Humility

After five days of Sierra wilderness I exited with a bout of stomach and fatigue issues I’ve not felt in the 23 years I’ve been tramping these mountains, most likely stemming from bad water I drank early in the hike. Humility in the face of unforeseen circumstances, unattachment indeed, but not uncaring. I should also mention that I will be filtering water from now on. It’s tough to walk away, to turn around, especially from a thing and a place I love so very much. So it goes. Wilderness is apathetic. It is not there for our entertainment or our selfish interests. It is just there, and the way we choose to engage with it is personal and reflective of how we choose to engage with the larger world. I try to walk the path of an artist. An observer perched to the side, always looking. Looking at tonality and shape, light and shadow. Looking for the right words to express something felt, something experienced. For a lot of years I’ve had a giant ego around the Sierra geography, as if I alone understood its magical pull, but this is erroneous. I’m learning to see others. I’m learning to let go. And I think that’s what this truncated hike was truly about.

I met a mountaineer who far surpasses my acceptance level for risk. I talked with a hiker who was 193 miles into walking the entire length of the John Muir Trail barefoot, a whole other measure of engagement. An engineer who found the love of mountains in his forties forever changing his perspective on life. He was walking with his good mate of 20 years, really his brother. A woman from the east who truly understood the art of taking images on a pinhole camera, who would stop while I was photographing and exclaim her future excitement at seeing this particular image later, who would praise my choice of subject, I liked her. The backcountry ranger helicoptered in with months of supplies while the snow is dozens of feet thick, she’s been doing this for 30 years. The honeymooning couple, having never really backpacked before, 17 days in, the spring of their life together fused by bonds of struggle and delight only felt deep in mountain canyons. Each unique, like the thousands I never met, in their reasons for being there. In their love of Sierra. In the ideal built for themselves, built step by tired step over granitic rock laid down during the Cretaceous and uplifted over millions of years.

What develops out of these grayed encounters is a visceral understanding of how similar we all truly are. Shared experience does that. And when that experience equally strips away comfort from everyone, it also strips away walls and what’s left is not a creed or a political persuasion, not a stance or soap box. What’s left is humanity and compassion.

If I failed this summer it’s not in a premature return, that was a medical decision, but in the inability to understand what I’ve learned in the past, what my own love is up there. It resides in a letting go, in that detached ideal, a mix of solitude and humanity and the Taoist acceptance of nature for its unknowable beauty. To let the wilderness flow over and through me, where art is my conduit in expressing the deeper feelings. I never let that in this time, even before becoming ill. I spent months building up a return to the project I started last summer, and in that I set myself up for failure. In trying to replicate an experience already had, I ignored what makes spontaneous engagement special. The unforeseen poetry that happens.

And so I will return to the Sierra again, and again, and again until my ashes are dumped in some remote canyon of that range. And each time I go I make art and write words and try my damnedest to let go.