I am currently sitting at home, recovering (much more a mental than physical process) from 3 days in Yellowstone with M.  Adding to the magnitude of processing the trip are the thought provoking things recently posted by two of my most esteemed online fellows: Ryan Jordan and Roman Dial.  I’m not yet on the level of colleague, as I’ll explain shortly that is still a work in progress.

Ryan, as part of the reinvention of his blog and website, wrote about the solo wilderness experience contrasted with the group experience, and his thoughts resonate in me with something of a guilty sound.  I’ve done a lot of my wilderness adventures alone, more often than not historically because I couldn’t find anyone who either wanted to come along or that I wanted to have along.  If you think about motivation for trips as being objective oriented on one end of a spectrum (getting it done, athletic, etc) and experience oriented on the other (go with a group, kick back, fish, cook gourmet), I used to traffic almost exclusively with the former.  Thankfully, I’ve gotten better at searching for and appreciating partners (I’m still pretty bad at both), as well as appreciating my own company and the full range of experiences and motivation the woods can offer. 

All of which have led me to see the aforementioned continuum as the false dichotomy it is.  I enjoy solo trips, I enjoy group trips, I like big trips with an emphasis on miles and challenge, and I also like to amble and enjoy the little things.  I’ve gotten a lot better at ambling lately, and still have progress to make, but the biggest improvement I’d like to make is by far in going with partners and groups.  Last year I resolved to get more comfortable with solo backpacking, and have done so.  Now I have something else to work on, playing well with others.  Picking a partner(s) and building a trip around that, rather than picking a trip, trying not very hard to find partners, and then going alone.

Of course, adding one’s significant other into said mix complicates things, at least for me as I find it hard to not hold M to absurdly high expectations, especially in the outdoors.  While hiking, canyoneering, backpacking, climbing, and skiing together we’ve had moments of sublime synergy and moments of teeth gnashing frustration, though far more of the former than the latter as in the last four years we’ve grown as a couple and gotten better at preemptively recognizing problematic expectations.  (I had the lions share of the work that needed to be done here.)  So I was excited late last week when M wanted to do an ambitious off-trail backpack over the weekend.  I should have better recognized that the past week had been trying, and that when combined with sore achilles tendons from boating friday (something that’s been plauging me randomly since shoe-caused inflammation on the May Thorofare trip) I wanted something less requisitely engaging for the weekend.  We changed plans on the fly, and even absent the car camping refinements had a great mellow day hiking and fishing Saturday, with stupendous light around the geyser basins that evening. 

Everything came to a head early yesterday afternoon at 9500′ on Mount Sheridan, when stress from the past fortnight combined with debate over turning around and had me, absent any other emotional outlet, rip my pack off and hurl it full strength down the hill.  The Talon 22 got 2 new, but very small, holes, and the bear spray was dented but fortunately not punctured.  I eventually was able to cry, which cleared my head enough for me to have a modicum of insight, reveal the turmoil in my head, and apologize for throwing a fit.  We then hike down and, sore feet, the year’s nasty bug crop, and a really long last half mile aside, had a really good day.   Soda and Don Miguel burritos from the Grant Village store helped. 

This all goes back to Ryan’s words, insofar as “relational black holes” can exist even between two people on the same trail.  Thankfully, we’ve built a relationship that allows such holes to be breached with increasingly astonishing ease.  Something for which I am very grateful.

That doesn’t directly address Ryan’s larger point, that deep wilderness travel sustained over years changes people, and is possessed of sufficient profundity that not sharing it with the most important people in our lives seems negligent.  The execution of this, and balancing shared experiences with the importance of independent interests in a long-term relationship, is a never-ending challenge.  Again, one I want to get better at facilitating, with M and with more of my friends, old and new.  Obviously few people in the world are ever taken over with the need to suffer in the way that some of my trips require, and culturally men seem vastly more prone to this, which adds another complicating dimension to long-term heterosexual partnerships.  (I’m not qualified, nor do I even know if there is a literature concerned with, queer relationships and this topic.)  But I think I can have a pendulum that swings, if not less vigorously, at least a little more evenly.

What this has to do with Roman’s fantastical series of remembrances of the Arctic 100, is that behind the formidible food list, enlightening gear reviews, and vibrant anecdotes is the glow of a trip where the human element was very well tended.  That’s the ideal of all this is it not?  To find a trip that for you brings up and out all the intrapsychic dimensions, known and unknown, for which the wilderness is such an unequaled mirror, and then look away and find someone else looking in their own mirror, right next to yours?

I’ve believed for a long time that we go into the woods, the most radical and representative instantiation of the Other available, to reaffirm and reexamine our subjectivity.  I check and make sure that all the pieces of ourselves upon which so many daily assumptions are founded are in fact still intact.  I’ve also long agreed with W.V. Quine, that the function of language rests on faith, on the unfoundable belief that when I say “Love” what you think I mean is in fact what I mean.  So much of marital conflict exists precisely because the peculiar sort of personal closeness that relationship fosters is very good at making the shortcomings of linguistic communication obvious.  And this is what Ryan talks about in his piece, and why internet forums about outdoor activities proliferate: there is no substitute for being there, and the closeness the comes with being there may be the least inadequate form of intersubjectivity available to us. 

That’s why I love Yellowstone, because so much other love comes so easily out of being there.