You may say that I’m not free,
But it don’t worry me.
—Keith Carradine

The highway between Wilson and Jackson crosses the Snake River about a mile outside Wilson over a concrete-asphalt-metal bridge of uninspired though functional design. Past the river, the road continues for a half-mile before entering a long right turn leading to a quarter-mile straightaway and turns left into another straightaway. That is the only section of the Wilson-Jackson highway we are concerned with here.
The road itself is not special. Just a ten-mile stretch of classic two-lane black-top connecting two western American towns. The only thing unusual and unique about this particular slice of highway is the contradictory unusualness and uniqueness common to any piece of the road we are all traveling. This is the fact observable to the patient and interested that he who pursues the road, no matter how sporadically, will, like every gypsy who ever used unspeakable cruelty to teach a bear to dance, someday find himself once again on the same stretch of road during one or another of his swings away from his own ever changing, unvarying nature.
Wilson is little more than a road stop at the bottom of the eastern side of Teton Pass, and that’s the way locals like it. Wilson is the site of the Stagecoach Bar, the one saloon in the Jackson area that is common ground for all the diverse social elements living there—cowboys, ski bums, hippies, climbers, tourists, musicians, horny housewives, college students on vacation or leave, construction workers, restaurant workers, fat cats, lodge owners, condominium salesmen, fishing guides and anyone else in the vicinity hankerin’ for a sandwich, some company, a bunch of beers, a pool game, good music, and, maybe, a lay. On Sunday afternoon the Stagecoach jumps. Jumps, hops, skips, rocks, rolls, howls, runs, back-flips and spread eagles. All good local musicians and any passing through gather there to jam. Sunday afternoon in Wilson can get pretty raucous; but because of the local laws, inspired by quasi-religious sentiment, the bars close at 8 p. on Sunday. Around 7:30 there is a run on six-packs at the Stagecoach, and by 8:30 there are empty beer cans all over the parking lot, the highway and alongside every road leading out of town.
That’s Wilson.
Jackson has its charms, but all in all it’s about the worst tourist trap in western America. During summer, Jackson is wall to wall people, bumper to bumper traffic, asshole to eyelid hustle, junk stores, mosquitoes and all the lost energy of displaced Americans desperately seeking their own misspent history and heritage in the noon and 5 p.m. fake gunfight held daily in the town square. The entrance to each of the four corners of the square is through an enormous arch made from the antlers of elk, a large noble animal indigenous to the area. Indeed, the elk is indispensable to the local economy which thrives on the trade of the great white hunter in the autumn in much the same manner as it survives on the dreaded white tourist in the summer. Most conscientious wanderers pausing in Jackson overnight or a little longer will somehow drift into the Million-Dollar Cowboy Bar. At one time only the bold, the blind, the unwise or the saintly long-hair would have dared venture into the then aptly named saloon. But times change, and, in one of the ironic moves of the karmic wheel, the cowboys lost their territory for a change. Not lost but came to share. And what better way to work out all the old bullshit than by sharing—both the bullshit and the bar.
That’s Jackson.
The Snake River drains out of the mountains of Wyoming into Idaho and Oregon and on to Washington where it joins the mighty Columbia, which eventually flows home to the ocean. Some people speak of an ocean of love from which life comes and to which it must return. And because of all this idle talk down the years, it often crosses my mind as I cross over, bathe in, look upon and drink from the fine Snake River that, if that’s how it works, then that which begins in love, must, inevitably, end in love. And it is simple to make the next step of seeing the true beginnings of things in how they end. That’s called hindsight, but I don’t hear so much about the importance of beginnings. It is the state of mind that comes before the aim that comes before the arrow is launched toward the target. The river of peace; the ocean of love; and there is even a man who is said to have walked on the water. Who knows? He may have walked on the Snake.
Concrete, asphalt and metal are materials used by the human animal to subjugate, dominate and violate the nature that gave him birth and so far continues to sustain him. The human critter can be exceedingly ungrateful.
The bridge across the Snake is a tool of convenience. From one aspect it’s a piece of shit, but it serves a function by allowing people and their vehicles to shuttle back and forth across the river without getting wet. Some people and most vehicles do not take well to getting wet; though coyote shuns the bridge. In 100 years the bridge won’t be there, but the Snake will. There may be another bridge over the same river and different men to cross it; but I cannot repress my curiosity about the state of those men’s mind, 100 years from now.
Uninspired is the state of life of the coward who would rather live with an unacceptable comfortable situation than throw it all over for a chance at joy.
Functional to an engineer or a soldier or a politician or an insurance salesman may mean something very different from what it means to, for instance, a coyote. What is functional to each person says more about the person than about function, and it is an interesting word to throw into a conversation with someone you wish to check out. The bridge does serve a function in the material world.
Construction. Well, shit, boys and girls, we still haven’t figured out how the Pyramids were built, much less why. If modern technology can’t answer that one, it puts, at the least, what man calls “construction” in a perspective that cannot help but make the honest scientific mind…pause.
Once past the bridge, the road goes straight toward a turn. Just before the turn a small farmhouse on a hill can be observed out the left window. Right ahead is a field where the farmer grows hay, and the road bends around a field. It is, perhaps, half a mile long and a quarter mile wide; and every time I’ve seen the field it has been as groomed and well kept as those beautiful women in international airports who melt your heart and fry your brain, and, when you’re graced, sustain your spirit during those long, alone trips around the planet…trips which find you trapped in strange cities between flights to other, even stranger places where you know you will not tarry long, just as you know it is part of the weaving of the eternal tapestry that you must visit there from time to time. And that’s why there is a turn at the end of the straight section.
If you had been in the Stagecoach for ten hours, playing pool and drinking beer without eating sandwiches or getting laid; and if you had ingested ten reds and, possibly, snorted holes in your septum with the magic anesthetic white dust; and maybe if there were some other lethal frustration in your life…like ten years (or ten minutes) living with a mate no longer wanted; or a job so boring that it turns the honey of the spirit to carbolic acid, or, at the very, very minimum, a good old-fashioned scrotum-to-brain burn by the all-time honest-to-God, truer-‘n-shit wonderful unbelievable down to the center of the earth higher than the cosmos perfect love of your life…then, with such a frustration or physical or psychic handicap bubbling away in your brain and being, clouding judgment with visions of devils and demons and never-ending red lights in the rear view mirror, you might miss the turn and go blazing across the good farmer’s field. If you did that, and if your vehicle and everything in it survived, which is not impossible, and if you kept going with a slight lean to the left and did not hit any hay bales or coyotes or holes, you would cross the field and run through some willows on the other side from which you would emerge to crash through a hand water pump and continue up a driveway to a small cabin nestled right up against a small forest of aspens.
I once spent the better part of a summer in that cabin.
To reach the cabin by staying on the road it is necessary to negotiate the right turn, continue up the straightway, hold on through the left turn, continue 100 yards, and turn back left onto a dirt road just off the highway. The hoop gate on a barbed wire fence must be opened before driving through and closed after; and there are three such gates before the cabin is reached, each to be opened and closed, both coming and going. The road goes along the edge of the shimmering, murmuring aspens, mostly within the shade of the fine summer leaves; and the road must be driven with as much care as is cared for the vehicle driven. Very often Hawks, ground squirrels and coyotes are seen along this road.
The one-story cabin is a beauty for people who do not mind a 100-foot walk to the pump for water, or, in the other direction, to the two-hole shitter; or cooking over a wonderful old cast iron wood burning stove; and cutting wood for that stove; and doing without electricity. It was built of wood by some less than mediocre craftsmen and has a large rock fireplace in the middle of its one room. That summer there was a wooden table and four matching chairs and a dresser and two double beds, which we never used, preferring to sleep outside under clear Wyoming skies or in the bus with all the doors open, listening to the nightly coyote serenade.
I was cruising for a time with a peroxide lady and a child who were both close and distant. On clear days I climbed the variable rock of the Tetons. Stormy days were spent writing at the cabin or in the peaceful Jackson library where there were not only free coffee and comfortable chairs and a big table to write upon, but the quiet of all the sad, lost souls seeking freedom from both sides of every page of every book of every shelf on very aisle of all the libraries man has ever built and burnt and sanctified and censored throughout a history he but dimly remembers…for if he remembered and understood he would not be condemned to the prison of repetition, and the seeking of a freedom that stands, like naked, beautiful, beckoning innocence across the ocean of love, the river of peace, the stream of understanding and the trickle of attempt.
A few days were spent in the front yard with heads full of acid, watching our neighbor tend his fields. One particular day sticks in memory. We were sitting on the ground with our friend the German woman of fine intelligence and heart. She talked too much and pushed too hard and was never sure about living in unending sorrow over some unacceptable personal tragedy that was talked around but never about, and thus could not be plowed under to fertilize happiness; and the tears she shed inside flooded the world, drowning all not contained within the ark of her mind.
The two interweaving currents of our energies revolved around reading Ecclesiastes aloud to each other and watching the good farmer work his fields the entire day in the sun. The two were, of course, the whole; and holding them together in our minds was, at the same time, the most serious endeavor; the most hilarious pastime; the most arduous undertaking; the easiest frivolity; grinding work; and the most fun any of us had ever had. The high awareness that it is “all emptiness and chasing the wind” laid us out in hysterical laughter, clapping each other on the thighs and backs and repeating over and over, “all emptiness and chasing the wind.” And out of that day and line we were finally able to name a route we had climbed on Mt. Mitchell in the Wind River Mountains a few weeks before. It was a hard, beautiful route on perfect rock that we started right after breakfast and which saw us return to camp at midnight. It is one of my favorite climbs. We named it Ecclesiastes, in honor of the joy of the empty chase.
The farmer worked his field in a circular manner, starting from the perimeter and advancing inward, in just the opposite direction of harvesting crops of karma. He was cutting hay that day, sitting beneath the sunshade atop his roaring machine, and a circuit of the field took about 15 minutes. He was a big man wearing a blue Levi shirt and a straw hat. I never spoke with him, but for perhaps 20 seconds of each tour of the field we could hear him, above the road of the machine, singing at the top of his lungs. There was, in the strength of persistence of his voice, a daylight counterpoint to the nighttime coyote song. His deep baritone was filled with joy and revelry which came, we could only assume, from his work. He sang Italian opera; and, though we only picked up on his serenade for a few seconds of each cycle, it was consistent and it is fair to assume he sang the whole day long. And we were there from tea and capsule breakfast until sundown.
Or maybe the man was putting on a show for us…the neighbors who never, ever communicated or worked or did anything that he could see…and it is possible that he only sang during the part of his cycle which came within our realm. But that is a cynicism I recognize and cannot accept. I never felt he cared a politician’s word of honor whether we watched him or not, but I was aware he knew we were watching; and in a sense that cannot be written about because I wasn’t on his side of the page, he was as much a spectator as we…watching a boy and a longhair beard and a blonde and a shapely brunette sitting in front of the cabin across the way…apparently doing absolutely nothing the entire day long. He worked his fields with a thoroughness we could not envy because envy gets you hard every time; but we did not refrain from admiring and wondering about it. While I will never know what was going on in the farmer’s mind, I still would not like to live in a world without wonder; and there was no emptiness in his barn. If there is a wind to chase, the farmer made an inward circular pattern out of his pursuit.

If you witness in some province the oppression of the poor and the denial of right and justice, do not be surprised at what goes on, for every official has a higher one set over him, and the highest keeps watch over them all. The best thing for a country is a king whose own lands are well tilled.

We read those thoughtful words while watching a careful, conscientious farmer at work upon his land; and our particular vision allowed us to see that there are many kinds of fields to till, and we were learning how much work, and fun, it is. The sun will rise and set again and the earth will abide; but whether or not human life on earth survives, there’s no excuse for making the living of it cruel, harsh or unreasonable. Probably we made a mistake not to invite our industrious neighbor to join us.
But the only thing unforgivable about mistakes lies in the ones that are continued and in the song repetition blares forth about the inability or refusal of its singer to learn, for once we truly learn we move on and that’s called evolution; and then the circle is not endless but only functional. Sounds in the form of words flowed from the blonde, the brunette, the bearded and the boy as easily as water in a mountain stream, though there were droughts that must have their place in nature but certainly put you through your paces and don’t help at all in dealing with the lurking paranoia that must be fought at every step; and, as the killer of trust, is the most vicious of enemies, more dangerous than a shark or polar bear or cobra that can kill only your body since they carry no malice. The dry spells usually happened while the farmer was at the apogee of his orbit of contact with us, for the sound of his singing voice brought us laughter from his pleasure, faith in the feeling that someone in the neighborhood had their shit together; and then there would come the sound of our own voices talking about the farmer and ourselves and what we all might possibly be doing, should be doing, could be doing and damn well will be doing, and, actually were doing. It was fun to hear him singing.

Who is wise enough for all this? Who knows the meaning of anything? Wisdom lights up a man’s face, but grim looks make a man hated. Do as the King commands you, and if you have to swear by God, do not be precipitate.

I remember the sadness, humor, terror and beauty of assurance striking home; assurance that the farmer would keep on working his fields in the pattern he had chosen beneath the sun that would continue to rise and set upon the…if you can believe Ecclesiastes…eternal earth; assurance that we would accept our destinies and take what we would from them according to how hard we enforced our own will and fought for what we wanted; assurance that the particular pattern by which each of us expressed the love within was not so important as the intensity of that love; assurance that there is not understanding without mystery; and assurance that no matter how much intelligence we use and how hard we try there is an element outside ourselves that the irreligious call “luck” that will cover mistakes or destroy creations according to laws we don’t comprehend except that finished work on one particular pattern moves us into a different standard that is only another segment of a much larger pattern seen only through the eyes of the Buddha nature in its entirety , unless we drop a stitch along the way and have to do the whole thing over again, which brings on the assurance that all is contained within the mind and that both everything and nothing is ours. It’s a strange, wonderful…ah, balanced, universe, for even if it is all emptiness, there is fullness in the chase; and if that’s all we got we might as well make fun out of it instead of some of the other things we might make.

I know that there is nothing good for man except to be happy and live the best life he can while he is alive. Moreover, that a man should eat and drink and enjoy himself, in return for all his labours, is a gift of God; I know that whatever God does lasts forever; to add to it or subtract from it is impossible. And he had done it all in such a way that man must feel awe in his presence. Whatever is has been already, and whatever is to come has been already, and God summons each event back in its turn. Moreover I saw here under the sun that, where justice ought to be, there was wickedness, and where righteousness ought to be, there was wickedness. I said to myself, “God will judge the just man and the wicked equally; every activity and every purpose has its proper time.” I said to myself, “In dealing with men it is God’s purpose to test them and to see what they truly are. For man is a creature of chance and the beasts are creatures of chance, and one mischance awaits them all: death comes to both alike. They all draw the same breath. Men have no advantage over beasts; for everything is emptiness. All go to the same place: all come from the dust, and to the dust all return. Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward or whether the spirit of beast goes downward to the earth?” So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should enjoy his work, since that is his lot. For who can bring him through to see what will happen next?

Accordingly, before bedding down that night under summer sky, we made ourselves a feast worthy of kings and queens and princes and laborers; and we washed it down with a couple of bottles of good wine, though not so much as we had and would again consume in the evenings of less hard-working days when unstoned heads drifted into more illusory perspectives of reality that the slight to gross wine OD makes real, or, at least, bearable.
That night and every other night we ever slept at the cabin the coyotes serenaded us with their wondrous song from the center of the universe. I love coyote’s song. I miss it when my life takes me away from coyote life, when coyote sings me to sleep on the bed of Mother Earth. Coyote, as every Indian and all spiritual gypsies of the cosmos know, is hunter, trickster, teacher, fool, creator, protector and wife stealer; or, as poet Barry Gifford (Coyote Tantras) writes, “Coyote drifts in and out, a searcher, a wastrel, supersensitive vagabond of the universe; never settled; always moving; dropping in here and there along the way. Coyote is no idealist; but he never gives up. What is most important is that he is alive; and whatever shred of nobility he wears rests in his awareness of that life. Never aimless, always grinning; forever looking, always lost; ever lonely, never making excuses; Coyote speaks for none but himself.” Coyote sings for himself in the night, but he sings for us too; and in the bus or on the ground in the warm down bags that would not be zipped together too much longer past that long ago Wyoming summer, we listened—carefully to his songs of cold, lonely space travel and the distances between galaxies and the warmth and humor and wisdom of the chase, the hunt, the song itself and of the teachings you can pick up from coyote or the songs of the humpbacked whale or the flight and swoop of the hawk or the shy grace of the deer or the brute wild strength of the moose that tell you way down there in the central nerves of the solar plexus to be very, very careful of men who only understand nature through such manmade abstractions as politics, religion, war and power and have not spent enough time in relationship to the true, eternal nature that, in functional fact, sustains and gives life to them and their abstractions and to the coyotes and trees and bears and birds and bees and elk and wolves and marmots and flowers and fish and rivers and oceans and all the other interacting forms of life on planet earth that men like that are so unconscious of.
One early morning I woke from the restless sleep that is the lot of the wanderer who has been too long in the same place but isn’t moving on just yet. We were sleeping in the bus with the back open, and the sun had just hit the farmer’s field. It was early morning chilly, but a hot day was coming. Something nagged at my sleep-filled consciousness. And then it came again a solitary, soulful, painful and sick coyote call from very close by. I came instantly awake, for something was deeply and terribly wrong with that call. It was not a howl of the proud loneliness and joy and interstellar communication found in the normal coyote song. It was a yell of such pathos and pain and nearness that I became both afraid and angry in the same rush of clear feeling; afraid for the animal itself and afraid, since he undoubtedly was one of the coyotes who had serenaded us in the night for several weeks and who we had seen on many occasions, for a friend. And also afraid of what a pain-crazed critter might do; and angry because I could only think of two things that could put a coyote in that sort of pain poison and traps both from the murderous hand of man, and, as a man, angry at that cruel, uncaring potential within myself.
Motherfucker, I said to myself. Motherfuckers. Sonsabitches. Bastards. Killers. What’s wrong with that poor fucker? The woman and the boy, masters of more sedentary souls than mine, were deeply asleep. I crawled out of the bag, quickly dressed, picked up the axe we used for splitting wood, and cautiously went down to the willows at the edge of the farmer’s field. I hunkered down and crept through the willows until I could see the field, full, by that stage of the growing cycle, of hundreds of bales of hay waiting to be picked up. There I saw the damndest thing.
Dragging himself up the field from the south was the most pitiful, wretched coyote ever seen on planet Earth. He was pulling himself along mostly with the power of his forepaws. His ass-end sort of clawed and dragged itself along behind; and the two halves of his body seemed to be disjointed, as if his back were broken or some carbolic poison and pain were wrenching the poor creature’s innards in indescribable agony. He passed maybe 50 feet in front of me, too intent on his own destiny to notice me, which, of course, is the fool aspect of coyote. Every so often he would crawl upon a bale of hay, raise his muzzle to the sky, and give out that terrible, caricatured howl that had awakened me. I watched, fascinated by the scenario and by some inner resource operating in that sad beast, who, I could not forget, was coyote, pre-historic animal of myth and fable and story, and, to the Indian, who knows this land better than the white late-comers, creation Coyote, the trickster Coyote, Panama Red of the most ancient hipster. Just as this coyote was finishing his call of affliction from atop a bale directly in front of me, the farmer’s dogs, two big hounds of indiscriminate heritage, went berserk with awareness of their cousin’s plight. I could see them running in circles, jumping in the air and raising dust in the farmer’s front yard. Their barks were ecstatic and out of control, but it was evident they weren’t leaving their master’s front yard.
Coyote flopped off the bale and continued his wearisome journey north through the field. I had decided by then it must be poison because I could see he hadn’t been hurt in a trap and his back looked intact. My curiosity wouldn’t allow me to quit my seat at this show. But I was pissed. There are certain sorts of shitheads (I use that word literally) on earth who set poison out for coyote, not caring about coyote, rabbit, fox, mouse, hawk, ground squirrel, groundhog, bear, eagle, porcupine, skunk and even domestic dog who, thereby, leave this life in agony and bewilderment, wondering what evil unnatural fate has come over them. Cocksuckers. May they eat some of their own poison and see how it feels, if they got any feeling left. No! No! Richard, that’s not the way either. You can’t answer for another man’s actions, intentions or karma. You got your own to take care of. But you can, by rights and necessity and duty and fun, say what you think and express what you feel; and setting poison out for coyotes and his friends is not the way and will buy the man who does it some unholy dues; but that’s not the point somehow, surely not to the animal with a gut full of crippling pain and a spirit full of a cruel gift from brother man. I felt terrible about that coyote; and not hate but disgust for the pitiful excuse for a human being who had done it to him. Teacher/trickster coyote dying so ignominiously was patently unacceptable; for how could he teach or trick or find nobility in his own awareness of life with a belly full of pain?
A few yards up the field he dragged himself again atop a bale and repeated his cry of agony, muzzle to the sky. The hounds were in a frenzy. By then the farmer was out in his yard, loading gas and water and tools in his pickup, which prior observation had taught me he would next drive down to the field to begin his day’s work, that day involving the loader sitting idly at the southern end of the field. Sometimes the dogs accompanied him, and my feelings were mixed about the possibilities. My attention was divided between watching coyote finish his sad song and nearly fall off the bale before continuing to drag himself up the field, and watching the farmer call his dogs into the back of his truck and drive down to the field.
Shit, the dogs are going to kill the coyote, I said to myself. I didn’t like that. I also didn’t like the coyote’s suffering. I was stuck upon my own dislikes until, as the pickup approached the loader, I realized what I really disliked was that these dogs would never mess with a healthy coyote. All they were doing was letting out the bully that always grows from the indignity of being a domestic animal. Fucking cowards! Buzzards! Scum! Vocabulary, as usual, falls short of feeling, but no way was I going to relinquish my spectator’s seat at whatever this play was going to be; besides, I was both spectator and participant, like every man. The farmer stopped next to the loader, and I was struck by his unconcern about the two frenetic, howling hounds. The dogs leapt from the truck in a full sprint north. The farmer never even turned to watch.
I, on the contrary, swung my vision to what I was sure was going to be an ugly battle to the coyote’s death; and the next few seconds seemed like a couple of hours, for everything slowed down as the flow of life tends to do when attention is complete.

There is an evil that I have observed here under the sun, an error for which a ruler is responsible: the fool given high office, but the great and rich in humble posts. I have seen slaves on horseback and men of high rank going on foot like slaves. The man who digs a pit may fall into it, and he who pulls down a wall may be bitten by a snake. The man who quarries stones may strain himself, and the wood-cutter runs a risk of injury. When the axe is blunt and has not first been sharpened, then one must use more force; the wise man has a better chance of success. If a snake bites before it is charmed, the snake-charmer loses his fee.

As I turned my attention north, I was aware of the Grand Teton (the great tit of the great Mother Earth) overlooking all. I saw the coyote increase the rate of its struggles and thrash about between the bales as if seeking shelter among them. The hounds closed the distance as fast as they could run, howling the whole time, the thrill of the kill driving them dog crazy. Suddenly, not 50 feet from the coyote, I saw a second coyote crouched down behind a bale; and even from my perspective I could see the grin upon his face and the life within his eyes. He waited until the hounds were about 70 to 80 feet from his partner before he broke cover. At that instant the crippled coyote, like Lazarus springing from the grave, blossomed into full-statures coyote and turned on the hounds. One of the grand sights of my life was seeing a couple of full-grown mongrel hounds exchanging ass-holes for noses while involved in a full stride known only to the heat of the hunt, and get that stride headed in the opposite direction. One of them tried to back pedal, causing his rear quarters to come underneath, and he wound up skidding on his back; but he came up in a scrambling sprint with the greatest actor I have ever seen right on his ass end with coyote’s own magnificent tail laid flat out behind, floating like a flag of coyote wildness in the wind of the newly directioned chase. The other hound just put on the brakes. He tumbled end over end in a couple of good head-first rolls before he, too, could get back up with his powerful legs moving in the other direction, the hidden coyote of patience right on his ass. Those coyotes chased the two hounds around that field at full speed and the farmer went about his work without paying the slightest attention to the whole spectacle, as if he had seen it 1000 times before; and I laughed aloud with the show and at my new knowledge and at the pattern of education; and I watched the coyotes chase the dogs without catching them around the field and around the field and around the field and around and around and around and around.

In 1968 I was one of a group of climber friends who drove a 1965 Ford Econoline van from California to Patagonia where we made the 3rd ascent of Fitz Roy, an 11,171 foot high granite, snow-blasted peak. The trip and the route are relatively well known in the climbing world because of the films “Fitz Roy” and “Mountain of Storms,” the book “Climbing Fitz Roy 1968” and the subsequent resumes of my mates on the journey, Yvon Chouinard, Doug Tompkins, Lito Tejada-Flores and Chris Jones.
The entire trip took nearly six months, two of them on Fitz Roy. Thirty of those days the five of us lived in two different ice caves on the mountain, each approximately 10’ by 10’ in size. At one point we spent 15 consecutive days living in the highest one. The weather, particularly the infamous Patagonian winds, made movement impossible. Most days we were unable to even leave the cave. It was a life changing trip and significant climb filled with memories and lessons for each of us, many of them from the cave.
For several years after the trip I periodically gave slide show/talks about it and, of course, mentioned without excessively dwelling on the 15 successive days we spent confined to the second cave. After one talk, sometime in the mid-70s, a woman from the audience came up to me and introduced herself as a leader/facilitator of encounter group therapy sessions. She asked if I knew about encounter group therapy. I told her I had heard of but didn’t know much about it. My impression was that people in the group let out their repressed hostilities and agressions and ignored social politeness and correctness to express their truest feelings and thoughts, uninhibited by how those might be taken by others. It was said to be a therapeutic technique of letting it all hang out on whoever was there as well as being on the receiving end of whatever came out of the others. The theory was that such venting produced a healthier psychology.
She replied that my impression was more or less correct. She then said something to the effect that our 15 days in the cave had to have been “the all time encounter group therapy session.” I thought about it a moment and told her, truthfully, that unless my impressions of encounter groups were wrong that wasn’t true. So far as I could remember, there was never an intentionally unkind, hostile, aggressive, demeaning word or encounter between any of us during those 15 days, though there was abundant good-natured, uninhibited ribbing of the smelly fart and body odor variety, especially during the close-quarters, visually/audibly/olfactory disagreeable if personally comforting once a day ‘shit call’ when a hole was dug in the floor of the cave and we took turns relieving ourselves into it. She replied, not unkindly, that she didn’t believe me and that I was either repressing or not remembering the way it was. She seemed sincere, friendly and not engaging in an argumentative encounter and we talked about it for a few minutes before she left. This woman’s genuine if erroneous belief that the five of us could not have spent that much time in such conditions without conflict because that is what humans do and that is how humans are has intrigued me and influenced my subsequent standards of observing my own and others’ interactions. It is one factor that leads me to periodically ruminate on that time in the cave. Encounter group therapy turns out to have been more an exploratory branch of the human potential movement than a root of the tree of human psychological healing, but more than 40 years later that woman’s erroneous certainty about our personal dynamics in the cave has stayed with me.
That humanity’s past, present and, if those are any indication, future are and will be filled with conflict, brutality, and letting incomprehensible hatreds and hostilities hang out on the encountered group of the day—the religious, political, sexual, racial, ideological, economic, geographical OTHER—is not in question. The news of any day is filled with innumerable examples. I am not a psychiatrist, psychologist, therapist, counselor or even advisor, but it seems to me that the same individual dynamics explored in encounter group therapy are similar to larger conflicts between nations, tribes, ideologies and business interests (drug wars and those over who controls oil in the ground are business interests). Conflict and cooperation begin with the individual (though they do not end there), and, as every climber knows, climbing is a great metaphor and schooling for larger arenas of living. The encounter group therapy leader’s contention that five men could not exist together in a small cave for two weeks without conflict is not to be lightly dismissed, and I do not.
Still, five of us—each in our own way opinionated, strong minded, not reluctant to speak up, sometimes abrasive and always right—-existed for two weeks in a cramped, damp, cold snow cave without conflict and with a great deal of camaraderie, good cheer, cooperation, consideration, re-told stories, bad odors and worse jokes. We survived, successfully completed the climb, went on with our individual lives and have remained good friends for nearly 50 years (Doug died in December 2015). I have been involved in and know of many other climbing expeditions in which the personal dynamics of its members, both during and after the expedition, were, to put it mildly, filled with conflict, hostility and demeaning behavior. Some climbers learn and move on from their personal contribution to those dynamics, and some do not, and, as George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Having written about some of my own expeditions I am often reminded that the written word keeps alive the dynamics of the past, as they are intended to do, though not everyone enjoys or is capable of remembering the past. That is, climbers are human and climbing expeditions are microcosms of the human condition.
And there are lessons to be learned from them.
Some of those lessons from the cave on Fitz Roy are worth repeating, writing down and contemplating. None of these ruminations would have occurred if that woman had not appeared after a slide show to offer her assurance that conflict is the natural way of humanity and that encountering it is the path to psychological healing and good health.
Au contraire. I think conflict (which is not the same as disagreement) and good health is antithetical. By the time our little group arrived at the 2nd cave we had spent a few months together in a small van driving the length of South America—sleeping on the ground and in the van, surfing, skiing, cooking and eating and cleaning up, learning the strengths and weakness, follies and genius, social and other skills and their absence, philosophies and prejudices, histories and dreams of ourselves and each other. And, yes, there were a few disagreements which we worked through and, thereby, learned and kept moving on from. The more we learned the better we worked together as a team, a unit, an expedition, an interdependent band of humans on the same path up a mountain. That path included time in the cave which I’ve come to think of as a microcosm of human life on Earth, past, present and, one hopes, future. Despite the opinion of the well intentioned encounter group therapy leader, our cave time was marked by cooperation, encouragement and interdependent care, a good model, it seems to me.
I don’t pretend to speak for my cave mates, but the cave lessons speak to me for both the time in the cave and for the previously mentioned microcosm. We were in the cave together and there was nowhere else to go. Challenges and discomforts were shared equally. When food supplies ran low, rations were distributed equally. Cooperation, companionship and compassion were not so much conscious choices as necessities guided by instinctive intelligence and gratitude for the present moment. With nowhere else to go there is no ‘other’ but only ‘us’, and survival is dependent on equal sharing, cooperation, companionship and compassion. That seems to me a timely and apt metaphor for human life on planet Earth. For those who divide humanity along social/racial/religious/sexual/political/economic ‘us’ versus ‘other’ lines and endlessly blather about building bigger, better walls instead of healthy relationships or who fantasize about colonizing Mars as a survival option, the metaphor is lost.