The Human Pace, part 2
There’s something about the human pace. Is it the soul’s pace, too? Am I my whole-est, holiest self when I move as an animal through a wild place? What space is created by a three mile an hour pace? What are my senses capable of when I’m moving slowly?
On foot in the Frank Church – River of No Return Wilderness I knew that I needed my senses to be fully operational. Moving through severely burned terrain required a quality of vigilance. My eyes were trained to the trail. “Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world,” writes Rebecca Solnit. While my mind certainly wandered farther than my feet did that week, there were times when the two had to be in lockstep. At times each footfall mattered, the consequences of a misstep high.
Sight wasn’t the only sense critical to me that week. Nothing rocketed my attention back to the present moment in the Frank Church like the tail of a rattlesnake, warning me off. Often, I was just hearing grasshoppers, who swarmed the trail where it crossed scree slopes in choruses capable of drowning out any forewarning a rattlesnake might attempt to make. Other times I was hearing a single grasshopper moving through or somehow entangled in dry grass – a particularly compelling imitation. On three occasions, I heard rattlesnakes. Twice from comfortable distances of about ten feet.
In Becoming Animal, David Abram writes of a quality of being, “a language that stirs a new humility in relation to other earthborn beings.” Once, when the trail hugged the canyon wall and I had nowhere to redirect my path, I was forced to pass a rattlesnake with barely any margin at all. I knew that the capacity for harm between us went both ways. I knew morality wasn’t a thing out here, but mortality was. I knew that, where I was concerned, this snake wanted nothing but to be left alone. I shook in my animal body still, as was reasonable, and felt very alive on the far side of that encounter.
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It occurred to me in moments out in the Frank Church when my mind felt safe enough to wander a bit off-trail, that the places to which I feel the most attachment are not necessarily the places I’ve lived the longest, but the places in which I’ve walked the most. That place attachment, for me, has been an outcome of connecting in this particular way: moving through a wild landscape like an animal, merging the capacities of mind and body and focusing them on a single task – getting from one place to the next. Experience is deepened by the demand of my full attention in environments that require all of me to be there and nowhere else. These are the places my heart pulls me to again and again. This is the quality of being that feels right to me.
On my last full day of hiking that week, the Middle Fork Trail entered what I now think of as its adventure miles. I wasn’t within a short hike of any of the ranch inholdings responsible for most of the trail’s usage, and, for this one stretch, the trail ran on both sides of the river, halving the traffic on each side.
The topography, along with the ecosystem, had been changing around me since day two. The high-montane conifer forest ecoregion I began in – much of it burned, but much of it forested still in a variety of pine and fir trees, and gently tending downhill – was transitioning. I watched the forests slowly give way to the dry canyon ecoregion, dominated by sparse ponderosa and sagebrush and the spires and rocky headlands that make the Middle Fork the third deepest river canyon in the country.
On this particular day my usually well-delineated trail dispersed in a scattershot of animal trails at the base of each headland I came to. I repeatedly took what looked to be the most direct route up and over; I was repeatedly wrong about my route of choice having been made by and for bipedal animals such as myself. I cliffed-out three times and found myself hundreds of feet above the river, a sheer drop between us. Lacking the nimbleness and the fearlessness of the bighorn sheep – who, by the looks of their prints and other leave-behinds were the only animals to ever visit these heights – I slid back down the scree slopes I’d just climbed and tried again.
Each time, I found that the trail took a wide arc inland, gaining and losing minimal elevation in the process. Such is the shape the elements have given this place. Were I inclined to constantly check my progress by referencing a little blue dot on a downloaded map, I might’ve saved myself a handful of adventure miles that day. But for a few moments, I had a bighorn sheep’s vantage of the river and wilderness. By the time I was soaking in Loon Creek hot springs later that night, I was pleased with the whole day, diversions and cliff-outs included.
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This was my second trip into the Frank Church – River of No Return Wilderness to raft the Middle Fork. Two visits; three weeks total; .1% of my life. I can’t claim any kind of serious attachment to this place. I understand, however, that the investment of emotions and experiences in a place is the how of place attachment. When I go places, I can behave in certain ways that deepen the experience available to me. I can, with the use of my attention and my ability to just be a sensing animal, begin to guess at what an attachment to that place might feel like.
“All of the more than 850 miles of trail described in detail have been hiked by the author,” Margaret Fuller writes of herself in the third person in her introduction to Trails of the Frank Church – River of No Return Wilderness. She doesn’t appear again, obliquely or explicitly, in the pages of her book, but I thought about her a lot as I made my way down the Middle Fork Trail.
“Margaret’s…knowledge of Frank Church Wilderness trails, acquired through decades of hiking and exploration in the remote, rugged landscapes of the Frank has always impressed me. This is the most comprehensive collection of information on hiking trails in the Frank Church Wilderness you will find,” reads the guidebook’s forward written by Sally Ferguson, Executive Director of the Selway Bitterroot Frank Church Foundation.
Ferguson later writes, “A trail provides an opportunity for us to see ourselves as a momentary part of the wilderness.” I can’t help but wonder what Margaret Fuller, thousands of miles into her relationship with the Frank Church, might say to that in response.
“Walking returns the body to its original limits again, to something supple, sensitive, and vulnerable,” writes Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Depth of relationship available and degree of vulnerability braved are certainly correlated elsewhere in life; maybe it’s that vulnerability that makes walking such a powerful way of getting to know a place.
And might the next logical step be true as well? If walking reminds me of my animal nature and attaches me to place, I wonder if simply remembering my animal nature attaches me to place? I wonder if the places to which I have the strongest attachments are the ones that have somehow drawn on my instinctual, animal self in powerful ways?
I wonder how Fuller sees herself when she’s out in the Frank Church. Is she a momentary part of the wilderness? Or has she returned there again and again, walked the river’s edge and scaled its crags, because she senses she’s not? When she leaves only to be pulled back again – to hike the same miles she’s hiked before, perhaps in a different season, under different skies – I wonder if she’s wondered or guessed at what it is doing the pulling.
