by Robert Moor
Back on the road, he started off slowly. He said it took him at least a half hour to get the kinks out of his back. “Every morning, you think, oh man, this isn’t going to go away today,” he said. “But it does.”
As we passed the refinery again, he stopped to take a picture. “That feller over there makes its own clouds, doesn’t it?” he said. Among the hikers I had met, Eberhart showed a rare appreciation for human environments. When taking landscape photos, most hikers will go to great lengths to crop out any power lines. But Eberhart said that once you resign yourself to the fact that every photo is going to have power lines in it, you’ll find you can take much better pictures.
The problem, he said, was that hikers tended to divide their lives into compartments: wilderness over here, civilization over there. “The walls that exist between each of these compartments are not there naturally,” he said. “We create them. The guy that has to stand there and look at Mount Olympus to find peace and quiet and solitude and meaning—life has escaped him totally! Because it’s down there in Seattle, too, on a damn downtown street. I’ve tried to break those walls down and de-compartmentalize my life so that I can find just as much peace and joy in that damned homebound rush-hour traffic that we were walking through yesterday.”
As a proud traditionalist, Eberhart was startled when I told him that, in this regard, he was in the vanguard of environmental philosophy. In the last twenty years, postmodern environmental scholars like William Cronon have subverted the gospels of Muir and Thoreau by arguing that nature, as a world distinct from the realm of human culture, is an empty and ultimately unhelpful human construct. The concept of nature cleaves the planet in two: presuming that there is a natural world over here and a human world over there. Cronon argues that this division not only alienates us from our own planet, it also obscures our origins as animals, as collections of cells, as collaborative and intertwined living beings. All organisms are involved in a constant process of reshaping our world to better suit their needs, whether they are termites building mounds, elephants felling trees, kudzu vines colonizing an abandoned house, or shepherds and sheep working together to trample out a grassy turf. The thing we call nature is in large part the result of these minute changes and adaptations. There is no single entity or primal state one can point to and call “nature”: it is both everything and nothing.
There are many smart and conscientious people who argue that humans should resume living in a more natural way, which we have abandoned at some point in the past. But the problem with equating the natural with the good, Cronon argues, is not simply that the concept of nature is illusory—it is also counterproductive. “When we speak of ‘the natural way of doing things,’ we implicitly suggest that there can be no other way,” he observed. By arguing that something is natural—and thus “innate, essential, external, nonnegotiable”—we short-circuit any meaningful conversation about how the world should be.
At the eastern edge of Port Arthur, we crossed a bridge, which arched over the river to reach a green island. On the far side of the bridge stood a sign reading WELCOME TO PLEASURE ISLAND. There were sailboats, fishing piers, a golf course, a castle made of wood, and an RV park. We walked until we reached a bait shop, where we stopped for breakfast. Eberhart handed the perplexed cashier his business card. With her permission, we spread our wet rainflies out on the front yard. As they dried, we sat together at a picnic table in the shade. Eberhart ate a cheese danish and drank a cup of coffee. He looked deeply content.
“You know what, Rob?” he said, unprompted. “You can be a whole lot happier if it don’t take a whole lot to make you happy.”
He thought for a moment.
“You know when you see a child, and you see that innocence, that glow in a child’s face? It goes away when we grow out of childhood, and it doesn’t come back almost until you’re old and feeble. But you still occasionally see it in someone. They don’t even have to speak. You see it in their face; they have that inner joy, that inner peace. I hope you can see some glimmer of that in my face.”
His sunglasses were off, and he was staring me in the eye, earnestly. “So is it real or isn’t it, when you look at me?” he asked.
I looked at him closely, mildly unsettled by the directness of his question. There was indeed something radiant in him—his cheeks were glowingly pink, his eyes guileless and clear. But I also thought I detected something else, the faint smolder of an ancient anger, carefully suppressed. What peace there was seemed so fragile, so incipient, that I was wary of prodding it.
I dodged his question with another question: Was peace a lasting state of being, I asked, or was it something you had to continually work on?
“You work on it day to day,” he said. “It’s a daily pilgrimage, something that you renew. I would be miserable today if I let myself. And the peace that I’ve enjoyed these last number of years is fleeting. It could be gone in an instant.”
We packed up our rainflies, which had grown crisp in the sun. When we left, our packs felt lighter. The road entered a swampy marsh. Wind invisibly petted the wet green grass. Eberhart stopped and bowed his head to recite a prayer he had written. He adopted the cadence of an old cowboy poet, his voice misty with sincerity.
Lord, set me a path by the side of the road,
Pray this be a part of your plan.
Then heap on the burden and pile on the load,
and I’ll trek it the best that I can.
Please bless me with patience; touch strength to my back;
Then cut me loose and I’ll go.
Just like the burro toting his pack,
The oxen plowing his row.
And once on this journey, a witness for you,
Toward thy way, the truth, and the light.
Shine forth my countenance steady and true,
O’er the pathway to goodness and right.
And lest I should falter and lest I should fail,
Let all who know that I tried.
For I am a bungler, feeble and frail,
When you, dear Lord, I’ve denied.
So blessed be the day your judgment comes due,
And blessed be thy mercies bestowed.
And blessed be this journey, all praises to you,
O’er this path by the side of the road.
The prayer, he said, had come to him one day on his transcontinental hike from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, to Point Loma, California. He spoke it into a microcassette recorder that he used to carry, and transcribed it when he got home. He was fond of saying that he paused only to look up the words he didn’t know in the dictionary.
As we approached the Louisiana state line, the air began to prickle with heat. Eberhart’s shirt had turned a diaphanous shade of pink. At one of the convenience stores we passed, I filled up my water bottle with tap water. Outside, when I opened it to take a sip, I recoiled: it smelled like kerosene. Eberhart said that was common around here. “The last two or three places, they said, ‘Oh man, you don’t want to drink this stuff,’ ” he said. “In fact that one lady back there said, ‘Just go over there to the cooler and get yourself a bottle of water.’ Some of this stuff tastes pretty bad.”
Curiously, for a man who spent nearly all his waking hours outdoors, this pollution did not seem to greatly anger Eberhart. He wasn’t in support of pollution, of course, but he was skeptical of efforts to tighten environmental regulations any further. To him, personal freedom was sacrosanct, and anything that impinged on that freedom was dangerous.
“God put us here on this earth so that it can be productive and provide sustenance,” he explained. “Petroleum is a natural resource. So yeah, we’re going to use it up, eventually. Before that day comes, hopefully, they’ll bust the hydrogen molecule, and then, damn it, we’re going to the moon again! But until that day, what are we going to do? Go back and get the plow and the horse and build a cabin and bu
rn firewood and fight off the Indians? What are we going to do? The Lord put these resources here for us.”
I was surprised, and I told him so. Based on his minimalist lifestyle, I’d assumed he would recommend a lighter footprint for other people as well.
“I’d be happy to talk to you about it, but I’m not going to force my lifestyle on you,” he replied. “That’s what’s happening. These things are being forced on me. I resent it. I absolutely resent it. If I want to buy an airplane and fill it full of a thousand gallons of fifty-dollar-a-gallon fuel, and I got the money to do it, goddamn it, leave me alone!”
A lengthy—at times, heated—discussion about the proper role of government regulation ensued. As we continued talking over this point, though, I discovered our disagreement was not so much political as epistemological; far from agreeing on the solution to pollution, we could not even agree on the existence of a problem. Environmental science, Eberhart believed, was “politicized and bastardized” by people with a dual agenda: to increase the government’s control over its citizens and the desire to put man above God. Darwinism, he argued, was also part of this ruse. He waved his hand at the land around us. “If you stand here and look out here across these fields, you can see that there is an order. You say that’s all just chaos, but it isn’t. There is an order. And that didn’t come from Darwin.”
I looked around. On either side of the road was tall marsh grass, which spilled lushly through a barbed wire fence, pushing the posts askew. That grass housed countless insects and reptiles and birds. When Eberhart looked out over those fields, he saw a divine creation, infused with purpose, perfectly designed and lovingly tended. Whereas when I looked at the same field, I saw the miracle of evolution—an infinitely complex constellation of particles, cells, bodies, and systems competing and cooperating, reproducing and dying off, self-perpetuating and yet always in flux. I tried hard to imagine the field from his perspective, and then again from mine. Both were beautiful—even awe-inspiring—in their own ways.
“I believe in the Maker, I believe in the hereafter, I believe in the Holy Spirit. I believe in these things as deep in my heart as anyone could,” he said. “Now, in all this discourse, I haven’t told you that you’re wrong. You can believe what you want, but I have the right to believe what I want. What do you expect from an old man who was raised in a church-based community, where right was right and wrong was wrong?”
By this point the afternoon heat had closed in around us like a bad hug. Sweat flies tangled, vibrating, in Eberhart’s beard. It grew too hot to argue, and we still had miles more to walk, so we fell into an uneasy silence. We were both relieved to reach the next stop, a truck-stop restaurant, where we sank into cool plastic chairs. A family of four gave us their leftover onion rings, fries, and a half-eaten burger. Five miles later, we stopped at another oasis of air conditioning. At the table next to us sat a mother with her two rambunctious young sons. The boys silently gaped at Eberhart as he walked past, then promptly forgot all about him and returned to torturing each other.
Their exhausted mother, who helped run the store, told us that this area had been hit by two hurricanes since 2005, and the store had been flooded both times. They weren’t able to get flood insurance anymore, so each time a hurricane approached, they simply packed all the merchandise into a U-Haul and tried to outrun it.
“But you keep coming back?” Eberhart said, wonderingly. “That is incredible.”
She explained that the hurricanes were unpredictable: “They hit and miss.” The last hurricane had left her bicycle right where she had left it on the lawn, but had hurled an old washing machine into the marsh behind her house. Sitting there, I pondered how it must feel to live in the shadow of such roiling, ravening complexity. I wondered if it would make me believe in a vengeful and capricious God, or no God at all.
I once read a study that found that in this very parish of Louisiana—which is predicted by scientists to be severely damaged by rising sea levels and increased storms—more than half the population disagreed with the scientific consensus that human activity was altering the climate. Eberhart too was skeptical. (“It’s one hell of a leap of faith,” he’d said.) Indeed, when I considered it here, where the hurricanes raged worst, I was momentarily amazed by the idea that we tiny humans are capable of radically altering the planet, when for our whole existence it has tossed us around like so many ants. It was as if we had wounded one of the gods.
We are all children of landscapes. We first learn about the world in the place where we grow up; it shapes our language, our beliefs, and our expectations. I was raised on the shores of Lake Michigan, among plunging ravines and manicured lawns, where human ingenuity reversed the flow of the Chicago River and converted the prairies into corn and concrete. Eberhart was from the northeastern Ozarks, a hard land, trod by Meriwether Lewis and terrorized by Jesse James, where lead ore was once pulled from the ground and hauled off by oxen until it ran out, leaving the people to scrape out a living from the acidic soil. This woman and her children were from a place where, any summer or fall, with little warning, a cloud could erase their lives.
The sun was setting by the time we left the store. We walked down the roadside searching for a dry place to sleep. First we looked behind a firehouse on stilts, then behind a cemetery named Head of the Hollow. On the far side of the graves, Eberhart spotted a motte of live oaks. He hopped nimbly over the barbed wire fence and ducked beneath their gnarled branches. “Beautiful!” he called out.
Inside was a shady grove, carpeted with slender, rippling leaves. We hurriedly set up camp and crawled into our nylon cocoons as mosquitoes descended like mist. I thought back to what Lamar Marshall had said, that Eberhart’s way of walking “defeats the whole damn purpose of being in the woods.” Here we had discovered a corner of wilderness that few people ever slept in, and it was truly lovely. “A person with a clear heart and open mind can experience the wilderness anywhere on earth,” the poet Gary Snyder once said. “The planet is a wild place and always will be.”
Wilderness, according to William Cronon, is as illusory a concept as nature. He writes that wilderness is too often seen as an Edenic escape from the modern world—“the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world.” It is both our fantasy and our fallback plan; we forgive the poisoning of our local waterways so long as Yellowstone remains pristine. “By imagining that our true home is in the wilderness,” he writes, “we forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit.”
But Cronon argues that unlike the concept of nature, which tends to narrow our thinking, wilderness can broaden it. In the wild, we witness firsthand that there is a world of stunning complexity that existed prior to us and will always stubbornly resist our attempts to simplify it. “In reminding us of the world we did not make,” Cronon writes, “wilderness can teach profound feelings of humility and respect as we confront our fellow beings and the earth itself.” (This lesson, Cronon writes, “applies as much to people as it does to (other) natural things.” So his “wilderness” and Scheler’s “fellow feeling” are, oddly enough, kindred concepts.)
On a farm, the land is narrowly defined by how it profits the farmer—he sees little more than crops, soil, storm clouds, pests, debt. But the defining feature of wilderness is its unruly condition: it is the land we leave to grow wild. The wilderness has always been defined as the land out there, beyond the fence, not-self, not-home. It is open land, which no one owns, and no one can claim to fully know. Throughout history it has offered a home to all manner of prophets, explorers, ascetics, outcasts, rebels, fugitives, and freaks. Some, like Muir, found it holy; others, like the Puritans, found it horrible. None, however, could hope to fully grasp it; it is forever beyond us. Perhaps this is why the wilderness, as sung into being by Thoreau—“this vast, savage, howling Mother”—has managed to retain its transcendent power in our increasingly secularized and post-natura
l society. Whether it be a snowy mountaintop or a shady grove, the wild is a place where both Eberhart and I, different as we may be, could feel bathed in the same cosmic light.
On wild land, wild thoughts can flourish. There, we can feel all the ragged edges of what we do not know, and we make room for other living things to live differently. Cronon boldly concludes his essay on wilderness by asserting that we must learn to reinfuse this sense of the wild back into the human landscape—for instance, to see even the trees in our backyards as wild things—and to reframe our understanding of the wilderness so that it can contain us within it. The next great leap in our ecological consciousness, he argues, would be to “discover a common middle ground in which all of these things, from the city to the wilderness, can somehow be encompassed in the word ‘home.’ ”
The following day was my last with Eberhart. A little after dawn we snuck back to the road and resumed walking eastward. Hot gray skies pressed earthward. Somewhere, a marsh was burning. To our left were vast ranchlands. A helicopter hovered low over them, releasing a fine chemical mist. Off to the right, bulbous storm clouds floated in from the gulf, trailing gray tentacles.
In ten miles, at the storm-ravaged town of Holly Beach, I would hitch a ride back to Houston with a group of touring Danes, rewinding, in an hour, all the progress we had made in three days. But that morning, the end still seemed a long way off, and my legs had already begun to ache. Walking on the uniform surface of a road for days wears on the body in the same way working in a factory does. The same motion is repeated, with very little variance, thousands of times each day. Odd body parts grow sore: the backs of the knees, the bottoms of the feet.
Eberhart, meanwhile, seemed fine. His posture was hunched, and he had a slight hitch in his right step, but his stride, from the outset, was remarkably steady: three miles an hour, on the tick. From time to time he stopped, leaned forward on his trekking poles, and swung first one leg backward, then the other, to loosen them up. Throughout the day, to ease his pains, he swallowed handfuls of aspirin and joint supplements.