Spring Going on Summer - Get Out of Doors
I found a Salon article today ever-so-timely. I spent numerous hours this weekend hunched over a weed-pulling device that certainly saves the back as compared to getting down and grubbing on hands-and-knees as I used to. I find though that this device does yet have some counsel with that lower back.
And today I spent working that same back on a marine research vessel in Sinclair Inlet, an inlet of Puget Sound, witnessing and participating in a limited fashion in the semi-annual monitoring of a Superfund site - today's work being part of an unusually comprehensive sampling of sediment in said inlet. Today was pretty much cloudless, somewhat windy, and almost unseasonably warm - with still-air temp probably in low '70's. Hard work and long hours in balmy conditions, you might say.
Both events for me, involving routine procedures and actual labor, were made far more enjoyable by the fact that they occurred outdoors and involved living things - for example, they shared more or less constant encounters with wild birds.
So I'm here to celebrate that outside, even if in my most recent experiences it is far from as majestic as Yosemite or Yellowstone. For the moment I can settle for revisiting personal historical visits to Yosemite (e.g., hike to top of Yosemite Falls and climb of Cathedral Peak) and lots more of the wild out-of-doors. And, incidentally, here's to son Eric's upcoming trip possibly including some Sierra!
May you too find inspiration here at Salon:
The planet is putting on its most spectacular show right now in Yosemite. Over an ancient sun-soaked cliff, a river that moments ago was as staid and obedient as you and me is hurling itself over the edge like a runaway roller coaster, turning into a hundred-headed shower of white downward-streaking comets, twisting and turning and dissolving and embracing and vanishing and reappearing, falling 500, a thousand, 1,500 feet before it collides with the rocks and disappears into a maelstrom of foam and mist. And that's only the top half of the springtime epic that is Yosemite Falls, a no-two-shows-alike performance that ends another thousand feet lower in a seething whirlpool at the base of the north face, where we little humans sit and look and are baptized in the mist and try to remember the mystery of this world.
I have been to Yosemite, and deeper into the majestic mountain range that John Muir called the Range of Light, many times over the last 35 years. The wilderness draws me for lots of different reasons, but the one continuous thread is a desire to find bedrock -- something enduring, something quieter and stronger than the everlasting din of my own mind, or the misshapen life of Bush's America. The Sierras are for me what the sea was for Melville's Ishmael. "Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul ... then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can," Melville wrote at the opening of "Moby-Dick." Call me Ishmael. I've been much too grim about the mouth. I needed to follow the prescription of the good Dr. Muir, who wrote, "Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves."
The great Scottish naturalist and visionary, as he looked back upon the ecstatic waterfall of his first summer in the Sierra Nevada from the tranquil downstream river of his old age, cried out, "Beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and being made forever." Muir was stunned into permanent happiness by his discovery of this planetary garden spot: The stars seem to have been happily aligned in his soul in such a rare way that nature's magnificence instantly filled him up, brimming over into prose that seems scarcely able to restrain itself from being just one endless shout of joy.
When Muir arrived in San Francisco, he asked a carpenter he met on the street "the nearest way out of town to the wild part of the state." The astonished man asked, "Where do you wish to go?" Muir replied, "Anywhere that's wild." He went there, and he was never the same.
When Muir first walked to the edge of the vast Sierra coniferous forest, in the gold country above Coulterville at 2,500 feet, he wrote, "We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun, -- a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal. Just now I can scarcely conceive of any bodily condition dependent on food or breath any more than the ground or the sky. How glorious a conversion, so complete and wholesome it is, scarce memory enough of old bondage days left as a standpoint to view it from! In this newness of life we seem to have been so always."
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I strongly urge you to consider finding some of that stuff yourself this year. Yes, check snow-depths and road-closures, but absolutely do not make excuses and miss the incredible show of nature. I promise it will help you with any problems you might have with your own species, in ways neither I nor you could possibly predict.
And today I spent working that same back on a marine research vessel in Sinclair Inlet, an inlet of Puget Sound, witnessing and participating in a limited fashion in the semi-annual monitoring of a Superfund site - today's work being part of an unusually comprehensive sampling of sediment in said inlet. Today was pretty much cloudless, somewhat windy, and almost unseasonably warm - with still-air temp probably in low '70's. Hard work and long hours in balmy conditions, you might say.
Both events for me, involving routine procedures and actual labor, were made far more enjoyable by the fact that they occurred outdoors and involved living things - for example, they shared more or less constant encounters with wild birds.
So I'm here to celebrate that outside, even if in my most recent experiences it is far from as majestic as Yosemite or Yellowstone. For the moment I can settle for revisiting personal historical visits to Yosemite (e.g., hike to top of Yosemite Falls and climb of Cathedral Peak) and lots more of the wild out-of-doors. And, incidentally, here's to son Eric's upcoming trip possibly including some Sierra!
May you too find inspiration here at Salon:
The planet is putting on its most spectacular show right now in Yosemite. Over an ancient sun-soaked cliff, a river that moments ago was as staid and obedient as you and me is hurling itself over the edge like a runaway roller coaster, turning into a hundred-headed shower of white downward-streaking comets, twisting and turning and dissolving and embracing and vanishing and reappearing, falling 500, a thousand, 1,500 feet before it collides with the rocks and disappears into a maelstrom of foam and mist. And that's only the top half of the springtime epic that is Yosemite Falls, a no-two-shows-alike performance that ends another thousand feet lower in a seething whirlpool at the base of the north face, where we little humans sit and look and are baptized in the mist and try to remember the mystery of this world.
I have been to Yosemite, and deeper into the majestic mountain range that John Muir called the Range of Light, many times over the last 35 years. The wilderness draws me for lots of different reasons, but the one continuous thread is a desire to find bedrock -- something enduring, something quieter and stronger than the everlasting din of my own mind, or the misshapen life of Bush's America. The Sierras are for me what the sea was for Melville's Ishmael. "Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul ... then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can," Melville wrote at the opening of "Moby-Dick." Call me Ishmael. I've been much too grim about the mouth. I needed to follow the prescription of the good Dr. Muir, who wrote, "Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves."
The great Scottish naturalist and visionary, as he looked back upon the ecstatic waterfall of his first summer in the Sierra Nevada from the tranquil downstream river of his old age, cried out, "Beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and being made forever." Muir was stunned into permanent happiness by his discovery of this planetary garden spot: The stars seem to have been happily aligned in his soul in such a rare way that nature's magnificence instantly filled him up, brimming over into prose that seems scarcely able to restrain itself from being just one endless shout of joy.
When Muir arrived in San Francisco, he asked a carpenter he met on the street "the nearest way out of town to the wild part of the state." The astonished man asked, "Where do you wish to go?" Muir replied, "Anywhere that's wild." He went there, and he was never the same.
When Muir first walked to the edge of the vast Sierra coniferous forest, in the gold country above Coulterville at 2,500 feet, he wrote, "We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun, -- a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal. Just now I can scarcely conceive of any bodily condition dependent on food or breath any more than the ground or the sky. How glorious a conversion, so complete and wholesome it is, scarce memory enough of old bondage days left as a standpoint to view it from! In this newness of life we seem to have been so always."
-clip-
I strongly urge you to consider finding some of that stuff yourself this year. Yes, check snow-depths and road-closures, but absolutely do not make excuses and miss the incredible show of nature. I promise it will help you with any problems you might have with your own species, in ways neither I nor you could possibly predict.
posted by Sir Gumbo at 10:35 PM
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