When the cardiologist mentioned that a leaky heart valve combined with my long-term atrial fibrillation (A-fib) must leave me feeling exhausted most of the time, I was startled at how exactly right his statement was.
Physically active my entire life, ever rushing out-of-doors like Antaeus in Greek myth, I’ve always won strength and drawn energy from contact with our Earth Mother. Even my academic degrees involved field experience: marine archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean, leading student backpacks for Crane Country Day School, tramping around Germany working on the language, researching and writing outdoor columns for Noozhawk.
Yet admittedly, for about the past five years, I’ve struggled mightily against recurring fits of deep exhaustion, even resorting to daily naps in order to trek on and surge into the Santa Barbara County wilderness regions.
I’ve never been one of those “back-to-nature” frilly wanderers who consciously saunter like Henry David Thoreau advises in his famous essay, “Walking” (1861).
While often asserting that, ‘Oh yeah, I hiked into the backcountry to slow down,’ to smell the wild thyme and slowly masticate miner’s lettuce, the truth says otherwise. Oh, and I’d describe how I pondered and studied the geologic oddities of our local transverse ranges, or the delight in wandering weird regions like the Carrizo Plain and rock art caverns of the magical Hurricane Deck.
Yet, given some alarming heart issues, a more honest truth emerges as I survey my hiking life here since 1971. Since I’m no well-heeled scion of Montecito wealth, like all the McCaslins (and not just those fictional miscreants in William Faulkner’s Southern novels) I’ve always labored for my daily bread (4.1.1.). I worked in the UCSB Reserve Book Room earning my way to bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history. When my partner and I spent three years in Europe, we consistently held teaching jobs and could rarely just mosey about enjoying the British Museum, cafes along the Seine, or the music scenes in Munich and Berlin.
As a dutiful son of western science and materialism, an offspring of technology and an industrial base that seemed to pervade everywhere in North America — in a word, I’ve always been a striver and an achiever and dedicated linear hiker/traveler. “Sauntering” is a glorious Transcendentalist ideal, but difficult when working as a full-time teacher, while having a family and handling administrative duties at school. There has been limited free time for running off to the hills.
Thoreau’s quotation emphasizes that medieval saunterers were “idle people who roved about the country … under pretense of going to la Sainte Terre, the Holy Land.” (Only after retirement did I gain this sort of “idle” time.)
Back in the day, with guru Franko, we’d set very specific linear hiking goals on almost every one of our longer backpacks into the San Rafael Wilderness and along the future Condor Trail. I’ve bragged about the five 45-mile circumnavigations of the Hurricane Deck, and on a whim in Lone Pine, Franko and I tackled a one-day jaunt to the top of 14,000-foot Mount Langley. I did it again in 1993 with my 9-year-old son. We wouldn’t have dreamed of not making it to the top!
When leading Crane School backpacking treks from Camp Whitsett (southern high Sierra Nevada), we usually had specific goals, detailed accomplishments to achieve (e.g. clamber to the top of the nearest spire), and once again the linear and episodic prevailed over the cyclical and eternal-return repetitive. (My first backcountry book is titled “Eternal Backcountry Return” for a reason.)
As decades passed and I became a student of the Tao, conducted pilgrimages to southern India and hiked in the Taman Negara wilderness zone in Malaysia, this linear drive mellowed somewhat. In my 60s, I managed to wander and roam a bit more. Less mileage meant less stress on the knees (and heart) and growing appreciation for savoring the moment “back there.”
Just recently, I’ve learned why the mysterious periods of increasing daily exhaustion have grown so much since around 2018. I’m very healthy — no drinking or smoking, and my vital numbers are excellent — but a worn-out heart valve (tricuspid, right), an enormous right atrium and erratic A-fib have simply caused extreme depletion of energy. I’m quite tired by 1 p.m. of a typical hiking day.
My life partner has expressed respect for my commitment, and also growing disquiet at the 90-minute naps into which I’ve often fallen. My hiking pals really didn’t notice, since old white guys often act stoic and refuse to articulate their emotions or exhaustion to each other, and I simply stomp forward on the trail.
In the Antaeus myth, he’s the giant Libyan son of Gaia and Poseidon, and he famously lost a wrestling match (and his life) to Herakles. All strangers passing through Libya had to wrestle with this giant, and every time Antaeus was thrown to the ground, Gaia redoubled his strength. Like Antaeus, I get gigantic energy whenever I spend hours hiking (and sauntering!) in touch with the Earth — my boots on sacred California soil, mythic Antaeus’ feet on exotic Libya (a Greek word).
I honestly do not feel “right” when I fail to walk at least 90 minutes a day, even if only up to Elings Park and back in my Westside environs.
Sometimes I feel the fluttering of the A-fib, but the steady walking and yogic breathing (so – hum) mellow it out and my feet keep moving forward and upward. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe constantly stated, immer Steigerung, always upward, and the German poet meant it as much metaphorically as he did physically. Like Friedrich Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein and Anaïs Nin, Goethe had to move at least an hour a day and often more, sometimes with his friend the poet Schiller but always walking. Sauntering, shuffling, roaming, creeping, hiking: moving across terrain without an omnipresent linear goal. These joys are our heritage from paleo-human stone ages.
The Greek hero Herakles had to defeat the non-European anti-hero Antaeus (son of Earth) as part of his 11th Labor en route to more adventures in the Garden of the Hesperides. As Antaeus’ energy redoubled just like mine when out hiking, rational Herakles proved to have the superior intellect. He realized the giant’s re-energized state every time he fell, so he held him aloft, strangling him in midair while estranged from his mother Gaia.
Since I’m retired and now have the leisure to roam, I can refuse to be held aloft in the air by science and technology and individual ambition. After a couple of endoscopic heart procedures, it’s my intention and hope to cling to the soil as always, occasionally removing my boots to dig my toes into the dirt, and I’ll again clamber along the trails, rambling and wandering rather than doggedly hiking in a linear obsession to “get to the top” (Langley), finish first (lamely), or wrestle with every false competitor on the trails of life.
4.1.1.
William Faulkner’s awful McCaslins figure fictionally in “Go Down Moses” and “Intruder in the Dust,” and in most of his stories about Yoknapatawpha County.
Master Ni, “The Complete Works of Lao Tzu” (1979); Ovid discusses Antaeus in his “Metamorphoses, Book IX”; and Dan McCaslin, “Eternal Backcountry Return” (2018), available on Amazon.
