Eff It, It’s Time to Cut Loose

For years, I kept a Gahan Wilson New Yorker cartoon pinned on the board above my desk. A horde of worshippers, each wearing a giant “N” on their clothing, is hailing or genuflecting before an altar-like structure, which has gilded Ns on its sides and a fringed banner on top declaring “NOTHING.” Holy men are chanting, playing music, and burning incense. A curious onlooker has tapped the shoulder of a congregant. Somewhat bewildered, he asks, “Is nothing sacred?”

Read in that what you will, but the cartoon still cracks me up all these years later. Recently it’s come back to mind, not because nothing seems sacred, but because everything does. Our culture is shifting radically and rapidly as we try to atone for the sins of the past and to create safe spaces for people who’ve long felt unsafe, and many of us are struggling to adapt and comprehend a physical world that is no longer predictable or familiar. That’s all important stuff—really important stuff. But, jeez, have we gotten uptight or what? If I read another pretentious, self-important book about the sacredness of nature, I think I will barf.

Nature is. The world is. We are silly, lightly haired apes who alternate between self-congratulation for our superiority and self-loathing for our shortsightedness and greed. We are, as my wife often points out, a bunch of fleas arguing over the dog. Gahan Wilson was a master of absurdity, and what’s fundamentally absurd is thinking a species that’s existed for a nanosecond in geological time is in any position to declare a patch of ground sacrosanct or holy. I take strange comfort knowing that in a few billion years the earth will become a s’more, and then ash, and then nothing. It provides needed perspective.

What I’m saying is, we need to lighten up. I like solitude very much and have long supported wilderness the idea and Wilderness the legislated land protection, but in Greenland I became friends with an Inuit man named Larseroq Skifte, who explained to me the Inuit have no word for wilderness because everywhere they go is home. Think about the differences between those two worldviews. One reflects reality and the other is a human construct that divides us conceptually and practically from our natural place. Would we be happier and less fractious if we approached the world and things in it with simple respect instead of value-heavy piousness? I suspect so.

Last October, Nick Paumgarten emailed me with a story idea. “I just got back from a private trip down the Grand Canyon with friends,” he wrote. “18 days. Decadent. No writing assignment. Should I give some thought to writing some kind of idiosyncratic thing about it for you? I say this knowing it’s about the most standard adventure trip in America, and that almost anything anyone would have to say about it would be a cliché. Still, it’s experience, as yet unprocessed, and I’m keen to convert it into something.”

We don’t typically run trip reports, in part because they tend to rely on tropes, but every trip down the Grand Canyon is unique and, indeed, unique for each person on the trip. I’m also leery of decadence as a narrative tool—as with curse words, references to partying often cheapen a story. But people who float down the Grand Canyon for eighteen days sometimes drink alcohol, smoke weed, eat mushrooms, sing, dance, screw, and act like adolescents. Same for those who car camp and ski, hike, or ride into backcountry huts. People are peoply, and puritanism has rarely served us well. Besides, letting loose is fun. Adventurous outdoor recreation is also outdoor re-creation, and much as I love to sit by the fire contemplating the mysteries of the cosmos (“the universe is expanding? into what?), a good dance party resets the soul like nothing else. Definitely, let’s go ID wildflowers and sit quietly watching for critters. Let’s also have rock-throwing contests and jump off things and howl at the moon. And let’s treat the world less like a church and more like a home. Maybe then we will better understand what is truly sacred.