“Now he walks in quiet
solitude, the forests and the streams
Singing praise with
every step he takes,
His sight has turned
inside himself, to try and understand
The serenity of a
clear blue mountain lake”
I love the wilderness. There is really nothing more amazing
than just being in the great outdoors, looking at what nature has to offer. I
am convinced that no artist’s canvas is able to best the beauty which nature
has endowed.
The best parts about Yellowstone are not the main
attractions. Magnificent as they are, Old Faithful and The Grand Canyon of the
Yellowstone are separated from their viewers by walls and fences and rightfully
so, as they do need to be protected from the cold hands of humanity, which would
otherwise fling rocks and trash into them as a silly game or try to “tame” them
with dams of cold steel and cement.
No, the best experiences in this park come when you park
your motor-vehicle by the side of the road and run into an open field, with the
wind singing in your ears and the heavens opening up in front of you. You feel
limitless, unbounded and, most importantly, free.
I can now say that I have wandered into a mountain valley,
and that I have dipped my hand into the cold fresh water of a mountain creek. I
love the feeling of being alone in an open field or a pine grove, where I feel
there are no restrains on me and I can do whatever I want. The troubles of the
world melt away, and I feel that my problems are small compared to the vastness
of the lakes or the eternity of the mountains.
I realize that I feel most at ease when I walk alone in a
great plain, or sit alone by a river bank, or wandering alone in a forest. While
trekking through the plains in Yellowstone, I sometimes felt the uncanny urge
to just leave my fellow travelers behind in the car and run for the hills, just
run until I could run no longer, and then collapse and leave myself to the
mercy of the elements and the spirits who almost definitely roam the mountains
at night. Or while walking through a path through the pine trees, I felt the
urge to forge on and on and on until I had lost everyone and everything, and
give myself up to the ghosts who live among the trees.
Ultimately, I suppose that I’m a loner at heart.
Yellowstone was only the second place where I truly felt the
feeling of the sublime. I had felt that
beautiful feeling once before; in Japan, when I opened a screen door
overlooking a snowy pine grove. The total quiet, punctuated only by the
drip-drip-drop of melting snow falling from the pine needles to the ground
below, took me to a place which I had not been to since, until I arrived at
Yellowstone. There were times in the park that I wanted to sing, run and cry at
the sheer beauty of the landscape.
Night in Yellowstone is magical. The setting sun bathes the
rivers and the mountains in a rainbow of colors. Then the moon rises and
imparts a silvery-blue sheen on everything it touches.
There was one time during the darkest night when our car was
in the middle of nowhere, and we stopped by the side of the road. We got out to
look at the stars. The night sky was a deep-blue dome covering the earth,
studded with stars which were placed there by the Gods to allow us earthly
creatures to walk around by night. Even with one’s modern scientific knowledge
of stars, planets and galaxies, while in the woods at night it makes more
logical sense to cast all that aside and believe that there is indeed a dome
which surrounds a flat earth, and give a prayer of thanks to the gods who were
so kind as to place lights in the heavens for us mere mortals to make use of. I
certainly did.
And perhaps if you wished on one of these magical creations,
your wish would indeed come true. I certainly did. Childlike, perhaps. But
isn’t it good to let the inner child out sometimes? While embedded in the
social constraints of our offices and classrooms, the inner self is repressed,
but when there is no one around to watch you, who cares what the neighbors
think? Especially when the neighbors are bison and grizzly bears.
Another time, we were at the lower falls of the Yellowstone
Grand Canyon. I took the time to observe the water and listen to its roar as it
plunged into the cavern below. The purity and clarity of the river water has
yet to be equaled by any human artist, Eastern or Western, from antiquity till
now. The miniature pine trees which studded the rock-face of the mountains were
more Zen than any Japanese garden designer could dream of attaining, not after
a thousand years of tradition and a hundred years of training. No, no artistic
creation which man has come up with has yet to equal the beauty of nature. I
would suggest that all the artists of Paris and New York, with all their fancy
dress and theories of life, love, existentialism and painting, should case
their brushes aside for a week and camp out in the wilderness. The ones who the
bears didn’t eat up should hopefully become enlightened, and finally learn some
humility.
From the point of view of the Yellowstone River, you are
nothing. The individual, with his career, education, unrequited loves and
checkbook of ten million dollars, is not important. He could be cast screaming
headfirst into a raging waterfall and perhaps it would cause a disturbance
among his friends and family, but in the grand scheme of things, he only takes
up a space of about 5 cubic feet, which is nothing compared with the
magnificence of what surrounds him. Most of us work in offices and live in
cramped apartments where we are constantly in interaction with other people,
which makes us believe that we are the center of the universe. It takes a sudden
shock, where man is flung out of his social networks, even for a day, for the
individual to suddenly understand that he is not the be-all and end-all of
existence.
Perhaps I am a romantic at heart; to my mind the New World
remains untamed and relatively untouched by the hands of man, as compared to
the Old World of Europe and Asia which, as the Chinese say, can be described as
沧海桑田.
Despite the fact that Asia is “rising” and “reclaiming” it position in the
world system, and despite the fact that China and India are building skyscrapers
and parking lots and other architectural monstrosities at a rate unprecedented
in world history, the Old World still feels tired, as if it has been weighed
down by social conventions and outmoded traditions, and as if its soils have
been ploughed through so many times that they do not have the wherewithall to
produce so much as a peanut without a generous injection of chemical
fertilizers. America is simple and straightforward; some laugh at the New World
as being unrefined and crude, but is simplicity of civilization necessarily a
bad thing?
The hustle-and-bustle and human artifice of New York and San
Francisco is one side of America, where tech wizards and financial engineers
create the economic architecture which keeps human society ticking. The quiet
of the wilderness is another side of America; fresh, open and untouched, and
which will be here long after we are all gone. I ought to visit it more.
