After years of going “up north” year round, I am still shocked at how bad the bugs can be in summer. As one disgruntled local put it, “Summer sucks anyways. Too many bugs.” Got that right.
But still I, and the others from the flatlands, go, the newby pilgrims drawn by pictures of the unquestionably beautiful scenery: towering cliffs over a calm blue fresh-water sea, or a raging, white capped fury; miles of clean sand interspersed by water-smoothed pebbles, ending against an endless forest of light green leaves and dark green needles; a rushing brook run through by quick brown trout; a towering white lighthouse pressed against a deep blue sky. Beautiful images all, and all better seen live than in pictures. These sights are no posed tourist gimmicks. They are all real – but so are the bugs.
Good God, nothing is more real than the bugs. My son and I were on our last few miles of trail along the Superior coast this weekend as the heat soared and the tourists in clean shorts and bright sneakers or boots thickened. The grown-ups mostly smiled as they passed, although often with knowing irony, but the kids were not up to social games. They wanted back in the camper or tent, or better yet, back in a clean, air-conditioned hotel. It was hot and the water in Lake Superior was still icy, but that was nuthin’ compared to the bugs. The kids did not pretend complacency or world-weary toughness, but instead grimaced and stamped and swatted the hoard of stinging sand flies from off their sweating legs and backs and necks and everything.
Some had it even worse: their parents had gone through the trouble and expense of getting them on camping forays with other fortunate children, all shepherded by too-cheery adults with walking sticks and safari hats. Looks from these children were from the miasmal depths of soul-eaten woe. There was no way out for them, not for the whole weekend. From their vantage, the best part of it would be the heat and sweat and stinky outhouses or “doody cans” and hard ground and bad burnt food forever. But the bugs - oh, come on now! Those camp leaders with their pasted-on looks of game adventure, are you kidding? If I could have read their minds, I know that I would have heard one phrase humming over the little campers louder than the shrill whine of mosquitos and the dart-like zip of the stinging flies: “This sucks.”
As indeed it did, and it all gets me to wonder why the hell guys like me go up there when we know it will suck. Those poor kids or water-cooler grown-ups who only have seen the pictures are innocents, but I know; I am of the cognoscenti who know to rush from the jeep to the door of the cabin on arrival before having even tested the outdoor air. I am of those who marvel at my good luck for having made it into the stale smell of log walls with only a few minor bites; of those who then think, “Well, maybe it won’t be so bad,” when we know damn well that we will have hides as thick and hideous as a rhino’s before the end of the all-too-long weekend. And still we go.
I understand the Madison Avenue aspects of it, of how we are supposed to enjoy it as we snap on our North Face wind breakers and lace up our Bean boots while we pitch our Cabela’s tent. But no, the stupidity only goes one way, and that is towards the willingness to suffer while our air conditioners whir back at home. As my father always said, “I worked hard to have a comfortable bed. Why would I choose to sleep on the ground?” He was a smarter man than I, in that and so many other ways. But still, I think I have him on this one, even as it seems I have no defense; I have him on this one because, and only because, my reasoning defies all reasoning. In point considered, if not fact, I have him because of what happens to that reasoning when you knowingly go into such environments with all its discomfort, of something that (can but not always) happens to our inner workings that, trite as it sounds, no amount of normal work can provide. And it isn’t just a rhino hide.
I am not talking of the John Wayne syndrome, where rugged nature makes a tough and self-reliant man (and tough and doting woman) of you, although it surely can do that. I am not even talking of the beauty you may eek from between broken clouds of mosquitoes, although that happens too. Instead, I am talking of the very point of this and most of the other blogs and essays and even pictures on this website: that there is something else within us and without us that, for many, can only be found in raw simplicity, bugs – maybe even especially bugs - and all. For me, I call it the spark or the spirit, but I might generalize it with the popular phrase, “getting real.”
Since most of us feel this need to “get real,” it shows us that most of us aren’t real in our daily lives. And this rarely depends on what we do for a living.
I am currently reading an excellent modern war book by Jon Kerstetter, Crossings. Jon is an Oneida Indian who grew up dirt poor (born 1950) on the reservation in Wisconsin, and in a hovel near a reservation in Utah. Through many struggles, he was finally able to attend a medical school in Minnesota and get his MD. He worked in the ER section of the hospital, where trauma is standard, but it wasn’t enough. He then signed up for the Army Reserve to become a flight surgeon. He served three terms in wartime Iraq. He cried over loneliness for his wife and four kids; he cried over the deaths of those he knew; he felt awed and chilled by the silence that death often imparts to those in witness; he felt disgust at the mounds of rotting bodies left by insurgents; but still, he tells us with shocking honesty that he loved it, needed it.
What “it” is he has yet to fully explain – maybe his explanation will come in the last third of the book I have yet to read – but I do believe we all know what it is. Not all of us need that big a change and that big a challenge, but all of us feel the need, at least now and then, to “get real.” And all of us would like to be real for our whole lives, if we could.
To try to be real is to know that we are not normally real. How do we know this, and what is it? For me, it is a feeling of emptiness and unnamed desire and an anxiousness to fill that emptiness and satisfy that desire. In Mark Sundeen’s book, The Man Who Quit Money, the cover title has as its subtext, In 2000, Suelo gave away his life savings. And began to live. I talked about this book and Suelo before, and, like the flight surgeon, his is an extreme case of becoming real, but it haunts us all. The telltale signs that our life is unreal are all about us: we don’t understand or control our dreams, we often behave in ways we don’t want to, we often have thoughts we don’t want, and, when the shit hits the fan, we often don’t know what the hell to do or who the hell we are, sometimes at all. The falseness of our consciousness is also all about us: our common-sense level of thought – that is, our normal reality – does not solve the basic problems of why, what and how of our existence, and in that, of our “who” as well. But most pressingly, we know that our lives are not real because of our anxiousness, our need and desire to get away to something else that may help fill the need and the emptiness.
The religious – people like me, for instance – would tell you that the empty space is the longing for God. If one accepts a broad of interpretation of the word “god,” as I generally do, this works for everyone. Because, in the end, we all want to understand our true self, and in that, our true place in the universe. And that puts us in the lap of God.
So: bugs, heat, bad food, bad beds or no beds at all, smelly outhouses and, for the tenderfoot, a shocking and disappointing first look at real nature; all this because we are restless. All this because we want to be real. All, if you can stand it, worth it, if you know that you are looking, for if you seek, as we are told, you shall find. What you find will not be what you thought, if you do indeed find, for as St Augustine said, “if you understand it, it is not God.” That is true. But at the moment of finding, you will know it. And then you will lose it, or deny it altogether. And then you will want to go back. You might not know why, but you will want to go back, and, like the definition of God, you will never truly understand it, but there you’ll be, fighting bugs and so on, batshit crazy to everyone including yourself, except your real self, who started all this crazy stuff for you in the first place.
After years of going “up north” year round, I am still shocked at how bad the bugs can be in summer. As one disgruntled local put it, “Summer sucks anyways. Too many bugs.” Got that right.
But still I, and the others from the flatlands, go, the newby pilgrims drawn by pictures of the unquestionably beautiful scenery: towering cliffs over a calm blue fresh-water sea, or a raging, white capped fury; miles of clean sand interspersed by water-smoothed pebbles, ending against an endless forest of light green leaves and dark green needles; a rushing brook run through by quick brown trout; a towering white lighthouse pressed against a deep blue sky. Beautiful images all, and all better seen live than in pictures. These sights are no posed tourist gimmicks. They are all real – but so are the bugs.
Good God, nothing is more real than the bugs. My son and I were on our last few miles of trail along the Superior coast this weekend as the heat soared and the tourists in clean shorts and bright sneakers or boots thickened. The grown-ups mostly smiled as they passed, although often with knowing irony, but the kids were not up to social games. They wanted back in the camper or tent, or better yet, back in a clean, air-conditioned hotel. It was hot and the water in Lake Superior was still icy, but that was nuthin’ compared to the bugs. The kids did not pretend complacency or world-weary toughness, but instead grimaced and stamped and swatted the hoard of stinging sand flies from off their sweating legs and backs and necks and everything.
Some had it even worse: their parents had gone through the trouble and expense of getting them on camping forays with other fortunate children, all shepherded by too-cheery adults with walking sticks and safari hats. Looks from these children were from the miasmal depths of soul-eaten woe. There was no way out for them, not for the whole weekend. From their vantage, the best part of it would be the heat and sweat and stinky outhouses or “doody cans” and hard ground and bad burnt food forever. But the bugs - oh, come on now! Those camp leaders with their pasted-on looks of game adventure, are you kidding? If I could have read their minds, I know that I would have heard one phrase humming over the little campers louder than the shrill whine of mosquitos and the dart-like zip of the stinging flies: “This sucks.”
As indeed it did, and it all gets me to wonder why the hell guys like me go up there when we know it will suck. Those poor kids or water-cooler grown-ups who only have seen the pictures are innocents, but I know; I am of the cognoscenti who know to rush from the jeep to the door of the cabin on arrival before having even tested the outdoor air. I am of those who marvel at my good luck for having made it into the stale smell of log walls with only a few minor bites; of those who then think, “Well, maybe it won’t be so bad,” when we know damn well that we will have hides as thick and hideous as a rhino’s before the end of the all-too-long weekend. And still we go.
I understand the Madison Avenue aspects of it, of how we are supposed to enjoy it as we snap on our North Face wind breakers and lace up our Bean boots while we pitch our Cabela’s tent. But no, the stupidity only goes one way, and that is towards the willingness to suffer while our air conditioners whir back at home. As my father always said, “I worked hard to have a comfortable bed. Why would I choose to sleep on the ground?” He was a smarter man than I, in that and so many other ways. But still, I think I have him on this one, even as it seems I have no defense; I have him on this one because, and only because, my reasoning defies all reasoning. In point considered, if not fact, I have him because of what happens to that reasoning when you knowingly go into such environments with all its discomfort, of something that (can but not always) happens to our inner workings that, trite as it sounds, no amount of normal work can provide. And it isn’t just a rhino hide.
I am not talking of the John Wayne syndrome, where rugged nature makes a tough and self-reliant man (and tough and doting woman) of you, although it surely can do that. I am not even talking of the beauty you may eek from between broken clouds of mosquitoes, although that happens too. Instead, I am talking of the very point of this and most of the other blogs and essays and even pictures on this website: that there is something else within us and without us that, for many, can only be found in raw simplicity, bugs – maybe even especially bugs - and all. For me, I call it the spark or the spirit, but I might generalize it with the popular phrase, “getting real.”
Since most of us feel this need to “get real,” it shows us that most of us aren’t real in our daily lives. And this rarely depends on what we do for a living.
I am currently reading an excellent modern war book by Jon Kerstetter, Crossings. Jon is an Oneida Indian who grew up dirt poor (born 1950) on the reservation in Wisconsin, and in a hovel near a reservation in Utah. Through many struggles, he was finally able to attend a medical school in Minnesota and get his MD. He worked in the ER section of the hospital, where trauma is standard, but it wasn’t enough. He then signed up for the Army Reserve to become a flight surgeon. He served three terms in wartime Iraq. He cried over loneliness for his wife and four kids; he cried over the deaths of those he knew; he felt awed and chilled by the silence that death often imparts to those in witness; he felt disgust at the mounds of rotting bodies left by insurgents; but still, he tells us with shocking honesty that he loved it, needed it.
What “it” is he has yet to fully explain – maybe his explanation will come in the last third of the book I have yet to read – but I do believe we all know what it is. Not all of us need that big a change and that big a challenge, but all of us feel the need, at least now and then, to “get real.” And all of us would like to be real for our whole lives, if we could.
To try to be real is to know that we are not normally real. How do we know this, and what is it? For me, it is a feeling of emptiness and unnamed desire and an anxiousness to fill that emptiness and satisfy that desire. In Mark Sundeen’s book, The Man Who Quit Money, the cover title has as its subtext, In 2000, Suelo gave away his life savings. And began to live. I talked about this book and Suelo before, and, like the flight surgeon, his is an extreme case of becoming real, but it haunts us all. The telltale signs that our life is unreal are all about us: we don’t understand or control our dreams, we often behave in ways we don’t want to, we often have thoughts we don’t want, and, when the shit hits the fan, we often don’t know what the hell to do or who the hell we are, sometimes at all. The falseness of our consciousness is also all about us: our common-sense level of thought – that is, our normal reality – does not solve the basic problems of why, what and how of our existence, and in that, of our “who” as well. But most pressingly, we know that our lives are not real because of our anxiousness, our need and desire to get away to something else that may help fill the need and the emptiness.
The religious – people like me, for instance – would tell you that the empty space is the longing for God. If one accepts a broad of interpretation of the word “god,” as I generally do, this works for everyone. Because, in the end, we all want to understand our true self, and in that, our true place in the universe. And that puts us in the lap of God.
So: bugs, heat, bad food, bad beds or no beds at all, smelly outhouses and, for the tenderfoot, a shocking and disappointing first look at real nature; all this because we are restless. All this because we want to be real. All, if you can stand it, worth it, if you know that you are looking, for if you seek, as we are told, you shall find. What you find will not be what you thought, if you do indeed find, for as St Augustine said, “if you understand it, it is not God.” That is true. But at the moment of finding, you will know it. And then you will lose it, or deny it altogether. And then you will want to go back. You might not know why, but you will want to go back, and, like the definition of God, you will never truly understand it, but there you’ll be, fighting bugs and so on, batshit crazy to everyone including yourself, except your real self, who started all this crazy stuff for you in the first place.
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