Touching Grass

A photo from my hiking trip in the Dolomites.

I just returned from a few weeks of traveling, including a week-long group hiking trip in the Dolomites in Italy. I was on the trip with my mother, and almost all of my fellow hikers were women my mom’s age (most of whom were exceptionally fit). We were kept in line by an excellent guide with strict rules about punctuality, etiquette, and proper gear.

I enjoy long walks and beautiful scenery, so in theory, I should be perfectly suited for hiking. In reality, I mostly like it when the weather is nice and there’s a glass of wine and a soft bed at the end. Moving to the Pacific Northwest in my 30s after a life as an indoor person gave me many petty resentments about outdoor culture, particularly the smugness of it all: the not-so-subtle implication that there’s something inherently virtuous about camping, hiking, and kayaking. Though I admire the paean to water found in the early pages of Moby Dick¹, I dispute the notion that there is something automatically pleasurable about being on a boat. Nor does snowfall trigger any fond, pleasurable associations for me. My least favorite “outdoorsy” experience is actually an indoor one: whenever I visit the flagship REI store in Seattle to buy outdoor gear—the outdoors are ravenous for gear—I’m overcome with disgust for the merchandise, most of which is both hideous and hideously expensive, not to mention useless outside its advertised purpose.

None of this makes me superior in any way, just cranky. When traveling in a group setting, I consider crankiness and complaining a cardinal sin and avoid it as much as possible. In truth, once I get past my annoyances about gear, bugs, and smug fit people, I usually enjoy myself outdoors, especially if I’m in good company. The Dolomites in particular offered stunning vistas, the weather mostly cooperated, cowbells rang charmingly in the air, and the hikes were followed by good wine and showers. I appreciated being in a group, enjoyed my companions, and was grateful to be led by an excellent guide.

“Spending time in nature” is supposed to be good for your mental health. It pops up regularly on lists of recommended self-care practices, alongside gratitude journals² and therapy. I’ll spare you most of the churning about how this concept of nature only makes sense in the context of an industrial, urban society, and just say that it’s rarely had that effect on me. I’m as likely to grow ruminative and melancholy as to access any state of wholeness or peace. If happiness is self-forgetting, I find it difficult to forget myself in nature—only when among other people. When I see a beautiful vista opening up to me, sometimes I’m elated, but at other times I feel entirely empty and disturbed by that emptiness—like someone in a museum standing in front of a Caravaggio, having expended considerable funds and time to reach it, knowing they’re supposed to have some kind of experience of wonder or transcendence but remaining guiltily unmoved. Unlike a lot of visual art, scenes of natural splendor are self-evidently beautiful, but they can also feel meaningless, and their indifference can be frightening.

From Czeslaw Milosz’s short essay Facing Too Large an Expanse:

We spread papers on a table beneath a tree and try to write or add columns of figures; the uneasy leaves, stirred by the wind, the birds in flight, the drone of insects—that incommensurability between open space and the operations of the mind—immediately drive us to a place with four walls, where our activities seem to inquire importance and dignity. Cocoons, caves, rooms, doors, enclosures, lairs, those underground galleries where Cro-Magnon man ventured, though endangered by cave-dwelling hyenas, so that in the farthest, deepest corner, he could draw magical beasts by torchlight: only there did his work become enormous, only from there could it govern the fate of the live animals on the surface of the earth.

Now I seek shelter in these pages, but my humanistic zeal has been weakened by the mountains and the ocean, by those many moments when I have gazed upon boundless immensities with a feeling akin to nausea, the wind ravaging my little homestead of hopes and intentions.

If there is anything inherently moral about spending time outdoors, it must be in this encounter with insignificance and indifference, not in any notions of physical fitness, inner peace, or accomplishment.

1. “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.”

2. Gratitude journals also annoy me.