The Subtle Landscape

  In the 8/10/08 NYT there was an article about the recent tragedy on K2 titled: “Does Climbing Matter Anymore”?  Tragedy it certainly would have been if just one had perished let alone eleven, but only a couch potato would ask that question.  It is actually more of a koan and the answer is the Louis Armstrong response to the ‘what is jazz’ question:  “if you have to ask, you’ll never know”.

  Commercial endeavors (a big and growing) aside, adventurers know what they’re getting into and do so with purpose and resolve.  No matter if it’s the Himalaya or an unnamed wood, they understand that there is grave existential peril in a comfy slouch.  

  For some reason, the piece brought to mind a trip taken many years ago…

  We were headed, by narrow gauge rail, toward the Chicago Basin at the head of Needle Creek in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains.  Our car was several back from the engine, but even so, its spewing plume made me feel like an erstwhile citizen of Herculaneum.  I could not understand how my wife and kids were not bothered and instead hopped from side to side describing the scenery with ebullience.

  The angular bits of coal dust soon floating across my cornea triggered not exactly a pain response, nor diverting anticipatory thoughts of the wilderness that we had barely entered, but instead memories of recent car troubles, problems at the office back home, and dinner the last night in Aspen.  Why had we left?

  El Rio de Las Animas Perditas, the river along which the rails mostly traveled, was far below yet beckoned hypnotically.  I sank into my seat resignedly to obsess and await what might lay before.

  Just as I entered the state between wakefulness and sleep, the train stopped at the ghost town of Needleton which lies approximately midway between the railroad’s eponymous northern and southern terminuses; Silverton and Durango.  We jumped out, hustled back to the boxcar to retrieve our backpacks, and watched the train depart and disappear.

  The steep ten mile hike up along Needle Creek was in a word, brutal, but at least my thought pattern began to make sense.  I was again in the wilderness with my family.  Did we have the right stuff?  Would we be safe?  Would we have fun?

  Well not right off. First, cartographic aphasia led to several wrong turns, a trip to the top of a pile of rubble some distance from the day’s goal, and hours lost.  Then the water pump/purifier performed poorly and during attempted remediation an o-ring popped into the stream.  Finally, it rained intermittently during the hike up and through the night.  One of our tents leaked and all five of us spent the first night huddled together in the other - a few with pre-oedemic headaches.   

  Nonetheless next morning the pervasive beauty began at least to inflect my cortical cramping.  We set out to hike yet higher and reached a pair of lakes at about 12,000 feet.  There were of course no trees, little vegetation, and the water virtually sterile due to its hibernal solidity.

  The surface upon which our vibram almost squeaked had been polished smooth by the icy meniscus’ expansive ancestors and was ensconced high up in and surrounded by the castellated rim of the cirque.  The air was still, though laden with the smell of brimstone and the sounds of the neophyte creek.  Sally and I watched our three children silently stepping from rock to rock as if in performance of some Shinto rite.

  It is amazing - the grandeur of the infinite - that with which one becomes suffused in an area so devoid of life’s layers.  Wondering about how that sort of stark emptiness could be so fulfilling, so sort of spiritually tumescent, I recalled a proposition of physics which as written by one Alan Wallace has it that: “there is more energy in a cubic yard of empty space than in all the matter of the known universe”.  It must be that energy which has led native peoples around the globe to impute magic and divinity to such purlieus.

  After further exploration and a bit of rest we decided to move our camp down valley from whence to find a seldom visited lake about which we’d somehow heard.  Why it held allure I’ll never be certain.  There was no trail marked on the map and our guidebook described its approach as steep, indistinct, discontinuous, and treacherous.

  Indeed, though we were amazed at the myriad flora, fauna, and signs of men long gone that we had missed on the way in, we could not even determine which drainage would lead up to the darn place.

  Frustrated my group became as we covered the same steep mile several times in search of both some sort of indication of previous trail bifurcation as well as simply a way to cross the now adolescent torrent.  Our only encouragement was an animated description of hidden beauty by some wild eyed sacerdote.

  Our persistence was soon rewarded when another stranger offered assistance.  This one, a local fishing guide, showed us where to cross and described in general (the nature of the mountainside did not lend itself to detail) the way to the lake which was several thousand feet up and over a subtle ridge replete with turrets, hidden streams, and it was true - no real trail.

  “Purty well hid” he said looking upwardly as he twirled his mustache.  “Awful purty though; awful purty.”  In parting, he blew a wad of tobacco juice across the trail in front of us.

  The next morning we started up through the trees as directed.  They were dripping wet and seemed more like a forest of kelp.  After an hour or so of bushwhacking and log hopping, vestiges of the old miner’s trail did appear.  It was discontinuous - segments averaged about 100 yards in length - but we soon found ourselves able to follow it quite well by naturally filling in the blanks and being aware of the degree of arc and slope of a stretch, interpolating, and allowing reawakened internal guidance to lead us to the next short section.

  Occasionally, the way disappeared completely for quite some distance having been wiped out by landslide or avalanche and overgrown.  We would then build a little cairn at the breakpoint as we dropped into each new bit of destruction we had to cross to reach more virgin wood.

  More serious were the hazards created a bit past the more or less halfway point as the ridge’s rocky ossature began to protrude.  Mossy cliff edges were hard to identify due to the soft lighting and surrounding mist.  Fortunately, their position had been fixed in our minds while scanning the terrain the previous afternoon.

  As we rose, clouds obscured our view of the valley below and Mt. Eolus and subsidiary peaks to the north.  Once though, during a brief respite and snack, a hole appeared through which we watched massive disembodied blocks of orange granite seem to float in space.

  By the middle of the afternoon, light could be seen through the trees above.  Negotiation of a broken dark cliff band led to the top of the ridge, but not yet quite to our destination.  An old path led first to a absolutely still shallow tarn by which we sat briefly to watch trout dart back and forth with their dorsal fins protruding above the surface.  The glistening triangles were interesting counterpoint to the similar shapes on the far horizon.

  Our lake rested in a peneplain one hundred yards to the south and was larger than we had expected; several acres or so.  Behind and around it sloped a meadow resplendent in yellow and green which itself was collared by a rolling monadnock.  Its highest point looked like a turtle’s head beginning to emerge from the folds of its neck.

  As we approached, the clouds parted allowing the sun to set our wet garb steaming and reveal the lake’s luminescence as well as transmute the meadow into its almost iridescent apprentice.  It is in such a place, upon such a surface that Tibetan Lamas trek to read the names of the future.

  We looked in and saw ourselves.  Needed sunglasses.  The kids scurried around the edge for about half an hour while Sally and I watched and wrung out.  They first clambered around bone bleached piles of tailings and then continued around the lake, in birth order, toward a position opposite us.

  Their animations were uncharacteristically subdued and we speculated about the nature of their conversation.  I will forever hear the soft tones of their voices lilting across the invisible surface barely discernible from the sound of the gently falling water nearer to us.

  The clouds eventually drew back together reminding us that we were ill prepared for a night at 12,000 feet and serving effective notice that one must not long tarry in such a place lest the right of return be forsaken.

  Our descent was pure, clean, and mostly silent.  We had little trouble finding our way even though, if anything, the air grew more murky.  The cairns led us across the desolation zones and in between those we discovered keloid scars left by miners on the uphill sides of trees for unenlightened colleagues.

  Needleton was thriving the next afternoon with others in wait of a ride back to Durango.  Abigail flagged down the beast as it approached puffing and belching.

  We threw our gear into the boxcar and slowly climbed on board without a look back.  Pilgrims.

  If you buy the idea that developments in the arts of a time or  civilization are due to tremors in its underpinnings, then get this: the cave paintings of Paleolithic artists were largely unchanged for some twenty five thousand years! Must not have been any neurotic cavemen.  Or angst.  Or civil displeasure.  I read this in an interesting article by Judith Thurman in the 6/23 New Yorker.

  Isn’t that amazing?  Just think of all of the different movements of art that rode tumultuous waves of change in the twentieth century alone: Fauvism, Die Brucke, Cubism, Futurism, Orphism, Der Blaue Reiter, Constructivism, Suprematism, Dada, De Stijl, Art Deco, Bauhaus, Surrealism, Regionalism, Abstract Expressionism, Op, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Performance, Earth, Post Modernism, etc, etc. 

  She writes: “Paleolithic artists transmit[ed] their techniques from generation to generation for twenty-five millennia with almost no innovation or revolt.  A profound conservatism in art is one the hallmarks of a classical civilization.  For conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served… must have been deeply satisfying - and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine.”  In addition, she points out that there has not been found any depiction of human conflict in cave art.

  Thurman tells us that the life expectancy way back then was about eighteen.  The brevity of the average was due to high infant mortality.  However, those making it through could expect to live for another thirty or so years due “to the rarity of infectious diseases and abundance of protein… considerably longer than the Greeks, the Romans, or the medieval peasants who built Chartres”.

  The zeitgeist way back then - for all of those centuries and all those generations - must have been characterized by an overwhelming sense of natural rhythm.    

  Must have been sweet.  But then we invented agriculture and began to try to remake the world according to an endless variety of parochial visions.  Shit happened and the rest is, well, history.

  As I have asked before, and will again, now that we are all elbow to elbow and our existence is at the very least wildly syncopated:  whither now that zeitgeist?

Back to work next week…

  Hard, really, to find physics any less weird than most religions - at least once past robe and sandals expectations.  Example?  How about Bell’s Theorem.

  Remember how nothing can move faster than the speed of light?  That if a star blows up in a galaxy many light years distant, it would be impossible for us here on earth to know anything at all about the event until its light reached someone’s eyeballs some millions of years down the road? 

  OK, now one would thus suppose that if something happens here, there could be no instantaneously connected event over there.  Whether across the room or in that other galaxy.  Locality they call it.  Must be present to win.  That is what the theory of relativity holds.

  Well an aspect of quantum physics holds that there can indeed be “spooky action at a distance” as Einstein put it.  That part of the theory is what caused him (with two colleagues) to write “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete” in 1935.  He never did buy in.

  Quantum theory was developed before there were means by which to test many aspects of it.  But a theorem developed by John Stewart Bell in 1964 and experiments in particle physics since have shown that an event here can in fact be subtly entwined with one way over there.    

  Physicist Brian Greene makes an analogy using dice.  An identical pair is separated - one goes to Vegas and one to Monte Carlo.  They are repeatedly thrown at exactly the same time.  If ‘entwined’ they somehow always come up the same.  No one has yet figured out how or why.

  David Harrison, a professor at the University of Ontario commented in an essay that: “Bell’s Theorem is the most profound discovery of science… not just physics, but all of science”.  At the end he notes that it would force Einstein to accept Quantum Physics were he still alive.

  And as Greene writes in his book The Fabric Of The Cosmos: “Numerous assaults on our conception of reality are emerging from modern physics…  Of those that have been experimentally verified, I find none more mind-boggling than the recent realization that our universe is not local.”

  Jeesh.

  An old guide with features as sharp and chiseled as the rock ledge upon which he sat stared into the void.  His much younger companion ministered his smooth hands with tape and tincture of benzoin.

  Higher up, the youth, a “guide aspirant”, allowed as how the elder moved rather well for his age.  Indeed, he had so far been impressed.  There was no retort or response but for the crunch of rice cakes and gurgle of water from the canteen - water which had been scooped from the clear cold stream far below.

  Long before sunset the guide had prevailed upon the youth to take advantage of the broad ledge traversing both walls of the huge dihedral they were ascending.  Protestations as to the waste of yet available light were left echoing alone.

  Moreover, though the ledge on one side was flat and smooth, the other was roughly castellated.  The youth had remarked upon this fact and the related possibilities for a comfortable night.  To his then further dismay, the old guide insisted that they both watch the moon from amongst the blocks.

  Just after dawn, there was a terrible sound from high above.  Covering his head and face with his hands, the youth pressed himself to the back of the ledge and behind the now welcome hunks of orange granite.

  Thick with the smell of damnation, the dust cloud slowly cleared as the young man peered between his fingers to see the old man unmoved and beyond him unweathered rock where the opposite ledge had for millennia been.

  Ever see The Perfect Storm?  Remember near the end when it’s clear the end is near and the character played by Mark Wahlberg screams into the storm over the raging sea:  ”Christina? Christina, can you hear me?  I don’t know if you can, but I’m talking to ya, baby.  Do you know how much I love you?  I loved you the moment I saw you.  I love you now, and I’ll love you forever.  No goodbye.  There’s only love, Christina.  Only love.”

  And then after the storm, after Bobby (Wahlberg’s character) and his colleagues have all perished, and after the memorial service, Christina recounts a recurring dream in which “all of a sudden there he is.  That big smile…” And he repeats the above word for word.  “And then he’s gone.  But he’s always happy when he goes.  So I know he’s gotta be okay.  Absolutely okay.”

  Sebastian Junger writes in the introduction to the book that “No dialogue was made up”.  So while the film is largely true to the book the last words to leave Bobby’s mouth in the movie are fiction, but Christina’s dream not.  No matter what, cool bit of antiphony, right? 

  The day after the last time I saw the movie, I read a note in Outside magazine about a book by Maria Coffey: Explorers of The Infinite which asked: “What is it with extreme athletes and paranormal experiences?”

  Had to buy the book.  Found it fascinating.  Coffey punctuates her work with views and explanation of mainstream science, but it is clear that she believe that there is indeed something else going on.

  During the course of reviewing historical accounts of and numerous interviews with folks living life on the edge: “I became increasingly convinced that extreme adventurers break the boundaries of what is deemed physically possible by pushing beyond human consciousness into another realm.”  

  She quotes Krishnamurti:  “A complex mind cannot find out the truth of anything, it cannot find out what is real - and that is our difficulty.  From childhood we are trained to conform, and we do not know how to reduce complexity to simplicity.  It is only the very simple and direct mind that can find the real, the true”. 

  Coffey tells the story of a couple who followed, on foot, a caribou herd for months and hundreds of miles way up in the Yukon.  Alone and vulnerable, they fell into rhythm with the pace of the life of the animals.  Some weeks in, they both began having dreams.  The dreams began coming true.  “Heuer and Allison believe it was the rigors of the journey that led to their dreams and the other inexplicable events that began to unfold.”

  The identical twin British mountaineer brothers, Adrian and Allan Burgess provide several fascinating anecdotes.  In one, Adrian, who didn’t often remember dreams and hadn’t thought about a certain dead alpinist friend for quite some time was visited by her in his sleep during early stages of an attempt on Nanga Parbat.  “Adrian, you’re with the wrong people, get the fuck out of there” she told him.  He was shaken and did leave.  Shortly thereafter the team was hit by an avalanche.

  It’s not all dreams.  There’s intuition.  “Jung described intuition as the perception of realities that are unknown to the conscious mind.”  Marlene Smith says: “Intuition is about our body translating the energy it picks up, animals listen to those physical messages, but most humans reason them away”.  Among other examples, Coffey cites evidence of unusual activities of some animals and primal people that spared them death from the Asian tsunami in December 2007. 

  In 1985 a mixed Spanish-Polish team of alpinists attempted Nanga Parbat.  They communicated in English over their two way radios.  During the descent there was a terrible storm and all “felt near death”.  After safely reaching base camp, they listened to the recordings of their conversations and were amazed that they were all speaking in their native languages - unintelligible to each other.  Yet during the actual event they understood one other perfectly.

  There are many more stories and much hypothesizing, but it’s hard at the very least to disagree with British climber John Porter who said: “I think the starting point for any sort of weirdness is life itself.  If we’re here, then it seems to me that anything is possible.” 

  After all, without even having to wade through the several bewildering mainstream explanations of the origin (or lack thereof) of our universe, it interesting to note that physicists do agree that the universe is made up of: 4% matter as we know it; 22% dark matter that we maybe know something about; and 74% something else yet to be determined. 

  Now that’s weird.

  In the Science Times section of the Jun 3, 2008 NYT there was an interesting series of predictions given by futurist Ray Kurzweil.  He has a decent track record and now posits that: solar power will be economical in ten years; soon there will be a drug that will let you eat whatever you want, and by 2050 “humans and/or machines [will] start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software”.

  Most interestingly, he predicts that by 2020 or so, with new tools including nanotechnology, gene sequencing, and brain scans etc, we will be “adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves”.

  Another interesting fellow, V. S. Ramachandran does not agree.  He is a neuroscientist with impressive range having done research and written fascinating books about phantom limbs and consciousness; is (or was) on the board of directors of the San Diego Museum of Art in La Jolla; and lectured widely about art, perception, and the brain.  (Including at the National Council for Education of Ceramic Arts!)

  Ramachandran allows that a thinking feeling machine might one day be possible, but not a reverse engineered brain.  “My colleague Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an engineer.  You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.”

  I agree with Dr. Ramachandran. Think about it.  An immortal man/robot hybrid would not have thoughts about sex or death and since the primordial soup, evolution of life on the planet has been guided by pursuit of the former and avoidance of the latter.  Still is: look at any billboard.

  Furthermore, it’s the incredibly inscrutable array of connections and cross connections that has led to the invention of the wheel, penicillin, thermos bottles, crepes suzette, the push-up bra, and everything else.  Even experts can’t account for all the stuff they come up with. 

  For example, Irvin Yalom begins his book Existential Psychotherapy with an anecdote about a cooking class in which he and several friends had enrolled.  After repeated failures at home, he went back to the school to watch again. 

  He hadn’t originally noticed that the chef did more than simply follow a recipe.  She would taste, readjust, and even incorporate afterthoughts.  Thus, before even beginning to really convey his thoughts about existential psychodynamics, he admitted that while “Formal texts, journal articles, and lectures portray therapy as precise and systematic, … and a careful rational program… I believe deeply that when no one is looking, the therapist throws in the “real thing”.

  (BTW, the book is really interesting and his selection of cookware provocative:   ”The existential position emphasizes a different kind of basic conflict: neither a conflict with suppressed instinctual strivings nor one with internalized significant adults, but instead a conflict that flows from the individual’s confrontation with the givens of existence… Death - Freedom - Existential Isolation - Meaninglessness. )

  Or to come at it from an entirely different perspective: in the June 21 edition of the Wall Street Journal, billionaire financier George Soros credited his success to his backaches.  “I would say that I basically have survived by recognizing my mistakes.  I very often used to get backaches due to the fact that I was wrong.  When I make the right decision, the backache goes away.

  As a final example of the irreplicability  of the gray matter in our skull I’m reminded of an issue of the New Yorker a few years back.  In it were an interview with Bill Gates and an article by Oliver Sacks about Temple Grandin, the autistic veterinarian who says she feels like an “anthropologist on Mars”.  It was impossible to read the two pieces and not recognize characteristics and mannerisms of each in the other.

  Like it or not, we’re dang complex.  Maybe unfigureoutable.

  Amazing.  After just having remarked about what a great magazine is the Economist, the very next issue carried a short bit about my father’s first cousin!  The interview was shorter than a haiku, but cool just the same. 

  It had to do with the terrible flooding here in Iowa.  “Surveying his farm [with the reporter, he] saw glistening pools where corn stalks should have been.  Where the water had receded the earth was muddy, dotted by feeble plants.  ‘I consider us lucky’…  Much of his farm has survived.  Others have seen their land almost totally submerged.” 

  When I called out to ask if he was signing autographs, his wife answered and paused at first.  She hadn’t seen the article.  But, someone had called from town a few days back and asked if it’d be ok for a reporter from NYC to stop out…  

  They’d agreed to help, but with some concern.  They’d been interviewed before about life on the farm and the experience had done little but reinforce their innate reticence.  One’s life should speak for itself. 

  I read the bit to her.  She said they had been lucky, that the Lord had always been good to them. 

  Doesn’t all that make you wish your were a farmer? Had an intimate and interactive relationship with the earth?  No BS, no whining, no spray, no bling. 

  Reminds me of a poem (and source of the name of this little digital acreage): 

Subtle Signs

by Michael Carey - from his book The Noise The Earth Makes 

Also just like last time, I am reminded of something Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard once said: 

“You don’t see farmers as climbers.  You see city people.  Farmers don’t need to climb”

  Awesome!  The Economist is such a great magazine!  I just learned from reading the current issue (June 14 - 20 ) why my attention span is so short.  Ahem.  Among other things.

  It’s about attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.  Those with ADHD are impulsive.  They “have trouble concentrating on any task…they flit from activity to activity… tend to perform poorly in society [and] are prone to addictive and compulsive behavior”.  C’est moi!  Yo comprendo!

  Turns out I owe my restlessness to nomadic ancestors.

  Testing has shown that ADHD is a genetic condition. “It is associated with particular variants of receptor molecules for neurotransmitters in the brain”.  Variant 7R of protein DRD4 has been shown to be associated with “novelty seeking, food and drug craving, and ADHD”.

  The neurotransmitter here is dopamine which, as you may know, is associated with reward and pleasure.  The thought is that people with ADHD are getting hits of dopamine (aka positive feedback) for behavior that seems inappropriate in today’s society.

  How could this have come to be?  Well, we’ve not long been desk jockeys and the sorts of things associated with ADHD might have well served our nomad and hunter-gatherer ancestors.  Couch potatoes would not have fared well, would they?

  Recent research in Kenya supports this hypothesis.  The Ariaal people are historically nomadic.  Those now among them with the variant receptor and who continue to wander were found to be “better nourished” than those without.  By interesting contrast, those members of the group that had the variant but had settled down were worse than those without.

  A further question is why, if important, the variant is found only amongst 20% of the population.  Could be that the “effects are beneficial only when they are not universal”. 

  I buy that.  Somebody’s got to poke sticks at snakes and do the peyote ceremonies etc while the rest keep the fire burning. And the latter would tolerate the presence of the former for only the briefest of intervals - eg long enough to drop off the day’s catch.

  I’ve always felt like the odd one out.  Now I understand.  Everybody else is missing a gear. 

(For some reason, this reminds me of something that Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard said in an interview that appears in the June/July issue of Businessweek Small Biz:  “My favorite quote about entrepreneurship is that to understand an entrepreneur, you should study a juvenile delinquent”.)

  For me, it is not about the war in Iraq.  The decision was made to go, we went, and we’re still there now.  Arguing about whether or not we should have and who voted how is even worse than pandering, it is a waste of time.

  That region - Istanbul to Calcutta - is the locus of the most grave threats (those of a political nature anyway) facing this planet today. All sorts of scenarios can be constructed wherein throw-weight is an important consideration and zealotry and sacred values make for scary hair triggers.  An escalation by either side for whatever reason could lead to a level of turmoil heretofore unseen. 

  Amazingly, contemplation of the situation took my mind back to my youth.  In the early sixties my mother drove my brothers and me through the deep south on our way to visit our grandfather in Florida.  Didn’t really have to get that far from home to find the restrooms at gas stations labeled Men, Women, and Colored. 

  First time I saw three rooms so labeled we battered Mom with questions.  Why separate?  If they have to be separate, why aren’t there ‘Colored Men’ and ‘Colored Women’? Why is the ‘Colored’ sign hand scratched and the other two, well, regular? Consciousness raised, we looked around and asked other questions such as: “why are all the men in the chain gangs ‘negroes’?” 

  When Dad joined us at Grandpa’s house, there were adult conversations discussing race related protests, Rosa Parks, segregation, lynchings, and murders.  The phrase: “there’s gonna be a bloodbath” really scared me.  When we got back home I began to notice the similar if more subtle disparities.  Took longer to realize that I wasn’t ‘lily white’ myself.

  Didn’t think about it in 1968 but there was momentous paradox, incredible irony during those years in which we should all find hope. For while it was white European men who forcibly, violently enslaved black Africans several hundreds of years ago - thereby sealing a cruel fate for them and as well as for the continent left behind - the figure most associated with the mostly peaceful passing of the era was a black man.

  There is hope again today.  What must the leaders of non western nations, as well as the dispossessed, think when they see that a black man, with the middle name Hussein, has an excellent shot at being the president of the United States of America?  I am about as far from being a statesman as my dog (no offense Sauger), but I think it matters big time.

  Perception and words make all of the difference.  We do have an embarrassment of riches in the back stories of both major candidates.  But who, walking through the doors of difficult foreign capitals would be the most, well, disarming?   How could it not be the articulate son of a white mother and black immigrant from Kenya?