[l/m 12/27/94] Colin Fletcher/Rachel Carson Distilled Wisdom (8/28) XYZ
Eugene Miya
If you are just beginning activities like hiking, perhaps some of the best
books written on the subject are those by Colin Fletcher. He has tried to
keep his editions current with trends such as equipment, but his spirit
comes through in books like The Complete Walker (his beginner guide)
and The Thousand Mile Summer (walking the length of California
12 years before it came popular).
Excerpts from The Complete Walker:
There is a cardinal rule of travel, all too often overlooked,
that I call "The Law of Inverse Appreciation."
It states: "The less there is between you and the environment, the
more you appreciate the environment."
Every walker knows, even if he has not thought about it, the law's
most obvious application: the bigger and most efficient your means of
travel, the further you become divorced from the reality through which
you are travelling. A man learns a thousand times more about the sea from
the "Kon Tiki" than from the "Queen Mary;" euphorically more about space
at the end of a cord than inside a capsule. On land, you remain closer
in touch with the countryside in a slow moving old open touring
car than in a modern, air-conditioned, tinted-glass-window,
80-miles-per-hour-and-never-notice-it behemoth. And you come closer
in touch on a horse than any car; in closer touch on foot than on any horse.
But the law has a second and less obvious application:
your appreciation varies not only according to what you travel "in"
but also according to what you travel "over." Drive along a
freeway in any kind of car and you are in almost zero contact with the
country beyond the concrete. Turn off onto a minor highway and you are
a notch closer. A narrow country road is better still.
When you bump slowly along a jeep trail you begin at last to sense those
vital details that turn mere landscape into living countryside. And not
long ago, on the East African savanna -- where it was at
the time not considered destructive to drive cross-country over the pale
grasslands -- I discovered an extending corollary to my law:
"The further you move away from any impediment of appreciation,
the better it is."
It is less obvious that these same discrepancies persist when you are
travelling on foot. Any blacktop road holds the scrollwork of the country
at arm's length: the road itself keeps stalking along on stilts or
grubbing about in a trough, and your feet travel on harsh and
sterile pavement. Turn off onto a dusty jeep trail and the detail moves
closer. A foot trail is better still. But you do not really
have to break free until you step off the trail and walk through waving
grass or woodland growth or across rock or smooth sand or (most perfect
of all) virgin snow. Now you can read all the details,
down to the print. Drifting snow crystals barely begun to blurr the four
footed signature of the marten that padded past this lodgepole pine.
Or a long-legged lizard scurries for cover, kicking up
little spurts of sand as it corners around a bush. . .And always, in snow
or sand or rock or seascape grass there is, as far as you can see in
any direction, no sign of man.
That, I believe, is being in touch with the world.
--Colin Fletcher
"Technology gets in the way."
--Don Norman, Apple Fellow, UCSD Professor Emer.
"Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine,"
Voyager First Person Books-on-CD series
See "The All in One Knife" in
'The Gallery of Undefinable Things'
An Exhibit from the Collection of Jacques Carelman
Fletcher would like this.
Back to Fletcher:
Other foot notes
* It would probably be a good thing if you reread this paragraph at least once
-- and tried to remember it later on. This is essentially a "know-how"
book, but we must never lose sight of the fact that what matters in the end
is the "feel how" of walking.
* Frankly, my advice to those genuinely interested in walking has always been
to forget the books and to get out and get on with it. Relying on the
two finest teachers in the business, trial and error. I'm not at all sure
a piece of me that doesn't still stand by that advice.
"Once you become a walker, you become a conservationist: no one can walk
for days on-end through wild and unspoiled country and then stumble on some
man-perpetrated horror without having his blood start to boil.*
*At least, I used to think this was so. I'm afraid I am no longer
so sure.
Appendix IV: Pleasant Quotes for Contemplative Walkers
While some people take dispute with the above as being "elitist,"
counters those those call of elitism exist. Those counters are not
included at this point for several reasons which not be elaborated.
See the "natural" debate.
-----
From: mor...@ccmail.orst.edu (Terry Morse)
Subject: The Noise Needers
The Noise Needers
excerpted from _Journey Into Summer, by Edwin Way Teale
(NY: Dodd, Mead, 1960, pp. 21-22)
". . . It is, no doubt, a measure of the stillness of that day that, for a
time, the noisiest creatures on the mountaintop were flies.
Sitting relaxed, aware of all the little sounds around me, enjoying the
peaceful calm of these mountain heights, I remembered the young barber who
had cut my hair in a small town a few days before. His great amibition he
said, was to work in New York. There was a city! For a good many years, he
explained, each summer he had visited his grandfather on his farm in the
country. But he couldn't stand it any more. Everything was so quiet! It
gave him the creeps. He felt like going out and blowing a trumpet or pounding
a drum - anything to make a racket. He represented that new breed, growing in
numbers, the Noise Needers.
From the outboard motor to the jet airplane, through the radio and TV,
the electric razor and the power lawnmower, almost every mechanical advance
has added to the noise of the world. Each successive generation lives in a
less quiet environment. In consequence, evolution is at work in massed urban
centers. For evolution concerns the present as well as the past, ourselves as
well as the dinosaurs. Noise is evolving not only the endurers of noise but
the needers of noise.
Those whose nervous systems are disturbed by uproar are handicapped
under such conditions. They are less fitted to maintain good health, to
endure and to increase their kind than are those who thrive on clamor. What
is strain and distraction to one is a stimulant and a tonic to the other. In
step with noisier times, the number of Noise Needers is growing. I was told
recently of the art editor of a chain of magazines who carries a pocket radio
with him all day long and even places it, turned on, under his pillow when he
goes to bed at night. Noise is comforting and reassuring to him. He seems in
his proper environment when quiet is eliminated. The metallic clangor of
rock-and-roll music is, perhaps, symptomatic of the steady rise in the number
of Noise Needers. For them, quiet is somehow unnatural, stillness is somehow
unfriendly. They feel better, more at home, when they are surrounded by a din
-- any kind of din. They do not merely tolerate noise. They like noise.
They need noise.
Their world, and those who inhabit it, were far away as I sat in the hush
of the mountain glade. . . ."
Terry Morse
mor...@ccmail.orst.edu
**********************************************************************
"Snowmobiles, jet skis, dirt bikes, ATVs - ah for the days when people
lived lives of _quiet_ desperation." -- Terry Morse
**********************************************************************
-----
Rachel Carson was perhaps the most influential environmentalist
to have lived in the modern era. She wrote simply and clearly, and when
her ideas came under attack, she was ultimately vindicated. If you want
to learn about the backcountry environment, you will find no
finer set of books. They rank with Darwin's Origin of Species
by Means of Natural Selection. She died in 1963 of breast cancer.
"We still think in terms of conquest. We still haven't become mature enough
to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe.
Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because
we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But
man is a part of nature and his war against nature is inevitablly a war
against himself. The rains have become an instrument to bring down
from the atmosphere the deadly products of atomic explosions. Water,
which is probably our most important natural resource, is now used and
reused with incredible recklessness. Now, I truly believe that we in this
generation must come to terms with nature, and I think we're challenged
as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity
And our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves."
--Rachel Carson
"The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson"
Copyright \(co 1963 CBS Reports,
Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc.
*After publication of Silent Spring, certain spokesmen for the
pesticide industry claimed that Rachel Carson was not a trained biologist.
For them should be reserved a special corner in the Library of Hell,
equipped with a barnacle-covered bench and a whale-oil lamp, by whose
light they would be compelled to read out loud her masters thesis:
"The Development of the Pronephros During the Embryonic and Early
Larval of the Catfish (Inctalurus Punctatus)."
--Paul Brooks
"The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work," 1972,1989
Her editor
TABLE OF CONTENTS of this chain:
8/ Fletcher's Law of Inverse Appreciation and Rachel Carson <* THIS PANEL *>
9/ Water Filter wisdom
10/ Volunteer Work
11/ Snake bite
12/ Netiquette
13/ Questions on conditions and travel
14/ Dedication to Aldo Leopold
15/ Leopold's lot.
16/ Morbid backcountry/memorial
17/ Information about bears
18/ Poison ivy, frequently ask, under question
19/ Lyme disease, frequently ask, under question
20/ "Telling questions" backcountry Turing test
21/ AMS
22/ Words from Foreman and Hayduke
23/ A bit of song (like camp songs)
24/ What is natural?
25/ A romantic notion of high-tech employment
26/ Other news groups of related interest, networking
27/ Films/cinema references
28/ References (written)
1/ DISCLAIMER
2/ Ethics
3/ Learning I
4/ learning II (lists, "Ten Essentials," Chouinard comments)
5/ Summary of past topics
6/ Non-wisdom: fire-arms topic circular discussion
7/ Phone / address lists
Article 57347 of rec.backcountry:
Path: cnn.nas.nasa.gov!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!usc!nic-nac.CSU.net!hbgeo002
From: hbge...@huey.csun.edu (jeffrey trust)
Newsgroups: rec.backcountry
Subject: Re: Hiking philosophies
Date: 26 Aug 1994 06:50:08 GMT
Organization: California State University Northridge
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Robert Pirsig, quoted in _The_Earth_Speaks_:
Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without
desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If
you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You
climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.
Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a
means to an end but a unique even in itself. *This* leaf has jagged
edges. *This* rock looks loose. From *this* place the snow is less
visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway.
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the
mountains which sustain life, not the top...
[end]
Can't say I'd always agree with this, but when I'm in a rambling mood....
--
Jeffrey Trust (jtr...@huey.csun.edu). Student, Dept. of Geological Sciences,
California State University, Northridge (for which I don't speak).
"The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their
energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves." -John Muir