What is Home?

I just finished reading Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. What a fantastic book.

I had been told many times I should read it because I have some things in common with the person about whom the book was written. I finally picked up a copy on Friday and read it over the weekend. It's the true story about a kid who went to college, graduated, then essentially ran away and severed all ties with his family. He had crazy notions of abandoning civilization, which he despised, and living his life as a lone drifter. He especially wanted to live in the "wild," which culminated with him marching into the Alaska wilderness with virtually nothing, where he starved to death at the age of 24. His name was Chris McCandless.

It's a fascinating book because it touched on some topics that I found to be particularly close to home. While this kid was far more extreme than I could ever be, there were some extraordinary similarities between us I found disturbing. I also learned that my own fantasies of pulling away from civilization and dreaming of a simpler life closer to nature are far from unique. They are also by no means a recent phenomenon, which I found particularly surprising. The history books are filled with examples of others who share these thoughts to varying degrees. The most extreme examples, such as Chris, make for particularly interesting and frightening tales.

In the 1930's a sixteen year old kid set out from California to live a solitary life as a nomad in the deserts of southern Utah. Eventually he disappeared without a trace and the mystery of what happened to him has never been resolved. Only his horse and some graffiti were ever found. This kid's name was Everett Ruess, and here is an excerpt from a letter he wrote before he disappeared:

I have been thinking more and more than I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wilderness. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me. After all the lone trail is the best... I'll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I'll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.

The beauty of this country is becoming part of me. I feel more detached from life and somehow gentler... I have some good friends here, but no one who really understands why I am here or what I do. I don't know of anyone, though, who would have more than a partial understanding; I have gone too far alone.

I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly.

Now who does that sound like? Gives me a chill. Ruess goes on to talk about the beauty of the country and the ruined dwellings of the ancient Anasazi. Some of his writings sound a lot like my blog entries.

And check this out, written by Estwick Evans in 1818:

I wished to acquire the simplicity, native feelings and virtues of savage life; to divest myself of the factitious habits, prejudices and imperfections of civilization; ... and to find, amidst the solitude and grandeur of the western wilds, more correct views of human nature and of the true interests of man. The season of snows was preferred, that I might experience the pleasure of suffering, and the novelty of danger.

And that was in 1818!

The book is full of such examples. Chris was just one in a long line of people wanting to renounce civilization for the complete opposite alternative. The book focused a lot on comparing these people and what drives them, while telling Chris' fascinating story and ultimate tragedy. Many, many times I found my own words being repeated.

One thing that sets me apart from many of these people is that I know I can't just walk into the wilderness and survive. And even if I could, mere survival is not the kind of life I want. Chris was extremely lucky on many occasions but his luck finally ran out in Alaska. His biggest problem, ultimately, was that he was overconfident and notoriously ill-prepared for the vast majority of his adventures. For example, on a whim he acquired a canoe and floated down into Mexico hoping to reach the ocean. He didn't bother to read up on where he was going and didn't know that the Colorado River no longer reaches the ocean because of all the water that's diverted for irrigation. It ends in a vast swamp, where he got lost. He likely would have died there had he not happened to be found by some Mexican duck hunters who also happened to speak English and who also happened to be kind enough to tow his stupid ass out of there. This kind of thing happened to him a lot. When he set off into the Alaskan wilderness he had minimal clothing and gear, knew virtually nothing of the land itself aside from what was contained in his field guide to edible plants, and refused to take even a map with him. Just a few very basic precautions would have saved his life. His story is extremely complex and I can't hope to reproduce it here, but I found the book very helpful in framing my own desires and organizing my own thoughts on the matter.

First of all, I realize that I don't have the ancient wisdom of the natives who once roamed these lands, which they accumulated over the course of 10,000 years of living here. I also realize that these natives had a support network through their families and tribes, and that virtually all tribes, in turn, traded with other tribes in a network that effectively stretched from the Aleutian Islands to Patagonia. They had well established cultures and were on intimate terms with the land and all its peculiarities.

Second, I don't think civilization is bad, per se, and even if I did I am not and will never be able to become a modern day hunter gatherer living solely off the land, no matter how cool the fantasy might be. Honestly this isn't even something I want. I would certainly like to experience it in the short term, provided I knew what I was doing and/or had sufficient guidance from someone who did. But I fully realize and am completely okay with knowing that even when I get my cabin in the woods I'll have ties to civilization. I don't want to be a hermit. I don't want to shun the world. I just want to trim the fat (and there's a hell of a lot of fat.) But I do want to have a soft bed, a warm fire, solid walls. I want to have a gun for hunting and I rather enjoy running water, electricity and farm fresh produce. I like eating at a table and baking pies. I like stretching out on overstuffed leather furniture. I like having a phone if I need to call for help or if I just want to say hi to someone. I love books. I love traveling. And I really do love people. I don't think people are inherently bad or that living in cities is a sin or automatically has to be a destructive thing. And perhaps most importantly, I think education is an extremely good thing. Perhaps more than anything else, I think the greatest benefit of modern society is our unprecedented access to information. Along those same lines, I think our ability to so easily travel far and wide is probably just as important, because knowledge acquired either through books and the internet or from seeing foreign places and cultures first hand are the best ways to overcome hatred, intolerance and small-mindedness. Just moving out of Huffman, Texas changed my world. A hundred years ago most people never traveled more than 50 miles from home in their lifetime.

And while I'm on the subject I wanted to make one more thing clear. I've read quite a few books (Into the Wild included) where at least one gripping tale is told of a lone adventurer braving bottomless crevasses in frozen wastelands, enduring frost bite, starvation, 3,000 foot precipices, calamitous storms that only God could whip up and much more just to summit some craggy peak that the human species was never meant to set foot on. They are places where nature seems to be telling us in no uncertain terms that we are not welcome. While I find these stories interesting in moderation, I have absolutely no understanding of what drives someone to want to do this. It's the same feeling that ensures I'll never be a rock climber or a cross country cyclist or go backpacking through rural Asia. I don't see the point. Well, that's not entirely true. I can see the point because it has been explained to me. I guess I'm just not missing from my life the thing(s) that motivate others to seek them in those places. That, or I'm just looking for them in different places.

One more thing I got from Into the Wild was annoyed. I was annoyed by these peoples' tendency to ramble on and on with flowery talk about nature and their excessive philosophizing. (Is that a word? It probably annoys me because I know how bad I am at rambling on and philosophizing about stuff that has no answer.) Anyway, Thoreau really was a bit of a putz. Often these people have no real concept of nature. It's like they describe the natural world as if it were a painting, and when they try to step into that painting they end up dead. One thing I've learned in recent years is that nature really doesn't give a crap about us. We may admire it, write songs and poetry about it, frame images of it on our walls, plan vacations around seeing it from the comfort of paved overlooks, send Greenpeace out to save it, but in the end it really doesn't give a shit. Nature is her own woman. Step out into the "wild" and she'll have no qualms about snuffing you out if you can't get out of the way.

This last realization has had a major impact on my life. When I first went to college I had a biology teacher who liked to deer hunt. I remember we had a lively discussion about it after class one day. Basically I was all over her case for it. What an idiot I was. I no longer see nature or wilderness as something other than or outside of myself, something that must be set aside like a delicate glass object, put into a case and never touched for fear of shattering it. I fully realize that many ecosystems are fragile and we can't just tromp across the globe doing whatever the hell we want or else we're going to end up with a pretty ugly and miserable world. But I now realize that we are an indelible part of the whole thing. We can't pull away and live like some ethereal higher beings, so if we can't integrate and use the resources of this world either then where does that leave us? The trick is finding the balance. The Native Americans had no such inclination as to have flowery, putzy notions about the fragility of nature. To them, "nature" was not something separate. It was the world. And they were part of the world. They understood that if they killed all the beaver then there would be none for making clothing, or that if they hunted all the deer there would be no more meat or buckskins. They also realized that not killing them would also leave them without food and clothing. They just realized there was a give and take relationship, that they were part of the cycle, and they knew how to sustain that. I think that's what I'm trying to find. I don't want to be a lonely wild man living off bugs and roots in the frozen Alaskan wilderness anymore than I want to be a suit in some smog-choked high rise with a Blackberry attached to my head. There has to be some reasonable middle ground.

Am I philosophizing too much?