The Deception Of Nature - The Irrelevance Of The Woods In A Brave New World

Sam Perkins was a nature lover, although he never would have called himself that, for his communing with the world could have no description.  It simply was and would always be the closest Man would ever come to God.

Sam came by this affinity with nature quite naturally, born and raised as he had been a Western valley town surrounded by the snowcapped peaks of the Rockies.  Chesterton had once been an important railhead for coal trains, great mile-long iron and steel caravans out of the Old West, and even now the winsome whistles of the Great Northern line broke the silence of the Wyoming night. 

Sam grew up with deer rifles, meat lockers, and pickup trucks and went into the Absaroras in all seasons to hunt, track, and hike. He felt exhilarated every time he stepped into the wild, alone but never feeling lonely in the vast wilderness.  A spiritual home was in fact more comforting than any brick and mortar dwelling could ever be.  

He smiled as he started up the long, winding cliff trail up to the top of Blantyre's Peak, his place of rest and solace, his Tibetan sanctuary, his holy shrine, his resting place.  The day was bright, clear, and cold.  The first tinges of yellow were on the aspen leaves, and few reds and golds were appearing on the cottonwoods.  The day was brisk, and Sam felt that special energy that he always had when he stepped into the mountains.  A spring in his step, a firm grip on the steep ledges of the upper reaches of his climb, deep breaths at 12,000 ft. in the air.  All was right with the world. 

One might expect that a man with such sensitivity to his surroundings and with such an ability to commune with nature, would be of fungible character.  He would be just as open, generous, and spiritually alive with his wife and children as he was high in the Rockies. 

The sad truth was that the Absaroras were a refuge.  Nature was only a temporary balm to the misery of living in a spiritless cow town, an endlessly aimless job, and life in a trailer on empty, rocky land east of town. 

Sam was a prisoner of the mountains - addicted to the wide open spaces and the rush of glorious possibility every time he set foot there.  He knew nothing else, for he had never been far enough east or west to see the great cities of the coasts but had convinced himself that they were chimeras, imaginary, fanciful places without the heart and soul of the West.

At the same time he felt the old spiritual energy of the Absaroras draining out of him.  The hike up Blantyre's Peak became more and more of a slog.  No matter how hard he tried to rid his mind of the clutter of dissatisfaction, there it was ahead of him at every turn.  Nature had become an empty, spiritless place, devoid of anything remarkable or new.  The view from the top of the mountain, a hundred miles of prairie extending to the Montana border, a vast empty space he once saw as a metaphor for infinity had become simply a desolate, empty, unwanted place.  He had wasted time and energy just for the sight of something as pedestrian as a Walmart kitchen aisle. 

It wasn't supposed to be this way.  There was supposed to be something permanent about nature, some indescribable subtlety that always touched the soul, landscapes that in their simplicity reflected the mind of God more than any New York skyscraper could; so how was it that he was bored, tired of being cold, pulling off galoshes and stoking the fire.  Tired of seeing nothing but featureless rangeland in the shadow of uninhabitable mountains.  Tired of the limited possibilities, the routine, the absolute vacuity of his life. 

He had been cheated, born and raised in this desolate place, provided an education so spare that it allowed him not even an intimation of the greater world around him, and forced to lead his life without variation.  

Worst of all, nature had deceived him. It was not what it had seemed.  It was not the place of spiritual renewal but of a deadening conventionality.  The world was exploding with information, knowledge, and experience, and here he was still bound and tethered by the mountains, the prairie, and the endless winter. 

Joe Francis was also a nature lover, but he, unlike Sam, embraced the term and the idea. For him, it was life's safety valve, a temporary, needed exit from the hopeless bureaucracy where he worked.  He had risen up through middle management until he secured a position as Division Chief of an important bailiwick of the Treasury Department and remained there secure, respected but desperately unhappy.

The perks of such an existence were not insignificant - a good salary and retirement, a home in a wealthy Washington suburb, and enough disposable income to enjoy occasional trips to Europe - but they could not compensate for the endless, soulless warrens of the Calvert Building, the perpetual meetings, the petty politics, and the depressing lack of any substantive value of his work. 

Only the Shenandoah lightened the load, gave him some measure of inspiration, some inkling that his life was not entirely meaningless.  Nature was itself inspirational, intimating meaning, suggesting that the life of Hindu sadhus and Tibetan monks sequestered high in the Himalayas reaching out for God was not just religious extremism but something valuable to be sought after. 

But after a while the Shenandoah had lost its cachet; or better had lost the spiritual significance that Joe was so sure he saw.  Leaves were just leaves, vistas were just breaks in the clouds, panoramas just perspective, silence was not golden but empty.  What was he doing here? he repeatedly asked himself; but he had no ready answer, no alternative.  This - the Washington bureaucracy and the Shenandoah were his ying and yang, his only one. 

On every hike in every season, his mind filled rather than emptied, and the clarity he had once sensed in solitude was entirely gone, replaced by nonsensical clutter, scattershot ideas, bits and pieces of women, food, and camaraderie. The woods - his woods, his solace, his go-to place for spiritual rest had become nothing but a buggy waste of time.  What had Thoreau been thinking?

Everything in life comes in cycles, and this particular one - the routine of work and the anodyne of Nature - was at an end.  Although neither Sam nor Joe realized it, a new, impossibly seductive, appealing, and satisfying world was just beyond their reach.  

Virtual reality was in its embryonic phase - simple back-and-forth excursions in a Disney world that offered more in the Wow! than in the substantial - but soon when one travels to infinite places with infinite permutations and combinations of the imaginary and the real and no distinction made between them, the real world will cease to hold interest and attention. 

Sam and Joe were on to something - they saw beyond the scripted reality they had been provided.  They both had been told that there was something mystical and transformative about nature, something elevated and spiritual, an unchallenged good of a priori value; and they had found that it was nothing of the sort.  

Being alone in the woods was simply to be without, not with.  It was primeval, yes, but in that originalism it is best left on its own.  It was, it is, and perhaps it will always be in some form or another, but not as this sacred fount, this holy temple.  The human spirit wants exit not a psychological huis clos. It doesn't want to be hemmed it, confined, limited in choice and opportunity.  Nature is a red herring, supposedly offering a glimpse into the sublime but offering nothing but shade. 

Sam and Joe were first adopters - they both had an insight into the false promise of nature and into the nature of the inexhaustible human spirit.  The realization of both at once made them unique, for taken individually the ideas are familiar.  Rejecting the faux promises of nature while at the same time understanding the full dimension of their very human nature is significant, and then discovering the virtual world an epiphany. 

Of course such tales are informative and interesting; but Sam and Joe were just ordinary guys trying to make the best out of the hand they were dealt, often befuddled by the unexpected, bored to tears by the hyped miracle of the woods, getting word of this brave new world but leaving it at that.  Yet attention should be paid to these two.