The first time I ever went alone, into the wild, at least as wild as you can get in the west of America, which is still surprisingly wild, I will always remember. South of Tuscon, an hour maybe, Mount Lemon, a saguaro forest, a national forest I think. My car was the only one in the parking lot, it was late winter, but warm enough to camp, no snow, but I had a good sleeping bag and was warm easily at night. I hiked all day without seeing anyone, I was 23 or 24 and could hike easily with a pack, it was as if I carried nothing at all, it was all on my back.
Daylight was easy, lonely, but easy and I spent my time hounding for rocks, examining animal excrement, making up stories, visualizing my future, studying my past. As the sun set and the night air cooled the landscape I began looking for a place to camp. This was before internet, mobile phones, and electronic devices. I didn't have a walkman, so I looked for a stream to camp near.
I had a decent pack, carried a supply of dried foods, campstove, lantern, fuel, and a notebook and pen. I had camped my whole life. My dad instilled this in me, my friends all liked camping too, so camping wasn't a thing for me to be worried about. When I left my car behind in the parking lot and the sun shone in the sky I didn't consider the darkness.
I found a nice place, it was shaded, with a small clean stream that sort of hooked into a little nook and then back down into a bigger stream a few hundred feet away, it looked as if someone had used this place to camp before me. I set up my tent, threw my sleeping bag inside and opened up the vents and after starting a fire admired my little plot. I kept busy, gathering wood, reading, writing notes, imagining I was like Thoreau. It wasn't until years later that I learned that he was kind of a fraud and what I was about to experience was pretty unique.
Actually it wasn't until a few days ago, while reading Kafka on the Shore, that I recognized how special that moment was. Murakami, in his novel, makes a reference to Ben Franklin and lights and how prior to electricity man lived truly in the dark. That made me think about that camping trip back when I was 23. I had camped alone before, but always with other campers nearby or supplies, or a toilet or an outhouse or some form of civilization. This time was different. Nobody was around. I was alone. As darkness came I didn't think about the cavemen, or medieval times, or the Greeks, I thought about what I would do, who I was, where I was going, why I was here and my first instinct was to flee. Pack up my things and hike back to my car and go back home. I was afraid of the dark.
I'd always been afraid of the dark. As a child, if my mom told me to go down to the basement to get something, I'd rush down, grab what it was she wanted and with cold chills rushing up and down my spine speed back up the stairs imagining some hideous monster hot on my trail and burst thru the door and into the house before it could get me.
Now, in the darkness of the Arizona desert, there was no door to burst thru. I tried to cook some food and to eat but I was so overcome with loneliness and fear that eating just didn't suit me. I didn't know then what I was experiencing. I didn't make the connection to what Murakami was trying to express, that for most of human time people lived in this darkness and it was a part of them. Like the morning sun, like fresh dew on a field of grass, like a congregation on Sunday morning, like harvesting a bounteous crop or gathering wood from the forest--there was a life just as long and just as meaningful to us all, and it was in the dark.
People gathered with wooden bowls filled with tallow and lighted and they went into a hole in the ground and then painted walls and prayed. Not prayer as we know now, prayer more closely to paganism, as if drawing a picture of a bison would bring a promising hunt, or carving a figure of a woman with a big belly would bring a child, or placing a pile of grain on the temple of Neptune would bring a lusty rains and a good harvest.
Some people knew it was not real and they profited from the darkness. Maybe a shamen or a priest or a guardian of the temple, but most of us feared the darkness and we lived in it despite ourselves and when we woke and the sun was shining, and dew dripped from our crops we rejoiced and worked.
Darkness came, parents sent their children to bed and they stayed up long enough to get ready for the morning. Maybe they had company and drank wine or beer and they told stories or laughed into the moonlit night. Maybe they walked along together holding hands. Maybe they went straight to bed too. Maybe there wasn't enough wood to keep the fire going all night and they froze under layers of wool. Maybe their experiences haunted them and stood like spectral apparitions in the corners of their minds reminding them of the horrible things they'd done. But they had candles or lamps or fire, but before there was fire they didn't fear the dark...I don't think.
I think they transformed, like the ghosts they believed existed, they changed too. And that first night in Arizona, I transformed too. I had a dream, but I don't think I slept while I had this dream. It was a landscape similar to the one I'd hiked that day. Saguaro cactus peppered the mountains and flames shot up like some avant-garde light show, straight from the earth, and sounded like flames should sound when you are alone in the dark. I saw this dark landscape of fire and red and heard the sound of steel striking steel, and witnessed the swinging of hammers, of huge Orc-like monsters working their hammers upon anvils the size of VW Beetles. I walked along unnoticed thru this landscape and sweated in the cool Arizona night.
I think before electricity, before lamplight, before candles were prevalent, people lived in the darkness just like they lived in the sunlight and it created in us two sides that still exist in us today. How could it be any different. So long we lived like this, so long we were two different beings. In the morning sun in us we worked and in the moonless night we dreamt. And it was natural, pure, it was not something we questioned. These were not myths or fairy tales, it was simple, light and dark, and while I feared the dark on that first night, the second, third, and fourth nights I dreamed too, I still was afraid, but I grew familiar with how to deal with it. I hiked long hard days and in the mornings I felt invigorated and lusty and as the sun set over the next mountain I began to prepare for the darkness.
I didn't know what I was doing. I'm not sure I know now what I was doing, but I think I was getting close to living.
Darkness will come today but it will never be the same. Last summer, when I biked across Europe, I never once let my phone die, I always found a place, just before the nighttime came to charge the battery because I knew darkness would come and I am still afraid of it. In Slovakia and points east the wild returns to the earth. Last summer, in the west of Europe, I never saw true darkness, civilization is permanent, but I can imagine in parts of Slovakia, Ukraine, and Russia, there is wild darkness again where people gather in caves for protection.
Daylight was easy, lonely, but easy and I spent my time hounding for rocks, examining animal excrement, making up stories, visualizing my future, studying my past. As the sun set and the night air cooled the landscape I began looking for a place to camp. This was before internet, mobile phones, and electronic devices. I didn't have a walkman, so I looked for a stream to camp near.
I had a decent pack, carried a supply of dried foods, campstove, lantern, fuel, and a notebook and pen. I had camped my whole life. My dad instilled this in me, my friends all liked camping too, so camping wasn't a thing for me to be worried about. When I left my car behind in the parking lot and the sun shone in the sky I didn't consider the darkness.
I found a nice place, it was shaded, with a small clean stream that sort of hooked into a little nook and then back down into a bigger stream a few hundred feet away, it looked as if someone had used this place to camp before me. I set up my tent, threw my sleeping bag inside and opened up the vents and after starting a fire admired my little plot. I kept busy, gathering wood, reading, writing notes, imagining I was like Thoreau. It wasn't until years later that I learned that he was kind of a fraud and what I was about to experience was pretty unique.
Actually it wasn't until a few days ago, while reading Kafka on the Shore, that I recognized how special that moment was. Murakami, in his novel, makes a reference to Ben Franklin and lights and how prior to electricity man lived truly in the dark. That made me think about that camping trip back when I was 23. I had camped alone before, but always with other campers nearby or supplies, or a toilet or an outhouse or some form of civilization. This time was different. Nobody was around. I was alone. As darkness came I didn't think about the cavemen, or medieval times, or the Greeks, I thought about what I would do, who I was, where I was going, why I was here and my first instinct was to flee. Pack up my things and hike back to my car and go back home. I was afraid of the dark.
I'd always been afraid of the dark. As a child, if my mom told me to go down to the basement to get something, I'd rush down, grab what it was she wanted and with cold chills rushing up and down my spine speed back up the stairs imagining some hideous monster hot on my trail and burst thru the door and into the house before it could get me.
Now, in the darkness of the Arizona desert, there was no door to burst thru. I tried to cook some food and to eat but I was so overcome with loneliness and fear that eating just didn't suit me. I didn't know then what I was experiencing. I didn't make the connection to what Murakami was trying to express, that for most of human time people lived in this darkness and it was a part of them. Like the morning sun, like fresh dew on a field of grass, like a congregation on Sunday morning, like harvesting a bounteous crop or gathering wood from the forest--there was a life just as long and just as meaningful to us all, and it was in the dark.
People gathered with wooden bowls filled with tallow and lighted and they went into a hole in the ground and then painted walls and prayed. Not prayer as we know now, prayer more closely to paganism, as if drawing a picture of a bison would bring a promising hunt, or carving a figure of a woman with a big belly would bring a child, or placing a pile of grain on the temple of Neptune would bring a lusty rains and a good harvest.
Some people knew it was not real and they profited from the darkness. Maybe a shamen or a priest or a guardian of the temple, but most of us feared the darkness and we lived in it despite ourselves and when we woke and the sun was shining, and dew dripped from our crops we rejoiced and worked.
Darkness came, parents sent their children to bed and they stayed up long enough to get ready for the morning. Maybe they had company and drank wine or beer and they told stories or laughed into the moonlit night. Maybe they walked along together holding hands. Maybe they went straight to bed too. Maybe there wasn't enough wood to keep the fire going all night and they froze under layers of wool. Maybe their experiences haunted them and stood like spectral apparitions in the corners of their minds reminding them of the horrible things they'd done. But they had candles or lamps or fire, but before there was fire they didn't fear the dark...I don't think.
I think they transformed, like the ghosts they believed existed, they changed too. And that first night in Arizona, I transformed too. I had a dream, but I don't think I slept while I had this dream. It was a landscape similar to the one I'd hiked that day. Saguaro cactus peppered the mountains and flames shot up like some avant-garde light show, straight from the earth, and sounded like flames should sound when you are alone in the dark. I saw this dark landscape of fire and red and heard the sound of steel striking steel, and witnessed the swinging of hammers, of huge Orc-like monsters working their hammers upon anvils the size of VW Beetles. I walked along unnoticed thru this landscape and sweated in the cool Arizona night.
I think before electricity, before lamplight, before candles were prevalent, people lived in the darkness just like they lived in the sunlight and it created in us two sides that still exist in us today. How could it be any different. So long we lived like this, so long we were two different beings. In the morning sun in us we worked and in the moonless night we dreamt. And it was natural, pure, it was not something we questioned. These were not myths or fairy tales, it was simple, light and dark, and while I feared the dark on that first night, the second, third, and fourth nights I dreamed too, I still was afraid, but I grew familiar with how to deal with it. I hiked long hard days and in the mornings I felt invigorated and lusty and as the sun set over the next mountain I began to prepare for the darkness.
I didn't know what I was doing. I'm not sure I know now what I was doing, but I think I was getting close to living.
Darkness will come today but it will never be the same. Last summer, when I biked across Europe, I never once let my phone die, I always found a place, just before the nighttime came to charge the battery because I knew darkness would come and I am still afraid of it. In Slovakia and points east the wild returns to the earth. Last summer, in the west of Europe, I never saw true darkness, civilization is permanent, but I can imagine in parts of Slovakia, Ukraine, and Russia, there is wild darkness again where people gather in caves for protection.
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