| western watershed romance |
| about | episodes | musings | voyeur room |
Y'know, I'm a confused fucking man, stuck in a
purgatory between the shining, homogenous world of mainstream society
and the antisocial, anarchist, technology-hatin', Unabomber-imitatin'
iconoclastic, misanthropic, isolationist hermits that cast off all
vestiges of society to live as solitary hunter-gatherers subject wholly
to the rules of no-man's land. I just need society - I need the
connection, I need the few people I don't forget about in this life
like a thirsty man needs water, I need to see and smell and feel
fucking woman to have any sense of balance and health. Conversely, I
can only take so much of you assholes, and probably likewise, too,
before I need some distance, before I need to shove off in the
non-human world and get what I need, at least in part, vicariously from
the trees and the birds and the fishes and the wind and the water.
At times, my life is like trying to push
through a murky fucking nighttime fog with no asphalt road under my
feet, no concentration of light that signals the sun and hence the
possibility of direction. So, like any reasonable fucker would do, I
poke around in media to see if there's anyone else, any other
purgatory-inhabitin' humans out there struggling with the same
dichotomy that have put it into words and thus could help accelerate my
own understanding of my place and role. I've luckily found some, such
as a couple of Ed Abbey's works (of course Desert Solitaire, and Down the River is pretty insightful, too) and Freeman House's Totem Salmon (though I loathe the author's hippie name), but one especially hit home - an anthology titled Hunter's Heart
edited by some guy named David Petersen. Many essays in that anthology,
all about what it means to hunt in its myriad aspects and colors,
struck a chord in me, resonated with many of the same issues I feel
when going after fish. Petersen himself had an essay in the book about
elk-hunting that was well-written and expressed many of the same
sentiments I feel when chasing stripers or lakers or carp. Given that
favorable first impression, I picked up a book solely by Petersen
called On the Wild Edge, which I felt would round out and enhance my understanding of how to balance these two worlds - the human and non-human.
And y'know, well, it did crystallize
my philosophy a little more, it did enhance and expand my horizons a
little bit. But not in a typical, an expected way - it made explicit
that which keeps me from joining the antisocial grub-eatin' misfits out
in the woods because, in general, I fucking hated this book, and,
perhaps more so, I hate the fucking guy who wrote it.
And I've never met the dude!
I think part of my, well, disgust
with Petersen is that I actually agree with many of his opinions. The
issue, however, is that his arguments frequently suck major, hairy
Bigfoot balls: their evidence is flimsy, the links are at times
senseless, and, man o' Manischevitz, the guy so easily slides down the
slippery slope to only land in, and then spew, bullshit. It also
doesn't help that a lot of his observations, his statements, are really
fucking trite and cliché. And, finally, at least in the writing, he
seems like, well, a dick, like a really fucking unpleasant person to be
around. And so these faults of the book, I guess, fire up my hatred
more since I do resonate in direct correlation to the issues he brings
up.
Let me clear some of this shit up. First, his
arguments. He states that animals that smell better, such as bears,
dogs, and deer, know more (whatever the fuck THAT means) than
smaller-schnozzed humans, yet he leaves out the fact that humans have
better color vision and image resolution than any of those critters. He
states that his cutting of firewood uses no fossil fuels for
transportation but apparently misses the fact that the fucking truck,
the chainsaw, and the maul he used to process and move the wood all no
doubt required fuel for their production and distribution,
not to mention the function of the saw and vehicle. He makes the
misanthropic claim that humans are the only species that kill other
animals and waste most of the flesh, but don't bears often eat just the
fucking brains of salmon and leave the rest for scavengers to pick on?
He boldly declares that humans are meant to be in wilderness, but, um, if they were meant to be there, wouldn't they be
there? He mourns the fact that the daily work of so few people supports
their "spiritual and material needs" since they're not out choppin'
their own wood and killing their own food, but how the fuck does he
know that most people don't meet these needs with the fucking paycheck
derived from their work or a well-played game of chess? He states that
kids will only be safe outside when the environment contains less
concrete, less traffic, and fewer light bulbs, but I'm pretty sure that
hunter-gatherer societies such as the Yanomamo fucking killed all
their enemies' children, and all that without any semblance of the
artifice of modern civilization. Fuck, man, even gorillas kill, and
then eat, rival females' babies, and they're not pummeled with either streetlights or the screech of cholo low-riders burnin' rubber.
And there are some statements that make no
fucking sense at all. He writes that staring into a wood fire
"...rekindl[es] that magical human trio of myth, imagination, and
utility." Y'know, I think I can imagine all sorts of wild shit just
staring at a fucking white wall; if I want some myth, I'll bust out the
saga of CuChullain; and if I want utility, blessed be me, I'll pull out
a lovely, inexpensive, 1/16-oz black-back/red-belly Hard Time Minnow
and bag just about any carnivorous fish that swims in my local waters.
Remarkably, none of those things happen when I gaze into a pine split
burning on a cold mountain night. And can someone please explain to me
what the fuck this is supposed to mean, because I sure as fuck can't
figure it out: "...human predation that fails to respect the unity of
the global biotic community is a major and growing problem everywhere
today." Um, how do I "respect the unity of the global biotic community"
when I go kill a few fish for the frying pan? And this is just, well, nothing:
"...the civilized human animal has lost its deep-time animistic gift of
perceiving the intrinsic sacredness of nature dispersed equally through
all living things." Man, how do we measure the equality of sacredness
in each living thing? Is the sacredness of the cell of a cockroach and
the cell of a grizzly bear equal? Or is it the equivalence of the
entire organisms, such that each cell of the roach is commensurately
greater in sacredness relative to the bear so that they're equal? Wow,
this really seems like a math problem requiring some Asian kid!
And the fucking sixth-grader philosophy...dig:
"And what is life, really, but the moment?"
"For life to continue, death must always have a next time."
"We are products of our decisions, minute by minute."
"How I love it so when nature breaks the "just so" shackles we try to force her into!"
"Even by ignoring choices, we are making choices."
"It is only the promise of death that makes our lives worth living."
And perhaps the topper, the icing on the
pile of dung, Peterson's asshole-ism. Half a page is blown haughtily
quoting a friend showering Peterson with compliments, which he
concludes with a one-sentence, painfully inept self-effacing attempt at
balancing his smug righteousness by suggesting he's actually full of
shit. He derides all his fellow Baby Boomers for remaining within the
mainstream and ultimately evading happiness, as if Peterson's the one
to judge the definition of happiness for these "millions" of other
people. And he remarks how he wishes his wife wouldn't visit a spot
with bears - a location she
wanted to go to - since it'd be unsafe, even though he himself notes
how woods-wise she is - that doesn't seem really respectful of the
better half. Finally, his writing style is just...cold.
His jokes are flat, and the sentences, the transitions, they're just
really stolid, which, when combined with the litany of trite fucking
pseudo-intellectual statements throughout the book, just make him
appear like a smarmy, know-it-all fucking high-schooler.
A real fucking dick, y'know?
But I'd be a dick if I left it at that because there are some worthy insights and quips in On the Wild Edge,
and I ain't no dick - I'm a fuckin' O'REAR! - and thus the positives.
First, Peterson does have wonderful natural-history knowledge of myriad
species he lives among, which is especially valuable in this day and
age when a greater and increasing proportion of time spent by
biologists, by hunters and fishermen, by any type of person with even
the remotest interest in Nature is comprised of staring at computer
screens and/or numbers rather than actually interacting with the
ultimate subject - the plant or animal. Similarly, his in-depth
discussion of the physics of chopping wood was remarkably, despite the
seemingly boring topic, worthwhile given how small a proportion of
people today actually know how and why to split firewood a certain way.
He softened my cold black heart a bit with this statement about the ol'
television set: "...on my deathbed reflecting back on my small life, I
doubt I'll exclaim, 'Damn, if only I'd watched more TV!'" He explains
eloquently, logically, why clear-cutting practices are ultimately harmful to forest ecosystems. Consequently, the book certainly ain't a total loss.
But, in general, I still fucking hated it, and
hate - yes, that passionate of a word - is appropriate. Why? Because,
as I mentioned earlier, I do agree with many of the same points that
Peterson makes, such as judiciously killing the animals you eat, but
feel almost, well, offended
since he continually debases and fucks up his own arguments with his
shitty writing and his spiraling off into senselessness and his
frequent descents down the ol' slippery slope. Let me put it another
way - birds of a feather flock together, and couching his several
valid, sound points among the mountains and mountains of bullshit
sullies his good arguments, making it all too easy for too-easily led
people to really miss the point.
And those fucking people, glued to the screens of their smart-phones, are only increasing.
And I still straddle the two worlds.