I failed at wilderness solitude

In Part 1 of the Solitude Trilogy, our hero tackles nature alone, with unexpected results

On my first solo backpacking trip, a camera would have been too much weight. But to capture the mood, here’s a later picture of a smaller, less solitude-laden lake.

Like many fans of wilderness, I have vivid memories of my first solo backpacking trip. I studied topo maps, chose a destination, tested my equipment, planned my meals, and worried about the weather. I anticipated communing with animals, listening to the stillness, and pondering the meaning of life.

I was around 30 years old, already living in a Montana mountain town. I’d been on solo car-camping trips before, and solo day hikes, and small-group backpacking trips. But to spend the night alone, in the wilderness, subsisting entirely on what I carried under my own power, seemed an overdue rite of passage.

I drove to a high mountain trailhead, so that my walk would be mostly flat rather than uphill. I let the dog out of the car, and fruitlessly told her not to waste so much energy bouncing around right away. I strapped on the pack, and gave thanks that I’d made so many careful sacrifices to reduce its weight.

Then I started walking, and things went awry. They were the standard logistical difficulties. For example, mis-interpreting the map, I missed the trail on the right side of a lake, and instead stumbled along the difficult left side. I forgot the counterintuitive first step in setting up the tent, and had to disassemble and go back to square one. I fumbled the water-filter and spilled filtered water over the lakeshore. My clunky old stove and cheap matches generated more frustration than heat.

I knew that I should feel triumph at eventually conquering these difficulties. I had done it. Me, alone. Capable of conquering the wilderness. What an ego boost! But instead I just felt aggravation: it sure would have been easier to solve these problems using two or three tiny brains instead of just one.

I was camped at almost 10,000 feet, above treeline, on a tiny flat spot that looked down on a massive backcountry lake. I had nonstop views of wildflower-strewn meadows, granite crags, and endless high plateaus marked with ridges and peaks. A really beautiful scene! Around the lake were a few other backpackers. One of them seemed to be waving at me.

I went over to say hi to a newlywed couple from town. We’d met several times, were friendly but not yet close friends. Thus etiquette suggested—and the landscape accommodated—pursuing our own separate quests for solitude.

I returned to my site. There was plenty of daylight left. I was finally set, and ready to immerse myself in the experience. I admired the view. I looked for animals. I listened to the stillness. And I got bored.

I told myself that boredom was just the first step. I needed to embrace it, enter it, move through it to the profundities beyond. But I couldn’t find them. The problem was not the setting. Nor was it really me. The insignificance resulted from being alone.

I felt so ashamed: had Ed Abbey ever been bored? Annie Dillard, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau? How could I love wilderness if I couldn’t love it on its own? How could I find myself if I couldn’t take the solitude?

Maybe, I reflected, I wasn’t really cut out to be a backpacker, a camper, a Montanan, a nature writer, an environmental advocate. Maybe I was that lower form of being, a social creature, an extrovert, a team player. Maybe I should just pack up right now and trudge several miles back to my car in the dark, a failure.

What had led me astray? Eventually I remembered the family reunion in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters area the summer I was eight years old. On a rainy afternoon, we played the card game Pit in an open-walled campground shelter. On a cool morning, I watched my uncle flip pancakes high in the air above the campstove. Later, we spotted a bear and I tried not to be jealous of my little sister for being small enough to climb atop my father’s shoulders.

I remembered a huge party with a bunch of college friends who had rented a cabin in the mountains south of San Francisco. These were smart, funny, passionate people, some of them a little strange. But our conversations felt richer for the California redwoods towering over us.

I remembered a group backpacking trip when my friend Gary’s voice awakened me to mountain goats outside my tent. I remembered hiking around Devil’s Tower with a woman I’d just met, a friend of a friend eager to vent about her hardships living in Wyoming to someone from somewhere else. I remembered flyfishing with a friend on a mountain creek outside Yellowstone, boating with a friend in Alaska, taking a Jeep up a dirt road with a brand new friend in the Cascades.

All these memories of profound experiences in nature—they had people in them.

The perception that my solo backpacking trip would be a culmination of my relationship to the natural world: was it a universal human truth? Or was it driven by mythology?

Politically, love of wilderness usually sits in opposition to love of the cowboy myth. In stories of the Old West, the solo stoic man conquers the elements through the force of his white male will. He cuts the trees, blazes the trail, harvests the grass, drill-baby-drills, and exploits the wilderness. He does it all alone, and the crunchy granola-eaters hate him for it.

But sitting there in my boredom, I started wondering if Thoreau, Muir, Abbey, and company actually belonged in that cowboy camp. They celebrated wilderness for their similar ability to conquer it alone. Had they too been immersed more in individualism than nature?

At my wilderness campsite, I somehow passed enough time to be ready for sleep. The next morning, I tried to fish the lake, with my typical lack of success. I waved goodbye to my friends. I took the correct path on the way out. The dog expressed her joy.

But if the chief product of my solitude was this skepticism about the value of solitude, then clearly I had failed.

Discussion:

• Great works of art come in trilogies, like The Naked Gun. So this is Part 1, and next week we go deeper.