The Nature Of Life. Wilderness As A Crucible For Finding Our Humanity For The First Time

The trail along the ashen gray cliff was maybe ten inches wide. To the left was a 200-foot drop into Convict Canyon and its roaring creek pushing through jagged rockfall. To the right was a steep mountain side of scree and gray boulders, all the product of the massive, decomposing marble metamorph above. The darkened sky matched the rocks. The wind blew snow under the flaps of our packs. No greenery, anywhere.

The trail gave way. My exhausted legs attempted to maintain balance, but the 40-pound pack on my back, along with the disorientation caused by the wind and snow blowing in my face, allowed gravity to take over. I have had a few moments like this in the Sierra Nevada, but never with gnawing teeth below.

I slowly teetered to the left. Scree poured into my boot. I could feel blood draining from my face. There was nothing to grab. Yet, upright I remained, albeit down on a single knee, with my left leg sinking into squishy sand and pebbles. Tilting to the right for leverage, I pushed against a rock, somehow managing to convince my weary thigh to push me up. I stood there for a moment, my lungs straining to pull in enough oxygen in the thin air. Then I took a step forward. Continuing onward down the trail, I eventually caught up with my friend Rudy around the bend.

“This snow is something else,” he said after hearing the crunch of my boots on the fragile trail.

The morning of, having just emerged from our tent, noses blown, peed, and faces splashed with water, we walked back and forth on the cold, barren rock that surrounded our camp as tiny snow drifts accumulated in the crevasses. We occasionally examined the little stove to check if the flame was still lit, to see how close the water was to boiling. “People will ask, ya know,” Rudy mumbled as he paced, “You guys really had fun being that uncomfortable?” Both of us laughed. “Nothing we can say will make any sense,” I said.

Photo: The trail going home, in the wind and snow, in August.

Several days after returning home, my friend Dave, the third member of our backpacking adventure, came by for a cup of coffee. “One day of bitter cold and rock in the Sierra,” he said while watching the birds from our backyard deck, “is worth a thousand days sitting here like this. Comfort doesn’t mean much without knowing how it feels to lose it.”

As the years have gone by, I’ve noticed it is becoming increasingly difficult to find kindred spirits who embrace the notion that discomfort and risk are an essential part of Wilderness. Its beauty sustains and motivates our souls. The freedom and risk release our humanity.

“Are you taking a satellite phone?” I’m often asked. “No.”¹

The Little Lake

Our objective during our backpacking trip last month was a little, blue sapphire of a lake nestled within a rocky bowl, 10,580 feet high, sandwiched between two ancient rock formations. Its auburn brown eastern wall is formed by Mount Morrison, a mountain composed mostly of 325-million-year-old metamorphized sedimentary rock with a peak dusted in pale sandstone. Named for Robert Morrison, a posse member who was killed while chasing down an escaped convict in 1871, the mountain rises above a larger lake to north, named for the same event, Convict Lake.

The little lake’s western wall is a younger, 300-million-year-old, blue-gray deposit of crumbly, limestoney marble that creates a moon-like landscape over a seven-and-a-half-mile long exposure. Scattered throughout the deeply folded, west face of nearby Mt. Baldwin are several sparkling pockets of calcite, beautifully transparent crystals originally mined in the early 1930s due to their optical property of splitting light into two refracted rays. Look at text through a calcite crystal and you will see double. The calcite at Baldwin was determined to be extremely high quality and was reportedly used in Norden bombsites, the secret device used in World War II by Allied bombers to target enemy facilities below. The crystal has special meaning to me as my father was one of those B-17 bomber pilots who flew missions over Nazi-occupied Europe.

Photo: The barren moonscape below Mt. Baldwin. The calcite mine is over the ridge on the left.

Youth, Father, Elder

The trip was to be a bookend of sorts to my decade’s long exploration of the Sierra Nevada.

While I had hiked the Sierra several times in high school, it was the summer backpack to the little lake with my friend Dave and his cousin Mike after my first year of college that cemented the landscape into my psyche.

Photo: The calcite mine at Mt. Baldwin with Dave and Mike during our first trip in 1974. The original claim was filed by an industrious chap name Chubb Horton.

We went back up to the same spot the next two summers, the third trip being a farewell to Dave prior to his departure to the Peace Corps. Our next two visits occurred several years later, a few weeks before I was to be married, then again, the following year, with my wife Vicki. Dave and I thought it would be a good idea on the last trip to take a short cut, up a steep, rocky incline with several cliff faces and a tiny thread of water draining from the lake above. The innocence and ignorance of youth makes one prone to stupid ideas. Vicki was convinced I was trying to kill her. Despite the falling rocks, exhaustion, and thin air, we made it to the top. More importantly, our marriage remained intact.

Twenty-seven years later, I returned. This time as a father with our two sons, Nick 17, and Jake 12. We avoided the cliffs and took the safe, long way around. Nick got lost for a bit, but he had learned his Wilderness skills well – he returned to where we had last been together. Going back home, however, we decided to take the short cut. At the time, it seemed like a reasonable route as we would be going down. Upon reaching Convict Creek, with hands shaking, I collapsed in relief next to a boulder. The boys were waiting for me, safe, and enjoying deep swigs of water. I swore I would never tackle the route again. Jake turned to me and declared, “That was awesome!”

Photo: The view from the short cut, across Convict Creek canyon.The auburn foliation is composed of hornfels (rocks that have been metamorphized by contact with heat), over-topped by a blue-gray marble-like deposit.

Another seventeen years would pass before I decided to go again this past summer. The bookend. Not that the trip marked an end to my backpacking explorations of the Sierra, but rather a pilgrimage to the place that bore witness to several of my former selves. How was the place, or rather my own mind, different from when I was an invincible young man, and then as a father? My body this time was certainly less flexible, but my mind was hungrier than ever for new knowledge and experiences.

When I discussed such things with my friend Nancy, a gentle spirit who always saw the world as offering constant opportunities to become a better, wiser person, she would always offer up some short, literary passage from memory. One of my favorites was from T.S. Eliot’s forth poem, Little Gidding, in his Four Quartets.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

I believe Eliot’s poem, and this verse in particular, encapsulated how I saw my upcoming backpack given how the little lake had played such an important part in my life. The trip was part of the circular, recurring journey of self-discovery that never really ends for any of us, either individually or collectively as a species. If willing, age and accumulated experience can become transformative for an individual’s sense of humanity, especially when circumstances allow the freedom to do so.

Under what conditions do we begin to know the place for the very first time? I don’t think it was mere coincidence that Eliot’s poem, linked deeply to Christian theology, was put to paper as bombs fell from the sky during the London Blitz in World War II. The comforts and stability of civilization were in question. Having those qualities taken away, or voluntarily leaving them behind, tends to inspire a new, deeper understanding of the world and one’s place in it.

While war, disaster, or personal trauma force reflection, such experiences leave emotional scars that are difficult to heal. There is one experience, however, that allows for one to voluntarily leave the comforts, the judgements, and the expectations of civilization under peaceful conditions – Wilderness. If the experience is long enough and contains the distinct possibility that help will be too far away to make a difference, the wilds can provide the necessary environment to alter one’s state of being.

The research is rich on this point. Spending at least three days in Nature, away from the security of civilization, provides significant mental and physical benefits including enhancing creativity and introspection. Away from the constraints of society, the mental gates open. Hence, emergency beacons, satellite phones, or nearby facilities are inconsistent with the Wilderness experience, whether they are used or not. The knowledge of their presence is enough to keep the mental gates closed.

The Rocks

On prior trips, it was the biological realm that caught my attention. This time around, it would be the rocks. I’ve spent the last few years recharging my love for geology. It has been an inspiring replacement for fire politics. So, armed with a large geological map, I was determined to understand the origin and composition of the place. I knew the rocks were there before, of course, but I did not have the ability to really see them.

Photo: The magical metamorphic layers of Sevehah Cliff above Convict Lake, at the the beginning of our trip.

We don’t describe what we can see, we see what we can describe, is a blindness the ancients identified long ago. One of the original descriptions is found in the Babylonian Talmud – “A man is shown in a dream only what is suggested by his own thoughts.” The etymology of the modern version is a testament to how ancient knowledge underlies much of what we may think of as novel thought.²

The Convict Lake area is the perfect spot to explore geological wonders. As we approached Lake Mildred, the first lake near the terminus of Convict Creek where we would establish base camp, the geology ran wild.

Photo: The Lake Mildred shoreline littered with striped hornfels boulders. The bluish marble mountain in the background is a portion of the Mount Baldwin formation.

Orange-weathering hornfels, a metamorphic rock formed via contact with a hot igneous mass deep underground, lay beneath our feet. Across Lake Mildred, younger, gray and white striped hornfels created rectangular boulders that looked like giant Swiss chocolate candies. Behind us, an older, massive mountain of bluish marble dominated the eastern sky. And twisting all around, synclines, anticlines, and cinnamon rolls of metamorphized layers of ancient ocean sediment betrayed the 275-million-year-old origin of the place, the Utahian coastline of North America. The area represents the Sierra Nevada’s best remnant of those drying, sketchy times that would ultimately end in the largest mass extinction on earth, the Great Dying. Fewer than 10% of the world’s species would survive by the time the Permian Period ended 252 million years ago.

Photo: A twisted syncline of hornfels near Lake Mildred.

To us, the hornfels were ageless and unchanging. There had been rock avalanches in the 1980’s to be sure, but the place remained essentially the same as it had been when we first visited fifty years ago. All the celebrations, the achievements, and the disappointments of the anthropocentric world meant nothing to the rocks. In fact, the entire span of human civilization, from the hanging in Bishop of Morrison’s killers, to the Gold Rush, to the arrival of humans in North America, had all been consumed in an instant by the immensity of deep time.

The Elusive Little Lake

The day after arriving at Lake Mildred was dedicated to wandering the lake shore, watching a pair of Dippers fly over, around, and through the little waterfall pouring out of the lake’s northern end, and taking naps. John Muir loved them. As dusk neared, we prepared one of the defining experiences for the day, a warm meal of chicken cacciatore – 350 calories per serving.

Photo: The Dipper, the elusive bird of high Sierra Nevada streams.

Gale force winds kept us awake most of the night as our tent was slapped about. The morning was no different, forcing us to move camp into a protected alcove away from our lake view lot, surrounded by a handful of lodgepole pines. By noon, the gusts finally died down. It was time to embark on our day hike to reach the little hidden lake we had come up here to know for the first time.

We didn’t end up making it.

By the time we reached the barren moonscape terrain below Mt. Baldwin, with the little lake just over the next ridge, it was getting late. We knew we had a long hike out the next day. So, we headed back, having just enough time to make dinner before dark. We woke up to snow the next morning.

“I’m thinking it was a good thing we didn’t push it yesterday,” I said to Rudy as we broke down camp. “The trail going down might be difficult this morning.”

We stopped at Jack’s Restaurant in Bishop on the way home. Dave and Rudy ordered lunch. I ordered breakfast. The over-medium eggs, bacon, and hash browns never tasted so good.

Deep Time

Comprehending the meaning of deep time requires a difficult reorientation of self that ultimately allows one to embrace the joy of irrelevance. It was here, on the floor of an ancient sea where countless life and death struggles found their final resting place, where deep time finally started to form new neural networks in my mind.

Beyond the rocks, it was the reading I was doing while leaning against a fragment of that ancient sea floor in the middle of the Sierra Nevada that lit the fuse – the personal meditations of man who ruled the Western world more than 1,800 years ago.

“The earth will soon cover us all,” Marcus Aurelius wrote. “Then the earth itself will change, and that changed earth will change again, and then again, changing into eternity. Anyone who contemplates these endless waves of change and transformation will look with indifference on every mortal thing.“

The evidence of change was all around us; the folded layers of hornfels that revealed the pushing and pulling that occurred deep underground long before California formed; the scratches I could feel on the tops of larger rocks, carved 10,000 years ago by glacial movement; the sediment filled basin that supported a sprawling meadow around the lake.

Photo: The convoluted result of pushing and pulling ancient sea bed deposits deep underground, then scraped clean by glaciers.

I wondered about the urgency, the drama our species becomes so obsessed with, the crumbling monuments of Rome, and the years I spent fighting the temple destroyers blinded by their pursuit of power and gold, and the angst I’ve sensed in college classrooms from students worried about the a future wrought by human-induced climate change.

Aurelius wondered too, but was able to put into perspective the always changing world.

“Look down from the sky at all the herds of men, their countless ceremonies, their endless voyages to and fro in both calm and storm, and the amazing diversity of creatures that are born, make a life with one another, and disappear. Imagine that life of those who lived long ago, or the life of those who will live after you are dead, or the life now being lived in distant foreign lands. How many don’t even know your name? How many who do will soon forget it?”

I’ve recently been cataloging the photographs my dad took during his time as a B-17 pilot with the 381^st Bomb Group during World War II in Ridgewell, England. Looking at the planes, the faces, and the buildings on base, reminded me of the intense sacrifices paid to protect our way of life. My generation will be the last have immediate family connections with them.

I was lucky enough to go with my dad to a 381^st reunion at Ridgewell in 1982. Dad is gone now, as are all the guys I met there. All that remains of the base is a portion of the hospital Quonset hut and a few fragments of runway, runways where dozens of bombers flew off with their 10-man crews not knowing if they would be coming back. The control tower is gone. The hanger is gone. The stone house dad’s flight crew built for him is gone.

Photos: (L) Stone house built by 535th Squadron crew members for Squadron Commander Lt. Col. Charles L Halsey (Dad) in 1944.
(R) Dad visiting the remains of his little stone house in 1972.

The disappearing signs of past wars can be found across the world. When visiting Teutoburg Forest in Germany, one would never know that three Roman Legions were wiped out there in 9 AD trying to expand and defend a growing empire.

Sitting on my rocky bench overlooking the nearby lake, I considered the trappings of my own life. The restaurant dad and mom built after the war, where I scampered about stealing lima beans for my garden, has been replaced by a new shopping center. Our family home when I was a kid has been sliced in half to make room for another house. The Calico Early Man Site near Barstow, where I spent many high school weekends with the family of scientists and volunteers that I found out there, has been bulldozed and mostly filled in by the Bureau of Land Management.

Beyond providing perspective, deep time can foster a sense of calm. I noticed this during a recent field trip with a bunch of geologists having fun touring the Scablands of eastern Washington. All of them knew, as I do now, that the geological pulse of the earth reveals the repetitious, transitory nature of life. I believe it is this understanding that causes geologists to generally have a more tranquil, tolerant approach to life, at least in comparison to other professional groups I’ve encountered.

While a crisis or change can be feel unique to us, the earth has seen it multiple times before (“only the names of actors change”). The earth has carried on. Knowing that life on earth has neared extinction five different times over the past 500 million years, and yet persevered, lessens the hopelessness of the current climate crisis, if we allow it. The fact that a meteor turned much of the earth into a burned out cinder 65 million years ago, also provided the opportunity for primates to evolve to create our very lives, affirms the notion that disasters can truly become opportunities.

These doesn’t mean that we should ignore problems. We need to support efforts to reverse climate change, participate in political activism, and speak out for the truth to honor and celebrate the virtuous individuals we strive to be. But we must not waste a moment being anxious over outcomes that we have no ability to control, or give outside events or people the power to steal our joy. Advocate and fight for what is right, but celebrate the actions you have taken, not bemoan how things may turn out.

I suspect like most everyone else, I’ve heard these kinds of admonishments before about how one should live in the present moment. They can become quite annoying platitudes, especially after one of those thoughtless humans trespasses on our lives, some accident befalls us, or regrets or anxieties worm their way into our brains. But the struggle to get a handle on our spinning minds is a worthwhile one, one that has been pursued ever since wandering philosophers first tried to make sense of our conscious selves. Alan Watts, Eckhart Tolle, and Deepak Chopra are merely the most recent interpreters of the idea articulated by Buddha 2,500 years ago.

The West figured it out a bit later with the advent of the Stoics around 300 BC. Marcus Aurelius communicated the value of the present moment in his journal, much of which was written while his Roman Legions were trying to quell the Germanic hoards, nearly two centuries after Teutoburg Forest massacre.

“Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.”

Knowing for the First Time

My hope for this trip was, as Eliot said, that the mountains would allow me to arrive at the place where my explorations and my sense of self began, and to know it for the very first time. My dream was that, upon returning home, the mountains would stay with me. They have so far. While my muscles have healed and the pack has been stored away, I remember everyday to let my soul throw open its windows to the sun.

I brought to the mountains all the ingredients to facilitate this bookend experience. I invited my two best friends, witnesses to the most pivotal experiences in my life. I had my journal and the guide book from my mentor, Marcus Aurelius. And I was finally old enough to clearly see the end and embrace the new beginnings it has unearthed. As Aurelius described,

Spend this brief moment walking with nature and greet your short journey’s end with a good grace, like the olive that falls to the ground when it is ripe, blessing the earth that receives it and grateful to the tree that bore it.

But make no mistake, it was Wilderness that provided the necessary time and space for the transformation to occur.

Photo: View from our first camp of Lake Mildred looking south.

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Notes

1. Creeping Technology

This essay was drafted over a period of two weeks on both computer and paper. Pushing the publish button felt good, but it didn’t compare with the joy of writing.

Photos: (L) The writing process. (R) Section of my makeshift journal in 1976. The only available material to write on was from a roll of toilet paper.

I think that kind of joy, enjoying the moment when the blank page finally comes alive, is becoming increasingly endangered by the advent of the latest technological wonder, artificial intelligence.

Just like the justifications for social media, the ballyhooed potential of AI ignores the fundamental problem of both – their use decreases our humanity.

The very essence of the human species, the thing that has shaped our advancement as a species more than anything else is our ability to string a bunch of words together to communicate complex ideas to each other, personally. The process of writing, of verbal communication, emerge from the vast sea of thoughts and experiences in our minds, creating new ways of looking at the world. It has guided us from telling stories around the fire to exploring riddles of the cosmos.

Based on a few conversations with colleagues familiar with education today, the phrase, “staring at a blank page,” will likely go the way of the typewriter and the rotary phone. The approach to writing by students, journalists, and researchers increasingly involves employing AI to come up with a few ideas about a subject, then filling in the blanks and moving around the AI generated sentences to come up with a finished something. It looks like writing, but it’s no more insightful than a poorly translated set of instructions on how to put together an imported table.

The essence of creativity is being able to draw upon the internal workings of the human mind and create something on a blank page that never existed before. Developing that kind of creativity in schools (and being able to enjoy the moment when creativity sparks) will be a challenge going forward.

2. A Note About Ancient Quotes

Translation is an art. It is difficult to translate one modern language into another without introducing tones and concepts the original writer never intended. This is why poetry must be read in the original language. The task becomes much more complicated when trying to translate an ancient language. So, when you look for Marcus Aurelius quotes, be forewarned.* There are as many versions as there are translators.

For example, the 2002 translation by the Hicks brothers has this quote:
Time is a kind of river, an irresistible flood sweeping up men and events and carrying them headlong, one after the other, to the great sea of being.

Here’s the same quote in the 2001 Project Gutenberg version:
The age and time of the world is as it were a flood and swift current, consisting of the things that are brought to pass in the world. The age and time of the world is as it were a flood and swift current, consisting of the things that are brought to pass in the world

And the one you’ll find all over the internet is from a translation by George Long:
Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too.

*An added complication. Before you cite someone for saying such and such, triple check that you’ve got it right. Many times quotes are attributed incorrectly. You can quote me on that.

– Rick