Woods Wanderer

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

Everyone is going green these days.  I can’t figure out whether this is good or bad.  The optimist in me wants to believe that we’ve finally reached the tipping point in ecological awareness – that being green, once marginalized, is now going mainstream.  But I worry that it might just be a passing fad, no more profound than red handbags or thin ties.

Are we ready to trade our gas-guzzling trucks for hybrid cars?  After building millions of energy-sucking McMansions, is the average homeowner ready do downsize to a smaller, more energy-efficient dwelling?  Forgive me for being skeptical, but this is America for chrissakes.  Moderation is a dirty word here.

But green is clean.  Green is oh, so modern.  Green is the new organic.  When being all natural was countercultural, only young rebels and social dropouts were interested in it.  But now green appeals to everyone who has greenbacks to spend or a credit card to plop down.  Green is the kind of buzzword that makes advertisers orgasmic.  Its marketing possibilities are endless, and no aspect of the economy will go untouched.  Green can pick up where high-tech left off.  Better than that, green can be a new religion.  And every consumer is a potential convert.

In a culture such as ours, where consumerism is two-thirds of the economy, it’s foolish to talk about socioeconomic change without taking spending habits into consideration.  The Thoreauvian ideal of the simple life is fine in theory, but it doesn’t drive the Dow.  If we are serious about retooling our civilization, thus making it more environmentally sustainable for our children and grandchildren, then the greening of consumer behavior is absolutely necessary.  Still, I’m a bit leery about it.  Can we really spend our way to salvation?

Truth is, I’m a lousy consumer so my opinion doesn’t count when it comes to these matters.  Much to my wife’s dismay, I wear shirts with frayed collars, pants with holes in them, and shoes coming apart at the seams.  Most of my backpacking gear is repaired and/or outdated, and I scour the bargain tables of bookstores on a regular basis.  I’ve completely worn out a half dozen rusty cars.  The economy would unravel and civilization would collapse altogether if the average consumer suddenly behaved the way I do, so ignore my grumbling.  Get out there, open you pocketbook and go green!  All nature is counting on you.

Tags: clean tech, consumerism, green economy

Just about the time the first homeowners put up Christmas lights, I feel it.  Oddly enough, the feeling usually comes in the middle of the day, when the muted, overcast light of late November isn’t enough to read by.  After a long walk in bone-chilling rain, I’m happy enough to stay indoors the rest of the day, but it seems strange to be doing everything by artificial light.

Every year I am given plenty of warning.  Daylight Savings Time kicks in around Halloween and I’m eating dinner in the dark for weeks before it gets to me.  Then all of a sudden pow! I’m in a funk for no reason whatsoever.  I’m not alone in this.  Millions of people have Seasonal Affective Disorder and millions more don’t particularly care for these short days and long nights.  But like all those who suffer SAD, the dark season is something I experience in deep solitude no matter how many people around me are suffering the same. That’s just the nature of the beast.

Yes, I know all about sun lights and the many other strategies one can employ to keep SAD at bay, but the darkness still hounds me.  I’m adept now at staying a step ahead of it most of the time, but there are moments during the course of each short day when the sense of desolation is overwhelming.  Surely this feeling is as old as humanity itself.  Surely the first self-aware hominid felt something like it when he/she suddenly realized that several lean months lay directly ahead, and that not everyone in the clan would make it to spring.  Awareness is damning that way.

I am a creature of light.  I revel in the long days of early summer when it seems the sun will never set.  My two-week sojourn in the Alaskan bush was the greatest high of my life, and I’m sure that the 20-hour days had a lot to do with it.  Conversely, the only time I seriously considered suicide came on a day much like today.  Thank god I didn’t follow through on that urge, otherwise I would have missed out on dozens of glorious springs and as many magnificent summers!

Just now the snow-dusted landscape out my window becomes more visible as a lazy sun rises behind a wall of gray clouds. Later on this morning, I will go for a long walk in quiet defiance, as if to affirm that I will live to see the wildflowers bloom again.  Like my distant ancestors, I have seen this coming and have braced myself against it.  Awareness is redeeming that way.

I can’t help but think that my sensitivity to light and darkness is somehow linked to my close association to the wild.  Rationally speaking, though, this makes no sense.  There are plenty of nature lovers indifferent to these long nights.  Still, the Winter Solstice rituals of the Druids and other pagans make me wonder if there isn’t some aversion to darkness deep within us all.  Everyone braces against it, one way or another.  No doubt the candle makers and manufacturers of Christmas lights will have plenty of buyers for their wares for many years to come.

Tags: Alaska, awareness, moods, seasonal change

As a lover of all things wild, I find myself torn nearly every day by two distinct realities: the economic and the natural.  Theoretically, there is no conflict between the two since economics mimics the rules of survival laid out by nature, and nature follows the basic principles of economics as it goes about its affairs.  But on a practical level, the tension is palpable.

Henry David Thoreau, the patron saint of environmentalism, railed against what he saw as the crass materialism of his day.  “I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in,” he complained in his journals, “They are all ruled for dollars and cents.”  Anyone who has committed large chunks of his/her life to writing and thinking understands this all too well.  While blank books abound in our day and age, the time to actually sit down and write something in them remains a precious commodity.  Writing, ruminating, walking, or merely observing wild nature – all the activities we associate with that Concord nonconformist require time, money and energy that could be devoted to earning a living.

Yesterday I mentioned to a shopkeeper that I might have to curtail my writing when my wife retires, that opening a bookshop remains my fallback plan if I can’t generate enough money writing.  “Why can’t you do both?” he asked, then I asked him what he does other than run his business.  He fell silent.  Yes, I did a little writing while running a bookstore back in the 1980s, but nothing compared to what I’ve written since then, while working part time and relying on my wife’s income.  I didn’t get into the woods much back then, either.  We all make choices, and often those choices are heavily influenced by economic necessity.

When I was a kid, I dreamed of having a cabin in the woods not all that different from Thoreau’s shack on Walden Pond.  Nowadays I see that cabin as something that competes with my writing as well as my wife’s own cost-dependent desires.  Everything requires money, and while I could build that cabin cheap enough, I haven’t the land upon which to put it.  Keep in mind the fact that Thoreau built his cabin on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, who shared the same dream.  Emerson was too busy writing and lecturing for a living to follow through on his own cabin dream so Henry did it for him.  So much for self-reliance.

The problem here, of course, is that I’m trying to be a nature writer much like both Emerson and Thoreau.  Not a journalist, a biologist, or anything practical like that, but one who delves deeply into the wild then writes down whatever comes to mind.  Truth is, there has never been much market demand for this kind of thing.  During the better part of his life, Thoreau supported himself by surveying land and running his father’s pencil factory.  Short of an inheritance or a hefty trust fund, we all make hard choices.

The choices we make in life reflect our core values.  This is true for both individuals and society at large.  The tension between the aesthetics of the wild and material well being is as fundamental as the water we drink, the land we walk, and the air we breathe.  There is no getting around this.  At all levels, we make choices that determine the fate of both our selves and the global community.  And this is why every ideology contains at least one lie.  Theory never matches practicality.  Theoretically, we can have it all.  Realistically, something has to give.

Tags: economics, Emerson, nature, Thoreau

Midday.  Matika and I stretch our legs.  There’s a light flurry of snow falling, which is probably why we have the hill all to ourselves today.  The forest is mostly shades of brown and gray.  Matika cavorts about the open woods, looking for a chipmunk or squirrel to terrorize.  She occasionally finds one rummaging about the leaves.  I ignore her for the most part as I amble up the trail.

Halfway up the hill, I detour to the lookout for a quick view of St. Albans.  The town sprawls before me like a model railroad layout.  The collective hum of cars coming and going contradicts the stillness of the greater panorama.  Beyond the edge of town, farm fields and woodlots stretch to Lake Champlain and its islands.  Beyond the lake, mountains rise into low clouds.  A squall to the west blocks the northernmost edge of the Adirondacks from view.  The cold wind brings tears to my eyes.  I turn away from the lookout and slip deeper into the woods.

While climbing the last rise to the summit, I wonder how many more times I’ll hike this hill before I tire of it.  There’s no way to know, of course.  There’s only this eternal present.  Deep in it now, I realize that I come here more for a sense of perspective than anything else – a quick fix of the wild when I haven’t the time or inclination to drive an hour or so to the mountains.  A week, a day, or only an hour in the woods, I take what I can get.

I cross over the summit ridge, then catch the view eastward from the nearby ski slope.  More cars race along the interstate below.  I turn away, deliberately cutting my pace to make the downhill half of the hike last as long as possible.  I have work to do but am in no big hurry to get back to it.  Matika chases a squirrel up a tree.  I call her back to my side.

On the way back to the car, I pass the remnant of an old, dead tree still protruding twenty feet into the air.  I’ve been passing it for years and can’t help but wonder when it’ll come down.  Someday it’ll drop.  It’s just a matter of time.  Chances are good that I won’t be walking past it when it does, yet fallen trees litter the forest floor.

It seems like everything is a function of time and scale.   “Time is cheap and rather insignificant,” Thoreau once wrote in his journals, “It matters not whether it is a river which changes from side to side in a geological period or an eel that wriggles past in an instant.”  A walk in the woods, even a short one like this, drives this point home.

The roof of my house is visible from the lookout on the hill.  So is the cluster of buildings downtown where I run my errands.  The better part of my life is visible from up there, though I rarely think about it as I go about my daily affairs.  Someday I’m going to sit up there and ponder things for hours on end, or so I keep telling myself.  But I can never sit at that lookout more than twenty minutes before growing restless, thinking about all the things I should be doing.  That, I find, is the essential paradox of a good view.

Tags: reflection, time, Vermont, walking

A couple weeks ago, I stood beneath the old maple tree in my back yard amid a shower of leaves.  A steady breeze coming on the heels of a hard frost was doing the trick.  My old maple is one of the last trees to give up its leaves.  On that day it relented.  The sun was shining through a partly cloudy sky and each leaf shouted orange as it tumbled to the ground.  Hundreds, thousands of leaves rained down.  I was certain that the tree would be naked the next day.  But a tight cluster of leaves in the top left quarter of it refused to budge.

I looked up once while raking yesterday to see how many leaves were still clinging there.  Remarkably, the tree was clear of them.  Can’t say when exactly the last few leaves came down.  I missed that show.  But as I raked it occurred to me that “stick season” had arrived in Vermont as it usually does, without fanfare.  And winter is right around the corner.  I raked for a couple hours, then went inside to warm up as the faintest flurry of snow fell from the dark gray clouds overhead.

When my wife and I drove to Montpelier the other day, fresh snow blanketed the mountains and a dusting of it covered the grass on both sides of the highway.  The landscape all around us was a pitching sea of naked trees.  It was easy to imagine happy hunters creeping through them.  A little higher up, the earliest skiers will be at it soon, if they aren’t already.

There are no big snowstorms in the forecast, but every Vermonter knows they’re coming.  Winter in this part of the world is like that.  Although it gives plenty of advance warning to those of us paying close attention, it still shows up one day like an uninvited guest.  Sometimes that guest goes away for a few weeks then comes back.  Sometimes it stays until spring.  Either way, it pays to be ready.

I’ve insulated my house, brought in my outdoor planters, and dug out my snow shovels.  My winter boots are handy, as are my winter clothes.  Already my thoughts have turned inward as they usually do this time of year.  Winter is the best season for pondering philosophical matters.  It’s easy to read, write and think when the days are short and the windows have frosted over.  I used to hate winter but now I look forward to it.  I get a lot of literary work done when the snow flies.

I’ll gather up a few more bags of leaves later on today then put away my rake.  If there’s time afterward, I’ll go for a long walk with my dog through nearby sticks just to listen to the clatter of branches against each other in the late autumn wind.  That’s a sound easy to hear when the leaves are down.

A couple days ago, a diehard pansy was still flowering in the corner of my garden.  Now it’s gone.  I’m stocking up on root vegetables and planning meals that call for them.  Best not to fight it.  Best to smile at the 4:30 sundown, fully aware of the implication.  The geese have headed south and the leaves are all on the ground.  Dull brown, dry and crinkled, fallen leaves used to sadden me, but not any more.  Now they look magnificent.  They clearly illustrate nature’s endless cycle of growth and decay.  They show the circle completed.

Tags: nature, reflection, Vermont

Like most people living in America these days, I am deeply concerned about the state of the economy and have been closely following the presidential election as a consequence.  A seismic shift in the political landscape occurred two days ago – there’s no doubt about that.  But it remains to be seen whether or not this shift signals a real change in the way we do things in this country.  Maybe it’s just another swing of the pendulum.

Partisan fighting has been the standard operating procedure in Washington for as long as I can remember.  I worry about terrorism, war, climate change, the mass extinction of plants and animals, a failing social net, and economic collapse, but what I fear most is the kind of left/right squabbling that has paralyzed our country for decades.  If we do not snap out of it soon, we are doomed as a civilization.  I sincerely hope that the current regime change will lead to a major shift in the way we do business.

The whole world is watching.  It begs for leadership worthy of the name.  It hopes that we can overcome our self-righteous, self-absorbed, bullying tendencies and get the global economy moving in the right direction again while addressing planetary matters that touch us all.  There will always be terrorists and tyrants among us, but they can’t get very far until all hell breaks loose.  It is up to us to minimize their impact by making both our country and the world a place where every man, woman and child has a chance, at least, to live a long, happy and healthy life.

I am just a woods wanderer.  I amble about the forests and fields while pondering the human condition, then sit down at this desk to verbalize my take on things.  I am not a voice from the wilderness, a religious or political leader, or an expert of any kind.  But this much I do know:  Either we go to the bargaining table with our foes and work up some kind of deal acceptable to all parties involved, or we fight them to the bitter end.  So what will it be then – conflict or cooperation?  I suspect that more can be accomplished by the latter than the former.  But not everyone shares this view.  Time will tell what those in our new government think.

Tags: change, civilization, globalism, the human condition

Snow lingers on the ground despite the weather forecaster’s promise of a return to autumn.  I look at the calendar on the wall.  It’s not even November yet.  This is an unusual turn of climatological events even by Vermont standards.  A dusting of the white stuff before Halloween, sure, but lingering snow this time of year?  C’mon now.

The night before last, I drove home through the darkness just after the cold rain switched to wet snow.  It was a white-knuckle drive that made me think about things to come.  But I went to bed confident that the snow would be gone by noon the next day.  And now, into the second day, I’m trying to make sense of it.  I’m trying to make sense of Mother Nature’s capricious ways.  It isn’t easy.

The law of averages provides some consolation.  Given enough time, snow will fall in September one year, and flowers will bloom in December another year.  It all evens out, right?  Of course it does, unless Mother Nature is up to something we don’t know about.  Yeah, trust the law of averages.  It’ll pass.

On October 4, 1987, I was taken by surprise.  I hiked into the mountains that day with enough gear to spend the night and every intention to do so.  There was something in the forecast about possible rain and a big drop in temperature but I shrugged it off.  Way too early in the season for anything serious.  I was trout fishing in my shirtsleeves at noon, wearing my rain jacket by mid-afternoon, and dealing with freezing rain at dusk.  I set up my tarp against a fallen tree then started a fire to stay warm.  That sorta worked.  When the freezing rain switched to sleet, I put on the dry clothes I’d brought with me and slipped beneath the tarp.  I duct-taped my ground cloth to an emergency blanket, creating a waterproof pouch around my sleeping bag.  Then I climbed into it.  I was nice and warm even as the thermometer I’d brought with me dipped below thirty.  The sleet turned to snow.

Just before daybreak, I awoke to snow – several inches of it covering my camp – and it was still coming down.  I used a stick to beat the ice loose from my rain jacket, then I put it on. The trees swayed precariously in a strong wind blowing from the west.  I broke camp in a hurry, foregoing breakfast.  Then I bushwhacked out of the mountains, three miles downhill, following a stream.  A mature birch cracked loudly in a gust of wind and I jumped out of the way just as it fell where I had been standing.  I kept an eye on the trees all around me as I slogged through the slippery wet snow, falling down repeatedly.  It was a long hike out.

I’ve never been so happy to leave the woods as I was that day, but my tribulation wasn’t over when I reached the road.  It was another two-mile march along the highway, face to the fierce wind, before I reached the nearest town.  There I called Judy and drank hot coffee while waiting for her in the delicious warmth of a convenience store.  I still had icicles in my beard when she picked me up.

Whatever happens today, I’ll be sure to stay warm.  I probably won’t go outdoors for anything more than a little errand running.  It’s way too early in the season for a winter hike.  But I’ll be thinking of that time when Mother Nature really zinged me.  By comparison, the inch or two of snow covering the ground right now is no big deal at all.

Tags: bushwhacking, survival, weather, wild nature