Look Around

Some words on thanksgiving and paradise

One thing I enjoyed about leading a trail crew, beginning with my first crew in Montana, was occasionally dispensing what I believed to be useful—though no doubt unsolicited—advice. A favorite saying was this: when you start to really hate this job, take a minute and look around. All of us at least occasionally hate our jobs, after all, trail crew or not. But if your job involves backbreaking labor, biblically shitty weather, mud, mosquitoes, unnerving remoteness, and no cell phone coverage, discontent is not only natural, but a sign of a sound mind.

Perhaps the years I wasted in a cubicle before my trail crew career sufficiently undermined the soundness of my own mind. Rare was the day swinging a pick mattock that I didn’t at least begrudgingly thank some higher power for getting me out of the office and into the woods. But most of my younger crew members had been smarter than me when I was their age: they’d gotten into trails early. Worrying they might not fully appreciate, therefore, their innocence of and freedom from office life, I’d dispense my hard-earned piece of wisdom in this area just once at the start of the season. Once was usually enough. As far as I ever heard, no one on my crews ever yearned for a cubicle or expressed serious ingratitude for the mountains and forests around us. Of course some credit there belongs to the mountains and forests too.

But what about those of us who aren’t so lucky? My illness and subsequent hiatus from the woods offered no such advice, and for a long time, exiled from the wilderness, I searched for sources of gratitude seemingly in vain. Fortunately that feels like a long time ago now. As soon as I was well enough to sit outside on a porch comfortably I discovered how easily gratitude could prance, hop and flutter its way right to me, or waft in the breeze, or paint the clouds gold.

I still don’t know exactly what it is about wild nature that provides such deep, mysterious solace during the dark seasons in our lives. No single explanation seems sufficient, at least if the extensive accounts from such obsessive seekers as Thoreau, Dillard, and Abbey, to name just a few, are any indication. What seems more certain to me are their conclusions: heaven is under our feet; there is such a thing as grace; paradise is with us yet. I’ve followed their advice into the mountains and forests for enough years to see my fair share of paradise, though it is fleeting, raises more questions than answers, and invariably returns me back to our messy imperfect world at the end—at least so far.

Thanksgiving may be a holiday founded on a myth, but for now the break from work and return to family and friends is as good a time as any to practice a much older tradition of thanking some higher power for our good fortune. And all the more important, if you ask me, during our tumultuous current times. Ultimately the only bit of advice I have to offer hasn’t changed much over the years. It’s only natural to hate what has become of our modern world, with its greed, violence, corruption, stupidity, its penchant for cruelty, the biblical waves of destruction in store, and the painful defeat of our efforts to change it. But there is still much to love; much to praise; much to fight for. Take a minute and look around.