[Anne Strainchamps]: Welcome to Wonder Cabinet.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I'm Anne Strainchamps.
[Steve Paulson]: And I'm Steve Paulson.
[Anne Strainchamps]: How far would you go to get a glimpse of wilderness?
[Anne Strainchamps]: And how would you even know when you got there?
[Cal Flyn]: A few years ago, I think it was the summer of 2017, my partner and I rode the Colorado Trail from end to end, almost 500 miles through the Rockies.
[Cal Flyn]: And it was just me and him and three horses.
[Steve Paulson]: This is Cal Flyn, a writer and journalist who spent a lot of her life looking for wilderness.
[Cal Flyn]: Having ridden for days and feeling really like we've gone through many physical trials to get there, we came across this signpost in the woods, in the mountains, and it said, Welcome to the Holy Cross Wilderness.
[Cal Flyn]: And it was what looked to me like a street sign.
[Cal Flyn]: And it had a drawer in the base and the drawer held a register and it asked us to sign in.
[Cal Flyn]: And this whole bureaucratic situation caught me really by surprise.
[Cal Flyn]: I'd never really done something like that before.
[Cal Flyn]: You arrive in a wilderness and the wilderness has a street sign telling you where you are.
[Anne Strainchamps]: For as long as we've had maps, people have been trying to get off them, looking for places that are uncharted and untamed.
[Steve Paulson]: Wilderness is an ancient and powerful idea, and people have been chasing it for thousands of years, but often with devastating results.
[Steve Paulson]: Because what one person calls wilderness, someone else may call home.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Truly untouched lands probably don't exist.
[Anne Strainchamps]: So then what is wilderness?
[Anne Strainchamps]: A beautiful dream or a dangerous fantasy?
[Steve Paulson]: That's what Cal Flyn explores in her new book, The Savage Landscape, How We Made the Wilderness.
[Steve Paulson]: I know it's a book you couldn't put down.
[Anne Strainchamps]: It is just so beautifully written.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Part adventure story and part intellectual quest.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Cal Flyn is an investigative journalist, a nature writer, and an intrepid explorer.
[Anne Strainchamps]: So people might have heard of her first book, Islands of Abandonment, which was about traveling into post-human landscapes.
[Anne Strainchamps]: For that one, she was crawling on her belly, breaking into forbidden no-man's lands, demilitarized zones, places like that.
[Anne Strainchamps]: But then she had that experience we just heard of being six days into a wilderness trek in the American Rockies and stumbling onto an official signpost that had a logbook and a list of rules attached.
[Anne Strainchamps]: And she couldn't stop thinking about the contradictions that are built into this idea we call wilderness.
[Steve Paulson]: And you were really drawn to the history that she tells, the desert ascetics, the primeval forest, the Europeans who explored the so-called New World period.
[Steve Paulson]: But you said it's also an adventure story.
[Steve Paulson]: Well, you can't have a wilderness quest without adventures.
[Anne Strainchamps]: True.
[Anne Strainchamps]: So Cal canoes deep into the Amazon rainforest.
[Anne Strainchamps]: She climbs high mountain passes in Tibet.
[Anne Strainchamps]: She flies a helicopter inside an Icelandic volcano while it's erupting.
[Steve Paulson]: The kinds of places we might dream about going, but we'd actually rather read about them.
[Steve Paulson]: Definitely.
[Steve Paulson]: So where did you reach her?
[Anne Strainchamps]: In Glasgow, Scotland, where she lives.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Have you always lived in Glasgow?
[Anne Strainchamps]: Did you grow up in Scotland?
[Cal Flyn]: I grew up in Scotland.
[Cal Flyn]: I'm from the Highlands originally, quite near Inverness, if you know Scotland at all.
[Cal Flyn]: And then until quite recently, myself and my partner were living in the Orkney Islands in the far north, but we moved to Glasgow quite recently.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Wow.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Okay.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I mean, talk about wilderness.
[Anne Strainchamps]: So clearly, you're drawn to remote places and have been for a long time.
[Anne Strainchamps]: What are the Orkney Islands like?
[Cal Flyn]: Well, they're low and green and mainly treeless.
[Cal Flyn]: And often you see weather formations coming in from a really, really long way away.
[Cal Flyn]: So it's got this sort of almost like romantic sense of drama.
[Cal Flyn]: It's interesting.
[Cal Flyn]: You really feel sort of at the mercy of a lot of the elements up there.
[Cal Flyn]: A big question I'm asking myself at the moment is having moved from somewhere like that, how do I keep my connection to what's happening outside the window alive in the same way?
[Anne Strainchamps]: Well, I think that's a question so many people resonate with, no matter where you live.
[Anne Strainchamps]: You have spent, over the course of your life, a lot of time in wild places, not just for this book.
[Anne Strainchamps]: You've done a lot of adventuring outdoors, often in difficult, dangerous conditions.
[Anne Strainchamps]: And people have a lot of different reasons for spending time in wild places.
[Anne Strainchamps]: How would you describe yours?
[Anne Strainchamps]: What's the draw for you?
[Cal Flyn]: You know, it's a really interesting question, because I think psychoanalyzing the self is often difficult, right?
[Cal Flyn]: So I do think in my own psychology, I'm very hung up on, I don't know, something like proving myself not to be a coward.
[Cal Flyn]: Or I think this is my big preoccupation with myself is I sort of believe myself to be easily scared.
[Cal Flyn]: And so
[Cal Flyn]: I spend my adult life pushing the boundaries of that and going to places that scare me.
[Cal Flyn]: In my previous book, I wrote about abandoned places and that was very much a mental battle for me a lot of the time.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I mean, you went to places like Chernobyl.
[Cal Flyn]: Yeah.
[Cal Flyn]: They talk about scary.
[Cal Flyn]: I did a strange way.
[Cal Flyn]: Chernobyl was mentally easier because I had like a piece of paper that said I was allowed to go there.
[Cal Flyn]: A lot of the places that I found hardest to go might be
[Cal Flyn]: They don't sound like anything, but because I'm crawling through a hole in the fence or going through a window to get there, that puts it in a special, frightening place in my own mind.
[Cal Flyn]: And I think wildernesses are part of that.
[Cal Flyn]: I started thinking of that feeling that I get of being right on the edge of something.
[Cal Flyn]: That's what the wilderness is to me.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Right on the edge of something.
[Anne Strainchamps]: The edge of what?
[Cal Flyn]: It's the border with all that is other.
[Cal Flyn]: You know, the question of what is a wilderness, often people are like, well, I know it when I see it or I know it when I feel it.
[Cal Flyn]: And actually, history is full of these situations in which people see and feel wilderness and are later disproven because lots of people will come out of the woods or lots of people will turn up and say, hey, actually, we camp here once a year.
[Cal Flyn]: And we have done for the last 10,000 years.
[Cal Flyn]: So this happens over and over again, this sort of mismatch in the way that we understand the natural world around us or misread it or miscomprehend it in some way.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Well, it's a concept with such deep roots for us, as you say, it goes back thousands of years.
[Anne Strainchamps]: And deep roots in human psychology, our spiritual lives.
[Anne Strainchamps]: So this journey you took, you set out to look for unsignposted wildernesses in a way.
[Anne Strainchamps]: You kept kind of chasing the idea of wilderness, but you also set it up, and I love this, as a trip in time through the evolution of the idea of wilderness.
[Anne Strainchamps]: So your first stop was Mount Sinai.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Why there?
[Cal Flyn]: So I wanted to have this sense of arc through the whole book that it would tell a bigger story than just the 10 adventures that I would go on.
[Cal Flyn]: And so the first chapter is set up as a discussion of the history of wilderness as a spiritual concept, a biblical concept, a pre-biblical concept in many cultures.
[Cal Flyn]: And Sinai seemed like a brilliant place to start because it's at the heart of many epiphanies and revelations that
[Cal Flyn]: in the Abrahamic religions generally.
[Cal Flyn]: And secondly, there's this micro industry of people who go there to pilgrimage to try and have a revelation themselves or to experience it or to pay respect to the past revelations, something like this.
[Cal Flyn]: And I could go there myself, half as a narrative device and half as an earnest hope, go in search of my own
[Cal Flyn]: Revelation, because I think that that is, it's always at the heart of it, right?
[Cal Flyn]: You can hope, you can hope.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Yeah.
[Anne Strainchamps]: But so one thing that fascinated me, I never thought before of the Bible as a series of wilderness quests, but you know, it's one of those things where once somebody points it out, you can't unsee it.
[Anne Strainchamps]: So then I was thinking, oh my gosh, the Old and the New Testaments, the entire thing is people going into or out of the wilderness and
[Anne Strainchamps]: I'm not sure wilderness meant to them what it does to us.
[Anne Strainchamps]: What did going in and out of the wilderness signify if you're going back to Moses, Jesus, the desert fathers and mothers?
[Cal Flyn]: Well, when you dig down into translations of the Old Testament, they use a number of different words that do and don't translate to wilderness.
[Cal Flyn]: Many of the words that are used repeatedly throughout the Old Testament can mean wilderness, and they can also mean things like area where you graze your goats, or it might mean area where no crops will grow, or it might be
[Cal Flyn]: area of desolation so the the words themselves are a little bit slippery certainly what we're talking about is an area which is felt to be outside outside of normal reality or normal society something like this an area where people might drift through or drift out or if you went and you set yourself up there as the desert fathers did these ascetics in in the sort of second third century onwards
[Cal Flyn]: you could be there and be completely outside of your normal set of rules for living.
[Cal Flyn]: It's also a kind of stripped back landscape that this is probably a place of thorns, maybe some berries, maybe some mountain springs or desert springs bubbling up.
[Cal Flyn]: But it's going to be quite a desolate landscape or certainly a bleakly beautiful landscape.
[Cal Flyn]: And it's going to be a challenging place to live.
[Cal Flyn]: So for
[Cal Flyn]: physical trial is really built into this idea of wilderness and this idea that you can go on some kind of physical journey that will force yourself into a mental or spiritual or metaphysical journey as well.
[Cal Flyn]: I think that that is all tied together in these early examples of wilderness trials.
[Cal Flyn]: And then as monasticism moves through Europe, they start using the word desert in slightly different ways.
[Cal Flyn]: You can just be talking about a deserted place, but it also has this larger, more mystical meaning, which is a place where you might be
[Cal Flyn]: alone with your thoughts, or you might be in a stripped back situation of some kind.
[Cal Flyn]: That might be in the forest, but probably you're living there very simply.
[Cal Flyn]: And so this idea of the desert or the idea of wilderness or whichever word you want to use starts being applied more broadly and in a much wider sense.
[Anne Strainchamps]: But it's interesting that it became a practice.
[Anne Strainchamps]: So I was traveling recently in the Republic of Georgia, and we went to visit right on the edge between Georgia and Azerbaijan, a very ancient monastery carved into rock, probably.
[Anne Strainchamps]: probably around 400 AD, but at any rate, a very early church father with maybe a tiny band of monks just lived there.
[Anne Strainchamps]: It's not near a town.
[Anne Strainchamps]: It's in the middle of nowhere.
[Anne Strainchamps]: And this kind of thing, I mean, you can visit all these places, not only in Georgia, but throughout the Middle East and throughout Europe where people did this activity.
[Anne Strainchamps]: It's almost as though wilderness and remote places had become a kind of spiritual technology.
[Cal Flyn]: I think that's a really perceptive way of putting it as a technology.
[Cal Flyn]: Yeah, it's something that you can use to create the conditions that will allow a certain kind of mystical experience.
[Cal Flyn]: I think that that is often what this kind of monk was looking for.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Did they write much about land-based spiritual practice?
[Anne Strainchamps]: I mean, about ways to pray?
[Anne Strainchamps]: Or is it just, no, we're going to go there, live, and somehow the land is going to just exert this, you know, have this effect on us?
[Cal Flyn]: It's quite difficult to write a history of hermits, right, because many of them go unrecorded.
[Cal Flyn]: So a lot of their findings have vanished with them and was always intended to.
[Cal Flyn]: But what I find really interesting is that the writing that we do have from people who live like this,
[Cal Flyn]: You almost always get the sense that the true revelation or the sense of epiphany or whatever it is, is only moments in the day.
[Cal Flyn]: So much of it is taken up with survival, with getting on, with hoping for revelation.
[Cal Flyn]: And I think that that is what's so fascinating, that the frustration of the hermit or the frustration of the ascetic just, you know, they're doing so, so much.
[Anne Strainchamps]: And maybe that's part of it, because wasn't the idea that, you know, this encounter with nature that's supposed to kind of strip you down, the difficulty of living in these places was supposed to be painful and challenging, but purifying.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Purifying, yeah.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Yeah.
[Cal Flyn]: Purifying is absolutely it because you do see extreme examples of that, of when all people will have is they'll survive off water and crusts, as they often talk about ravens bringing them crusts or ravens bringing them dates, you know, just the absolute bare minimum.
[Cal Flyn]: And so the wilderness itself, so the place, but there are other aspects that you can use as intensifiers.
[Cal Flyn]: So you can use things like fasting and you can use physical pain as ways to intensify that experience further.
[Cal Flyn]: So what was Mount Sinai like?
[Cal Flyn]: Mount Sinai was this incredible landscape, really.
[Cal Flyn]: So you start from this almost like flat, plain, sandy, dry, dry, dry landscape.
[Cal Flyn]: But then these mountains rise up and they're red and bare.
[Cal Flyn]: And so it means when you rise up to the top of Mount Sinai, you're sort of at eye level with a lot of the surrounding peaks and mountains.
[Cal Flyn]: if you're there for sundown or sunrise, these bare rocks are sort of lit by all of these crazy desert lights.
[Cal Flyn]: You know, all the colours in the sky just sort of rebounding off the rock.
[Cal Flyn]: It's a very ethereal landscape.
[Cal Flyn]: So I can see why one might feel it to be a place of revelation.
[Cal Flyn]: It's a place where if you come across a mountain spring, that is a revelation of its own kind.
[Cal Flyn]: You know, it is a remarkable place.
[Cal Flyn]: And all the other people I meet there
[Cal Flyn]: find this landscape to be sacred to them in some way.
[Cal Flyn]: There's something in that too, this sort of collective air of veneration.
[Anne Strainchamps]: You were there at sunrise, right?
[Anne Strainchamps]: And if you're there at sunrise and there are pilgrims around you whose voices are hushed and who are clearly deeply moved by and bringing a certain feeling and tone to being there, that's part of the landscape too.
[Anne Strainchamps]: We're all part of nature.
[Anne Strainchamps]: And so, yeah, I can see then the landscape feels sacred because it is.
[Anne Strainchamps]: We're all together making it sacred.
[Cal Flyn]: Yeah, we are treating it as thus.
[Cal Flyn]: I mean, in the same way that to enter the cathedral, you are bowled over not only by the architecture, but by the atmosphere inside, which is at least partly the behavior of all those other people who've gone in there.
[Cal Flyn]: And you might not know exactly what you're seeking, but you can get swept along with this sense of the sacred place.
[Anne Strainchamps]: So after Mount Sinai, you headed to Transylvania, to some of Europe's oldest and most mythic forests.
[Anne Strainchamps]: And this was, I think, partly to think about a different kind of wilderness archetype, the wild wood.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Tell me about that.
[Cal Flyn]: Absolutely.
[Cal Flyn]: As I mentioned, this idea of the wilderness as being home to wild beasts, you know, these animals that are not domesticated, that are not...
[Cal Flyn]: easy to comprehend and perhaps are inherently threatening.
[Cal Flyn]: And so I was interested in the experience of present day Transylvanian people in their conflict with carnivores there.
[Cal Flyn]: So they have been seeing a big boom in the population of brown bears and in wolves, as actually has most of mainland Europe.
[Cal Flyn]: But Romania is really ahead of the curve because
[Cal Flyn]: bears have been under special protections there since the communist regime.
[Cal Flyn]: And their numbers are enormous in comparison to other parts of Europe.
[Cal Flyn]: And what that means is that as Romania has been growing in wealth and growing in population, they've been building these beautiful sort of storybook towns out.
[Cal Flyn]: They're expanding into the forest.
[Cal Flyn]: And this is where the conflicts tend to arise.
[Cal Flyn]: It's like the bears still live.
[Cal Flyn]: kind of think of it as their territory.
[Cal Flyn]: And so they will wander the streets.
[Cal Flyn]: You have a lot of problems in these areas of bears breaking into schools and raiding the canteen or bears breaking into churches and drinking the communion wine and eating the wafers and eating the beeswax candles.
[Cal Flyn]: And then because it's Transylvania, it also has this great backdrop of an uncertainty around the border between human and animal.
[Cal Flyn]: You start seeing
[Cal Flyn]: vampires, you start seeing werewolf legends, all of these things are all to do with how do you siphon the human from the animal and vice versa.
[Cal Flyn]: And so I think that that is a big
[Cal Flyn]: element of what we're talking about when we talk about the wilderness.
[Cal Flyn]: It's like, where do we stop?
[Cal Flyn]: And that starts.
[Cal Flyn]: It's all threshold.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Yeah, but it's fascinating that, I mean, I don't know exactly when.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I think you suggested it was early Middle Ages, maybe as the Roman Empire begins to kind of break apart.
[Anne Strainchamps]: villages begin to be abandoned and the forest moves back into Europe.
[Anne Strainchamps]: But one thing that happens is that forest becomes a supernatural zone.
[Anne Strainchamps]: The fairy tales and folk tales that come to us from Europe all have their basis in this feeling of the Wildwood is where enchanted beings live.
[Cal Flyn]: Yeah, this fear of the forest, this fear of foreign forces, right, which is all tied up with the etymology of it.
[Cal Flyn]: You know, the forest and foreign are derived from the same words.
[Cal Flyn]: And I think that that reflects something about this idea of, you know, the enemies at the gate almost.
[Cal Flyn]: The suspicion of nature rises actually as populations are rising as well.
[Cal Flyn]: As people are getting more pretensions about being civilized, they also start being more and more afraid of the forest.
[Cal Flyn]: They understand it less well.
[Cal Flyn]: It becomes someone else's or some other animal's territory in a way that perhaps it hadn't been for a while.
[Cal Flyn]: And so this unsettling feeling of the forest then becomes a really dominant strand of the culture.
[Anne Strainchamps]: So I was thinking about the spiritual connotations of wild landscapes and that notion kind of foreshadows this much later historical melding of religion and wilderness in the creation of America's national parks.
[Anne Strainchamps]: You know, Yosemite, Yellowstone, those are the parks that the early conservationists called them God's cathedrals, which is a beautiful idea, but underpinned by violent dispossession.
[Anne Strainchamps]: These were not untouched lands.
[Anne Strainchamps]: They were inhabited by people who were driven off them.
[Anne Strainchamps]: So these two things, wilderness conservation and atrocity,
[Anne Strainchamps]: have gone hand in hand for a very long time.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I know that's something that interested you too.
[Anne Strainchamps]: How far back do you trace that history?
[Cal Flyn]: Well this idea of wilderness as being unpeopled has got a sort of patchy history actually which is maybe a good parallel might be the hunting reserve where this is regions are laid aside essentially for the recreation of the rich over the ages so that kings for example might go and have an emotional or transcendent experience that they might feel that they've left the royal courts and so on and so forth and that
[Cal Flyn]: is protected through a series of exclusionary laws.
[Cal Flyn]: Essentially, the local peasantry who are almost inevitably living there, you know, they have houses or cottages and so on, and in these hunting forests or deer forests or wherever it is,
[Cal Flyn]: And they are not allowed to gather firewood or they're not allowed to do their own hunting and so on and so forth.
[Cal Flyn]: And the penalties are quite harsh, right?
[Cal Flyn]: The penalties are really harsh.
[Cal Flyn]: Sometimes it's death.
[Anne Strainchamps]: You go into the king's land and you kill a rabbit and the king's stewards come and they're going to put you to death.
[Cal Flyn]: Right, right.
[Cal Flyn]: I'm sure a lot of people were hunting rabbits, but it all has to be secret.
[Cal Flyn]: It all has to be underneath the radar.
[Cal Flyn]: And so you see these exclusionary policies.
[Cal Flyn]: It's a big thing in medieval Europe.
[Cal Flyn]: But then when you look to America, you start seeing this wholly unpeopled aspect being revered in a new way, kind of a colonial way of looking at the land, as we've discussed, which is
[Cal Flyn]: You come in and you mentally erase the effect of the people who are also living there, who've been there for a long time, and in fact, who have co-created the landscape with the other residents of this landscape.
[Cal Flyn]: So people arrive, they say, wow, you know, this is what an incredible creation.
[Cal Flyn]: We need to protect this and essentially to get rid of the people who are cluttering it up.
[Cal Flyn]: You know, they've got a village at the bottom of this incredibly picturesque hill or a
[Cal Flyn]: We've got people who are just sort of charging around and killing the buffalo and all of this kind of thing.
[Cal Flyn]: And it can't be had because it's too perfect otherwise.
[Cal Flyn]: And so the United States has been doing and is continuing to do a lot of self-reflection on the creation of the national parks.
[Cal Flyn]: And I have actually been quite impressed often by how these difficult histories are reflected in the national parks themselves, that you can learn a lot about them.
[Cal Flyn]: What I think is less discussed is how these patterns are still playing out across the world, and they're very sort of American-influenced or American-driven sometimes, American-financed, which is like the setting up of other national parks in other places, all based on a similar or the same model, which involves essentially driving indigenous groups from their homelands.
[Cal Flyn]: We see this a lot in the Congo Basin.
[Cal Flyn]: Forest peoples, the Batois, the Baka, are being forced out
[Cal Flyn]: of their homelands very violently and made to sort of reinvent themselves on the edges of the national park.
[Cal Flyn]: And so conservation, which is an obvious moral good, can also be oppressive.
[Cal Flyn]: This has been a big problem in creation of fortress conservation in which we might sort of set aside pieces of land and really, really police them in a militaristic fashion.
[Cal Flyn]: This mode of thinking about the wilderness as being unpeopled becomes a real social harm that is enacted again and again and again
[Cal Flyn]: as sort of this idea of wilderness preservation spreads out across the world.
[Anne Strainchamps]: And as you say, often funded by American-based conservation groups.
[Anne Strainchamps]: You know, very well-meaning, I suppose, but the people who set up America's National Parks were well-meaning too.
[Cal Flyn]: Yeah, absolutely.
[Cal Flyn]: And I think, you know, the...
[Cal Flyn]: especially these larger groups and especially these sort of government bodies are not necessarily setting out to create the conditions of eviction and expulsion but nevertheless the sort of money trails are right there and and depending on how you define the term it's thought that there are about 10 million conservation refugees in the world today and that is people who have been displaced yes people who have been displaced in the name of saving nature and
[Cal Flyn]: When we say we want to protect the wilderness, the answer is invariably whose wilderness, because there's always somebody there.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I mean, a very specific little moment of moral choice for you.
[Anne Strainchamps]: This is when you're in the Amazon.
[Cal Flyn]: Sure.
[Cal Flyn]: When I went to Brazil, I wanted to visit the Yanomami Indigenous Reserve.
[Cal Flyn]: So this is an enormous region, actually, really as large as many European countries is.
[Cal Flyn]: where the Yanomami people, they're an indigenous group, but they live within the forest, often in villages of between, say, 50 and 200 people, some of them living very traditional lifestyles.
[Cal Flyn]: they're not in much contact with what you might call the outside world or the Brazilian government, or they might not recognise the Brazilian government at all.
[Cal Flyn]: And the Yanomami have essentially been at war for decades with wildcat miners and gold miners and illegal loggers and all sorts of things like this.
[Cal Flyn]: Drug runners often go across borders through Yanomami territory, so it can be a dangerous place.
[Cal Flyn]: And so when I went to visit the Yanomami, part of...
[Cal Flyn]: the process of sort of gaining access to people to speak to them and to have this kind of conversation involved, meeting with all of the village elders, because it's much more of a democratic system.
[Cal Flyn]: They can all talk.
[Cal Flyn]: And so they talked back and forth about essentially what we would pay them for us to be allowed to stay with them.
[Cal Flyn]: They didn't want dollars or other currency.
[Cal Flyn]: It wouldn't be helpful for them.
[Cal Flyn]: So they were chatting back and forth for hours about what we should give them.
[Cal Flyn]: They were asking, you know, can you give us a speedboat, which was beyond my means.
[Cal Flyn]: And then at some stage, they sort of alighted on this idea that we should give them a chainsaw because this would be a really helpful tool day to day.
[Cal Flyn]: And of course it would.
[Cal Flyn]: You know, if you live somewhere where your main...
[Cal Flyn]: transport hub is the river and the river is constantly moving and rerouting and trees will fall across the river you get stuck and it's very difficult and time-consuming for you with hand saws to get rid of these enormous trees so this is what they have in mind but i find it so difficult to agree to because you know the idea of bringing a chainsaw to this place which is so valued for
[Cal Flyn]: It's lack of chainsaws.
[Cal Flyn]: And for Yanomami people who've become famous for their refusal to deal with people who want to use chainsaws, you know, they repulse these illegal loggers.
[Cal Flyn]: They fight them off, which is incredible.
[Cal Flyn]: So the idea of me then bringing a chainsaw and gifting it to the group just didn't sit well with me.
[Cal Flyn]: But then it also...
[Cal Flyn]: forced me to look at myself and think, well, what do I want of these people?
[Cal Flyn]: What am I trying to achieve by refusing them a chainsaw if they ask for it?
[Cal Flyn]: And in the end, they changed their mind, and I didn't have to decide.
[Cal Flyn]: So that was great.
[Anne Strainchamps]: You know, thinking about the nature of a landscape, we haven't really talked much about how one writes about and describes wilderness.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I mean, that's such a long literary tradition.
[Anne Strainchamps]: A lot of contemporary nature writing, I think, really emphasizes joy and wonder and the positive emotions.
[Anne Strainchamps]: One of the things I really admire about your writing is the way you blend beauty and fear.
[Anne Strainchamps]: So, like some of your writing about the Amazon, you describe it as this dark green, ominous Garden of Eden moment.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Plants are climbing over other plants.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Wood is winding like rope around other wood.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I'm using your words, but you call it a terrible density of life.
[Anne Strainchamps]: And then you go on to list all the ways you can die in the Amazon.
[Anne Strainchamps]: So tell me what you were thinking.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I mean, this is a landscape that is storied.
[Cal Flyn]: I think at least some of it is to reflect my fish-out-of-water status, which is to visit the Yanomami Special Reserve,
[Cal Flyn]: was like a real culture shock to me, you know, and I'm going in as someone who has traveled a lot, spent a lot of time in other cultures, but nevertheless, the intensity of the experience, not only of sort of traveling there for multiple days in a boat, often having to get into the water, get out of the water, you know, it felt like a trial to get there.
[Cal Flyn]: And then on arrival, there is so much of a difficulty in making oneself understood.
[Cal Flyn]: So that's partly body language.
[Cal Flyn]: It's partly actual language.
[Cal Flyn]: spoken language because i have a guide whose first language is portuguese but he can speak some english but we didn't fully understand each other a lot of the time and then he is also not fully understanding the the yanamani people that we are speaking to in the village he's having to do a lot of rephrasing a lot of expressing himself through through different means and so being caught in this like net of misunderstandings and
[Cal Flyn]: often I'm traveling as a woman alone in some sense, which is I might have a guide sometimes, sometimes I don't.
[Cal Flyn]: I'm always on high alert.
[Cal Flyn]: And so that gets sewn into what I notice.
[Cal Flyn]: Again, this is this sort of, what do you project on landscapes that you move through?
[Cal Flyn]: And there are lots of very objective reasons to be scared of moving through the Amazon.
[Cal Flyn]: It's a very difficult place to travel through unless you have a lot of local knowledge and experience.
[Cal Flyn]: If you're going to travel long distance through the rainforest, you need a rainforest experience.
[Cal Flyn]: You just do.
[Cal Flyn]: And you can learn some of that on the job, so to speak.
[Cal Flyn]: But nevertheless, you've got to be really careful.
[Cal Flyn]: So I try not to touch anything that might move.
[Cal Flyn]: You know, when I get up at night from my hammock, I'm using my torch.
[Cal Flyn]: I'm checking that I'm not about to put my foot inside a shoe that's full of scorpions.
[Cal Flyn]: You know, all of this kind of thing.
[Cal Flyn]: I see scorpions all the time.
[Cal Flyn]: I see all these spiders that
[Cal Flyn]: Well, I don't see them to begin with and then they move, you know, so the ground around is full of things that could do me harm.
[Cal Flyn]: And I guess I want to stitch that into the language itself or the way that I talk about the place, which is partly objective, but also very, very deeply first person subjective.
[Cal Flyn]: This is how I'm feeling now.
[Anne Strainchamps]: How much of the power and really the wonder of wilderness is fear, do you think?
[Anne Strainchamps]: I mean, I'm thinking about a trip I took years ago to the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah.
[Anne Strainchamps]: It's a stunning landscape.
[Anne Strainchamps]: And I remember...
[Anne Strainchamps]: At a certain point, I thought this landscape could kill me easily.
[Anne Strainchamps]: There was no protection in it.
[Anne Strainchamps]: There was nothing soft, nothing green, just searing heat.
[Anne Strainchamps]: And then this kind of unspeakable time scale, like you're looking out across a valley at 300 million years of exposed rock.
[Anne Strainchamps]: It's dwarfing and terrifying and beautiful at the same time.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Is that edge of fear partly what draws you to wilderness?
[Cal Flyn]: Yes, fear is absolutely like an intrinsic element of it.
[Cal Flyn]: You know, often I be that, ah, I'm here or this is what I'm going to be writing about when I started to feel really unsettled.
[Cal Flyn]: I'm like, maybe I want to go home.
[Cal Flyn]: Like, that's what I'm looking for.
[Cal Flyn]: It's just that sense of like a place that sets you on fire, you know, like this.
[Cal Flyn]: You need something, all of your
[Cal Flyn]: systems to be like whoa whoa whoa okay i can't handle this i think that's the central question of a lot of wilderness travel which is like you set things up almost like a test you're probably going to fail can i do this that's going to be so difficult actually it's going to be exhausting i've got to keep up that level of physical exertion or i've got to keep up that level of focus on navigation for days you know like that's what you're doing you're you're you're testing yourself
[Anne Strainchamps]: And that included getting very up close with an erupting volcano.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Hang on and we'll hear that story in just a sec.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I'm Anne Strangechamps and this is Wonder Cabinet.
[Steve Paulson]: Hey, it's Steve.
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[Anne Strainchamps]: Talking about wilderness and wildness, I had Steve and me remembering an interview he did years ago with Gary Snyder, the American poet and philosopher who wrote the eco-classic The Practice of the Wild.
[Anne Strainchamps]: We're going to hear a little bit of that interview, too, at the end of today's show.
[Anne Strainchamps]: But in the meantime, getting back to Cal Flyn...
[Anne Strainchamps]: You pushed the edge of danger a bunch of times for this project.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I mean, you write about being in a helicopter in Iceland, flying over the crater of an active volcano.
[Anne Strainchamps]: What did that even look like?
[Cal Flyn]: It was the closest thing I've had to a religious experience, truly, which is...
[Cal Flyn]: The sense of your mind being overloaded.
[Cal Flyn]: You don't know how you feel, actually, because it's too much.
[Cal Flyn]: You're being jolted around.
[Cal Flyn]: You're being dropped.
[Cal Flyn]: You're being lifted again.
[Cal Flyn]: You're being twirled.
[Cal Flyn]: And outside the window is this cauldron of molten rock.
[Cal Flyn]: I mean, what can you do with that?
[Cal Flyn]: Your brain can't handle it.
[Cal Flyn]: It got out of the helicopter and I just had to sit in my car for hours.
[Cal Flyn]: I don't know, half an hour.
[Cal Flyn]: And I was like, the adrenaline was going and I called my husband at home and I couldn't really explain myself.
[Cal Flyn]: I was just like, gasping sound.
[Cal Flyn]: He's like, are you okay?
[Cal Flyn]: And I was like, it was incredible.
[Anne Strainchamps]: The line that got me was you described flying through droplets of magma the size of bathtubs.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Oh.
[Anne Strainchamps]: It's just, it sounds terrifying and glorious.
[Cal Flyn]: Yeah.
[Cal Flyn]: The volcano was a big thing of when, like often I couldn't really make sense of what I was looking at because the physical...
[Cal Flyn]: laws that you have sort of programmed into your head of it doesn't make sense you look at it and you think how how can that drop that be taking so so so long to go up and then so so so long to go down and then and then your brain slowly clicks into gear being like oh it's it's going hundreds of meters wow and the scale jumps and you understand the scene that you're looking at completely afresh it sounds like an altered state
[Anne Strainchamps]: There's a name for that mixture of beauty and terror, the sublime, which goes back to mid to late 1700s romantic era philosophers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant.
[Anne Strainchamps]: What did they say that experience of the sublime is?
[Anne Strainchamps]: Like, what are the building blocks of it?
[Cal Flyn]: I suppose the key definition being that it is beauty and fear all tied together.
[Cal Flyn]: um it's like a a clashing chord of of emotion and edmund burke described it as the the strongest emotion that man is capable of feeling and i i agree with that i think that that sort of two-tone element of it means that it's both incredibly positive incredibly negative all at once it sets you up in this intense state of something um
[Cal Flyn]: Psychologists call it all, but it's all the same thing.
[Anne Strainchamps]: The romantics were hungry for it, greedy for it, right?
[Anne Strainchamps]: I mean, they not only wrote stories designed to elicit it, but they also went out to try to experience it.
[Anne Strainchamps]: There's something a little addictive about it, which I think maybe you felt too, because the day after that helicopter trip,
[Anne Strainchamps]: You went out back to the volcano and you hiked into the exclusion zone, like where you were not supposed to be for good reasons.
[Anne Strainchamps]: How close did you wind up getting?
[Cal Flyn]: For the reasons discussed previously, which is that your eyes find it very difficult to make sense of the landscape you're in, I would estimate I was about 200 meters from the huge crater that I was about eye level with it because I was up in a little hillock.
[Cal Flyn]: And so it seemed to me to be
[Cal Flyn]: extremely close.
[Cal Flyn]: I was outside of the hot lava, but I was very close to the edge of the hot lava.
[Cal Flyn]: It was definitely a lot closer than I had promised myself that I was going to go.
[Cal Flyn]: I knew that this was, it was against the rules and that intensifies the emotional experience.
[Cal Flyn]: That was part of the experience and that there were helicopters flying overhead and that they could see me disregarding the rules.
[Cal Flyn]: All of this added this sense of peril.
[Cal Flyn]: But
[Cal Flyn]: That's part of it, right, the pursuit.
[Cal Flyn]: You want things to happen, and then if they happen, it would be terrible.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Going back to wanting to be on that edge, I mean, it's kind of the edge of adrenaline.
[Anne Strainchamps]: There's a point where you write, I think you're standing, you're pretty close to a field of magma, pulsing red liquid rock,
[Anne Strainchamps]: You describe it as a soaring eye, lidless and always awake.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I have to tell you that my immediate thought was, oh my God, it's like Frodo and the Lord of the Rings looking in terror at the great flaming eye of Sauron.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Why is that what came up?
[Cal Flyn]: I think that's what I was trying to channel.
[Cal Flyn]: It's like if you were driving around some miles away,
[Cal Flyn]: occasionally you'd align with this like gap between the mountains and you could see it and you could see the sort of leaping of the lava, this sort of cauldron of rock.
[Cal Flyn]: And it was like that.
[Cal Flyn]: It was this sort of, not evil, but certainly awesome spectacle that just seemed to be constant and sort of had this unsettling sense of constant activity that it was up to something.
[Cal Flyn]: Yeah.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Right after that, there's a little section when you kind of attempt to explain to the reader why you would risk your life to see an active volcano up close.
[Anne Strainchamps]: And you're kind of talking about the parallels between our internal psychological climates and the outer world.
[Anne Strainchamps]: So in a sense, between our interior and exterior landscapes, and you make this comment about
[Anne Strainchamps]: that I paused for a minute because I know exactly what you mean.
[Anne Strainchamps]: You said, the lack of control over one's emotional weather has always been a source of great frustration to me.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I do think for many of us, the experience of being alive is to be not infrequently at the mercy of ebbing and flowing emotional tides, moods that can roll in, like hot or cold fronts and color.
[Anne Strainchamps]: your internal atmosphere, I have never really thought about noticing parallels in actual physical landscapes.
[Anne Strainchamps]: What does that do for you?
[Cal Flyn]: I think it helps me understand how we relate to the world around us, right?
[Cal Flyn]: So this idea of if you go into the landscape in a certain frame of mind, you see it in a different way.
[Cal Flyn]: I guess I've been talking a lot about intensifiers.
[Cal Flyn]: And so if you are in a state of mind and you seek out a place that somehow symbolizes that to you, it can be a very profound experience that your inner climate is somehow being reflected in the outer world.
[Cal Flyn]: I think there's a real megalomania in that sort of thing.
[Cal Flyn]: pure ego or something like this which is that maybe it's a relief that there is something that is bigger yeah no a relief i think that's better because you think yes it's like that i think that you can recognize it you say oh yeah yes that's true whatever is happening to this landscape right now this sort of the awesomeness of it can chime something in myself as well
[Anne Strainchamps]: Well, this seems like a perfect segue to the Himalayas, these Buddhist landscapes, speaking of observation and acceptance of one's interior.
[Anne Strainchamps]: There's this section where you're visiting a very remote area in the Himalayas.
[Anne Strainchamps]: It's way, way up high in mountain passes, tiny villages you can only get to by footpaths.
[Anne Strainchamps]: And you went there not just for the wilderness landscape, but you wanted to meet a particular group of people, the Banpo people, who practice really interesting, probably ancient form of Buddhism that's also animist.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Am I getting this right?
[Cal Flyn]: Yeah, absolutely.
[Cal Flyn]: It's a sort of merging of Tibetan Buddhism and local animist principles so that they believe in many of the Buddhist figures and Buddhist philosophy, but they also believe that
[Cal Flyn]: The mountains around them might be the abode of a certain god or a particular boulder, for example, or that the wild animals that move through the landscape around them are owned by certain gods that live in a valley or something like this.
[Cal Flyn]: And so that was very interesting to me, this idea of ownership that in this landscape.
[Cal Flyn]: place that's so sparsely vegetated that you can only pass through in certain times of year but it is not felt to be no man's land it's it's felt to be the the property of of gods or goddesses and that these are very territorial deities and they are wrathful if you misuse their resources or if you mistreat their animals and so that these figures are worth dealing with and you make
[Cal Flyn]: If you would like to build a house, for example, you need to trade for the rocks that you might take from the riverbed.
[Cal Flyn]: So you would go and you would approach the river god and you would make some kind of deal, some kind of sacrifice of your own.
[Cal Flyn]: For example, laying aside part of the river and saying, I'll never fish there or I'll never take water from there.
[Cal Flyn]: And in return, I will take some of the rocks.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Yeah, it's a kind of transactional relationship with the land and the beings, supernatural beings that animate it.
[Anne Strainchamps]: There's reverence, awe, fear, admiration, and taboos.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Maybe fear is a thing to pay more attention to as a path towards our relationships with these wild places.
[Cal Flyn]: Oh, absolutely.
[Cal Flyn]: Because fear is a force that works in the world.
[Cal Flyn]: You know, you speak to ecologists about the landscape of fear.
[Cal Flyn]: This is what they're talking about when they talk about the change in vegetation that occurs when you reintroduce carnivores to a habitat.
[Cal Flyn]: So it's talked a lot about in the context of Yellowstone, of mountain lions and wolves, that the return of these apex predators has changed the way that landscape is on a sort of ecological level.
[Cal Flyn]: So the landscape of fear is
[Cal Flyn]: is the landscape that arises as a result of these emotional forces as much as anything else.
[Cal Flyn]: And I think that that can be a way to think about our dealings with the natural world as humans, which is, you know, actually a lot of the places that get really exploited and used up are places where there is a sense that anything goes.
[Cal Flyn]: You know, I think that's often why we see it in colonial cultures, which is you arrive in another country, you've got less respect for it.
[Cal Flyn]: You've got less respect for the laws that have been keeping it safe for centuries.
[Cal Flyn]: And so you come in, you say, anything goes.
[Cal Flyn]: We can build this here.
[Cal Flyn]: We can blow that up and use the rock for that.
[Cal Flyn]: You see it in purely utilitarian terms.
[Cal Flyn]: And you don't have that sense of culturally imbued fear, taboo.
[Cal Flyn]: You know, we can't blow up that mountain.
[Cal Flyn]: That mountain's been there for centuries.
[Cal Flyn]: You know, like I buried my grandmother on that mountain.
[Cal Flyn]: You know, you don't have any of these taboos.
[Cal Flyn]: And that frees you up to sort of act with impunity.
[Cal Flyn]: And that's when we see these sort of like rabid economies.
[Anne Strainchamps]: And the taboos are not just, but that's a very special sight to me.
[Anne Strainchamps]: It's more like, oh no, there are consequences.
[Anne Strainchamps]: If you like mess with that mountain, let me tell you, this has happened before.
[Anne Strainchamps]: You mess with that and the God that lives in that mountain is going to smite you or whatever.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I was really surprised that you said sacred landscapes are,
[Anne Strainchamps]: are among some of the best protected areas on the planet, and in fact, better protected in many cases than many areas that are officially, you know, scientifically protected.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Really?
[Cal Flyn]: Yeah, I mean, ecologists will call them sacred groves.
[Cal Flyn]: It's a phrase that's a sort of retroactive application of a concept that they had in ancient Greece and in ancient Rome.
[Cal Flyn]: But you find these parallels all over the place, all over the world, which is this idea of there being certain places that are
[Cal Flyn]: must be kept safe for cultural or religious reasons.
[Cal Flyn]: India is absolutely packed full of them with hundreds and hundreds of sacred groves and often they become these sort of storehouses of biodiversity.
[Cal Flyn]: They are maybe the only wooded places left in the whole landscape.
[Cal Flyn]: They are places where they are primary forests.
[Cal Flyn]: Sometimes they're big like a mountain or a valley, but often they're much smaller than that, but they're like tiny islands of old growths.
[Cal Flyn]: old landscape, undisturbed ecosystems.
[Cal Flyn]: And these are wildernesses of all different sizes.
[Cal Flyn]: And we might understand sacred groves as essentially a kind of conservation project, a multicultural conservation project.
[Cal Flyn]: But most of the time, the cultures would not think of them in those terms.
[Cal Flyn]: They're thought of as being the abode of spirits or the abode of gods or a trade that has been made in some transactional way with God that
[Cal Flyn]: forces the seeding of control over this piece of land but if you want to look at it through the eyes of a biologist or ecologist they are amazing natural sanctuaries and so yes there's a sort of new field of ecology that studies these places and it's really fascinating they're trying to draw up a list of all of the sacred groves around the world to try and calculate the I guess the biomass of everything that's being protected within them but also sometimes they've flown under the radar and that's good you know that that is partly as what has protected them
[Anne Strainchamps]: There's a term I kept thinking about when I was reading your book.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I don't know if you've come across it.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Wild mind.
[Anne Strainchamps]: It comes up in both mindfulness and eco-psychology circles.
[Anne Strainchamps]: The idea that beyond our tamed and socialized minds, there is another inner state that is...
[Anne Strainchamps]: pure, freer.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I'm never entirely sure what I think about that because it also, it's a bit of a romanticized idea, maybe kind of mapping the wilderness onto the human psyche.
[Cal Flyn]: I think yes and no.
[Cal Flyn]: And I really liked what you said there about, I don't know how I feel about it.
[Cal Flyn]: Like I feel about this all the time, which is like, I don't always believe in what I want.
[Cal Flyn]: I think it's also so tied up in many religious and spiritual practices, which is that we believe and we don't believe all at once.
[Cal Flyn]: And the complexity of the way that we look at the landscape has helped me understand the complexity of how my own mind works and to make a kind of peace with that.
[Cal Flyn]: I suppose that's my response, which is I would like to have a wild mind.
[Cal Flyn]: And on a day-to-day basis, I
[Cal Flyn]: I don't know that the wild mind is always in play, but I like to think of it as something that's in there somewhere.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I mean, you did wind up feeling that wilderness is at least partly a state of mind.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Have you found ways to access it more yourself?
[Cal Flyn]: Oh, great question.
[Cal Flyn]: One thing that I learned through the, I guess, the final chapter of the book, I have this sort of interview with a
[Cal Flyn]: a lama in remote part of Nepal, right up on the border in Tibet.
[Cal Flyn]: And his argument to me was that he went to this very remote sacred valley and he lived there and he stayed there.
[Cal Flyn]: And he waited for the wilderness to come to him.
[Cal Flyn]: And the way that he sort of turned it on his head really sort of set me to thinking about how I could chase this idea that's very hard and slippery.
[Cal Flyn]: I could chase it all over the world.
[Cal Flyn]: And actually, maybe what I needed to be thinking about was that if this is an emotional experience of place or if this is a spiritual experience or whatever it is that I have to learn how to create those conditions in my own mind.
[Cal Flyn]: And so what I've been doing as a practice recently is going somewhere that feels to me to be a bit wild, but locally and sitting down and waiting for the wilderness to come to me.
[Cal Flyn]: And that might be, well, it should be something I can't,
[Cal Flyn]: expect.
[Cal Flyn]: So perhaps you sit very still and a bird comes down and it sort of hops over your feet or you sit down and then you hear a call that you haven't heard before.
[Cal Flyn]: So this is my new level of experimentation, which is trying to build that wilderness in my own head.
[Cal Flyn]: And I think a lot of my most profound experiences in nature are in places that are not so, so far away from my home or somewhere that I'm meant to be.
[Cal Flyn]: And it's maybe a place on the map that nobody's thought to name because it's just a kind of in-between kind of a place.
[Cal Flyn]: Something about maybe the lack of attention or something like this allows it to take on this far away aspect.
[Cal Flyn]: And often that's what I guess I'm looking for.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Yeah.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Cal, it's been such a pleasure talking with you.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Thank you.
[Cal Flyn]: You too.
[Cal Flyn]: Thank you so much.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I've really enjoyed this conversation.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Cal Flyn is a journalist, writer, and explorer.
[Anne Strainchamps]: We were talking about her terrific new book, The Savage Landscape, How We Made the Wilderness.
[Anne Strainchamps]: And as I said earlier, this book got both Steve and me remembering a conversation he had years ago on our old show, To the Best of Our Knowledge, with a legendary writer on wilderness and wildness, Gary Snyder.
[Steve Paulson]: who is now 96 years old, and he has had one of the most remarkable lives of anyone I can think of.
[Steve Paulson]: He was friends with the beat writers.
[Steve Paulson]: Jack Kerouac actually based one of his fictional characters on Snyder.
[Steve Paulson]: He was a Zen apprentice in Japan back in the 50s and then went on to become one of the great environmental writers.
[Steve Paulson]: So when the second edition of his book, The Practice of the Wild, came out about 15 years ago,
[Steve Paulson]: I tracked him down and we had a great conversation.
[Steve Paulson]: And I asked him about the origins of one of his early poems, Paiute Creek.
[Gary Snyder]: I was working on a trail crew as a laborer in the northern section of the Yosemite National Park high country, up around 7,000 or 8,000 feet elevation, with a crew of several other men every day for weeks on end.
[Gary Snyder]: completely out of touch with the rest of the world.
[Gary Snyder]: And after work and after dinner, which was cooked over an open fire, I would practice learning how to meditate and look at the stars.
[Gary Snyder]: So this came to me one of those nights and was in some way transformative for me.
[Gary Snyder]: Paiute Creek.
[Gary Snyder]: One granite ridge, a tree would be enough.
[Gary Snyder]: Or even a rock, a small creek, and a bark shred in a pool.
[Gary Snyder]: Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted.
[Gary Snyder]: Tough trees crammed in thin stone fractures.
[Gary Snyder]: A huge moan on it all is too much.
[Gary Snyder]: The mind wanders.
[Gary Snyder]: A million summers, night air still and the rocks warm.
[Gary Snyder]: Sky over endless mountains.
[Gary Snyder]: All the junk that goes with being human drops away.
[Gary Snyder]: Hard rock wavers.
[Gary Snyder]: Even the heavy present seems to fail this bubble of a heart.
[Gary Snyder]: Words and books, like a small creek off a high ledge, gone in the dry air.
[Gary Snyder]: A clear attentive mind has no meaning but that which sees is truly seen.
[Gary Snyder]: No one loves rock, but we are here.
[Gary Snyder]: Night chills.
[Gary Snyder]: A flick.
[Gary Snyder]: in the moonlight slips into juniper shadow back there unseen cold proud eyes of cougar or coyote watch me rise and go
[Steve Paulson]: That is wonderful.
[Steve Paulson]: Thank you so much.
[Steve Paulson]: Now, in the new preface you wrote for your book, The Practice of the Wild, you describe your own spiritual path as old-time Buddhism.
[Steve Paulson]: And you say this is connected to the ancient traditions of animism and shamanism.
[Steve Paulson]: What does it mean to be a Buddhist animist?
[Gary Snyder]: Well, all of the Buddhists up to the 20th century were animists, as well as Buddhists, because the whole world is animist.
[Gary Snyder]: That is to say, feels that there is a special kind of life in all of phenomena, that there are possibly spiritual forces and spiritual powers, and that the world only asks good manners of us, so we might as well have good manners,
[Gary Snyder]: make a little bow here, offer a little rice or alcohol there, say thank you whenever there's any reason to say thank you, say grace for food, and pay attention to those places in the landscape that are awesome.
[Gary Snyder]: And then we might say, oh, there is some special spiritual presence there, and acknowledge that.
[Gary Snyder]: That's what the ancient world did.
[Gary Snyder]: up until the 20th century and Occidental rationalism, at which point a lot of academic and westernized somewhat Asian Buddhists even said, well, I guess we don't need that old-fashioned peasant shamanism.
[Steve Paulson]: Now, I'm guessing that your Buddhism goes especially back to the time you lived in Japan.
[Steve Paulson]: And I know you lived there for many years from the 1950s to the late 60s studying Zen.
[Steve Paulson]: That's right.
[Steve Paulson]: And that must have been a very unusual thing for an American to do back in the 50s to go off to Japan.
[Gary Snyder]: At that time, there were not many other Americans.
[Gary Snyder]: I knew of three or four maybe others scattered over Japan in different Zen practice situations.
[Gary Snyder]: It was hard then, you know, right after the war in 1956 is when I first went to Kyoto.
[Gary Snyder]: Japan was still recovering from World War II.
[Gary Snyder]: There was a lot of poverty.
[Gary Snyder]: Nobody had a refrigerator.
[Gary Snyder]: Nobody had heat in the house much except burning charcoal or a little kerosene.
[Gary Snyder]: And it was a hard time for people.
[Gary Snyder]: And so the monastery was particularly severe.
[Gary Snyder]: It still is, actually.
[Steve Paulson]: Now, there's one thing I have to ask you about your Zen apprenticeship in Japan all those years ago.
[Steve Paulson]: There's a story about how some monks dangled you over a cliff with a rope tied to your ankles.
[Steve Paulson]: Did this really happen?
[Gary Snyder]: Well, it wasn't Zen.
[Gary Snyder]: That was another school of Buddhism.
[Steve Paulson]: Oh, okay.
[Steve Paulson]: The Zen monks don't do that, but some other Buddhists do.
[Gary Snyder]: It would be good for them to get out in the mountains more, actually.
[Gary Snyder]: But that was the Shugendo or the Yamabushi.
[Gary Snyder]: I went out with them.
[Gary Snyder]: I was already a climber, you know, before I went over there.
[Gary Snyder]: I had done a lot of mountaineering in the Pacific Northwest as a teenager and into my early 20s.
[Gary Snyder]: Climbed most of those big snow peaks along the West Coast.
[Gary Snyder]: And so one of the elder Zen monks at the monastery I was connected with, the Daitokuji Sodo, said,
[Gary Snyder]: said, well, you want to go out with the Yamabushi?
[Gary Snyder]: And I said, yeah, I've read a little bit about them.
[Gary Snyder]: I'd love to go out with them.
[Gary Snyder]: And he connected me up with somebody.
[Gary Snyder]: They took me up in the mountains, the Omine Mountain Range.
[Gary Snyder]: And part of their way of inducting people into their particular society is actually no rope.
[Gary Snyder]: Hold your feet with their hands and hang you over a cliff.
[Gary Snyder]: And then ask you questions.
[Gary Snyder]: And they say they'll drop you if you don't tell the truth.
[Gary Snyder]: So they did this with you?
[Gary Snyder]: Yes, they did.
[Gary Snyder]: Were you scared?
[Gary Snyder]: Yeah, sure.
[Gary Snyder]: But, you know, I trusted them.
[Gary Snyder]: And I was sure they couldn't tell if I was telling the truth or not.
[Steve Paulson]: What kinds of questions did they ask you?
[Gary Snyder]: Oh, I shouldn't talk about that.
[Steve Paulson]: Okay.
[Steve Paulson]: You have a wonderful phrase in one of your essays.
[Steve Paulson]: You talk about entering into the wild areas of the mind.
[Gary Snyder]: What are those wild areas?
[Gary Snyder]: Well, let's take it as parallel to the physical wildness in nature.
[Gary Snyder]: There is the territory in your house and around your house and your neighborhood, paths and roads by which you go to work and come back every day or go to school and come back every day that are familiar to you.
[Gary Snyder]: But then beyond that is the territory of where a wild process is dominating.
[Gary Snyder]: And you often go in there on your own and by yourself.
[Gary Snyder]: So the wild areas of the mind are the less visited places, the less obvious places, the ones that challenge you, the ones that you cannot quite figure out why it went that way.
[Gary Snyder]: And to bring it right up close to remind us that we don't even know what our next thought is going to be.
[Gary Snyder]: Our ability to manage our mind is very limited.
[Gary Snyder]: And this is one of the things you learn when you meditate.
[Gary Snyder]: Meditation is like cutting off all of the outside stimuli, no music, no painting, no conversation, and seeing what your mind does when it's really there, subject to your full attention.
[Gary Snyder]: And there are parts of it that you will find yourself going into that you've never been to before, which is like the wild.
[Gary Snyder]: Could we end with a poem?
[Gary Snyder]: Sure enough.
[Gary Snyder]: And I'll try this one called Ripples on the Surface.
[Gary Snyder]: The quotation in the beginning is a Tlingit woman I was out fishing with, with a lot of other people, in Sitka Sound up in Alaska.
[Gary Snyder]: She was saying, as we were out on the water, explaining, ripples on the surface of the water
[Gary Snyder]: are silver salmon passing under.
[Gary Snyder]: They are different from the ripples caused by breezes.
[Gary Snyder]: A scudding plume on the wave, a humpback whale is breaking up in air out gulping herring.
[Gary Snyder]: Nature, not a book, but a performance, a high old culture.
[Gary Snyder]: Ever fresh events, scraped out, rubbed out, and used, used again.
[Gary Snyder]: The braided channels of the rivers, hidden under fields of grass.
[Gary Snyder]: The vast wild.
[Gary Snyder]: The house alone.
[Gary Snyder]: The little house in the wild.
[Gary Snyder]: The wild in the house.
[Gary Snyder]: Both forgotten.
[Gary Snyder]: No nature.
[Gary Snyder]: Both together, one big empty house.
[Steve Paulson]: That was Gary Snyder talking to me back in 2010 after the reissue of his book, The Practice of the Wild.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Wonder Cabinet comes to you from Madison, Wisconsin, and Vershire, Vermont.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Thanks, as always, to our audio engineer, Steve Gotcher, and our digital producer, Mark Riechers.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I'm Anne Strainchamps.
[Steve Paulson]: And I'm Steve Paulson.
[Steve Paulson]: We would love to hear from you.
[Steve Paulson]: Send questions or comments to us at wondercabinetproductions.com and sign up for the newsletter while you're there.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Be well and happy adventuring.