It’s in the middle part of a long walk, in the quiet space when you are free of the head trips and worries of your life back home, that we think most clearly, see most deeply. Alaska writer Bill Sherwonit, in his essay “Old-Timers Find Hidden Arctic Magic” from the current issue of Deep Wild Journal, describes one such visionary moment on the seventh day of a hike in the Arctic Wilderness:
Our seventh day in the mountains, Dale, Sonja, and Jan decided to explore farther up the main, broad valley in which we were camped. I’d visited that area on my previous trip and felt a stronger pull back toward the Valley of Spires, so I returned there to spend some quiet, solitary time. My unhurried meanderings led me to one of the rock buttresses that form the hidden valley’s gateway area, and I took a position beneath its weathered eastern wall. To those who understand the language of Earth’s landforms, it tells the story of how the Valley of Spires came to be. Or at least it presents some parts of that story.
Even in my geology days, I never was especially skilled at interpreting the structures of rocks; and over the past forty-something years I’ve forgotten most of what I once knew. Yet standing before this immense marble cliff, I could plainly see a multitude of folds, fractures, and displacements, which in their entirety spoke of the enormous forces that had shaped and reshaped the rocks that now form this extraordinary mountain landscape. Talk about mystery and magic . . . The Earth conjured up some magic here, it seems.
Rather than try to figure out how that happened—which would have been futile, anyway—I was drawn into the rocks themselves and for a short while entered something of a meditative state and experienced what I can only call a passage through “deep time.”
The marble cliff and the ground immediately below it represented time on vastly different scales: first, the eons during which the calcium-carbonate sediments and rocks were formed and transformed, over and over, across time far beyond human understanding or even imagining; next, the centuries of weathering and erosion that have produced huge rock piles beneath the wall, a process that however old is still ongoing and can be witnessed by observant humans who notice the clattering of falling rocks; next, the decades—or centuries?—that it has taken to form the alpine meadow in which I stood; finally, this year’s greening and flowering, symbolized by the grasses and single golden Alaska poppy that grew beside me. I suppose I can also add the instant of my own brief participation in this immeasurably larger whole.
Standing there, I wondered how our modern, western culture can be so certain that mountains and valleys and streams are not in some sense alive, or sentient, or spirited, as many societies around the world once understood them to be (and some contemporary peoples continue to believe). Our human time scale is so tiny in the greater scheme of things. And for all we think we’ve figured out, our comprehension of the complex, interconnected nature and workings of the Earth and its many aspects—life forms, landforms, bodies of water, the atmosphere, weather systems, climate shifts, on and on—remains limited.
As one who’s thought a lot about such matters and experienced realities the larger culture considers fanciful, I would join those who argue that modern humanity’s inability to perceive, or even seriously consider, the many, varied forms of consciousness (or liveliness or spiritedness) that exist right here on this Earth is a measure of how disconnected we humans have become from the larger, wilder world of nature. And our own wild nature.
From the 2023 issue of Deep Wild: Writing from the Backcountry. To read Bill Sherwonit’s essay in its entirety, visit deepwildjournal.com/subscribe. We are currently open for submissions for Deep Wild 2024, to be published next June. No reading fees!
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