After nearly six weeks “trapped” within the glowing confines of a well-functioning European city, on Sept. 7 — my second day home — I began a much-needed hike into the wilderness, only to learn that Los Padres National Forest was closed because of fire danger until Sept. 17 by order of California regional forester Jennifer Eberlien.
The joke’s on me as I had been drooling about a few hours of marching uphill following a long flight returning from 37 days abroad. While over “there,” I dreamed nightly about hikes into the San Rafael Wilderness along the stony Manzana or rambling amid old-growth conifers on Reyes Peak, and I hyperventilated imagining sweaty slogs to the magical and singing Sisquoc River.
For sure, my partner and I had felt very comfortable and well-established in a convenient and quite small economy flat in one of Munich’s green suburbs while visiting family. We made several vigorous urban hikes in local green spaces such as Luitpold Park, West Park and the ginormous green Englischer Garten (1.4 square miles over 910 acres with a natural river running through). The vibrant if slightly underground live-music scene also flourished in quiet ways in this unified south German city of 1.4 million. Restaurants were open but, like on the subways we rode daily, everyone faithfully wore surgical-quality face masks over the nose and mouth until seated, and they kept 1.5 meters apart when possible. Museums also were open.
Even with more than 100 bookstores and the surging Isar River, public fountains and the boisterous beer gardens, München still reeks of city, subways and soot. Over 36 years, the free time allowed by a teaching calendar led to developing this admittedly selfish Santa Barbara small-town lifestyle. An addiction to going outside often and every day evolved given the spectacular weather and climate in which we bathe daily. Inveterate Santa Barbarans and all who’ve lived here for at least 10 years, you do understand my point. Just as the Stone Age Chumash and other hunter-gatherer tribal societies knew, Mother Earth boasts no better climate/weather zone throughout all six continents. I think regions in Greece compare, as well as a few hill stations I visited in Malaysia, and riverbank sections of the upper Sisquoc River.
After 5½ weeks swaddled in Munich’s many joys — it’s not termed a karnevale city for nothing; it’s home of the original Oktoberfest — my lust for the hills overwhelmed on Sept. 7, so I headed for Rattlesnake Canyon preserve immediately, since the national forests were out. Only one vehicle was parked on the road, like a lonely white sentinel, and after dashing down beside the sturdy Stanwood Bridge, Rattlesnake Canyon Trail led harshly uphill. The 1.7-mile steep trek takes only about 40 minutes, but you know it’s been a strict workout because of the hard breathing and achiness in 73-year-old legs.
The canyon’s creekbed smolders dry and very dusty, and there’s very little mud. Oaks and canyon sycamores provide shade, and I smell pine fragrance at the pine meadow section. Even the hardy lizards have retreated like covert anti-vaxxers beneath broiling stones, and one wonders what in the hell he’s doing back here solo at 7 a.m.?
Charles Foster’s fascinating new book, “Being Human,” points out that the lifestyle was considerably better back in the Upper Paleolithic Stone Age, 30,000 years ago, writing, “It’s laughable to consider modern humans as normative. We are a recent and palpably inadequate mutation” because of our vandalizing the planet and overheating the atmosphere with pollutants. But Foster throws in an unexpected corollary to accompany our loss of wild nature: the chilling absence of ritual and rite and spirituality’s song, dramatic stories, and festivities. How impoverished this Anthropocene has become!
Describing these losses, Foster carefully chooses not to deploy the correct anthropological term — animism. Instead, he describes a spiritual tragedy where we’ve lost that world faith; the whole-cosmos feeling, and he dates the tragedy to about 300 years ago when the tenets of the modern European Enlightenment took over western thinking (Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, Newton, Locke, Darwin and Einstein).
Foster contends that until about 1700 CE, “almost every human in the world assumed that the world as a whole, and every little thing in it, from pebbles to whales, has some sort of consciousness.” We gave away our mystical and spiritual umbilicus to Mother Earth about the time Newton invented the clockmaker God of the mechanistic universe. That god “absconded” as a Deus absconditus, leaving humanity without miracles, newly created rituals, or original songs in a denatured universe bound by immutable laws. We make an easy leap from this materialistic universe view into Nietzsche declaring “God is Dead” 150 years ago to a manic determination to hike up steep Rattlesnake Canyon Trail.
The chaparral was dry and the wildflowers had fled, with only black gnats rising. I did not encounter another human until 70 minutes into the trek, when a guy passed me from behind, another fanatic hiker-dude outside wearing himself down so he can sleep in the evening.
Forty minutes chugging uphill cleared out the psychic dreck and cleansed the Augean Stables of my mind’s sloth and indifference. Flowing water in Rattlesnake Canyon Creek miraculously resurfaced in this stretch of the big canyon. I’m aware that it’s Sept. 7, a Tuesday, and about 8 a.m. — so where are all the humans? It is a workday, but in older times I would encounter small groups of outdoor fanatics who were hiking or jogging before work started. OMG.
On the return trip down from Tin Shack Meadow (or, “the meadow” — 1.7 miles up from the parking at Skofield Park), I ran into just two other sets of other humans: There was sadness that so few avail themselves of their right to hike up here in Rattlesnake Canyon (not part of the national forest, but part of the city of Santa Barbara). Foster has some words about this physical lassitude in his book:
“The main visible difference between modern humans and Upper Palaeolithic humans isn’t clothes, or hairiness, or even our own physical weediness. It’s their cosmopolitanism and motion [walking] and our own parochialism and sedentariness.”
Dragging and enticing our children out of doors and into the hills would align them better with their Upper Paleolithic heritage. I agree with Foster that those times before the agricultural revolution (Neolihtic) had more freedom, a better diet, fewer diseases and more excitement, especially in an animistic world pulsating with living forms and awareness of other realms. The sedentary disease afflicts many seniors and makes cognitive decline an even slipperier threat.
Somehow, when a couple have children, the parents often wake up to how outdoor-deprived many children are today. Looking around, they make choices. They read about the “Last Child in the Woods” and other sources telling them what we intuitively already understand: Get the kids outside! Every day, and as often as possible, bring water and snacks.
Although there are hundreds of green “parklets” as well as larger green parks in Munich, coming back into Santa Barbara offers so many active choices out-of-doors: the sea (surfing), the lakes, and the hills and backcountry trails. Now there are more local trail closures. Click here for the latest updates.
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» Charles Foster, “Being Human” (2021), quoted pp. 70, 73 and 89; for animism and “other realms,” see McCaslin, “Trails Into Tomorrow” (2021, Lulu.com).
— 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.
