Out for an afternoon transformational

Guest Commentary:

I don’t know when I began to feel nervous, whether at the first gust of wind or crack of lightning. Or boom of thunder. Maybe when the afternoon turned dark. I don’t even remember which came first.

I do remember hurtling down that trail. And hardly voluntarily. I flew, hoping I would make the next switchback in that stand of mature timber, of dense, falling, crashing trunks a foot or more thick.

Somehow, it seemed the very fury of a wildland scorned.

Those regal killers. I couldn’t see the trees for the force — survival — driving me down that hill, what with the gale, rain, gloom, thunder, and flashes. The air up there was so violent, so dark, I couldn’t trust my vision. I’d hear them topple to the ground, sometimes seconds between, sometimes their shattering simultaneous, the toys of a drunken deity playing dominoes. Whether onto the tread or into this solo hiker, I couldn’t tell as the crackling of boles vied with the whoosh of the wind.

And all reason was out the window.

Wildness, supposedly, helps keep the world alive. But in wild storms was not necessarily the preservation of the individual.

What hit me so hard was how I careened out of that Needles Roadless Area in central Idaho. So knee-jerk, so instinctive. I might have met head-on one of those falling giants, its plummeting top invisible up there in the canopy. Ditto had I halted. Slammed if I do, slammed if I don’t. Somehow, mind was the lesser as body chose between the equal of two evils: I just ran, like a wound-up toy.

Twenty-two years later, the lightning has struck me. 

The concussion rings with a contrast: of the beautiful side of wild with the fearsome. And it reverberates. With more contrast. Not just in the obvious ways — safety versus jeopardy, risk with reward, take your bad with your good, and so on — but in deeper. 

It’s penetrated the wilderness that is part of my quintessence. That inner landscape has certainly been shaped by storms of emotion as well as spells of serenity. And what that tempest did, I realize, is unravel a more crucial part of that essence: that there is such a thing as peace and sanctuary.

For all I know I could’ve been born into some world where any contentment is inconceivable. Unthinkable. But here there can be, for example, goodwill as opposed to animosity. Quenchedness against thirst. A cathedral of (motionless) old-growth cedars dwarfing their litter, duff and humus versus a slum full of littered hummus cartons.

I may not always have the good things, but I know they’re there and worth running for. And that my mind is capable of choosing to, usually. The world I know is not, for the most part, a place of constant agitation or peril.

I reached the wet, windy gravel road, relieved to at least be off that narrow footpath. Such an eerie, charged atmosphere. I scurried back to the guard station, unnerved, unscathed, and in the dark about what an electrical transformer I had just passed through.

What hits me so hard is how I saunter into this novel boundless area in central essence, not a spooked saddle horse but at the mind’s rule, feeling much more confident I’ll get there. And if something hits me en route, I’ll make what good I can of it.

I guess it took one long, lingering flash of lightning to make me see the light.

Well I’ll be slammed.

— Ray Stout of Libby contributed this installment of Voices in the Wilderness