I walked out of Fred Meyer a few weeks ago, with groceries in my arms and thoughts in my head—trip-planning thoughts, packing thoughts, dull, gray thoughts—when I looked up to see Lazy Mountain looming over the big box store, crisp and majestic, holding up a few clouds and a big, blue sky. It felt just like the first time, when I moved to Alaska 30 years ago: miraculous, a slow-motion explosion on the land. A mountain is an embodiment of a time-frame that is bigger, grander, slower, maybe even wiser than our tiny sliver of experience.
If a sense of wonder is a psychic fuel, a mountain on a clear day is like a corner gas station.
But that sense of wonder dissipates easily. The longer you live with the mountain, the more it recedes into the background, until you go for weeks, months, years, without bothering to notice. Only sometimes, it returns, like it did for me that day coming out of Fred Meyer.
I get that feeling of returning in other ways. I’ll hear a song that I’ve heard a hundred times, but catch the drummer adding a fill between the beats I never noticed before, and I imagine what the drummer must have felt when she discovered that the first time. Or I try to imagine not knowing something that has become air-we-breath obvious.
Like flying. Watch a float plane take off from the lake. Try to experience it as if you didn’t know that people could fly. You didn’t know that the shape of a wing can manipulate the speed and pressure of the air to create lift. And for those of you who were in the eclipse viewing area, How would that have felt if you didn’t know it was coming? A feeling of wonder rock-falls down the mountain and becomes a feeling of terror?
So, you can stumble upon a sense of wonder if you wait for it. Or you can manufacture a sense of wonder by pretending to forget what you know. Or you can actively pursue it by digging deeper. I think that’s what compels me to repeat one of my previous bike trips. I feel like I just scratched the surface when I rode the Lewis and Clark route in 2018. I hope returning means something different than repeating.
Henry David Thoreau had his faults, but I admire him for actively pursuing his wonder—and not just during that short two-year performance art piece he did on Walden Pond. He spent his whole life exploring the rivers and lakes around his home in Concord.
I picked up a really good book at the Walden Pond Visitor Center last year: The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau’s River Years by Robert M. Thorson. Thorson writes about a magical scene Thoreau witnessed on the Assabat River in 1859: empty clamshells floating on the river, like little toy boats, held gingerly aloft in the gentle current. Because of Thoreau’s lifetime of studying the river, Thoreau was able to suss out the complex web of causes and effects that made this scene possible. Those clams flourished because agricultural run-off built up rich sediment in the river. Dam construction also allowed muskrats to flourish—on those clams— and, because the dams opened and closed to meet industrial schedules, the water rose gently to lift up the clam-boats from the river’s edge where the muskrats left them, and float delicately down the river.
The slaveowner William Clark (Do you think he was a slaveowner who happened to be an amateur naturalist— or an amateur naturalist who happened to be a slaveowner?) used similar deductive reasoning 48 years before Thoreau. On August 25, 1804, he observed that the wind raced across an open field before the “Spirit Mound” near Vermillion, North Dakota. Because of the wind, the insects were concentrated in the area of the mound—and because of the concentration of insects, birds flocked to the same area to eat the insects. It was a clever observation. I admire his analytic mind. I don’t admire his arrogance regarding Indigenous spiritual beliefs and practices surrounding the place.
I get a different perspective on the Lewis and Clark expedition from Debra Magpie Earling. Her novel, The Lost Journals of Sacajawea might be the best Lewis and Clark book I’ve read so far. Some of it is as much poetry as prose. Earling’s Sacajawea conflates Lewis and Clark’s scientific acquisitiveness with the greed of the white traders that converge on the Fish River area in North Dakota. She mocks Lewis for the way he catalogs antelope skins and other items he collects to send back to Washington DC.
Lewis whispers as he counts his loot. He whispers on and on and writes down everything he sees, everything he and his white men kill and collect.
Is curiosity just another species of greed? Maybe I should take that question more seriously, but if I did, I might not go on another bike ride.
I very much want to go on another bike ride.
I’ve done my “first draft” packing for the 3,000 mile trip coming up. Everybody said I’d pack lighter when I got a little more experience, but I’ve got 10,000 miles of bike travel behind me, and I still pack heavy. Ok, yes. I am doing a little better. I carried 100 pounds in 2018. Now I’m down to 50. Twenty five pounds is the norm, according to other bike tourists I’ve met. But I can’t find anything else that I’m willing to shed. It doesn’t help that I’m adding a new storytelling emphasis to this trip. I’m packing the GoPro, extra batteries, a laptop (no more writing Substacks on my phone. Yay!), etc. Something as trivial as the various USB cords I’m taking adds more weight and complexity to my load. It changes my system, too. I had developed a routine for packing so I always knew where to find stuff. With this new equipment—until I settle into a new packing system, I’m going to spend a lot of time looking for stuff!
Remember a few Substacks back, when I mocked Lewis and Clark for carrying their big, heavy writing desks with them? I think some of that criticism is boomeranging back to me now.
One thing I’m proud of: I learned how to do two-camera editing on the iMovie software. So I should be able to synch up GoPro and iPhone video, going back and forth from wide angle to head shots without any awkwardness. It’s a small thing, but it sounds fun.
But it’s happening! A week from today, I’ll fly to St. Louis. I’ll probably spend a week or so there getting ready, then hit the road! Missouri River, here I come!
Happy trails!
Oh, my. I did not realize your departure date was coming so soon! Bon voyage! Happy trails! Wishing you good weather, good roads, and good adventures!