Walking Home

reveries of an amateur long-distance hiker

Mediating a Mountain

June 9th, 2021

Mediating a Mountain—some thoughts on Nan Shepherd and Elise Wortley

After some years of exploring nature writing through actual material practices (e.g., that time we framed up Thoreau’s house using only the tools he could have used “Building Thoreau’s House”), I was gratified to read Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways where he encountered Edward Thomas’s poetry by following the paths he had walked. It seems a simple, even obvious, move, but it is one at some distance from much academic writing which tends to comment on other writing. Macfarlane’s approach provides real insight. Thinking back to Walden and our woodworking, it is surprising how few pages Thoreau devotes to actually building his house even though, as we learned, felling those “arrowy pines,” squaring them with an axe, and joining the resultant beams with mortise and tenon joints is incredibly time-consuming (at least for 21st century novices). Walden became a radically different book for us after that experience. It is not surprising that I found myself drawn to the work of Elise Wortley—Woman with Altitude—who studies famous women walkers (e.g., Nan Shepherd and Alexandra David-Neel) by walking their paths with period clothes and equipment. I’ve had the opportunity to trek in the Himalayas though not David-Neel’s path (and I walked with 21st century gear). I’ve also have had a good wander around the Cairngorms and have long thought Shepherd’s Living Mountain is perhaps the best nature writing ever (pace Thoreau).

Usually mediating nature—those mountains—involves movement between text and path, that well-worn distinction between word and thing, a jump that has always troubled me as it seems so stark, a vertiginous abyss between the material world and our sometimes feeble efforts to refashion it with words. Wortley, with her unusual strategy—along with her filmmaking friend from Wilderness Scotland (Rupert Shanks) who made a short film of her Nan Shepherd research—helps show how what seems an abyss is actually a series of short leaps, almost like crossing a creek (or burn) by stepping from stone to stone. https://vimeo.com/368036090

The short film depicts (and is) a range of incremental mediations, showing many material practices that are part and parcel of what we think of as mediation. The first and obvious strategy is Wortley’s voiceover. She does not speak in her own voice; instead she reads passages from The Living Mountain. At one point she is filmed sitting by the path reading from a tattered paperback copy. The filmmaker integrates images of her walk in the Cairngorms with passages from the text. The viewer is treated with a panorama of the rough peaks of that massif while Wortley/Shepherd exclaim “one has to look creatively to see this mass of rock as more than jag and pinnacle—as beauty.” The film links closely image and text— very much in the tradition of nature documentary, but that by itself replicates the binaries of word/world, or here image/world.

It is within the action of the film that mediating the mountain gets interesting. Along with the book, another printed text appears— a well-worn topo map (I’m guessing a UK ordnance survey). Again, a distant (scale of miles) representation, but for trekkers, a bit more. They learn to see the subtleties of contour, elevation gain and loss directly correlated to the image the Cairngorms themselves (on a clear day) produce. Those topographic lines are not just seen, but are also felt; they are embodied at a glance by the experienced hiker. Discussing the beauty she encounters, Wortley/Shepherd notes, “A certain kind of consciousness interacts with the mountain-forms to create this sense of beauty. Yet the forms must be there for the eye to see.” Here the film shifts from cartography to aesthetics but the two are of a piece. The mountain forms need to be there for the aesthetically inclined eye to find beauty, but they also must be there to confirm the topography represented by maps, seen by eyes, and felt through feet.

The opening scenes, perhaps unintentionally, raise this point. The camera focuses not so much on Wortley in relation to the mountain, but instead on her feet following a rocky path. This of course calls attention to her period attire—she wears a hand-sewn pair of leather boots—handsome, but a far cry from the comfort and stability demanded by today’s trekkers. Something more is going on in this opening scene— another form of mediation makes an appearance that begins to re-articulate the word/world gap. For Wortley (along with so many Cairngorm walkers), the mountain is first felt through feet. The leather soles of her boots are a media form. Sure, eyes and images are important, but so are those feet and all the small muscles in her knees, ankles, and hips, each teaching the terrain in a way more intimate than graphic representation.

In his introduction to the most recent edition of The Living Mountain, Robert Macfarlane calls attention to the similarity of parts of the book with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. One section Wortley chooses to read up on the mountain that day is perhaps the best example. But I have a nagging suspicion that phenomenology with its concern with “consciousness of” the material world can only go so far in understanding Shepherd’s mediation of the mountain. As we will see in a moment, she references consciousness, but as Shepherd states and Wortley’s research reveals, the mountain becomes something you enter into, not become conscious of. There seems in this layered mediation, something that evades conscious apprehension. Here Macfarlane rightly signals Merleau-Ponty’s as a phenomenology that would accommodate this broadened sense of mediation, and yet to me, it seems she is doing a bit more here, that her experience of the mountain is somehow more elemental than the phenomenological.

Wortley’s boots on that path show that experience—even the experience of reading nature writing—is worked out in the middle, not on the endpoints of a polarity of mind/world or text/object. Shepherd and Wortley understand well the in-between. Many modern walkers— particularly those “quants” with fitbits —measure their movement by specific geographic or numerical goals. They live beginnings and ends. In contrast, The Living Mountain is always in the middle, the milieu. Even structurally, the book works through chapters (often elemental) and does not narrate a temporal sequence. Indeed, I think one characteristic of the best nature writing is a de-emphasis of narrative. As Shepherd says early in the book (and Wortley repeats at the beginning of the film): “Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.”

Wortley’s shoes mediate the material world while the path she follows mediates both the mountain and generations of Scottish walkers. The path the film features prominently is both physical and graphic. It is a history of feet and a mark on a map and on the ground—here is a line, follow it! (Footpaths). And it is also a history. Once while walking down the southwest side of Cairn Lochan on my way to Ben MacDui, I looked off to the west and could see in the distance Ben Nevis. An older man stood on the path looking in the same direction. He said he had been walking the massif for over fifty years and there were few days when Ben Nevis appeared. At first I was struck by the visual privilege I had been given that day, but then I realized how his fifty years was very much part of the line I was tracing. Paths are communal and require the ongoing presence of feet to remain clear, open, and legible—to continue to produce meaning. I was talking with a long-term contributor to that knowledge and a source of that mark.

Although the film only makes glancing reference to it (and Wortley’s boots skillfully avoid it), water is a medium Shepherd explores at length (air gets the full treatment as well). Early in the chapter entitled “Water,” she invokes communication: “Water is speaking.” Of course it is easy to mention babbling brooks (or in her vernacular, burns), but Shepherd’s speaking water is not soporific. It too, like the path, is full of meaning (both interpreted and felt); its sounds guide the walker on her way through those peaks and vales:

“The sound of all this moving water is as integral to the mountain as pollen to the flower. One hears it without listening as one breathes without thinking. But to a listening ear the sound disintegrates into many different notes—the slow slap of a loch, the high clear trill of a rivulet, the roar of spate. On one short stretch of burn the ear may distinguish a dozen different notes at once.”

Through sheer repetition over years of wandering the Cairngorms, Shepherd learns to listen to the sounds literally pouring from the mountain, to distinguish various and complex messages. For Shepherd, water as a medium is the message.

Not just sound, Cairngorm water is also taste and a touch that engenders a sense of embodiment: “This water from the granite is cold. To drink it at the source makes the throat tingle. A sting of life is in its touch.” In The Living Mountain, water is a source of physical satiation but also a signal of alarm: “Water, that strong white stuff, one of the four elemental mysteries, can here be seen at its origins. Like all profound mysteries, it is so simple that it frightens me.” Her’s is an interesting fear, one sometimes felt by walkers who encounter what feels to be the purely elemental, that which is devoid of mediation and provokes a thrill, perhaps even the nausea of the sublime (Water). But rather than framing such an encounter as beyond media or prior to it, Shepherd makes mediation itself elemental. Before words, before images, there is water—pure media. In the above quotation, she is regarding water, later she directly encounters it when attempting to ford a rain-swollen burn: “For the most appalling quality of water is its strength. I love its flash and gleam, its music, its pliancy and grace, its slap against my body; but I fear its strength.” Yes, in Shepherd’s world the water speaks.

A body that has learned to fear the strength of the water becomes for Shepherd and Wortley a way into the mountain. Unlike Emerson, a founder of American nature writing, Shepherd’s nature does not symbolize some higher, transcendental power, but instead is, in its very materiality, what we access directly by being in it. She refuses a figure of speech that abstracts—pointing elsewhere—and instead is resolute in pointing toward the experience of the flesh in and of that mountain as meaning in itself, as first writing. Wortley reads at length from The Living Mountain:

“Walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent. But no metaphor, transparent, or light as air, is adequate. The body is not made negligible, but paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body. It is therefore when the body is keyed to its highest potential and controlled to a profound harmony deepening into something that resembles trance, that I discover most nearly what it is to be. I have walked out of the body and into the mountain.”

Like her elemental water, Shepherd’s walking is itself a mediation of her essential body—one that does not stop at the skin, but is made and made meaningful (at the same time) by its and the mountain’s inter-worlding. Her “walking out of the body” is no transcendence, nor is it spiritual in a traditional sense. Nor is it some abstract oneness. Rather it is the aggregate that walkers sometimes experience—the sense of being as there, in all its messy, multiple, plural immediacy. And let’s not forget, immediacy’s etymological root is media.

The film then turns to Shepherd’s phenomenological aesthetics, one that rejects the spectatorial for the immersive—an embodied plunge into a wider, worldly body found through walking (Brutal Beauty). Wortley reads from her copy of the book—the one that has clearly spent time on the mountain itself, absorbing its blows—directly addressing the problem of beauty in a way that reframes or at least points in a direction different from Immanuel Kant’s formulation:

“Why some blocks of stone, hacked into violent and tortured shapes, should so profoundly tranquillise the mind I do not know. Perhaps the eye imposes its own rhythm on what is only a confusion: one has to look creatively to see this mass of rock as more than jag and pinnacle—as beauty. Else why did men for so many centuries think mountains repulsive? A certain kind of consciousness interacts with the mountain-forms to create this sense of beauty. Yet the forms must be there for the eye to see. And forms of a certain distinction: mere dollops won’t do it. It is, as with all creation, matter impregnated with mind: but the resultant issue is a living spirit, a glow in the consciousness, that perishes when the glow is dead.”

What intrigues me is Shepherd’s notion of “matter impregnated with mind” which seems to re-inscribe any number of traditional binarisms, ones that the book (and the film) are working against. Mind and consciousness are barely categories in this text except as effects of the ongoing unfolding of experience of the mountains and its elementals. She introduces beauty as a category—how could she not?—only to ignore traditional notions of unity, symmetry, balance, etc., to embrace a processual immersion of sights, sounds, smells, and bodies—the “confusion” of being in and with the mountain.

In the immediately following passage, Shepherd turns from aesthetics to ontology, though I think she purposely elides the distinction: “It [a living spirit] is something snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us continuously and can be held off by continuous creative act. So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.” With this Shepherd brings the last binarism—being/nonbeing— back into the middle, giving new meaning to the notion of love (and I think representing the love Wortley is expressing in her taking on a version of Shepherd’s sense of being). Being-in-with-the mountain is the subject of the entire book but she gets there by walking into it, in those hand sewn leather boots and homespun clothes, not seeking transcendence or abstraction but instead a sense of the admixture of being and non-being in a “continuous creative act.” From that perspective, Shepherd is more Whiteheadian than phenomenological. The sentence “Man has no other reason for his existence” is not so much existential—a way of framing individual being (an impulse to demarcate self)—as it is a celebration of our minor selves in the milieu of “the vastness of non-being” which is, as she has been saying all along, the source of the material being that produces meaning, mediates self as mountain. It is a nature “writ” (lived) large.

T. Hugh Crawford

Walking to the Smoky Mountains, Day 11

June 9th, 2021

Walking to the Smoky Mountains, Day 11, June 8

Sandy Gap — Tellico River 15 miles

In the middle of the night, the rains came in, and I had that moment of satisfaction being in a well-pitched, well-designed tent. Just had to check around the edges to be sure nothing leaned on the tent “tub”, then lay back to listen to the drops. By morning the clouds had moved off, and even with the typical early fog (after all, I’m close to the Smokys) it looked to be a clearer day than the last few. And of course, I’m on my way to town, a hot meal and a soft bed.

This was an interesting stretch. I’d stayed in a more or less dry camp (feet hurt too bad to seek out possible water 1/4 mile away). As it turned out, water was no problem after about 6 miles as the trail crossed and recrossed Brookshire Creek all morning. A fascinating watershed where dozens of small streams fed the creek up fairly high on the mountain, making quite a torrent all the way down the ridge. Guthook labeled a number of crossings as “fords”, but thankfully only one (at the top of a wonderful falls) actually required wading. The others I crossed rock hopping. The afternoon was a climb up the Bald River watershed (the river of the famous falls), followed by a fast descent to the Tellico.

And after a week and a 1/2, I finally encountered another thruhiker— actually two— heading southbound a few miles apart. It highlighted just how solitary this trek has been. After my first night at Three Forks, I’ve been the only tent in any campsite I’ve pitched in (except of course the mystery empty tent back at Halloway Gap). The first was a man probably about my age who had to abandon the BMT last year midway (something these blisters might require me to do) and was now doing the second half. Nice man. Then I bumped into a serious hiker from Birmingham who has done many trails in these mountains including the Pinhoti last year. Clearly fit and experienced, we had a brief but good talk. There’s much common understanding between experienced trekkers that forms a baseline for conversation.

I’d like to think today was a short day, but measured out at 15 miles, which has been pretty much the total for most days. I got to the Tellico Trail Head at 2:30, and by a little after three, Jacob (the guy who Lance, from Trout Mountain Inn had recruited to pick me up) arrived, and soon the miles were ticking by at an unfamiliar pace as we made our way to Tellico Plains— a small Tennessee town where most of the main businesses are out on the highway, but with a couple of blocks of old downtown with classic old storefronts which is where Trout Mountain is located. Lance, Cheryl, and Ammon are wonderful and interesting California transplants who make some of the best coffee I’ve ever tasted. Before shedding my shoes, I trudged out to the strip mall to get resupplied, pick up some beer and a gallon of lemonade, along with an early dinner at The Bears Den pizza place— another kind and interesting cook running the place.

Feet still brutalized, but a satisfying day, and a good place to rest up.

Walking to the Smoky Mountains, Day 10

June 9th, 2021

Walking to the Smoky Mountains, Day 10, June 7

Coker Creek to Sandy Gap 17.5 miles

In past long-distance hikes, right around the seventh or eighth day, the world of work and obligation fades to a distant place, and then I have wonderful and interesting conversations with myself while walking that long path. Something always prompts a revery or a memory worth thinking through. I dunno, maybe it’s pandemic hangover, or maybe the rigors of this trail (it can be difficult), but I have yet to find a rhythm that brings solace.

Today was long and in the rain. Mostly ascent since the Hiawassee is the low point of the trail. The climbs didn’t bother me, and the rain kept it cool, but it was something of a plod. Fortunately on arrival at Sandy Gap, the rain stopped, the wind freshened and the sun came out. Now at least everything is just damp instead of soaking wet. Tomorrow I head to Tellico River, then get a ride to Tellico Plains for resupply and a zero day.

Walking to the Smoky Mountains, Day 9

June 9th, 2021

Walking to the Smoky Mountains, Day 9, June 6

Lost Creek tent site-Coker Creek campsite 16.6 miles

By far the most difficult day. It rained hard in the night and everything was wet, as was the trail. So even though the opening parts were easy flat walking, my feet were soon soaking and some blisters that had been bothering me blew up. The first few miles were on an old, overgrown railroad grade full of flowers and following a stream. I kept getting a whiff of cucumbers, which reminded me of the old story that pigs don’t eat cucumbers because that’s what snakes smell like. I question the veracity of that tale, but paid attention when the smell returned, looking for either a plant that smelled like salad or a serpent in the grass. Because of my early start I missed going to Webb’s store in Reliance—the town’s post office and all-around general store though I got to see the historic Hiawassee Meeting House in the early morning while the mist rose up from the river. I also took a half mile detour to eat breakfast at Reliance Fly and Tackle—another must-see fishing store with resupply and hot food— a couple of biscuits later I was heading back down the hill for a day that pretty much followed the

Hiawassee upstream. The river, which is also controlled by the TVA is a popular rafting and kayaking spot. Later in the day the trail wound up on some ridges above the river with large ledge rock overhangs. There I saw my first copperhead of the trip, and then realized the trail was a snake hunter’s dream, and so I proceeded with caution. Sore feet slowed my pace, but arriving in camp there was a little sun (but not enough to dry things out). To cap it all off, a semi-swarm of honey bees descended on my sweaty clothes and the outside of my tent. After getting stung, I had to zip in and wait until dark for them to leave. And of course, like any dinner party, two just kept hanging around.

Walking to the Smoky Mountains, Day 7

June 4th, 2021

Walking to the Smoky Mountains, Day 7, June 4

Double Spring Gap to highway 74 (and on to Ducktown) 11.1 miles

Short hiking day—heading in to Ducktown to resupply for a 4 day stretch. A few days back I stopped to talk to a man (about my age) who was standing near the top of a mountain carrying nothing but trekking poles. He told me what to anticipate in the miles immediately ahead, mentioned some stretches he enjoyed, then looked down, gripped his poles tightly and said— “Big Frog, uh uh!” Last night I camped at Double Springs (a gap with a spring on either side of the trail, one in Georgia, one in Tennessee—I drank Georgia water that night). That campsite is at the foot of Big Frog, so my day started with the longest, steepest ascent thus far. It’s not like Roan mountain or some others on the AT, but it got my heart pumping first thing in the morning.

After those early exertions it was, as they say, all downhill from there. Long stretches of well graded and maintained paths, many, like Georgia, on old logging roads. Some of the ridges were steeper and paths narrower, so I relearned some caution I had not yet needed. The only excitement was a moment when I heard a crashing in the woods just down below the trail. An unseen mama bear making a ruckus, while I could see a small black bear cub climbing a tree. Wish I could have stayed to watch, but it was not all that clear where mama had gone, so I proceeded posthaste.

On hitting the highway near noon, I walked down to the Ocoee Whitewater Center (site of the 96 Olympics whitewater competitions) where it was easier to hitch a ride. A really nice truck driver named Bill picked me up and took me all the way to the Copper Inn, a motel recommended by the BMT guides. Nice folks who arranged transport back tomorrow morning. Ducktown is an old copper town, but the mines have long since closed, and nothing much has taken its place except seasonal river rafting. Even the Piggly Wiggly is closed, so I had to resupply at the Family Dollar. That experience helped me understand better the dietary challenges of rural America.

Much of the town is in disrepair and many of the shops are closed (I suspect covid has something to do with that). The bright spot is Rods Rockin Rolls— a restaurant specializing in Thai food and sushi, but (given the need for diversity) they also have an Italian menu. I spent the evening in their garden courtyard, sipping a beer and trying the fare. Was the highlight of the day.

T. Hugh Crawford

Walking to the Smoky Mountains, Day 6

June 4th, 2021

Walking to the Smoky Mountains, Day 6, June 3

Halloway Gap to Double Spring Gap 17.3 miles

Last night I was reading Suzanne Simard’s The Mother Tree— a section where she and a friend had to climb trees to escape a mother grizzly, not exactly the best story to be reading alone in the wilds of the North Georgia mountains. My sleep was undisturbed, but in the middle of the morning, while rounding a curve in the trail I found myself face to face with the biggest black bear I’ve ever seen. We briefly eyed each other, then he turned and ran up the hill. I’ll need to check on my appearance when I get to the next town.

It was a day of up and down. Started with a light rain, then sun, then rumbling thunder all afternoon and I had to trot the last three miles only to have the heavens open about 15 ministers from the campsite. I got the tent pitched in the rain, crawled in with all my gear, and waited it out. Between the rains, it was a beautiful day. Along with the bear, I ran up on an eagle eating some rodent it has just caught. Just before, I noticed the trail was all torn up—not like the way bears do, saw plenty of that today too—it was unusual. The eagle and I both startled each other, with a rush of wings and a mole in his talon made it clear he was not going to share. Later in the day I scared up a whitetail deer, one of many I’ve seen on this trip. I love how their tails flop up, flashing white when they run away.

One of today’s more notable observations involves the blooming rhododendron. They have white flowers and the fallen petals look like little gears. There’s a species of butterfly, tiny and pure white, who live in the rhododendrons. It’s windy on the ridge so the flower petals are often torn from the stem and float across the trail. Sometimes the butterflies take off at the same time, and appear to be flower petals that have decided to fly.

Simard got me thinking about mother trees—few to be seen here so far though today I saw the largest maple I’ve ever seen. There are many more maples in these woods than I expected. But the tree of the day was on the peak of Flat Top mountain. In a small flat open space stands a magnificent old oak. Not really a mother tree as it stands in isolation on that peak, but still imposing. Had to stop to say hello.

T. Hugh Crawford

Walking to the Smoky Mountains, Day 5

June 4th, 2021

Walking to the Smoky Mountains, Day 5, June 2

US 76 to Halloway Gap 15 miles

After my complimentary breakfast at the Douglas Inn (some of that screw tap cereal) I caught a ride back to the trail head for the next stretch which will in a few days take me over the Tennessee line. The west side of the highway is much like he east, with the trail winding between developments, alternating short bits of trail with road walking. I was surprised how far out the development goes, it when it finally broke through the BMT offered some of the best paths— winding down narrow draws beside streams in some older growth woods. This area has been extensively logged so it is rare to run up on what Suzanne Simard calls “Mother Trees” but there are still stands that soothe the soul. The tree size signals logging as does the presence of faint, often overgrown logging roads. The designers of the BMT took advantage of those already formed tracks, and the trail often turns onto one for a while.

Today the trail also turned onto another long road walk, this one through old and often derelict farms. The developers are only just now arriving, but it is still possible to see what the area was like when the people were fairly isolated from the flatlands. Lots of confederate flags still flying. By noon I was finished with the day’s road walking and entered the national forest for some beautiful winding trails with a lot of ascent and descent. I’d checked the weather and expected afternoon showers which arrived on schedule— mostly just sprinkles for several hours. But of course it intensified just as I was nearing the day’s end— a really great campsite just down off the trail a bit beside a stream. I hustled to it just as the skies opened, pitched my trusty ZPacks tent as fast as humanly possible and crawled in to wait out the storm. When I arrived I was surprised to find a tent already pitched. By and large this has been a solitary trek, with only encounters with day hikers and few of those. Imagine my surprise when the rain stopped. I crawled out of my tent and went over to introduce myself to an empty abandoned tent (glad it was empty!). So once again, it’s just me and the bears.

T. Hugh Crawford

Walking to the Smoky Mountains, Day 4

June 4th, 2021

Walking to the Smoky Mountains, Day 4, June 1

Garland Gap to Blue Ridge 15.4 miles (plus hitch into town)

In the last 4 or 5 miles of a long bicycle ride, my friend Greg would note our increase in speed and say “smelling the barn.” Like Greg’s proverbial horse, I was smelling the barn today. The prospect of a hot shower, a meal with fresh vegetables, and not having to hang a bear bag had a strong appeal and no doubt quickened my pace. Today was also the day my trekking legs started to reappear. Still stiff and sore, but now able to maintain pace. I was up and off early because I wanted time in Blue Ridge to resupply and just relax. The early morning trail off Garland Gap was ideal, and watching the sun work it’s way up the sky through the trees quickened my steps. At one road crossing I ran up on a wild turkey, always exciting.

The two concerns I had were a long road walk and, at the end, getting a ride into town. (Only later did I remember I had a friend who I could have called—forgetfulness can be a curse). The road walk was along a beautiful stretch of the Toccoa river, crossing at the old Shallowford Bridge. Road walks tend to reduce concentration. You have to worry about traffic, and it is easy to miss a turn— which is precisely what I did, adding 2 miles to the day. But they also give you a chance to see houses and farms tucked up in the coves. That area is becoming heavily developed and some houses are monstrosities, but there were a number that were inviting. Trying to hitch on US 76 — 4 lanes with a speed limit of 65 is nearly impossible, but you can count on the hospitality of mountain folk. A minivan with a young family turned around, picked me up and delivered me to the Douglas Inn.

When my son Bennett and I hiked the Appalachian Trail, we discovered (particularly in the northern parts) on arriving in small towns there usually was an inexpensive hostel, but also an old classic motel—the kind with lawn chairs in front of the rooms facing the parking lot. Since there were two of us, the cost of the motel was similar to the hostel, so after resupply, Bennett would take his break from the trail watching television, while I would get a book and a beer and read on that “veranda.” This is all just to say, on a trail town day, I’ll look hard for one of those classic motels, enjoying my evening this time at the Douglas Inn, reading a book and looking out at the empty swimming pool.

T. Hugh Crawford

Walking to the Smoky Mountains, Day 1

June 4th, 2021

Walking to the Smoky Mountains Day 1, May 29

Day 1 Amicalola Visitors Center to Three Forks 15.1 miles (Approach Trail, then 6.1 on BMT)

Walt Whitman opens his “Song of the Open Road” with enthusiasm that is hard to match:

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

I aspire to light-hearted, healthy and free. Like so many finally crawling out of the husk of pandemic solitude (much like the 17 year cicadas emerging in the woods, dazed by the open), light-hearted is probably not the operant mood. And the joyful sort of health Whitman describes will only result from working hard to transition into a post covid world. Which is just to say, I look forward to feeling light-hearted and light-footed, soon I hope.

I have chosen “a long brown path.” The Benton Mackaye, named after one of the founders of the Appalachian Trail, is a 286 mile footpath beginning on Springer Mountain (the point of commencement for the AT) winding its way northwest through the North Georgia Appalachians crossing into Tennessee then touching North Carolina before traversing the Great Smokey Mountain National Park, ending near Davenport Gap. Unlike the AT, the Benton Mackaye, though well-maintained, is uncrowded, often remote, with little of the support system enjoyed by hikers of the Appalachian Trail.

In true trekker fashion, I included the approach trail up from Amicalola falls (which added 9 miles to the trek—a lot on the first day, a mere whisper on the last). There the path mingled day hikers, weekenders, and some AT section hikers. I think I was the only one heading off on the BMT. There was a large contingent of Boy Scouts on a preparatory hike before leaving for Philmont Ranch in New Mexico. Confident, exuberant, and loud, I was happy to be walking a different trail (though we did camp together at Three Forks, a point where the two trails cross).

I think I come at this trek in a mode different from all those others documented in this blog (and the many I took before starting WalkingHome). The need to flush away what has felt like some kind of pandemic-induced fugue state is front of mind, so I find myself desiring more from this saunter than I expected from others. In the spirit of Whitman’s “Open Road”:

Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,

They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.

******

Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!

Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d!

I have to admit that today I unable to leave behind lecture rooms, unwritten papers, and books on shelves. Throughout the walk I was preoccupied with life back in the flatlands. And I have to further admit that, even though my gear set-up performed well (see Inventory), my body did not. 15 months of the same thing, day in and day out, have clearly taken their toll, and I suspect it will take some time to get back to trekking fitness (mental and physical).

But, for a sense of optimism, I turn once again to Walt:

The earth never tires,

The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first,

Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d,

I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

Allons!

T. Hugh Crawford

A Conspiracy of Trees

August 6th, 2020

A Conspiracy of Trees

I want to revisit a forest walk— maybe this one near Lake St. Clair in Tasmania (the trek that prompts this essay) or ridge-top nothofagus in New Zealand’s Tararuas, or the old, twisted orchards that surrounded my boyhood home— to think about empiricism, specifically “radical empiricism,” and the problem of representation in nature writing. For decades literary scholars have “problematized” the notion of Representation (“problematize” means they talk about it, a lot). While nature writing often does its damnedest to invoke the beautiful and the sublime, it, unlike much imaginative writing, is anchored by the brute facts of the more or less directly experienced material world. In a sense, its representation is more aligned with science— the act of naming and categorizing—which helps account for much of the writing by today’s “new naturalists” who are either practicing scientists or write of their experiences with them. (I’m thinking of, for example, Robert Macfarlane, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Merlin Sheldrake, or Bernd Heinrich).

For those who remember their history of philosophy, radical empiricism is most directly associated with William James, the American philosopher from the late 19th century. In brief, empiricism is the philosophical position that understanding and knowledge arise from the direct experience of objects in the material world rather than through rational or logical categories that somehow preexist or transcend actual experience. James attaches the adjective “radical” to his empiricism to make room in thought not just for the isolated objects of experience but also for the experience of relations among them: “the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves.” James is of course arguing this fine point in the rare air of academic discourse. For trekkers, radical empiricism is simply the air we breathe. Unlike a scientific researcher who of necessity brings an abstract nomenclature designed to produce order and extract a specific (but often narrow) understanding of the objects of nature, for trekkers, wandering in the world brings both the perceptive clarity of specific objects—look at that tree, hear that bird, stub that toe on that rock—and at the same time the perceptual blur of conjunctive and disjunctive relationality. It is not so much a philosophical position as it is a necessary practice. The sights, sounds, and smells of the forest relay understanding of specific threats — the rattle of a snake— but also relational moods: the wind shows the underside of leaves, the humidity shifts, the birds go silent; the weather is changing. I don’t want to turn loose a philosophical concept onto the forest to find a way to “Represent Nature.” Instead I want to try to understand how thinking and knowing happen while wandering in an area teeming with sensation, with entangled multiples, with life.

Representation depends on the notion that the world presents itself to some generally outside observer, then language or art re-presents that world. For the radically empirical trekker (a redundancy) the individual furnishings of the world are not simply represented by a word or symbol, because they are not individual. Nothofagus alpina doesn’t stand in for those moss covered southern beech I wandered on a Tararua ridge except as the most rarified of abstraction or objectification. Those epiphytes and their symbionts were all of a piece, as was my presence there along with uncountable other nonhuman actors: “The humidity seems to go up as the temperature drops. The hairs on your arms respond even as your heart rate slows. The smell is both faint and acute, the merest but cleanest whiff of turned soil, and the moss itself breaths. We have no words to describe the sound of moss.”

Here is perhaps where James can join forces with his friend and philosophical colleague Charles Sanders Peirce. The two are best known as the founders of the philosophical school Pragmatism, but Peirce is also the author of a complex semiotics, a study of how signs make meaning. Unlike Ferdinand de Saussure who famously declared there is an arbitrary connection between the signifier and the signified, a point that later became generalized as an irretrievable split between word and thing, Pierce takes a different tack, bringing three possible forms of meaning production: icon, symbol, and index. The last—the notion that meaning can come from the act of pointing, brings us back to the forest. If the Latin nouns define and isolate the nothofagus, the pronoun (as Peirce explains in a different context) functions on another plane. It is indexical, pointing out that specific southern beech festooned with moss and lichens, not an abstract isolated botanical specimen. The indexical points toward an object but is intimately linked to the disjunctive and conjunctive relations constituting the moment (including the pointer and the observer following the finger).

Eduardo Kohn, author of the recent How Forests Think, brings Peirce (and, by implication, James) into the forest. Kohn uses his experience in the Amazonian rainforest to ascribe the meaning-making capacities of the indexical to non-human and even to non-neural beings. He explains, “For Saussure human language is the paragon and model for all sign systems …. Peirce’s definition of a sign, by contrast, is much more agnostic about what signs are and what kinds of beings use them; for him not all signs have language-like properties, and . . . not all the beings who use them are human.” The index is a pointing out or a signaling that turns the attention of any entity toward a part of the world, perhaps momentarily singling out a recognizable object (or threat) in the perceptual blur that is the experienced world. For Kohn, the myriad signals threading through the rain forest—odors, sounds, temperature gradients—are all a form of communication (between all those entities).

In contrast, a representation would be of a system in a single, stable slice of time. It could be called scenic, the Western privileging of the radical split between the object and its (human) observer. Conversely forest semiosis is fluid, unstable, and situation specific. As James would say, “Our fields of experience have no more definite boundaries than have our fields of view. Both are fringed forever by a more that continuously develops, and that continuously supersedes them as life proceeds.” Much nature writing tends to highlight that expected scenic moment: the point where the green tunnel opens up to a vast, open landscape, where the trekker becomes observer of the beautiful and sometimes sublime. But the trekker’s experience of the world is rarely that. Hours are spent, day after day, where experience is “fringed forever by a more,” and where meaning is not abstracted from noise but lived in and through it.

Another way is to think a forest walk as a conspiracy. For most that word calls up images of shadowy figures talking in hushed voices in out-of-the-way corners, but etymologically is means “breathing together.” To conspire is not so much to plot as it is to conjoin in recognition of mutual needs and desires. Trekking is always about breath. It’s keeping pace, increasing speed and slowing based on dimly perceived oxygen levels— oxygen encountered by breasting the air the forest has just made. The experience of the forest cannot be represented but it can be conspired. As Natasha Myers makes clear, “our worlds will only be livable worlds when people learn how to conspire with the plants.” Her’s is a practical and a political imperative. It is also (radically) empirical: “The objective nucleus of every man’s experience, his own body, is, it is true, a continuous percept; and equally continuous as a percept (though we may be inattentive to it) is the material environment of that body, changing by gradual transition when the body moves” (James). It’s not knowing about the forest, nor is it knowing with the forest, it is knowing as part of the forest, as its very breath: it’s a conspiracy.

PS. This year my time in the forest was cut short by the need to avoid conspiring. The Covid 19 pandemic brought me home from the woods to a place where breath is not to be shared. We now live in a world where responsible people wear masks to avoid sharing breath while, at the same time, some complain that masks inhibit breath and still others actively cut off the breath of their fellow humans. The product of an objectification that ignores the conjunctive and disjunctive relations that enable (and compel) us all to breathe together.

T. Hugh Crawford