First published in The Great Outdoors Magazine, Sep. 2002.
I’ve been wandering and working in wild places for over twenty years now. Growing up in the heart of the Peak District, with the ‘Eliminate’ face of Curbar Edge looming down through my childhood bedroom window, lead to an early obsession with rock climbing that very nearly cost me my secondary education. This addiction to rock transformed into a passion for mountains – the wilder the better. I was more attracted to remoteness than height and to the amount of time spent ‘out there’ than the number of peaks ‘ticked’.
Being out in the wilds made the jump from luxury to necessity the time I first encountered wilderness on a massive scale in North America. It was while climbing in Yosemite that I had an experience that was too weird to admit to, let alone try to understand. I kept my embarrassed silence for nearly two years. As somewhat of a cynic, I found it very hard to come to terms with the notion that we could experience the world around us in ways that were beyond the realms of rationality, perhaps even at the edge of human perception itself.
By this time I was living in New Zealand having taken a job as an Outdoor Instructor with the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre. It was here that I eventually talked to people who had spent prolonged periods of their lives in remote wilderness. These friends listened to my tale and responded with talk of ‘self actualisation’, ‘flow experience’, ‘enlightenment’, ‘transcendence’, ‘the zone’, and ‘altered states of consciousness’. Suddenly I had numerous explanations to choose from – spanning three thousand years of history and a full philosophical circumnavigation of the globe.
But after a while I gave up the search for an off-the-shelf answer. I had rifled through every text I could find from the Tao Te Ching to the Tao of Physics, from the Bible to the Upanishads. In one way or another they all explained it… without really explaining anything at all. I’d had enough of books and rather than shave off my hair and retreat into a monastery… I decided instead, as did Thoreau, ‘to go out for a walk’.
It was ‘out there’, cresting on the solid waves of a granite sea high in the Sierra Nevada, that my first inexplicable experience had occurred. So ‘out there’, not ‘in here’ must be where the answers lay. Sure enough, since that incident back in Yosemite, it seemed that almost every time I committed to a half decent adventure, I would find myself buried deep in that otherworldly state. By stopping the search for a rational explanation and by simply joining in with the world around me, I had found what I was looking for.
Wild places offer us a power insight into the hard reality of human being. ‘When’, as D.H Lawrence put it, ‘we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into forests again’, we are given the chance to experience the relationships upon which we depend – in no uncertain terms. We are given a window through the political rhetoric and media hubris, to a world where human supremacy is a dangerous presumption.
When Thoreau wrote that ‘In wildness lies the preservation of the world’, he meant just that. We need to become wild again, wild at heart, connected tacitly to the simple realities of our own existence. He took himself off into the woods of North Eastern America to test his wild theories. He came back a changed man. Connecting with his own wild heart lead him to an early realisation that was important back in Thoreau’s day. Now, sharing Thoreau’s realisation is quite simply a matter of life and death.
Our industrial culture is destroying us. It is sawing off the branch it’s sitting on. It hasn’t yet plummeted to the ground because, in geological terms, it is so young. In effect, we have only had time to saw part way through the branch. But we are no longer ineffectually hacking at the bark with sharp rocks – we are instead effortlessly slicing through the branch’s very core, with lethal laser efficiency.
And the limb is getting weak. Some people are even starting to hear the creaks and groans of impending fracture. Warnings that are being noticed by an increasing number of experts in ever more diverse fields of inquiry, from ecology to economics and from physics to psychology. For others, the creaks and groans can be heard, but the warnings make no sense. Those noises, they argue, could be down to anything.
Whether we can hear the creaking or not, for the most part we feel trapped on our branch – locked into our current ecologically unsustainable lifestyles. The bills must be paid, the kids must get to school on time, shopping must be done. We need cars to get to work, we need convenience foods, dishwashers and microwaves because we spend so much time at work, we need TV’s, stereo’s, DVD’s and holidays to recover from work… and we need to keep working to pay for all these things.
The things we have no choice but to carry on doing all contribute to our sawing – and there is no alternative.
We know that, because we have no alternative, we must find some way of dealing with the inevitable day that the branch is sawn through. The best plan seems to be to deny the sawing altogether – it’s not really happening. Failing that, we console ourselves with the reassuring knowledge that technology will provide us with a strut to fix the branch, or perhaps transport us to a new branch altogether. Maybe we will be able to genetically modify the branch we have and it will become saw-resistant?
Or, ‘Perhaps’, sustainable agriculture guru Bill Mollison suggests, ‘we should do nothing else for the next century but apply our knowledge. We already know how to build, maintain and inhabit sustainable systems.’ We already know how to stop the sawing but we seem unable to act. We are passengers on the deck of an ocean liner squabbling over the deck chairs, oblivious to the name ‘Titanic’ on the bow… and the fast approaching iceberg.
Our deck chair fiddling finds us genetically modifying tomatoes to be crush-proof to meet those ever-more-discerning consumer rights, while simultaneously hiding behind corporate mission statements about the ‘elimination of world hunger’. We heroically design drugs to treat AIDS and then withhold them from the most needy because they don’t have the money to pay for them. The depression common on our branch, from all that infernal sawing, is prescribed away with drugs, ignoring the less profitable course of action of dealing with the sawing itself. These contradictions are all symptoms of our failing to see the ecological strands that connect them to each other… and to our own short-sighted behaviour.
The saving grace of all this, for the tree at least, is that should the branch fall, the tree will remain. But where is the sanity in this self-destruction for us humans, and why does our current way of life deceive us by feeling like the only available path?
‘Sanity’ wrote psychologist Evelyn Underhill, ‘consists in sharing the hallucinations of our neighbours’. Imagine for a minute that the world you are currently experiencing is hallucinatory, that this illusion is believable simply because those around you share your perceptions.
The ‘sanity’ we are enjoying on our branch is only safe through the shared hallucination of our neighbours. If we all sit on the branch and together deny that anything is wrong, then until the very day the branch falls – nothing is wrong. To secure this illusion, we can also suggest that those who threaten to reveal the truth are mistaken, perhaps even insane. So we are now happy because we all believe that the branch on which we live is safe, and that those who don’t believe this are mad. Business as usual!
The sawing continues…
When I get out into wild places the sawing gets very loud indeed, until it is the deafening roar of a giant whirling blade. I am no longer confusing myself with the shared hallucinations of my neighbours, because my neighbours have changed. Seeking to share the madness of my human world I find no takers. My neighbours are now rock and ice, pine tree, heather, eagle and otter. When the weather sets in and the sky sinks toward darkness, there is no hallucination to hide behind and reality threatens to bite hard. I awake to a simple truth – If I do not adapt to my neighbourhood, the one beyond the shared hallucination of my human friends, I will be plucked off the branch like a dead Autumn leaf in the first storm of Winter.
Humility is a powerful teacher and wild places demand it. They require respect in the face of forces that place humans firmly amongst the common citizenry of our blue-green planet. And what a lesson that kind of experience can be, one that many people have been taught with life-changing consequences, myself included.
These experiences prove one thing above all else – that we are ecological beings. Hold your breath for ten minutes before you make up your mind that we are ‘individuals’ separate from nature. Like air, we share a connection with everything, we breathe carbon dioxide out and leaves breathe it in, leaves exhale and we inhale their oxygen. The branch and we are totally interdependent.
It’s not just air and other biological processes that connect us to our habitat. There’s something else that connects us too. A ‘connection’ that many people have experienced, usually offering different interpretations. These senses of connection with our environment have been explained as experiences of the Tao, the Great Spirit, God, Goddess and Pan. To others they are all about physiology, or a chemical change in the brain, perhaps even Transpersonal Psychology. But to the sceptic they are irrational or romantic rubbish, the shamanic mumbo-jumbo of ‘primitive people’, diabolic paganism or perhaps the affect of narcotics.
While it’s difficult to choose any one explanation, it is not hard to establish that experiences of being connected to our environment, in more than scientific terms, are real – especially for those that have had them – my Yosemite story being one personal example.
In the numerous and diverse accounts that I have come across though, explanations are frequently influenced by those ‘neighbours’ – the social and cultural net in which each of us is, to some degree or other, caught.
But in fact, it doesn’t matter how you choose to explain things, or which ‘hallucination’ you and your ‘neighbours’ agree upon. The important thing is that these experiences actually happen, often with life changing consequences.
When I’m in wild places, the core of me seems to come to the surface. I become the creature I really am – I lose the ‘hallucination’ – I can see the branch, the saw… the whole mad picture. While I have given up trying to explain these experiences, I can say without reservation that they have changed my life. I find it impossible to live without doing everything I can to stop the sawing. Whatever those experiences are, they make me act as if that saw is rasping at my own leg.
Outdoor educator Robert Greenway suggests that Western culture is only ‘four days deep’. That is how long it takes participants on his wilderness journeys to shake off the influence of our dominant social and cultural norms. The watch gets put away – we rise and retire with the sun. There is no function for sharp cut suits, no place for shiny shoes. We eat what we can carry, or catch. Our world is as big as can be traversed by muscle power alone. History is buried beneath our feet and the present moment absorbs us fully. We become dependent on our fellow travellers and reliant on our respect for storm, avalanche, eddy-line and flood, and in some places… predator.
After four days in the wild we become real.
When this happens to me, when the expectations, frameworks and social norms that usually surround me are left behind, when the ‘hallucination’ fades away, I am left totally immersed in a world that gives me no doubt as to who, and what, I am. I experience myself as Leopold’s ‘plain citizen of the biotic community’.
This identity is at my heart and it is always intimately connected with the landscape in which I am. Wilderness is where heart and Earth can meet.
‘Wild at Heart’ is a new column in TGO that hopes to explore our experiences of wild places from an ecological perspective. And to go way beyond the popular framework of gear and grades, ticks, ‘objectives’ and awesome views. It’s time outdoor recreation acknowledged the full nature of our human ecology and became what it really is – ‘re-creation’ – a way of experiencing who we really are.
Experiences of wild places set our datum, they remind us of our animal selves, set us in our true earthy context. Being able to hear the sawing, see the deep cut and experience the creaking and groaning of our own Tree of Life is essential if we are to see through the hallucination, rediscover our ecological reality, and take action to live within the Earth’s limits.