HELLROARING

One. 

I am alone.

There are patches of snow on the ground, still, although the summer sunshine is beginning to thaw it out, a final seeping assault on winter’s last stand. There is an easy breeze playing among the conifers, tickling loose the myriad small sounds of a silence in the wilderness.

My heart is beating, and my eyes are open wide. I hope that I have only brought with me what I did not want to leave behind.

I said goodbye to Rose in our bedroom and made it out of the front door before I let out the first sob, so that she could not hear it. Tears streamed down my cheeks as I climbed into the truck, overwhelmed by fear and guilt for leaving her to worry. An hour and half’s drive along dirt roads and forest tracks was time to think again about what I was doing, and why. The first revelatory surge of emotion reared its head, and then shook it in disgust.

This is not about exploring how to build a cabin in the bush, you idiot. It is not about finding ‘space’ in the wilderness. This is about your fucking ego. This is about you trying to ‘be a man’.

But perhaps it was the biggest trick my own ego ever played on itself, leading me out beyond comfort to be a ‘hard’ man, when I can foresee that every day out here will only serve to make me a humbler man, and diminish that ego. I will be so fragile, so aware of my limits. So small.

If it is my ego that brought me here, then it is still in charge, because it pushes me out of the door of the truck, and into the forest. Perhaps I need to stay here in the wilderness, and stare long and hard into the sun of humility, so that forever hereafter its bright light is burned into my retinas. Or perhaps I need to fail, to quit, to show myself that there are some things which I cannot do; to be taught a lesson. We shall see.

From where I parked the truck, I hike for an hour up the old logging track overgrown with bushes, grateful for the cool weather and the lack of rain. Eventually, I reach the place where the path runs out. Then it is into the trees, clambering and strolling through this evergreen remnant of ancient forest, a living kingdom of moss and bugs, towering iron-strong trunks and the rotting fallen. A short while later I trot down a steep little bank and emerge onto the thin shore of an alpine lake. This is the place that I have chosen. Other people could come here in just the way that I have. But I don’t think they will. I will be alone.

The lake is magical. Incredible what a difference three weeks makes, since the last time I was here, scouting out locations. Then, it was still locked in ice, and there was deep snow underfoot the whole way here. Now it barely has a fingernail’s cover of ice. The water beneath is perfectly clear. Across on the other side, the steep talus slopes and crags of the mountain rear up and surround me, enclosing the head of the valley in all directions except the one I just came up by. The avalanche runout sweeping down to my left is half melted out too, and it looks like prime bear foraging territory. Maybe I will see one there someday.

And now I am thrilled to be here. Ecstatic! My whoops of joy send a ripple into the lake, and commence the break-up of the ice, which continues with small splinters and shivers for the next five minutes. I know that I will have many more low times, but this moment is perfect, and perfectly freeing.

I hike upslope, away from the water’s edge, to the cabin site. It is a brief flat-spot in an otherwise unrelenting climb, perfect for being out of the way of any visitors to the lake. It looks good, and I am pleased with my selection, but there is a still a lot of snow to dig out before I can begin to build, so I decide to camp at the lake shore until I have made some progress on that front. I spend the rest of the day making another long walk down the truck and back, to bring up my second bag of gear, and then busy myself with erecting my tent, collecting firewood, and making a fire. I mix flour, oil, salt and water into a rough dough and pat it into small flatbreads which I cook over the embers. They taste good, but I chew on them disconsolately, now very much back down from my midday high.

Why am I here? All I want to do is to go home, to be with Rose, who I love and who loves me back. This is stupid.

I talk out loud to myself as I gather more firewood, arguing with myself over the point of the whole thing. Then I raise to a shout, a yell, an all out scream of anger. I berate myself for being so stupid as to go so far out of my way in life just in order to do something extreme; or even worse, just to have done something extreme. I yearn to be impressive, or so it seems- to excel, to be thought of highly, and to leave no doubt that I am something great. And yet, it is so painfully obvious that all the people I love and care about the most, and who love and care about me, do not need any convincing of anything in order to keep loving me. I am doing this to myself, to impress myself. And yet, my ego is so powerful that I am still here, afraid and all alone, to prove nothing important to nobody important. Am I in danger? Maybe no more than the danger inherent in living. The stress I can feel in my body is an over-reaction to the thought that a bear is going to rip open my tent and eat me. Statistically I am more likely to be killed by a person in the street, and I know that. But still… if this continues for the next two and a half months, as I planned for it to, I will leave an absolute wreck. 

Will go to bed, and try to sleep.

__________

As a child, I would sit quietly at my desk, and stare out of my bedroom window at the tops of the trees on the hillside opposite. I lived among the woods, but rarely chose to venture far into their damp entanglement. I was safe in my room, in my mind, reading books in which heroes befriended strange creatures and fought goblin warriors in fantastical faraway lands. I wrote and wrote and wrote, endless stories of gnomes and dragons and strange beings who lived in cabins in the deep, dark forest. My siblings were bolder, but I was the indoor child, afraid to leave mother’s side, happy to be left alone with paper and a pen and my own thoughts for company while they played outside.

As I grew older, I became bolder too. I learnt the ways of moving through those landscapes around me, and became confident in my movements too. But fear is liquid. It finds gaps, it seeps, it drips. It pools and stagnates. I still feel the fear of that child inside me, afraid to go out, afraid to face the wind and the rain, and the monsters in the corner of my eye. Maybe it is because my father died in the mountains. Or maybe it is because the mountains are dangerous, and it is human to see danger, and to fear it.

I am here, looking across at the trees on the hillside. I am the strange being in the deep, dark forest. But do I want to build a cabin, or do I want to have done it? Am I living, or am I writing another story? One in which I am capable and courageous, not just an indoor child.

__________

Two.

It rained on and off through the night, and most of the morning. The mountain tops are shrouded in mist and the forest is damp. I feel a bit more balanced than yesterday, but not by much. Maybe if I wait out the rain, the sunshine will bring a better outlook.

I am pleased to find my hasty tarp-rigging still up by the campfire, and I eventually get a fire going and sit under it, warm-ish and dry-ish, cooking soup and watching the rain make ripples on the lake.

It is a day of almost nothing. Quiet and mellow. Sat by the fire, staring out over the water. I see a fish! Only a tiddler, but it proves that there are at least some fish up here; where there are little ones, there may well be bigger ones. The rain stays away all afternoon, though it threatens me with its grey. The squeaks of the groundhogs keep me company. 

If there’s rain tomorrow too, it may well be another day of the same, but that’s ok. When the sunshine comes I will start clearing the cabin site. There is no rush.

__________

Though I came out here to be more animal, to see the purposelessness of things more clearly, the uncertainty of the wilderness only accentuates the most animal of our urges; to survive. My survival instinct is on high alert, and what it tells me to do is to turn around and go back to the best tool of survival the human animal has- society. Out here, I fall back on that fundamental array of things that humans do better than all other animals. The things that set us apart: using tools to create fire and shelter, organising, considering, thinking ahead, and telling myself stories. The part that is missing from it all is other people. I came to get away from them, but they are what makes me a human too.

This is an escape from the trap of modernity, which provides every comfort for the body, and every discomfort for the soul. But that desire to escape is cyclical.

In the beginning, some things just feel important, like food, water, shelter and safety. It is simple enough to understand why: these things are essential to our survival. But cooperation with others allows us far greater chance to secure all these things, and over time, all this good cooperating has led to larger and larger social structures. So we move away from saying ‘I will help you hunt for food so we can both eat’, to saying ‘I will help you by submitting this financial report by the assigned deadline, so that we as a recognised company of individuals will appear to the state regulator (who represents a further company of individuals to whom we have implicitly delegated authority so as to have a fair arbitrator between us and other groups) to have done our due diligence regarding the rules that legislators (a third group) have chosen, and in return I expect you to honour the contract we signed, which states that you will award me a certain number of points which I can transfer to a marketplace middle-man in return for food… so that I can eat’. This is the hyper-devolvement of responsibilities and tasks into a huge array of specialisations, in service of the incredibly complex system known as modern society.

All this specialisation allows for the development of technology, and technologies allow for science, and the power of scientific explanation shows us that despite the fact that we feel like those basic things are important, they are only important to us. Because the universe is not built around our lives. And so, we become aware of the utter cosmic irrelevance of our report deadline. And so, a disconnect arises, between the bizarre social importance of our work, and its obvious cosmic un-importance. And some of us feel alienated from society, and we flee from our social responsibilities, in order to come face to face, in the wilderness, with that cosmic irrelevance, and be aligned with it, and have the dissonance within us calmed.

But then… as we venture among the instinctive dangers of that wilderness, we feel the inevitable urge to survive. We seek food, water and shelter. These things feel so very important again. And we know in our DNA that our best chance of getting those things is cooperation, because that is the kind of animal we are. And our cooperative partners, whether they be one, or two, or a hundred –and whether we bring them with us, or whether we go back to them – create complexity. Structures, hierarchies, delegations, specialisations: a system. We have returned to society.

And in the blink of an eye, we are back, sat at our desk, typing our report.

With each passing generation, with more people, and more advanced technology, there is more alienation; more disconnection.

The trick is to go out and open yourself to the perspective of the wilderness, then carry it with you when you return, hold its peace inside yourself, and pursue your human goals with the grace and attentiveness of one who understands that we are not on a quest for ultimate control, we are just getting by. But that is a hard thing to do.

What brought me here is the confluence of my thoughts into this notion of mountain-cabin-wilderness-life. But those thoughts were not manifested from the ether, they were grown on the stump of humanity. A humanity whose cognitive capacity allows for ideas like these, which amount in no small way to self-abnegation. But even for us hecklers, shouting our sullen rejections of the cookie-cutter lifestyle towards our primitive brains, the roads that look the safest are still those which look like they lead home.

I do not reject people. I love people. I couldn’t not; we are all social creatures. But I reject the notion of progress that hyper-devolved society inculcates, progress away from our interpersonal instincts, away from love for the sake of survival, and towards complexity.

__________

The clouds slide across the hole of sky I see above me, encircled by mountaintops and treetops. I sing, I dance along the lakeshore, I yell louder than I think I have ever yelled, so loud that my throat hurts.

There is nobody to hear me. It is monumentally freeing.

I cry for my own self-pity. I cry for confusion. I cry for the loss of my father.

The blue sky winking from above the peak never looked so honest. This place is painful, but truthful.

I am released.

__________

One of the main fears of being in the mountains alone, is not getting where you’re going. When you are lost, and you don’t know the way, when darkness is falling and the weather is closing, and you will not reach home before both of them have. But if you are not going anywhere, then that fear evaporates. You cannot be lost, because you have already arrived. You cannot be stuck out too late, because you are out all the time.

__________

Three.

Today is passing much quicker than yesterday, probably because I have things to keep me occupied. Much less mind wandering. My mood has flattened from the peaks and troughs of the arrival, and it allows me to be more productive. I walk up to the cabin site around midday and spend the whole afternoon toiling away. After clearing a section of snow in the intended spot, I discover it to be far less flat underneath that it had seemed. But just stone’s throw away a good alternative patch presents itself, with minimal clearing required. I scour the surrounding area for large rocks to build my footings, with some success, and pile them in preparation near the four corners of where the cabin will sit. Then I wander the surrounding woods for a while, until I find the right spot for the outhouse, and spend a good hour or two digging as deep a hole as I can manage, to serve as its pit. I hope it's deep enough!

The cheap collapsible shovel that I bought last minute at the hardware store in town makes the first pitch for being the worst piece of equipment I brought. After 20 minutes digging it ‘collapses’ so effectively that it snaps in half. Fortunately, the spade-end and my arm are shovel enough to get the job done. I carefully build up the sides of my pit with a simple stone retaining face – just like a well – in the hope that this will prevent inopportune cave-ins. Then I return to my lakeside camp, make flatbreads over the fire for tea, and watch the fish darting in the lake while the sun sets over the mountain.

The clouds are beautiful.

__________

Modernity teaches us that we can comprehend the world, because we can point to token things within it, generalise between them, and elide all the rest. We travel the globe, stand in front of monuments and vistas, tick it off our bucket list and fly home. From our pixelated shrines we feel almost omniscient of everything the earth has to offer, because we think information can plug the holes that our experience has not filled. We go out on the hunt for those tokens, because we are only satisfied in the brief moments when we can feel the slither of the oyster-of-which-the-world-is-ours going down our throat. It’s a small world, after all.

But it is not. Even at the scale in which we live our mammalian sensory lives, this world is incomprehensibly vast, composed of an unfathomable number of places. Walk in any direction from where you are for an hour, a minute, even a few seconds, and you will be in another space, another place. Perhaps it has a similar character to the one you came from, so perhaps you don’t see the differences between them. But that is not because there are no differences, but because our brains are obsessed with the novel, and bored by the familiar, and they fade everything ‘normal’ down until it is just so much background noise.

And yet each of those places is not only distinctive at a human scale, but also divisible in space to scales much smaller than our capacity to experience, and extensive through time beyond even the eras of our furthest descendants or most ancient ancestors to live or have lived through. And looking out from our planet through the cosmos, we have glimpsed how far ‘places’ may extend, to distances beyond the scope of our brains to make sense of. Forcing ourselves to try and confront the magnitude of it all, the mind cannot help but be overwhelmed.

Nor should it be anything less than overwhelmed. It was not made for such vastness. It was made to understand the place we are in, how it is now, relevant to us as a human. We could never hope to see, feel, hear, let alone begin to know, even the tiniest fraction of places of this world, let alone in existence, in anything close to a full range of possible sensory experience and knowledge.

Flying in planes and driving in cars might seem as though they are movements congruent with the pace and scale of humanity, but in truth it is impossible for a human mind to take it all in, as we move through space in those metal boxes. And so we don’t take it in, we let it slide by, and by, and by, holding onto only the start and the finish, two relevant nodes in an ocean of other places that we will never really see, because they are inhuman places, with no name, nothing to mark them out in our minds.

As a child, every little corner of the playground represents an entire nation, a land from where the fantastical world of the rest of the playground might be explored in an unceasing adventure of imagined places. And yet that imagined cacophony of experience is the truest reflection of how vast that small-to-us patch of the world is.

The closest we can come to knowing a place, is to become familiar with one little spot, at human scale, in a small way, for a short time, through an intense and attentive lifelong habitation of it. A life – in contrast to that hyper-local existence – characterised by a relentless voyage to ‘see the world’, is doomed to failure. World maps with country-by-country scratch-to-tick completion are a mockery of reality, because to have walked a handful of streets in Rome is to have ‘done’ Italy in nothing but the most facile way. To suggest that because you passed by one place, in one moment, and captured a trickle of sensory data, you have been there and done that, is the inevitable arrogance of an animal fixated on its own existence. We have mapped the world to human scale, but none of us can know it in any more than the most laughably small way.

But why, for that matter, would knowing the world, if it were possible, be better than not knowing? Maybe because knowledge feels like power, like control. The more we learn, the more we feel we are on top of things, surfing a wave of understanding in an ocean of data. But as we slip from the board and crash into the water at the end our brief ride, we must surely be struck by awareness of how thin and brittle that understanding is. We are born, we take in a fraction of what it is possible for humans to know, and we die, never knowing the rest, and never even having the ability to know any of the other things that it is not possible for humans to know. That’s supposing, as I do, that we are not gods, and that omniscience is unattainable, because our fleshly little grey lumps of consciousness – built for killing animals with sticks and having sex – are not in fact the ideal tool for conceptualising the nature of everything in existence. We are not masters of the universe, we are mould, growing briefly on a rock, floating for a while in space.

Don’t try to do everything, because you can’t. Or try to go everywhere, because you won’t. Or try to fulfil all possible futures, because we do – as the trite observation goes – only get one life. But whether we cram into that one life a kaleidoscope of exhilarating adventure, or we just sit and stare at a wall and wait for death, the difference in knowledge, understanding, and experience of the world between the two will be but a blip in the totality of existence. We can strive for exceptionality, and fail, and die. Or we may accept irrelevance and die. Those are our choices.

But there’s no real need for us to fret about that. We just find some things to pass the time, and do them modestly, knowing that we are not conquering the world, we’re just here… having a little look around.

__________

Four.

I am carrying out my morning routine. I gather old man’s beard lichen from the trees, to catch the sparks I need to start my fire. I arrange twigs, and blow until they catch, then add the bigger sticks, then a log or two, and then wait for it all to burn down to embers to cook breakfast on.

The difference between dry wood and very slightly damp wood is painfully apparent when trying to maintain a small campfire. I struggled to find anything good near the lake shore until yesterday, when I discovered five standing-dead trees, each about six inches in diameter at the base, not more than a few hundred yards from the fire. Once the flames are licking around the last of my previous unsatisfactory supply, I make my way over to the small stand with my axe and my saw, and set about felling one of them, cutting off the limbs, and portioning it out into cheery little logs. I split a couple of the logs with the axe and add them to the fire, and they take beautifully. A real difference maker.

I make my porridge, eat, and carry my pans down to the riverbank to wash them. I pour water over the embers until I’m confident they are out, arrange my things, and set off through the woods. It’s early summer, and the ground is probably too wet for the embers to smoulder into a forest fire, but I prefer to be careful. Better safe than sorry.

I spend the day preparing poles for the outhouse frame, and fitting it all together over the pit, before retreating back to the lakeshore camp for my evening routine of food, again, campfire, again, and collecting more firewood. I try to sharpen my knife and my axe, but I am struggling to get the right edge. Oh well.

This has been the fourth day of rain showers and grey skies, and it’s getting a bit old. Bring me the sunshine.

__________

Five.

Today I almost feel cheerful. Far calmer in my surroundings, and more confident in them too. I suppose I am living out many people’s boyhood dreams. It’s all very ‘My Side of the Mountain’.

I work on the outhouse frame. It’s ok, but it lacks solidness and finesse, and might blow over at some point if there’s a storm. But good enough is good enough. Or as the foreman would have put it; ‘Fuck it, Long Story’.

Then I walk down to the cabin site, half-clearing a little trail between the two as I go, and set about building the rock footings, ready for first logs. I have selected a site with enough low snags and standing dead trees nearby of the right diameter to build the cabin entirely out of dry wood. They will be much easier to move down to the site than green logs would have been. It also feels less intrusive on the forest to take what is already dead – just moving them from one rotting place to another – than to go about hacking down young trees. I have already felled and hauled a few to get me started, and I will go and cut more in the coming days. The weather is ok today, and I am looking forward to finding a building rhythm over the next few, if it holds.

In the evening I cook oatcakes. I am dubious about the simplicity of the recipe – just oats, water and oil – but they work out very well. Quick to make, easy to cook over a campfire and damn tasty. A real revelation.

__________

Six. 

Finally a warm sunny day, although not without a few of the obligatory scattered raindrops that have fallen on the lake all six days I’ve been here. I wash some clothes in the river and hang them up on a clothesline I erected between a couple of low hanging spruce boughs. I was inspired to make some pegs out of some short half-split lengths of willow, and I am now delighted to find they work very well.

Then to the cabin site. I fell another tree for the bottom round, sned it, along with a nearby deadfall, cut both into log lengths, and drag them down to the footings with the help of my climbing sling. Then I stop work and hike the long two hours down to the truck and back to resupply with food. Oats, flour, nuts. I return to camp via a new route, down by the river. It is hard going, and I realise why I haven’t come this way before. In the evening I go for my first bath in a week; a very brief dip in the lake. It is very cold.

__________

Seven.

I stare at the log. It looks, in the words of Dick Proenneke ‘like a boy scout was turned loose on it with a dull hatchet’. The truth is not far from it. I line the underside of the notch with moss, and plop it down. It fits, just about, though not well.

The first round is complete. But I feel no real joy in that. I can see in my mind’s eye the rough rustic charm of the completed cabin, and my heart is not stirred. I just want to get it done, and be done with it, and collect my points, and move on. It is not a labour of love, it is just a labour. 

I sit on the log for an hour and stare around me. This is a beautiful place, a dappled glade in the woods, full of insects and birds, as peaceful as any place on this earth.

And I am here to… what?

Test myself against it? It puts up no fight.

Mould it to my will? But what is that will, if not to prove something to the world that nobody asked of me; that I am a mighty man, an all-conquering beast of sheer skill and power and determination. This was to be the most special, impressive and commendably extreme thing I would ever do, and upon its completion, I would be released from the need to become a big man. I would be big forever, and could coast all other challenges, secure in the knowledge that I had already secured my place in the respectful gaze of acquaintances new and old. What an infuriatingly arrogant man. What a normal man.

 The desire to go to the wilderness is not an urge to arrive, but an urge to leave. It is the madness of society that pushes us away. We want to have done with pettiness, arbitrariness, power dynamics, oppression, subjugation, authority. We want to untether, to feel free. You do not re-connect with nature, you merely dis-connect from society, and nature is what you are left with; the layer underneath. Every time I run up a mountain, or sit in a forest, or swim in a lake, I am soothed by the lack of purpose in those things. But I only need to be alone, away from people, to re-establish the calm. I have it camping by the lake shore. I have it walking through the trees. I do not need to build a cabin for that.

But my mind still runs with ways to explain away the truth that I really, really wanted to do this, and now I only wish that it were already done.

Perhaps it is.

Perhaps I ought to know my place. This is a wondrous place, but this is not my home.

Nothing has gone wrong, and I have no complaints. Perhaps if I continue on, there will be more highs, and fewer lows. But that is not relevant. There is only relevant question that I must ask myself.

Do I want to be a hard man, or a humble man?

I have gotten far enough here to think that I could finish this cabin. So should I say ‘I stopped once I’d proven to myself that I could?’ No. I have stopped because I have proven to myself that I could not. Because my will is not strong enough to go against what I believe to true: that this does not matter. And I am only here to glorify myself. 

Perhaps I am just weak. But we are all weak. Born and die in the blink of an eye.

I am not proud to have come here to live by pride. I hope never to live by pride again. I choose to try and become that most difficult of things to be: a humble man.

__________

As I drive down the valley, a deer leaps out and across my path, and I have to brake hard not to hit it. A little while later a rabbit bursts from the undergrowth and sprints ahead of me for a minute before darting away. Groundhogs raise their heads and scream at me. An elk startles from its resting spot and jumps away. Then, as I round the corner, a cinnamon bear emerges from the bush, and I slam on the brakes. It lopes across the track, and away up the slope.

It feels as though the forest is giving me one big salute, wishing me well on my departure. But its probably just telling me to fuck off back where I came from.

__________

Two days later I am sitting outside the café in town, eating sausage and eggs and drinking coffee with my friends. A lazy day. A normal day. Just taking it as it comes.

One of the best things about going anywhere, is coming back.

Home is the catharsis of not-home.

I have failed. And modern western society begs me to re-brand that failure as ‘learning’, and ‘growth’, but the facts are that for a long time I intended to do something, and I began to do that thing, and then I stopped doing that thing before it was complete. That is what is correctly referred to as a failure. Many kind souls would reach to let me off the hook, but I should remain here, writhing and wriggling on the line, to reflect on why I took the bait, and why I bit down so hard on it.

Because I do want to go back, and finish it. To complete what I set out to do, to succeed. The first day after my return, a huge storm engulfed the mountains, and I was well glad to have been clear of it. But now the sun shines, and all my gear is not yet unpacked, and I want to go back.

I like order, and neatness. I like to do things properly, to completion. But the truth is that reality is not composed of ‘things’, and they are never ‘complete’. I know that going back would be giving in to my perfectionism, to my craving for good narrative, for my desire to achieve, and to be known as an achiever.

All of the ways in which we enrich our lives the most; loving, learning, exercising, exploring, are not defined by their end-of-the-line achievements, but through their ongoing-ness. They are processions of experience, not incidents. They are relationships. And relationships take time to develop. They have ups and downs, and the best parts of them are usually entirely private from the world. Their value to us is found in their continuation, not in a single moment that we pursue as an end in itself.

Our dreams are ghosts, beckoning us forth from the horizon. We chase them down and seize them with fervour, only to find ourselves clutching at smoke. The more I tried to grab at mine, to keep it together, the faster it disappeared, chuckling at my attempt to build an unshakable identity on thin air. I need to let go of this one idealised moment in my life, not because it was worthless, but because I came to it the wrong way. I do not subscribe to the been there, done that model of experience, so why did I try to go there, and do that? Either I must evolve the singularity into a lifelong path or else acknowledge that this is not how I wish to spend my life. A life spent learning how to live and move in the wilderness, and how to build with raw materials and hand tools. Either take it as a lesson – not a test – or else leave it behind entirely.

In the months that follow my return, the mountain ranges of the west are steeped in a 40-degree heatwave, then scoured by forest fires, then clogged with weeks of smoke. I begin to know that the window has closed, and I cannot go back. From time to time, I am crushed by regret. I know that it is only the pangs of misdirected self-worth crying out for desperate attention, but that doesn’t stop it from being painful. 

In the end I failed not because it was beyond my physical limits, or my practical limits, or perhaps even beyond my psychological limit for sheer stubbornness, but because it was beyond my limits of willingness to endure emotional pain for an arbitrary goal. To make sacrifices for things that I do not believe matter. It was less important to me than not doing it was, and that is why I stopped.

Of course, it was not such a lofty quest after all, no so extreme. Not discovering a new continent, not founding a religion, or landing on the moon. It was just a little cabin in the woods. But it was my quest. And it can’t be any more, because it no longer holds the same sway over my mind. And even that is a loss, and I am grieving it.

__________

We never pursue things just because they are convenient. Instead, we pursue things because they feel more meaningful, more satisfying and more complete than the merely convenient options would have felt. We not only care about what we do, but how we do it. We want to do things in ways. But the ways in which those of us who go and camp in the woods choose to do it, seem confused.

Many people have dreams of ‘surviving’ in the wild, but that is not complicated to do. Drink water, conserve energy and stay warm, and you can lie there for weeks, alive. In that spirit, to return to being truly animal, we would go out naked, no clothes, no tools, nothing. An ape. That just seems too far. After all, we are not looking to risk death out there, we are looking to live well out there in some way, to thrive. But thriving in the wild is also not complicated either: you just take everything. Full supplies, vehicles, generators, power tools, computers, mini fridges, a helicopter for emergency medical evacuation. You take as much of society with you as you can, because a person’s greatest chance of survival in this world lies in a wealthy western home. Palaeolithic people died in their thirties; modern people die in their eighties. But that seems much too far the other way, somehow. Like it’s missing the point of it all. So exactly what those of us in the middle ground are looking for is unclear, unless we are just fetishising the image of the 19th century pioneer woodsman. Certain technologies make the cut, and others do not. Shoes, knives, axes and saws are always in. Raincoats, tents and tarps are usually in. Chainsaws and smartphones, rarely. Games consoles, absolutely never. They are all human technologies, of course, but an arbitrary line has to be drawn in Amish-like fashion. Things have to stay primitive enough to ‘count’. Simple enough to be basic, but not so simple that we revert to doing what true animals do; live by fear and rage, reproduce, and die.

So, we cannot be out there to cut things, build things and hunt things to best serve what we need to continue surviving… but we are also not there to transport all the guff of life along with us, because the experience would be ruined by doing so.

No, we are out there to pursue our psychological needs, our emotional needs. And it seems that I, along with many others, conflate two of these needs which it would be better to keep distinct.

The first need is for the feeling of being released from the painful and overwhelming demands of society, leaving only the calmness that cosmic irrelevance brings. For most of us, this feeling is inspired by moments alone in a peaceful natural place, confronted by our own smallness in the enormity of it all. The dissolution of our burdens in a moment of total acceptance. Society cannot give you this feeling.

The second need is for the feeling of simple purpose; of being focused on a specific task with direct relevance to your basic human instincts, in a way that aligns with your mind and your body. What you might want to call a flow state. Society should give you this feeling, but almost always, it does not. There are too many distractions, too many disconnects. The pace of life is too fast, the built environment is too inflexible, other people place too many demands upon you. The clock keeps ticking, hustlers keep hustling and bustlers keep bustling, and the whole interminable juggernaut of faff keeps ploughing forward.

The two feelings share commonalities: a mindfulness of the senses, a soothing of the nerves, a freedom from oppression, and a sense of grace. But they are very different in a fundamental way: one is purposeful, and the other is purposeless. One roots us in our humanity, while the other places that humanity in the context of the entirety of existence. And although time spent camping out in the wilderness can often find you flitting back and forth between experiences of the two, going out to look for both will often find them at odds with one another. There is no time to stare at the sky, because the fire needs tending too. There is no time to forage for berries, because you sat listening to the birdsong too long.

So we could separate the two ends, and focus on one or the other each time we go out into the wilderness. But to try and block out the peacefulness of nature, in order to focus on purposeful tasks undertaken while in it, would seem a bizarre thing to do.

Far better, it seems to me, to focus our efforts on shaping society to serve our need for purpose, and leave the wilderness to provide for our need to be reminded of its ultimate purposelessness. I want to look to places away from people to re-establish the calm that only irrelevance can bring; to experience the sublime terror of it all as a solace from humanity. But I do not want to look to places away from people to find flow. That is what I want from humanity.

Do not build a cabin in the woods. Build a cabin in the village, and when you go out into the woods, sleep beneath the open stars.

__________

I am here again. Picking my way carefully across the creek, and up the bank, now head-high with the False Azalea bushes that blanket the forest floor. I came back here to remember, just for a moment.

Sunshine is scattered through the trees surrounding the clearing as I approach it. Plants are already growing up through the floor where the cabin would have stood, winter melt and summer sun throwing them upwards. The forest shrugged in ambivalence of my efforts the moment they ceased, and set about their immediate decay. It is no longer a place of purpose, but a fading place, soon just forest again. Nothing really noticed me go, or noticed me return. Nothing moved, nothing changed.

I make my way through familiar trees down to the lake. The sun is shining, and the fish are jumping for every last bite. Everything is grown, green, flying with insects and the rampant chaos of high summer.

I wanted to let my mind free to wander, more than it has ever wondered before. But maybe our minds were never meant to spend so much time wondering. They are tools for doing the work of living. Given too much space, they begin to lose themselves.

Since I was a child, I have kept going to look for answers, but no matter where I look, I only ever find the answers I already have. They are not moments of awakening, just well-worn steps in the never-ending dance of humanity: conjuring meaning from the meaningless, purpose from the purposeless. But out here it is easy to remember, and back there is it easy to forget, that all of this tedious obfuscation is just the self-soothing of an animal brain. And that we are all just passing the days until we die.

Every little thing we do, every big thing; our entire lives, are nothing but a whisper in the winds of time.

Bobby Gard-Storry
Kootenay, 2021, Scotland, 2021