Looking out the window

Looking out my bedroom window

I sit and look out the window. Funny. It hasn't been that long ago that I would have been shaken with guilt for spending my time on such a frivolous activity.  Actually, it is hard to admit but there was the day when the last thing I would think to do would be to look outside.  Those days seem so long ago but, as I look back at the computer, I realize that for so many people, such a tremendously high percentage of the population, that is current reality. That makes me sad and so I again turn to the window.

Out there is where I know real life.  It sounds corny but it's true. I had always liked the outdoors as a kid. I was the youngest member of a group of Explorer Scouts that were known for seeking out the most outlandish, wild adventures allowable. Well, sometimes we used the 'receiving-forgiveness-is-sometimes-easier-than-obtaining-permission' approach, but not too often.

One November in the late 1950s we decided to take a canoe trip down the French Creek. French Creek flows into the Allegheny and that becomes the Ohio River at Pittsburgh.  The thing is that we lived in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains in northwestern Pennsylvania.  It can start snowing there in October and often does. But we were determined. David Smith, the group leader and my next door neighbor, had a canoe known as 'the tipsy orange crate.' Only a few of us rode with David because it was so easy to flip. One of the boys hounded David for over an hour to let him ride in the tipsy orange crate. Finally David gave in. I switched places with the boy. Shortly we hit some fast moving water made worse by wind and snow and the next thing we knew David and the boy were in the water. We all made our way to a spot along the bank and built a large roaring fire. It was snowing hard by this time. We created a human wind-break as the two wet adventurers stripped down to their skivvies and dried by the fire. Once they were fairly dry I again took my place with David and we made our way the remaining miles to where the trucks were waiting to pick us up.

Covered bridge across French Creek in western Pennsylvania

I had always loved being out in the woods or in the water. I took my children camping. When we lived in McKean, PA we bought 40 acres of hilly woods. It was our get-away place and we camped there whenever we could.  My children seemed to enjoy being out there. That was before the days of cell phones, so we were alone. Come to think of it, that was also the time of life when we lived on five acres. We had two horses in the barn, a quarter of an acre in garden and four hives of bees. We canned 1,000 quarts a year. The well in the barn froze every winter so I had to take water to the horses in 5 gallon containers on a toboggan. I had a well beaten path from house to barn. One evening I was late getting home. When I got out of the car I could hear my wife screaming. She had tried to help out and take the water to the horses. She fell off the path. She was only 5 feet tall and the snow was so deep she couldn't get out. The average snowfall in that area was 110" of snow by January 1.  But we thrived.

When had I closed myself off to the out-of-doors?  When had I given up really living?  I'm not going to bore you by attempting to answer those questions. Actually I'm not sure they're worth the effort because somehow I found my way back.

 Goofy 40 mile back-to-back. Cinderella's castle just before dawn
18 miles down. 22 miles to go.

The closest I can come to identifying a starting point for my new life was when my Grandson was looking for someone to do a Disney 5k with him. His Mother was running the Walt Disney World Marathon so she couldn't do it. His Father was facing knee surgery and his sister was at college. That left Grandpa who was, at that time, walking with a cane because of arthritis. It took me five months to be able to "run". My first 5k race was the day before my 63rd birthday.  The next January I ran the Walt Disney World 1/2 Marathon. Before I was done with road racing I had done the WDW Goofy (a 40 mile back-to-back race) three times. Then I discovered trails and the ultra-marathon (runs of >40 miles) became my passion. I ran on beaches, in mountains and across deserts. I was back in nature. My life was renewed.  My life was saved.

I was getting ready for my last WDW Goofy when I met Pamela.  Before she starts thinking she caused me to give up the Goofy, let it be known that I gave them up because of the cost.  It was costing $600 plus room, board and transportation to do the Goofy.  Pamela and I met because of our mutual love for running. Then we discovered our other mutual loves - all centered around nature and being out of doors.  We spent most of that January hiking and camping around western Kentucky.

Pamela hiking at Penyrile State Park

Camping in Willy at Land-Between-the-Lakes, KY
Primitive camping - nothing but a place to park.

I'm sure our families thought us nuts when we bought Willy together after knowing each other only a month. But the kids all agree that we are like the proverbial 'two peas in a pod.'  You have to admit that you must be really compatible to be pretty much attached at the hip and live in 128 square feet for 90 days without even an argument. In that first year we not only worked at Glacier National Park from the first of May to the end of July but we traveled 11,700 miles, camped 134 nights in 17 states, visited 10 national parks/forests, cycled 300 miles, hiked 450 miles, kayaked 20 miles and went scuba diving in a glacier lake where the surface temperature was only 40 degrees on July 5th. Life doesn't get much better, but it did.

In my last blog I quoted Henry David Thoreau. I realized that, just as he feared and worked to avoid, I had come dangerously close to coming to the end of life without having lived.  When I was traveling alone and doing the ultra runs I had a pop-up trailer. On the side, written in Irish, was my motto "Don't stop living before you die." It was written in Irish because that made people ask me "what does that say?" I loved to translate it for them.

My first trip to St. Andrew State Park in Panama City, FL I had my pop-up. I parked it so close to the water that my pull-out bed literally hung out over the water. I could lay in my bed and watched alligators cruise the lagoon. When I went back with Pamela she had just started snorkeling and was so engrossed in following a giant sea turtle that she didn't realize that she was going right out to sea. I had to grab one of her fins to stop her. Pamela fell in love with all of the sea creatures along the jetty. I encountered an enormous Goliath Grouper in a sunken ship and six Barracuda each as big as me. What marvels of life on planet Earth! What treasures!  We would walk or bike along the edge of the fragile dunes admiring and taking pictures of the plants. In the evening we would watch the sun go down in the placid lagoon then lay in our bed in Willy with the lights out listening to the sounds of life around us. And we were a part of that life. We had torn down the wall which homo sapiens have built around ourselves that makes nature something strange, foreign and threatening.

There is current research which believes that it has discovered that DNA has memory or carries memory. Perhaps we had somehow triggered a primordial memory that allowed us to return to being one with nature like our hunter-gatherer ancestors. People generally think of the hunter-gatherer as being poor and struggling, but that's only because we think we have to have so many possessions. Marshall Sahlins calls them the original affluent society.(1) They were rich in the treasures of nature around them. Each day we spend away from our sad, burdened, depressed, troubled modern society and in the midst of nature we realize how rich we really are. We are connected to all around us and we know our oneness.

Lake McDonald at sunset.  We live at the foot of the first mountain on the right.

Our campsite at Glacier National Park is only yards from the beautiful Lake McDonald.  From the very first evening we were there Pamela would go to a spot on the lake each evening and 'wait for the pink', the beautiful sunset.  We would sit and talk about the day and the wonders around us. We would share our thankfulness for being privileged to spend our days in the wilderness and the sense of oneness we felt with all around us. This was not a foreign, scary place. This was home and we soon knew that. I would refer you to my blog "The journey home" (2) where I share the experience of returning to Glacier.  Hiking trails and climbing mountains in the middle of 150,000 square miles of wilderness makes you aware that you are not the master of this planet but a part of its complex being. You understand your oneness with the animals, plants and land around you. You begin to see your place in the order of nature, where you really stand in the food chain, and how your footsteps on the mountain leave the earth changed forever.

As long as there have been philosophers there has been the ongoing debate on whether there is meaning to life and if so, what is it.  I'm not going to pit my puny intellect against the great philosophers of our age or any other age, so let me simply state observation and opinion. I believe that life has the potential to have meaning but we must give it that meaning.  In my thinking the jury is still out on whether there is any innate meaning to human life. Like other animals we are born because we are conceived and what happens in and/or to our lives is dependent upon a host of variables, most beyond our control. I won't argue that one can not give their life meaning without thinking about it, but I am of the opinion that most of us will not have one of those experiences in life that natural draws us into a meaningful life. If we have a meaningful life it will be because we determine that we want our lives to have meaning. We must determine the definition of meaning since philosophy can't actually agree upon a definition of meaningful. In their defense, it is an almost impossible definition therefore we must be the ones to decide. I strongly believe that experiencing a meaningful life is much less likely and much more difficult to achieve in our modern world where we are encapsulated in a stainless steel shell designed to protect us from reality and the world around us. If you notice people whom you would have to say lead meaningful lives, they have exposed themselves to reality, to the true nature of the world.

Nature is not other. Looking out the window it is easy to see nature as "out there" but that is not true. We are a part of nature - good, bad or neutral. I look out the window at the trees and the plants. We have a symbiotic relationship. We provide them with carbon dioxide and they provide us with oxygen. It is when we forget that we are totally dependent upon everything else in nature that we fail to have a meaningful life and we become the invasive monsters we are today. Our ancestors knew that they were a part of everything around them. The ocean, mountains, prairie and desert were their source of life.  They never had to think about environmental management or renewable living. They were part of the nature.

Looking out the window I see the trees and watch the dogs race around the yard and enjoying the openness. I am reminded of the nature I love and of which I am so joyfully a part.  The sunlight shimmering through the almost leafless oaks create an ever changing pattern of light that lifts my spirit.  The earth is preparing itself for its winter rest, and watching I know that we are one.

"There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not man the less, but Nature more."               Lord Byron 

FOOTNOTE: 

(1)  Sahlins, Marshall. (1972) The original affluent society.  http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html. This essay is one of his best known and seems to have been published circa 1972. 

(2)  Vance, Russell (2015) Our Journey Home.  http://oldconservationist.blogspot.com/ 2015/10/our-journey-home.html