How Not to Die When Hiking

            The most important decision I make when hiking in the wilderness concerns how many risks to take.

            If I stay on the trail, odds are good that I will survive. And I’ll survive if I have enough water for the trip and I’m physically in shape to hike up and down mountains for hours on end, and if the trail is clearly marked even when it goes over bare stone so that I don’t go off in the wrong direction, and the weather doesn’t change and turn beastly hot or frigidly cold, and it doesn’t snow and hide the trail, or freezing rain makes everything so slick that it’s impossible to continue on or go back over the ice. And I’ll survive if I don’t surprise a hungry bear or mountain lion, don’t trip and sprain an ankle, or fall down a ravine and have a boulder pin me down so that I have to cut off my hand in order to survive, like Aron Ralston, the guy portrayed in the movie. These are the common, everyday cautions.

            But I ratchet up the risk by pushing on the limits of my luck and doing things like hiking alone, which the rangers say never to do. Yet I do because I haven’t found anyone willing to get up before dawn, hike for twelve hours, eat fistfuls of nuts and raisins, and come back to camp at dusk. And I’ve discovered that I relish the quiet of a long hike by myself.  Forgotten matters rise to the surface from my subconscious that I think about, and I listen to the woods, the rivers, the birds, and the wind flowing through 200-foot-tall Sugar Pines, making them sing. When I’m in nature’s world, I like to pay attention to it. If someone were hiking with me, we’d talk and I would be thinking about what to say next. We’d be listening to each other, not to the outdoors. While this is valuable, it’s not what I go into nature to find. 

River Reflections

In a favorite area of Yosemite, I like to sit by a bend in the Merced River and watch the reflection of Half Dome glow on the water. A slight breeze causes the surface of the slow moving river to ripple slightly, making Half Dome flicker.  A line creases the river’s surface where an underwater sand bar ends and the river drops down to a rocky bottom. The trees reflecting on the surface of the water shimmer with the water's movement.  Looking deeper, I see leaves fluttering on the river's bed, moving not to the movement of the air but to the current of the water.

Is the reflection of Half Dome on the water more real than the reflection of light on Half Dome?  Without the light, I would not see Half Dome at all.  When I see love on the smiling face of my beloved, is that a reflection or real? 

Chew the Gum

Anne Lamott tells the story of having her tonsils taken out as an adult.  After two weeks her prescription for painkillers ran out.  She called the doctor’s office to get a new prescription.  The nurse said No and told her to find some gum and chew it vigorously, which is the last thing that Lamott wanted to do with a painful throat.  The nurse explained that when we have a wound in our body, the nearby muscles cramp around it to protect it from any more violation, and that Lamott would have to use those muscles if she wanted them to relax.  She got the gum and she said that the first chews felt like she was ripping things in the back of her throat, but in a few minutes all of the pain was permanently gone.

For some people the death of a loved one is so traumatic that they never want to deal with the grief.  This freezes the one who died in a perpetual state of unresolved dying, and prevents survivors from taking the risk of loving someone else as deeply again.  They think this protects them from ever feeling the pain of grief, and it partially does, but it also drags shadows over every good thing that happens.  If we take no risks, we will experience no wonder.

Alone in Nature

We aren’t alone when we hike by ourselves.  If we respect nature, it will be a companion who walks alongside us.  It will share itself with us, sometimes conversing so loudly in a waterfall that we can’t hear ourselves think, and sometimes murmuring so quietly in a creek that we have to get down on our knees to hear what it is saying.

We don’t have to hike very far to feel nature’s presence.  We can sit and let nature come to us.  After half an hour, the birds and animals will set their caution aside and resume what they were doing.  As we watch them go about their daily lives, we discover the many ways that we are kin. And when I am tired and silent, I lean back into nature’s arms and listen to the world we share.

We can also hike on and on without ever stopping until our senses overload from all the beauty and the endless discoveries and we fall mute in ecstasy.

When we begin to hike, we head off on a trail eager to discover what it will show us.  When the trail starts to head up a mountain, we take another trail to stay under the trees, or along the river, or in the meadow, unless, of course, we want the challenge of going up the steep side of the mountain.  We pause when we want to linger in a setting where we feel a presence, then move until we feel drawn to stop again.

Nature meets us where we are and guides us further down the path into our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.  Nature also challenges us by bringing mysteries for us to ponder by the campfire at night.

When we listen to nature, we hear our own wilderness respond.   

Dropping in on Kathleen Norris

A few years ago I was traveling home from Montana to Illinois when I decided to detour three hundred miles to Kathleen Norris’s town of Lemmon, North Dakota.  I didn’t tell her I was coming.  I just stopped in.  Not that I saw her, and I doubt that she even knew I was there.

Norris is the author of such books as Dakota, Cloister Walk, and Amazing Grace, and moved to North Dakota after living in the bright, shining din of New York City. I wanted to see where she writes of isolation and spirituality in a place she describes as “the high plains desert, full of sage and tumbleweed and hardy shortgrass.” 

Half an hour from her town, I drove into a thunderstorm and the world went dramatic -- dark and moody with hard driving rain.  As I came around a bend in the road, a slant of sunlight burst through the clouds and lit up a patch of the prairie.  I pulled over to the side of the road to watch.  The hillside sloped down to a low ridge of brown rock that cradled a small marsh with cattails and sedge.  The rays of the sun shimmered on the wet, green prairie grass as blue sky returned in the west.  A strong wind pushed the black storm clouds east and made it hard for birds to fly anywhere.  The rough, unforgiving land was stunning.

Public Grieving

The bombings in Boston remind us that public tragedies lead to public grieving, and even if we don’t know anyone involved, when we see photographs of the faces of those who were killed when they were happy, see the faces of the injured in pain, see the despair on the faces of those who lost loved ones, we also grieve.  Public grieving becomes personal because we identify with their sorrow, confusion, and anger.  It doesn’t matter if the photographs are of people in Boston, India, or South Africa.  We are affected and we feel compassion rise from within us because we are part of the same human community.

When innocent people are killed, this is like a hammer tapping on a porcelain vase.  It sends cracks shooting through our conviction that goodness is the ruling force in the world.  How could this happen? we ask, as if we hadn’t been paying attention to news reports of bombings like this occurring around the world almost every day.  The pressure cooker bomb?  It’s the bomb of choice in Afghanistan.  How did we not know this?  We may take note of tragedies in far away lands being reported on the evening news, but then we go back to what we were doing, thinking “How sad, another bombing in…”  But if we see a photograph of the face or the limb that’s been blown off, then it becomes tangible and it affects us personally.  We grieve individual people, not numbers.

John Muir

I grew up in Wisconsin playing in the woods through the seasons and reading about John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Sigurd Olson, nature writers in Wisconsin and Minnesota. I lived near Muir’s home, we both went to the University of Wisconsin, and one side of my family is Scottish, so there are those connections. Then he headed west and found himself entranced and delighted by Yosemite’s grandeur.

When I moved to California, I went to Yosemite to experience the place that Muir raves about in his books, the place that nurtured his soul.  I was, and still am, amazed that such a place can exist – a valley with granite walls that go straight up for almost a mile, waterfalls that flow into the valley from every direction, mountain peaks that stretch to 13,000 feet, and giant sequoias that are 300 feet tall and 3000 years old. I continue to use Muir’s words to guide and draw me closer to nature.  Like him, I also to hike by myself because the solitude I find nourishes me.