Lured by this literature, the twenty-year-old engraver Edward Whymper managed to get an assignment to make images of the Alps. He spent his spare time exploring the mountains and turned out to have a talent for getting up them. Though he made a number of first ascents elsewhere, it was the Matterhorn that captured his imagination. Between 1861 and 1865 he made seven unsuccessful attempts on the spectacular peak, racing against other climbers to be the first. He finally succeeded, and his success is said to have ended the golden age. Whether it ended because Whymper had brought a different or at least more overtly ambitious spirit to the enterprise, because the Matterhorn was the last major Alpine peak to be summitted, or because of the ensuing disaster is unclear. His eighth ascent had been made in collaboration with the greatest amateur climber of the time, the Reverend Charles Hudson, two other young Englishmen, and three local guides. On the descent Hudson, the two young men, and the outstanding guide Michel Croz, who were all roped together, fell to their deaths when one of them slipped. The Victorian equivalent of a media circus ensued, with much condemnation of mountaineering itself as unjustifiably dangerous and much muttering about whether Whymper and the guides had behaved professionally and ethically. Whymper’s Scrambles in the Alps became a classic anyway, and perhaps it’s why the Matterhorn has become a ride at Disneyland.
The history of mountaineering is about the firsts, mosts, and disasters, but behind the dozens of famous faces are countless mountaineers whose rewards have been entirely private and personal. What is recorded as history seldom represents the typical, and what is typical seldom becomes visible as history—though it often becomes visible as literature. Something of this dichotomy is present in the two major genres of mountaineering book, the epics that the general public generally reads and the memoirs that seem to have a far smaller audience. The epics are heroic accounts of an attempt on a major summit; they are books about History and, almost always, Tragedy (high-altitude mountaineering literature, with its emphasis on bodily suffering, survival through sheer will, and the grisly details of frostbite, hypothermia, high-altitude dementia, and fatal falls, often reminds me of books about concentration camps and forced marches, except that mountaineering is voluntary and, for some, deeply satisfying). In contrast, the cheerful memoirs by even some of the greatest climbers—Joe Brown, Don Whillens, Gwen Moffat, Lionel Terray—often read as humorous idylls that deemphasize difficulty. The satisfactions in these narratives come from minor and major excursions, from friendships, freedoms, love of mountains, refinement of skill, low ambition, and high spirits, with only an occasional tragedy on the rocks. The best books’ merit comes from the vividness rather than the historic importance of the events they recount.
If we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story. That is to say, we can leave behind sports and records, and when we do, the discipline of the destination is once again balanced with the discipline of detachment. Smoke Blanchard, the guide who came of age climbing the Oregon peaks during the Great Depression, wrote in my favorite of all mountain memoirs, Walking Up and Down in the World, “For half a century I have tried to promote the idea that mountaineering is best approached as a combination of picnic and pilgrimage. Mountain picnic-pilgrimage is short on aggression and long on satisfaction. I hope that I can show that mild mountaineering can be happily pursued through a long lifetime without posting records. Can a love affair be catalogued?” The convivial, humorous Blanchard was as much a walker as a mountaineer, and among the pleasures he recounts are long hikes along the Oregon coast and across the width of California, from the White Mountains east of the Sierra Nevada to the sea, as well as many ascents in the Sierra Nevada and Pacific Northwest. Like a lot of other Pacific Coast mountaineers from John Muir to Gary Snyder, he approached the mountains in a way that reconciles wandering and arriving and recalls the older mountain traditions on the other side of the ocean, in China and Japan.
It wasn’t ascending so much as being in the mountains that those poets, sages, and hermits celebrated, and the mountains so frequently portrayed in Chinese poetry and paintings were a contemplative retreat from politics and society. In China, wandering was celebrated—“To ‘wander’ is the Taoist code word for becoming ecstatic,” writes a scholar—but arriving was sometimes regarded with ambiguity. One of the eighth-century poet Li Po’s compositions is titled “On Visiting a Taoist Master in the Tai-T’ien Mountains and Not Finding Him,” a common theme in Chinese poetry then. Mountains had both physical and symbolic geography, so that literal walking has metaphorical overtones:
People ask the way to Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain? There is no road that goes through. . . .
How can you hope to get there by aping me?
Your heart and mine are not alike.
writes Li Po’s contemporary, the ragged, humorous Buddhist hermit Han-Shan.
In Japan mountains have had religious significance since prehistoric times, though Bernbaum writes, “Before the sixth century A.D. the Japanese did not climb their sacred mountains, which were regarded as a realm apart from the ordinary world, too holy for human presence. The people built shrines at their feet and worshipped them from a respectful distance. With the introduction of Buddhism from China in the sixth century came the practice of climbing the sacred peaks all the way to their summits, there to commune directly with the gods.” Afterward, though monks and ascetics wandered, the indeterminate geography of wandering was overshadowed by a determinate one of pilgrimage to the mountains. Climbing mountains became a central part of religious practice, notably in Shugendō, which is more or less a Buddhist mountaineering sect. “Every aspect of Shugendō is conceptually or physically related to the power of sacred mountains and the benefit of reverential behavior within sacred mountains,” writes the foremost Western scholar of this sect, H. Byron Earhart. Though festivals, temple ceremonies, and extended periods of mountain asceticism were also part of Shugendō, ascending mountains was central to it both for priests and for lay people, and a kind of priestly guide service emerged. Mountains themselves were perceived as Buddhist mandalas, and ascent paralleled the six stages of spiritual progress toward enlightenment (one stage involved dangling initiates over an abyss while they confessed their sins). The seventeenth-century Zen poet Bashō ascended some of Shugendō’s most sacred mountains in the course of his meanders, as he recounts in his haiku-and-travel-narrative masterpiece The Narrow Road to the Deep North: “I . . . set off with my guide on a long march of eight miles to the top of the mountain. I walked through mists and clouds, breathing the thin air of high altitudes and stepping on slippery ice and snow, till at last through a gateway of clouds, as it seemed, to the very paths of the sun and moon, I reached the summit, completely out of breath and nearly frozen to death.” After Shugendō was banned late in the nineteenth century, it ceased to be a major religion in Japan, but it still has shrines and practitioners, Mount Fuji remains a major pilgrimage site, and the Japanese remain among the most avid mountaineers in the world.
Gary Snyder, pretty good mountaineer and great poet, seems to unite the spiritual and secular traditions. After all, he studied Buddhism in Asia but learned how to climb mountains far earlier, with Oregon’s Mazamas (a mountaineering club founded atop Mount Hood in Oregon in the 1890s). In an afterword to his book-length poem named after a Chinese scroll, Mountains and Rivers Without End, begun in 1956 and finished nearly forty years later, he writes, “I had been introduced to the high snow peaks of the Pacific Northwest when I was thirteen and had climbed a number of summits even before I was twenty. East Asian landscape paintings, seen at the Seattle Art Museum from the age of ten on, also presented such a space.” During his years in Japan, he practiced walking meditation and made contact with surviving Shugendō practitioners, “and I was given a chance to see how walking the landscape can become both ritual and meditation. I di
d the five-day pilgrimage on the Omine ridge and established a tentative relationship with the archaic Buddhist mountain deity Fudo. This ancient exercise has one visualizing the hike from peak to valley floor as an inner linking of the womb and diamond mandala realms of Vajrayana Buddhism.”
In 1956, just before he left for Japan, Snyder led Jack Kerouac on an overnight hike to the sea and back across Mount Tamalpais, a 2,571-foot peak on the other side of the Golden Gate from San Francisco. On that walk, Snyder told his footsore companion, “The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.” The scholar David Robertson comments, “This sentence states what is perhaps not only the central idea of Gary Snyder’s poetry and prose, but the fixed point around which rotate the thought and practice of many who take to trails. If one habit beats in the ritual heart of the lives and their literature, surely this is it: the practice of ‘mattering,’ of repeatedly accessing the thing that is at one and the same time both spirit and matter. . . . Hiking for Snyder is a way of furthering a political, social, and spiritual revolution. . . . The essential nature of things is not an Aristotelian plot nor a Hegelian dialectic, and does not lead to a goal. Therefore, it cannot be the object of a quest, as for the grail. Instead, it goes round and round and on and on, rather like the hike that Kerouac and Snyder took and even more like the poem that Snyder projected writing and told Kerouac about as they walked.”
That poem is Mountains and Rivers Without End, and one of the pieces in it, “The Circumambulation of Mount Tamalpais,” describes the sites and recounts the chants of his daylong excursion there with Philip Whalen (now a Zen roshi) and Allen Ginsberg in 1965 “to show respect and to clarify the mind.” The Himalayan-style circumambulation has been taken up by local Buddhists to become a several-times-a-year walk of some fifteen miles and ten stations, from near the foot to Tam’s east peak and down again (which, when I went on it, preserved Snyder’s humor by reading from his “Smoky the Bear Sutra” in the penultimate station, a roadside parking lot appropriately sprinkled with cigarette butts). The peak isn’t a culmination, just one of the ten stations on this circuit, which wraps the mountain in a spiral of interpretations drawn from mostly Asian religious sources. Mountains have been a recurrent subject of Snyder’s poetry. He once reset Muir’s description of his ascent of Mount Ritter to make a poem of it, wrote his own Cold Mountain Poems after Han-Shan, and described not only climbing and walking in mountains but living in them and working in them as a fire lookout and a trail builder. In Mountains and Rivers Without End, says Snyder, “I translate space from its physical sense to the spiritual sense of space as emptiness—spiritual transparency—in Mahayana Buddhist philosophy.” The book opens with what at first seems to be a long description of landscape but is in fact a description of a Chinese painting, and Snyder travels through all kinds of space—paintings, cities, wildernesses—in the same spirit. In “Walking the New York Bedrock / Alive in the Sea of Information,” Snyder traverses Manhattan, thinking of the Indians’ encounters early on with European settlers, seeing the skyscrapers as corporate deities—“Equitable god” and “Old Union Carbide god”—seeing trees, peregrines nesting “at the thirty-fifth floor,” homeless people wandering amid the street-canyons whose buildings become “arêtes and buttresses rising above them.” But real mountains delight him in ways Manhattan does not, as a short poem with a long title, “On Climbing the Sierra Matterhorn Again After Thirty-One Years,” suggests:
Range after range of mountains
Year after year after year.
I am still in love.
Chapter 10
OF WALKING CLUBS AND LAND WARS
I. THE SIERRA NEVADA
“Another perfect Sierra Nevada day,” said Michael Cohen, hovering over his coffee and managing to sound caustic about it, to me, hovering over my tea, as we looked at the morning light glittering on the lake. Valerie Cohen wasn’t up yet, and I wasn’t all that awake myself early that morning in the Cohens’ June Lake cabin, on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada, a little southeast of the highlands of Yosemite National Park. I don’t remember what made him say all of a sudden, “The Sierra Club likes to say that John Muir founded the Sierra Club. But California culture founded it.” We were products of that culture ourselves. The Cohens had both grown up in the Los Angeles area and spent a lot of time in the Sierra from an early age. I wasn’t nearly so dedicated a wilderness explorer as they were, nor so athletic, even if my father’s parents had met in immigrant hiking clubs in L.A. The high Sierra was definitely the Cohens’ territory, in which they had skied, climbed, hiked, worked, and even gotten married thirty years before, and I let them pick the destination for our day’s hike.
It was a gorgeous cloudless day in mid-August, and winter had been so late and so wet that the meadows were still green and wildflowers were everywhere. So were other hikers. Valerie led off at a good clip down the trail that began southwest of Tuolumne Meadows, and for the first mile or so through the pines she reminisced for my benefit about when she was a law enforcement ranger, this trail was her beat, and she was responsible for dealing with the demented and drugged of the high country. In the meadow where the trail had been trodden into a narrow trench several inches deep she told me about the time the campers complained that there was a crazy guy in their campground who stayed up all night walking in circles muttering to himself, a guy who turned out to be an eminent but deranged mathematician. Somewhere in the course of these stories—maybe during the one about the babysitter and the amanita mushrooms—Michael commented that the consequence of the theory that nature is supposed to make you happy is that those most desperately in search of happiness tend to show up there. Certainly they do, along with a few million others every year, in Yosemite National Park, one of the most famous and heavily visited natural places in the world.
Yosemite is also a major historical site, not least for the history of walking, mountaineering, and the environmental movement. It was my good fortune that Michael had written the history of the Sierra Club and an intellectual biography of John Muir, so that in walking along the Mono Pass trail we were traversing the terrain of his scholarship. Dorothy and William Wordsworth walking together through the Pennines just before the nineteenth century began seem lonely figures, choosing an unpopular activity in an unpopulated countryside, and John Muir tramping across Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada in the decades after his arrival in California in 1868 seems part of that tradition of solitary wandering, pursuing the aesthetic while those all around pursued the utilitarian. But Muir, as Michael had been saying, was a founder—if not the founder—of the Sierra Club, and the club would further transform the social landscape in its efforts to keep the natural landscape untransformed (except by trails; trail building was an important activity of the early club). A little more than a hundred years after the Wordsworths set off on their lonely winter walk, almost a century before the Cohens and I set out from the roadside bustle, ninety-six Sierra Club members—including their president, Muir—spent two weeks walking, mountaineering, and camping in Tuolumne Meadows. That first Sierra Club High Trip in July 1901 is a milestone in the history of the taste for walking in the landscape. Not the only such milestone, for club secretary William Colby wrote, “An excursion of this sort, if properly conducted, will do an infinite amount of good toward awakening the proper kind of interest in the forests and other natural features of our mountains, and will also tend to create a spirit of good-fellowship among our members. The Mazamas and Appalachian Clubs have for many years shown how successful and interesting such trips may be made.” Walking had become so entrenched a part of the culture that it could be, by means of walking clubs, a foundation for further change.
Since English mountaineers founded the Alpine Club in 1857, outdoor organizations had been proliferating across Europe and North America, many, like the Alpine and Appalachian Clubs, combining the pleasures of a social club with the publications and explorations of a scientific society. Bu
t the Sierra Club was different. “The proper kind of interest in the forests and other natural features” was, in the ideology of the club, a political interest. Mountaineering and hiking were ends in themselves for most of the clubs, but the Sierra Club had been founded as a dual-purpose organization. In 1890 Muir and such friends as the painter William Keith and the lawyer Warren Olney had started meeting to discuss defending Yosemite National Park from the developers who sought to raid its timber and mineral resources. They had merged with professors at the University of California, Berkeley, who were considering founding a mountaineering club, and the new organization’s name came from the range they would explore, just as the Appalachian Club’s name came from its members’ local mountains. On June 4, 1892, the Sierra Club was formed.
To pretend that the world is a garden is an essentially apolitical act, a turning away from the woes that keep it from being one. But to try to make the world a garden is often a political endeavor, and it is this taste that the more activist walking clubs around the world have taken up. Walking in the landscape had long been considered a vaguely virtuous act, but Muir and the club had at last defined that virtue as defense of the land. This made it a self-perpetuating virtue, securing the grounds of its existence, and made the club an ideological organization. Walking—or hiking and mountaineering, as the club tended to call it—became its ideal way of being in the world: out of doors, relying on one’s own feet, neither producing nor destroying. The club’s mission statement said its purpose was “to explore, enjoy, and render accessible the mountain regions of the Pacific Coast; To publish authentic information concerning them; To enlist the support and cooperation of the people and the government in preserving the forests and other natural features of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.”
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Page 20
