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Last week on the ridge above a deep canyon, before descending into the canyon with my wife and friends, I miscalculated our location and the distance around the base of a mountain peak that is part of the ridge.
The canyon is steep and rocky and forested. Some of the rocks are large boulders. The thorns of the ceanothus that grows there hurt to touch. In some places the thick duff is topped with slippery pine needles. Fallen trees add to the ruggedness of the land. Although my GPS guided us to the destination, our journey was much longer and harder than we expected when we left the ridge. The thorns scratched us and we all fell more than once when the pine needles slid beneath our feet. Climbing through and over boulders tired our legs and arms. It all stressed our patience and confidence.
Deep in the canyon are ruins of a historical log cabin, so deep that hiking there from any point in or above the canyon is strenuous, difficult, slow and tiring. On the day last week when I was lost, by being lost I unexpectedly found a new route to the cabin – something I had previously sought but been unable to find.
Two days later I returned with my wife and friends to explore the new route. It was more difficult than the others we had used, but more dramatic, more remote, more isolated, and unused except by deer and other wild creatures. I often hike in lands designated “wilderness” by Congress, but walking this steep forested canyon slope was really the first time I had been in a place that was plausibly unvisited by humanity before me. It was a place like Thoreau described in Chesuncook: “There you are never reminded that the wilderness which you are threading is, after all, some villager’s familiar wood-lot.” There were no signs that other hikers had been here seeking solitude before us. This was wilderness.
Places like this – so beautiful, so remote, so inhospitable, so wild – seem to affirm Darwin’s suspicion: the land was not made for us. Wild land confounds agrarian theology. Chance and necessity seem to have found expression in error and travail. In wilderness life came unexpectedly and it still does.
The walk to Stills Landing and back was twelve miles in the wilderness, in a place a friend of mine calls “tall and uncut.” His expression is an allusion to Thoreau’s use of those words to describe the forests were he liked to walk – a place not transformed by humanity.
Stills Landing is named for someone who attempted to settle there in the 1940’s. The homestead failed.
The beauty and benevolence of wilderness is deceptive. The harmony is illusion. The river runs cold through Whitewater Canyon, bears hunt the deer, and my survival, as well as that of bears and deer, depends on me leaving this tall and uncut place before night.
I want to be deceived – I love the illusion. And yet, my disbelief in the terror of existence, my disbelief that nature is sublime, is hard to suspend.
Thoreau, Darwin and Nietzsche, each in his own way, confirmed the terror. I think Thoreau hoped for transcendence and feared the nihilistic boredom of civilization more than he feared places tall and uncut. Darwin faced the terror stoically – accepting it as it is and admiring the grandeur of the terror and the deception. Nietzsche faced it heroically – acknowledging the power such terror has over us, but resisting, not with suspension of disbelief, but with a raised fist. It is as if Thoreau said, “Let it not be so;” Darwin said, “so be it;” and Nietzsche said, “Nevertheless, thou must reckon with me.” Nietzsche was like Job.
As for me, I guess I am much like Thoreau – I walk in the wilderness and return to the city with hope renewed. I admire Nietzsche, and yet I love the wilderness too much to raise my fist. Let it be – tall and uncut, and terrifying.
John Burroughs wrote: “Natural selection is just as good a god as any other. No matter what we call it, if it brought man to the head of creation and put all things (nearly all) under his feet, it is god enough for anybody.” That is an allusion to Genesis 1:26 and Psalm 8:6.
Can stoicism overcome the nihilism associated with Darwin’s view, overcome what Burroughs called “the cosmic chill.” I think Burroughs believed stoicism would warm us. He wrote that “most persons feel homeless and orphaned in a universe where no suggestion of sympathy and interest akin to our own comes to us from the great void.” And then, in a sentence that alludes to Psalm 8:3-4 and to Darwin’s great work, he wrote: “A providence of impersonal forces, the broadcast, indiscriminate benefits of nature, kind deeds where no thought of kindness is, well-being as the result of immutable law – all such ideas chill and disquiet us, until we have inured ourselves to them.”
Inure: this is the counsel of stoics.
Burroughs wrote these lines in a work he titled stoically, “Accepting the Universe: Essays in Naturalism” (1920.)
Thoreau had already famously written, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” They are related, I think – wildness and natural selection. Still, I am not sure Thoreau meant it that way. Although some critics have suggested that wilderness or nature was Thoreau’s god, and that a Zen theme (which is a stoical theme) can be detected in some of his writings, I think wildness was not natural selection to him – wildness was the opposite of civilization. Thoreau was engaged in resistance, not acceptance. In wildness was hope to him.
For me, stoicism fails. Resistance is my path. Resistance, and, like the psalmist and Thoreau, hope that we will find sympathy, kindness in the wildness in or beyond the moon and the stars.
Aldo Leolpold on the land ethic: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” (A Sand County Almanac, page 224-225.)
One can write about the wildness of nature because natural selection is wild, but it is hard to write about morality in the context of nature because the way of nature – natural selection, or chance and necessity – is indifferent to morality.
Leopold tried to avoid a human-centered ethic, but he did not succeed. Preservation of the integrity, stability and beauty of nature is something humans sometimes seek because we associate them with existence. Natural selection has no such aim – no beliefs, no values, no purposes.
Natural selection is indifferent to existence and nonexistence. Humans are not. We have realized that our existence depends on the existence of the web of life of which we are part. We value that web, like we value integrity, stability and beauty, because the thought of nonexistence is so awful to us.
Integrity, stability and beauty: these are virtues or values. Philosophers have associated them with what is eternal and, therefore, transcendent. It is a strain to sustain belief that they are connected with nature or the cosmos after Darwin. It is hard to sustain belief that existence matters.
“Coarse are the motives which commonly carry men into the wilderness,” Thoreau wrote in Chesuncook. He was referring to logging and to white men and Indians hunting wild creatures.
Today, the motives which carry men into wilderness have evolved to include biking and jeeping and other sports. The motives remain coarse: racing up and down trails for the sake of physical conditioning or sport, climbing mountains to test the limits of one’s body or mind or equipment or one’s power versus nature, and walking in large chattering groups mostly unconnected with the wilderness and using wilderness as a scenic place for an outdoor party.
“But, pray, could not one spend some weeks or years in the solitude of this vast wilderness with other employments than these,” Thoreau asked, Thoreau prayed – “to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light.”
Thoreau prayed because he believed: surely in wilderness our souls shall be restored.
Snow on the ridge and clouds below: sometimes the order of life is unexpected.
At an overlook below an unnamed peak, rocks were arranged in seven circles, each a few feet in diameter. Within some of the circles smaller rocks formed symbols, their meaning unknown to me. In other circles, Hebrew letters, alef and tav. Alef: the seed of life. Tav: its wholeness. In another, the Chinese character for peace.
A coyote paused nearby on a rock outcropping. A raven floated in the air next to me, almost close enough to touch, its wings in motion but its body held in one place for a moment by the wind.
In the heart of things, life is unexpected.
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