Location: Boca Reservoir, Tahoe National Forest

This morning I am reflecting on the relationship between mankind and the natural world. Specifically, I am thinking about my own relationship to nature.

The first book I’ve selected for my three-week mountain trip is Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks, a book about “the power of language to shape our sense of place.” Macfarlane compiles rich glossaries of words describing the subtle details of particular landscapes. These are dying vocabularies, on the verge of extinction because human beings have lost their connection to the land.

Language defines how we think; it filters what we can even see. A seemingly barren desert or moor springs to life when we can speak the names of all the variated lifeforms inhabiting it, the subtle hades of color, the contours and features of its geography. Human beings have largely lost their sense of enchantment with the world—the feeling of mystery, the awareness of incomprehensible forces shaping the world around them—but Macfarlane writes that the right language can restore intimacy with nature and re-ignite enchantment.

I read Macfarlane while sitting outside my van, in the biting cold before the sun breaks over the hills to the east, watching the mist rise off the Boca Reservoir west of Reno. Macfarlane’s writing always gives me much to think about, but this morning I’m thinking about his intense focus on the land itself. When he writes about nature, he writes about things outside himself. He almost recedes from view as an author, at least in this morning’s chapter. He is not so much a character in the book as the invisible cameraman filming the cinematic masterpiece.

It’s very different from how I write, and how I think about the world around me. Here I am, sitting in a gorgeous landscape I’ve dreamed about for months. I am watching sunlit ground slowly overtake shadow, while formations of birds soar silently past over the reservoir. I could spend hours walking the shoreline, enumerating the different species of life I find, even if I don’t know their names. But I struggle to turn my attention outward. The locus of my attention is so often inward, on my place in this landscape.

—

Yesterday was the load-and-go day: a series of lessons from dad on operating the van’s systems, grocery runs to Costco and Walmart, transferring our belongings from suitcases to cramped storage lockers in the van. After that we made the seven-hour drive from Boise to Reno.

It was a good drive, easy and uneventful, full of rich conversation. Hannah is reading Rollo May’s Love & Will, which led to discussions about free will, determinism, and sources of hope for human beings who feel so little agency over their lives. May, writing in 1969, believed the invention of nuclear weapons broke something in mankind; humans lost all sense of control over their lives. I think May is wrong; I think humans have always felt this way.

At long last, just past Reno, we turned off I-80 in search of a campsite. On certain public lands campers can engage in “dispersed camping”, which is an elegant way of saying they can camp wherever they want. That is our plan for the next three weeks. We have no reservations, just a self-sufficient vehicle with all the life support systems of a small spaceship.

That doesn’t make it easy. I’m new at this. It’s simple in theory, but there’s a lot to learn.

Our arrival was exactly what I feared. I’d chosen Boca Reservoir based on a reddit thread about dispersed camping recommendations, but believe it or not, the Internet was wrong; the reservoir was serene and beautiful, but when we arrived we discovered that dispersed camping there was illegal. After a pause for dinner, we loaded up the van again and headed deeper into the forest, to a set of GPS coordinates I’d also unearthed on reddit.

This area looked more promising. Signs permitted dispersed camping. We saw tents through the trees. The paved road turned to dirt, but it was in good condition and we were clearly close. We continued up the road in search of a good spot. Things quickly got dicey, when the road narrowed and steepened. We found ourselves ascending a winding forested hill, with nowhere to turn off. The van had low clearance, and worse, had highly flammable Lithium batteries mounted behind the rear axle. The sun was getting low; it would be dark soon. I felt rising anxiety, wondering if we should reverse all the way down the hill before sunset or keep going in hope of a turnaround. My mind played vivid scenes of striking the batteries on a rock and burning my parents’ new van to cinders.

In the end, we found a place to turn around and pulled into a patch of dirt in an otherwise unremarkable expanse of trees. By this point, I was mentally and emotionally drained. I don’t like feeling incompetent. Hannah consoled me. We’re fine, she said. We’re here.

We buttoned up the van, shutting out the darkening forest, and went to sleep.

—

Our first night of van life is a parable, I suppose, for the complex ways we interact with nature. I yearn for close contact with pure nature but it’s always mediated by human needs and the technologies of survival. Even our purest excursions into nature, such as backpacking, now rely on extraordinary technology: down jacket, boots, Gore-tex, water purifiers. We spend inordinate amounts of time meeting basic needs for water, food, and shelter. Even as we enjoy a landscape, we’re thinking about the logistics of moving safely through that space. On this trip I’m also thinking about state and local camping regulations, axle clearance, and Internet availability for GPS guidance.

Even in the heart of nature, it’s easy to lose sight of nature. We have ourselves to think about.

That becomes especially apparent when I write. When I write, there’s no hiding. Writing makes my thoughts transparent. I’m partly on this trip to find my voice, and I’m little appalled at where my voice wants to go: inward, to myself, to what my encounters with these places unearth in me. It is hard to let the places themselves be enough. I have a new reverence for the masters like Macfarlane, who can so effortlessly disappear in their writing.

Maybe that is one reason why it’s so healthy to enter the wilderness. The wilderness poses a continual challenge: to lift our eyes, to look beyond ourselves, to see a world more rich and immense than we can imagine. It is sometimes good to feel small, to sense our own unimportance in the bigger scheme of things.