Chapter 5. Civilization and the Skagit.
NOCA. A Daily Testament of Youthful Discovery in the Wilderness.
“Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.” — Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
May 31
Our first four days off!
Heather had to make a trip back to St. Louis for a family engagement and she left before I knew what happened. I spent the morning lying in bed finishing up Big Sur, by Jack Kerouac. As it turns out, Jack Kerouac spent some time in NOCA as a fire-lookout on Desolation Peak in the summer of 1956.
The day was passed tossing the Frisbee with the remaining crew, eating, drinking and being merry and the night was spent jamming music together. Gary and I strummed wildly on acoustic guitars while Tom romanced the fiddle. The voices of the crew harmonized in free-flowing lyrics about the mysteries of life. Each song took on themes of adventures we’d had thus far, the creepy park biologist Dean Driscoll, our bird boss genius Barry and we sang silly stories describing each crew-member.
Gary proved to be a talented guitar player and singer. We polished off a box of red wine and some Skagit brown ales and Gary got tipsy and sang Irish folk songs like a true drunken Irishman. The later it got, the more I could feel my body’s exhaustion from the backcountry experience we had just had. I laid down in a boozy delirium and thought of Heather, in St Louis. I left the light on in our room and watched bugs wander in through the open window and swarm the 60-watt glow.
June 1
Gretel, Tom and I voyaged into Bellingham to do some shopping. I brought out the credit card and did some damage. We ate at a nice Mexican restaurant called Dos Padres Cantina in Fairhaven and la comida was exotic compared to my recent backcountry gruel. We shopped at the REI and washed our clothes at the laundry-mat next door. The old woman attendant at the laundry-mat was sweet as a rose. Her hair was blonde-gray and she wore it long. She wore a dragging silken pink skirt and a bright yellow top as she looked into a picture book of Colorado. I struck up conversation with her and we spoke about my original homeland of Missouri. She talked slowly and laughed at her own jokes.
At a bookstore in Fairhaven I bought a collection of poems by Edward Abbey called Earth Apples. I figured it would be a nice accompaniment in the backcountry of NOCA. We watched a high school jazz band play big band tunes in the basement of another bookstore and then traveled back to Marblemount to rest.
June 2
I laid in bed for a long while that morning, reading Peter Camenzind by Hermann Hesse, the German poet and wanderer. After I finally rose from bed, I cooked a breakfast of eggs and sausage links with a side of onions and mushrooms and went back to bed, cuddling with my lonesome blankets. After no satisfaction in bed, I decided to get out of the house and clear my mind. I drove over the Skagit River Bridge and instead of feeling at peace, my mind paced fervently as I grappled with the bewilderment I was experiencing after a week in the wilderness…It appears to me that all we have are our own experiences, dreams, inner struggles and perceptions that no one else can see. I can only perceive what is happening on earth with my own eyes. I run around smelling, seeing, touching, hearing and experiencing what I alone determine to be real. I feel content, I feel foolish, I cry crazy tears and I lose my mind in the trivialities. Maybe too few of us climb back into the womb that Mother Nature offers up to see more clearly? I feel pressure from society to conform. Maybe the alternative for me is to follow the masses, never question the status quo, walk like a capitalist into the future and to turn on the television for my answers. There seems to be a belief system floating around me, like a giant balloon, that I should be a part of the herd, auction myself to a corporation and become a compliant worker united under a brand name and a catchy slogan. The winds of truth should blow away those balloons in order for me to see more clearly. Maybe I cannot simplify the problems of society by turning only to the wilderness, but I believe that wilderness may be essential to our societies’ health. Without it, we may perish.
“Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.” — Aldo Leopold
I believe that human beings and nature are interconnected. Maybe each of us are crying out for peace but we can’t stop hustling towards some unknown future? Maybe we are caught in a squirrel cage of earn and spend? Will over-developing the earth really protect us? Maybe it is in wilderness preservation that we will be provided opportunities for the health of our species?
I stared deeply into the Skagit and nearly fell in as I became lost in my thoughts…I see these molecules of water as tiny vehicles, racing away, caught in turmoil and then they eventually reach the sea. Water wave masses churn over rocks; smoothing them. I hope that water keeps coming down from these mountains forever. I hope the sky will always open up and bring more water to be carried towards the sea. When water has the chance, it always rejoins its cycle; vapors rising to the clouds and back to the earth in showers. From glacier, to river, to sea and back again.
The past week in the wilderness came rushing back to me like a river of daydreams, as I struggled to feel grounded in civilization after a week in the woods…I smell the wet forest and organic matter. I have been out of the woods for a few days now, living a dormant lifestyle and I realize how easy it is to live a life separate from nature and its cycles. We pack all our necessities inside so we can be comfortable, and why not? We are protected from the elements and maybe we have killed off predators so we can feel safe, but why do we still feel so uncertain? Our boxed in lives might seem trivial without the freedom of wilderness to shape our perspective. Where do we go to find peace, when we feel the overwhelm of modern life? The lake, the park, the canyons, the slopes, the peaks…the great outdoors! Why do we continue to build more of what we want to get away from? Why do we lay more concrete, yet we long to pick more flowers? Why do we envy the vagabond with a pack on his back, but overwork ourselves and get tied down with too much debt? Why do we do so much road building, so much concrete laying and so little hiking on a well worn footpath?
I stood on the gravel trail leading to the Skagit River and heard “jip, jip” from a tiny bouncing MacGillivray’s warbler. It was fumbling and hopping around in shrubs. A Swainson’s thrush called “drip” and I whistled back that leaky-faucet sound. It was incredible to hear the sounds of nature again after spending some time feeling disconnected from it, in the streets and in the house. The carpet, the treated lumber and the glass had kept all the intimate sounds out, trapping in the noises of music, dishes clanking and the fridge’s buzz. The language of birds and trees was medicine for my mind on that rainy afternoon.
June 3
I drove into Seattle to pick up Heather from the airport. The morning was overcast and rainy and I pushed fast to get to SEA-TAC on time. Heather emerged from the airport as I was pulling into the long line of cars at Arrivals. Busy Americans were out and about, traveling, coming, going and hurrying. It seemed like everyone had somewhere to go and not enough time to get there. The airport appeared to be filled to the brim with raw emotion. People were crying because a loved one was leaving or crying because a loved one had just arrived. People seemed anxious or upset because they had to wait around and follow orders.
Heather and I kissed and hugged as soon as we could. I was excited to see her and the feelings of separation while she was gone felt intense. The warm newness and our sense of touch was magnified when we embraced. We reacquainted ourselves by smelling each other like cougars might, making sure we were the same person we had left a few days prior. As quickly as we were at the airport, we were gone, back on I-5, heading north towards Marblemount.
Back at The Bird House, we began to pack for our upcoming 7 day outing. We started the process by packing enough food into our bear-boxes, “coal for the locomotive” as Tom would say. Heather and I held each other tight, knowing we would soon be apart for another week in the wilderness.
