Sojourn: Learning Life from Wild Places

Copyright © 2013 Vance Grace.

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ISBN: 978-1-4497-9363-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-9365-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-9364-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013907726

Printed in the United States of America.

WestBow Press rev. date: 04/26/2013

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Sojourning As A Way Of Living

Chapter 1 Complexity

Chapter 2 Weight

Chapter 3 Fear

Chapter 4 Integration

Conclusion

Bibliography

About The Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A S WE JOURNEY through life our path is inevitably shared, shaped and travelled with others. While the story of such interaction would read more like a biography which would take a lifetime to flesh out and read, I would be amiss if I did not at least acknowledge some of the people who have shaped my road and with whom I have shared some of the journey.

Zac Noble figures prominently in the pages that follow. We have shared countless miles of road and trail as well as sleepless and often brutal nights in the backcountry together, both in the high mountains and the sprawling deserts. I could not have asked for a travelling companion better suited to my own temperament, skills and inclinations. He has become more than a brother to me over the past fifteen years. Other individuals worth mentioning who have in sharing the trail shared life with me in significant ways include Dave Roepke, Rob McConnell and Brian Baird.

Another group of individuals have been travelling companions in more of a spiritual than physical sense. Doug Grogan has served as my dad for almost twenty years. Bill Janas walked with me through some important developing years and in difficult circumstances and never showed me anything less than unconditional love. Bob Hudson, whom I count as a mentor, friend and brother, was instrumental in this piece coming to fruition and in my life being restored.

Most of all, I have had the privilege of sharing this journey in all of its hills, curves, bumps and blind corners with the most amazing woman in the world. Colleen has more than stuck by me now for over two decades. Our three children, Cheyenne, William and Sheridan, have not only watched their dad in his sojourn but have had to endure a sometimes wild and unpredictable ride—which they have done with valor. I wouldn’t be who I am without their presence on the journey.

INTRODUCTION

Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.

—THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY

W HEN RANDY MORGENSON disappeared in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1996, there was nearly immediate conjecture about how intentional his disappearance may have been. Morgenson was a veteran backcountry ranger serving in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks for twenty-eight summer seasons, and he had gained a reputation for intuitively knowing how to locate lost hikers simply by piecing together predictable patterns of human movement with topographic terrain features. To fellow rangers, it seemed highly unlikely that Morgenson would have accidentally gotten himself into a situation that he would not have been able to escape. The questions regarding Morgenson’s failure to make scheduled radio contact in July of 1996 swirled around his apparent frustration and depression, both of which were apparent when he had returned for the season earlier in the year. Many were familiar with the marriage issues Morgenson and his wife had these days, and Morgenson had voiced some uncharacteristic musings about the validity of his years of work in the backcountry during discussions with his supervisor. At the very least, those who knew Morgenson believed that something was wrong and that it was possible that Randy had purposefully decided to get lose in the wild.

Jon Krakauer popularized the story of Christopher McCandless in his 1996 book Into the Wild. In 1990, McCandless had left behind a recent degree from Emory University, a substantial savings account, and his well-to-do New England family to disappear into the wild places of western America. His body was found two years later in the Alaskan interior. McCandless was a brilliant young man who was steeped in literature and philosophy, and he eventually found himself questioning the validity of many cultural values like consumption and at least initially, romantic love and relationships. For two years, McCandless wandered the western states mostly alone, though he interacted enough with other people that Krakauer could get a fairly accurate picture of this man’s personality and his reasoning for tramping about as he did. The picture that emerges is one of a successful man frustrated with life as it had been conceived for him, a man determined to find some answers by disappearing alone into wild places.

Stories like those of Morgenson and McCandless become popular reads because they seem to be precisely what so many of us in our modern context could see ourselves resorting to, especially those of us who are trying to figure out how to practice life despite being frustrated with some of our socially constructed realities (i.e., how to deal with the onset of a midlife depression and emptiness). Increasing numbers of young and middle-aged men have longed for the opportunity to disappear in some form, disillusioned in one way or another with the world they inhabit or the world they have created for themselves through education, work, and consumption. Confusion seems to mount as do bills and responsibilities, and many of us never anticipated life would seem so empty.

How do we really live, especially when it all seems to go wrong or we don’t feel as if we know what we’re doing in the first place? There have been a number of authors in recent years addressing the ongoing crisis of American life despite our wealth and leisure and the abundance of entertainment options in the twenty-first century. For many, entertainment and other distractions are not as effective as they were once designed to be. Pascal warned us nearly four hundred years ago that entertainment was a mere tonic, a distraction from the more crucial issues of the how and why of life. It often appears that these distracting options are not speaking loudly enough to silence the growing societal disaffection. Likewise, much had been written recently about the rise of interest in spirituality rather than its waning. Apparently, we haven’t figured everything out in terms of our science and technology. Americans continue to spend a disproportionate amount of their personal wealth on this program, that vacation, these books in order to try to gain perspective and meaning to life. In a seminal book on the meaning of the life of a male, Robert Bly wrote in Iron John: A Book about Men, Even though we are highly advanced in matters of atomic physics and computer technology, we are still beginners in the labor of learning how to live. We really don’t know what we are doing (Bly, 2004).

The result is a plethora of frustrated musicians telling us their stories through poetry. Eddie Vedder sings in Life Wasted, I’ve seen this home inside your head / All locked doors and unmade beds / Open sores unattended / Let me say just once that / I have faced it, a life wasted / I am never going back again. The issue may be increasingly pressing in the current and coming years as it feels as if an absence—the absence of challenge and the meaning which would accompany that challenge—is the particular plague on my own generation. Raised in the postwar age of entitlement, we believed that the good life or at least the real life consisted of school, a career, and an increasing climb up the ladder of authority, expertise, and income. We haven’t had any great wars or depressions, and therefore, we have had to largely make things up. It is likely that due to years of culture-wide fatherlessness, too few of us were ever initiated into the world of men or meaning. Douglas Coupland’s Life After God was once the voice of those of us just now on the verge of middle age. I think there was a trade-off somewhere along the line. I think the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched. And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God (Coupland, 1994). When we were growing up, many of my friends made a habit of relentlessly mocking those we called yuppies, individuals we believed were sellouts from the hippie era who once believed in fighting the system and who were now engaged in earning a six-figure income from the very same system. The reality I now recognize is that at least teens of the 60s had something like a cause to engage in while my own generation only had what authors have now come to call societal angst. As a consequence, we don’t necessarily know how to engage constructively with what frustrates us, and instead, we only unleash cynicism on everything around us while we lose ourselves in our music. Even for many of my close friends and contemporaries, who, I assumed, had avoided such crises, they find somewhere around forty an insatiable appetite for meaning and understanding.

I realize that every quest is intensely personal and takes on individual forms and a unique series of questions. Each person responds in varying degrees of frustration and desperation to the issues of life. Many people will never feel that life is devoid of meaning or go off the deep end in search of some kind of perspective on what we’re doing here in the world or what might bring some kind of meaning to this existence. But I know I had lost all perspective and hope, and I didn’t have the abiding sense that life was as it should be. Maybe, just maybe I had cast life in the wrong light and had been listening to the wrong stories. Maybe what I had been told all along about how to make a living—how to make a life, really—wasn’t real at all. Maybe I needed a different story. Maybe my own crisis was the result of failing to listen to some things I already knew and a failure to listen to what I was really learning. A lot of this comes down to disappointed expectations. What happens when we expect certain reactions to our actions that never find their way to fruition? If I did this or if I do that or change these things, shouldn’t I expect meaning, perspective, joy, and an abiding peace? Not that we necessarily need to feel good all the time, but isn’t there some kind of sense out there of shalom, the sense that things are as they should be?

Maybe we need a new metaphor, a metaphor that can embrace the complexity of life and take into consideration weight, our fear, and the need for integration—something that can provide perspective on life that isn’t steeped in empty promises, something so recent in the experience of the human condition that its sustainability and power to construct meaningful life are still highly suspect. Our current levels of leisure, wealth, and purported comfort exist for more people at levels never before known, and still, we long for some kind of authentic existence. Perhaps this metaphor is not really a new metaphor at all but rather a very ancient one that defined life even in this country up until the early 1900s. It may be that the absence of this defining factor for too many modern Americans (only decades after its absence) has led us to the fallout we are currently experiencing. I believe that the metaphor that can help us figure out life is the wilderness: the wild places of the desert, the mountain, and the jungle, namely those places which at one time and for the majority of human existence constituted the context out of which people lived and defined life. Speaking specifically of male initiation but revealing larger truths, Robert Bly states, To receive initiation truly means to expand sideways into the glory of oaks, mountains, glaciers, horses, lions, grasses, waterfalls, deer. We need wilderness and extravagance. Whatever shuts a human being away from the waterfall and the tiger will kill him (Bly, 2004).

In Wilderness and the American Mind, Roderick Nash chronicles the place for the idea and metaphor of wilderness in the development of America