Woods Wanderer

Last week I purchased a set of maps for the Maine section of the Appalachian Trail.  The first three maps, heading south from Mt. Katahdin, cover a patch of wild country known as the 100-Mile Wilderness.  Not a wilderness in the true sense of the word, this is the most remote stretch of the AT.  Hikers are told to carry 8 to 10 days food when going through this part of the Maine woods because there’s nowhere to resupply.   That’s music to my ears!  When I first learned this, I vowed to hike the 100-Mile Wilderness someday.  Well, now I have the maps in hand, and that day is less than seven months away.

Since acquiring the maps, I have pored over them with such intensity that I’ve practically memorized the route.  For a hundred miles the trail skirts lakes, follows streams, winds through wetlands, traverses two significant mountain ranges, and fords rivers.  And I’ll be deep in the forest most of the way.  This is my idea of a good time.  Most people dream of sleek cars, beautiful new homes, and lounging on Caribbean beaches.  I dream of a long, sweaty, bug-ridden slog along a muddy trail with a 60-pound pack tugging at my aching shoulders.  Maybe I should have my head examined.

My wife, Judy, is all for it.  She knows I need to get away like this every once in a while.  She’ll drop me off at Abol Bridge and pick me up 12 days later at Monson.  That’s a lot of driving, but she’s willing to do it for me.  Yeah, I’m a lucky man.

Matika will be going with me, of course, and her pack will also be fully loaded.  No chasing squirrels on this outing.  Matika and I are both soft and fat now, but diet and exercise will whip us into shape during the next six months.  The main thing right now, in the dead of winter, is to cut back on the treats.  No peanut butter biscuits for her; no jelly beans for me.

Some people hike long distances for the fresh air and exercise.  Others for the brag of it.  I hike as an excuse to spend a big chunk of time in deep woods.  That’s why I’ll be doing this section of trail in 12 days instead of the recommended 8 to 10.  That means carrying more food, but I don’t care.

Right now it’s a few degrees above zero outside, there’s a foot of snow on the ground, and my body is fighting off a cold virus.  The upcoming hike seems far away.  But six months goes by quickly when you’re my age, so I’ll be standing on Abol Bridge soon enough.  Until then, I’ll be dreaming of wilderness… and getting ready.  The single biggest question is this:  Can Matika get by on dehydrated dog food?

Tags: Appalachian Trail, backpacking, hiking with dogs, Maine woods, wilderness travel

While slogging along a snowmobile trail the other day, I couldn’t help but notice the sun smiling overhead.  It shined brightly in the middle of a deep blue sky – the kind we see here in Vermont when dry, arctic air blows our way.  Yankee blue, I call it.  There’s no equivalent in the Midwest where I grew up.  Skies so blue that it’s hard to believe that they’ll ever turn gray again.

Sometimes the snow is so bright white that you can’t help but love it.  Enough warmth radiates from the sun to make you believe that the worst of winter has passed.  And as long as you have your back to the wind, life is good.

Yesterday it snowed all day long.  I went out and shoveled it for a while, drank hot chocolate indoors at lunchtime, then went out and shoveled again.  My dog, Matika, romped in the snow piles undoing some of my work.  I didn’t care.  Neither did my octogenarian neighbor, Scout, who was happy to shovel away most of the day.  Vermonters like to brag about how cold it is in early morning when they go out to start their cars, and how high their snow piles are.  No sense fighting it.  After a while, the cold and snow simply become a way of life.

Is the cup half empty or half full?  That’s an age-old question whose answer reveals more about the person answering than what’s actually in the cup.  At first we respond to the weather, the seasons, and everything else by passing judgment on it.  Then, if we have any sense at all, we let go of that judgment and learn to live with what has been cast our way, maybe even finding joy in it.  Few circumstances in life are truly tragic: war, famine, pestilence, and that other dark horseman.  The rest is merely challenging, like the frigid wind icing over your face or the foot of snow that has to be pushed from your driveway.

I am one of those people who usually takes a dark view of things, who looks at the cup and sees what’s missing, not what’s there.  But every once in a while, I find myself enjoying my labors, even when chilled by my own sweat and running the risk of frostbite. The best part of my walk the other day occurred when I turned towards the wind, my face freezing all the way back to the car.  The best part of shoveling snow is the ache in my lower back afterward.  How can I explain this?  I can’t really.  All I can say is that sometimes adversity is good for the soul.  And when on occasion there are Yankee blue skies overhead, it all seems worthwhile.

Tags: adversity, moods, seasonal change, Vermont, weather

Yesterday was chock full of electronic frustrations.  I began the day in the rat maze that Bowker calls a web site, managing those ISBNs sacred to every book publisher, and finished with a phone call to my tech savvy stepson, Matt, regarding coming changes to my email account.  Plenty of other frustrations between those two: altered passwords, new online fees, and assorted glitches.  By mid-morning, I was ready to toss my computer in a snow bank and go live in a cabin in the woods, completely off grid.  By mid-afternoon, I was slogging through calf-deep snow in nearby woods, trying to sweat out my frustrations.  That helped a little.

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that I’m a phony woodsman.  Most of my troubles stem from the fact that I have a foot in two entirely different worlds.  On one foot, I’m a writer and small-scale publisher, deeply engaged in high civilization.  On the other I’m a woods wanderer, tramping around roadless areas like a wild animal.  In other words, I keep a line of communication open to society therefore I’m a phony.  If I were a real woodsman, I’d step into the forest and never be heard from again.

I often catch myself fantasizing about disappearing.  My greatest reservation is that I’d lose my wife in the process, along with cherished ties to family and friends.  Then there’s the whole matter of where and how to live, along with the money necessary to set myself up, so the fantasy doesn’t last long.  Making a complete break with society isn’t easy.  Even mountain men had to trap beaver and sell pelts to traders in order to supply themselves with essentials.  Truth is, any retreat into the forest is only a half measure, unless one is utterly misanthropic and independently wealthy.

“No one lives in the woods,” the rather caustic French philosopher Alain once wrote, “Life in the woods is a fiction; the man of the woods is a fugitive.”  When I first read this, I wanted to sling his book across the room.  “Bullshit!” was my gut response.  Then I thought it through and tempered my judgment.  When I’m deep in a wilderness for days on end, I am very much a man of the woods.  In such circumstances, the wild defines me.  But I start missing my family and friends.  Eventually, time and food run out.  Then I return to the world of words, dollars and other abstractions.  Yeah, I’m a phony.  Alain called it.

Yet nothing Alain or any other cafe philosopher says can change what I feel in my heart.  My connection to the wild is profound.  I can’t imagine going too long without a good dose of it.  If ever the day comes when dropping off the grid isn’t possible, then woods wanderers like me will no longer exist.  Yeah, I may be a phony when I call myself a woodsman, but I still must have my regular infusion of the wild, if only for a day or two here and there.  This utterly electronic world can’t sustain me.

Tags: civilization, modern times, the grid, the wild, wilderness

I got out of bed yesterday, dressed in thermals and wools, then stepped out the door while it was still dark.  I woke up in a bad mood for some reason – maybe I had been pondering the human condition in my sleep.  All I know is that I felt a powerful urge to go for a long walk and air out my stinky thoughts.  Since my wife and dog were visiting a friend for the weekend, there was nothing to prevent me from breaking the morning routine.  So out the door I went.

At first I kept to the sidewalk, but snowdrifts made walking there difficult so I moved to the street.  On a wintry Sunday morning before daybreak, it didn’t matter.  A car cruised by every once in a while, but I had the street to all myself for the most part.  I imagined trying to explain to some policeman why I was prowling the town.  But that was only my stinky thoughts creeping to the forefront of my consciousness, so I let it go.

I listened the other day as our outgoing president made his last speech, justifying eight years of ineptitude and that, I think, is what put me over the edge.  He passed judgment on himself as a way of setting the record straight, before anyone else could do so.  He passed judgment on everyone and everything in sight, seizing the moral high ground.  Or so he thought.  But history will not be kind to him.  I’m sure of that.

We all do it.  Passing judgment is as common as passing gas.  It’s an integral part of being human.  But there are times when it seems to me like the root of all evil.  I recently read several books about the Eastern Front in World War Two and was appalled by what the Nazis and Soviets did to each other there, along with anyone else in the way.  Tens of millions of people died, combatants and non-combatants alike, as each side pursued its morally righteous agenda by sheer force.  80% of the war was fought on that front and none of it was pretty.  To what end?  Misery, cruelty, death, destruction, and ultimately back to square one:  the Cold War, taking sides again, us and them.  And so on and so on . . .

Where does it all end?  According to those passing judgment, it never does – not until heaven on earth has been firmly established.  All we have to do is stand tall against the bad guys and good will prevail, right?  This is precisely what our departing president believes and why the world is such a mess.  I pray that the incoming president has more sense, but there’s a stink in the air as the victors of the last election celebrate.  Is that the smell of moral righteousness?  It smells to me like something dead.

As I finished my frigid walk, I flushed a murder of crows from a long row of conifers lining a side street.  They whirled about the bleached landscape in predawn light, cawing with unusual menace before settling into a few naked maples.  I was cold, achy, sweaty but feeling much better than I’d felt an hour earlier.  Walking is like that. I was tempted to read something into the sudden presence of so many carrion-eaters, but quickly jettisoned the thought.  “Give it a break,” I mumbled, reminding myself how easy it is to pass judgment and how little good comes from it.   Then I went home to a hot cup of coffee and breakfast.  And the day began in snowy stillness and beauty despite the endless gray sky overhead.

Tags: being human, morality, politics, walking

People living south of the border (the VT/MA state line, that is) are always surprised when I tell them that I don’t ski.  They think that’s what Vermont is all about.  I tried the sport once but didn’t much care for it.  I get out and snowshoe occasionally but am not as excited about that I as once was.  No, I hunker down during winter for the most part, focusing in on my literary work.  I wait for the other seven months of the year to roll around, when I can feel the earth underfoot and walking is easy.

Whether one skis or not, there’s no denying that Vermont is snow country.  It’s not unusual to get a hundred inches of the white stuff during a season here in the Champlain Valley and lot more than that falls on the mountains.  Oh sure, much of it melts off when the sun shines, but snow generally covers the ground from early December until the end of March.  So you’d better like it if you want to live here.

Do I like snow?  Let’s just say I’ve grown accustomed to it.  Growing up in central Ohio, I endured months of relentless gray skies and freezing rain.  By comparison, snow is much easier to contend with, especially on one of those blue-sky days like yesterday when the sun illuminates the frosty landscape.  A day like that can make even the crankiest, ice-hating curmudgeon believe that Vermont is a winter wonderland.

Shoveling snow is another matter, though.  I’ve noticed that those who like snow the most have Thule racks on their cars and usually bolt for the slopes after a winter storm has dumped a half foot or so.  You rarely see them shoveling out their driveways in full skiing regalia – that’s what the plows on the front of pickups are for.  But us poorer folk cringe at cost of snow plowing, so we resort to snow blowers or do it by hand.  It’s good exercise, we tell ourselves.  And that it is, for sure.

I pant and grunt as I push the snow around.  I often groan when I toss a particularly heavy load onto a five-foot snow pile.  I curse when my shovel catches on a knot of ice, wrenching my shoulder.  I sweat no matter what I wear and usually have ice encrusted in my beard when I finish.  A blast of cold air whips out of the northwest and I curse again.  Then my goofy dog, Matika, looks up from the hole she has dug in a snow pile and I can’t help but laugh.  Her furry face is even more ice-encrusted than mine, but she couldn’t be happier.  I stop shoveling long enough to toss her red ball a few times and she leaps through the snow like a snowbound dolphin.  Then the sun comes out again.

Being a Vermonter doesn’t mean playing in the snow all the time, but somehow we learn to live with it.  Hat, gloves and a heavy winter coat are essential.  A decent pair of snow boots can completely reverse one’s outlook on the season.  A little time spent outdoors sets one up for that commonplace moment when wild nature beams a frigid smile.  So when the weather forecasters threaten us with a Nor’easter that’s sure to dump a foot or more, we check our shovels to make sure they aren’t broken and say: “Bring it on!”  The more snow we get, the more we have to brag about.

Tags: moods, snow, Vermont

A few weeks ago, I posted a rumination called “Evolution is Religion” at this site, drawing fire from those who don’t wholeheartedly agree with me.  My friend Andrew’s criticism of my take on evolution and religion, at his site: http://evolvingmind.info/blog/ , is as good as any.  Check it out.  For those of you more interested in the hard science of evolution, which speaks for itself, there’s a big spread on it in this month’s issue of Scientific American.  For those of you still interested in trying to figure out what the hell I was saying in last month’s blog, read on.

Where did the first living cell come from?  In a sense this question is rhetorical because there’s no possible way for us to reasonably answer it.  I emphasize the word “reasonable” here to dismiss all wild-eyed theories about how it could have emerged, as well as all assertions based upon sacred texts.  A similar question is: What existed before the Big Bang?  That question has the time-bound word “before” in it, thus making it patently absurd to any serious student of cosmology.  I trade in these paradoxes and absurdities on purpose to illustrate how little we really know about nature.  We’ve filled entire libraries with the particulars of the natural world, but the whole of it still confounds us.

Knowing what we do about the particulars of the natural world, I don’t see how anyone can reject the mechanics of evolution outright.  It appears to be written in DNA itself, not to mention the multitude of fossils we’ve collected over the past couple centuries.  But all this suggests that nature as a whole is organized – a concept which begs the existence of some kind of organizing force.  Call that force what you will.  I call it God.

I understand the scientist’s natural revulsion to any kind of Godtalk.  One only has to conjure up images of Copernican heretics burning at the stake to see why men of reason cringe at the mere mention of anything remotely religious.  I also cringe when folks whip out their sacred texts, knowing that there’s a noose and/or torture chamber somewhere waiting for the likes of me, as well.  But that doesn’t change what I see in wild nature.  I see order as well as chaos at work in it, and I can’t for the life of me explain this.

As many people have pointed out to me over the years, my version of God is weak indeed.  I doubt it would hold up in any court, be it religious or secular.  But the wild keeps telling me that I’m onto something here.  And for that reason, I will follow this line of thought to its logical conclusion.  I just hope there isn’t a cup of hemlock waiting for me at the end of this road.

Tags: evolution, nature, philosophy, religion, science

All cranked up on sugar and caffeine, I cruised down the highway at 75 miles an hour and it seemed perfectly normal to me.  I followed a bare-pavement highway all the way through the snow-covered mountains of New York and Pennsylvania, finally arriving in Ohio a day and a half after leaving Vermont.  After a few days with the folks, then I did it all in reverse.  Gas was cheap – less than half of what it cost last summer – still I felt a little guilty about taking the trip.  The money I spent along the way to buy foreign oil was only making my home country poorer, not to mention the consequences of my car’s CO2 output.  But this is America and nothing is more American than motoring down an open road.

I enjoyed the ride out but not the ride back home.  Halfway through New York on the return journey, I felt cooped up, so I stopped at a roadside rest and walked half a mile to nowhere.  Sitting behind the steering wheel for a day and a half was the worst of it.  I am used to moving about, even on days when I don’t go for a hike in the woods.  I asked my brother, who drives a truck for a living, how he copes with this.  He told me that you get used to it.  I don’t think I ever would.  I like to stretch my legs too much.

Out on the highway, everyone is in a hurry.  Some people talk on phones while they drive; others listen to hard-driving music as I do.  Still others occupy themselves with talk radio or sports broadcasts.  I suspect that some long-distance truckers toy with other motorists just to relieve the boredom.  Nearly everyone drives too fast, too close to the vehicle in front of them, and with little regard for the weather.  Ego is involved, no doubt.  And every once in a while, we all pass a car or truck wrecked along the side of the road.  But that only happens to other drivers, of course.

Where are we going in such a hurry?  To our graves, ultimately.  Meanwhile the sun rises over the snowy, forested hills and we admire it at our own peril.  After all, the endless flow of traffic does not brake for beauty.

Yesterday, my first day back home, I went for a long walk along the Rail Trail with my dog.  She didn’t get out much while I was gone so she was happy just to sniff around and run.  I felt the same way despite the steady blast of arctic air freezing my face.  The sun rose high into a cloudless sky.  I kicked up powdery snow with each step.  I walked farther than I thought I would, just to walk.  Then it occurred to me:  I may live in an automotive society, but I’m a pedestrian at heart.  I’d choose the most mundane walk over a rock-and-roll ride every time.  Does that make me Thoreauvian?

Tags: modern times, walking

After reviewing my last few downbeat posts, I think it’s time for a little levity.  Renee, one of my readers, recently posted “seven random and weird things about me” at her site, http://combatpacifist.blogspot.com/ , and suggested that I do the same.  So here goes:

1.  As a kid, I used the birthmark on my left hand to differentiate between left and right.  Sometimes I still reference it.

2.  I was a Boy Scout for several years and learned a great deal about land navigation, building fires, first aid, and survival.  But I never earned a single merit badge.

3.  The first time I made love to a woman, I flipped a coin.  Best two out of three.

4.  A friend of mine won a Red Barron Pizza contest, but didn’t want the prize: a wild ride in a replica in the Red Barron’s biplane.  I took his place, requesting loops and rolls.

5.  While living in Oregon, I used to track mountain lions for fun.  I tracked one once to a ledge overlooking a spot where I’d been standing ten minutes earlier, and that was the end of that.

6.  I ran out of coffee the day before a bush plane extracted me from the wilds of Alaska and swore I’d never be without that precious black stuff again.  So if you ever run into me in deep woods, I’ll have coffee to spare.

7.  I’m not a picky eater.  I’ve eaten all kinds of wild plants, bear stew, the worm in the tequila bottle, and beetles on the half shell.  But I don’t like beets.

Weird enough for you?

Tags: humor, quirks

Every time I go deep into the woods, I am astounded by the fecundity of nature, by the myriad life forms taking root all around me.  Living things abound, even in the dead of winter.  The planet is teeming with them.  The oceans are soups chock full of plants and creatures great and small. Even in the coldest, most inhospitable regions of our world, colonies of bacteria thrive.  Others live on the hot rims of volcanic eruptions.  Life is everywhere and thriving.

While engaging in a series of mundane tasks the other day, it suddenly occurred to me that evolution is religion.  The great debate between Creationists and Darwinists is a contrivance – an artificial argument where the parties involved conspire against the reality manifest both in this planet of ours and in the stars.  This is clearly evident to anyone paying attention to the march of living cells: one splits into two, two split into four, and so on until everything living comes into being.  This sequence explains the seemingly endless variations found in nature, but it also begs the question: Where did that first living cell come from?

A genetic code is just that – a set of instructions by which a specific living organism takes shape.  Any self-respecting atheist will insist that the rise of the first cell was purely happenstance, that the animate sprung spontaneously from the inanimate after an incredibly long series of random events.  At face value, this appears to make sense.  But the stars refute it.

The evolution of inanimate matter draws attention to the problem of the first living cell.  Because we have become a species of specialists, the vast majority of us do not see the paradox here.  Biologists break down living things to long chains of proteins, naturally assuming that the building blocks of life have always existed.  Physicists study subatomic particles and see randomness at work in all things physical without giving much thought as to how this extends to their own living, breathing selves.  Cosmologists compile more and more data pointing to the emergence of the universe from an infinitely dense point in spacetime 14.7 billions years ago, offering no explanation as to how the physical world can be both random and organized.  Meanwhile natural historians present hard evidence that complex life forms have evolved from simpler ones, but stop short of explaining life’s origins.  Everyone assumes that the other specialists hold other important pieces of the puzzle, and that together these pieces will reveal a mechanistic world that’s mathematically comprehensible.  But the math never explains how that first living cell came to be.

The universe consists of countless stars organized into galaxies over eons.  We know that before there were galaxies, stars, planets, atoms, or any kind of organized material whatsoever, there were subatomic particles running amok in white-hot plasma that was the direct consequence of the Big Bang.  So again, I ask you: Where did the first living cell come from?  Where did this urge to live and reproduce originate?

A logically consistent atheism must deny the existence of nature altogether.  Both the laws of physics and genetic codes must be seen as mere accidents.  There is no room for natural laws in any worldview that denies a Lawgiver, unless the universe itself has always existed.  But we know this isn’t true.  We know that everything points back to the Big Bang.  We know that all matter can be reduced to four basic forces, and that a fraction of a microsecond after the Big Bang there were only two.  What happens when we go back in time and reduce that two to one?  Then we are standing eyeball-to-eyeball with God.

A true atheist must deny evolution because that seemingly scientific description of nature assumes a certain order to things that an utterly random universe cannot support.  Hence, evolution is religion.  This is so obvious that I don’t see how anyone can miss it.  But we are a species of specialists, so the left hand never knows what the right hand is doing.  When this fact is taken into consideration, it is amazing that we can figure out anything at all.  Too much information.  The particulars obscure the generalities.  We can’t see the forest for the trees.

Tags: evolution, living cells, nature, random universe

After the freezing rain had turned to snow, I bundled up, grabbed my dog’s leash and stepped out the door.  Matika ran ahead of me, naturally, excited by the prospect of a long walk.  We reached the trailhead after a short drive, then laid tracks in the pristine snow.  We had the rec path all to ourselves.

The naked trees and brush were a dozen different shades of brown, contrasting nicely with the whitened ground, rec path and sky.  The snow blew at a sharp angle across the path.  I raised the hood on my jacket to conserve body heat.  I picked up my pace.  Matika was already thirty yards ahead of me, terrorizing a squirrel.  The snow muffled every sound except that of traffic on the nearby highway.  Incongruity.  Nothing but trees in view, yet a blind man would have thought he was near a busy intersection.

Sometimes a walk is just a walk.  Sometimes I head outdoors, stretch my legs for a couple miles, then return home sweaty and a little winded but otherwise unchanged.  A lot of nature writing leaves the reader with the impression that every outing has the potential of being some kind of life-changing event.  Not true.   Sometimes the walk itself is all one gets out of it.  Sometimes there is nothing worth reporting – no wild encounters, no great moments of insight, nothing the least bit out of the ordinary.  Perhaps that is why so many nature writers tend to make something extraordinary out of the ordinary.  No writer wants to be caught without something to write about.

Ah, but there’s always the ineffable – that aspect of the wild that goes beyond words.  If an ordinary walk so often takes on the trappings of a religious experience, it’s only because the ordinary wipes the slate clean, making it easier for even an irreligious fellow like me to pick up on the essential Otherness permeating nature.  But that isn’t something easy to talk about, so we talk about the many familiar objects in nature, instead, hoping that something might emerge as a workable metaphor for that Otherness.  And it usually does.  But this is religion, not natural history.

Truth is, I’m not much of a naturalist.  Neither was Thoreau.  I’m just a writer with a bad habit of philosophizing while walking in the woods by myself.  But often I return home from an outing without a scrap of insight.  You, dear reader, usually don’t hear about those outings.  Why would you?

Sometimes a walk is just a walk.  Sometimes I head outdoors, stretch my legs for a couple miles, then return home happy to have gotten out.  I’ve had bad days that included a long walk, but they are rare.  I’ve had good days where I didn’t get outdoors, but they would have been even better if I had.  Above all else, a long walk is good for the body.  We Thoreauvians sometimes forget that.

The snow squall intensified as Matika and I finished our walk.  It quickly covered our tracks.  We were both covered with flakes by the time we reached the car.  While the defroster cleared the window, we exchanged big, goofy grins then picked chunks of ice out of our hair.  No doubt Matika was just as happy to get back to our nice, warm house as I was.  But going for a long walk is never a bad idea.

Tags: nature writing, walking