Fresh Air Fiend

by Paul Theroux

  It was impossible for me to travel except on skis. The rangers used snowmobiles for emergencies, or to traverse the backcountry, but these vehicles were useful only on the flatter and more thinly wooded areas. Skis were more versatile, and mine brought me to the brink of rocky precipices, across frozen ponds, and through trackless woods.

  Each day I ventured farther and farther from my cabin, with emergency supplies in my pack, some food, my water bottle—first skiing up the eastern edge of Katahdin to a camp called Roaring Brook, and then west to Abol Falls. I was looking for moose, which are numerous and fearless, for evidence of more black bears, for coyotes, for lynx or deer. I saw tracks of each of these animals, but not the animals themselves.

  Later, when I told a local man that I hadn't seen any of the creatures, he said, "Maybe not. But they saw you."

  In the winter, skiing cross-country through the forest, the greatest difficulty is not the cold—not initially. It is that such an effort makes you perspire heavily. I was warm, too warm, most of the time, even when wearing a minimum of clothes. At noon when I stopped for lunch, the perspiration would freeze on me and stiffen my clothes with ice. So my lunches were short, and when I got back to my camp in the afternoon, I got such a chill from my cold wet layers of clothes that I shivered for hours, long after my feeble stove was blazing. My clothes never really dried, and they were still clammy in the morning. In a tent this would have been much worse: traveling light, you never really dry out, and it is this that makes the winter wilderness dangerous—skiing hard and coping with wet clothes.

  All this time the mountain loomed above me, a great rocky camel's hump, some of its contours giving it a resemblance to the volcano it had once been—forced out of the ground by fire, then carved by ice—the monumental glaciers that covered this part of Maine during the Ice Age.

  It was so warm one day that some birds were particularly lively, jays and ravens and crows, frisking and flitting in the daytime warmth and tentatively uttering their mating calls. Strengthened by the sunlight, I skied to a place on the slope of the mountain known rather ominously as Avalanche Field, but before I reached it, I saw a team of climbers skiing slowly in my direction, descending through the forest. They had camped near the mountain a week, staying in shelters, and had climbed to the ridge of Katahdin and to several peaks.

  We talked awhile, and the team leader spoke of the precipitous trails, the icy cliffs, the snowdrifts, and a serious fall, when one man tumbled backward into the rest of the team. It had been a breathless all-day climb from their camp to the main peak and back, and they had been involved in technical climbing on rock, ice, and drifted snow. They were somewhat intimidated by my numerous nosy questions, and, at last feeling (I suppose) defensive, the team leader said, almost apologetically, "We had a nice view from the top."

  I knew exactly what he meant. It seems absurd for anyone to spend a week in a wilderness of snow, skiing and climbing, and at the end—cold hands and feet, extreme fatigue, aching muscles, and nothing to eat but hurriedly rehydrated cuisine—at the end of it all, sum up the crowning achievement with the murmur "a nice view."

  It is simply impossible to explain except in metaphysical terms, yet who wants to hear a camping trip deconstructed as a critical aspect of enlightenment? The motives of this effort are a personal matter, yet no bystander—and no reader—ought to be subjected to a pompous discussion of the wilderness experience and the Meaning of Life. Nonetheless, it is nearer to the truth to understand this passion of solitary skiing along narrow forest trails in the winter as an exploration of the heart and mind—an inner journey.

  As the days passed, my familiarity with the forest deepened, and I came to recognize birds and land features and the vagaries of the weather. My competence grew: I could ski greater distances, and I enlarged my territory in the forest, claiming more and more of the woods, becoming bolder. So I grew. It helped to be alone. I developed certain routes as my own, discovered shortcuts across frozen ponds, ranged more widely and was better able to judge the risks of distance and of cold.

  I liked the thought that as long as my little gas stove worked, I would always be able to melt snow and have a supply of drinking water. And it was a satisfaction to me that I learned to work the stove in a high wind and have a hot, energizing meal in the middle of the day in a remote snow field or in the forest. It made me feel that I had more than survived in this inhospitable place, that I had begun to enjoy the privilege of being a citizen of the wilderness.

  My conceited feeling lasted for a while—perhaps two more days. Then the weather deteriorated. From days of sunshine and nights of profound cold, the temperature rose, the sky darkened, the clouds lowered, and in their place was a fine mist of ice chips and rain. There was no mountain anymore. The trees had no tops—they ended obscurely in a ragged ceiling of mist. I had been prepared for this from the weather report on my tiny radio. Yet the effect was worse than I had imagined.

  I woke in the morning to a demoralizing sound: the steady patter of rain, spitting against the snow and eroding it, giving the surface the irregular and cratered look of old battered Styrofoam, as though the snow had begun to decay. It was not the spring thaw but a meteorological anomaly—the deranged weather of New England, in which anything might happen.

  The mist and fine rain was beautiful, giving a haunted look to the forest, a wraithlike aspect to the pines—but it was deadly. Just a short trip on skis was a frustrating experience, a sort of blinding baptism—poor visibility in a drenching downpour. To compound it, the surface of the snow was almost unskiable. There was no other way to travel, so I stayed in the cabin, feeling captive—the empty forest all around—and listened hard, hoping the rain would stop.

  It did not stop. It eased. But the temperature dropped again and on the second day of this dreary storm, in which the entire forest was transformed from a brilliant kingdom of tall trees into a forbidding place, the word "wilderness" acquired for me a more ominous meaning. The forest had been a region of sunlight and snow, overlooked by a mountain that seemed to have a benevolent shape. Now the mist veiled the mountain; a darkness penetrated the woods, picking out every tree as though traced in an etching; and the rain froze hard.

  In New England we have a macabre expression for a large patch of ice on a ski trail. This unexpected frozen puddle, often greeny yellow from the color of the earth erupting just beneath it, is called a death cookie. It is usually circular, a disc of ice, and it is rare for a skier to cross one without falling.

  It seemed to me that the frozen rain had turned the whole of Baxter Park into a death cookie. Every surface was glazed, every tree, every twig thickened with glassy frozen layers of ice. And the surface of the snow that had once broken easily under my skis had become a hard shell. It was like skiing on endless smooth slopes of crystal. My skis had no edge for this, they would not grip, and predictably I fell several times. The ice crust was so hard that in places when I fell I hardly broke through it.

  What was most maddening was its beauty. The frozen rain that had coated everything—each trunk and twig and pine needle glistening individually—this magic prevented me from venturing very far. More than that, it prevented me from escaping.

  I made several futile attempts to ski out, and then I calmed down. Be prepared, and be patient: these are the lessons of all winter travel in the forest. I was lucky to have a cabin, I told myself, even if it was drafty by day and like a refrigerator at night. I wrote my notes by candlelight, and before bedtime, holding a flashlight to the page, I reread Madame Bovary ("Accustomed to the peaceful, she turned in reaction to the picturesque"). Now and then I looked out the window at the wilderness encased in ice, like an old preserved carcass, a mammoth entombed in a glacier.

  I kept thinking how, after a week of skiing and climbing and at last reaching the summit of the snowy mountain, the men I had met had said, "We had a nice view." That oversimple summary illustrated the impossibility of describing the euphoria one felt in the open air of a remote w
ilderness. At the end of each day I had felt a sense of achievement and exhaustion—a thrill, yes, but why? Because I had spent the entire day alone in a vast landscape of snow and cold. There is a species of large-pawed rabbit in this forest called a snowshoe rabbit. I had seen their tracks: the creatures managed beautifully in the deepest snow. They had adapted and prospered. On my good days I had felt like one of them.

  Continuing rain and sleet, the weather report said, and so, leaving my spare food behind so that I could move more quickly, I packed my knapsack, waterproofed myself with my parka and gloves, and headed out. I got an early start. It was an amazing jaunt, three hours of cross-country skiing in the most slippery woods I have ever ventured through.

  Still, I was leaving with regret, because I felt I was being driven out by the terrible weather. And I had no single image for this place, only the sense of the wilderness as an enormous natural labyrinth in four dimensions. But, skiing that morning back to civilization, I saw a bird chirping in a tree. I had time to study it; it was wild and fearless and took no notice of me. It was a rare bird for these parts, an evening grosbeak, looking like an overgrown goldfinch, with a yellow visor over its eyes.

  Seeing it was a stroke of luck. It was hard to describe the experience of the wilderness, but this bird was the answer—it was rare, it was beautiful, I had never seen one before, and so it could stand to sum up the trip. What was your trip like? people would ask. And I could reply, I saw an evening grosbeak, a goldfinch bigger than my whole hand.

  Trespassing in Florida

  I WAS TRESPASSING on the coastal wilderness of an aboriginal reserve in northern Queensland in Australia recently when I met a middle-aged beachcomber. He looked sunburned and furtive. He had a small, nervous-looking dog under his arm, and he said that they—he and his mutt—had been living there in the dunes, under a piece of flapping canvas, for several years. Today he was out on the beach, he said, looking for plastic bottles and net floats that the tide had thrown up.

  "Flotation," he said. "That's what I'm looking for."

  He explained that he was building a raft that would take him and his dog across the top of Cape York. With its powerful currents and high winds, it is one of the worst channels known. I asked him if he knew the risks.

  "I'm not bothered," he said. "You can go anywhere, you can do anything, if you're not in a hurry."

  Perhaps it was not so strange to hear this from a penniless beachcomber in rags, at the edge of the Coral Sea, with a dog under his arm.

  Who are the great travelers? They are all sorts, of course. A large number have been depressives, bipolar types capable of serious gloom: Livingstone sulked in his tent for days, Vancouver locked himself in his cabin, Speke shot himself, Scott sometimes wept, Nansen was suicidal, so was Meriwether Lewis; but at their best they are curious, contented, patient, courageous, and paragons of self-sufficiency. Their passion is visiting the unknown. Travel, which is nearly always regarded as an attempt to escape from the ego, is in my opinion the opposite: nothing induces concentration or stimulates memory like an alien landscape or a foreign culture.

  I had not been talking to the beachcomber long before he began to reminisce about his old home on the Thames, near Gravesend. It interested me that he was pushing on, planning to raft around Australia. He said as far as he knew it had never been done before.

  I understood completely and encouraged him. The profoundest satisfaction in travel is a sense of discovery, the private thrill of seeing something new or seeing it in a new way. This is unquestionably egotistical, but such discoveries do not come easy. Nothing is harder than that uncertain, Martian-on-Earth feeling of being alone in the middle of nowhere. The payoff is a conceited feeling of having gone to a distant place and unlocked a secret. As far as I am concerned, everything else in travel is a vacation, the view from a chaise longue—horizontal.

  I admired the beachcomber's independence, and I admire the intelligent, knowledgeable, map-carrying traveler. Anyone who knows one bird from another, one wildflower or tree from another, is capable of intensifying this feeling of discovery. A landscape looks different when you know the names of things—and, conversely, can look exceedingly inhospitable and alien when it seems nameless. But there is a point where, when a place looks very strange, it is not an indication of its remoteness but simply a mark of your ignorance.

  When I was younger, I liked traveling in cities, being among mobs of people, seeking out churches and museums. I think it gave me a sense of self-importance, of being big and busy. I have not grown misanthropic, but with the passage of time I have come to value emptier spaces, to seek out the natural world and the ultimate of what travel has to offer—wilderness. Is this a way of reinvigorating myself with a peek at innocence, of having trespassed into Eden? It hardly matters—so much in travel is self-delusion.

  Look at Florida. Even in the middle of the busiest tourist destination, it is often possible to find something resembling wilderness. The road signs in the great empty stretches of south Florida's Alligator Alley saying PANTHER CROSSING are there for a purpose. Occasionally these endangered creatures are seen. The glimpse of one must be like a glimpse of the world before the Fall. Nearer the coast, where dolphins frolic among powerboats, there are so many ospreys they could easily be mistaken for pests. You can travel for days among the low and misleading islands on the outer reaches of Charlotte Harbor and never see a golfer, which I suppose is one definition of wilderness.

  Anyone wishing to understand the meaning of the word "backwater" should come here. In a tentative and accidental way, I first found this part of Florida almost twenty years ago when I was driving south from Sarasota on back roads looking for January sunshine. Then, after the motels and trailer parks petered out, the land grew spookier and more swampy, and the towns were little more than a gas station, bait shop, and post office, all in one weatherbeaten building.

  Beyond these remnants of roads was tropical vegetation and a network of waterways, the banks held together by the spindly legs and arms of mangroves. It delighted me to think that Florida (even then regarded as spoiled, vulgar, too flat, and too hot) had this stretch of paradise that was like the deep tropics—a jungly coast with glittering, beckoning islands. I kept going back. Even its hidden parts began to be discovered and developed, though some of it is still wilderness in the sense of being a place where you can be lost and never found.

  This thirty-mile-long outflung pattern of barrier islands, protecting Charlotte Harbor and Pine Island Sound, was charted by Ponce de León in 1513 while he sailed down Pine Island Sound looking for the Fountain of Youth. He saw only Indians, the Calusas, who were such determined warriors—their name means "fierce"—that they fought to the death. Most of them were killed by the well-armed Spaniards, and the rest were dispersed to Cuba and other parts of Florida. But the Calusas had left behind fascinating remains of their traditional culture, notably their shell mounds, which are impressively high, as much as forty feet, creating actual hills on what were the flattest lands imaginable. The Calusas used these mounds in their rituals; they had a cult of the dead that linked them with the Indians of Mexico.

  After the Calusas, conquistadores, and pirates had come and gone, millionaires and settlers arrived—this was in the 1920s and 1930s. These well-heeled pioneers were so impressed by the Indian mounds that they squatted on them and built their mansions on the ancient heaps of shells and human bones, an act of desecration that, like most acts of desecration, gave them wonderful views.

  The large low-lying area of swamps, barrier islands, and bays is variously known as the Shell Islands, the Pirate Islands, or the Coconut Coast. Sanibel, the southernmost link in the chain of islands, is the most heavily visited, as many as a million cars trundling across the causeway link to the mainland in a single season. Or not trundling at all but rather standing still in a mile-long halted line. The road, a continuation of Route 867, carries on, winding through pines and palms to a bridge to Captiva Island. At the end of the road is a
sprawling resort where, on most days, rambunctious jet skiers vie with dolphins and yachts for space at the edge of the intracoastal waterway, all of them captivated, so to speak.

  North Captiva, another barrier island of sand and mangrove, lies isolated just across Redfish Pass. It is accessible only by small boat, because of the mud flats and shoals that surround it. North of it is Cayo Costa, a state park, the prettiest island of all, and with almost no population, about four miles long and a mile wide at its thickest point. Cayo Costa, also known as Lacosta Island, is the haunt of ospreys and bald eagles, alligators and wild pigs, and a few campers. A small, environmentally friendly campsite lies on the western, gulf-facing side, near its spectacular beach.

  None of this is wilderness in the sense that it has been left unexplored, but it is wild enough, and in the maze of islands that make up this swampy offshore archipelago there are plenty of snakes, gators, herons, and turtles. The endangered gopher tortoises can't burrow in the densely planted lawns of Sanibel, but they have no problem in the dunes of the islands farther north.

  Yachts enter the anchorages of Useppa ("A Private Membership Island," a sign warns on the waterway), and most dinghies can get into Cabbage Key, where there is a small hotel—it was once the winter home of the novelist and playwright Mary Roberts Rinehart—but scores of other islands hereabouts stand in such shallow water they are off limits to almost all boats except those which draw only a few inches of water.

  I was once in the house of a friend on Gasparilla Island, near the prosperous settlement of Boca Grande, when an elderly and very wet gentleman appeared at the front door.

  "Just swam to shore—got stuck on a bar," he said, dripping salt water onto the welcome mat. He held a soggy stogie in his fingers—probably force of habit. "Mind if I use your phone?"