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I hiked a strenuous, glorious
10 miles yesterday, among diamond granite and glowing green conifers
and the chatters and twitters of Mountain Chickadees and twinkling
little subalpine creeks. As my body roamed over the wild country, my
mind roamed over ideas and images and experiences with some link to the
trees and the rock and the water. I thought about my relationship with
fishes, how it's progressed, and about its expression in photos, the
signposts of that progress, the ethics they reflect. The fish porn,
however trite and twisted it may seem, serves as the map, the resume,
of where I've been, what I've learned, what I've been, who I've been;
similarly, it forms the ethical criteria that guides my future
endeavors - who I should be. I thought, too, about the women who've
shared my life, the lost opportunities, the misfired emotions, the
shame, the awkwardness, the love, the lust, the kindness, the
sweetness, and how I gotta accept both the good and bad of all those
relationships to better my current and future ones. And I thought,
finally, about why I really was thinking, and deeply, about heavy shit
while stomping amid the woods and water. It was the environment's damn
fault - such a montane scene has been the setting for so many joyful,
life-saving experiences that these Nature walks, man, they just fucking
free me. When suffering in the house of my old man, I could zoom over
to little Lake Gregory, to its sapphire-emerald waters encircled by
towering ponderosa pines and shiny incense-cedars, and feel some
fucking life that wasn't dismissive, that wasn't insulting, and that
also gave me a sense of accomplishment and thus meaning via a fish on
the line. That coniferous setting also clothed Deep Creek, where the
posse and I cliff-jumped and swam and fished during the most vibrant
time in my social life, the first few years after high school, when the
crew and I were all fucking really tight. Of course my first exposure
to the water and trees and fishes that changed my life's direction, the
South Fork Kern, its arid pinyon pines and grizzled old juniper trees
and mirror waters and precious Sacramento suckers. And I'd be
self-denying if I didn't admit that the solitude of these Nature walks,
the absence of the oppressive mental intrusion of other people, abates
my misanthropy, calms it, thereby releasing me to really think and
feel.
It reminds me of another cat fired up by
mingling with the spires and firs: the godfather of California
environmentalism, John Muir. I first read his Mountains of California
in my late 20s, when I was busting my ass during the day at a
soul-killing job and frequently suckin' down copious suds at night to
escape the soul-killing job. I was really fucking self-deluded then,
fooling myself that I could be a stable middle-class guy with this
fractured mental landscape and associated need for solitude. So I also
read other tomes that I thought any erudite, typical bourgeois American
should've perused: Les Miserables, A Tale of Two Cities, Anna Karenina,
basically well-known revered classics. While all good books,
well-written, engaging, zippy, they just didn't strike a very deep
chord in me - I'd never felt the slightest desire to pick up any of
those books and get into 'em again, so I gave 'em away. But Muir's?
That one I kept, sensing that I might have some resonance with it that
had yet to be realized. Since working in fisheries science, I'd felt
that suspicion become stronger, that some alignment might exist between
Muir's ideas and my own, that his prose might illuminate some dim
notions floating in my own mind. So I read it again, and I found that
there was, that it did. Seemed reasonable then to read The Land of
Little Rain by Mary Austin, the godmother of California
environmentalism, and I found some synergy and insight there, too.
The language in both books strums my
soul - it's romantic, redolent with intimate, lusty portraits of
glaciers, of trees, of flowers and birds and winds and storms. Muir
seems like he's sportin' a big boner while describing some aspect of
Nature's countenance, such as American Dippers or Douglas squirrels or
the sound of the wind through the conifers, in glittering, exuberant
prose. Austin's writing is florid, too, with vibrant descriptions of
Nature, for example, in the way she describes in myriad, minute detail
Nature's many facets in the Owens Valley and up to the peaks of the
surrounding ranges. Nature, to Mary and Muir, has personality, has
emotion like people do, they see the life in Nature, relate to Her as
lovers, as friends, as their own intimate society...kinda like a
certain misanthropic nutcase who also finds Nature a surrogate for
humanity. And their language certainly ain't that of those whose work
they inform: many modern environmental workers. The dry, monochrome
verbiage of a statistician explaining a mathematical model, the
lifeless wordy jargon spewed out by desktop biologists (read:
bureaucrats), so much different from Mary and Muir, who doth not state
facts in the dull doggerel so often comprising a modern paper or report
about the same subjects. To Mary and Muir, Nature ain't an inanimate
factory you turn on and off according to an instruction manual, but a
living being you have a relationship with, that you write a story with.
The dispassionate, "objective" (as if
there is such a thing) scientist is often venerated these days as the
purest source of truth. Mary and Muir, I wager, would've thought
differently since their words stress the importance of emphatic, direct
experience and emotion in understanding, in science. For example, Mary
writes, "Never believe what you are told, that midsummer is the best
time to go up the streets of the mountain - well - perhaps for the
merely idle or sportsmanly or scientific; but for seeing and
understanding, the best time is when you have the longest leave to
stay" (p.72; emphasis added). Paraphrased: you wanna understand Nature,
you gotta spend a lot of time with Her, and especially when She's at
Her wildest. It's congruent to my own feelings, mainly about how so
fucking many people in aquatic science really only know their subjects
from words on paper, words on a computer screen (the more common
route), or numbers on a computer screen (i.e., data), and so their
knowledge is limited to a two-dimensional representation of reality
diluted through other people. They miss so much, locked up in the
static, controlled environment of the cubicle, they can't feel the
temperature changes as the clouds obscure the sun, they can't see the
water muddy up as the tide starts to rip, they can't smell the fecund
odor of the fermenting marsh plain, they can't hear the roar and rumble
of the crashing stream, all of which affect plants and animals and
almost none of which ends up in a database. Now do many aquatic
scientists have insights? Absolutely - few can better discern subtle
data patterns than a skilled statistician. But do they better
understand the aquatic environment? A smidgen at best - they have a
wealth of knowledge about numbers, but those numbers reflect only a
tiny fragment of the reality, of the sensible world. Too, the
simplified, sullen world of computers and endless numbers precludes
eliciting any visceral emotion, an energy that enhances memory and
subsequent comparison and understanding. As Muir writes,
...it is generally supposed
that complete pleasure of this kind, permeating one's very flesh and
bones, unfits the student for scientific pursuits in which
cool
judgment and observation are required. But the effect is just the
opposite. Instead of producing a dissipated condition, the mind is
fertilized and
stimulated and developed like sun-fed plants (p. 96).
In this age when drab, lifeless LCD screens increasingly
dominate life, the importance of emotion in understanding rises in
direct correlation. I mean, come on - what do you remember better -
your first fuck and its setting, or the first statistics equation you
learned and the classroom it occurred in?
I'll put it another way - if you wanted
to understand some aspect of the Sierra, some relationship, who'd you
trust more - Mary and Muir, or some dude who sits in a fuckin' office
all day? Or as Ed Abbey would say - you want science, or scientism?
And it's notable how often Muir refers
to his ramblings in Mountains of California as "studies."
Mary and Muir sing another tune that
touches me - both display awareness and appreciation of the beauty of
all Nature, not just the pristine spires of the Sierra Nevada or White
Mountains. Muir writes of the need to escape our common surroundings,
to explore unknown locations and climes, not only for expanding
experience and knowledge but for reinvigorating love of the sights and
smells and tastes of our home plants and waters and animals. He
promotes the importance of contrast (not unlike Aldo Leopold), really -
discovering novel, remote Nature to reaffirm the value of common, local
Nature. Of course, one premise here is that some local Nature actually
exists to which an excursion to a distant landscape can reference; or,
conversely, the ability exists to recognize the local Nature that
contains inherent beauty. Mary gets it. For example, her refreshing
lack of prejudice towards non-native species. Dig: "The seegoo
establishes itself very readily in the swampy borders, and the
white-blossomed spikes among the arrow-pointed leaves are quite as
acceptable to the eye as any native species" (p. 88). More revealing is
her description of the little field by her house, an intimate,
unassuming Nature, one that recalls Muir's statement in The Mountains
of California: "...the very abundance and completeness of the common
beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and
appreciated" (p. 240). Mary certainly wasn't prevented. In contrast, it
reminds me of some of my well-adjusted, middle-class coworkers who are
prevented, who seem to believe that Nature is only something you go to,
such as a national park, not something you live with. In this overly
domesticated world, discerning local Nature is exceedingly difficult
given that it just exists in gossamer threads beset by encroaching
expanses of uniform human development - but it is there. Many people
just can't recognize it, which is why they burn big bucks and fuel
jet-setting to fucking Patagonia or New Zealand and then either
castigate the gilded wild carp in the Arboretum Waterway as invasive
shit-eaters or stare starry-eyed and dumbfounded when told that "nasty"
lower Putah Creek contains edible bass and sunfish. They're duped,
these supposedly Nature-lovin' fools, duped by corporate marketing and
upper-class ethos into thinking that Nature's only found in fucking
faraway places that often cost a fortune to visit.
And what a fuckin' burly stud Muir was
and what a tough fuckin' bitch Mary was, weathering the harsh,
unpredictable Sierra Nevada and White Mountains and bone-baking desert
with the most bare-bones possessions - they could only do that had they
been molded in part by the landscapes they roamed. Mary alludes to the
force that environment has on the character of people when describing
her miner friend, the Pocket Hunter, who had been "...saturated with
the elements..." (p. 28) to where he didn't even notice 'em anymore. In
other words - he was one with the stark, convoluted desert where he
pined for his motherlode. She writes of the Shoshones "...living like
their trees..." (p. 35), and when describing Seyavi, comes a little
closer to the point: "To understand the fashion of any life, one must
know the land it is lived in and the procession of the year" (p. 64). A
rugged, wild country forms rugged, resourceful people - like Muir, like
Mary, like the Pocket Hunter, like the Paiutes and Shoshones. Or the
flip side - homogenous, predictable environments, such as the
climate-controlled, four-walled, right-angled room with the glaring
computer screen, breed homogenous, predictable people. And that's an
increasingly pervasive environment, spreading, infecting, conquering
more and more of the world's area and time, and it creates weaker
people with restricted, faint, distorted notions of what the real
world, what Nature, actually is. And some of those people direct how we
act towards Nature.
I think Muir, given his need for Nature
as society, and Mary, given her unvarnished love, would instantly
recognize the pricelessness of attentively watching, and the beauty in,
a golden-emerald Sacramento sucker sliding effortlessly alongside a
golden-bronze common carp up onto stodgy Putah Creek's riffles for a
periphyton snack under the dying dusk sun, despite the smoke-coughing
planes whizzing overhead from the Sacramento airport, despite the
endless vehicles roaring along the interstate. And they'd be disturbed
by all the homogenous people walking by on the groomed trail, "loving"
Nature by staring at smart-phone images of Argentina and New Zealand.
And, oh, yeah - they're good books.
REFERENCES
Austin, M. 2003. The land of little rain. United States,
Modern Library.
Muir, J. 2001. The mountains of California. United States, Modern Library.