I recently whiled away a few days in Death Valley National Park, sleeping in a tent, sedulously reapplying sunscreen, and generally existing in a state of discomfort. The some-odd-hundred dollars spent on a plane ticket and rental car was money well spent.
It was my second visit to the Valley. I made the first during January of last year, renting a little shoebox of a cabin (with amenities like electricity and running water) with my wife when the temperature was a balmy 65° F. The point of this trip was to get better acquainted with the place, closer to the time of year where it lives up to its name. (Last July the average high temperature was 116° F, and in early September it reached a high of 127° F.)
My spouse didn’t come with me this time; she definitely wouldn’t have enjoyed herself much.
I brought books to read. I had problems I wanted to contemplate at a distance from home. It was impossible. The heat truncates any line of cognition and cauterizes the basal thought. There wasn’t much to do but find shade to lie around in, eat trail mix, and briefly take up chain smoking again while gazing out at the striated mountains in the distance. Allowing the mind to ease into the mold of the environment. Silent. Bare. Inarticulate. Passively exploring the state of no-self that makes being in your own skin palatable when the mercury’s approaching the hundred-degree line, the air is aggressively drying you out, and there’s no air conditioning to escape into.
If Thoreau had come here to “live simply” and think things over, the book he’d write afterwards would have had a totally different message. Perhaps Henry David would have concluded that the quiet desperation and provincial mindset of the town ain’t so bad, all things considered. Or maybe he wouldn’t have come back at all. The desert has a way of making the niceties of civilization—books, letters, philosophy, politics, fashion—seem like so much empty frippery. Very likely one misses and desires them in inverse proportion to the duration of his or her visit.
Somewhere beyond space and time, there’s an alternate history where Thoreau somehow ended up in a Death Valley lean-to instead of a Walden cabin, and willfully allowed his “experiment” to go off the rails and turn into a lifestyle. A footnote in the local history would tell of an emaciated, sunburned fella with a New England accent who skulked about the badlands wearing goatskin skivvies, collecting pinyon nuts, lapping from springs, and amusing the Timbisha Shoshone tribe in exchange for scraps of meat. For a while, they say, he kept detailed records and drew sketches of spring wildflowers and migrating birds—but after the fourth year his last pencil broke and he took to simply eating the flowers and yelling at the birds…
“Don’t trick yourself into thinking we came here to do something,” my travelling companion reminded me when I got restless. It was good advice.
The underlying point of any camping trip, whether or not one is explicitly aware of it, is to attain an altered state of consciousness through the short-circuiting of behavioral patterns. Who do we become when we’re severed from our homes, our jobs, and all the stuff with which we ordinarily occupy ourselves? What do our thoughts tend toward when there’s no wireless internet or cell service, and we can’t peer into Twitter or Instagram or Reddit, gab on Discord, watch Netflix, play video games, look at the news, or listen to true crime podcasts or people confabbing about sports on the radio? What tertiary habits come to the fore when we’re unpaired from our peripherals for days at a time?
We loped through the scrub and scree, kicking at rusted cans that probably antedated us, and disturbing a thousand grasshoppers. Then we retreated to the shade and passed a water bottle back and forth like it was a handle of whiskey. After a while there wasn’t much left for either of us to say. It was so quiet that the hummingbird darting about the mesquite tree we sat beneath produced a persistently audible thrumming sound. The things are louder than you suppose. We’re used to meeting them in our gardens, inundated in the echoes of all the motor traffic we’ve stopped noticing.
I could think of nothing to do but make note of the bare fact of it.
At night, switching on a flashlight attracted upwards of ten moths within as many minutes. I counted dozens of satellites swimming across the sky like dim little spermatozoa.
This isn’t the same desert that it was a hundred years ago. For all practical purposes, neither are we the same animal.
Rosseau was wrong. There was never an age of human innocence, nor is there a baseline “natural” state from which we’ve deviated and of which we can attain knowledge, let alone return to. Any sojourn we take away from civilization (and virtually none of us can withdraw from it completely for any appreciable amount of time), whether we call it “camping,” “roughing it,” or “being in nature,” discloses less of our immutable human character or any fundamental relations between man and the Earth than it does about the zone from which we’ve momentarily stepped away.
Of all animals, Homo sapiens is alone in being capable of nudity, because no other creature can reconfigure the matter of the world into the forms of its own skin and nerves and memory, and wear it as a sheath, a chassis, an exoskeleton, a prosthetic symbiont. In nakedness do we most clearly perceive the garments we’ve shed, and can best appreciate the ways in which they wear us.
I’ve never had much aptitude for introductions or declarations of purpose. This will do for now.