First published in The Great Outdoors Magazine, Nov. 2002.
A few years back I worked as an outdoor pursuits instructor in New Zealand. One activity that youth groups especially enjoyed involved wading up a gorge deep into native bush, the whole time believing they were on their own.
Of course, as their instructor I would always be close at hand, sometimes they would pass within a metre of where I hid, oblivious to me curled up there underneath some giant fern. At the end of this gorge adventure was a waterfall about 30 metres high. This is where the group would have been told to stop and wait for me. But I would often have overtaken them before they got there. By creeping through the undergrowth somewhere down-river, I would be able to hide behind the waterfall and surprise them when they arrived.
Squatting there among the slimy rocks, the water bursting into misty rainbows around me, strange things would happen. If I tried to touch the brilliant emerald mosses, my hand would seem to go deeper than I expected, so that I felt like I was falling into an abyss of cool damp green. I would find myself staring at a rock, or a minute fern, its detail apparently increasing in complexity the longer I looked, until the texture would make me dizzy. The thunder of water from 30 metres above would muffle until I heard nothing at all, continual movement surrounding me… but absolute silence. Everything would be incredibly sharp, clear and immediate. I would hear my group break the silence on the other side of the waterfalls’ curtain minutes before they arrived. I would also lose my physical sense of self. When it was time to come out from my hiding place, I would suddenly realise how cold I was, how wet, how cramped my knees felt, how stiff my back – like I’d been asleep. It was another world behind that waterfall and I would never have known it if it hadn’t have been part of my job to spend so much time there!
That was my mistake before I started working outdoors – I moved too fast. I held objectives that bulldozed through the process of journeying itself. I would spend whole trips with that summit in mind, the top of the pitch, the end of the ‘difficulties’.
I was travelling through the wilderness, not in it.
Looking back, some of the best adventures I have enjoyed, both professionally and in my own time, have involved a minimum of physical effort and the slightest of technical skills. I can spend hours just drifting about in a sea kayak, not going anywhere. A whole day in the mountains can pass without reaching a single summit. I can boat an unfeasibly short length of river and spend the best part of the journey picnicking at some wild spot along the way. Last year two hours and numerous weary day-trippers past by while I sat with a friend on top of Suilven in the North West Highlands, having taken two days to get there, mostly by Canadian canoe. We took another day and night to get back. It was bliss.
To be affected, truly affected by wilderness – changed by it in fact – it must be experienced at depth. I see so many people who enjoy the privilege of access to wild places without really letting themselves be fully immersed in the richness and diversity of it all. They move over the landscape in monochrome – meeting personal challenges, testing their fitness, achieving goals and objectives, cloaking themselves in technology, obsessing over skill and technique. All these things insulate them from the potential full-colour richness, leave them floating on the perceptual surface – too self-absorbed to allow their selves to be absorbed.
The emphasis with this surface travel is on numbers: heights, distances, times and grades. A metaphor I love is that holding this emphasis is like judging the quality of a symphony by how loud it’s played.
Arne Naess, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Oslo, and in his day one of the worlds’ outstanding mountaineers, suggests that a mountain is best experienced from half way up. Here the view can be enjoyed, along with a unique sense of place, but at the same time the ‘greatness’ of the mountain is maintained. As soon as you reach the summit your attention is no longer on the mountain itself, but on what surrounds it, and perhaps on polishing your own ego at having made it to the top. The focus is elsewhere and the mountain has gone, consumed, bagged, conquered.
‘Mountains’, writes Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, ‘should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire…Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself’. Mountain travel can be an act of meditation, but not an easy one to master, especially in the all-consuming face of our dominant culture – bigger, faster, more.
Travelling in wild places is like skimming a stone across a river. If you move quickly, you will bounce along the surface to the opposite bank. You’ll get there fast, efficiently, you will have reached your ‘objective’ and maybe you’ll have time to skim back again before the pub shuts. But you will have missed out. You will only have experienced the river in one dimension.
To find that ancient connection between the wildness at the heart of us all and the wild core of the Earth – to experience your ‘self’ as part of this living planet – requires the courage to sink. This sinking is an act of respect in the face of greater things, it is an acknowledgement of humility and it is rewarded by diverse experiences of intense richness.
In wilderness travel, there is no destination except the utopian place you find yourself once you surrender to the process of the journey itself.
