Julie and I camped out in the Sawtooths for a couple of nights last week, up near the Finger of Fate and the Arrowhead. The Arrowhead exists only in memory since it fell down during the March 2020 earthquake. The earthquake also shook the top off the Finger of Fate, and from certain angles it now looks like the Owl of Fate. People still climb it. They just don’t climb as high as they used to.
We camped at a small, spring-fed lake, turquoise in the midst of bright red and yellow shrubbery. We found a flat spot to pitch our tent next to some flat rocks that would serve as kitchen counters.
The sun, which goes behind the peaks early this time of year, went down in a deep gap in the horizon, giving us an extra hour of sunlight. We were in a late-September heatwave and the afternoon temperatures had reached the high seventies, so sundown felt good for a while. Then the sweaters we had packed felt good. Then our down jackets felt good. Then we went to bed, and the sleeping bags felt good because we had walked six or seven miles to get there. Our legs were tired and our shoulders weren’t used to backpacks, and our sleeping pads felt like featherbeds.
We didn’t build a fire. The entire area was still under Stage 1 fire restrictions. There had been a fire ring at our campsite once, but someone had scattered it and cleaned up the ashes, and there was a good chance that we could leave our campsite in the reasonably wild condition we had found it.
We’ve been trying to go without fires since we started cleaning summer campsites near our house in the valley. Ashes eventually take over a campsite as successive campers build new fire rings rather than clean up the old ones.
Even when we’ve been camping in the mountains, we only build a fire in an established fire-ring. Then, when we leave, we clean it all up. We scatter the rocks, placing the burned sides down, and try to find a place—usually a depression left by a blown-over tree—where we can bury the ashes once we’ve picked the old bits of glass and aluminum foil out of them.
It’s the camping version of a broken-windows policy, and we’ve found that people don’t really want to wreck their camping spots with litter, ashes, and half-burned beer cans. They’ll add to the mess if it’s already there, but they’ll remember the delicacy of the natural world if you present them with a facsimile of it.
Anyway, campfires and wilderness don’t mix, no matter what your Boy Scout Handbook says, and we’re trying to follow a preservation ethic, even in a world that seems to be increasingly made of ashes.
We ate freeze-dried beef stew the first night. The beef was all right, but the vegetables that went with it had the taste and texture of Styrofoam. The next night we had freeze-dried lasagna followed by a dessert of apple cobbler. Both were excellent, or we had gotten hungrier after a day of climbing around the peaks.
We had visited some half-empty lakes above 9000’. We had seen a mountain goat and a pine marten (up close, both of them), a half-dozen pikas, a Steller’s jay, two pine grouse, and clusters of chipmunks and chickadees. We didn’t see any other people, not even when we checked to see if anyone was climbing the former Finger of Fate.
We did get hit with a close and loud thunderstorm the second night, but we had thought to put the fly on the tent and the rain was intense only long enough to wet down the trampled dust around our kitchen. The only evidence of human beings we saw was a bowhunter’s pickup at the trailhead, a few boot tracks in the first mile of our hike in, a disintegrating mylar balloon, and a plastic bottle of elk estrus scent a couple of miles from the end of our return trip. Judging from what I imagine you’d have to do to collect a bottle of elk estrus scent, it had to be an expensive loss.
I am getting old. I didn’t have to go backpacking to know this, but if any lingering doubts existed, they were gone by the time we got back to the pickup. My shoulders were sore after carrying a pack thirteen miles. Sleeping on the ground for two nights would have been quite comfortable if we hadn’t waited a full ten hours for daylight. Things get creaky over that amount of time, and a sleeping pad that felt like a featherbed starts feeling like a concrete floor around hour eight.
At the pickup, my knees were hurting, and I had a laceration on the back of my right arm from slipping and falling on a wet log within a mile of the finish line. My back felt like all the vertebrae had been compressed another inch.
My skin, which used to be reliable protection from abrasion, now bleeds at the brush of a dead branch. Nerves in my feet constantly telegraph wrinkles and folds in my socks, even when I’m not wearing socks.
Freeze-dried food and hard salami, crackers, and cheese don’t agree with my digestive system as well as they used to. Mixing powdered lemonade with a quart of lake water doesn’t serve as lunch anymore, and if I’m not careful, I can consume too much coffee and too much of a chocolate bar for breakfast. Venal alimentary sins have begun to approach the mortal category.
I try not to complain to Julie, because I know I’m lucky to still be able to head out into the hills, packing my own camping gear, bent but not broken by time. Part of Julie’s lobbying for our backpack trip included the declaration that if we didn’t get out this time, we might never go again, which is a compelling argument. It’s always true that when you do anything at all, it might be the last time you do it, but as you get older, the odds that tomorrow will be like today get steadily worse.
I’m glad we went. I’ve tried to explain to Julie that some of my satisfaction in life these days comes from living through painful adventures, camping or otherwise, and being able to recollect the high points a safe amount of time later, maybe sitting on the deck in the sunshine, maybe drinking a glass of wine across the table from friends, maybe half asleep on the couch. Neuroscientists tell us that we can’t experience the present directly—there’s always a tape delay, and what we think is happening now always lies a few seconds in the past. One of the benefits of age is you can stretch that tape delay over enough time to get home, take a shower, build a fire in the woodstove, put on some music, brew a cup of tea, and talk your spouse into giving you a foot-rub. Then you can go ahead and embrace the pain.
It doesn’t take long for this line of thought to veer into eschatology, but I won’t go there. Sometimes it’s enough for a foot-rub to be just a foot-rub, even if it feels like you’ve died and gone to heaven. Sometimes a camping trip is just a camping trip.
I took a book along. It was Carl Jung’s The Undiscovered Self, written during a time when it looked as if the United States and the Soviet Union would destroy each other in a nuclear war. Sixty-five years later, the United States and Russia find themselves once again on the brink of mutual suicide, so it was relevant if not particularly cheerful reading.
Jung’s thesis is that what we think of as our self, the everyday conscious entity that goes through our lives, thinking that it’s in control of its life story, is only a tiny part of who each of us is. Our conscious self is dwarfed by a bunch of titanic entities in our unconscious. They’re making the decisions, they’re dictating the life stories, they’re deciding who you marry, whether or not you graduate from college, where you work, your good and bad habits, your hobbies, and how you treat your kids if they decide you’re going to have any. Often enough, they’re at cross-purposes with your conscious self. The result is a life marked by one self-destructive drama after another.
Jung said that nations and cultures as well as people have a shadow-side that contains everything they hate about themselves. The conscious self won’t admit it contains self-defeating elements, so it projects those things on other nations and cultures and people, who become enemies. Jung noted that the United States and the Soviet Union needed each other far more as enemies than as friends. Having an enemy lets us believe we’re good when we’re a mixture of bad and good. It keeps us from knowing ourselves. It keeps evil safely located in the other.
The accusations that Russia and the United States throw at each other are remarkably similar, and the horrible temptation both nations face is that if they destroy their enemy they think they’ll destroy all the evil in themselves. Of course, it doesn’t work that way. Destroy an enemy and you’ll have to find a new one—quickly, before you start to see all the people you’ve killed or damaged as innocent, hurting human beings.
The Undiscovered Self might seem like odd reading on an idyllic trip to the mountains, but I found it a useful explanation of what’s going on in Ukraine these days, and in American politics, and between people in Sawtooth Valley. One of the dangers of reading Jung is that everything in your life starts looking like the unconscious, which isn’t a comfort when you’re lying in your sleeping bag at five in the morning, waiting a couple of hours for the sun to come up.
But one of Jung’s thoughts about lying awake in old age is that it’s the most important time in your life because it’s your chance to take back all the evils you’ve projected onto others rather than facing them yourself. You become less perfect in your own eyes, but you also become more whole. All those parts of yourself that you cut off because you didn’t like them return to you, and in most cases they’re not as evil as you thought they were. (Of course, in Putin’s case, they are as evil, which is why admitting them back into his psyche is a kill-or-be-killed situation. The question is how many people will have to die before he comes to a modicum of self-awareness.)
I finished the book thinking more about myself and my history than Putin, and wondering if my old age would be up to the task before it. I’ve tried to spend my life becoming more conscious, but the psyche seeks a balance in these things, and it becomes an optical equation: the brighter the daylight you create, the darker and longer the nights you endure.
All this sounds very self-indulgent, and it is. I can’t think of anything more self-indulgent than dedicating your old age to becoming whole, especially when you know you’re doomed to failure. Human beings are terribly incomplete from start to finish, possibly because we can imagine worlds we can never enter, selves we can never be.
This is my last Ghost Dance entry for a while. I’ll post something here after the election, once we determine if our country’s unconscious is going to kill us or not. I’m also going to start writing questions-of-conscience fiction, because its light is brighter and its shadows are deeper and more substantive. It seems more important than non-fiction, although that may be because I’ve written a hundred and four of these essays over the last couple of years. I’ve learned a lot, but it’s time to get out of the sun and into the shadows.
I’ll end on a note of cheer. I went to bed last night worried about the state of the world. I dreamed a bunch, which usually has me waking up exhausted, but sometime this morning, I dreamed a voice that said, “It’s going to be all right. It’s all going to be okay.”
It was a voice of supreme authority. I didn’t know if it came from within or without, but for the moment, it’s my story, and I’m planning on sticking with it.
