Wow.

Thinking about wonder.

I also realized that I’d grown soft, Things had been going too well lately. Too easily. I needed something to pare the fat off my soul, to scare the shit out of me, to make me grateful, again, for being alive. All I knew, deep and safe, beyond mere intellect, that there is nothing like a wilderness journey for re-kindling the fires of life. Simplicity is part of it. Cutting the cackle. Transportation reduced to leg- or arm-power, eating irons to one spoon. Such simplicity, together with sweat and silence, amplify the rhythms of any long journey, especially through unknown, untattered territory. And in the end such a journey can restore an understanding of how insignificant you are – thereby set you free.

-Colin Fletcher

Mr. Fletcher

Note: Colin Fletcher, now deceased, was the author of one of the real Bibles of backpacking — The Complete Walker. I loved that book, and have read it several times. He was also an outdoorsman, a writer, a soldier, one of the founders of the whole idea of conservation and an absolutely original thinker. This essay began as something completely different, but as I wrote and rewrote it, I could feel his writing and presence reshaping it.

Mise En Scene

I had to get outside.

Ever since I was a boy, if I spend too much time indoors I start to go more than a little crazy. I’m not sure I can actually explain it, which is guess is not a promising beginning to an expository sentence, but if I don’t get outside I begin thinking in circles, sort of emotionally attacking myself. A fly-fishing guide I work with, Joe Cauvel, refers to this as the “shack nasties”. He’s onto something. There is something about being outdoors that provides me with a reset I badly need, and where and how I do this varies depending on my location. Most of my very best memories are from the outdoors.

When I was a boy, this meant climbing water towers, swimming alone in the river (a lot), and endlessly coming home wet, freezing, dirty or some combination of all three. It meant long walks (or runs) very late at night, sometimes sneaking into someone’s swimming pool in the dark. Later, it meant reveling in long winter drives home through the mountains of northern Pennsylvania in the winter. Loving highways and truck stops and road trips, even if I couldn’t articulate why¹.

In California, this meant daily hikes through Garland Valley Ranch, in Carmel Valley. One circuit of the valley floor was 3 miles, and if I felt like really kicking my own ass, I could hike up into the mountains next to it. In the summer, Garland could be hellishly hot, which was especially hard on Koda², but given that the Carmel River ran through it, he could always go for swims, which helped a lot.

Over the summer, I spent a week at Chautauqua. Getting outside there meant endless miles up along Chautauqua Lake to Mayville, in the humid August heat for ridiculous distances — sometimes ten straight miles.

However, I was now in upstate New York in deep winter, which presented an entirely different set of challenges to getting outdoors. I really needed to go out, but there was snow, and ice, and cold. When hiking in the winter, you have to stay warm, but not too warm, or you get sweaty, which is not good. I was going to go from hauling my fluffy self (thanks, holiday eating and drinking) uphill for a mile, which meant serious exertion and lots of body heat to standing motionless in the snow. I had to dress for both, or either.

It was also New Year’s Day. Everything had that slightly eerie, deep, the-show-is-almost-over quiet. The planet had made yet another trip around the sun. It was the final holiday of the season, and the year ahead promised a lot of work, travel, pressure, issues — all the mental load of being an adult. The day felt like a rollercoaster poised on top of the big, inevitable drop. A pause, for just a moment, before the plunge, before hanging on for your life.

In addition to simply getting outside, I also wanted/needed to spend a little bit of time really, really alone. This meant the woods, a fire, Koda and darkness. I needed to stand looking into a fire I’d built, and let all the changes, the sense of time, wash over me. A benediction, maybe. A farewell and a hello. An acknowledgement that this massive planetary machine was turning over, again and still.

In other words, on the first day of the new year, I was looking for wonder. More on that in a minute.

Particularly as someone whose job means spending all day online, my life sometimes feels like an endless loop of getting chewing gum in my hair. A Groundhog Day of bullshit. Everything is urgent, everything is novel, everything is temporary, everything demands attention, but I also know, deep down, that absolutely none of it matters. This morning I have been personally insulted by a complete stranger on Facebook, seen several ridiculous videos on ridiculous etiquette by an ridiculously foppish British guy, read a dozen posts demanding Trump’s impeachment for grabbing the President of Venezuela. On and on and on and on.

By contrast, standing alone by a fire in the woods, in the snow, at night (Koda doesn’t count) is sort of a shock, and a little spiritually scary, which I think is a good thing. The endless quiet is awesome in the best possible sense, like standing inside massive, empty cathedral. The awareness of how ancient the scene I’ve dropped into is awesome, too. In other words, if the need to get outside is the tail, the dog is the need for wonder.

That word again. What is wonder?

Years ago, I had a priest, Father Bruce Freeman, who said that the hunger for spirituality is a basic human need. I think that’s basically the same thing as a hunger for wonder, just with a Christian overlay. I believe, deep down, human beings long for it.

Long for what? What are we talking about?

Wonder is a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable. Even if it’s very hard to define, everyone knows the feeling of wonder.

It’s what you feel when you’re standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon. Or watching one of those ultra slow-motion videos of a Saturn V rocket lifting off. Or sleeping next to a small child, and seeing how absolutely still they are, while so full of life. Or pondering the idea that parallel lines never, ever meet, even if they go on forever, which in fact they do. Or looking at an art installation (and by the way, I’m someone who pretty much hates modern art) deliberately designed to invoke that sense. I was at the AKG Art Museum in Buffalo last weekend, and went inside an installation by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.

I felt wonder this morning, thanks to, of all things, a blanket. It was a vintage olive-green wool one I’d bought at a military surplus store in Pennsylvania. I tried to learn who made it, and why, in 1941. And I thought, “Who has slept under this? What was the world like back then?” The label provided a clue, and ChatGPT helped, but it was impossible to know how it came to be mine, and who it had kept warm over the past eighty years. It was a visitor from a time when hundreds of millions of people around the world had devoted themselves to the insane task of killing one another. For that, you need blankets, right?

Wonder is also the theme of the final page of The Great Gatsby, the one that still, sometimes, brings tears to my eyes:

And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Commensurate with his capacity for wonder. So not only do human beings need wonder, but they also, perhaps, are the only creatures who can do it.

So, I hiked a mile up a hill in the winter twilight, then along a road covered in ice and snow, then down to a frozen pond and a forest clearing next to it — looking for wonder. I lit a fire.

There and Back Again

I got the fire started, although not without some trouble. The paper wrapper the firebrick came in didn’t automatically ignite the brick itself. I had built the fire against the trunk of a fallen tree, after tying Koda up nearby. At one point, buried under the pile of kindling I’d created, the flame shrank down to the tiniest pinpoint of light and heat before expanding, catching, growing. I stood there looking down, watching physics and chemistry work without any involvement from me. Eventually, it was a nice fire.

Because he’s the product of 10,000 years of breeding for the most brutal conditions imaginable, Koda lay in the snow, completely comfortable and thinking about whatever dogs think about when they’re just lying around.

Me? I didn’t think about politics or money or work or any of the other day-to-day stuff that often clutters my mind. I thought about how ancient this place was, how automatic it was, how the forces at work — the snow, the fire, the animals, the passage of time, gravity, weather, sound/silence — all operated together exactly as they always had and how they always would. I was along for the ride, and a lovely, syncopated ride it was, wasn’t it?

Capacity for wonder. Say it again. Think about it. What is that?

Children wonder a lot, and then, as we grow up, that shifts and so, a lot of things that I used to wonder at I no longer do. This isn’t a bad thing. It’s a natural consequence, I believe, of getting older, more experienced, more aware of how the sausage is made, how the party is thrown, how the plot of the movie begins, rises, climaxes and ends. I’m still sometimes surprised, which is a great thing, but a lot of simply being alive, day-to-day, at the age of 63 is familiar and comfortable rather than wondrous. That’s okay. I’m okay. It’s kind of nice, really. That first cup of coffee, which I’ve made the same way for many years, still tastes great³.

But I do still wonder, too. I still stand there sometimes and contemplate what’s in front of me or around me and feel that same sense of insignificance, of astonishment, or buoyancy. Maybe the best way to evaluate a year, when it’s all over, is how much I wondered at what had happened. How often had I stood there, and thought, “Wow”.

I stood there in the snowy clearing alone for half an hour or so, just taking the moment in. I then put the fire out with handfuls of snow, leashed up Koda, and began the hike out. Along the way, the same road I had traveled in was now illuminated in bright moonlight, the kind you can read by.

An almost-full, waxing moon was rising, which it had been doing for over 4 billion years. It lit up clouds, and created shadows on the snow in front of me. Nothing moved. There was no sound. Just the beautiful, silent, endless sense of the enormous machine I was part of still being in motion, as it always was, and as far as I or anyone else knew, always would be.

Happy New Year.

1. One of my favorite highway signs of all time was on this drive. It’s still there on Route 15, just a few miles south of the Pennsylvania state border. Nice and big, and aimed at drivers heading north, it consists of one word, in big, red letters: “EAT”.

2. The climb up the Garland Ranch mountains was one of the few times Koda has flat-out refused to go on. It was hot out, there was no shade, and he finally just lay down in the middle of the trail, and in articulate dog language, looked at me and said, “Fuck you. No.” So we headed back down.

3. A neighbor of mine told me once that she has exactly one coffee mug, made by a potter in, I believe, Ithaca. She picked it out, and uses it every morning. I understand why, I think.