Out There

by Chris Townsend

  Much of Murray’s prose is evocative, romantic and emotional. In this he is more in accord with American wilderness writers such as John Muir or Edward Abbey than most British outdoor writers. And here I think lies one reason for the lack of passion about wild land, the lack of a tradition of landscape writing. British writers tend to be more detached, more cool about their subjects, more reticent about their feelings, which results in work that may be descriptive and informative but which isn’t inspiring or visionary, which lacks intensity. British writers can be divided, crudely, into two camps: nature writers and adventure writers. The former give intricate accounts of plants and wildlife, the latter factual descriptions of climbs and long walks. Neither usually presents a vision of wildness. Some nature writers, like Gavin Maxwell, approach this but none succeed like Murray or the Americans. Adventure writers still tend towards the cliché of the stiff-upper lip, eschewing feelings towards beauty or the wonder of wild places.

  In the USA the 1960s saw the emergence of two very different writers who have been a major influence on wilderness thinking and wilderness travel, Colin Fletcher and Edward Abbey. Fletcher is the walkers’ writer, the backpacker who wrote about walking 1,000 miles through desert and mountain in California and, for two months, solo along the Grand Canyon. No one has captured the spirit of what it is like to walk and camp in a wild landscape better than Colin Fletcher. Here he is on his 1,000 mile walk: ‘High above the West Walker River, I climbed the final snowbank into a 10,000 foot pass … Beyond the snowbank the mountainside dropped away again. And there below me lay the valley of the Silver King. Timbered slopes plunged down to a twisting V that held the creek. Two miles downstream, a meadow showed emerald green. Beyond, peak after Sierra peak stretched away northward to the horizon. There was no sign that man’s hand had touched a single leaf or a single blade of grass.’

  Whilst not a major campaigner Fletcher does make it clear that we have a responsibility to preserve wilderness. At the time he walked through the Grand Canyon this amazing cleft in the earth was threatened with being dammed and flooded. Horrified by this Fletcher wrote that it was ‘vandalism’ and that we had ‘to shield from the blind fury of material ‘progress’ a work of time that is unique on the surface of our earth’, finishing ‘and we shall be judged you and I, by what we did or failed to do.’

  Fletcher’s account of his walk through the Grand Canyon, The Man Who Walked Through Time, was published in the same year as another book that was to have repercussions for decades to come and introduce the world to the iconoclastic, controversial and distinctive voice of Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire. For the next 21 years until his death in 1989, Abbey was to be a provocative and challenging writer on wilderness and many other topics. Abbey’s love was for the deserts of the South-West USA where he walked, camped and paddled down rivers. His view of wilderness was that it was essential for human sanity and that preserving it came before anything else, writing ‘I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving’, and ‘Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.’

  Fond of disappearing into the desert for days or weeks Abbey noted that ‘a journey into the wilderness is the freest, cheapest, most non-privileged of pleasures. Anyone with two legs and the price of a pair of army surplus combat boots may enter’.

  Having regretted the lack of a British tradition of writing about wild land and landscape I have been delighted with the work of Robert Macfarlane. In his book The Wild Places Macfarlane explores the idea of the wild through wild places, large and small, in Britain. Macfarlane walked and slept in his wild places and at times his writing has the same intensity and power as Murray, Fletcher or Abbey. Of a camp on a November walk across Rannoch Moor he writes ‘we stopped there, for dusk was spreading over the Moor, and pitched a small tent. We lay talking in the dusk: about the ground we had covered, the ground still to go, about the odd mixture of apprehension and awe that the Moor provoked in us both. Our sleeping-place was cupped in a curve of the river, on a miniature flood-plain that the winter spates had carved out and flattened: a shelter in the middle of the Moor’s great space’.

  Macfarlane ends his book with the important insight for our small, crowded island that wild places don’t have to be vast and that small pockets of wildness exist almost everywhere – ‘there was as much to be learned in an acre of woodland on a city’s fringe as on the shattered summit of Ben Hope’. And that whilst wild places are under ‘multiple and severe threats’, these are temporary in the history of our planet and the wild will return – ‘the ivy will snake back and unrig our flats and terraces’ – an image that reminded me of The Handsome Family’s wonderful song Peace In The Valley Again, which contains the lines:

  Empty shelves will swarm with bees,

  cash machines will sprout weeds,

  lizards will crawl through the parking lot

  as birds fly around empty shops.

  Somehow I find these sentiments comforting and optimistic, and I am sure that Edward Abbey would agree.

  Visionary writers on the wild are important, especially when we are far from wild places, both physically and spiritually. Read these authors, relish their words, turn over their ideas in your mind, let their visions inspire you. But above all go out into the wild and let it envelop you as it did them.

  Discovering John Muir

  2014 was the centenary of the death of John Muir, arguably the most influential defender of wild places ever and whose legacy is still relevant and important today. Born in Dunbar in Scotland, Muir emigrated to the USA when he was eleven and lived there for the rest of his life. In America he is regarded as the ‘father of National Parks’. The Sierra Club, which he founded in 1892, is one of the USA’s leading conservation organisations and does much to keep his memory alive. Scotland is slowly catching up with John Muir’s Birthplace, a statue of the young Muir and the John Muir Country Park in Dunbar plus the 215 kilometre John Muir Way across the Central Lowlands. And, of course, the John Muir Trust, founded in 1983 to campaign for wild land.

  I discovered Muir many years ago, not with a sudden revelation but slowly, as I came across the name every so often. I didn’t really pay him much attention though until I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail and found his name recurring again and again in the High Sierra

  From signs and leaflets and talking to other hikers I began to learn a little about the man. A few years later I came across a second-hand copy of The Mountains of California (books by Muir were hard to find in the 1980s) and began to read him in his own words. Immediately I was taken with his passion and devotion to nature. I went on to read his other works, some several times. The language can be flowery for modern tastes but his eye for detail and his love of everything natural shines through. I also read books about Muir, wanting to know more about this iconic figure. I think the best of these is Michael P. Cohen’s The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness, which goes more deeply into Muir’s dilemmas and contradictions than other biographies.

  Muir is to be admired not just as a conservationist, not just for his love of nature, key though these are to his greatness, but also for his outdoor adventures and experiences. Long before any of the equipment we take for granted, or guidebooks, maps and paths, Muir would head off into the wilderness on long solo treks. From a boy scrambling on the cliffs and castle walls of Dunbar to the adult mountaineer making a daring first ascent of remote Mount Ritter in the High Sierra, described superbly in The Mountains of California, he revelled in exploring wild places. He walked long distances as well, A Thousand-Mile Walk To The Gulf describes his journey from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico in 1867. When he arrived in California he walked from San Francisco to Yosemite Valley. There followed many trips into the then little-known Sierra Nevada and in later years further afield, especially Alaska (as told in Travels in Alaska).

  He was not just concerned for the conservation of wilderness for its own s
ake and the sake of the animals and plants that lived there. He was also concerned for the sake of humanity. Not being a conservationist who wanted to exclude people he wanted to share his joy in nature with everyone. He led trips for the Sierra Club and his writing was aimed at encouraging people to visit wild places as well as calling for their protection. He wrote in The Yosemite, ‘Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike’ and in Our National Parks, a book intended to encourage visitors to the parks, ‘Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.’

  John Muir’s vision of the necessity of wildness and nature is as valid now as it was 100 years ago, maybe more so.

  Tracking the spirit of John Muir

  ‘We are all, in some sense, mountaineers, and going to the mountains is going home.’ John Muir

  Muir Station Road. Best Western John Muir Inn. Muir Family Dentistry. Muir Lodge Motel. John Muir Medical Center. John Muir Elementary School. Muir Heritage Land Trust. Muir Station Shopping Center. Spend much time in the small town of Martinez (population 37,000) in western California and it’s hard to avoid the name of John Muir, though the use of it seems to have little to do with the great conservationist.

  The reason for the rash of Muir names is because Martinez is where Muir lived for the last 34 years of his life, 24 of them in a rather grand house built by his father-in-law and now the centrepiece of the John Muir National Historic Site. The house gives interesting insights into Muir but there’s not much feel of his presence and what little there is suggests a desire to be elsewhere, in the wilderness. His bedroom lacks curtains, as he wanted to be woken by the rising sun, and a downstairs parlour has a massive fireplace, put in by Muir after the original one was damaged in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, so he could have a ‘real mountain campfire’.

  His study is scattered with books and papers and it is easy to imagine him sitting here writing about the mountains and forests, his mind and spirit far away in what he regarded as his true home.

  From Martinez I travelled to Yosemite Valley, where he lived from 1868 to 1873, and which lies at the heart of his inspiration and philosophy. ‘Incomparable’, he called it. Whilst the Valley is beautiful and inspiring it’s also a holiday resort, crammed with cars, coaches, campgrounds, cabins, cafes, visitor centres, shops, hotels and hordes of people. The sandy banks of the Merced River look like a seaside beach in summer. Yet somehow the grandeur overcomes all this, the beautiful trees, the magnificent rock walls, the feeling of harmony dominates the works of humankind and makes them seem small and transitory.

  It was like this in Muir’s day too, when Yosemite was already a popular tourist destination and he wrote ‘the tide of visitors will float slowly about the bottom of the valley as a harmless scum, collecting in hotel and saloon eddies, leaving the rocks and falls eloquent as ever and instinct with imperishable beauty and greatness’. Walking round the Valley in the evening on quiet trails away from the crowds and looking up at the massive rock face of Half Dome I shared the wonder and inspiration he felt.

  Beyond Yosemite Valley lies the vast High Sierra, Muir’s ‘the range of light’ which he spent many years studying and exploring, discovering the evidence that the glorious landscape was created by glaciers and making many first ascents. Now a large swathe of the Sierra bears his name as the John Muir Wilderness and the magnificent John Muir Trail threads a way through the places he loved. There’s a Muir Pass, Muir Gorge, Muir Lake, Muir Grove and Mount Muir too as well as lakes named after his daughters, Wanda and Helen. These names seem appropriate here, unlike those in Martinez. This is the land that inspired Muir and that he knew intimately, describing it in detail in many books and articles. If his spirit is to be found anywhere it is in the Sierra wilderness.

  Leaving Yosemite Valley I spent five weeks exploring the High Sierra, without once crossing a road, though I did dip down to remote resorts to resupply. Like Muir I slept out under the stars most nights and appreciated daily why he wrote ‘How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains! To behold this alone is worth the pains of any excursion a thousand times over’. I visited the deep trench of King’s Canyon, where Muir gave talks to Sierra Club members, and Giant Forest, named by him for the Giant Sequoias, which he called ‘Nature’s forest masterpieces’. These trees are so massive – the largest living things – that I found it hard to believe in them even while looking at them.

  Travelling from the depths of the canyons and forests to the high passes and the mountain summits I found it easy to understand his feeling for this land. His words meant so much more to me once I had walked in his footsteps.

  Whilst John Muir’s spirit can be found in the High Sierra it can also be found in wild places everywhere and also, and importantly, wherever people fight for nature and wildness and are prepared to speak out against those whom he described as ‘temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, (who) seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar’.

  His legacy is found in the John Muir Trust, the Sierra Club and other wilderness conservation organisations as well as in the mountains and forests of the Sierra Nevada. However while continuing John Muir’s campaigns for nature we shouldn’t forget his advice to ‘keep close to Nature’s heart... and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean’. Renewing our inspiration is important.

  Colin Fletcher: the man who walked through time

  ‘I stood for a while looking at the mountains and listening to the silence. Then I walked slowly out into the desert that for six hundred miles would be my world’. Colin Fletcher, The Thousand-Mile Summer

  Few people in Britain have heard of Colin Fletcher, yet he is in my opinion the finest of all writers on backpacking and wilderness walking. Every time I read the words above a shiver runs through me as I know I am at the start of a literary adventure. Although living in California for half a century Colin Fletcher, who died in June 2007, was British, born in Wales in 1922. Fletcher inspired thousands of American backpackers and an appreciation of his work in Britain is long overdue.

  Before reaching California and the start of his writing life Fletcher served in the Royal Marines in World War Two, then farmed and built roads in East Africa before working as a prospector and road builder in Canada. Shortly after moving to California from Canada in 1956 he decided ‘that what I wanted most in life just then was to walk from one end of California to the other … I knew, of course, that the idea was crazy; but I felt almost sure I was going’. And go he did, within a month, on a journey that resulted in his first book, The Thousand-Mile Summer, which captures superbly the nature of wilderness walking and camping.

  I have to admit to a bias here as this book changed my life. I first read it in the late 1970s and it had a profound and inspiring effect on me. Fletcher’s descriptions of the deserts and mountains, of walking through real wilderness and camping under the stars started in me a hunger to do the same and resulted in my walking the Pacific Crest Trail and long distance walking becoming my passion and my life.

  Many people have written about long walks and backpacking but none have captured the experience so fully, intensely and personally as Colin Fletcher. He walked alone, and indeed shunned the company of others, coming across as quite a curmudgeon in some of his writing, but what he sought was ‘the gigantic, enveloping, including, renewing solitude of wild and silent places’ (The Complete Walker). His books are mostly about nature and his thoughts and feelings rather than about groups or other people. Indeed, he says little about his private life or relationships outside of his journeys. But the reader learns much about his relations
hip to nature and wilderness. Here he is describing dusk in the California desert after going down to a lagoon to wash:

  ‘I stood still, waiting for the light to go out over the mountains.

  ‘But the mountains were not yet ready. A line of golden peaks caught fire. Black canyons gouged their slopes and pierced the iridescent red with deeper hints of hell. The iridescence deepened, the hints broadened. And then – on the very threshold of revelation – the shadow reached out and quietened everything, and the world was only shades of grey.

  ‘I found myself shivering on the edge of the lagoon, still clutching a cake of soap’. The Thousand-Mile Summer

  Colin Fletcher wasn’t bothered about distance or speed. His concern was with experience. Camping was just as important to him as walking and he described many camps with a loving detail that every backpacker will recognise. Perhaps the book that describes this best, along with the intensity of feeling his walking engenders, is The Man Who Walked Through Time, which describes his walk the length of the Grand Canyon, the first time it had been done. Fletcher gives a long description of his first camp on that walk, covering every detail, even down to where he places every item. Here is a sample:

  ‘I unzippered the mummy bag part way, pushed my feet down into it, pulled the bag up loosely round my waist, and leaned back. It was very comfortable like that, with my butt cushioned on the pillow of the air mattress and my back leaning against the fully inflated main section, which in turn leaned against the now almost empty pack. I sat there for several minutes, content, relaxed, drifting – hovering on the brink of daydreams without ever achieving anything quite so active’.