I’d been reading a bit and thinking a lot about old John Muir, that crazy fuck.  So easy to think of him as simply the wizened old naturalist, an Aldo Leopold sort of nature writer with a flowing white beard and a broad brimmed hat, sitting there under a tree with Teddy Roosevelt, mapping out a novel little plan to leave a couple of little green postage stamps of these esteemed states unlogged. And sure, if that racist old coot TR hadn’t liked camping so much, there would have been nothing left in just a few more years.

But that man Muir was a real monument of endurance and mountaineering cojones. For decades, Muir scoured the Sierras, bushwhacking through the high country, setting up base camps and cabins, then climbing peak after thirteen thousand foot peak without a jacket, just a crust of bread tucked in his belt, sleep in a fucking pine tree at night.  Sketching on the summits, singing to flowers and cathedral walls, riding avalanches, crossing glaciers in the chill of the moonlight.

***

So I left camp and friends behind in California’s High Sierras, about ten-thirty in the morning, under a bright sun and cloudless sky, just after jumping in the creek and slamming two beers to take the edge off of last night’s embarrassments. I left the mountain jacket and the first aid and the whatever in the truck, packing a water bottle and a pullover. I also cheated it a little and brought a headlamp. I figured I would return the over some of the seven miles back from the summit in darkness, and a left a note on the truck for the rangers to that effect.

A few hours later I was whimpering, huddled in a survival crouch in a stand of trees as lightning blasted the ridge a quarter mile above me. Would Muir have noticed he couldn’t feel his hands or feet? Of course not. The man found nothing but sheer ecstasy in the flash, rumble, and shudder of the high mountain storm. I’ve read the enamor with which he would climb to the top of tall, tall Douglas firs, just to ride a windstorm. I just balled my hands in cold fists and watched the mist roll across the meadow clearing, face wet, mind blank, sky gray.

Another hour or two and a few thousand feet in elevation after that, I was the idiot punching through snow and rock hopping above the tree line, trail gone and buried beneath the early summer snow, soaking wet, shorts and sneakers.
Soon after I reached the rim of the alpine cirque at about ten thousand feet, the cloud I had been traveling in fractured a little, and the sun swept across the basin. The three spire peaks  shimmered in the light and  mild altitude sickness. And there below, a crystalline blue, half frozen jewel of a lake, and I was taken aback. I set out on a path to reach one of the sharp teeth without even thinking harder than it has taken you to read this sentence. Nearly immediately, the cloud and mist again thickened, and reduced the visibility to just a hundred feet or so.

I paused occasionally to stop the crunch of snow underfoot, in order to try and make out the murmur and far voices I could hear behind the wind that had begun, even though I knew I was quite alone.

***

There are plenty of conversations - or maybe explanations - about men and mountains; and most are pretty boring, I think we can agree. Sir Edmund Hillary’s sneering “because they are there,” which was taken literally, not as the insult to the inquiring reporter it was meant to be. Or terms of assault and dominance, like most of the sorts of people you might find paying thousands of dollars for a trudge up Everest.

The passion that led John Muir to the hills was invention: the architecture and engineering of it all. Grew up on a farm under a brutal Scottish father, but as a child genius would wake before dawn to, you know, carve fucking wooden gears for his homemade clock. Or invent a new kind of barometer.

At nineteen, he was offered the job of chief engineer for a sawmill, based upon his solutions and inventions and machinist skills there. But one day, while tightening the leather drive belt of a saw, he punctured the surface of his eye with an awl. He went home and wept in his boarding room as the aqueous humor leaked from the wound and the vision in his eye slowly dimmed and went black.

And then, to his horror, a few hours later the other eye went dark as well in sympathetic response.

His vision returned after a time but, duly chastened, he quit the job and set out to check out the wildest inventions he could find, lest he ever lose his sight completely. He went looking for those wonders in nature. There were rambles to South America even, and the jungles. He somehow came across Yosemite, and the upper Tuolumne meadows, and then spent the rest of his life devoted to unraveling their glacial and geologic secrets in what would appear from all accounts to be a state of complete and utter rapture; immune to discomfort or cold, and freaking out about how beautiful the mountains and their architecture, their plants and denizens and seasons, and climbing over every square inch of them.

***

I can relate to that stomach feeling one gets looking over or up to an alpine view, a desire to subsume oneself into a landscape so much more grand, disappear into it, climb upon it, sleep within it. As Muir wrote, “in the face of Yosemite scenery cautious remonstrance is vain; under its spell one’s body seems to go where it likes with a will over which we seem to have scarce any control.”

But you know, there is something sharp up there up at altitude, too, though.  Sometimes it’s rapture, maybe. I have found glory up there. But sometimes it is something else entirely. I think Robert Pirsig was closer to capturing that other shift you might find, the way dreams of the same place twice can be so different. Up there in the same Sierras, the clouds and oxygen-deprived dementia where Pirsig met his alter-ego, the other person he used to be, or his alternate personality still separate but within him, Phaedrus, and was assaulted by strange dreams of his son and death, and feared of what he might be capable, and retreated.

I am a skeptic scientist, a rationalist, an atheist. But I’ll tell you, only a few weeks ago I came close to a decision to spend my life savings, what little there is, to fly to the jungles of Peru and drink DMT-laced ayuhuasca tea with an eighty-year-old cuarendero named Don Julio in the Amazon to visit with what might be real or imagined spirits. That sounds extreme, I realize now that I condense it like that, but I suppose that factually it is about correct.

And I know I’m wandering a little bit, this is what altitude and cold and mist does to your train of thought. But in that last month of desert solitude, living by myself, the dreams recently, lucid, flowing, at times more real than waking. I approached evenings with the amused air of a child explorer, eager to try a new experiment in these technicolor visions: flying quickly became boring. One night I tried to conjure up an entire city to explore, build each building up. People its streets. These were like nothing I’ve ever called dreams before, controlled and uncontrolled, it is hard to find the right words.

And on one of those bright, dusty, desert days, I had a memory of an article Old Bo had sent me, that crazy adventurer turned desert hermit. It was clipped from a National Geo, years back. He had once spent some weeks convalescing in Iquitos, Peru, after a particularly brutal jungle misadventure, and had made a friendship there with an ex-pat bar owner, a collector for a New York natural history museum, a student of the jungle tribes, a drug war journalist, a former High Times editor, who guided trips up river to visit the old cuarenderos, the healers, and go through the purging ceremony of an ayuhuasca ceremony.

I tracked the article down again. It was a young reporter who went on one of these guided trips, and drank ayuhuasca tea under the tutelage old Don Julio for three nights. And the article and subsequent research was as I remembered:  it is plainly clear and relatively easy to explain, in terms of current science, why the stuff would make you trip balls. What is somewhat more troublesome to explain is how a group of people can have the same hallucination at the same time. How the cuarendero could see your vision, see what you are seeing, and advise you, protect you, they claimed.  But also how indisputably successful it has proved for resolving anything from severe depression to cocaine addiction.

The idea of such a trip clung doggedly to my thoughts for a week or two.
There was a series of coincidences that felt heavy at the time that I won’t bother to relate. But then a friend wrote me, mentioning a dream he had in which I had been in. Unbenownst to him, on that exact same night, I had had essentially the same dream, with him in it. The setting, the room description, the feel of the thing.

So, somewhat unsettled, I wrote my desert hermit friend Bo an e-mail. You still friends with that jungle explorer, Grumman? Got any advice for heading to Iquitos?  He usually writes me every few weeks when he makes his forays into Blythe, California, seventy miles from his desert burrow.

He wrote me back a few minutes later.

From Iquitos, Peru.

“Sure,” he wrote in his terse style. “Grumman just dropped me off here at the internet cafe back in the city. You should come down. It will change your life.” An hour or two later, two different warm invites arrive from his ex pat friends whom I’ve never met, pages long, describing the journeys we might have up that river.

***

A young man came to visit in all his radiance, glowing, beneficent. I could hear people in other rooms, moving. Richard was a young friend of mine whose last struggling mortal breath I had heard and witnessed at his bedside, at a house in the woods in Arkansas two years ago, and had touched and held his soft dry skin as it cooled in the minutes after.

“It’s so good to see you!  I didn’t think I’d get to see you again,” I say in this dream that I know is a dream but not a dream.
He has found me, and simply beams, whole again, robust, not the ramshackle skeleton I had bid farewell to.
“Can you hear us during the day, too?” I ask.
“Sometimes.”
“Where do you live now?”
“Oh, just a couple of valleys over” he motions with his hand vaguely.
“Have you seen my brother?”
Just a smile, a tilted head, a shrug.

***

“My enjoyments yesterday afternoon, especially at the head of the fall, were too great for good sleep. Kept starting up last night in a nervous tremor, half awake, fancying that the foundation of the mountain we were camped on and had given way and was falling into Yosemite Valley. In vain I roused myself to make a new beginning for sound sleep. The nerve strain had been too great, and again and again I dreamed I was rushing through the air above a glorious avalanche of water and rock. One time, springing to my feet, I said, “This time it is real – all must die, and where could a mountaineer find a more glorious death!”

-John Muir

***

The map is not the territory. The representation is not the reality, although we have no other way of talking about it or interacting with it. Our experience of reality is a representation, played out inside our heads, it is not the real Real, of course.

I am walking in a cloud, and I want to tell you about how it is simultaneously both absolutely ridiculous and also perfectly sane to re-adjust your whole worldview one afternoon, and suddenly find it perfectly reasonable that maybe you can talk to dead people in dreams.  That they are “somewhere.” Descartes said we must build cities of our theories and hypothesis, but be ever ready to raze them to the ground.

I want to talk about how it is demonstrably true, not even controversial even, to consider that time is elastic, and that distance and space are subject to dilation and contraction, and if we didn’t assume so, it would be impossible to synchronize satellites, and the damn cellphones wouldn’t work, and thus open a meditation on just how fucked up reality must really be, if this only what we know from fumbling around it’s edges. I want tell you about how maybe up here, in the high mountains, the high lonesome, this separation, the overlay of the map and what lies beneath it, maybe the underneath thing is that much closer, or perhaps at least more easily discerned.

I want to talk with you about how when we are young, we are obsessed with where we came from before we were born, and how that question is abandoned on our way through life, and replaced with an obsession of where we might go when we die. I want to suggest that the two are the same question.

And in a more general sense I want to talk about how sometimes it feels like there are two realities, one overlayed upon the other. Philip K. Dick used to talk about this: The Roman Empire never died, it’s right here, simultaneous with our reality. I wanted to talk about how healthy it is to see the universe with fresh eyes, that getting “close to death” isn’t something that happens only occasionally (though we certainly notice it at those times), it’s always right there, in the same way, all the time.

I’m thinking of a particular roadside cross in Arkansas, on Markham, and what to do with it. I want to tell you about how in Montana, the Department of Transportation puts dignified, small, white, and permanent crosses at the site of every road fatality, private property or not. And thus in Montana, one gets …. I was going to say “comfortable” with death being around, but I don’t suppose that’s the right word. But these repetitive reminders everywhere, these crosses, that remind you that the division between the Map and the Territory is thin, very thin.

I am a skeptic campchair scientist, an amateur engineer. It shocks me, in retrospect, how ready to abandon my schemas I was, just how powerful the allure and seduction of madness is. As the physicist Feynman said, “You can’t go out looking in nature looking for meaning, or a reason by presupposing that there is a reason to be found. Nature will reveal herself to be whatever she is. It may be the case that we are alone in a cold and empty universe, and I’m okay with that.” As much as I told myself that this ayahuasca stuff, this dream stuff, that these are just internal components, that this is tinkering under the hood of the car, I want it to be something else. Why can’t his words “a couple of valleys over” represent a wave form, just be a place that is a just out of sync with ours? Our universe is strange, strange thing.

And walking across that basin leaned into the wind, circling the frozen lake, reaching the flanks of the spire, and beginning to kick steps into the steepening snow, I looked over my shoulder, down the snowfield. I squinted into the mist and fog. Alone, not alone.

Seems that many of the best cognitive psychologists and scientists might agree we have “free will” - that they agree we are something far more complex than simply biologic determinism, more than just rats in a Skinner box. But the emerging evidence, from the markets to the lab, is that true as that may be, we have very little insight into why we even choose what we choose to do. This is an important, critical thing to remember about oneself.

This was not a place for the living, here in the snow and ice and fog. I was sure I was about to meet something up there. The other was there. Let me tell you friends: I was a coward.  I stopped in my tracks, walked a few feet back, walked a few feet forward, arguing with myself. The summit was a ghost in the mist above me, not too far.

Where the air is thin, where the boundary feels thin.

The universe is a very very strange place, time dilation, and length space shrinking parallel to velocity. Time is different, depending on who measures it. The length of a train is two different lengths for two different observers.

And there are two things at once, the representation, and the thing beneath.

Muir was up to the that grand task, to stare the thing down, the overwhelming task of performing an honest evaluation of one’s personhood and life. I was a coward, and turned around. Followed my vanishing snow tracks down the slope, across the cirque, shamed and cowed.

  ***

 “In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild drew a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography saw the vast Map to be Useless and permitted it to decay and fray under the Sun and winters.

 In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; and in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.”

-Jorge Luis Borges

  ***

Spent the next day driving around the mountain backroads of Tahoe with the wife, occasionally digging the truck out of snowbanks with a shovel, wearing flip flops. Drunk. A whole day of laughter. It was a beautiful day, I tell you.