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Outside Magazine January 2002

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Walking The Line (Cont.)

A few years later I settled into guiding for the Moose, Wyoming-based Exum Mountain Guides and was living in a cabin in Grand Teton National Park. It had suffered the same fate as the valleys of the Hindu Kush, although here the damage was limited to a hundred years of grazing. Sheep chewed their way through the Wind Rivers and the west side of the Teton Range; cows did the same in the Escalante, the Gros Ventre, and the east side of the Teton Range. But with the creation of national parks and the Wilderness Act, the land and its diversity, for the most part, had come back.

I became less concerned with the new and novel and more concerned with attaining an intimacy with what was at hand, in my home wilderness. I wanted a haven, my own safe place, thoroughly known and loved, however vast and empty—a place removed, as it were, from human history and its vicissitudes. I thought about my nation's foreign-policy record of oscillation between engagement and escape, commitment and separation, and of my own struggle, of how much, or how little, to engage with the world.

I was in search of places that were indifferent to the incessant march of human foible, the unending political squabbles, the putative reality presented each moment by CNN. And yet, I soon discovered, there is no escape. The truth expressed by Muir and Leopold and ecology, by modern physics and Buddhism—that everything is connected—is unrelenting. After the tragedies of September 11, we are almost unbearably conscious that remote forces, of which we are only marginally aware, might suddenly determine our fate, the fate of our families, the fate of our friends. And being far from human tragedy is comforting only if you maintain a rather solipsistic stance toward the well-being of those you love.

When the planes flew into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, a friend's son was in Kazakhstan working on a thesis in geology; another friend's son was in charge of a Navy SEAL team; another friend was flying from Boston to Montana that morning and was grounded in Michigan. Like virtually everyone else in America, my friends and family live far away—in Washington, D.C., Seattle, California, Utah, Colorado, and Hawaii—and there is no escape for any of us. Still, I believe that living in a meadow in the Tetons had a certain advantage on that sad day and in the sad days that followed. I have no television and my modem is too slow to run videos, so it wasn't possible for me to watch the interminable replay of footage that feeds our addiction to tragic events. I wanted to shed those images instead of magnifying them; to be informed, not inured. The means to do that was near and known. I went to the wild places I have gone to for 40 years.

I went up the Gros Ventre River and into the wilderness, walking up the stream where I caught my first Wyoming cutthroat many years ago. I said I was looking for hatches, but mainly I was throwing sticks in the creek for my dog and wondering what my heroes, the hermit monks and poets of ancient China, would have done about anthrax and the Taliban. They lived in a time of great strife: a civil war, the suppression of Buddhist monasteries and practice. What did they write about?

I climb the road to Cold Mountain,
the road to Cold Mountain that never ends.
The valleys are long and strewn with stones,
the streams broad and banked with thick grass.
Moss is slippery, though no rain has fallen;
pines sigh, but it isn't the wind.
Who can break from the snares of the world
and sit with me among the white clouds?
—Han-Shan

Wang Wei wrote a book he titled Laughing Lost in the Mountains. Whenever I get too serious I like to remember that title. I was rather lost myself by the creek in the Gros Ventre when suddenly a shadow passed over me and tore down my little valley faster than any bird could fly, ever. Then the blast, shattering and implacable. As the dim glow of the afterburners disappeared over Lavender Ridge, my wild valley transmuted into a landscape out of Top Gun.

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