I fill in the form and hand it to the ranger who reads it and eyes me with a touch of intrigue and amused concern. “Now Dan, you’re sure you know what you’re doing?” he asks. We don’t get many in here traveling alone this time of year. Fact is we don’t get many paddling at all this time of year. You got plenty of food and warm clothes?” I assured him that I was well prepared and that I had a cell phone I could take with me to call if I got into trouble. I knew there was no way I was taking that phone with me. One learns to say what authorities want to hear. A habit that I need to get away from.
And so I parked my car in
the allowed space, checked my gear carefully again and took off into the
wilderness that lay in front of me. The pack was heavy but I was so hungry to
get away, that I handled the difficulty of portaging across rough terrain with
relative ease. Determined, I even relished the burden. I was alive and the pain
and physical strain were far better than that awful empty “nothing” feeling of
losing love. I was shedding a world of news, TV, the internet and mail where
everything seemed to be happening all the time. Constant stimulation and
activity ever available were being left behind. Heavy with pack, I felt oddly
lighter. Only woods and water lay ahead. An abstract geometry of geographical simplicity
would be my home for a week. I was not being exiled. This was not being forced
upon me. In a deeply instinctive way, it felt right. I was here by choice and
it empowered me. I had had to overcome myself. I love you Alice Walker and your
“honor the difficult.”
Out here, all was empty,
harmonizing with my emotional evisceration. “Go into it,” Krishnamurti said.
It’s the only way to learn to own your emotions. Entering this wilderness, I
thought, I will do this thing, it’s only for a week, and it’s much more real
than therapy. The lush landscape seemed forbidding, but my stay would be short.
I must give wisdom a chance. That old native saying, “If you would find wisdom,
you must go out into the wilderness, far from men.” Some say God is to be found
out here. I began to believe that.
Absence can be a
blessing. No noise, no congestion, no impingement here. All urgency was gone
and the redoubtable wild was becoming comfortable. It was wrapping around me
like a blanket. I felt strangely accepted almost appointed, as if I peacefully
reigned over the woods and water, was guardian of the distant shore. Is this
why, I wondered, the Australian aborigines say “We live to feel,” and their
feelings are like a lived prayer? I had thought about this when I first read it.
I was feeling lighter, fuller, freer, liberated. Could I stand liberation for
an entire week out here all alone? I laughed. My friends would be driven quite
mad here by weeks end.
For seven days, I fell
into a near routine, distilling life down to bare essentials, shelter, food,
water, toilet, freedom, just being alive and contemplating the miracle of
it. Always rising at dawn to catch the
shimmering and subtle shift of light on forests and still water. It felt intimate
and I got to know the sun again. There were moments of boredom, of hiking to
nowhere wondering why when I returned.
Snow came and dusted the pines and transformed the landscape, so ethereal, so
beautiful and unseen by others that tears came to my eyes. I had wild dreams at
night which I would record in the morning as I drank coffee. I gave each day a
totem word, honoring Thoreau’s “Simplify, simplify, simplify!”
Day One: OWL…For the soft
sound of the large bird that flew so close to me the first night as I gazed
into the great night sky, so palpably near. Perhaps Minerva Owl, bird of
wisdom, brushing close.
Day Two: FOREST…The lone
and lush forest that reaches far away and seemed to move as the light changed.
Day Three: WATER…I could feel my mind begin to flow into
everything and rise and become light with the stars, the sun, the moon, the
spirit of the lakes.
Day Four: DREAM… I began
to feel surreal, outside of my body, made of the stuff of dreams. My night dreams
becoming more imaginative and complicated than I had ever thought possible. I
felt as if I were a dream within a dream that was, perhaps, being dreamed. All
was somehow gossamer, translucent.
Day Five: GRATITUDE…For
just being alive and able to be here. To begin to see my own absurdity.
Day Six: SKY...So all
encompassing, so real, so like a changing artist’s canvas going from
translucent blue to black and catching all the cloudiness and color most
brilliantly and ephemerally expressed at dawn and dusk. The sky so intimate and
eternal. As Millay had written, “The soul can split the sky in two and let the
face of God shine through.”Day Seven: HOWL…For my last day…the sentinel sound. Was it coyote, wolf or some mythical beast? I couldn’t know. It was a grand ululation, an all vowel sound, a lamentation. AEEIIOOOUUUUUUUuuu…that marked so perfectly, perfectly as perceived, my final night as if some spirit animal were asking me to stay. Was sorry to have me leave. The voice of the mystery of it all…with feeling.
Today when I am melancholy and feel like howling, I think of that singular cry coming out of the deep silence of the night, I smile and feel relief…less alone.
Books available from Steve Stepan:
Sundown at Dawn
Ebook:
http://www.amazon.com/Sundown-at-Dawn-ebook/dp/B00CNV3CNG/ref=pd_rhf_ee_p_img_1_EDD6
HardCopy:
http://www.thebookpatch.com/BookStoreResults?search=sundown%20at%20dawn&ddl=any
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