In
his essay Nature, Transcendentalist
writer Ralph Waldo Emerson attempts to understand man’s relationship to the
natural world. Nature is divided into
eight chapters with titles like “Commodity,” “Idealism,” and “Spirit.” To me,
the most interesting chapter is “Beauty.” Here, I believe Emerson has put into
words the reason that I choose to spend my time, money, and energies outside.
There
are all kinds of recreational reasons to get outdoors: the thrill of skiing,
the exercise of trail running, the nourishment of harvesting fish and game.
Underneath these advantages, the real reason I go outside is simply to be in
nature—to exist in a different space. Like Emerson, I find just being there is
enough. I agree with him that “the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the
tree, the animal, give us a delight in
and of themselves”—that the value of the natural world is intrinsic (Emerson
21). When I run through the hills outside my house, I’m thankful for the
elevated heart rate, but I remember
the visceral experience. On a November morning, when the logging road climbs
above Lewisburg Saddle and into the Coast Range, I am swallowed whole. My route
becomes an ominous tunnel flanked with Douglas Fir: fog and drizzle above, pine
needles and mud below. I could burn the same calories on a treadmill; the
running is secondary. What invades my imagination is the shape of the trees as
they melt into the clouds and the roar of the wind through their branches. Some
might look at this loop of road as a profitable place to harvest timber. Others
might see it as a seven-mile track, only a training ground for longer runs. To
me, and Emerson, the forest has its own intrinsic value and needs no other
qualifying measure taken of its life-giving beauty.
Deciding
that “the primary forms” are enough on their own, Emerson accurately makes the
connections between nature and art. He writes that creating “art throws life upon
the mystery of humanity” and that “[a work of art] is the result or expression
of nature, in miniature” (26). In other words, a painting that illuminates the
human condition is a tiny window into the grandeur of nature. Emerson sees this
beauty reflected in the variety of forms that nature takes, such as the veins
of a fallen leaf or the contours of a mountain range. To go into nature, then,
is to walk into the painting.
I
try to get into that painting. In the Fryatt Valley in the Canadian Rockies,
there’s a campsite at the edge of an alluvial fan. This rocky place, eleven
miles from the nearest road, is otherworldly. The streams rise and fall daily
with the changes in glacier snowmelt: high in the sunny afternoon, low in the
frozen mornings. Mist moves over the nearby peaks. The trees cling to the
mountainsides at the edge of the gravel plain, interrupted only by avalanche
scars. Great white bolts of ice sear into the limestone cliffs thousands of
feet above my camp stove, where I am a tiny shape, attempting to heat the
snowmelt for my coffee. I go to these places just to exist, for a day or two,
inside the art. Emerson said that “[t]he eye is the best of artists”, in that
the eye makes sense of the infinite painting that we can exist in, if we choose
to look at the universe the right way (21).
If
we accept that art has the ability to be transcendent, to elevate us out of our
ordinary perceptions, then it stands to reason that nature, the wellspring of
art, can be transformative. “To the body and mind which have been cramped by
noxious work or company” Emerson wrote, “nature is medicinal” (22). Increasingly,
I need this medicine. Blinking under the fluorescent lights of my classroom,
staring at a computer screen, I feel portions of my soul wither and fade. The
emptiness of a shopping center terrifies me; the hollow diversion of the
internet disappoints me. “Cramped” by the trappings of modern life, I escape to
more remote locales.
Last
Thanksgiving, desperate to flee the slog of fall term, I drove south. Over the
Cascade Range, into bleak Nevada, over snowy California plains, and finally
down into a warm valley, my friends and I hurried to find someplace remote.
Upon arriving at Death Valley, we paused. There was a tremendous silence in
that desert. Clumps of mesquite collected at the edge of a broad white wash.
Eleven thousand feet of relief, from the summit of Telescope Peak to the floor
of the valley, was visible to the west. To the east, the Amargosa Range turned
pink as the sun went down. If this were a painting, there would be three
significant bands running parallel across the canvas: a blue star-flecked sky,
a bar of crumpled mountains, a white stripe of desert at the bottom. Ennobled
by the beauty, we wandered into the picture and became a piece of the art. The
air was warm and dry, redolent of mesquite. All of it—the quiet, the majesty,
the absence of distractions—had a way of gently mending the dead places in our
souls.
Because
art can be rejuvenating, because nature is the highest form of art, and because
our human eye when beholding nature is the best artist, I try to get outside. I
structure my life in a way that work, the business of making money so I can eat
and have shelter, becomes a placeholder for sojourns in the wild. My next trip
is to a familiar spot: Furnace Creek at Death Valley, between two enormous
mountain ranges, this coming winter break.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, and Robert D. Richardson. Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems. New York: Bantam, 1990. Print.
