A lone raven, surfing a wind that is skimming the far side of the mountain, croaks and appears over the ridgetop. He pivots until he is facing the wind, but carried backward by it, like an Olympic skater skating backward while retaining forward momentum. He pivots again, pins his wings close, razors off around the ridge. Once again, I am alone on the mountain.
This is the most dramatic scene today. There’s nothing special about this hike; no bears, no eagles, not even a Canada jay. It’s too cloudy to see wildlife in the valley or on the adjacent mountainside. When I near the mountaintop, the wind is scraping the mountain raw, so I swing on my jacket and hike to the protected side of the ridge.
On a sunny day, there would be hipster types up here wearing Patagonia and North Face and knit ski caps, probably led by a dog whose breed you couldn’t pronounce. You hike through a burn, cross a saddle, then top out with a 360 degree view. It’s nice, but it’s not like famous mountaineers travel from Europe to climb it. Coming up, your hamstrings will ache; going down you can feel the muscles on the topside of your femur, opposite the hamstring and just above the knee, begin to ache also. You probably didn’t know you owned a muscle there, or, at least, forgot you had one.
But this is not a sunny day, and I have this public trail to myself. Two or three hours later when I arrive back at the jeep, I’m sore, but alive, and calm. I haven’t broken any records, seen anything spectacular, suffered any epiphanies, perhaps haven’t learned anything of consequence. I also spent a sizeable chunk of my day on a walk, which is what prepartum mothers and off-their-rocker grandmothers do.
And me. All day I live in a sensory deluge; cellphones, people, machinery. At home, there are magazines and a stack of books to read, emails to reply to, bills to pay, taxes to figure, the lawn to mow. It’s not that I’m a particularly busy person, it’s just that I’m living in the twenty-first century. The only time my mind can take a sabbath is when I make time for it.
So out I go. Richard Louv wrote his bestseller The Last Child in the Woods, filled with philosophical, scientific, and practical reasons why our children should be outside, away from mind-numbing screens and falling out of trees, playing in mud puddles, catching insects. Most of us will not need to be convinced of this. I could riff off on scientific studies of students who make better grades if they spend an hour in the park immediately before a test, or about the hardy immune systems of children who eat dirt.
But what about adults? Does spending time in nature pay well enough to justify our finely tuned economic sensibilities? Certainly, any benefit for adults will be less quantifiable—it won’t affect the bottom line except perhaps except in some abstract way.
For myself, there’s a feeling of self-abnegation in nature that I can’t find other places. I can almost forget about myself for something different. I can be mesmerized by a yellow maple leaf floating in spirals to the forest floor, or a turkey vulture, that humble public servant, riding kettles of warm air until you almost can’t find him with the naked eye. Even in an age of high-powered entertainment like Netflix and YouTube, this fascinates me and keeps me coming back.
Tracking a maple leaf as it falls doesn’t give you an endorphin buzz the way watching killer whales in a feeding frenzy on YouTube will. The shows are fascinating, of course, but removed, distant, like kissing your wife through a windowpane.
I’m trying to sidestep the philosophical reasons why we should be out there, but it’s a dance. Take that mallard pushing out a wedge of ripples against the last of the evening sun. What if I had not been here to see it? Like the old if-a-tree-falls-and-nobody-is-there-to-hear-it conundrum, how much beauty is lost with no humans to watch it or hear it? And the thought simultaneously delights me and makes me feel very small. There’s an entire world out there that’s going on without you, and it doesn’t care if you watch or not. You can come to the show if you like, but the leaves will fall, the birds and animals will ghost through, and you are welcome but you better come early and sit quietly. And this fact, which says the universe does not prepare itself for me, catches me in the gut every time: The universe is not Pete-centric. In an age in which the dominance of nature is celebrated, it does us well to be lost into the dramas of field and woodland.
Hunting can be one way of connecting, one of my favorites. It lends purpose to the forays into the woods. It narrows your focus, and demands you develop a skill. There are epiphanies in the long silences, rewards in the hard work, and an intimacy with nature bound up in the cycle of life and death in which a hunter inextricably ties himself.
And then it comes home with me, too. Some sort of peace with myself and the world, with a slightly diminished self-awareness. Show me a man who respects a tree and a whitetail deer and I can show you a man who is a decent citizen, husband, and father. A man who spends time away from his industrial gadgets that fool him into feeling more powerful than he is will find a truth about himself and his relationship to the universe that one can’t find in a wildlife display or YouTube channel.
And there’s something, too, about dealing with the elemental demands of weather, terrain, and physical capability. I still dream of doing an extended hike; an Appalachian-trail-style tramp where one might go for weeks, and the only thing he has to do is put one foot in front of the other. There’s a reordering of perspectives that come from things like that. A mountain reminds you not all things can be measured by money or civic status; money gets you nothing except tinder for the fire. As for status, the mountain sees it as a joke. Rich or poor, black or white, it’s all the same to the mountain. We relearn what our bodies are capable of, and what we mean by pleasure. What we commonly mistake for pleasure is actually only a neutral existence, the white noise of comfort zone. You have to step outside of it to hear the music.
Let me explain. Pleasure does not come from comfort, and perhaps is directly attributable to its opposite. You can’t enjoy the warmth of the fire until you have experienced the cold of the snow; if you spent all your time in a place conditioned to room temperature, your existence would be merely neutral. One can’t enjoy the rest of labor until he has experienced the pain of exertion. A good physical effort can make you wish for the old comforts again, almost as if you deserved them.
I dream of a generation that uses the public land, the walking trails, the ditches beside the road, that dusty bike in the garage, the hill behind the house, the walk from the far parking spot to the mall. Park that mechanized disgrace, that ATV, UTV, or Saab. Stop reading this. Get up an hour earlier than everyone else and pit yourself against a mountain. “Because,” as George Leigh Mallory, the Everest climber, reportedly said, “it’s there.”