, and leading to some of the most spectacular views and fishing. This year was no different. We summited little known Patterson Peak,
going off trail, and descended a terribly rocky scree field into a half frozen
Glacier Lake. At 62, my father is still
nimble and eager and I hope I have him as a backpacking partner for another 30
years. I know of no other person with
whom I would want out there with me. We come from a lineage of people who head
outside to get away from everything. My
dad has a difficult time finding people his own age that will hike and hunt, or
hike and fish. He goes with younger
people each year and usually walks them into the ground. 
I often question my desire to be
alone and away. I am learning it is not
the wilderness land, but wilderness mind.
Because if it is humans I am trying to escape, or human intervention I
am trying to avoid, then the deception is in my own mind. And maybe our modern society needs such
deception. We need to feel as if we can
stand naked on a peak and think we are the only people to have done such
events; surely I am the only person to have touched this rock, this tree; and
this wildflower blooms for my chance encounter with this beauty and no one else
will every witness this one moment.
Humans are explorers. The need to
explore is deep in our evolutionary and cultural history. But where do we go now where other humans
have not and why? Or, do we focus on
Leave No Trace so as to make each area feel as if no other humans have set foot
here to have a fleeting feeling of nostalgia?
Must we recognize the way our privilege, class, and even race allow us
to create such western experiences? Must
we realize that the equipment we use to minimize impact in one area of the world
creates devastation, poverty, and environmental degradation in other parts by
other people? Do we try to coopt native
skills and native traditions to harmonize with ecology? Is this possible with the population the way
it is? Or do only a few of us get such
experiences? Do we carry people away
from cities for short trips into wilderness areas and tell them the reality of
the city is false, and the wilderness is more real? Or do we acknowledge that wilderness is just
another type of park, a place for tourists to go to experience one kind of
reality?
I’ll never forget hiking a long
remote beach after a long dugout canoe ride along the southern part of
Madagascar. We woke in the morning to
find people all around our tents, preparing for a day of harvesting food from
the ocean, watching as we packed our belongings back into our packs. What were we doing just sleeping where they
worked? Or maybe it is the little
villages tucked deep into the mangrove parks in Guatemala—dirt floor dance
parties in the humid heat of the tropics.
I have always loved cultures moving with the moon and tide. I loved that movement in Alaska, breakfast to
dinner, and even visitation of neighbors across the lagoon dictated by the
distant pull of the moon on water. Maybe
the more you learn about how the system works, the more connected you find your
life at all places and times and the less “wild” the whole experience becomes
because I can sit here on a rocky outlook above the town of Chico, CA, and
watch the sun set and a drone crash, and watch the city lights ignite like a
sun moving through smoke clouds, and hear the death bell tolls, and see the
whole thing as wild and wonderful and know that while I sat here the earth spun
around the sun, the sun around the galaxy as the galaxy blasted out to the
Great Attractor; we have moved millions of miles. There is always change and
movement, endless and relentless movement.
Nothing stays the same and that is the real wild part of life; even the
most patterned part of existence is on a path towards change. The most untrammelled place by man is right
now, in this very second. The future,
intimately connected to this moment, is endless wilderness.
