What We Do in the Wilderness

1. In all that beauty, we meditate, we contemplate, we ruminate. 

There is such beauty we cannot absorb it adequately – a brilliant full moon spilling white paint over the granite; a mountain at sunset reflected in a lake; a statue-still deer twinkling its ears as she watches us pass; an aster blooming in a dry meadow or a trout swimming in a pool of a drought-stricken stream that is no longer running. In sky and water and mountain, in plants and creatures, in expansive views and the tiniest Persian-blue dragonflies darting over a lake we see beauty. We can gaze and gaze, we can stand in awe, we can try to grasp it, but in the end, however large or small the thing itself, its beauty is bigger than we. 

2. We walk. With everything we need in the packs on our backs – shelter, food, bedding, warm clothes – we walk to get wherever we go. We move at the speed of feet, and with a pack on our backs, speed isn't fast (but it's faster in hiking sandals than it is barefooted!). Uphill speeds are the slowest of all. But it is the foot-slow movement that takes us from beautiful place to beautiful place, the slowness that allows for meditation. It's the walking that makes us strong, and even when we've hiked so long over such difficult terrain and up such steep slopes we think it's the walking that has broken our strength and fall exhausted into our sleeping bags, we get up the next morning eager to walk again.

3. We read. Although at one time I eschewed reading as a part of the wilderness experience (I thought the contemplation of nature should be entertainment enough), sharing a book with my hiking partner has become one of the delights of a backpacking trip. To save weight, I read from a Kindle. Last month, in the Emigrant Wilderness, I was reading All the Light We Cannot See to my backpacking partner, Bob. It is a great read-aloud book. The sentences have such beautiful rhythm.

 4. “We” may not do this, but of all the things I do in the wilderness, my favorite is to swim in those ice-blue high-altitude lakes. I like to ease my way into the lake, wading, preferably not through ankle-deep mud that releases bubbles with every step, as though some unknown creature were lurking under my feet, but over a steeply sloping sandy bottom that puts me waist-deep in the cold water in only a few steps. I stand there a moment, telling myself, “This is the hard part” – the moment when my chest hits the cold water – then I take a breath and, with my hands in breast-stroke formation, push off from the bottom and am water-borne in the blue. 

Sometimes, if the water is very cold, it takes a few minutes to adjust to the temperature. When I do, I know I can swim forever, or, at least, that it's not the cold that will drive me back to shore.

    I can swim to rock islands. I can swim through kaleidoscopic images of mountains, trees, and sky shattering and reforming with every pull of my arms in the breast stroke.

I can swim across the lake to examine a flower in a crevice or I can swim far to the center of the lake, to the center of the blue that is the ecstasy of the swim. Though I know it's not “real swimming,” I swim with my head above water so I can look at the gorgeous landscape I'm immersed in, so I can experience the blue I'm swimming through. Otherwise, I might as well be swimming at the Y. And this is emphatically not the Y.