assault versus attentiveness
Of mountaineering, Wilfred Noyce wrote: “Danger for its own sake is seldom sought…. Apart from real serious danger, however, everybody knows that the feel or spice of risk gives an added zip to any adventure, even the mildest” [Noyce 1959: 45]. Jon Krakauer: “I accepted that danger was an essential component of the game—without it, climbing would be little different from a hundred other trifling adventures” [Krakauer 1999: 352]. In a book about wilderness in general, Laura and Guy Waterman wrote: “Here is a proposition on which all lovers of the outdoor world ought to be able to agree. Hikers, hunters, birdwatchers, technical rock climbers, anglers, skiers, canoeists—all these and many more turn to the outdoors to find challenge, not ease; uncertainty, not security” [Waterman and Waterman 2000: 213]. The same basic idea turns up in books on travel, particularly in regard to the distinction between “travel” and “tourism.” Bruce Cocker: “It is the very otherness of the visited country that makes the journey valuable. While the tourist seeks only a more leisurely version of what was left behind … travelers thrive on the alien, the unexpected, even the uncomfortable and challenging” [Cocker 1992: 2]. Paul Theroux: “People want to believe that somewhere, somehow, it is still very dangerous, bizarre, anxiety-making, and exotic to travel” [Theroux 1985: 135].
I read statements like those and scratch my head. On Mount Borah in Idaho, I was buffaloed by a cliff and needed help from other hikers to climb it, but that cliff was hardly necessary for my enjoyment of Mount Borah. A hike to Trail Gulch and Long Gulch Lakes in California would have been just as rewarding if I hadn't gotten bewildered by snow-covered trails and blowdown and delayed so long in returning to the trailhead that Laurie had begun to worry that I was lost or dead. She and I would have liked Québec just as well if we had been fluent in French. We don’t travel, climb mountains, or hike in wild country in order to challenge ourselves, risk our lives, or taste the spice of danger. It’s true that we've walked long distances, climbed steep grades, taken some risks, pushed through brush, dodged cactuses and yucca blades, encountered rattlesnakes, gotten lost, tired, and hungry, made difficult stream crossings, been caught in rain, hail, and snow, gotten our vehicle stuck and needed help to get out, and spent cold, wet nights in a pup tent on rocky ground. Sometimes, we had a good time in spite of those things, but they did nothing to enhance our experiences. We've had just as good a time, if not better, when things went smoothly. It doesn’t have to be easy. It doesn’t have to be comfortable. I find so much pleasure in wild country that I don’t mind working hard for it and taking some risks. But people who seem to go there for that reason remain a puzzle to me.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines climb as: “move upward on or mount, especially by using the hands and feet or the feet alone; ascend.” It defines mountain as: “a natural elevation of the earth’s surface having considerable mass, generally steep sides, and a height greater than that of a hill.” By those definitions, there’s no question that I love to climb mountains. Why, then, is the mountaineering literature so consistently irrelevant to my interests? Alfred Mummery in 1895: "Those who are so completely masters of their environment that they can laugh and rollick on the ridges, free from all constraint of ropes or fear of danger, are far more able to appreciate the glories of the ‘eternal hills’ than those who can only move in constant terror of their lives, amid the endless chatter and rank tobacco smoke of unwashed guides" [Mummery 1989: 187-88.]. As if there was nothing else for people to do if they avoided difficult climbs requiring special skills except to “toil up scree slopes behind a guide” and “move in constant terror of their lives.”
More recently, Jeremy Bernstein went to Chamonix and felt so intimidated by the surrounding Alps that he confined himself to “simple walks” [Bernstein 1989: 95]. But, in time, he ran out of simple walks and, rather than leave Chamonix, went on to climb snow-covered peaks. As if there’s nothing between a “simple walk” and climbing a snow-covered peak. What is it that motivates a person to leap from simple walks to what Bernstein acknowledges is “the most dangerous sport”? Or do I not understand what he means by a simple walk? Was my hike up Mount Yale's relentlessly steep trail a simple walk? Was the 20-mile round trip hike and a 6,000-foot ascent to Matterhorn Peak in Oregon a simple walk? Was Chicken-Out Ridge on Mount Borah in Idaho, where I needed help from another hiker to get up a cliff, a simple walk? If it isn't snow-covered or life-threatening, is it a simple walk?
In a book titled On Mountains, John Jerome gives a definition of mountains, cites Mount Kinsman in his own New Hampshire neighborhood as an example, and describes a climb to the summit [Jerome 1978: 22]. But, a few chapters later, he writes: “Our stroll up Mount Kinsman was a walk, a hike, not a climb. Let there be no confusion about such things: climbing is quite another matter” [177].
What’s going on here?
An article about “peak bagging” comes about as close as anything I’ve read to describing what I like to do: “For many people the object of climbing is the summit. It can be an easy summit by the easiest route. 'Peak baggers' often have little knowledge of climbing techniques and scarcely think of themselves as climbers. The summit offers a view and a fixed point for turning around” [Loughman 1989: 147]. However, the concept of “peak bagging” has a quantitative rather than qualitative connotation that troubles me, and, as the author of the article acknowledges, it tends to be a pejorative term among serious climbers, “perhaps because the activity requires no unusual skills, and the elements of challenge and risk are less conspicuous” [147]. Advantages the author attributes to peak bagging include the view from the summit, a destination, exercise, and companionship (although he acknowledges that it's okay to go alone) [147]. I notice also that the author writes that you can “go quickly” [147], but says nothing about going slowly. He also says nothing about views along the way (just from the summit), nothing about wildflowers, marmots, or rosy finches, and nothing about the weather, the clouds, or the light.
David Roberts, sharing his own impressions of the mountain climbing literature, writes, “Love of nature has little to do with it. Super climbers are uncheerful about hiking, impatient with the weather, insensitive to subtleties of the landscape” [Roberts 1986: 187]. I once read the essays in The Armchair Mountaineer with an eye out for mentions of beauty. I found some, including a glorious abundance of them in a 1938 essay by R. L. G. Irving:
Alpine literature has suffered so much from overproduction and standardization in the matters of sunrises and sunsets and summit views that only the brave or the unsophisticated will dare to add their personal contribution. That does not mean that dawn and evening and wide horizons on the upper snows are less beautiful…. It is no exaggeration of the fancy to claim that the climber knows the beauty of rock, its firmness, its variety of color, form, and texture better than a mere walker. Many of the loveliest formations of ice and snow are only approachable by him, and only he knows the full fragrance of the cool air on the ridge that has cost him hours of toil on burning slopes to win…. From start to finish he has the pageant of the sky enacted daily and nightly…. He knows the clouds from within and above as well as from beneath; he can watch the magic of their birth upon the crest, and of their reabsorption into the invisible. He can feel beauty in the morning air and in the soft grass, as well as in the rocks and snow. The meadows are dressed for him with a profusion of color that any gardener would envy…. As he rises, the dome of sky grows vaster, and the clouds and colors that come and go within it show variations that are never seen at levels where intensity of tone is lost in a softer air [Irving 1989: 120-23].But I didn’t find much of that, especially in comparison with discussions of difficulty, danger, exhaustion, frostbite, addled judgment, tragedy, and precarious rescues.
It seemed that beauty was more often mentioned in the 19th century, when mountain climbing was still fairly new. After that, perhaps the beauty of mountains became so well known that it no longer seemed worth mentioning. But it’s also true that, once all the highest mountains had been climbed, climbers began searching for more demanding routes and climbed peaks or rock faces that offered more difficult challenges. Such climbs, in the words of Yvon Chouinard, might be “as difficult as any yet done, but that is all they will be. They will offer very little aesthetic pleasure.... As a line becomes less logical and direct, the aesthetic beauty of the climbing also diminishes” [Chouinard 1989: 40]. I also noticed in my reading that beauty is more likely to be mentioned in the early parts of a climb. As climbs become more exhausting and harrowing, climbers are more likely to write things like: “I knew in an abstract, intellectual sort of way that it was a beautiful view, but I couldn’t get myself to care about it” [Krakauer 1990: 81]. Another thing that I noticed was that mentions of beauty were often double-edged, inseparable from apprehension about the writer’s own survival or fears about the welfare of companions.
Sociologist Richard G. Mitchell, Jr., writes in The Mountain Experience that “the experience of the mountains … may be found in the passive appreciation of natural beauty or in the active merging with the mountain through the dynamics of climbing” [Mitchell 1983: 147]. Ever since I read that, I’ve thought of the opposing approaches as Active versus Passive and associate myself with the Passive. In the Active approach, according to Mitchell, “the action of climbing per se … is sought by the mountaineer as an end in itself” [147]. The crux of Mitchell’s study is the concept of flow, in which climbers find an exquisite balance between challenge and ability. Their concentration is heightened, and focused on a narrow range of concerns. Mitchell acknowledges that there are Passives as well as Actives, but says little about them except to dismiss them as “failure-avoiders” as opposed to “success-seekers” [159]. Here’s what he says about people who enjoy mountains the way I do: “To be without stress is to be eddied in the stream of life-experiences, cut off from stimuli, noxious or otherwise. Less is required of the person and less is possible. The opposite of stress is not celebration, satisfaction, or tranquility. It is a state of reduced awareness and diminished capacity” [224].
I don’t believe I was “eddied in the stream of life-experiences” on Railroad Grade, a slender moraine that I followed high onto the slopes of Mount Baker until I was surrounded by practically nothing but snow and ice. Nor was I “cut off from stimuli” on Yellow Aster Butte, on a trail that offered a succession of spectacular views from start to finish. Do you think there was there “no celebration” on Table Mountain when the Grand Teton emerged from the clouds just as we approached the summit? Or “no satisfaction” on Mount Yale when half of Colorado seemed visible on a clear mountain day? I may not know the joy of a fine-tuned balance between difficulty and achievement, nor have I pushed myself to the limits of my ability and then realized the ecstasy of discovering that I still had enough left to succeed. But I’ve been stunned by the colors around Redcloud Peak in Colorado, and I’ve rambled in fresh snow in the Jarbidge Mountains in Nevada. I've been surprised by dramatic views from Middle Mountain in Montana's Tobacco Roots, and I counted eighty-four species of wildflowers blooming along my route to the summit of Matterhorn Peak.
Just as I don’t need risk and danger to enjoy a mountain, I don’t need fear and discomfort to enjoy wildness in general. Laurie and I return to comfortable beds at night, but that doesn’t keep us from appreciating wildness. What makes a place wild is the fact that it’s self-willed, not that it’s dangerous. I don’t want dangerous creatures removed in order to ensure our safety, because that would make a place no longer self-willed. I want nature to be left alone. If it proves dangerous, I will accept it. Either I’ll go there anyway, taking my chances, or I’ll stay away—and I’d rather stay away than visit an emasculated wildness that’s no longer wild. On the other hand, as long as a place is genuinely wild, I can’t imagine disliking it because it’s too safe. Much the same is true of traveling. By traveling in the U.S. and Canada, Laurie and I encounter little difficulty or risk, and the mechanics of travel are easy. Finding our way, obtaining meals, knowing where we’ll stay at night: none of those is a problem. Neither is getting our vehicle repaired or finding medical care when we need it. Our minds and energies are free to concentrate on the things that we travel for: mountains, waterfalls, wildflowers, canyons, art museums, historical sites, and so on. An Active traveler might lament a lack of new and exotic places to visit, but Laurie and I have no trouble finding places we’ve never seen before. We find them simply by digging more deeply into the familiar. The apparent assumption that you need to go to dangerous or anxiety-producing places in order to see something that’s not like home simply isn’t true. Maybe it's different for you, but there’s nothing around my home like the Fahkahatchee Strand in Florida, Québec's Severson Mountains, or the coast of Oregon.
My favorite counterpoint to the Active approach is Kathleen Dean Moore’s description of “poking around.” She writes: “People who poke around … [o]ften ... stand still for a long time, listening, and then they follow the sound, sneaky as a heron, until they are close enough to see a chickadee knocking on wood like a tiny woodpecker. But if the route to the chickadee is crossed by the tracks of a black-tailed deer, they will turn to follow the deer into the firs, unless the deer tracks cross a creek, in which case it is important to meander with the water through the fold between the hills” [Moore 1995: 31-32]. Moore says that poking around is “more capricious than studying, but more intense than strolling.... Unlike hiking, it has no destination” [32]. If you were studying, you might “walk into a field of reedy horsetails [and] deduce that there is groundwater under your feet and remark on the fact that you are in the presence of a plant as old as the dinosaurs. If you wanted to, you could imagine huge lizards chewing the stalks and blatting like French horns to claim ownership of the marsh, and you could formulate a theory of mass extinctions and apply it to humankind. But if you’re only poking around, you might prefer just to cut a section of the hollow stem and blow across it, trying to make it hoot like the mouth of a beer bottle” [32]. “Of course, there are no rules about this,” Moore adds, “and some people prefer to keep their minds engaged while they’re poking around. If so, the most fitting kinds of mental activity I have found are wondering and hoping. Knocking snow into the creek, I wonder why it turns clear before it melts.... I sit on a damp log in the ash swale and wish that the varied thrush would whistle again before my pants soak through” [33]. Despite its apparent frivolity, poking around can be educational, says Moore. “Ideas, after all, start with sense impressions,” she writes, “and all learning comes from making connections among observations and ideas. Insight is born of analogy. Everything interesting is complicated. Since truth is in the details, seekers of the truth should look for it there” [36].
If Moore’s description is “classic” Passive, Bone Games by Rob Schultheis is “classic” Active. Schultheis nearly died in a fall in cold stormy conditions in the Rockies, but somehow made a successful descent from a high precipice that would normally have been far beyond his capabilities. “The person I became on [Mount] Neva,” he writes, “was the best possible version of myself, the person I should have been throughout my life” [Schultheis 1984: 12]. Bone Games is a report of Schultheis’s long-term quest to regain the Mount Neva experience. He writes with admiration about “climbers in the eastern Sierra Nevada” who play a game called “Nothing Can Stop Me” in which “you straight-edge a line across a U.S. Geological Survey relief map and then you follow it across the actual landscape, no matter where it goes,” and about Yosemite climbers who “did what they called ‘mungey climbs,’ abstruse, obtuse routes up ridiculous geological features, things like conglomerate-and-mud walls, hanging brush fields, and cliffs so decadent you could sneeze holes in the rock” [167-68]. Schultheis describes his own trek to Mount Everest: “It was the monsoon season, the time of heavy rains, when the Himalayas are slick with mud and squirming with bloodthirsty leeches.... I had almost no money, a lingering case of dysentery, maybe hepatitis, and I spoke about five words of Nepali. Perfect vision-hunting conditions” [76].
I don’t understand why a person should aspire to be able to do superhuman things all the time. One thought seems to be that, if we’re capable of that kind of performance once, we’re wasting our abilities by not doing it all the time. But that’s not obvious to me. I could just as easily wish to be able to reach beyond my normal abilities on rare occasions, but to say thank goodness I don’t have to do it very often. Schultheis quotes a mountain runner: “Your eyes see what’s in front of you and your legs and feet just follow. You are aware of what’s in front of you, but you don’t think” [24]. Schultheis himself writes: “I move with extreme care, totally focused on my hands and feet, and the few square inches of ground under them.... Fingertips flexed around the flanks of a wobbly boulder, feet splayed on a broken pitch of cliff ... the left hand sneaks down to a bit of a ledge, followed by the right; my left foot searches out a crack between two more rocks: this is all there is” [40]. Those do not sound like people who are tuned into their environment—receptive and open to whatever is there. To me, they seem more interested in what they can do with their own bodies than in what they can learn about the world around them.
Schultheis laments that “we Homo sapiens lost something, some vital part of ourselves, when we gave up the hunting and gathering life for the fettered, programmed existence of agriculture, and later, industry” [172]. Richard White also attributes the emphasis on active recreation to changes in people’s work. “The most intense moments of our play in nature comes,” according to White, “when it seems to matter as much as work: when the handhold in the rock matters; when we are four days from the trailhead and short on food; when whitewater could wreck a craft…. We try to make play matter as if it were work, as if our lives depended on it. We try to know through play what workers in the woods, fields, and waters know through work” [White 1996: 174]. That’s an interesting angle on reasons behind the Active approach to nature, but I don’t find it persuasive. Work is a poor way to learn about nature, and I think it always has been. Cutting trees, catching fish, or digging in a mine might teach about trees or fish or rocks, but it doesn’t teach about forests, oceans, or the surrounding environment. People who do those kinds of work—even if they initially go into it out of a love of nature—seem quite capable of behaving like exploiters with no appreciation of the bigger picture. I think a better way to learn about nature is to be Passive. Quiet. Alert. Receptive.
Work, like risky adventure, requires too much focus on the task at hand, so that the task is all you learn about. The task and yourself—your ability to do the work. As for our hunting and gathering ancestors, I doubt that the seemingly impossible feats they were able to perform were done for Schultheis’s thrill of biochemical ecstasy. It’s more likely that they were done to hone the ability to perform such feats when they had to. Our ancestors needed that ability because life for them, when it was hard, was hard indeed. But, even then, I doubt that it was work that taught them the most about their environment. Considering the evidence that hunting and gathering people worked only a fraction of the time, my guess is that they did most of their learning about their surroundings and how to survive in them during the times when they were idle. I imagine that they learned a lot more by watching and listening than they did by challenging the physical limits of their bodies. “Poking around” is a more direct road to the “intuitive and powerful world” of our ancestors than mungey climbing or hiking hundreds of miles in the Himalayas with leeches and dysentery.
To my taste, nothing yields as much pleasure or as many rewards as plain old walking. Nothing but walking yields as much satisfaction for so little effort. I’m actually not very good at poking around. It’s not that I can’t do it, but basically I’m one of Moore’s hikers: I have destinations. But I’m essentially a one-mile-an-hour hiker if you average in all the stopping to take pictures, track down a vaguely familiar bird song, or count the number of needles-per-cluster on a pine tree. One thing about walking is that it’s supremely easy. It almost amuses me when proposals to close off areas to all but foot travel are criticized for being “elitist.” Walking is a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. What could be less elitist than that? It has the further advantage of requiring no special skill. No trainers. No lessons. No special equipment or clothing.
The best thing about walking is its pace. Rebecca Solnit says she likes it because it’s slow. She suspects “that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour” [Solnit 2000: 10]. David Oates makes walking a metaphor for life: “Perhaps … we could settle into a decent walking pace, a meditative pace, steady and determined, progressing calmly toward some modestly humane destination” [Oates 2003: 194-95]. I know that some people prefer to sit still and wait to see what happens, but I like more of a change of scenery than that. Walking continually brings me to new sights, sounds, smells, and other sensations, and does it—this is the best part—at a pace that allows me to not miss anything. Oh, I know I miss things. But not like I would if I were riding a mountain bike or skiing or riding horseback or driving a vehicle. Walking has the further advantage of being quiet, so I don’t disturb too much or miss out on many of the sounds. It’s perfectly easy to stop or change direction whenever I see a reason to do so, and there’s nothing to detract from my attentiveness to whatever turns up along the trail.
SOURCES
Bernstein, Jeremy. Ascent. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.
Chouinard, Yvon. “Modern Yosemite Climbing.” David Reuther and John Thorn, eds. The Armchair Mountaineer (Birmingham: Menasha Ridge Press 1989), 34-41.
Cocker, Mark. Loneliness and Time. New York: Pantheon, 1992.
Irving, R. L. G. “Solvitur in Excelsis.” David Reuther and John Thorn, eds. The Armchair Mountaineer (Birmingham: Menasha Ridge Press, 1989), 119-27.
Jerome, John. On Mountains. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
Krakauer, John. Eiger Dreams. New York: Anchor, 1990.
Krakauer, John. Into Thin Air. New York: Anchor, 1999.
Loughman, Michael. “The Varieties of Climbing.” David Reuther and John Thorn, eds. The Armchair Mountaineer (Birmingham: Menasha Ridge Press 1989), 145-53.
Mitchell, Richard G., Jr. Mountain Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Moore, Kathleen Dean. Riverwalking. San Diego and New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1995.
Mummery, Albert F. “The Pleasures and Penalties of Mountaineering." David Reuther and John Thorn, eds., The Armchair Mountaineer (Birmingham: Menasha Ridge Press, 1989), 185-89.
Noyce, Wilfred. The Springs of Adventure. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1959.
Oates, David. Paradise Wild. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2003.
Roberts, David. Moments of Doubt. Seattle: Mountaineers Books, 1986.
Schultheis, Rob. Bone Games. New York: Random House, 1984.
Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust. New York: Viking, 2000.
Theroux, Paul. Sunrise with Seamonsters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.
Waterman, Laura and Guy. Wilderness Ethics. Woodstock, VT: Countryman Press, 2000.
White, Richard. ”‘Are You An Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature.” William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996), 171-85.
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