The heat
radiates above this cursed field of jagged volcanic rock like a palpable
spiritual essence. One can almost hear it breathing, harsh whispers, like the
tiny black snake in Kipling’s Jungle Book
– “be careful, I am death!” Well, I am not careful, but then I’ve never been
known for taking advice too seriously, even if it is the sound contention of
nature in all its ugly, brutal beauty. It warns you to stay away from it, much
the same as a tattooed harlot in black leather with a bullwhip warns you to
stay away from her; the warning is as tantalizing as the danger. A sign that
says All Are Welcome may be okay for a motel or for one of those sterile,
fenced-in swaths of deciduous garden that passes for wilderness in most peoples’
minds, but this is the desert. Out here the signs say Enter At Own Risk and are
typically riddled with bullet holes.
So why am I here? Good question… A simple answer would be, “why not?” Take the Socratic high road; corner the bastards with circular rhetoric. Or Mallory’s answer, which always works in a pinch: “Because it’s there.” Well, televisions are there too, wherever there is, and so are shopping malls and bars and trendy cafes and a whole lot of other congealed mishmash to boot. Bad news, plastic surgery, cell phone ring tones that sound like the awful stuff that oozes out of radios and MP3 players all over the doomed, infested countryside… A better answer would be, “because that isn’t there!”
Escapism – there, I’ve said it. It rolls off the tongue with an aftertaste of acidic guilt, like saying ‘alcoholic’ or ‘afflicted.’ You can attach whatever romantic trappings you want to it, roll it up in the sweet dough of life-affirming adventurous whoozafuzz or prop it up with the tinderbox scaffolding of academic pursuit, studying the ecology of ecology firsthand, but we all know the truth. We go into the wild because we need to escape the cages of the daily grind. We need to escape because our cages become filled with shit.
The other day, someone asked me why I thought it was that people drink or use drugs to such an alarming extent as they seem to nowadays, and I replied that we need to numb the senses, dull the spitfire parts of the mind that we no longer need but which continually menace our minds none the less. He looked at me like I was spewing poetic gibberish, but I’m always prepared for that, logician that I sometimes pretend to be, so I brought out some examples.
“There was a time,” I said, “that we needed to know everything that was going on around us, for the sake of mere survival. It looks like rain, so we need to take shelter, and I think I smell a tiger, and that man over there is holding his spear a bit nervously… We had to stay on our toes, because in the wilderness danger can come at you from any side. You’re staring transfixed at a flower, meditating as it were, and you step right on the cobra. So evolution worked its magic, and our species became highly adept at perceiving and gauging its surroundings, being bereft of wings or a hard shell, in order to keep ahead of peril. Only now, with the peril all but gone, our finely-tuned perceptions drive us out of our wits, bombarded at all times by inane and utterly useless nonsense, so that we either succumb to the madness and dive headfirst into our ridiculous culture, invent and bow down to a whole slew of half-illusory new perils like terrorism or obesity, or else we seek refuge. Some seek it in books or ideas, and for them that is enough. Some seek it in the wilderness. For others, it’s the bottle – or something worse.”
“So… you think everyone wants to escape, so to speak, because we’re still hardwired to keep alert for tigers, but instead of hearing tigers we hear Britney Spears and how contaminated broccoli may be bad for our livers, or something. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Basically. We’re hardwired to be very much in tune with our world, and our world, at present, is absolutely goofballs. You can complain to your congressman, throw away your TV and follow the path of Zen, wind up a friendless but smiling weirdo in the unemployment line. Or you can get ripped to shit on alcohol and other fun substances and act like a heathen.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “There are other options, of course.”
I cocked an eyebrow right back. “But who would want them?”
Well, I was lying, but everyone does that from time to time – it keeps people on their toes, where they belong. There is another option, of course, and a far better one, but the signs say Enter At Own Risk and are typically riddled with bullet holes. Those are the places I like to escape to, such as I am in this journal entry. Scarred, scalded land bereft of lushness or verdure, overgrown with harshness and liberally sprinkled with the sorts of plants and animals that like to poke holes. Abbey’s country. My country. When the doctors finally tell me I can’t hike anymore I shudder to consider the alternatives.
Journal Entry, July 2009
