Seasoned backpackers and aging hikers discover a secret after spending decades moving purposefully across the Santa Barbara backcountry — say, the Sespe or the San Rafael Wilderness. After marinating for years in the exploration of these potent environs, a new elixir of startling information transforms hikers’ awareness and outdoor enjoyment. Often, an altered sense of time ensues.

One roams around the national forest without specific goals, wandering about in apparently aimless circles without time-bound rules. In truth, there is a spiritual plan as one’s left brain relinquishes control while the body meanders on well-worn trails.

Recent books about lingering, wandering and walking confirm the realization that halting “to smell the roses,” as it were, lingering amid the chaparral or fragrant conifers, and bushwhacking into more remote eco-zones add mental energy and appreciation for life all around us.

In earlier decades, I usually had very specific topographic hiking goals: from Nira to Manzana Narrows, from ‘Schoolhouse to Mormon Camp, ascending 6,700-foot Big Pine Mountain, treks from Upper Oso to Santa Cruz Camp, and myriad other sites.

Since I frequently led school groups, these forays usually had specific ending points, often at a creek or outstanding rock promontory. All this linear hiking and thinking was predicated on my limited school break times and consequent freedom from the teaching schedule. Most of us face job commitments, so sliding seamlessly into meandering mode along remote trails can be quite difficult (it takes some time to slip into it).

In the past, all these hinterlands “behind” coastal Santa Barbara held scattered Indigenous living sites, and a few year-round towns (e.g. Soxtonocmu, toward Los Olivos). According to ethnographic material and oral interview sources in Thomas Blackburn’s seminal collection, some backcountry areas contained more ancient sentient beings now enfolded into specific rocks and boulder fields (see 4.1.1.).

While moving about in these regions over a 50-year period, one can begin to sense the mystical presence of the ancestors (First People) as he/she/it sheds western civilization’s linear, time-bound, at times distressing, modern urban outlook.

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes about certain effects of modern ways that induce this intense linear thinking and a consequent loss of the “art of lingering.” He details how many of our technologies today literally (and figuratively) detach us from the Earth itself:

“Modern technology moves the human being away from the Earth. … The further one moves away from the earth, the smaller it gets. … The internet and electronic mail let geography, even the Earth itself, disappear. Modern technology de-terrestrializes human life.” — B.-C. Han, p. 20 (4.1.1.)

Eventually, one discovers that the energy-giving backcountry wanderings somehow reinforce an equally focused love of browsing in your imagination … AND lingering in bookstores … and eventually roaming among the stacks of various university libraries.  Determined walking can help us re-terrestrialize ourselves and embrace the Earth herself (Gaia/Hutash/Durga). A key aspect of our postmodern life is building up the capacity to know what to forget and what to remember, as Friedrich Nietzsche counsels.

Most of us realize that our early Anthropocene period features significant screen obsessions with speed, replication and linearity. Staring like hypnotized lotus-eaters into ubiquitous screens often pushes out the important sense of duration. Cormac McCarthy now writes “that there ain’t no linear, Laura” (“The Passenger,” p. 9).

If we’re stuck in linear modes of thought, then lingering and browsing become difficult or impossible to enjoy. We experience heavy loss of ritual and ceremonies today. While the Internet seems to offer a richer experience through an accelerated savoring of worldly options, it really punishes viewers with a loss of the capacity for lingering (and grazing). We, in effect, imagine we are experiencing more while exploring the Internet’s attention-grabbing options, whereas for most of us it’s an illusion and we just end up feeling like we are living faster.

These feelings of compulsion, of living fast, surely drive many humans batty, to say the least. Han tragically notes, “Whoever tries to live faster, will ultimately also die faster.” It’s not the total number of “events” in our lives that give us deep meaning, but rather the experience of duration that makes life much more fulfilling. I’ve been part of the Slow-food, Slow-travel, Slow-museum and Slow-hiking trends, and all these add a savor and meaning to counter our sped-up postmodern life. Deliberately eschewing social media, I stumble through actual books and long-form journalism, and avoid TV, Netflix and most podcasts.

While hiking on sacred Indigenous lands, we can make them our own, too, and realize that our homo sapiens’ ancestors belong to us, and we can also absorb the sacred realms inherent in these rocks. If we have the time and energy to seek them out, if we’re willing to go slowly, these other worlds are open. No toloache (datura/Mother Momoy) or alcohol or peyote or pespibata needed.

We face almost 2 million acres of Los Padres National Forest literally on our doorstep north and east of Santa Barbara — at one time, this huge 1.9 million-acre tract was called the “Santa Barbara Forest Reserve” (created in 1903). The five federal wilderness zones within the renamed Los Padres National Forest comprise about a half-million protected acres (4.1.1.).

We know that Aldo Leopold, one of the architects of the famous 1964 Wilderness Act,  originally hoped all the federal “wilderness” tracts, like the 220,000 acres of the Sespe Wilderness behind Ojai, would have neither roads nor even hiking trails. Every hike and backpack would be a bushwhack, a total roaming out to literally find your own route into the muck, into Life, into the intensity of the inevitable end of days. Thus, W.G. Sebald writes that both nature and humanity include “the history of destruction” — it begins with the omnipresence of the individual’s inescapable mortality.

My friends and colleagues have roamed with me through the national forest and wilderness zones since the early 1970s. We frequently trekked up and down Manzana Creek and hiked around the Hurricane Deck over to the fabled Sisquoc River. We located, or rather felt,  places of power here and there, and occasionally bowed in awe and respect at a remote Indigenous rock art site.

When we evade our bondage to linear time, we can choose to shift ourselves out-of-doors, hopefully for longer treks with some intervals of solitude, and where we will begin to re-terrestrialize our awareness, and slow things down.

4.1.1.

— Cormac McCarthy, “The Passenger” (2022); Chaucer’s Bookstore is my major resource for browsing in town. The five federal “wilderness” zones near Santa Barbara are the: San Rafael, Chumash, Dick Smith, Sespe and Matilija. Thomas Blackburn, editor, “December’s Child — A Book of Chumash Oral Narratives” (UC Press, 1975); Byung-Chul Han, “The Scent of Time: Art of Lingering” (Polity, 2017); David Lewis-Williams, “The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art” (2002).

— Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity and has written extensively about the local backcountry. His latest book, Autobiography in the Anthropocene, is available at Lulu.com. He serves as an archaeological site steward for the U.S. Forest Service in Los Padres National Forest. He welcomes reader ideas for future Noozhawk columns, and can be reached at cazmania3@gmail.com. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.