Backpacking is kind of a funny activity. You play ancestor
for a bit, taking a couple of days to go wander out in the bush, sleeping in a
very basic shelter and eating basic food, living and moving in the wilderness.
There is a yearning to leave civilization, to get closer to
the land, to go back to one's instinctual roots, and indeed the experience can be sublime and incredibly rewarding. Yes your surroundings are beautiful, and you get fresh air and exercise and immersion in nature. But part of what makes all of this so rewarding is something curious that you don’t
hear talked about as much or expressed in the imagery: the privation of it all.
Typically you carry on your back a heavy backpack that
contains all of your food, water, clothing, and shelter essentials. The weight
of it, and the arduous hike onwards – and often upwards – can be difficult and
at times even excruciating. Why do people do it? People take huge chunks of
time off and spend ample resources in pursuit of this.
The struggle and the difficulty makes the ensuing rest and immersion in natural beauty all the more enthralling. The many pains from the arduous journey give way to pleasurable relief. The food tastes better. The water and drink is more satisfying. Sleep and rest is irresistible. Companionship is directly and immediately appreciated.
As time wears on though, those privations begin to wear on you. One begins to miss one’s warm bed and one’s insulated space. One begins to miss all of the creature comforts, the cheeseburger and fries and a cold beer, the readings on the couch, and all of the rest of the trappings of settled society. One is born of civilization and expends energy to leave it, and eventually with a force of its own one is drawn back to it.
We speak of gravity and curving back to the earth, but what of being at the same time propelled away from it, carried in the overflowing and buoyant energy that flows from the sun into the living earth system?
Just as there is a dialectic between being ensconced in civilization and desiring an escape to land and wilderness, there is also a dialectic between being in the wilderness and bringing civilization into that too, and there is a constant traffic between the spheres.
Within civilization, one sees constant imagery of the wilderness, injected in, such as in public parks, entertainments, ads selling products, and so on. Wilderness shows up everywhere: one is to go there to find relief from the exhausting oversaturation of convention and sedentary life, and the bustle of technological stimulation.
But then out in the wilderness there is a relentless ironing out of the creases of discomfort wherever one has the time and energy. That campsite can always be buffed out, with more rocks removed, more comfortable seats positioned, more insulating sleeping materials and shelters that keep one separate from the bugs. When one sleeps, one notices all of the temperature differentials and encroaching moistures and all of the rest of it, dreaming of ways to dam it all up so that one is nice and comfortable.
There is an entire industry devoted to such pursuits. We collectively develop technologies like lightweight and warm sleeping bags and sleeping mats, lightweight tents to keep out the weather and the bugs, sophisticated clothing and fabrics and rubbers and plastics to modulate the exchange of energies coming from the body and going to the body, and so on.
Indeed, the yuppies live for this stuff. You can wander into any REI, where everything is far too expensive. One balks at the price of a fork and knife for example. But no no no no you don't understand, these are camping utensils!
So there is a constant tension between the worlds, a constant traffic between them. And really we seem to exist somewhere in between, constantly in tension between the two, constantly curving back to the earth in exhaustion, but then upon actually touching the earth, recoiling and swept back up into that tower of exploited energy we call civilization.
