Intimacy With Nature

I hike alone in Yosemite because I love the silence.

I love the presence of nature and want to be present to it. I hike alone to lose myself in the Otherness of the outdoors, and find myself home. The Ahwahnechees believed that humans are kin with the animals and birds, the mountains, rivers, and the sky. How can I come into nature and not pay attention to the members of my family?

To perceive what nature is and what it is doing, I need to involve all my senses. Of course, I want to be aware of large, predatory animals moving through the woods, but I also want to see beyond the generalities and notice their specifics, how they look, smell, and feel.

Too often in an outdoor place that is familiar, I overlook what is around me because I think it will look exactly the same as when I was here last time. But nature keeps making changes, animals don’t stay in one place, and I limit what I experience if I decide ahead of time what I will see.

For example, once I headed out to look at Half Dome in the early dawn. I was so focused on getting a good view of the dome with the sun rising behind it, that I didn’t notice the coyote resting in the meadow, a small group of deer on the far side under the oak trees, and a harlequin duck drifting along on the current of the Merced River.

I want to look at individual trees, and see how they differ from each other — feel the roughness of their bark, the shape of their leaves, and if they have cones, nuts, or seeds. I want to watch the interaction between the river and its bank, and see what creatures live there. I want to listen to the quiet sounds of the meadow and locate the vole walking under the leaves and making them twitch.

When I am physically connected to the landscape, I will sense, before I go around the bend in the trail, whether the land is going to rise up or go down.

As I’m hiking, I try not to focus on anything but keep my eyes open and take it all in, trying to be aware of everything on the land and in the sky, including movement on the periphery of my vision.

One day I was hiking in the highlands behind Eagle Peak. It was hot and I was breathing with my mouth open because I was not used to hiking at 8000 feet. At home I live at an elevation of 34 feet above sea level, and I was out of breath. I began to pick up a variety of scents I hadn’t noticed earlier. Closing my mouth, I sniffed, but the scents were faint. Opening my mouth, I breathed in again, and this time I picked up the scents of pine trees, granite, and moisture from a nearby marsh.

I resumed hiking and was practicing my discovery when I picked up the smell of something musky. I knew it was an animal, but I didn’t know whether it was a coyote, bear, or mountain lion. I didn’t know whether to continue hiking or back away. You are supposed to do one for a bear and the opposite for a lion. Unsure about what to do, I stood still and waited. A minute later a deer walked calmly out of the woods and crossed the path fifty feet ahead me.

Each area of Yosemite smells and sounds different — the heady aroma of the oak trees by Rixon’s Pinnacle, the granite and crisp smells of the cascading water at Happy Isles, the dry sleepy warmth of Sentinel Meadow, the cool pine-scented forest in Tenaya Canyon.

Does it matter if I physically connect with the land? It does because while beauty attracts me to nature, physical contact is the beginning of a relationship. Nature then moves from being an accumulation of data, of observations chemical reactions and geological forces, to being alive, and intimacy begins. In nature’s storms, I learn her moods and celebrations. As I hike and camp, she learns mine.

When I know the scent of her hair, the touch of her meadows, the sounds of her voice in the river, then I move closer to my beloved.