The West Will Swallow You

by Leath Tonino

  I was a college student with childhood at his back and the entire West before him—new landscapes, new prospects, new adventures, same old dream. What I found, instead of mountains rich with gold, instead of open range and cowboy freedom, was the underside of a city, a nature sunk in concrete gullies, funneled toward resonant culverts, pinched against the howling freeway and the coal plant’s fuming chimneys. What I found was unexpected: the dead buck bent across a patch of damp ground. Kneeling at the water’s edge where plastic bags collect, I peered into its vacant gut.

  Really, I didn’t question it much at first—not the buck, but the creeking. Maybe I was tired of books and words and talk. Maybe I was uncomfortable inhabiting urban sprawl. I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. These things just sort of happen.

  Suited up in rattiest jeans and rattiest jacket, I walk uncertain neighborhoods, traverse a weedy lot, drop to my belly, squirm a chain-link fence’s ragged hole. A shallow band of water cuts the bottom of a dirt slope, and I follow, hopping from tilted stone to tilted stone, rotten log to rotten log. The creek grinds deeper, banks rising, buildings rising with them, until I’m picking my way through a gurgling, shadowed corridor with sixty-foot walls. I wade. Pigeons imprint the sky. When I climb out, it’s dark and I’m far from home.

  Colorado Springs wasn’t a single creek, I realized, but a complex network, a web of fluid paths feeding one another, winding for miles. At sunset I’d go to a bridge and watch leaves and feathers and plastic scraps boat about on the current. I’d spit and watch it glide. Those evenings, bronze light spilling from the clouds, it seemed that I too could travel, without purpose and without thought, along the place’s streams.

  I started carrying a daypack with supplies: headlamp for tunnels, carrots for a snack, a lighter, a water bottle, a jackknife. Rambling, observing, I mapped in my mind the spot where two raccoons climbed a cottonwood, where a crumpled tent collected rain, where a rock rolled beneath my boot and threw me to the creek. I gathered images and experiences as my jacket gathered burs, grew heavy with them as my jeans grew heavy with mud. At night I’d sit in my room and fan everything out, the pebbles from my pockets and the scenes of the day.

  On and on and on—it went on like this for a couple of years. Increasingly, I understood the city as a skin of pavement and concrete stretched over the living earth. Strolling some random street, I’d hear water, track the murmur to a grate, press my ear close, wonder where it was journeying and if a guy could join. The surface became less real to me, less joyous and less sad. Increasingly, I understood myself as one of those raccoons climbing the cottonwood, a creature endlessly exploring spaces torn between civilized and wild.

  But that’s dramatic, that’s the words running off with themselves. Honestly, nothing notable happens in the creek. A syringe stabs mud. A lady screams at a retaining wall. Foxes weave trash-paths. Foxes pause, sniff, keep going. You pursue. You notice. You see stuff down there, that’s all. You see the wind in plastic bags, the bags writhing and sucking and wheeling. You see a dead buck, his flesh stolen, his fur and bones turning to sand, washing away, grain by glittery grain.

  Relittering

  The author Ed Abbey was famous, or perhaps infamous, for tossing empty beer cans out the window of his pickup. Hell, he’d say, it’s the damn road that we should be calling litter. This style of provocation dates back to the Cynics, a gang of Greek ethicists who came on the scene after Socrates died in 399 BCE. They were interested in drawing attention to nomoi, cultural conventions that go mostly unnoticed and, accordingly, mostly unquestioned. For guys like Antisthenes, Crates, and Diogenes, acting outrageous in public was a favorite pastime.

  Despite my wholehearted agreement with Abbey’s point about the damn road being a damn road, there’s a part of me that thinks his behavior was, well, sort of dumb. Adding trash to an already trashed planet is patently unnecessary, not to mention crude. Furthermore, this can-out-the-window radicalism has itself become a cultural convention, a standardized symbol of defiance. If the goal is to shake things up, another Budweiser in the ditch isn’t going to do the trick. Maybe we need a new outrageous act?

  Personally, I’m a fan of relittering.

  The story begins during my years as a philosophy student in Colorado Springs. Once or twice a week (more if I was reading a miserable text like Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit) I’d leave the dorm an hour before sundown, black Hefty bag in hand. Something about collecting the city’s refuse—Styrofoam cups and cigarette butts, broken bottles and cigarette butts, rags and wrappers and crumpled papers and cigarette butts—freed my mind of words, concepts, big theories. It will sound paradoxical, but filthy trash consistently swept my headspace clean.

  Unsurprisingly, the initial dozen outings ended with me at campus, struggling to lift my bulging bag over the rim of a dumpster, fearful of catching a corner and leaking Eau de C. Spgs. onto my noggin. That is to say, I prettified the city-scape by consolidating strewn garbage and transferring it to a socially sanctioned receptacle. A no-brainer: Where else would a good young environmentalist offload thirty thick gallons of disgusting junk?

  Alas, philosophy teaches us little more than how to confuse our settled opinions. Soon enough, I was wondering why a giant metal box brimming with rubbish was not a blight, and from there it was just a hop and a skip to the local dump, where, one hot Saturday morning, I watched bulldozers busy themselves with heaps of stinking, steaming waste. Their work reminded me of a neurotic friend who “cleaned” his room by tidying clutter into some seventeen neat piles.

  All we’re doing, I realized, is pushing this awful shit in circles. If it ain’t recyclable, it ain’t recyclable. Period. I understood, instantly, that pure intentions and elbow grease wouldn’t green up a single inch of a society that overproduces and overconsumes. It hit me as gut-level sadness: This is your home. Welcome.

  Relittering was thereby invented.

  It felt mighty awkward at first, so I started small. At the edge of a park or playground I’d stoop, pluck a wadded napkin, then walk five blocks and gently set it beside a bus stop. Within a few months, the napkins had become pizza boxes, ratty jackets, tires yanked from overgrown lots, shredded blue tarps excavated from the creek’s compacted sand. The artist in me wanted to consciously arrange, to fashion a thing of beauty, but my inner Cynic wouldn’t allow sugar-coating. He insisted that this was about forcing a raw confrontation between the citizens of Athens (C. Spgs.) and their milieu.

  The task was relocation, plain and direct. Haul nastiness from abandoned spaces—the undersides of freeway overpasses, the insides of concrete drainage tunnels—and set it in the sun, preferably in a spot where it wouldn’t cause extra labor for a municipal janitor or landscaper.

  These days I live in a rural area, and while there’s definitely plenty of garbage around, it appears manageable against the backdrop of undeveloped nature, which means I typically shoo it into a trash bin. I miss relittering, though, I really do. There was an absurdity to it, a black humor that helped me laugh in the face of our drive toward ruination. It was a grimy, tactile encounter with the truth of culture and place—what Henry David Thoreau would have called “Contact! Contact!”

  Funny that old Henry should butt in here, as he, like Ed Abbey, was also an heir to the Cynics. Different eras call for different techniques, I suppose. One fellow finishes his Budweiser and rolls down the window. A second kicks that can out of the ditch, into plain view. A third borrows an ax, heads to a pond on the outskirts of town, and builds himself a cabin, a dwelling apart from—a dwelling that stands as a rebuke of—his mad, reckless age.

  And then there’s Diogenes. He wore tattered clothes, resided in a wooden tub on the street corner, ticked off both Plato and Alexander the Great, and allegedly said, “Humans have complicated every simple gift of the gods.” If such a generalization causes discomfort, tough noogies. That’s the idea.

  When We Curse Peaks

  My buddy Chris and I were famous back in college, at lea
st to ourselves, for our many and varied defeats above treeline. To put it nicely, our vision and verve outstripped our technical climbing ability. To put it less nicely, we were incompetent. Once, attempting a notoriously exposed ridge in December, Chris forgot both pants and boots; he had his ice axe and crampons, but just bald sneakers for the feet and thermal underwear for the legs. Another time—okay, twice—we failed to even reach our desired trailhead, let alone the base of the route we had planned to ascend in “perfect style.” It demanded some effort, to be sure, but when it came to not bagging Colorado’s high peaks, we were the absolute best.

  Regardless of whether we did or didn’t ink our names in a summit register, much fun was had on these outings. There was the bivouacking in remote cirques, the alpenglow’s soft fade, the cheap whiskey, the singalongs, the enlivening wind, the slurping of cold beef stew from a tin can when somebody—who could that be?—spaced the stove. Shaggy white mountain goats, lovely as clouds, would pause to look at us with their deep eyes. “Take me to the top,” I’d say, making sure Chris overheard. “This guy in the thermal undies means nothing to me. You are the most beautiful beings on the planet. Please, take me with you.”

  Of course, there was also vigorous, impassioned cursing, for a misadventure without swears is far less enjoyable than one loaded with scatological references and creative anatomy lessons. When our subheroic assault on some fourteen-thousand-foot granite hulk was stymied by pissing rain, poor rope management, a misread map, or a hangover from the aforementioned whiskey—well, let’s say that our mouths glowed neon with blue language, like we’d swallowed our headlamps or something. Think of John Muir’s elegant syntax, those ornate sentences lavishing praise upon the divine order of nature, only dirtier.

  To be frank about the depth and breadth of our degeneracy, the dirtiness often started before we found ourselves stuck on a sketchy, chossy, dead-end ledge or playing hide-and-seek with lightning. Driving from campus to the mountains on Friday afternoons, a kind of manic energy crackled in the car, the sight of intimidating ranges out the window inspiring us to disparagement. Chris especially had a knack for belittling the horizon, for building himself up by putting the earth down with taunts, challenges, and macho nonsense. By no means was it genuine hubris; we knew our wings were made of wax. It was play, that’s all, what the basketballers call trash talk. Still, I cringe to consider how ugly and offensive it would have sounded to an outside observer.

  That’s where this gets interesting: outside observer. In my reading of contemporary eco-literature and my spotty study of indigenous North American spiritual traditions, I find again and again the marvelous, mysterious, brain-bending notion that the so-called inanimate world—the world of “objects” without human ears—is in fact listening to what we two-leggeds say. The hunter must take care not to offend the deer and bear, but he should hold his tongue in the presence of plants, stones, rivers, weather systems, and stars too. We all should. It’s a matter of manners, of simple respect.

  So, then, was our repeated defeat in the alpine zone due to irreverent chitchat and outright blaspheming of the sacred topography, or did it stem exclusively from sloppy mountaineering? Perhaps more important, were we being disrespectful in the first place, or did the land know it was just a joke, just friendly ribbing? It certainly never felt like we were behaving rudely.

  Another pal of mine, easily the funniest guy around, has said to me many times, usually after cutting into some soft spot of my ego with a simultaneously incisive and hilarious remark, that humor is the greatest form of honesty. I’m inclined to agree, and to add that honesty is one of the core fibers in the muscle we call the heart. Without honesty there can be no true love; there can only be a kind of rose-scented fake love, Hallmarky and shallow—a love that resembles some endless honeymoon, not a real marriage, warts, F-bombs, deprecating jokes and all.

  I picture my girlfriend, how her eyes shine with glee as she mirrors my idiocy back to me, exaggerating it, hugging me with it. I picture my sister, my mom and dad, all my closest companions, how what bonds us is the willingness to laugh at one another’s expense, and how that laugher itself becomes the external marker of our connection, our appreciation, our camaraderie.

  These days Chris is climbing glaciers in the Pacific Northwest, earning his keep as some kind of businessman, living a life that does not involve me. I mostly hike on my own, in silence, without the aid of whiskey; if I do get drunk it’s on thin air, and if I do speak aloud it’s probably to utter—good gentle fellow that I am—some little poem of thanks and praise to the ground beneath my boots. However, from time to time I’ll take a seat way up there above the trees, in the tundra meadows or among the jagged rocks, and listen through the memories of those missions Chris and I made into the glorious, rugged, ambition-smashing Colorado backcountry—those trips we threw ourselves into with all the stupid youthful energy of energized stupid youth.

  What I hear in such moments of reflection, albeit filthily expressed, is a kind of pure passion: rough and real, unedited, totally vulgar and totally true. I hear crazy yelling, cackling laughter, words unfit for print. I hear my dear old buddy leaning into the wind and sleet and danger, his voice barely audible over the louder, larger voice of storm.

  Hearing this, I relax, at ease with the land. Then I stand up, stub my toe, and cuss so forcefully that the sky trembles and the boulders shake, almost like the mountain itself is chuckling.

  The last laugh is always on me.

  In Praise of Scrambling

  I first heard the noun “scramble”—defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a mountain walk up steep terrain involving the use of one’s hands”—when I was eighteen, bumming around bonnie Scotland. Bonnie Scotland? More like wet, windy, tent-thrashing Scotland. My traveling buddy, a mostly inscrutable, mostly inebriated Glaswegian who cared naught for dental hygiene and knew naught of mortal fear, had initiated a rest break (smoke break) during our approach to the Black Cuillin’s Pinnacle Ridge. Features with fierce names like Sgurr nan Gillean and Basteir Tooth loomed overhead—a traverse far riskier than anything I’d undertaken back home. Reared in Vermont, I was a bushwhacker accustomed to dirt and ferns, not alpine gabbro.

  “Oh, come now, it’s only a wee scramble,” the Glaswegian said between puffs on an immense unfiltered rollie.

  Scramwhat? Only a wee? Had this bloke been nipping minibottles of Glenfiddich at breakfast?

  “A wee scramble,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”

  An hour later I was marooned on a crumbly ledge in twisting fog, the Glaswegian stemming up a grim, grimy chimney nearby—stemming and whistling to himself, the unflappable bastard. Reaching for a heinous little nub of a hold—gulp—I simultaneously reached my personal limit. Too stern, an inner voice said. You’re a hiker, a hillwalker. If you want to tango with Sgurrs and Tooths, go ahead, learn ropes and anchors and whatnot. Please, though, don’t be a damn fool. Acceding to this sage advice, I retreated, slightly ashamed, majorly relieved.

  But here’s the thing: Nursing pints in the pub that evening, buzzed on Guinness instead of adrenaline, I couldn’t stop thinking about that ledge, that chimney, that heinous nub of a hold. They were in me as question marks, as possibilities, as promises of … hmm, I wasn’t sure what they promised. I was sure, however, of my desire—my need—to find out.

  The wimpy Yankee kid was hooked, lickety-split. Hooked on scrambling. Hooked on the ancient art of walking landscapes with one’s hands.

  Picture it starting with some Cro-Magnon fellow crawling up a rock rib in search of berries. Picture Roman legionaries scaling outcrops to better view the battlefield. Picture nineteenth-century guides in knickers and hobnail boots summiting those very Scottish Highlands that puckered me. Fast-forward to the present, in which speedy unroped alpinists make short work of the casual pitches that punctuate their multiday Patagonian enchainments. Tomorrow, perhaps, we’ll enter a postindustrial future—no Petzl, no Black Diamond, just primates scrambling once again for
survival.

  Which leads to questions. Is there an instant of transition where Class 3 hand-walking leaves off and that revered, outrageous genre of ascent—the free solo—begins? Is Alex Honnold, modern master of the free solo, a glorified scrambler? Would he take offense at the suggestion? What of Tom Patey, hero among Scottish hardmen, a guy who prior to his death rappelling in 1970 unabashedly clutched grassy tussocks when they appeared at the perfect, desperate, knee-knocking moment? Did he give a hoot about labels and systems of classification, or was his concern only the topography and the challenge—the challenging fun—of fitting his body to its shapes?

  The rigmarole of so-called serious climbing (painful shoes, crotch-binding harness) strikes me as contrived. At the sport crag, over the clinking of quickdraws, you hear so much bomber-this and bomber-that, as though the bliss of “good rock” is all that matters. But last I checked, the majority of this planet’s intriguing nooks and alluring crannies are anything but solid. Should we disregard the chossy gullies and exfoliating gendarmes in pursuit of the cleanest, sweetest lines, or should we accept them, celebrate them, rejoice in their vitalizing difficulties?

  Here’s my response: Thank you, sir, may I have another!

  And this also: Technical mountaineering, with its requisite gear hoard and skill set, plus its narrow focus on, say, a particular flared crack, has for me felt like a door closing, whereas scrambling—unfettered, minimalistic—has felt like a door swinging open to reveal the sprawling earth’s limitless wonder. That wonder includes mountain goats drifting across fanning talus, moonlight reflecting from a midnight lake whose shoreline tundra serves as a pillow, a rain-slicked ramp fast becoming a hail-greased slide, a double rainbow culminating in the pot of gold that is a family of blond marmots—the list goes forever.