Trailer — The River Wild
“Their physiognomy is in the geography books, but this is a pallid simulacrum of their reality, which, like every reality that matters ultimately to human beings, is a reality of the mind.” — Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain
Sunrise, Yosemite Valley — Albert Bierstadt, c. 1870
The house we stayed in this July past for a week with my in-laws and company in Breckenridge, Colorado, was chock full of John Muir quotes. John Muir on pillows, framed prints, coffee mugs, cross-stitched onto doilies— Muir was everywhere. It was like the drawings a young Jonah Hill drew in Superbad, except John Muir Quotes and not…well, yeah.
Then, a couple weeks ago, my son and I checked out a book from the library titled “The Camping Trip that Changed America,” which detailed a 1903 trip President Teddy Roosevelt took with John Muir in the Yosemite Valley. It was that jaunt — and chats Roosevelt and Muir had about conservation while sleeping under the peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, that sparked Roosevelt to form our National Parks system and designate millions of acres of our public lands as sacred, protected.
And now, just a couple paragraphs in, a book review.
Mark Kenyon’s premise is that every American is a public land owner. He makes his living as a podcaster and writer about all things hunting and angling. “That Wild Country” is 1/3 part history and 2/3 Kenyon’s travelogues of his journeys through some of America’s most well-known (Grand Tetons) and not-so-well known (the Bob Marshall Wildnerness) wild spaces. From the Sagebrush Rebellion to the dopey tries by the Bundy family (Ammon and Cliven, not Ted), he recalls the fight that’s as old as America between keeping some lands public (and thus open to the people for all sorts of recreational activities) and private (open to mining, private business, etc.).
“It’s about as profoundly American an idea as you can find,” Kenyon writes. “The democratization of land and resources and food and recreation and wildlife and scenery and space and solitude.”
I found myself nodding my head with most of his words and affirmations (not to be confused with Words of Affirmation, which is my love language). But the most moving part of the book, outside of the snappy and specific stories of previous and current battles to #KeepItPublic, was his recollection of a family hike along Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in his home state of Michigan, which he took with his sister and dad, who is legally blind.
“We sat shoulder to shoulder, just a dad and his kids, remembering old family adventures and the laughable moments of the past twenty-four hours. We talked in a way that’s only possible when you have lots of time and nowhere else to be. And as the purple-orange sun slowly set beneath the horizon, we watched the redness in the west sky fade away. ‘I’m so thankful for this,’ said my dad. And so was I. We all were.”
These recent months have made me evaluate what connection really means, and what it’s meant to me.
When you go as fast as we all do, connection, whether it’s significant or not, is served up on a platter with every Sunday morning, happy hour, birthday gathering, sports practice, and so on.
I’ve been considering the previous days and hours and minutes where I’ve truly felt fastened to another person or people, moments in my life when I’ve deeply understood the reality that “we are for each other” — because, to be honest, I’ve been skeptical of that truth in practice, even though I want and have desired so badly to believe it, for it to be true for me, but more so and selfishly, for others to believe it’s true about me.
These moments and subsequent connections, for me, are most readily and heartily created outside.
Like the hike to the Pacific Tarn, the highest lake in North America, I rambled with my brother-in-law a few years ago.
Or, this summer, floating on life jackets and drinking Coors Light out of aluminum bottles in a cove on Stockton Lake, laughing my head off, with dear friends.
And the first trip my wife and I ever took together — tent camping in a remote valley along Miners Creek in Colorado after a few months of dating. We woke up to the sound of trickling water over rocks, and had a hard time sleeping at the thought of bears.
Even the close-but-still-outdoors moments are of great value to me: walking along and in Indian Creek trail with my son, looking for turtles and rocks to skip; trudging on horse trails at Kill Creek Park with my wife; and even relating to myself, which happens best when I’m running in single-track trails or paddling on Shawnee Mission Park Lake solo and in the sun.
When President Roosevelt asked John Muir to be his guide and partner camping in the Yosemite, he wrote to him and said: “I do not want anyone with me but you, and I want to drop politics absolutely for four days, and just be out in the open with you.”
What is it about the outdoors? How and why do landscapes have the power to move us like they can?
That same Colorado trip this summer — the Muir week — I couldn’t make it up a mountain I had been up easily a few years before. Something about the gravity around me when I got above the treeline, in addition to the ant-rows of people marching up and down, overwhelmed my spatial senses. I take fright of heights in seemingly random situations. While my family made their way to the peak, I trekked down to the base, then back up again to nearly the same spot where I’d abandoned reaching the summit, and racking up more miles than I would’ve if I had just gone to the damn top in the first place. I felt defeated when I turned back, but the mountain propped me up again. It was unique to retrace my steps like that, and I recognized nooks and formations and foliage I hadn’t noticed the first time. I saw the way light hit from the sky upon glisten-spots on chunks of granite.
When Mark Kenyon said his dad sat looking at a painted sunset from a cliff on Lake Superior and said “I am so thankful for this,” I felt that. What a real one. I could feel the emphasis in the “this” when I read it just like when Alicia Keys sings word “dreams” in the line “concrete jungle where dreams are made of” in “Empire State of Mind.”
The this is it!
It is what we’ve got!
Land and people…we get the chance to know them. They are what we can connect to, and they help us connect to one another, “out in the open,” where we can be open. It’s where where can so richly find one another, ourselves, and what we can have together.
I am so thankful for this.
