I’VE WRITTEN MYSELF into a bit of a hole. I can’t write too much more about the mountain where I’ve spent most of my backpacking time over the past three and a half years, other than what I’ve already put into my next book – lest I give the location away and become responsible for ruining it. And I’m struggling, right now, to write with my usual optimism and joy about nature because nature, at this precise moment, doesn’t seem to be the nature it once was: reliable, trustworthy, safe – a place where one can escape the ills and negative influences of the human world.
Last winter here in Colorado was unprecedented, both from my own (admittedly limited) experience but also from recorded meteorological data. Basically, winter barely arrived. Up in the high country in mid-December, a time of year when I ‘should’ have been camped in extreme cold upon multiple feet of snow, I was instead perched on bare ground, sleeves rolled high, basking in warm sunshine.
Snow arrived eventually, although in historically reduced volume, and the cold never plummeted to the frigid levels it, arguably, ‘ought’ to have . Following it was a warm dry spring, then an apocalyptically hot summer with skies thick with choking wildfire smoke. Conditions are now so parched and withered that my home town has become home to more hungry black bears than even old timers can remember. The usual food sources that bears previously relied upon up in the foothills have proven to be utterly unreliable. Bears, previously rare, are in town in large numbers desperate for nourishment, and are finding it in the trash bins of people who have never had to secure their trash from bears before. Adjustments are needed.
These changes feel very close to home. I know they feel that way too for friends and family back in the UK who have experienced an off-the-charts hot and dry summer. The sun-fried landscapes I’ve seen in photos and news reports sure as hell don’t resemble England’s green and pleasant landscape that I once knew. And I know that many other places have fared even worse.
Then there are collapsing glaciers and catastrophic flash floods. I’m writing these words feeling absolutely sickened by the flood that swept down a valley yesterday on the border of Tibet and Nepal. I’m writing this, also, feeling sickened by the climate-change deniers who still say, even today, “oh, it’s just summer, there have always been floods, glaciers have always thawed…
I’ll leave you to imagine the expletives I want to send their way.
The damming data that demonstrates irrefutably that the swift and unprecedented warming of oceans and air is linked to our activities is out there. If you’re reading this and you still haven’t accepted the evidence then clearly you never will.
Last weekend I went backpacking in the James Peak Wilderness, a busy location that I can write about because it’s already been ‘discovered’ by the masses, because it’s not an undiscovered ‘hidden gem’. (I have strong opinions about individuals and organizations that profit from giving away ‘hidden gems’. But that’s a theme for another time.) After returning home, I spent a couple of days composing a long and happy post about the weekend, focusing on the renewal I found despite (and sometimes even because of) the crowds I shared it with. But then yesterday’s flash flood tore down a Himalayan valley, and writing with joy about nature suddenly became, within seconds of seeing the first images and reading the reports, an impossible thing to do.
I’ve written in the past – and in my next book – about one of the aspects of nature that I most cherish: its reliability, its trustworthiness, its honesty. It’s why my weekend among the mountains filled and renewed me the way it did. It gave me what I sought. It gave me what it always has. Nature, I’ve found in the past, doesn’t lie, cheat, demonize, or hate – unlike much of the modern human world, especially its politics and unsustainably greedy industries. Nature offers only honest truth. It is simply there, always, reliably itself, a solid rock of truth that can be trusted no matter what. In a world that often seems unhinged, I’ve written in the past, at least we who know nature can still find sanity. Returning to nature is returning to a reality that I know I’ll always be able to rely on…
And yet now, today, after a barely-there winter, with bears in town hungry in the heat, with glaciers collapsing and flash floods roaring, scouring and killing, and with catastrophic changes occurring the world over, I find myself wondering: can I rely on it, though?
Can I still rely on nature?
Can you?
