by Paul Theroux
“But where do you want to go?” a stranger responds.
“To any place that is wild,” Muir says.
Directed to the Oakland ferry, he sets off for the wilderness on the first of April 1868, a walk that would change his life. He described his trek as slow, enchanted, easterly, toward the Yosemite Valley.
Muir was eloquent in his descriptions of landscape. He was also, like many other nature writers, something of a misanthrope, a trait noted in Driving Home by Jonathan Raban, who is a persuasive dissident on the subject of Muir’s style. (Raban deconstructs Muir’s sublime language as misleading, even subversive, the origin of today’s “cult of ‘pristine’ wilderness”.) Muir’s charismatic personality aided his evangelism in the cause that wilderness must be preserved: Teddy Roosevelt became an important supporter after going on a journey with him. But it was Muir’s prose, perhaps overegged, and his evocations of the Sierra that made his case and gave us the national parks as well as his shelf of distinguished books.
From his first glimpse of Yosemite, as he reminisced in The Yosemite (1912), his vision was apparent.
Looking eastward from the summit of the Pacheco Pass one shining morning, a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still appears as the most beautiful I have ever beheld. At my feet lay the Great Central Valley of California, level and flowery, like a lake of pure sunshine, forty or fifty miles wide, five hundred miles long, one rich furred garden of yellow compositae. And from the eastern boundary of this vast golden flower-bed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height and so gloriously coloured and so radiant, it seemed not clothed with light, but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city. Along the top and extending a good way down, was a rich pearl-grey belt of snow; below it a belt of blue and dark purple, marking the extension of the forests; and stretching along the base of the range a broad belt of rose-purple; all these colours, from the blue sky to the yellow valley smoothly blending as they do in a rainbow, making a wall of light ineffably fine. Then it seemed to me that the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems above all others the Range of Light.
Peter Matthiessen: “All the Way to Heaven Is Heaven”
PETER MATTHIESSEN (BORN 1927) is a happy combination of fine writer, courageous traveller, scrupulous naturalist, and spiritual soul — he has his own Buddhist dojo at his home on Long Island. A committed walker, he has travelled and written about Asia, New Guinea, Africa, and Antarctica. His The Snow Leopard is one of the great accounts of someone “paying respects to a mountain”. Toward the end of the book, suffused with the spirit of the trip, exhausted but uplifted, Matthiessen writes: “I lower my gaze from the snow peaks to the glistening thorns, the snow patches, the lichens. Though I am blind to it, the Truth is near, in the reality of what I sit on — rocks. These hard rocks instruct my bones in what my brain could never grasp in the Heart Sutra, that ‘form is emptiness and emptiness is form’ — the Void, the emptiness of blue-black space, contained in everything. Sometimes when I meditate, the big rocks dance.”
This is also an example of someone solving philosophical problems by walking, a deeply felt, subtly written, and arduously tramped-out account of Matthiessen’s search for the elusive snow leopard of the Himalayas — in essence a search for his own peace of mind.
“In late September of 1973,” he explains at the beginning, “I set out with GS [George Schaller] on a journey to the Crystal Mountain, walking west under Annapurna and north along the Kali Gandaki River, then west and north again, around the Dhaulagiri peaks and across the Kanjiroba, two hundred and fifty miles or more to the Land of Dolpo, on the Tibetan Plateau.”
The snow leopard, the “most beautiful of the great cats,” had been sighted by only two Westerners in the previous twenty-five years. To get a glimpse of one of these “near-mythic” beasts was the formal reason for the trip, but in effect this is Matthiessen’s pilgrimage: a search for healing after the death of his wife, a search for the sources of Buddhism, and a contemplation of a landscape regarded as holy by the Nepalese who live in the region. If there is a journey that is the opposite of the expensive, breathless guided climbs up Everest that Jon Krakauer writes about, it is this book, which has much more in common with Bashō, whom Matthiessen quotes with approval.
In ten- and eleven-hour treks, Matthiessen and Schaller rise higher and higher into the mountains, suffering from the cold and the altitude and the difficult trail, creeping on narrow traverses above deep and precipitous valleys. Such obstacles are inevitable, as Matthiessen writes: “Tibetans say that obstacles in a hard journey, such as hailstones, wind, and unrelenting rains, are the work of demons, anxious to test the sincerity of the pilgrims and eliminate the fainthearted among them.”
One of the more terrifying obstacles — this, at eleven thousand feet — are the fierce guard dogs of the Tibetan refugees who inhabit their heights. “In Tibet, where wolves and brigands prosper, the nomad’s camps and remote villages are guarded by big black or brindle mastiffs. Such dogs are also found in northern Nepal.” Matthiessen successfully fights off an attack by a slavering mastiff and pushes on.
The book is a self-portrait of Matthiessen the pilgrim, but also a portrait of George Schaller, a scientist, sceptic, and part-time misanthrope whom Matthiessen takes pains to enlighten. He teaches him the tenets of Zen Buddhism, and then “I tell GS of the Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhardt and Saint Francis, Saint Augustine, and Saint Catherine of Siena, who spent three years in silent meditation: ‘All the way to Heaven is Heaven,’ Saint Catherine said, and that is the very breath of Zen, which does not elevate divinity above the common miracles of every day.”
In a treacherous part of the mountains he reflects on the possibility of dying in this dangerous place — and he accepts the idea: “Between clinging and letting go, I feel a terrific struggle. This is a fine chance to let go, to ‘win my life by losing it’, which means not recklessness but acceptance, not passivity but non-attachment.”
Toward the end of the journey, the snow leopard unglimpsed yet still inspiring his pilgrimage, missing his family and friends, Matthiessen receives a batch of mail from home. Wishing to be at one with the landscape and people around him, he deliberately does not open them; he puts them in his pack, to be opened when this journey is over. If the news is bad, he says, there is nothing he can do to leave any earlier from this remote place. “And good news, too, would be intrusive, spoiling this chance to live moment by moment in the present by stirring up the past, the future, and encouraging delusions of continuity and permanence just when I am trying to let go, to blow away, like that white down feather on the mountain.”
In our present overconnected, hyperactive age, this is a salutary book and worthy of its predecessors: Bashō, Wordsworth, Thoreau.
14
Travel Feats
SPEAKING OF “THE WINTER JOURNEY” — SIX weeks of complete darkness and low temperatures (minus 79°F) and gale-force winds — an experience of which gave him the title for his book The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard reflected on dangerous feats in travel. “Why do some human beings desire with such urgency to do such things regardless of the consequences, voluntarily, conscripted by no one but themselves? No one knows. There is a strong urge to conquer the dreadful forces of nature, and perhaps to get consciousness of ourselves, of life, and of the shadowy workings of our human minds. Physical capacity is the only limit. I have tried to tell how, and when, and where. But why? That is a mystery.”
Maybe there is an answer. When I was preparing to write the introduction to the American edition of Alone, Gérard d’Aboville’s account of his single-ha
nded journey rowing across the Pacific, I pressed d’Aboville on his reasons for making this dangerous voyage. He became silent. After a long while he said, “Only an animal does useful things. An animal gets food, finds a place to sleep, tries to keep comfortable. But I wanted to do something that was not useful — not like an animal at all. Something only a human being would do.”
What separates some feats from others is the way the tale is told. Sir Richard Burton’s book about how he, an infidel, travelled to Mecca in disguise is a classic. After Joshua Slocum sailed around the world alone, he wrote a good book about the experience; so did Tschiffely, in Tschiffely’s Ride, the story of his trip on horseback from Argentina to New York. Breaking out of a POW camp in Kenya and climbing Mount Kenya would have been a hilarious anecdote, but Felice Benuzzi wrote a detailed account of the feat, and so did Gérard D’Aboville after he rowed across the Pacific Ocean.
Now and then a great feat is forced upon the traveller, as with Captain Bligh’s open-boat voyage of 4,000 miles with eighteen men after the mutiny on the Bounty, or Shackleton’s heroic rescue of his men, which necessitated his travelling almost a thousand miles through the Southern Ocean in a freezing lifeboat. But these epics of survival were unintentional.
There are many other notable travel feats: a man windsurfed across the Atlantic (M. Christian Marty, in February 1982); a woman windsurfed across the Indian Ocean (Raphaëla le Gouvello, sixty days in 2006, 3,900 miles, from Exmouth in Western Australia to the island of Réunion); a man skied down Everest in 2000 (the Slovenian Davo Karničar), and a woman did it in 2006 — Kit DesLauriers, who has also skied down the highest peaks on every continent, including Antarctica. Kayakers have gone everywhere, across oceans, around Cape Horn, and made ambitious circumnavigations (Japan, Australia, New Zealand). Some of these are admirable, even heroic journeys, and some are stunts; I am mainly interested in travel feats that have resulted in memorable books.
A Disguised Infidel Penetrates Mecca
IN HIS Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1855–56), Sir Richard Burton claimed he was “the only living European who has found his way to the Head Quarters of the Moslem Faith”.
He did it for a reason common to travellers setting off: he was, among other things, “thoroughly tired of ‘progress’ and of ‘civilization’; curious to see with my eyes what others are content to ‘hear with ears’, namely Moslem inner life in a really Mohammedan country; and longing, if truth be told, to set foot on that mysterious spot which no vacation tourist has yet described, measured, sketched and photographed”.
As with his long trips through Africa and the American West, Burton was happiest when he was in a remote place. “Believe me, when once your tastes have conformed to the tranquillity of [desert] travel, you will suffer real pain in returning to the turmoil of civilization. The air of the cities will suffocate you, and the care-worn and cadaverous countenances of citizens will haunt you like a vision of judgement.”
The trip, Burton says, took nine months, but in reality it took much longer, because he needed to be fluent in Arabic, knowledgeable in all aspects of Islam, and well versed in the Koran. This had taken years, while he had been a soldier in India from 1842 to 1849. He also needed to be circumcised. This he accomplished, probably in India, before the trip, when he was about thirty. He said that “external” physical evidence that he was a Muslim was essential.
One of the pleasures of the book is that Burton delights in his disguise, as the Afghan dervish Mirza Abdullah. “Little did he suspect who his interrogator was,” he remarks of a slave dealer. And he flirts with a pretty slave girl, telling her how beautiful she is. (“They were average specimens of the steatopygous Abyssinian breed, broad-shouldered, thin-flanked, fine-limbed, and with haunches of prodigious size.”)
She says, “Then why don’t you buy me?”
So as to make himself seem a humble haji (pilgrim), Burton travels in the lowest class on the ship, quietly mocking his fellow passengers. Though he speaks of the rigours of the trip, the discomforts and the heat, he seldom complains. He is on a mission. Three months after he sets out, in the month of July (“sickening heat”), he arrives in Medina and visits the Prophet’s tomb.
He moves on to Mecca with the other pilgrims, and achieves the objective of the trip, pretending to pray while examining the enormous stone known as the Kaaba, the heart and soul of Islam, forbidden to the unbeliever.
I may truly say that, of all the worshippers who clung weeping to the curtain, or who pressed their beating hearts to the stone, none felt for the moment a deeper emotion than did the Haji from the far-north. It was as if the poetical legends of the Arab spoke truth, and that the waving wings of angels, not the sweet breeze of morning, were agitating and swelling the black covering of the shrine. But, to confess humbling truth, theirs was the high feeling of religious enthusiasm, mine was the ecstasy of gratified pride.
Being Burton, though, another ecstatic experience is his glimpse of a flirtatious pilgrim, a girl he calls Flirtilla.
Close to us sat a party of fair Meccans, apparently belonging to the higher classes, and one of these I had already several times remarked. She was a tall girl, about eighteen years old, with regular features, a skin somewhat citrine-coloured, but soft and clear, symmetrical eyebrows, the most beautiful eyes, and a figure all grace. There was no head thrown back, no straightened neck, no flat shoulders, nor toes turned out — in fact, no “elegant” barbarisms: the shape was what the Arabs love, soft, bending, and relaxed, as a woman’s figure ought to be. Unhappily she wore, instead of the usual veil, a “Yashmak” of transparent muslin, bound round the face; and the chaperone, mother, or duenna, by whose side she stood, was apparently a very unsuspicious or complaisant old person. Flirtilla fixed a glance of admiration upon my cashmere. I directed a reply with interest at her eyes. She then by the usual coquettish gesture, threw back an inch or two of head-veil, disclosing broad bands of jetty hair, crowning a lovely oval. My palpable admiration of the new charm was rewarded by a partial removal of the Yashmak, when a dimpled mouth and a rounded chin stood out from the envious muslin. Seeing that my companions were safely employed, I entered upon the dangerous ground of raising hand to forehead. She smiled almost imperceptibly, and turned away. The pilgrim was in ecstasy.
No non-Muslim since Burton has made the pilgrimage to Mecca and lived to tell the tale.
Sailing Alone Around the World
JOSHUA SLOCUM DECIDED to be the first man to sail single-handedly around the world. He was an experienced sailor — and restless from the time of his youth in Canada, where he had been an inveterate runaway. He found an old thirty-seven-foot sloop, rebuilt and refitted her, named her Spray, and left in 1895 on his voyage, without a chronometer but using dead reckoning. The trip, which took three years and covered forty-six thousand miles, was full of incident, and Slocum’s account of the voyage, Sailing Alone Around the World (1899), is a well-told book — vivid, detailed, and very funny, right from the beginning, where he says, “I was born in a cold spot, on coldest North Mountain, on a cold February 20, though I am a citizen of the United States — a naturalized Yankee.”
Slocum, self-educated, wrote that “my books were always my friends” — in his library he had Darwin, Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, Don Quixote, R. L. Stevenson, and Shakespeare. His book made him famous, and he continued voyaging, as well as lecturing about his exploits. He also spent forty-two days in jail on a charge of molestation (see Chapter 8, “Fears, Neuroses, and Other Mental Conditions”). In the fall of 1909, he left Martha’s Vineyard, intending to sail the Spray to the Amazon. Nothing was heard from him after that — he was lost at sea, presumed to have been sunk after having been hit by a steamer, though he (as always using his self-steering device) was snug in his cabin, reading a book, his normal practice when sailing.
In The Cruise of the Snark (1911), which was inspired by Slocum’s voyage, Jack London wro
te:
Joshua Slocum sailed around the world a few years ago in a thirty-seven-foot boat all by himself. I shall never forget, in his narrative of the voyage, where he heartily indorsed the idea of young men, in similar small boats, making similar voyage. I promptly indorsed his idea, and so heartily that I took my wife along. While it certainly makes a Cook’s tour look like thirty cents, on top of that, and on top of the fun and pleasure, it is a splendid education for a young man — oh, not a mere education in the things of the world outside, of lands, and peoples, and climates, but an education in the world inside, an education in one’s self, a chance to learn one’s own self, to get on speaking terms with one’s soul.
No Picnic on Mount Kenya
THE UNUSUAL ITINERARY in this book clearly illustrates one of the principal motives in travel: the wish to escape from boring, nagging, pestiferous people. That wish can inspire long journeys and ambitious travel feats.
In 1943, Felice Benuzzi (1910–1988) was bored and irritated with confinement and his annoying fellow Italians in a British prisoner of war camp outside the town of Nanyuki in Kenya. He was surrounded by “every kind of person … old and young, sick and healthy, crazy and sensible”. He says that the lunacies and achievements of the other prisoners could fill a book, and he proves this with examples. But his mind was on other things. From behind the barbed wire of the camp Benuzzi had a view of majestic Mount Kenya: “An ethereal mountain emerging from a tossing sea of clouds framed between two dark barracks — a massive blue-black tooth of sheer rock inlaid with azure glaciers, austere, yet floating fairy-like on the near horizon. It was the first 17,000-foot peak I had ever seen.”
A junior colonial officer in Italian-controlled Ethiopia, he had been captured by British soldiers along with thousands of other Italians and imprisoned in the British colony of Kenya. (Benuzzi does not mention that other Italian prisoners, as forced labourers, helped build the western road out of Nairobi that traverses the Great Rift Valley, as well as a lovely chapel in one of the bends in the road.)
