People are always telling me to be careful. This usually comes after several questions such as: "You hike alone?" "You do use ropes don't you?" and my personal favorite "Are you crazy?" Actually, my all time favorite question was simply the word "Why?" from two larger girls who were confused about a photo I was showing them. It was of a cliff, looking down. They asked how I got the picture and I said I climbed the cliff. Then they asked my all time favorite question. I simply replied with what I hope was politeness, that I was not sure how to answer that one. It really did stump me. What does one say? The cliche and blase, "because it's there"? I've never been much impressed by that answer, though it does have a blunt metaphysics to it. I suppose one climbs for the same reason another paints, or tries to sleep with hundreds of women, or make millions of dollars. Because it is what I feel compelled to do. It is what I enjoy. And it is something to do that feels right, or makes sense, to me. I don't think you should hike alone, climb without ropes, ignore storm clouds, risk everything routinely, and camp 10 miles from the next nearest human being on the planet. But I do feel I must. And if you want to try it, or something close, that might be good. If you ever start hyperventilating because you feel so trapped by your life, or because you hate shiny bright stores and rows of perfect identical bottles, or not being able to walk without stepping over trash, or find privacy without slipping headphones over your ears, then maybe you do need to go and find the still wild parts of America. There are worse things to try.
I never feel I am doing anything dangerous out in nature. Which brings us back to that question: "Are you crazy?" Okay, a bear could maul me while I sleep, or a large boulder could come loose randomly and land on me, or start a slide I can't dance away from, or lightning might get me, or I might get careless or tired and slip, or grab a handful of stone only to have it break off, or a crazy person might come to play a game of tag with my guts, or any other number of things could happen- but they are all things I can mostly prepare for and thus control to some extent. Those that I cannot remedy are of such small probability that I do not consider them worth stressing over. Besides, for all the fun, escape, thrill, and high I get, the risks are well worth it. I certainly in any case, feel much safer on a mountain where I only need account for myself and fate, than I do in an automobile cruising at near 70 miles per hour, with such unknowns as: the inner workings of a complex and powerful machinery, road conditions including potentially tire-piercing debris, and especially other motorists. I know me. Sure I might make mistakes, and I tend to hike without sitting down or stopping or eating at all until I nearly pass out (this is a good way to train yourself into fitness; you are always pushing the bar farther and get used to great endurance) and when I do this, I start to get fickle in my resolutions, stray off trails, make bad decisions, and get wishy washy and lose confidence, falling into a "why am I out here" or "woe is me" state (though this happens less and less as I gain in endurance each trip and season and get myself out of jams), but that is much less frightening than being at the mercy of other people. Have you met people? People believe they are intelligent, logical, and skilled. Trust me, they are not.
I have had so many near accidents I have lost count. And of those, I believe only one was my fault. Others have usually been the result of someone else not paying attention, someone being a reckless bully and refusing to get over to another lane, slow down, speed up, or some such thing, or simply misjudging completely. Some people panic in snow flurries, others drive faster in a blizzard figuring, one way or another let's get this over! I do not enjoy being around either sort. I'll take my chances with the bears. Bears know what they are. Your average suburbanite has a confusing mix of feelings they cannot master: urges to mate, throw spears at elk, beat their chest, and to sip tea at the same hour every afternoon, enunciate properly, and maintain a perfect lawn. You find people who scream at a cashier with the ferocity of a Mongol Warrior over the price of a pair of jeans and who come home from the grocery store every morning showing off their bargains as if they were out combing a thick and shaded forest floor for hidden mushrooms and beat out the other primates. Freud said we are children of vikings and that buttons force us to become obsessive at things like antiquing. The suppressed urge to drag a woman off by the hair or to hunt for our sustenance comes out in some marketable way or another such as collecting snowglobes. Then too in our fine modern world you get people who claim to be atheists and tailgate outside the local football team's stadium before every home game. The same inner need and drive is satisfied in the sports fan as the cleric: faith, devotion, and so forth. Beware the superfan who wears team jerseys and never misses church. He has too masters.
Well the point is, this sort of thing is fun to read about in the best novels of the best novelists, and in poetry, but not to deal with day in and day out. Wading through this world, I feel like I am trapped in a sewer. There is ever more noise, signifying ever less. More on this at another time perhaps. I hike to get away. And you can't do that on a trail so popular that getting to a waterfall feels like being at Disney Land, you can't do it climbing a mountain in the midst of a team of bored professionals who slog up the same route every day and in a monotone, well passed curiosity and interest, wave you to every best spot, their very auto-pilotry reminding you of just how many people there are in the world and just how many have snapped the pictures you are snapping. All of this is lost on most people though. Well is it surprising? What does 7 billion mean to a person who could barely do long division with two digit numbers in high school? Technology and society change, but our wiring does not. We have invented every form of boredom, which parents try to save their children from. For boredom is an accusation, or so parents react. As if boredom is not the child's problem to solve, but Mom's failing. So ever more toys and games are piled around the child, when dealing with boredom is perhaps a skill that helps a soul to develop. But there is no alternative when raising Junior in a maze of other assembly line houses, with little yard, little chance for adventure, the prairie long gone, and the mountains designated dangerous. We are all bored as adults too, and yet people think me crazy too for cooking food from scratch. How can I get anything done, they seem to wonder, failing to notice they get nothing done worth doing. Our surroundings change, but every man and woman still feels original and unique. That is our wiring. And so John can meet 100 other Johns without this bothering him. Mary can take comfort in knowing she dresses like other people, likes popular movies and music and is pretty average. She believes this makes up a personality. I on the contrary, believe I have met perhaps 10 people in my life. Except for a foible, a fetish, and a phobia, most people are just people, not an individual. I think of them as you think of cattle. Sure the steer who made your hamburger might have led an unhappy life eating the wrong foods in ugly places, with little exercise (who does this remind you of? PETA asks for sympathy for the four legged sufferers and most people are probably just thinking, hey at least my meat was sad too), but after all, how much could it really suffer? You ask. It was just a cow.
But I am one who is struck by my unimportance, my redundancy within a species doing too well. I look at tulips and think, well I am just a tulip. I am just one person. The species would do fine without me. My liking 1980s pop music does nothing for 1980s pop music. It would get along fine without me. So I seek out places others are not, where I can count. Where I can exist. And get a feeling of deeper reality. Sometimes in nature, climbing, after I get a cut, say, I will look at a hand and see it for the first time, dwell for a moment on how much we are taking for granted, with all our hands can do. A computer, for all its voodoo complexity beyond most of those who use them, has nothing on a simple human hand. It is a thing of real beauty. Am I willing to risk dying for that thought? Yes. If that is what I am doing, though again, I rarely feel I do anything dangerous, compared with what we all do everyday, just to drive down the street. I like to go places where others are not, and more than that, where others can not, or have not been. A mountain is not good enough, it must be an obscure one, one not on popular trails. I detest pictures that everyone else has. Most of the photographers I run into seem to want to prove themselves by going where other photographers go, to a few mecca spots (In Utah, say Bryce Canyon and "The Wave"), but I don't want to compete. Why run through a wall when you can go around it? I feel important taking in some vista few others have seen, as if I am validating the artisan care of some angel who put together the Uintah mountain range, with exquisite detail, only to find out, that the star of the show, the pride and joy of the boss, mankind, would not need his place, would not drink in his fine and well-planned views. And then for thousands of years it sat, with only now and again someone bothering to travel to this corner of the world that took as much time as the flat plains where Chicago and Salt Lake were thrown. So I do not simply admire it, I try to adore it, to memorize it, to fill myself with it. It is a medicine, a chapel, a salve, a sanctuary, and somewhere that with my eyes upon it that becomes more real, more vivid, which shines I expect, brighter. Every grove once had a local god or power to it. There were spirits on every mountain, good or bad, petty or wise, who could be appealed to, or had to be appeased, avoided, thanked. Perhaps there still are, though mostly forgotten, and it is they who, out of gratitude and fellowship, with communion and dignity, steer the storm cloud away from me rather than at me as it seemed to be coming. Perhaps it is I who give the sagging mountains and the lonely deep valleys hope again, who remind them they were put there for a reason. And beauty, if harsh, or if hidden, well it is better. It is poetry, the kind one does not write, but which flows throughout, which one must live everyday, while being called an odd duck, while being made to apologize for it, to feel ashamed of standing out, while oblivious or trying to be that one does, to all that, to the disapproval of inferior beings, who have not risked what you have, who would not, even if the rewards were certain, who do not feel chained to sit and watch others living, doing, all day on various channels, as if that were enough, or were the proper (the kind of beings who have watched so long and so naturally that they can no longer think of God as anything but a viewer, who must be entertained, or His attentions will drift, and who with the power of ratings in their hand, judge themselves not by self-satisfaction but by friend counts on facebook and the approval of others; as if it is better to be watched than to be good, as if what matters is being liked, and not being likeable) state, who say it is fine to eat meat as long as they do not have to kill it themselves and believe this backwards morality (though if murder is wrong, then by bypassing the murder, you are dooming another to your added share of it; not only to his own share of it, as a being with the cravings and the teeth of both a wolf and an ox, but to yours too, so that if there is a doom in it, a shame to it, you pass the buck. If there will be a penalty for that flesh, that chicken wing, then we do not own up to it anymore, but try to avoid it, and then every slaughterhouse worker is a deportable Christ, a single-serving, disposable martyr, and if we know that people who work in slaughterhouses become sadistic over time, then by not taking up the knife ourself when we desire pork, we are endangering the families of these workers, who haunted by squeals, by screams, will lash out at their children, having been trained into a rapidity and an automatic brutality through the necessities of industrial efficiency and de-assembly lines), the kind of people who fall asleep to classical music which involves ten more tones than the standard pop beat. It is poetry to believe that a Cezanne Painting loses its impact over time not only from the sun fading it, but from eyes draining it, that there must be some essence and potency drained away from it. I still expect and demand of movie stars that they deflate and age badly; the appropriate price for having been viewed so often.
But the masterpieces in dark corners, the women who are not studied usually, these remain vital. For the very reason of having not been viewed. And a man by doing stupid things, Dostoevsky wrote this, proves he is a man, and not an animal, not a soft and warm machine. Convince a man on paper of what he should do, or more so, must, and he will do the opposite, for the very reason of confounding, for the very reason he should not. And he is brilliant to do so, for at least then, he knows it was not some gene, some instinct, which provoked him. We cannot trust true love. When it fades, when it ends too often in divorce, cannot trust it as anything but a marketing device, to sell greeting cards, or the shape that comes out when the dough of primal urges are shoved through a press, through society and custom. We cannot trust it to be true love still the morning after, ten thousand mornings after, when me might find that all along it was only our biological programming, endocrine function and pheremones at play with hormones. But stupidity, irrationality? That we can trust, must trust. It is malfunction perhaps, but the malfunction makes the man.
All of this is poetry, the kind which overwhelms, though it may be just a gene too, some mutant one which twitches in me, easily disguised as elegance. And I do not speak, out loud. How could one begin to say any of this sort of, whatever it is? How could this remain, alert, by the time one is through with pleasantries about the weather and the exchange of names? No it is napping then, it is gone outside already. It will not wait, and then for the rest of the day I am alone, am cold and empty and dark like a room that has been left and does not know there is a world outside, only that nothing is happening. No it is not expressible, why I go out alone, where even thoughts cannot keep pace, and I recede into a reptile brain which does not think, but rather moves my limbs for me, so that I am only watching or waiting, as removed as a spectator would be, when the danger comes. Nor is it sensible to try, and so I usually do not. I say, that I am crazy, and that is true enough. Either the whole world is or I am, and personally I think the world is, but well, is that not the definition of craziness? There is a line I paraphrase: They all pointed at me and said I was mad, and I pointed at all of them and said they were mad, and they out-voted me, so here I am, locked up away from them. It is only going away that makes the world bearable. I do not come back, desperate for a shower, ecstatic to have a rocking chair to snuggle into and a roof over head. I return with resignation, able to endure again what cannot be escaped. I could move to Alaska true, but the barbarians would come. And quickly, to complain of cell phone reception and mosquitos, and of how they cannot post their clever observations of how wonderful it is to get away from it all, in real time. They would come and demand a Pizza Hut and a mini mall, and seethe over the price of every little bauble in every little store. I come back recharged, having been alive for a few days, having faced uncertainty, shivered, slept with a rock in my back (oh it is not good to get everything we want, to have to tolerate nothing; stress is like love, you go your whole life certain you've had it, and finding now and again you have not; at 12 you kiss, and you say, oh so this is love, but it is not love, and you know that at 18, when you are in love, and then your heart broken, you say, oh I will never love again, but at 25 you find you had yet to love, but do love now, and that what you thought was love, was more so fury, was more so the angst of not having it, the attempt at it- as one flails and thrashes about in a pool before one knows how to swim gracefully, achieving little but making a lot of noise, and proud all the while; and stress too, we think we have, fear, we think we are right to feel, over what should not even bother us. With the risk of yellow fever always near at hand, do you think the first Americans worried about paying the bills 2 years down the line? Yet people think it sad when I say a thing like, well if I'm alive in 6 months, I will figure out...oh you who have no plan, the less idea and drive there is to your life, the more you demand it of me, the more you point out the absence of one to me; I think we should have a government Viking program. We will send thugs and brutes out randomly, they shall be immune to all the laws that others face, and will be shot on sight, will recieve no quarter, or mercy, and so give none, who will maraud about randomly destroying, stealing, burning, pillaging; with that threat real again, maybe housewives will stop moaning about not having time to balance the check book); I return from each trip, able to bear the circus lights, the infectious frivolity of pointless people, and the madness of weenies, and cowards who think they have really lived, who think they have lived like no people have ever lived before, because they alone have had Ipads and 6 color Tetrus.
It is not ignorance of danger that makes me march right into danger's midst. The exact opposite is true. I never have so much fun as picking out a little cliff I am not sure I can climb, which I think I can. Anything I know I cannot climb would be terrible to try to climb and anything I know I can climb is tedious. It is pure matadorship that drives me. I enjoy expertly getting myself out of trouble that I invented to begin with. I am a genius at this, or I have been to this point. One day, I will fail to extract myself. And then you can all say, what a fool I was, or how crazy, or whatever you like.
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