Location: Dispersed Camping on Highway 89, Donner Peak
Travel forces a reckoning with the question: what is it that we’re seeking?
If the great 20th century psychologists taught us one thing, it’s that unconscious impulses guide so much of our lives. We follow yearnings and impulses that we ourselves scarcely understand. A person can spend a lifetime sifting through the accreted geological layers of their own life, unearthing reasons and explanations, all of which are only hypotheses. We never find bedrock, just mystery and wonder the whole way down, into the substrate of which Annie Dillard so poetically writes.
I feel those impulses quite strongly, because I’ve committed so much time and effort to listening to them. I continually try to dial down the noise, to shut out distractions, to let that faint pulse be heard. It’s like searching for starlight in a sky irradiated with the light waste of industrial society. The faint glittering swath of the Milky Way does not yield itself to casual glances skyward; one must intentionally seek those rare spaces left in the world where ancient ways of seeing are still possible. One must shun every other light.
We live in a society that has invented and commercialized innumerable ways to protect us from the dangers and uncertainties of our own deepest stirrings. To listen, we must dismantle, create space. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote, “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” That is true of all crafts, not least writing, and it’s true of life. As we subtract the non-essential, we see and hear more. As our own inner callings become audible, they pose hard and vital questions about their origins, their meaning, and what they ask us of us.
It is those impulses that brought me here, away from my usual life, away from a cycle of striving and achievement. It was a near thing. Three weeks in the mountains was not my original plan. I’d applied for and been accepted into a Complex Systems Summer School at the Santa Fe Institute, the beating heart of complexity science, a kind of shining tower for my academic ambitions that I felt unable to achieve in traditional academia. It was a stepping stone towards a book I want to write, a magnum opus distilling two decades of studying war—another call from the soul. But something felt off in a way I couldn’t explain. Something deeper called. A time of letting go, of relaxing ambitions, of disappearing into a wilderness where anything or nothing might happen.
—
Why do we yearn to travel? I ponder the question throughout my first full day in California.
It is everything I hoped. We awake in the forest, brew coffee, then drive down to the Boca Reservoir, where we set up camp chairs. I write for hours, at first freezing in my down jacket and then roasting when the sun breaks over the hills. Mountain life always entails a forceful surging between extremes. I alternate writing with reading, Hannah beside me. We periodically break the silence to share an author’s brilliant insight or gorgeous line of prose. Some conversations fall away; others take on a life of their own. We follow the thread back into eventual silence and a return to our books. We feel we’ve had a full, rewarding, and timeful day, and it’s not yet 1:00pm.
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Enjoying a moment atop Donner Peak
In the afternoon, we drive up Donner Pass Road to the summit. Along the way we pass climbers, clinging to cracks in towering granite walls like brightly colored insects. It’s awesome and intimidating. We’ll be back here soon, making our own forays into the vertical. Today it’s a hike, beginning at the highway and progressing up steep winding switchbacks, across a short snowfield, and up through a stream of snowmelt to the summit of Donner Peak. The scenery is spectacular. It is, I hate to say, everything that Alabama is not.
The questions about why we travel surface as we descend back to Donner Lake and the town of Truckee. We need showers. This is no trivial matter. The van has small indoor and outdoor showers, suitable for quick sponge baths, but we’re conserving our finite water supply. The nearest truck stop is thirty miles away. We call gyms, asking if we can pay to shower. No. We pay $10 to enter a state park, disregarding signs notifying us that showers are for campground guests only. My brief foray into outlaw life ends when we enter the bathhouse and discover that the showers require tokens.
We give up and search for a campsite. A pullout in Tahoe National Forest leads us to a dirt road and on to a secluded meadow. The meadow is huge, invisible from the freeway, ours for the taking. It’s dreamlike, alive, the kind of meadow that would catch my breath in an open-world video game, speckled with bright flowers and aflutter with butterflies. We shower outside, unconcerned about being seen.
Anxiety creeps in as the sun sets. For all its beauty, the open meadow leaves me feeling exposed and vulnerable—some evolutionary instinct, I suppose, protecting me against predators that might be stalking me from the bushes. We have no cell service. Before bed we place a can of bear spray near our heads and ensure the van is ready to drive away.
I sleep well, despite my sense of vulnerability. Then, around 1:30am, we both awake to a loud thunk under the van. Five minutes later, it happens again. It is a heavy mechanical sound, like something striking the van’s exterior. Such an isolated sound can’t be a bear. A sneaking human? I jump when it happens again. Eventually, I take the dreaded step of yanking the sliding door open and stepping outside with a flashlight, fully expecting bear claws or human hands to reach out of the darkness. Hannah is in the driver’s seat, ready. I sweep the flashlight beam through the dark trees. It’s a scene from a horror movie, the suspenseful moment before all hell breaks loose. There is nothing. We’re alone.
Back inside, I systematically work through the van’s system. I’m a C-17 pilot again, running checklists, isolating systems. When I disconnect and reconnect the van’s batteries, the sound stops. A gremlin in the electrical system, then. We sleep.
—
What is it that I’m seeking out here? What are any of us seeking?
It can’t just be simplicity. Van life, like the tiny house movement or its other minimalist cousins, makes promises of ultimate simplicity. Living small and mobile is not simple. Even the simplest task is hard. Backpacking, tent camping, or hotel stays aren’t any easier. Simplicity is a home, hot water, a kitchen, storage space.
I have a theory about this, after researching and daydreaming about simpler ways of living: the simplest way to live is the suburb. Humans are biologically programmed to conserve energy, and the suburb is the pinnacle of low-energy living. Cookie-cutter houses, straightforward appliances, small yards, easy access to schools and grocery stories and all the other essentials of living. Maybe it isn’t simplicity that I’m really after.
Travel offers beauty and wonder, to be sure. The Sierra Nevada mountains offer it in spades, and there’s no doubt that’s one of my major motivators. The mountains bring me to life in a way that nothing else does. That is Alabama’s one great deficiency for me. And yet beauty and wonder aren’t enough to sustain a whole life.
Adventure is another draw. I’m partly here to climb, to test myself, to expand my limits. That is another one of those elusive unconscious drives, which raises deep questions worth unpacking another time.
Many of us want to learn about places, people, and cultures different from our own. I share this desire, and yet I’ve never felt like my travels live up to my hopes in this regard. The way to know a culture is not to pass through, but to plant oneself in its cultural soil. Two years in Jordan gave me the opportunity to begin learning a culture. My other travels feel superficial, a mere window tour. I feel guilty, admiring mountain vistas when I don’t know the names of the trees, the geological processes that thrust these peaks up through the earth’s crust, the history of the peoples who lived here. As for getting to know a culture, the native populations of a town like Truckee are almost invisible; Hannah and I live among the countless other travelers, the vagabonds, the tribeless.
I wonder if what I’m seeking is simply novelty itself. Difference for its own sake. There is a long evolutionary story to tell here, anchored in the complexity science of which I’m so fond. Complex systems—human minds, civilizations, life itself—need novelty the way humans need oxygen. Novelty is the raw grist for evolution, the source of all new features and ideas and behaviors, the material we sift through and parse and separate and recombine to move ourselves and our world forward. Without novelty, there is only stagnation, a dreary sameness. Stagnant systems are dead systems. Chaos and complexity scientists have long known that life thrives at the edge of chaos, where an influx of novelty keeps systems fresh and adaptive. Thriving systems balance familiar, effective patterns with continual change.
—
It’s an abstract way to think about camping in the mountains, but then, I’ve always been an abstract thinker. That’s my own personal way of developing familiarity with a subject that catches my interest: not merely observing the empirical details, but pondering the deeper structures, the mathematical scaffolding that lies beneath.
These abstract insights lead me right back to practical living. If novelty holds intrinsic importance, then it must do so for good and practical reasons. I can think of many. The novelty of travel allows me to experiment with being someone new. Novel experiences provide the raw material for my writing. Shared novel experiences allow Hannah I to grow our relationship, learn about each other, and build memories. Novelty seems to be important for revitalization. For me, rest does not entail passivity but rather active enjoyment of meaningful experiences.
But if complexity science teaches us the importance of novelty, it also teaches us the importance of stability. Systems thrive at that knife-edge. Many of us, myself included, daydream of travel as a permanent state of being. That’s a siren call, I think; a life of permanent novelty would prove exhausting and eventually unfulfilling. If we are wired for travel, we are also wired for homecoming.
In my reading of Landmarks this morning, I came across this lovely passage in which Macfarlane offers a tribute to his friend Roger Deakin, a writer who lived in the same home for forty years while also traveling extensively and indulging his love of wilderness:
“… his writing [showed] people how to live both eccentrically and responsibly, and by both dwelling well and travelling wisely, he resolved in some measure the tension between what Edward Thomas called the desire to ‘go on and on over the earth’ and the desire ‘to settle for ever in one place.'”