A Better Animal

by TALLEY V. KAYSER

Thick smoke from nearby fires greases the sky, smearing the sun to a dark red ball. The smudged gray landscape flares dim orange here and there, where narrow stretches of mirror-smooth granite catch the weak light. Across the canyon behind me, through thinner smoke, I can just see white threads of waterfall snarling down from the edges of cliffs.

I know where I am.

But I do not know where to go.

I consider the dark escarpment ahead: a wall of rock, perhaps fifty feet high, that juts from the steep slope of the mountain and blocks my way, then vanishes into the swirling murk above and below me. I shift my gaze and hunch over the ragged pages in my hand. Leftover rain drips from the hood of my jacket. My finger smudges the print as I read the lines for the twentieth time, out loud, very slowly: “From a grassy gap north of Peak 10,280 (3,125 meters), ascend a gentle hillside west until level with the top of the peaklet, then contour straight across medium-sized talus until reaching a dark bluff.”

My voice sounds fuzzed, oddly bounded by my skull; my hearing still hasn’t returned. I lift my head, shaking more water onto the page, and deliberately scan the landscape yet again.

Were this another day, those waterfalls behind me could be helpful landmarks. But the falls are ephemeral, unmarked on any map; they were spawned by the three hours of hail that just pummeled this corner of the Sierra Nevada mountains. And, as evidenced by the raw skin on the backs of my hands, pummeled me.

I turn back to the guidebook. My eyes skim over the next few lines, which describe a “fabulous view”: a valley where “miniscule groves of conifers harmonize perfectly with shining slabs and glistening brooks.” By contrast, the next instructive section is brusque. “A moderate descent from the dark bluff leads down into the canyon,” I read, “and the route for the next mile is both obvious and easy.”

“Okay,” I mumble. “Descent from the bluff. Come on.” My thoughts grind slowly. Descent from the top? I can’t climb that wall. Not with a forty-pound pack. I could follow the wall down. But is that the right canyon?

I check my watch—6:47 p.m. An hour before sunset. I shift, and the rocks I stand on shift in turn, reminding me of the unstable talus I need to cross safely before dark. Maybe I could go higher. Look for a place to cross the bluff . . . get caught in the dark. At eleven thousand feet, on talus, this tired. That’s asking for a broken ankle. Should I go down, then? Descent from the dark bluff . . .

I know where I am.

But I do not know where to go.

That circumstance, for me, is unusual. I’ve spent over a decade accumulating outdoors skills. After more than forty thousand hours of professional, in-field wilderness experience, I am better-than-average qualified to guide not only myself, but you, your children, and/or your most treasured parent into and out of wild places.

Wild places. What does “wild” mean? Certainly not “untouched by humans.” I’ve walked into Alaskan wilds via ATV-churned mud roads, found abandoned vehicles in the middle of the Mojave, and bumped into research equipment in remote pockets of the Rockies. Humans build facilities, manage invasive species, cut paths through, conduct research in, and otherwise alter every designated wilderness area in this country. That’s in addition to our historical impacts on ecological systems and the large-scale impacts of our eagerness to burn the carbon-rich remains of ancient organisms.

Each year, I walk a small group of college students through the history of American wilderness, challenging received ideas about wilderness and introducing arguments that complicate our shared adventures. “Wilderness is an elitist idea,” I say. Or, “Wilderness is ableist. Wilderness is racist.” Often, students express fascination with a particular point environmental historian William Cronon makes: that “wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural.” And yet, no matter how cynical I become about the word “wild,” I—and the students in my classes—continue to believe wilderness has value.

Likely, that’s because we actually go there.

For many of the students, our multiple-day backpacking trip is their first exposure to wilderness. As much as I encourage them to interrogate wilderness, my greater hope is that they continue to explore it. I hope even as I know that their conclusions about wild places may be very different from mine. Why do I value wilderness? I am still answering that question, and still answering it by going on walks. As often as I can, I spend stretches of days in mountain wilderness; as often as I can, I spend them alone.

Thus: this route. Wander solo for two hundred or so miles in the Sierra Nevada, mostly above ten thousand feet. Climb up thirty-three passes, ascending roughly twice the height of Everest over the course of the trek—and then scramble immediately down each one, through snow and/or scree and/or ankle-breaking talus. Most significantly: avoid trails. Instead of following a path, route-find through the rugged terrain with a set of maps and guidebook. From a grassy gap north of Peak 10,280 (3,125 meters), ascend a gentle hillside west until level with the top of the peaklet . . .

Go wild.

The route is demanding, but my journey has been relatively smooth. I’ve re-routed small sections to avoid the wildfires ravaging California this summer, and nigh-daily storms slow my progress, but until this afternoon I’ve adjusted to conditions without much trouble.

Yesterday, for example, a hailstorm pinned me to a hillside around 4:00 p.m., just as I was poised to enter “labyrinthine granite corridors” under a boiling sky. I pitched my yellow tarp in good time, taking advantage of a clump of juniper and pine. While hail whipped into the tarp and thunder rattled loosely between the ridges, I rested, content with the simple pleasure of good shelter in heavy weather. When the sky settled a couple of hours later, I tucked into my sleeping bag unruffled, sure I could make up lost mileage in the morning.

And the morning started well. I moved through the granite corridors easily, approaching my next destination—an impossibly blue lake—earlier than planned. I forded the lake and headed into the next stretch with confidence. But more convoluted terrain drew me off-route within an hour. By then, the clear morning had become a smoky afternoon. As I backtracked, I failed to consider that the thicker-than-usual firesmoke had clouded the sky, making it difficult to monitor for storms.

Thus, I was above eleven thousand feet, crossing a steep tongue of bare boulder and rock between two high peaks, when the first thunder screeched through the smoke.

I do not like storms. I gain satisfaction in preparing for them: in reading the sky well, in setting up my tarp effectively, in staying dry for as long as the storm persists. I savor, too, the post-storm emergence: the sudden first birdsong, the ozone-invigorated atmosphere sharp and vivid. But the storms themselves are a different matter. I do not rejoice in them; I endure them.

Sierra literature, by contrast, describes storms with boundless enthusiasm. Guidebook author Steve Roper, for example, offers this breathy description of the classic cloudburst:

“. . . thunderheads shoot up with amazing rapidity to altitudes as high as 35,000 feet. The temperature drops abruptly, a brisk wind springs up, and the sun disappears behind seething gray shapes. Thunder growls in the distance, and then the heavens explode. Tendrils of lightning lick nearby summits. An eerie darkness contrasts with the glistening hail pounding the earth. Crackling ripples of thunder foretell of impending detonations that echo forever off the cliffs. The gods seem to have lost control of their domain, and all is chaos.”

In a similar vein, indefatigable John Muir glories in “big, bossy cumuli” and “silvery zigzag lightning lances,” in rain “fitted like a skin upon the rugged anatomy of the landscape.” Not to mention the thunder: “gloriously impressive, keen, crashing, intensely concentrated, speaking with such tremendous energy it would seem that an entire mountain is being shattered at every stroke.” Characteristically, Muir is unconcerned that he might be shattered, even as he describes 200-foot firs that lightning “split into long rails and slivers from top to bottom and scattered to all points of the compass.”

Sierra storms are relatively mild; the chances of getting struck by lightning are much lower than the chances of, say, freezing to death on Denali. But unlike many of the explorers I read, I cannot entirely shrug off the danger inherent in weather. Even as I set up shelter, tuck my gear away, and get into the defensive squat known as “lightning position,” the skin-and-nerve bundle of me is keenly aware that I can neither predict nor control atmospheric conditions.

This is instructive.

The more time I spend in wild places, the more I realize that my lived experience of wilderness leaves no room for Cronon’s “dualistic vision,” for the human self as distinct from capital-N Nature. Human privilege is, of course, inherent in my walks: I am in the mountains by choice, I can (theoretically) leave them at will, and I bring tools that increase my comfort and safety. But the actual space of the mountains, the walking through them, blurs binary distinctions between human and nature with every step. When I solo, I am as exposed as any creature to a lightning strike, or a broken bone, or a falling rock. Regardless of accumulated competence and excellent gear, my lived experience of wilderness is an experience of vulnerability.

I’m no rugged individual conquering the wild; I walk in a hyper-awareness that can, and does, veer into fear. And if I fail to stay aware—fail to sense a storm behind the smoke—a wild place can quickly put me in mine.

This particular thunder caught me by surprise. Moreover, it caught me in a dangerous place: exposed, high, and hard to hurry from.

I immediately turned from the peaks and down, picking my way from boulder to boulder, suddenly awake to the energy sizzling above me. The rocks I crossed first shone wet with rain, then bounced merrily with hail, then rattled louder and louder as the hail grew in size. I hunched my shoulders and focused on my feet, which flashed chiaroscuro. Banshee thunder shrieked between the peaks, screamed down the slope I walked, and wailed over the canyons below, clawing at their walls.

Again.

Again.

My teeth chattered. The boulders slickened with ice. I moved down the jumbled rocks, in the only direction I could go without going up a ridge or into the storm. Down and away. Down and away.

Until I approached the edge of a cliff.

I stood in a chute about thirty feet wide, with a wall of jumbled rock on either side. The declivity sloped, gradually but certainly, into the edge of a canyon perhaps a half mile wide. A cluster of three small red firs hugged the southern wall, their roots clutched tight to the rock. I crouched beneath them, hoping the lightning and thunder would slacken. It increased. The hail grew larger, pummeling bruises into my back.

“I need more shelter,” I muttered eventually. My voice made no sound amid the racket—just buzzed in my chest.

I stepped from the partial protection of the firs, wincing at the renewed force of the hail. The wind and falling ice slowed my progress; my hands fumbled familiar hitches. But in time I pounded the last stake into a bare patch of sand and ducked under my protective tarp.

Inside, the noise of the storm doubled. Hail hammered the yellow fabric hard and fast. In moments, the tarp bulged inward with ice, threatening collapse. I crouched again, face toward the wind, and extended my arms to support the fabric. Swipe left to clear the hail. Swipe right to clear more hail. Left. Right. Left, right. Lightning tore at my eyes. I kept my breathing steady, but it grew ragged. Hail gathered at the rim of the tarp in a pearly white wall and gathered into pearly peaks at the corners.

An hour had passed since the first thunder. The storm would last two more hours. I would spend that time in my defensive squat, shivering and clearing hail, muttering self-encouragement, until the wind yanked a corner stake from the sand and whipped it painfully into my shoulder.

The vulnerability I’m lauding—solitary, hyper-aware, open to terror—seems to fall into the aesthetic category of “the sublime,” wherein overwhelming terrain inspires mingled fear and awe. I certainly gravitate toward sublime landscapes: “vast, powerful landscapes where one could not help feeling insignificant and being reminded of one’s own mortality,” as Cronon puts it.

But “mortality,” and the sublime, emphasize the soul. “Sublimity,” writes wilderness historian Roderick Nash, “suggested the association of God and wild nature,” and Cronon agrees that for the Romantics that canonized the sublime, “God was on the mountaintop, in the chasm, in the waterfall, in the thundercloud.” Even in secular company, talk of wilderness blurs into talk of the spirit, of the self found and fulfilled. In wild landscapes, the story goes, the soul experiences a kind of bigness-induced vertigo, teeters into awe at its smallness, extricates itself, and walks away with a mighty wow!

Awe, wonder, smallness—these are essential to wildness. But as far as I’m concerned, they have nothing to do with God, and even less to do with the soul.

I internalized this at age nineteen, during my first-ever hike. The trail ascended three thousand feet in three miles; it led to a peak unlike anything I had experienced, where great cliffs roughened the foreground and mountain after mountain carved the horizon sharp and stark into the utmost limit of distance.

At that age, I was supposed to pray at beauty. I tried, to great discomfort. And alongside the swifts that zipped through the thin air winged a pair of new, strange thoughts:

This place is older than God.

This place is older than even the idea of God.

Those thoughts are a part of me, now. They swoop through my chest every time I am tempted to pray for safety, or say that a physical obstacle has helped me “find myself.”

Wilderness is not my cathedral. Wilderness certainly doesn’t perch pieces of my inner self on peaks for me to collect, like so many spiritual trophies.

Wilderness pays me no attention at all.

Instead, wilderness demands all of my attention. Wilderness insists that I consider food, water, shelter, rest, the chance of injury, my fleshiness. The vulnerability I feel in wild places is entirely unselfed, entirely unsouled.

It’s not mortal, but animal.

I gritted my teeth at the sting in my shoulder, then lunged for the stake and pulled it to tension, restraining the walloping fabric. Hail forced me into a hunch. I spotted a bare patch of sand, grabbed a rock, and hammered the stake in. My hands and hair streamed water; hail flayed my knuckles open. I kept my head down and focused on the task, on breathing steadily.

I briefly glanced up from my work as I finished. But at that precise moment, a bolt of lightning

         —orange and purple-thick and liquid, almost slow—
         jagged naked from the clouds cracked against the rim of the canyon
                                 and seared my vision entirely white.

If what I’m seeking is vulnerability, surely I don’t need to walk two hundred miles through mountains. I could run alone at night. I could read more news. I could head approximately thirty miles southeast, where fires gnaw at California’s wild-urban interface. There’s no shortage of ways to experience bodily dread from within civilization.

But dread, of course, is not the point. You don’t need to find God/self in the wilderness to see how vulnerability entwines with wonder; the wonder is the vulnerability, the self humbled by and entangled in a living world that does not cater to its image.

In wild places, I marvel at my animal kin. Flies zip past my head, whizzing with vigor through thin air I struggle to breathe. A black bear eases through streamside willows with enviable, muscled strides. Water ouzels fly the contours of a stream, then fly into and through the snow-cold water as though it were air. A toad hops, surprising as a dinosaur, from beneath a rockshadow at twelve thousand feet. Migrating butterflies, hundreds of them, stream across high passes and over snowfields, batting aside turbulent wind as though only flirting. “Humility,” in a space inhabited by the wild deor that give wilderness its name, blurs into “respect.”

And then there’s the land itself, which shapes me into a better animal. In the first two days, I write poems. In the next twenty, I write: food, water, shelter, terrain, and rest. My journal consists of the space and my movement through it.

“What if thought,” asks philosopher David Abram, “is not born within the human skull, but is a creativity proper to the body as a whole, arising spontaneously from the slippage between an organism and the folding terrain that it wanders?” It takes time. But after several days in the mountains, my brain and my quads remember that they speak the same language, that they are the same body. And it’s a whole body/mind/self that wanders the folding terrain, whether scrambling through talus or strolling a streambank . . . or learning the taste of lightning.

The thunder shook me. My jaw went numb. My hands convulsed. I screamed.

A moment later, I confirmed that I was breathing.

I was also kneeling. Blindly, I felt for the edges of the yellow fabric and ducked under.

My vision began returning, in antlike swarm. Hail pounded down. I stared at my bleeding hands. I crouched, and rocked, and repeated soundlessly:

when this is over (breathe)
the sky will be so blue (breathe)
you won’t believe (breathe)
it ever happened (breathe)

Some of my students contend that wilderness is a frame of mind. That by attuning yourself to wonder, you can have wilderness anywhere: by holding your hands under an open tap, or considering the bacteria in your gut, or taking a walk around your neighborhood and admiring light in the trees. After all, they point out, wilderness is subjective. A hiker might “feel” wilderness only a few yards from a trailhead, long before crossing any designated boundary, and plenty of urban spaces can feel like wilderness.

I encourage these meditations. They de-privilege wildness, open it up to all bodies and all places, complicate the stereotype of the rugged explorer dashing into the woods and emerging triumphant. They bring nuance to our discussions and apply a critical lens I consider integral to any responsible conversation about wilderness.

But.

When my shelter collapsed, I sat still for almost three minutes.

Which is quite a long time to be tangled in sodden material under full hail. My head was bowed. I looked at my hands.

I said, “This seems unnecessary.” I still couldn’t hear my voice.

It was hard to get out of the tarp. The hail kept pounding down, weighting the fabric where it pooled around me. I shoved hail aside and aside and eventually crawled from under the sodden mess . . . and squinted through the still-oncoming hail as I registered the changes in the landscape.

On my left, a torrent of brown water churned and snapped at the hail that fed it. On my right, a second torrent of brown water pounded the roots of the red firs, threatening to wrestle them from the rock.

I was hunched on a single raised finger of land, perhaps fifteen feet wide, framed by rapid and rising waters that met in a snarling heave and tumbled over the cliff into the canyon.

I was on all fours, half-tangled in fabric, in the middle of a waterfall.

I may never be able to tell this story well. Told well, there would be no trace of familiar arc—the rising action, the climax, the resolution. There would be no hero (here, a heroine) emerging safely from the storm.

Instead, there would be a steady pressure of event, simultaneously numbing the senses and scraping them raw, until you feel what it is like to sit in the middle of a waterfall in equal proximity to terror and laughter and wonder all at once, and to not have a single thought.

The best I can do is to keep walking.

I looked ahead, where the brown water continued to thrash over the edge of the cliff and down, pockmarked by hail.

I looked behind me. The narrow strip of land mounted higher: a way out. I turned to my work.

I plucked and hauled at my tarp until it was free of hail, then shoved it into the outer pocket of my backpack. I shouldered the soaked pack, then climbed up the narrow finger of hail-slick rock, into the storm.

The storm eased. Thunder wailed in fits, then trailed into a quiet that hummed in my skull. No blue skies emerged as I worked back on route; fire still greased the sky, and red light bounced eerily from polished rock. The hail that crusted every surface began to melt, pooling and spilling, clicking in intricate rhythms. It sounded like chattering teeth, or a swarm of insects clacking tiny, myriad jaws.

Unable to cross swollen streams, I shoved through tangles of willow. Blood continued to trickle through the creases on the backs of my hands; I hissed when leaves scraped the tender skin. My ears whined with thunder-echoes. My throat was raw from the lightning-scream, and would stay raw for two days.

When I paused for breath, I watched the white tangled threads of water just visible in the distance, numbly acknowledging that—shrouded in smoke, surrounded by lace-like webs of cliff-caught hail—they were new and strange and beautiful. Then I walked on.

All the way to this dark bluff.

I need thought. I need thought like I need the muscles in my legs and the alveoli in my lungs. The guidebook, the map—these human tools, these products of thought, are essential.

But my tools do not separate Brain from Body or Human from Nature. The thoughts I turn to the map are bodied. They are the fleshy movements of a brain in a place, using its cultural skill as an animal sense. My brain is as caught in place as my throat; my self is an animal that needs shelter and rest before dark. I am not separate from world.

My culture pushes this truth away, insistently. Our stories tell us that wild places exist to serve us—to offer us God, or a frontier in which we can prove our skill, or tourism dollars. In the Lower 48, where less than 3 percent of land is designated wilderness, critical approaches to wilderness emphasize human control: that we designed wildness, we define wildness, and we protect it from ourselves.

We tell this story––I teach this story––at risk of eliding another truth: that we are vulnerable. That we are as subject to the rules of resource availability, carrying capacity, habitat destruction, and chance as every other creature on this planet. “We cannot abide our vulnerability,” as Abram writes. “Vast in its analytic and inventive power, modern humanity is crippled by a fear of its own animality, and of the animate earth that sustains us.”

In our stories, we forget that we are animals.

When wildness speaks––in thunder, or another of its tongues––we remember.

At the dark bluff, of course, I consider none of this.

I look at the guidebook, and back at the landscape. I eye my watch. I eye the bluff. The smoke shifts, and the light turns gold, and I glimpse the canyon below.

Miniscule groves of conifers. Shining slabs. A single, glistening brook.

My laughter tangles with the chatter of restless hail. I shoulder my pack, and I walk.