Wyoming Philosophy

My previous entry left one issue dangling. Last time, I wrote about Joseph Epstein's grumpy article "The Perpetual Adolescent" and how it spurred along the process of rethinking my years in Yellowstone. At the end, I concluded that time spent there was time spent at better pursuits than those often followed by directionless youngsters. To be sure, we had plenty of evenings and weekends of pure loafing. Some of the people who worked for my little company, Yellowstone Park Service Stations, stayed for long seasons, six months or more, and then returned for the winter. They came to the park with all the comforts of home and dorm, so we put in our share of time watching TV, playing video games, and eating Little Debbie snack cakes with beer and, for a vegetable, leftover salsa--the salsa, that is, that sticks to the sides of the jar and only comes out with a spoon (waste not, want not). But in a place like Yellowstone, there are always trails and mountains that beckon. They helped us put Little Debbie back in her place, and off our midsections.

But here is the issue I left dangling, and could not have covered in that one entry anyway: why is it that one activity is better than the other? Why is the active life of [insert your favorite park or wilderness area here] better than the life of pure loafing? The answer may seem obvious to you, but if we probe more deeply, we find that it is not actually easy to say why, or what the source of our conviction might be. The major religions usually have something to say on this topic, and they rarely come down in favor of a life devoted to snack cakes, no matter how delicious. But let's try to do this without referring to a divine standard, and also leave health issues out for now. Is there anything inherently better about an active life spent outdoors, compared to the pure Homer Simpson existence? And how can we be sure?

I work at a university, so in my present life, they actually pay me to ask basic questions like this one, but it isn't a new malady for me. One reason I went to Yellowstone in the first place was that I could not decide what to do with myself, and the main reason I could not come up with a good plan was that I never was able to define what "good" is. As an angry youngster totally lacking a sacred book, I had to try to find the definition on my own.

When other guidance is lacking, we usually turn to our experience of the world in answering such questions, but I didn't have much experience of anything, and certainly not "the world." I tried searching the books they gave us to read at school. It's not easy to find philosophical guidance in a textbook. I did best with the dialogues of Socrates as handed down to us by Plato (and Emily Edwards, I notice, says in her October 5 blog that her students are reading Plato. This will probably be my last reference to him; I was never that good at the ancient Greeks, and these days, I'm much more familiar with Play-Doh). Socrates speaks of "human excellence" as his ideal, which I found appealing--although I soon had to ask, "excellence at what?" No matter: eventually, his moral code came to seem ancient and distant and uninspiring. In his final lengthy dialogue, Socrates, having been sentenced to death, is urged to escape from prison. He could do that; ancient prisons were not Leavenworth. Socrates spends what is nearly his last breath arguing, in essence, that he cannot do so because escape would be against the law.

Half the things I liked doing at that age were at least a little against the law. I sort of gave up. Then, lacking any other plan, I came to Yellowstone, and learned something about human excellence.

I sure had an excellent adventure. It went on for a long time--it's still going on today--so let me focus just on one phase of the adventure: the hiking I did. I should say, at the outset, that one of my legs is not normal; as a kid, I had osteomyelitis in one hip, and the hip is fused in place, which slows me down and can make climbing an unhappy experience. At first, I planned to do no hiking at all. The park, however, has a way of upsetting plans.

I started slowly. I had to: the parts of the park where I spent most of my time ran between seven and nine thousand feet above sea level. My first hike left me hurt and gasping, and fantasizing about climbing Sherpas and bottled oxygen. It was a climb up the ridge behind Old Faithful called Observation Point (elevation change, 200 feet), and it was pretty embarrassing to be reduced to a quivering wreck by this handsome little wart of a hill.

But I got stronger, and it happened quickly. My job kept me literally running, outside in the mountain air, and my YPSS friends kept me hopping; there was always a backcountry trip in the works. I learned what all hikers discover, and like anyone, I mostly made these discoveries the hard way. I learned that mud has a certain color depending on its consistency, and some is to be avoided. In Yellowstone, the lighter colored stuff is likely carrying runoff from a hot spring; stepping in it is like putting your foot into a bucket of Elmer's Glue-All. A deep bucket. I learned that a wet log on the trail without its bark is like a big banana peel; step on it, and low comedy follows. I learned how to ford a river without coming to grief, how to light a fire after rain, how to find Polaris by first finding Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper (in the place I come from, where the lights of greater LA reflect off particulates and ocean fog, Polaris is mostly just a rumor). I learned how to recognize the few kinds of rock in Yellowstone that will hold up a climbing body. A lot of it just crumbles.

And I climbed, a little higher all the time, and finally much higher than that hip should have ever allowed. Over a year after the process started, I stood atop one of the three Tetons, not the tallest, but the next one down, 12,804 feet. Behind me was Idaho; ahead and down below was Jackson Hole, where toy airplanes took off and landed from the Jackson airport. In my previous existence, such a place as this--a granite nest blasted by refrigerated wind--would have been about as accessible as the surface of the moon. By a happy coincidence, a couple of weeks later, I discovered an essay by Edward Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, in which he tries to solve the old and difficult riddle of why people climb mountains. The essay, "Mountain Music," appears in his book The Journey Home, and it answered my remaining questions.

"Reproduction and mere survival," Abbey writes, "never have been good enough for humankind. We torture one another, we torture ourselves, we torture the universe with our questioning, our endless strife, the tedious struggle against death. Even a simple hike up Whitney, even the mild walk and scramble to the apex of Sierra Blanca in Colorado (last week's holiday), involves that element of risk and effort which compensates for the usual banality of our lives. We love the taste of freedom. We enjoy the smell of danger. We take pleasure in the consummation of mental, spiritual, and physical effort; it is the achievement of the summit that brings the three together, stamps them with the harmony and unity of a point. Of a meaning."

I learned that a lived life is better than one unlived, and that living intensely is the best course of all. A heightened and deepened existence may not ensure that the person who opts for that course will be "excellent" and "virtuous" in a way Socrates would recognize, but I am certain that it creates a better life than the one I had before Yellowstone. To a moral certainty, I know that one is better off in the woods than in the reclining chair with a TV remote--and I haven't even mentioned weight gain.