Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 5

50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

Day 5 - A Storm of Individualism

Seclusion does not automatically lead to a silent mind. The brain goes right on firing without the stimulation of society. Instead of receiving ideas from others, ideas can come from the patterns of nature. And thus I hope for ideas to counter the oppressive feeling that much of my life, with its choices and sense of freedom, might be entrained as part of a complex mental-biological automaton created by the dual processes of biological evolution and social channeling.

Out in the social world, friends continually ask how we’re doing and what’s going on. Perhaps it is because we are socially conditioned to expect such questions that even when now alone in nature, I continue that general habit of answering. But here my questioners are streams, pine needles, sandals, hiking paths, and the shadows of walnut leaves.

Romantic poet William Wordsworth, who often wandered alone in nature, described his version of a connection to the patterns of nature:

“To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran.”

Today I had planned a carefully scripted loop hike. I figured that if I could leave early enough, I’d hike downstream along the main Gila River and have lunch near Alum Canyon. There a branch trail rises steeply up out of the valley. I would climb just as the sky was starting to fill with clouds, which happens like clockwork during these summer monsoonal mid-afternoons. I would be kept cool by shade from the gathering clouds, and then, once on the high ridge I’d head home along the power company’s dirt service road that snakes along terrain more entertaining than that offered by the paved highway. Thus, I’d witness sublime landscapes in the distance as the still-benign clouds above me were developing into precursors of what would later be thunderheads. I’d have time to get to a lower altitude along the ridge and even back to home in the valley before any actual storms would start.

So I predicted.

This plan did not happen unconsciously. It was thought out by consciously juggling specific imagery. I imagined myself walking home with the drama of the landscape and the developing clouds safely in the future. This pleasurable image influenced my decision to do the hike. Therefore images we mentally play with feed into decisions we make about our future. This playing and deciding seems to be a standard cognitive process in the tool kit of our neuro-automatisms for progressing through life.

In a kind of counter-flow in the brain, images (perceptions) coming from the outer world can affect and even become our thoughts. I’ve been witnessing that in these day by day meditations. On this day, just a half hour along on the hike in the morning, near the river and with no one else in sight, I was stopped in my tracks by some breathtaking wispy ultra- high clouds splayed out against a blue sky otherwise as vast as space. Such a display is unique, I thought, and I’ll never see another exactly the same, because water vapor, temperature, and winds create dynamic synergies so complex they are unrepeatable.

In childhood I often watched clouds in rapture, without a thought in the world. How did that happen? Was I entranced by the psychological ingestion of pure pattern? Now, so much older, perhaps I have been dulled from having taken in the basic cloud patterns too often. Most often, helplessly I watch my own rapture-busting inner dialogue of chat as it carries on full blast in the presence of clouds. Perhaps there is nothing more to be gained from the white airborne delicacies.

Yet there I was, as if back in childhood, wrapped in awe. Unique clouds reminded me of the uniqueness of the day. Uplifted and uplifting, I felt more intensely individual. Time slowed down. An inner voice insisted, “A hike should be like life, you want it to go on forever. You know neither will, but that doesn’t mean you can’t profit from experiencing the want.” The idea took me away from any sense of hurry to push on to any particular goal.

We are each unique, like the proverbial snowflake. Snowflake, cloud, or Jean Arp-sculpture-like slab of cottonwood bark strewn on the ground—all uniquely combine inner and outer forces. Humans, too, are unique, playful mergers of within and without, of body-and-environment relations. At the joining of genome far within and levels of society far above, and all in-between, “I” am born. So what if I’m a neuro-robot? I’m unique. The title of the jazz standard said it, “There will never be another you.” Never another me, another you.

Later, after lunch, I started the uphill climb, according to plan. The sun was stronger than I had hoped, so I went slowly to not overheat. It was apparently too early to get the expected shade I had figured on. But as the slope started to level off, nearing the top, I realized, huffing and puffing, that clouds had in fact been building up to an ominous degree ahead of me, in the portion of sky that had been hidden by the ridge I climbed toward under what I thought was clear sky. I stepped up the pace. By the time I did reach the top, still three miles from home, I knew I was in for rain. The only questions were how heavy and for how long. No problem, I had packed an umbrella.

Just starting on the way downward from the peak, on the scenic dirt service road, confident that a good half hour remained before rain, which would give me time to descend far enough to better security, the rain began, with lightning still in the distance—but on all sides. Then, a shock. In what were literally seconds a cold deluge broke loose, a catastrophic stroke that seemed to come from nowhere.

Curtains of dark gray had instantly closed around me. Rain drove down in thick sheets. Rivets of hail fell. I had to immediately prepare to ride it out. All I could manage to do was to get off the ridge top by about forty feet (nothing, really), decide on a spot between two well-separated juniper trees, hunker down with my knees drawn up into my chest, shelter the pack between my legs, and clamp the open umbrella against my bowed head.

I had never been so frightened out in nature. I was caught in the worst possible place: on a ridge close to electrical poles. By counting seconds between lightning flashes and the subsequent arrivals of tsunamis of thunder, I determined that many strikes were mere fractions of a mile away, and all around, all of which meant I was right in the middle of the storm, in nature’s Russian roulette. One strike cracked right behind me, and the synchronous thunder rocked my spot as if I were to be a bowling pin to be smashed by a ball from the gods.

I squatted and dared not move. There was nowhere to go anyway. I had wanted uniqueness and heightened individuality. Soaked and chilled, I got it. I could have been individually dead.

After a grim half hour I suddenly found myself standing. My unconscious knew the storm was dying before I consciously was aware of the fact. One of my automatic routines had taken control, honed into a secure intuition from the cumulative experience of many summer storms in these mountains (but in safer locales). This body-memory triggered me, perhaps from a smell in the air or change in light, to jump up. Although it was still raining quite hard, my body-memory knew that the killer energy in the atmosphere was spent.

Then, walking back, as the storm receded into the distance, I finally got the amazing views planned for before I left home in the morning. Lightning still flashed to the north. I watched it with unexpected internal levels of stress hormones, which tinged with a bit of apprehension the otherwise relieved delight, and I didn’t deny my bodily urges to step-on-it toward home in the mountain weather’s still uncertain mood.

© 2024 Tyler Voik

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