It’s morning in the Absaroka Mountains. The word absaroka means “raven” in the Crow language, though I’ve seen no ravens in three days. Last night I slept with my head butted against an Engelmann’s spruce, and when I woke, it was a many-armed goddess swinging around and around. The trunk is bigger than an elephant’s leg. I stick my nose against it. Tiny opals of sap stick to my cheeks where the bark breaks up, textured: red and gray, coarse and smooth, wet and flaked.
I’m looking for the source of the Yellowstone River, and as we make the day-long ascent from a valley, I think about walking and wilderness. We use the word “wilderness,” but perhaps we mean wildness. Isn’t that why I’ve come here, to seek the wildness in myself and, in so doing, come on the wildness everywhere, because after all, I’m part of nature too.
Following the coastline of the lake, I watch how wind picks up water in dark blasts and drops it again. Ducks glide in V’s away from me, out onto the fractured, darkening mirror. I stop. A hatch of mayflies powders the air, and the archaic, straight-winged dragonflies hang blunt-nosed above me. A friend talks about aquatic bugs: water beetles, spinners, assassin bugs, and one that hatches, mates, and dies in a total life span of two hours. At the end of the meadow, the lake drains into a fast-moving creek. I quicken my pace and trudge upward. Walking is almost an ambulation of mind. The human armor of bones rattles, fat rolls, and inside this durable, fleshy prison of mine, I make a beeline toward otherness, lightness, or like a moth, toward flame.
Somewhere along the trail I laugh out loud. How shell-like the body seems suddenly—not fleshy at all, but inhuman and hard. And farther up, I step out of my skin though I’m still held fast by something, but what? I don’t know.
How foolish the preparations for wilderness trips seem now. We pore over maps, chart our expeditions. We “gear up” at trailheads with pitons and crampons, horsepacks and backpacks, fly rods and cameras, forgetting the meaning of simply going, the mechanics of disburdenment. I look up from these thoughts: a blue heron rises from a gravel bar and glides behind a gray screen of dead trees, appears in an opening where an avalanche downed pines, and lands again on water.
I stop to eat lunch. Emerson wrote: “The Gautama said that the first men ate the earth and found it sweet.” I eat bologna and cheese and think about eating dirt. At this moment the mouth frames wonder, its width stands for the generous palate of consciousness. I cleanse my taste buds with miner’s lettuce and stream water and try to imagine what kinds of sweetness the earth provides: the taste of glacial flour or the mineral taste of basalt, the fresh and foul bouquets of rivers, the desiccated, stinging flavor of a snowflake.
As I begin to walk again, it occurs to me that this notion of eating the earth is not about gluttony but about unconditional love, an acceptance of whatever taste comes across my tongue: flesh, wine, the unremarkable flavor of dirt. To find wildness, I must first offer myself up, accept all that comes before me: a bullfrog breathing hard on a rock; moose tracks under elk scats; a cloud that looks like a clothespin; a seep of water from a high cirque, black on brown rock, draining down from the brain of the world.
At treeline, bird song stops. I’m lifted into a movement of music with no particular notes, only windsounds becoming watersounds, becoming windsounds. Above, a cornice crowns a ridge and melts into a teal and turquoise lake, which, like a bladder, leaks its alchemical potions.
On top of Marston Pass I’m in a ruck of steep valleys and gray, treeless peaks. The alpine carpet, studded with red paintbrush and alpine buttercups, gives way to rock. Now, all the way across a valley, I see where water oozes from moss and mud, how, at its source, it quickly becomes a river.
Emerson also said: “Every natural fact is an emanation, and that from which it emanates is an emanation also, and from every emanation is a new emanation.” The ooze, the source of a great river, is now a white chute tumbling over brown bellies of conglomerate rock. Wind throws sheets of water to another part of the mountainside; soft earth gives way under my feet, clouds spill upward and spit rain. Isn’t everything redolent with loss, with momentary radiance, a coming to different ground? Stone basins catch the waterfall, spill it again; thoughts and desires strung together are laddered down.
I see where meltwater is split by rock—half going west to the Pacific, the other going east to the Atlantic—for this is the Continental Divide. Down the other side, the air I gulp feels softer. Ice bridges the creek, then, when night comes but before the full moon, falling stars have the same look as water falling against the rock of night.
To rise above treeline is to go above thought, and after, the descent back into bird song, bog orchids, willows, and firs is to sink into the preliterate parts of ourselves. It is to forget discontent, undisciplined needs. Here, the world is only space, raw loneliness, green valleys hung vertically. Losing myself to it—if I can—I do not fall … or if I do, I’m only another cataract of water.
Wildness has no conditions, no sure routes, no peaks or goals, no source that is not instantly becoming something more than itself, then letting go of that, always becoming. It cannot be stripped to its complexity by CAT scan or telescope. Rather, it is a many-pointed truth, almost a bluntness, a sudden essence like the wild strawberries strung on scarlet runners under my feet. For half a mile, on hands and knees, I eat and eat. Wildness is source and fruition at once, as if this river circled round, mouth eating tail and tail eating source.
Now I am camped among trees again. Four yearling moose, their chestnut coats shiny from a summer’s diet of willow shoots, tramp past my bedroll and drink from a spring that issues sulfurous water. The ooze, the white chute, the narrow stream—now almost a river—joins this small spring and slows into skinny oxbows and deep pools before breaking again on rock, down a stepladder of sequined riffles.
To trace the history of a river or a raindrop, as John Muir would have done, is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble on divinity, which, like the cornice feeding the lake, and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself over and over again.