Individuals have compelling physical and spiritual needs for regeneration that must be balanced by their social needs for community and good fellowship in town. Since most Americans do live in a town or a city, finding the “privacy” time for the self in nearby nature has become the more desperate need in our era featuring its “frenzy of contact.”
Fifty years ago, most Americans went to church/synagogue, met friends socially in various public spaces, participated in bowling leagues or adult sports teams, and simply spent a lot more time in group associations.
But today’s America feels fundamentally different, and I do not mean worse, simply quite different with the individual more alienated from society despite living in one (e.g. noted in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and many tomes like it).
Individualism and entrepreneurial capitalism feed the typical American “solo” mania, and I admit to a love of extended solo backpacking treks myself. Kurt Andersen writes that this extreme form of individualism is an idea …
“… as old as America itself, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
unbound: believe the dream, mistrust authority, do your own thing,
find your own truth.” — (Fantasyland, 2018)
Therefore, rushing off into nature, over to Jesusita Trail, Romero, Blue Canyon or old standby Rattlesnake Canyon, can furnish sick-of-town American individuals — you, dear reader — a place and a space to set the soul free.
Early on April 30, while again hiking up a green and junglelike Rattlesnake Canyon Trail, there were few other humans about, the wildflowers glowed under gray skies, and I found time for the self. Escaping the political madness, Game of Thrones, NBA semifinals, William Barr and the ferocious House Democrats … the short flight from “town” becomes necessary for soul survival!
Along the verdant local trail with green-clad boulders, I noticed the ubiquitous wild cucumber vine clambering over the low chaparral bushes. The luxuriant man root (marah macrocarpus) has distinctive large, white, hairy pods, which native Chumash would dry and hang on strings as nature necklaces.
The main use for man root (chilicote in Spanish) was as an important medical ingredient as well as a pigment for the rock art paintings (Jan Timbrook, Chumash Ethnobotany).
Society and life throw up many barriers, preventing the individual from going to nearby nature for this private, liberating experience and some relative solitude. As mentioned in the last column, finding the immediate “ignition spot” in your head and immediately leaving the apartment/home/car/workplace to go straight to your natural haven is extraordinarily difficult.
The Hindu philosophers discuss the mysterious and healthy unity of thought/word/deed, an integration that American individuals have had trouble attaining in this age of distraction.
The same explosion of digital technologies and ubiquitous screens that have limited public associations also shrink our essential privacy. Email “letters” and handwritten missives originate in different parts of the brain.
So many of us carry our phones around as if they are life preservers while we stare from the Titanic’s heaving decks. Apps such as StayFocusd (turns off Twitter after 45 minutes a day) and Freedom may help, but as Jia Tolentino notes in a recent New Yorker, “If any of my digital chastity belts malfunction,” she loses it and succumbs once again to Mark Zuckerberg’s privacy thieves.
Some tricks for recovering your autonomy may include instituting a “digital Sabbath” for the whole family, or at least for yourself. Another strategy might be to meet someone regularly at the trailhead rain or shine, but then hike uphill in silence and with hundreds of yards between (at least 40 minutes).
Also, see if you can (and dare?) leave your phone in the car when you hike (not in remote areas, of course).
Recent books such as Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism suggest a one- or two-month “digital detox” — declutter your online universe and unplug, later to reintroduce a few of the apps you really do require. Since our “attention” is what Facebook wants, digital dieting and heading for the local trails is a kind of response.
In Jenny Odell’s new book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, we’re reminded of Pascal’s well-known 17th century truism: “There is nothing harder than to sit quietly in an empty room.”
Odell really understands how the commodification of personal information easily destroys this esoteric private self that I discussed in my previous column. I paraphrase her challenge to outdoors Americans:
Humans are not just widgets or units of production! It’s not organism as
algorithm yet. In order to imagine the “self” we have to find or “see” the
natural world differently, and become absorbed in it in order to regain
spiritual and mental health. My self overrides algorithmic calculations and
the contortions involved in constant “presentations” online …
There are plenty of books on this topic of Internet decluttering. One of the best is Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now! Lanier’s a cold turkey guy, but even he accepts, like Tolentino in her New Yorker piece, that we’ll all be back on the digital upload within months (New Yorker, April 29).
The best antidote is simply charging back into nearby nature — the San Rafael Wilderness is fine, but 40 minutes strolling in a nearby green park will suffice.
Animism is the stone age parent of all the world’s subsequent religions, and ancient humans just knew that nature oozed with fecund life — look at the green moss growing out of the cliffs (lead photo). There are traces of this pre-civilization approach right in Rattlesnake Canyon with the decorated boulder we call the Rock Monster.
For more than 45 years, I’ve observed that casual hikers have constantly dismantled and redecorated the “mouth” of this fascinating boulder, and it’s ever-changing.
Back in 1985, the song “We Are the World” went viral, and such a woke term has become a much-mocked meme. It’s a short jump to my assertion that what’s happening to the natural world is also happening to us.
I am hiking up into the forest along riparian Rattlesnake Creek while wading into my own mind’s damaged habitat and inner “forest.”
As an older white American male, my demographic has a lot to answer for, oh yes indeed! The cliché is that we are all interconnected — and it’s also the truth, so we accept also that climate change is real, and has been happening in this Anthropocene since at least 1750 CE.
Odell suggests that we need to be “restoring habitats for human thought” as we attempt to restore nature habitats — an engaging idea to mull while hiking to Tin Shack Meadow, 1.7 miles from Skofield Park and your parked truck.
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» Books: Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now! (2018); Jan Timbrook, Chumash Ethnobotany (2007); Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland (2018); Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (2000); Umberto Ecco, Liquid Society (2017) for “frenzy of contact”; Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker; Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism — Choosing a Focused Life in a Digital World (2019); and Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019).
— Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity and has written extensively about the local backcountry. His latest book, Eternal Backcountry Return, has been published by Sisquoc River Press and is available at Lulu.com. He serves as an archaeological site steward for the U.S. Forest Service in the Los Padres National Forest. He welcomes reader ideas for future Noozhawk columns, and can be reached at cazmania3@gmail.com. Click here to read additional columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
