The West Will Swallow You

by Leath Tonino

  “Josh—coof—patra— / Aye ee mo powsh—”

  Um, beg pardon?

  “Ssst—Cum here read me— / Dirty postcard—Urchin sea— / Karash your name—?”

  Where the Mozart biography had pulled me back from the brink—had given me the companionship I needed to keep going on the trail—the Kerouac forced me into an inhuman chaos of waves. For five days I stumbled through frothing foam and mazes of mist, encountering nobody but seals and crabs, and for five nights I listened to eerie techno-symphonies, bickering mermaids, the incessant rush and rip of tides.

  In a sense, Big Sur was the ideal book, an echo of the ocean’s severe strangeness. But “ideal” is after-the-fact talk, armchair-philosopher talk. During the hike, I was immersed, in over my head, frantically swimming. At three a.m., tossing and turning, dreaming that I was drowning, I would have given anything for the dry, soothing logic of a vacuum’s manual.

  An urge toward language is surely integral to our identity as Homo sapiens—“the animal who possesses speech,” as Aristotle put it. Erudite scholars could no doubt trace this idea—the significance of possessing speech and, in turn, of being possessed by speech—through Western intellectual history and beyond, to the very evolutionary origins of our species.

  I am not an erudite scholar, just a guy with worn leather boots and an eagerness to ramble through canyonlands, alphabets, varied terrains. The best I can offer is obvious: Reading in the wilderness isn’t easily reduced to good or bad, this or that. Books lead us to an enriched sense of our surroundings, yes, but they also help us escape the elemental present. They function in countless ways, providing botanical detail, local lore, critiques of the status quo, visions of the future, entertainment when you’re socked in by blizzards, arcane wisdom, wigged fellows tinkling pianos in Vienna, maddening oceans. Bundled in a dirty fleece jacket, they even make for a decent, albeit firm, pillow.

  If you’ll excuse the pun, the question of wild reading is itself an open book, an invitation to speculate and, better yet, to experiment.

  My experiments of late are less concerned with how literature shapes appreciation of places than with the inverse: how places shape appreciation of literature. Specifically, I’ve developed a Sunday afternoon practice of browsing classical Chinese landscape poetry in the thick woods bordering my rural home. According to certain commentators, the vivid imagery of a Wang Wei verse—light falling on a bed of jade-green moss, a crimson leaf floating circles in a river’s eddy—enacts the movement of nature. That is, instead of describing the ceaseless burgeoning forth of organic reality, the poem literally re-creates that dynamic, lines lifting from the white space, expanding in the mind, disappearing into silence.

  For me, an hour chilling with Wang Wei is all about the encompassing scene, about it animating the book in my lap. Sitting on a shadow-dappled log, my attention flickers between warblers and words, and I notice a parallel motion. These intricate markings on the page … they’re flying? These letters … they’re birds to read? Language seems earthly, of a piece with the environment.

  At such moments I feel a surging unity, as if the animal who possesses speech belongs here among the wild energies of wild country. Poetry in a dim study—dusty shelves, leather chairs, windows closed—isn’t the same. Wrong habitat. Almost like reading in a zoo.

  Nature-Loving Beards

  You know Henry Thoreau. He built a shack at Walden Pond, planted beans, read some books, communed with wood-chucks and thunderstorms. His beard is sort of funny—most images I’ve seen show him with an Amish-style chin-strap—but I’ve put him on the list anyway. You’ve got to put Henry on the list.

  Next comes John Muir. His beard’s reputation precedes him, so I will curb my urge to praise. I like to picture the two of them—the beard and the man—rambling for weeks on end in the High Sierra. When dusk falls they wrap themselves up and hunker down, sheltering one another. They carry no tent, no sleeping bag.

  Walt Whitman once wrote, “I think I could turn and live with animals.” Does he mean the squirrels and chickadees and hornets nesting beneath his Adam’s apple? Surely his beard was a habitat, an ecosystem, a world teeming with multifarious life, like the world described in his poems.

  Most folks probably remember John Wesley Powell as the mutton-chopped, one-armed, river-running hardman who explored the Grand Canyon in 1869, but I am partial to what his chops became in the 1880s, when they were allowed to freely and unabashedly roam across his face. Think Gimli, the dwarf from The Lord of the Rings. Think big.

  It’d be nice to give Chuck Darwin a shout. Unfortunately, this list is exclusively for homegrown beards, and dumb rules must be taken very, very seriously. As an indirect homage, we might turn our attention to writer John Burroughs, a Darwinian doppelganger if there ever was one. In a photo I found on the internet, his beard seems to have sprouted a second beard, a spur-beard of sorts, and though it’s unlikely, a part of me thinks it’s Chuck’s beard risen from the grave, visiting, hanging out, chatting about whatever it is beards chat about.

  Sorry, friends, no beard on Teddy Roosevelt, just a ’stache, but one so important to North American conservation that it deserves brief mention. Sometimes, when I’m drifting off at night, when dreams are close, I see it creeping over the lands it dearly loved, a bristly caterpillar crossing the Great Plains, ascending the Rockies, inching through the Yosemite Valley, heading west into the setting sun.

  What of Ansel Adams? Personally, I think he made a wise decision when he went bald. That’s not to say his beard wasn’t handsome early on—trim, black, a few dignified streaks of gray—but consider the competition, the nature-loving beards it was up against. Volume? Mass? Square footage? Forget about it. When contrasted with that round, shiny dome, though, it’s hard to miss.

  Let it be clearly stated that a list of such discernment and penetrating insight as the one you are presently reading doesn’t magically, effortlessly appear while imbibing numerous dark beers on a Friday evening. Did Bob Marshall—Adirondack peakbagger, founder of the Wilderness Society—even have a beard? His is not a famous visage, but I did some searching. While Bobby was clean-shaven much of the time, when out in the backcountry his beard got busy. Points awarded for bushiness, twigginess, and—à la Ansel—it being longer than the hair atop his head.

  Edward Abbey, a.k.a. Cactus Ed, a.k.a. Mr. Scraggly, is yet another example of beard-man hybridization—and spirit too. When I’ve sat too stolidly at the computer, when I sense my soul withering and puckering and curling at the edges, I listen for the voice behind the hair. Get outside, the voice shouts. It’s full of piss and vinegar and sandstone and desert sky and adoration of all things wild, free, uncut, unkempt.

  By now you’ve probably noticed that there’s something missing from this list, and really, I do feel bad about it. Here’s the problem: Most women don’t grow beards, ample or otherwise. I studied damn near fifty photos of Rachel Carson, shots from all angles, in all types of light, and never in her life, whether as a young marine biologist or as a grandmotherly hawk-saving badass, did she sport even the wispiest of goatees. The same can be said for Susan Fenimore Cooper, Mary Austin, Mary Oliver, Ann Zwinger, Annie Dillard, Ellen Meloy, and countless other forceful, tender, inspiring writers. So, in solidarity with these literary heroes of mine, and to emphasize that it is not the face but rather the beating heart that loves our precious earthly abode, I hereby lather my jaw. After many months of slow growth, yes, the time has at last arrived to shave the patchy sucker off.

  Things I Will Not Say about Wilderness

  I will not say that wilderness is a tonic, balm, or medicine for the troubled soul; that most everyone has a troubled soul in need of moss’s healing touch and birdsong’s rejuvenating cheeriness; that this common soul-ache is just a little human-sized sliver of despair situated within the broader soul of the natural world; that I have walked for weeks among meadows and outcrops and waterfalls, blisters on my toes, a grin spreading from ear to ear and beyond.
/>   I will not say that trees speak; that their leafy words have offered me solace in moments of pain and their branchy words pointed me in the appropriate direction when I was lost; that at the Grand Canyon, while telling a friend how I sincerely appreciated pinyon pines, the realization hit me like a ton of glorious bricks that a nearby pinyon pine was listening; that alone, backpacking in the Rockies, I once curled myself beneath a venerable bristlecone, closed my eyes, opened them again, and was granted by the tree a waking dream in which I saw something akin to the face of the divine, a face that looked like bark.

  I will not say that lying on your back at dusk beside a tarn where frogs chorus to the rising moon is a definite must; that if you do choose to recline in such a locale the moon will carry your thoughts into the sky until those thoughts are no longer yours; that the frogs, unperturbed, will go on chorusing their froggy chorus; that eventually the moon will set, carrying the former you with it into darkness.

  I will not say that time is a polished pebble easily lifted, considered, and dropped into the stream by the edge of the trail to sit forever under clear flowing water; that this stream is itself a pebble some older being previously lifted, considered, and dropped; that pebbles and streams when taken together are, as the saying goes, like “turtles all the way down”; that if one’s not careful preparing dinner at the campsite, a pebble can find its way into the soup, the soup whose broth is water from the stream.

  I will not say that the Stanislaus National Forest, on the Sierra Nevada’s western slope, is in fact owned only by itself and beholden only to itself; that the more we try to claim places rather than hum with places, whether the Everglades, the North Cascades, or an anonymous patch of dirt and weeds in Altoona, Kansas, the more we lose a thing gladly and freely given; that the loss of a thing gladly and freely given forebodes a parallel loss in the collective body of humanity; that the more we lose gladness and freeness, the more we reach and grasp and claim and, well, suck.

  I will not say that canoe guide Sigurd Olson was right when he wrote, “There is a penalty for too much comfort and ease, a penalty of lassitude and inertia and the frustrated feeling that goes with unreality”; that eleventh-century Chinese landscape painter Kuo Hsi was correct when he said, “The din of the dusty world and the locked-in-ness of human habitations are what human nature habitually abhors”; that desert rambler Ellen Meloy nailed the nail squarely on its head when she forged her voice into a hammer and professed, “There are people who have no engaged conversation with the land whatsoever, no sense of its beauty or extremes”; that the aforementioned succeeded in coming anywhere close to the eloquence that is rain on palms, a coyote glancing up from the kill, the calcium in a snail’s shell, dry wind across stiff brown grass, et cetera.

  Wrapping up, I will not say that I trust human phrases, inky scratches, the tongue’s ribbony cursive scribbles, or anything remotely of their ilk to accurately express the many truths that I know with absolute certainty in my mute heart, in my inarticulate bones, to be utterly, awesomely, incontrovertibly, truthfully true.

  Addressing the Forces That Would Destroy Us and Everything We Love

  You might think you’ve got time. Let me be the first to tell you: It’s a lie. Yeah, you’ll coast on fumes for a decade or a century, take down more forests, suck up more groundwater, spread a bit more suffering here and there, but it’s fumes you’re running on, mere fumes. Your back is to the wall. The wall is a ticking clock. Your days are numbered.

  I get it, you’ve been reading about yourself, hooray for you. Your head is big, inflated with photos and headlines. I saw one this morning and I’ll admit to tasting the fear, the fear like metal in the mouth, like the moment before you vomit, like the barrel of a gun. It was something about swans. It was something about shallow graves. It was this and that, gloom and doom. It was some little something about plastics, whales, mosses, winters.

  But let me show you something different. Come here. Look at this guy. He leads people into the sandstone canyons and the high cold mountain cirques and the aspen groves where pale white trunks float ghostly in the moonlight. And then he leaves them there, leaves these people with no food, no books, no toys, no distractions. He leaves them with just a water jug and the clothes on their animal bodies, with just the wild animals of the land and the wild animals of the mind.

  Watch these people. Watch them sit and wait, wait and sit. Maybe every once in a while some old terror or old joy brings them to their feet, some lightning or rockfall or inching insect or green glowing eye. Watch them run circles in place until they are exhausted and sure to collapse, and then, yes, watch them dance. Watch them push on past collapse and into the night and through the glorious dawn and farther still.

  Your clock is ticking. Your days are numbered. Meanwhile, they’re still out there. They hum and pile pebbles. They squint at the grass with their ears and attend to the wind with their noses and sniff the soil with the tips of their fingers. They hang in there, these simple people, hang in there through boredom and fear and pain, through conversations with lichens and figures in the clouds and rain that rips dreams. They sleep. They wake. They do not eat and they hang in there, crying tears for a vision, for a way to go forward with bolder, longer steps and a stronger, redder heart. They hang. They cry. They sleep and sway and keep crying, crying, crying for the loss of what is already lost, what was left behind when they followed this guy I know away from the roads, deep into the canyons and the mountains and the forests of pale ghostly trees.

  So do you understand what I’m saying? Tick-tock, tick-tock. The hour is late. I’m saying that you can have those species you’re set on taking. You can have the groundwater. Here, take the climate. Take the moss, the river, the swans. Take the flight from the wings and the freeze from the ice. I’m feeling expansive. I’m in a generous mood. Have fun while it lasts. Read about yourself. But listen. Hear that? Tick-tock, tick-tock.

  And listen: Everything will change and nothing will change. As always. We are made of remembering and you are made of forgetting.

  You’re laughing. You’re saying the only word you speak, the drip of poison. I get it.

  But come close. Look. I know this guy, this guy who leads people into a wilderness that can’t be destroyed. I know these people. You should meet them.

  Write-Ins for President

  I elect that bull elk in the Snake River.

  I elect that raven in Canyonlands National Park.

  I elect autumn moonlight on metal roofs.

  I elect the strand of barbed wire that fell from the post and is now woven into the tall brown grass.

  I elect the tall brown grass.

  I elect my neighbors’ cat—the neighbors who are always cursing one another and screaming hateful things—because every morning he sits with me on the fire escape and watches the sunrise without meowing a single word.

  I elect the feeling of boots laced tight.

  I elect potatoes cooked however.

  I elect the valley of my birth and its faded, sagging, leaning, crooked-in-the-best-sense-of-the-word barns.

  I elect rain improvising songs on a busted junkyard piano.

  I elect the ghost of my grandfather, Dean, because the man never wanted to be anything but a farmer, so says my grandmother, Betty.

  I elect my grandmother, Betty, because at ninety-five she takes the long view.

  I elect the thump-thump-thump of many wagging tails.

  I elect the hungry mouse who stole my snack but did so honestly, out in the open.

  I elect that dream my sister once had of a black bear hurtling through our childhood house, breaking through a bathroom window, transforming midair into a timber wolf, climbing higher and higher into the nighttime sky, higher and higher, and higher, and higher, and then falling as a brilliant shooting star.

  I elect that dream I once had of a monkey riding a flying goat, a dream in which I understood intuitively, instantly, that a monkey riding a flying goat foretells the healing of all wou
nds.

  I elect the tears on my cheeks when I woke up.

  I elect the Kaibab Plateau.

  I elect crushed mint.

  I elect snowflakes on spiderwebs.

  I elect littered napkins folded together by the wind and placed, as if by magic, at the base of a street-corner trash can.

  I elect a climb of Precarious Peak that made me, and will forever keep me, humble as a pebble.

  I elect our innate mammalian ability to walk one hundred miles, hardly eating, hardly sleeping, at home in the weather, whatever weather.

  I elect that which can’t be written in, that which will guide us forward, ever forward, regardless of who lives in some white mansion.

  Talking Clouds

  Last week, when I swung by the assisted living facility for a quick hello, Gram surprised me with the news that she had been a good Catholic girl from Yonkers—the Irish Lass from the Big City—and that she had maintained her chastity right up to her very wedding night. Is news the appropriate word for such a disclosure? Being her grandson, I was slightly put off by this saucy talk and suggested that we pour ourselves some ginger ale in little clear plastic cups and head to the patio, where we could talk weather instead.

  At ninety-five years old, Gram likes the weather, no doubt about it. Specifically, she likes the clouds that are the weather’s heart and soul—how they flop around in the sky, how they hang on the empty blue. These are her words, an uncommon and delightful music that issues from dementia. She doesn’t talk cirrus or stratus or cumulonimbus, and she doesn’t say, I see an elephant, or, That one resembles a ship with three sails, or, Hey, wow, it’s a monster with a long tail. No, when Gram talks clouds she talks about the clouds themselves: shape and motion, pattern and texture, two drifting together, a third drifting away, a fourth pausing, a fifth disappearing.