Dan McCaslin: The Joys of Travel — Yes, Hiking Counts – Noozhawk

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The freshest news in Santa Barbara County My partner and I love to travel and fortunately have managed more than we ever dreamed possible. Now, a few age-related infirmities limit my “traveling,” and I recollect how I found this “trail” into such a peripatetic life.

While growing up in Los Angeles-area tract housing, the idea of making distant travels and “journeys abroad” was never on my horizon. Late 1950s Sylmar in the San Fernando Valley featured kids aiming for jobs in retail or as manual workers on the General Motors assembly line in Van Nuys. However, when I began dating the woman who later became my life partner in 1968, she ignited a novel and glorious wanderlust.
Her love of French and also the German language stirred me out of my bourgeois limitations, and I came to share her desperate desire to see other worlds and to live in Paris and central Europe. While others have focused on the quick eight-day blitz trip to London, Paris and Madrid, we lived in Bavaria and created time to meander through the streets of Berlin and hike in the spectacular Alps for a few years in the 1970s. (We love the Sarntal area in south Tyrol.)

These years of working overseas grew and grew, fostering a shocking appetite for foreign exploration, and later spawned four pilgrimages to south India and Malaysia.

Going over my several journals of those decades, I find we managed to be out of the country almost six years between 1971 and 2022. I hasten to add that we had teaching jobs through the Bavarian Ministry of Education, but we could never afford five-star or even two-star hotels. (In the early years, youth hostels did the trick for rough travelers like us.)

At times, I felt a need to justify or evaluate this plethora of jaunts and expeditions, so I developed my own form of “slow travel,” allowing for a local focus leading to periods of unhurried thinking and contemplation. While formal education can be wonderful, Jiddu Krishnamurti points out that so much of that approach involves “secondhand” thinking (think “influencers” today).

In addition to the physical trips abroad and living in Germany and Greece, there are at least two other forms of travel I’ve enjoyed: hiking and cultural travel. Hiking is indeed a form of travel, although some people cannot see it this way.

The original homo sapiens species, the notorious hunter-gatherers of the various stone ages, constantly walked about, roaming far afield in search of food sources, new areas and simply out of interest.

Ötzi, the famous “ice man” whose 5,000-year-old frozen mummy was found in the Alps between Austria and Italy, had been hiking far from his home region when he was murdered. His tools included a medical kit, tattoos and a copper-bladed axe (4.1.1. Ötzi). Today, I believe we’ve become a digitally altered species — the phono sapiens.
There is no doubt for me that our species has adapted to constant moving around, which these days has devolved into hiking, trekking, and long-distance backpacking. We are hard-wired to enjoy going hither and thither, uphill and down dale, searching for new food resources, gathering and hunting, but also eager simply to explore.

Yet, this hiking in green nature is also a form of hidden time travel, too, which helps us revert to an earlier lifestyle/way of thinking, at least for a few hours, for a day or even a few weeks.

In my salad days of long hikes, I created a special backpacking niche by occasionally rambling a few days solo into the San Rafael Wilderness along the Sisquoc or Manzana creeks seeking separation from western civilization. The niche fostered conditions that engendered super-clear thinking, the sort that comes only with extended full solitude.

In 1999, for example, I backpacked east alone up the Manzana and communed with the nature gods and spirits residing out there: Mother Momoy, the recumbent whale rock ancestors, and riparian water deities. Here I rambled on the southern flank of the holy Hurricane Deck, perhaps even a form of ‘alapay. One re-learns how to hear amid the overpowering silence. This episode became my essay “Six Days Solo in an American Wilderness” (4.1.1).

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I realized that these forays into a wilder nature —wildeor — can really morph into paleo and pre-civilized ways of thinking. I would carefully divest myself of family, analog watch, all electronics and, of course, I have never carried a firearm or needed a cell or emergency beacon, so therefore I did not miss any of the tech devices. All I needed was a moleskine journal (and pen), a D harmonica and the shrunken Shambhala edition of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. (My Kelty pack also included a Whisper-lite gas stove, seven dehydrated foil meals, a one-man tent and so on.)

I certainly did miss my family, friends and my social world in Santa Barbara, but I planned to get back on my own little “eternal return” (4.1.1.).

Remember that Henry David Thoreau generally walked around rustic Walden Pond, and often tramped over to town (Concord, Mass.), where he picked up his mail and stopped by for a meal at his mother’s house.

Both of these kinds of walking — up the Manzana solo and circling a local pond — are vivid forms of travel. My solo forays into deep-nature solitude help control the wayward mind, a beast that always wants novelty and too often speeds up by surging into the linear.

At the same time, simple walking offers us physical benefits, whether we make a stroll at a local park (e.g. Parma Park) or push up the Manzana. The grueling longer backcountry backpacks are not necessary to ignite the intense joy of distant travel and journeys outside the North American continent.

When my partner and I aimed for overseas experiences, we always pointed toward non-English language speaking countries in continental Europe. No Scotland, New Zealand or Ireland for us. When we did not speak the native language, even cultural travel felt like a wilderness experience.

Yet I have often pursued more extreme efforts to roam into almost-raw wilderness or to “travel” far into the original Arcadia and to the fabled East. I have discussed wildeor, a term that contains an earlier European meaning for “wilderness” (die Wildnis in German). True wildeor would contain no roads, trails or GPS and would include ferocious large mammals that might easily kill and eat reckless humans wandering about.

OK, so I don’t travel in such wild places today, but “extreme” may also mean in time or solitude or aesthetics. About 30 years ago, I began admiring the Indigenous rock art in our area, and these visions feed the soul.

Hiking in our own local wilderness zones — about 500,000 acres in Los Padres National Forest — can actually feel like a return to natural Stone Age freedom and ambulatory liberty.

4.1.1.
Ötzi, also called “The Iceman,” is the natural mummy of a man who lived between 3350 and 3105 BC. Ötzi’s remains were discovered on Sept. 19, 1991, in the Ötztal Alps (hence the name), and he had rambled far from his original region.

“Six Days Solo in an American Wilderness” in “Autobiography in the Anthropocene,” pp. 41-67 (2019). See also “Eternal Backcountry Return” (Sisquoc River Press, 2018).

R.M. Rilke, “Duino Elegies,” tr. Stephen Mitchell (Shambhala Pocket Classics, 1992).

Of course, I realize how fortunate my partner and I have been — three sabbaticals, two year-long study fellowships, many summer travel grants, diligent savings and a willingness to hold teaching jobs in other lands (Germany).