Over the last couple months I have been dipping in and out of The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd: one of the foundational pieces of nature writing, and deservedly so. I underlined the following section, which comes at a point where wading across a loch Nan and her companion suddenly realise how deep it is:
‘I waded slowly back into shallower water. There was nothing that seemed worth saying. My spirit was as naked as my body. It was one of the most defenceless moments of my life.’
I love this quote because I think it captures something like what the Romantic poets called the sublime: those moments in nature where it feels huge and awe-inspiring, and makes you feel smaller and more vulnerable in comparison. Similarly, Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail opens with the moment where she loses a boot on the trail.
‘I looked down at the trees below me, the tall tops of them wavering gently in the hot breeze. They could keep my boots, I thought, gazing across the great green expanse […] [I] I considered my options. There was only one, I knew. There was always only one. To keep walking.’
Now, I need to confess that I find myself weirdly attracted to stories of those forced to survive in the wilderness: the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in the Andes, Ada Blackjack, even fictionalisations like Yellowjackets. I think my fascination lies in how humans manage to live: how do they find food and water and shelter? How do they look after one another? How do they find comfort or purpose? I adore how much of our silly, seemingly unnecessary, human routines we cling to.
What these stories also underlie for me is how alienated we are from nature. I don’t mean we should all be spending our spare time forgoing duvets and hot showers, just how completely backwards our attitude towards nature is. The RSPB’s motto “giving nature a home” feels bizarre to me - we don’t “give” birds a home, we live in theirs.
It’s too easy to assign some intent to nature - as if the coldness from snowfalls or dehydration from deserts - is some kind of cruelty on nature’s part. What energises me about nature, and what I take from Shepherd and Strayed’s writing, is that nature feels so truly neutral. It can offer dangerous situations, but also life-changing moments.
I am not like Strayed. I love walking and spending hours in nature but I am the worst camper. All my walks end somewhere comfy with a good book and somewhere to rest my feet. I don’t think this diminishes my relationship with nature at all. I find joy in spotting crows in the park, using an app to figure out what bird’s song I’m listening to, finding flowers growing through pavements, even just watching the trees near where I live change throughout the seasons. In spring and summer, I love the lush sound of the wind through their leaves. In winter, I get to be nosey and spy on where the birds nest and feed one another.
In most built environments, we are either working or consuming (save special places like libraries, spaces wilfully undermined by Tory rule). Walking in nature, going nowhere in particular, you are neither worker nor buyer.
The scariest moment, by far, in Wild is when Cheryl meets two bow hunters. They’re threatening and creepy, so she pretends to be hiking further to make camp. One of them comes back and sexually harasses her again.
‘I could hardly hear my own words for what felt like a great clanging in my head, which was the realisation that my whole hike on the PCT could come to this. That no matter how tough or strong or brave I’d been, how comfortable I’d come to be with being alone, I’d also been lucky, and that if my luck ran out now, it would be as if nothing before it had ever existed, that this evening would annihilate all those brave days.’
This moment is deeply terrifying - she is completely alone with a threatening man. But nature is not the fear here: people are. A threatening man is just as scary in the wilds as in your own house.
What is scary about nature? It’s changeable and outwith our control. In a capitalist society we have routine and a solution to that problem. It’s only one click away via online shopping and next day delivery. In our stories and art and reporting, it’s too often man vs. nature - the civilised vs the unruly. Humans are the active agent, and a barrier hovers around our bodies, separating us from that which is not us.
Why is it that surviving a situation in the wilderness is heroic but those who survive the worst of capitalism - poverty, homelessness - are not afforded the same honour? We have absorbed the idea that capitalism and built environments are “just life”, no matter who they harm, whereas nature is “not for” us.
I find nature’s neutrality deeply comforting. Yes, if I don’t wear the right clothes on a cold night I could die of hypothermia. But this it isn’t active or controlled. I can’t say the same for the harm that social structures we live under in a patriarchal capitalist society.
We need new stories about nature: ones that do not centre us, but show us as part of a much wider series of connections. If you can, go for a walk today. If it rains through your clothes, or an insect happens to bite you, I can promise you this: it was nobody’s fault.
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