Earth's eye - how water and nature can rejuvenate a person

Sierra, May, 1999 by Edward Hoagland

This feast of variety is part of a writer's life, the coin of the realm you inhabit if you sacrifice the security Americans used to think they'd have if they weren't freelance in their working lives. In reality, everybody winds up being free-lance, but mountains telescope the experience. During a weekend you climb from flowery summer glades to the tundra above tree line, slipping on patches of ice, trudging through snowdrifts; the rain turns to sleet. The view is rarefied until a bellying, bruise-colored sky turns formidably unpretty. Like climbing combers in a strong surf, there's no indemnity if you come to grief. You labor upward not for money but for joy, or to have been somewhere, closer to the mysteries, during your life. Finding a hidden alpine col, a bowl of fragile grassy beauty, you aren't just gleeful; you are linked differently.

Leaving aside specific dangers like riptides, vertigo, or terrific cold, I've found I am comfortable on mountainsides or in seawater or in caves or wilderness swatches. In other words, I am fearful of danger but not of nature. I don't harbor notions of any special dispensation, only that I too am part of it. I fought forest fires in the Laguna Mountains of Southern California when I was 20 and discovered that moderate hardship energized yet tempered me, as it does many people, just like the natural sorties for which one puts on hiking shoes and ventures where barefoot peoples used to go. In central Africa I've walked a little with tribesmen like the Acholi and the Didinga, who still are comfortable when naked, and have seen that the gap between us seems not of temperament or intuitions, but only acculturation.

Just as habitat is the central factor in deciding whether birds and animals can survive, what we are able to do in the woods will be determined by land regulation and taxing policy and public purchases. Maine's private timberlands have remained unpopulated because of Americans' lavish need for toilet paper--as Vermont's trees, too, make paper, cotton-mill bobbins, cedar fencing, and yellow-birch or maple dowels that become furniture legs. Any day, I watch truckloads of pulpwood go by. And in the California Sierra above Lake Tahoe and on the pristine sea island of Ossabaw, off Savannah, Georgia, I've devoted lovely, utterly timeless hours to exploring refuges that seem quite empty of people but are actually allotted in careful fashion by state or federal agencies for intensive recreational use. The animals hide while the sun is up and feed when it's down. This is the way it will have to work. Levels of life on the same acreage. Or else it won't work at all.

I can be as jubilant indoors, listening to Schubert or Scott Joplin, as when sauntering underneath a mackerel sky on a day striped yellow, red, and green. Indeed, the density of sensations in which we live is such that one can do both--enjoy a virtuoso pianist through a headset outside. We live two lives or more in one nowadays, with our scads of travel, absurd excesses of unread informational material, the barrage of Internet and TV screens, wallpaper music, the serializing of polygamy, and the elongation of youth blurring old age. A sort of mental gridlock sometimes blocks out the amber pond, the mackerel sky, the seething leaves in a fresh breeze up in a canopy of trees, and the Walkman's lavish outpouring of genius, too. Even when we just go for a walk, the data jam.