jocelyn catterson

D Not On Any Map E

Jack Turner On Our Lost Intimacy With The Natural World
Leath Tonino
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The Sun August 2014

few months after I met writer Jack Turner in Jackson

Hole, Wyoming, to talk with him about wildness, wilderness, solitude, and the roots of Western civilizations
environmentally destructive tendencies, he sent me an e-mail
with the subject line Griz. Attached were two photos: The
first showed a pair of bears beside a picnic table half buried
in snow. The second was taken through a smudged window, on
the other side of which one bear stood on its hind legs, its nose
all but pressed to the glass. Grizzlies at the cabin, the e-mail
read. So Im not going anywhere for a few days.
This was hardly Turners first encounter with a wild bear.

Since 1978 he has lived at the foot of the Tetons, one of North
Americas most dramatic mountain ranges, usually in cabins without electricity or running water. A retired mountain
guide, he believes that to really love a place one must forge
an intimate, bodily relationship with it, and that to do so in
this day and age is an achievement. One cabin in which he
lived, a twelve-by-twenty-foot plywood shack located inside
Grand Teton National Park, could be reached during the winter months only by skiing or snowshoeing four miles from the
nearest plowed road. Temperatures sometimes dropped to 40
below. Weeks passed without a visit to town. He says the years
he spent there with his wife, Dana, and dog, Rio, were the best
of his life.
Raised in Washington, D.C., and Southern California,
Turner grew up in a family of outdoorsmen. His grandfather
was the co-owner of a hunting-and-fishing camp in northern
Pennsylvania, and his father hunted and fished year round.
Turner got an undergraduate degree in philosophy at the
University of Colorado and went on to study Chinese and
philosophy at Stanford and Cornell. Soon after, he accepted a
teaching position at the University of Illinois in Chicago, but
he was less comfortable in the halls of academia than he was
wandering the backcountry. Hed become obsessed with rock
climbing in the early 1960s, and by the middle of that decade
he was partnering with some of the best climbers in the U.S. on
difficult routes in Yosemite National Park and Colorado. He
loved climbing more than philosophy, so he quit being a professor. The mountains were calling, and he trusted their voice.
Now seventy-two years old, Turner has spent more time
outdoors in pursuit of wildness and wilderness than anybody
youre likely to meet. For forty-two years he worked for Exum
Mountain Guides, a company based in Wyoming, leading
clients up the 13,776-foot Grand Teton and neighboring peaks.
He has climbed the Grand Teton roughly four hundred times
and participated in more than forty treks and expeditions to
Pakistan, India, China, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, and Peru. In
his free time hes backpacked, canoed, fished, bird-watched,
and camped often alone and always without a GPS all
across North America. Friends of mine who live in Jackson Hole
tell me they occasionally run across Turner when theyre out
hiking. One saw him on the side of a steep ridge, meditating
on a flat rock among wildflowers. Another saw him crawling
around in the snow at his wifes feet with a magnifying glass,
talking excitedly.
Turner is the author of three books of nonfiction: Travels
in the Greater Yellowstone; The Abstract Wild; and Teewinot:
A Year in the Teton Range. In all three he weaves personal
anecdotes from the field with philosophical arguments, quotations from Chinese poets and Buddhist masters, and naturalhistory lessons. He is the recipient of a Whiting Foundation
Writers Award, and his work is currently taught in more than
fifty college environmental-studies programs. Hes been a visiting scholar at the University of Utah, but these days he turns
down most offers to lecture and teach, preferring to stay near
his home and its surroundings.
When I first contacted Turner about an interview, I had
August 2014 The Sun

a fantasy of skiing through fluffy powder to

Ive worked inside a forty-hour-a-week,
reach his cabin, then sitting all day by the
punch-the-time-clock type of job for only
woodstove, my socks drying as we talked. As
two and a half years total. The rest of the
it turned out, the Sunday afternoon in Febtime Ive been working outside or writing
ruary when we met was a busy one Turner
in my cabin.
had houseguests and hed arranged for us
Tonino: Your feeling of being caged
to conduct the interview at a friends law ofreminds me of the last line in Lew Welchs
fice in downtown Jackson Hole. We settled
Chicago Poem, written, I believe, while he
into a conference room with a glossy black
was working in advertising. He says of overtable, black leather swivel chairs, and flatdevelopment: Maybe / a small part of it will
screen monitors on the walls. For a mountain
die if Im not around / feeding it anymore.
man, Turner looked oddly at ease, which is
Turner: There was a massive shift in the
a testament to his adaptability. He moves
1950s and 1960s, a fierce reaction to modern
back and forth nimbly between subjects and
American life that had begun much earlier
worlds, from Zen poetry, to ocean acidificawith Thoreau. Many people of that time
tion, to iPads.
Lew Welch, Edward Abbey, Doug Peacock,
Tall and strong, with a bald head and a
Gary Snyder, the translator Red Pine, and
trim white beard, Turner has a commandjack turner
others bailed, as I did, from programs
ing presence. Frequently over the course of
in good schools or from distinguished caour three-hour conversation, he got fired up about a topic and
reers. A lot of these people, including myself, found their way
leaned in close, stabbing his finger against the table. Yet he
to Asia and got involved in Eastern religion and literature. I
also struck me as wise and kind. Hed brought a bag of clemtraveled there in 1974, and by then the hippie trail from Isentines with him, but we never paused to snack on them.
tanbul across the continent had been humming for ten years.
People with nothing more than a day pack would head off for
Tonino: When you were growing up in Washington, D.C.,
three, four, five years to wander the world. All of this had a
your father took you to visit the many museums in the city.
profound influence on American culture in ways we dont
I understand that the Freer Gallery of Asian Art was your
even understand yet.
favorite.
Tonino: What happened during your first trip to Asia?
Turner: Yes, it was. The entrance to the Freer Gallery was
Turner: My friend Allen Steck, an American climber,
flanked by two temple guardians, fierce creatures carved out
was one of the founders and owners of Mountain Travel, now
of whole tree trunks, with huge forearms and fists and fangs.
Mountain Travel Sobeck. I wrote to him saying I wanted to
Theyre probably ten or twelve feet tall, but I was seven years
go to the Karakoram mountain range [along the Pakistaniold, so to me it was as if they were thirty feet high. Im still
Chinese border] and visit K2, the worlds second-highest
impressed by them. I also loved the ink paintings of guys in
mountain, to take photographs. He wrote back saying he
little huts in the mountains playing the lute or practicing calcouldnt pay me anything, but he was leading a trip there in
ligraphy. My family lived in an apartment above a freeway at
the summer, and I could go as his assistant if I wanted to. I
the time, and I always thought those paintings of Taoist or
accepted.
Chan recluses sitting beside waterfalls depicted an ideal life.
It was to be a five-week trek to K2 with 125 porters and
When I was ten, our family moved to Southern California,
eighteen clients. We flew in on a militarytransport aircraft;
where I spent my teenage years. I became a surfer and a lifethere were no roads. Then Allen became ill and had to leave,
guard. I went hunting. As an eighteen-year-old I got into
which meant I was now leading the trek. It was a crash course
rock climbing. But the Freer Gallery is central to it all. I was
in Himalayan expeditions.
fundamentally affected by that early exposure to Asian art
When I got out a month later, a letter from Allen and a
and its love of nature. Later I studied Chinese poetry as an
pile of blank travelers checks were waiting for me. The letundergraduate, then Chinese linguistics at Cornell. These
ter said I could use the money to scout northern Pakistan
encounters at a young age can have profound effects. As the
and the Hindu Kush mountain range and try to put together
Buddhists say: What happens upstream floats downstream.
a few more treks. I went back north with my liaison officer
Tonino: You ended up teaching in Chicago, but you left
and another friend to explore the Hindu Kush. There were
after several years. What prompted that?
no banks, no telephones, no telegraphs, no doctors, no roads.
Turner: In the mid-1970s I was an assistant philosophy
I didnt get out until mid-September. It was one of the most
professor at the University of Illinois. I was about thirty years
wonderful periods of my life. After that, I told the philosophy
old. I was very unhappy. One day I went to the Lincoln Park
department at the University of Illinois to take me off the
Zoo to sneak some meat to the snow leopards, as I did on octenure track.
casion. It was a crappy day, cloudy and dim and snowing, and I
Tonino: Were there pivotal moments or experiences
thought to myself: Im as trapped as these wild cats. I decided
during those first expeditions that shaped your relationship
that I didnt want to live my life working indoors. Since then
with wilderness and the wild?
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Turner: I think that anybody who goes into a wild place

like that for the first time is simply stunned, not only by the
land but by the differences in lifestyle. The average per-capita
income in Baltistan [a region in northern Pakistan] at the
time of my first visit was seventy-three dollars a year. I quickly
learned that Western ways of classifying people according
to education and career are meaningless. There are brilliant
people who cant read. There are ways of living that dont have
anything to do with our way of living. People in the Hindu
Kush knew virtually nothing of the U.S., nothing of our
ways of life, and their own ways of life were thousands of
years old. And there was the marvelous unfamiliar wildlife,
too. I saw markhor and ibex and blue sheep and snow-leopard
tracks. You simply cannot imagine the wildness of the place,
the animals, the humans. Years later I led the first trek to the
north side of K2. There is no place on earth wilder than the
Karakoram.
Tonino: What exactly do you mean by wild?
Turner: I mean something that is self-willed, autonomous,
self-organized. Basically its the opposite of controlled.
You can see wildness in the movement of glaciers, or you
can track it in star-forming regions in the Orion Nebula. Wildness is everywhere. It starts with microscopic particles, and it
goes more than 13 billion light-years into the cosmos. Its in
the soil and in the air, its on our hands, its in our immune
systems, its in our lungs where there are two thousand
bacteria per square centimeter! In a certain respect, much of
what we consider us is in fact not us. We breathe, and wildness comes in. We dont control it.
Tonino: Youve called wildness an endangered experience.
What do you mean by that? If were steeped in wildness, is it
just a matter of perception?
Turner: It has to do with scale. On one scale youve got
the Orion Nebula, which is twenty-six light-years across
and two thousand times the mass of the sun. At the other
extreme is the scale of quantum physics and subatomic particles, zooplankton and proteins. The scale that Henry David
Thoreau and the American conservation movement focuses
on is that of voles and coral reefs and redwoods and whales.
Were particularly interested in wildness at that scale and
for good reason but that scale doesnt include all wildness.
And heres the problem: nowadays very few people directly
experience voles, coral reefs, redwoods, and whales. You can
live in San Francisco, ride a Google bus to work, stare at a
screen, come home, stare at a screen, repeat, repeat, repeat.
Ive asked my environmental-studies students how much
time each day, on average, they spend in contact with raw
wild nature. Thirty minutes, they say. And what are they
doing then? Walking between classes. Theyve told me they
look at a screen eight to twelve hours a day, on average. These
kids have not spent much time hiking in remote areas. They
dont have much personal experience with wild creatures.
They also dont have much experience with isolation. These
days parents can hardly get their children to participate in
an outdoor program, such as a backpacking trip, because it
will cut them off from Facebook for two weeks.

At Exum Mountain Guides Climbing School we forbid our

students to bring music into the Tetons. They hate not having
music. They dont want to be alone. They are hive creatures
now, far more so than generations past, fiercely attached to
their social network, which is a large part of their identity.
Im part of the amateur astronomy community here in
Jackson Hole. Our club has more and more trouble getting
young people to come out in the dark the cold, scary dark
and look at stars. They want to watch the night sky through
video cameras. They want to use computers to connect to a
telescope in Chile. They want to look at the stars on a screen.
But the immediate, raw experience of being out in the dark,
of being in the ocean with sharks, of seeing a bear, is far different from any simulation on a screen.
If you dont have contact with a wild place, a wild animal,
or a wild process and I mean experiential, bodily contact
then why would you ever vote for conservation and environmental measures? Thats a long-term problem for the
American conservation movement. Sure, there are still Sierra
Club trips and Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and families who
cherish the outdoors, but in terms of a general population
trend, it doesnt look good. In Japan they have a word for people
who wont leave their rooms: hikikomori. Its estimated that
there are up to a million such people in Japan! This doesnt
bode well for the natural world, let alone the quality of these
peoples lives. I fear there will come a day when people wont
understand the writing of Thoreau and John Muir. It will be
unintelligible to them. They just wont get it.
Tonino: Ive heard scientists speak of shifting baseline
syndrome. If all the glaciers melt, then the new normal is a
world without glaciers. In that case, when Muir writes about
glaciers in Alaska and his reverence for them itll seem
obscure and confusing.
Turner: Fishery biologists also use that term with respect
to salmon populations. Theres historical data tracking the decline of salmon populations down to nearly zero. Now, when
the salmon come back in response to conservation efforts,
people celebrate: We have X number of salmon now! Look how
incredibly successful we are! My God, the fishing is fantastic!
Well, fine, but the salmon-population numbers are a minute
fraction of what they were a hundred years ago, and that was
a fraction of what they were a hundred years before that.
The shifting baselines have to do with our expectations.
A famous mountain-climbing saying is: Expectation is the
mother of the fuckup. If you expect something, you may well
become blind to whats actually going on. Take the famous
gorilla-on-the-basketball-court experiment: Psychologists ask
a group of spectators to count the number of times the ball
is bounced by one team. These spectators are Type A people,
competitive and committed to doing a good, accurate job.
The game starts, and the spectators are counting the bounces.
Meanwhile, a guy in a gorilla costume comes onto the court,
strolls around, and leaves. After the game is over, the psychologists ask the spectators: How many bounces? And then
they ask: What about the gorilla? This experiment has been
repeated multiple times, and the spectators always have the
August 2014 The Sun

same response: What gorilla? What we expect, what were

focused on, our background, and our traditions all radically
affect our experience of what is normal. Right now most
humans are blind to climate change and species loss the
new normal.
Sometimes, people from New Jersey come to Jackson
Hole after making a lot of money in the stock market. They
say, Jeez, this is the most beautiful place in the world. Ill
explain that the Snake River hasnt had a natural flow in nearly
a hundred years because its been dammed, and that hurt the
insect population, and now we dont have any salmon flies
anymore. Locals used to describe them as blizzards blizzards of salmon flies. And the lack of salmon flies has in turn
impacted the size and health of the fish population, and thats
had a cascading effect on other animal populations. Its the
difference between a healthy place and a pretty place. But
these people just look at me and say, Im not going to complain. It sure beats Hoboken. Thats their baseline.
Tonino: Youve written: We believe we make contact
with the wild, but this is an illusion. In both the national
parks and wilderness areas, we accept a reduced category of
experience, a semblance of wild nature, a fake, and no one
complains.
Turner: Three years ago I gave a talk in Yosemite, and the
area around the visitor center was as crowded as anywhere
Ive ever been other than Calcutta. It was literally shoulderto-shoulder. People arrive at the park in cars, they wander
around in the areas theyve been funneled to, they look at
something without knowing what theyre seeing maybe
a ranger tries to explain it, maybe they read a description
then they get back in their cars and drive away. Most visitors
to Grand Teton National Park never leave their vehicles. Nature is a movie that goes by outside the car window. Theres
absolutely no intimacy with it. Intimacy always has to do
with the body. It has to do with what you see, what you hear,
what you smell, what you touch, what you taste. Its like sex:
you cant have it abstractly. And you certainly cant have intimacy with whats going by the window of a moving car. At
best what youve experienced is scenery through a window,
which is really not much different from looking at a screen.
You cant smell a bear through a television. You cant look a
moose in the eye and know its looking right back at you. You
certainly dont have to worry about a moose hurting you.
In my youth I did a lot of skin diving. One time I was
ten feet underwater by some undulating eelgrass, and suddenly it opened to reveal a five-foot shark against the sand.
That does something to your nervous system. Its the same
when you come across a bear in the wild. And you can have
these experiences with people, too. I once ran into a sadhu
[a Hindu holy man] way up in the Himalayas. It was sleeting
and snowing heavily. He had a long beard and wore nothing
but a loincloth. His eyes were huge! I said hello. He nodded.
I pointed to the camera on my chest, indicating that Id like
to take a photo of him. He politely asked me not to in perfect English. I replied by saying something incredibly stupid:
I asked him where hed learned English. He said, From my
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parents; whered you learn English? Wham! That guy was

something else. Whether its with sharks or bears or sadhus,
that type of wham experience shakes your foundations in a
way an iPad never will. It has to do with contact. As Thoreau
wrote in The Maine Woods: Contact! Contact! You cant get
contact from a screen.
Tonino: Can you talk about the difference between wildness and wilderness?
Turner: Wildness is a quality; wilderness is a place. I have
never been much interested in the great wilderness debate,
about what wilderness is and whether we have preserved it.
It is now divided into real wilderness and legislated wilderness areas. As for the latter, Im for anything that preserves
what remains of the natural world, and if the only way we
can do that is by formally declaring these areas wilderness,
then fine. Do it even if they are tiny, littered with old roads
and trails, lacking dominant predators, subject to fire control
and constant surveillance, and filled with people carrying
iPhones, iPads, and GPSs. What I am personally interested
in are places that are remote, quiet except for natural sounds,
and have natural wildlife populations and few people. I think
it will eventually come down to this: wilderness is a place you
can go where there are no other people.
Tonino: Youve also written of the measured idleness
requisite to intimacy with the natural world, and elsewhere
youve quoted the samurai adage: Only the weak are in a
hurry. Those are contentious words in a culture obsessed
with productivity and efficiency.
Turner: I think employee time cards and everything that
follows from them are among the most pernicious things that
have ever happened to the modern world. The techniques developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific
management, infected the very beginnings of wildlife biology
by stressing the importance of efficency and the collection
of data. An emphasis on these to the exclusion of everything
else always leads downhill.
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The
Washington Post have reported that Google has found its employees are more productive if they actually stop and meditate
once in a while. Its also been reported that productivity goes
down with open offices. People need some solitude, some privacy, some time to slow down. In our culture, thats anathema.
Were unnerved by the idleness of Thoreau and Muir, both of
whom were censured for not working all the time. Thoreaus
critique of American life went much deeper than our mumblings about late capitalism and consumer culture. He would
have felt much more at home with those Taoist hermits.
When I taught some courses for the University of Utah,
I would take my class out in the national park for eight hours
at a stretch. For those eight hours I asked the students to be
totally silent. It wasnt formal meditation; we just walked
for twenty-five minutes slowly inching along, doing what
Zen Buddhists call walking meditation and then we sat
for twenty-five minutes. Then we walked again. Then we sat
again. Finally, at the end, we wrote. Some students said it was
like an explosion on the page. About a third of them liked it,

a third thought it mildly interesting, and

a third hated it. Some of the latter said
it was as if ants were crawling all over
them.
Getting people to slow down, young
people in particular, is important to me.
Im not saying that anybody needs to formally meditate. A far less loaded word is
contemplate. Whats going on in your life
and your relationships? Think about it.
Reflect. Most people dont contemplate
anymore. They just go, go, go. Every one
of the luminaries from the American conservation movement Thoreau, Muir,
Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Margaret
and Olaus Murie, E.O. Wilson, and many
others spent a lot of time alone on the
seashore, or in a canoe on a lake, or in the
forest, or in the mountains, or digging
in the soil, and always in silence. I dont
think the conservation movement is going to get anywhere
if we have a citizenry that no longer wants to be alone and
experience silence.
Tonino: Should we encourage everyone to go out into
the wilderness? Wont they overrun and destroy it?
Turner: There is no need now to encourage most people.
There was when Muir started leading large groups of the public into the Sierra Nevada to acquaint them with the values
of wilderness. Now the values claimed for such areas are well
known. The problem is that the people who go there dont
care about the wildness; they care about the other human
values of our culture: money, gear, family, friends, having fun.
Most people who do go into the natural world are going for
recreation, not contemplation. They use their beloved stuff
skis, fishing rods, backpacks, rafts in the playground of
their choice. Many are in the wilderness business, servicing clients, often hordes of them, at thousands of dollars a
whack. These visitors do not have to confront the loneliness,
existential fear, silence, and indifference of the wild, nor do
they contemplate what these things mean for a human life.
Tonino: In an essay on Vietnam vet and grizzly expert
Doug Peacock you say that all seekers and wanderers require
a mixture of danger and love. What do you mean by that?
Turner: If you have no passion or desire for exploration,
then you probably wont take an unknown path. If you do,
your path will be treacherous, if only because it is unknown.
Thoreau was opposed to the State, but his ultimate enemy
was conformity to the known. The less conformity you have
in your life, the greater the likelihood that your path will be
dangerous. And I say: the more digital your life is, the more
you have conformed. Its safe to stay home and watch reruns
of Star Trek and fiddle with Facebook and track digital gossip, but its also shallow and lifeless.
Tonino: It strikes me that the best antidote to our aversion to nature might in fact be to spend more time in nature,
thereby realizing its not so bad. Its pretty simple, really.

Turner: Theres no obstacle blocking us from real contact with nature.

Students will sometimes say to me, I
want to have a wilderness experience,
but I dont have the money to go to Tibet.
What should I do? I tell them to get a
pair of cheap snowshoes and a plastic
sled and then drive up to the Tetons in
the middle of winter and head north
for eighty miles into Yellowstone, alone.
Youll have a wilderness experience real
fast that way. Sometimes people will ask
me how to become a hermit. Look, the
Escalante in Utah and many other places
in the desert have huge alcoves. Find a
side canyon that branches into more side
canyons. In many of them theres water
trickling along the bottom. Live in the
alcove. Drink the water. You dont need a
tent. Spend a week there. Nobodys going
to bother you. Nobodys going to even know youre there.
Its important to note that there are many levels of solitude. Thoreau was often not completely alone at Walden Pond.
His cabin is little more than an hours walk from Concord.
He wrote about the Irish workers living in shacks nearby. He
went home in the afternoon to have tea with his sisters and
to visit his mother. He walked the beaches of Cape Cod with
a friend and went to the Maine woods with Native American
guides. The amount of time that he spent in complete solitude
was minuscule compared to the isolation of the Taoist and
Chan and Tibetan hermits, and yet you can see how vital it
was to the development of his thinking.
When the British first visited the Rongbuk Monastery
on the north side of Everest in 1924, they found 450 monks
living there, plus hundreds of meditation caves, all of this at
over 16,000 feet in one of the most hostile environments in the
world. We dont have a hermetic tradition like that in America.
Its contrary to the Puritan spirit of work, work, work! Youre
supposed to spend your life working, not sitting in a cave. My
conservationist and environmentalist friends often take me
to task for advocating wilderness and hermetic experiences.
But what about saving the world, Jack? they say. You should
spend your time fighting climate change, saving the wolves
and the redwoods, tweeting, blogging, and doing all that you
can. I reply with a very simple statement: I think a hermit can
live a perfectly good and full human life. People recoil at that
response. The Puritan ethic and Taylors ideals of management
and efficiency are eating away at us. Solitude is seen as something to be feared, something thats not productive.
Tonino: Im reminded of a quote from Edward Abbey: It
is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important
to enjoy it. While you can. While its still here.
Turner: In the first chapter of Walden Thoreau says,
more or less: Dont be too good. If I repent of anything it is
very likely to be my good behavior. And Abbey says that the
problem with his environmentalist friends is that theyre all

f you dont have contact

with a wild place, a wild animal, or a wild process and
I mean experiential, bodily
contact then why would you
ever vote for conservation and
environmental measures?
Thats a long-term problem
for the American conservation movement.

August 2014 The Sun

mike cavaroc

obsessed with doing more in the fight for conservation. Too

often this comes at the loss of a week spent alone in the desert or a week gone fishing. The root experience is lost for
the sake of the branches, which will eventually die.
By and large, I think that environmental nonprofits are
not very productive or successful. They take peoples money,
fill out forms, go to meetings, write letters, and talk a lot.
There are a lot of problems with putting faith in them, as
well as orienting environmental and conservation education
toward them. At the University of Utah, there was a student
who wanted to spend her life defending wolves. I asked her
how much time shed spent with wolves. She told me shed
never seen a wolf. Thats a problem.
I do support environmental nonprofits that are doing
something concrete. I love Earth Justice because they sue
environmental offenders. I support Greenpeace. But I also
hope that the people working for those organizations dont
lose perspective. I hope that they spend some time in the
water with the whales and dolphins, that they get out in the
Yellowstone backcountry and backpack for a week now and
then, preferably in a horrible storm.
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Tonino: In your essay Wilderness and the Defense of

Nature you quote Lao Tzu: The world is sacred. / It cant be
improved. / If you tamper with it, youll ruin it. / If you treat
it like an object, youll lose it. How do you reconcile the active defense of nature with the need to leave it alone?
Turner: There are many ways to act as natures helpful partner. One option is to start very close, with yourself
and your own surroundings right here, right now with
your life and your community. I put out bird feeders around
my cabin in the winter, not because the birds need them but
because I need the birds. Every once in a while a chickadee
will fly into the screened-in breezeway and get trapped. I go
in and catch the bird as gently as I can. Then I go outside and
open my hands and let it go. Thats one end of the spectrum.
From there you can go all the way up to the most extreme
ideas about controlling the climate. For instance, Mark Lynas,
author of the book The God Species, now says global warming
has gone too far and that the only hope we have of preserving livable conditions on this planet is to actively manage the
atmosphere, the acidification of the ocean, and the nitrogen
cycle, and to group people into cities so they dont live on the

land anymore. Everybody living in cities? Nobody living on

the land? Its appalling.
I like to pick berries. I like to pick mushrooms. I like to
fish. I like to do these things as responsibly as I can, humbly,
modestly, the old Taoist way, seeking harmony as I understand
it, by not taking too much or exerting too much influence. Humans have interacted with nature for thousands of years, and
for an awful lot of that time we got along relatively well. Then,
incrementally, we developed more power and more control. In
my opinion some of the major environmental organizations
have gone way over the line. Theyre really pro management,
really into tampering with complicated cycles and systems. I
dont support that. I say, keep it local, keep it close. Can you
touch it? Can you smell it? Good. Youre doing OK.
I have a tremendous distrust of turning things over to
collections of experts bearing numbers. Look what they did to
the financial markets in 2008. Look what they did in the Iraq
War. Look what they did in Vietnam. We have a substantial
history of extremely bright, numbers-oriented, technologically savvy people making terrible mistakes. So why should
we trust them with the earth? I wouldnt trust them as far as
I can spit a brick.
Tonino: In your essay The Abstract Wild: A Rant you
quote an officer in Vietnam who explained the destruction
of a village by saying, We had to destroy it in order to save it.
Does this apply to the scientific management of the natural
world?
Turner: I think that both the wildlife biologists and the
conservation biologists in Yellowstone and Grand Teton and
elsewhere are well-intentioned human beings. Theyve spent
considerable time out in the natural world, and they really
do love it. But the ways they interact with the natural world
and what their jobs entail are often intrusive. Its one thing to
talk in the abstract about putting collars with radio-tracking
devices on wild animals, but in practice its ugly. They shoot
nets over mountain sheep from helicopters. The sheep become hysterical. They run into avalanche zones and sometimes fall and get buried. They develop an incredible fear of
helicopters and planes, so that when you try to monitor them,
they scatter and run into avalanche zones again. And these
sheep or wolves, or bears often arent trapped just once,
but many times. And, of course, theres a certain mortality
rate, too.
There are few animal species in Grand Teton National
Park that are not part of a management program. Everything
is studied, everything observed. Ravens are collared. Microchips are implanted in fish. The studies raise further questions that need to be answered. Now you need to put radio
collars on more animals. This kind of science feeds on itself
in a horrible loop. You end up with more and more biologists
collaring more and more critters. The numbers generate more
numbers. The intrusion grows. And who can deal with all
that information, anyway? It forces us to turn to computers
and create models that tell us what the world ought to be like.
Anyone who loves wild nature and wild animals should be
opposed to all this.

Tonino: Perhaps theres a feeling that if youre a nature

lover you have to jump onboard with this kind of scientific
management because there seems to be no viable alternative.
Its this or nothing.
Turner: The real problem is that the nature lovers who
want to get involved in ecology and biology and conservation
are trained in this tradition. Look at the courses in wildlife
biology at any university. What do the future managers of
nature study? They study computer monitoring. They study
the use of radio collars. They analyze data. If you say, No, I
want to be an old-school naturalist like Olaus Murie and go
out with my binoculars and my notebook and watch elk for
ten years, then everybody will assure you that youre not
going to get a job. The only way to get a job in the field is to
participate in the continued growth of this intrusion, and a
lot of these intruders are aware of this and some feel rather
badly about it.
The cowboys have a great saying: You can kick the spirit out
of a puppy, but its hard to kick it back in. We have all known
dogs who were terrified of doing something wrong and getting kicked. The same goes for kids. You can absolutely smash
a kids spirit. I dont want to kick the spirit out of the natural
world. Once we kick it out, we cant put it back in; we cant
fabricate spirit and autonomy after the fact. The elk population here on the National Elk Refuge has been called the most
heavily managed collection of animals in the world. Theyre
fed pellets. Theyre given shots for their health. Multimilliondollar mansions pen them in. And theyre still called wild?
From the moment we emerged as a species, weve influenced
the world; influence is not the problem. The question is a
matter of degree: where along that line do you interfere with
autonomy and self-organization? I believe that two human
beings can be relatively autonomous and still have a healthy
relationship. And I believe that this is the kind of relationship we need to have with the natural world: influence but
not control.
Tonino: Are there other cultures that have a more intimate connection with the wild?
Turner: Yes. Any hunter-gatherer culture will be more
intimate for the simple reason that they eat the wild. They
have to know nature intimately in order to survive. For instance, men in the trackless dunes of the Taklamakan Desert
of western China know where they are by smell. This intimacy
isnt a hobby reserved for summer trips to the mountains with
a flower handbook in hand.
An easy way to track our own cultures decline is the lost
vocabulary describing plants and animals. Ethnobotanist Gary
Nabham has documented this decline in the Native American Papago culture, generation by generation. Also, of course,
theres the decline in skills: the ability to hunt and fish, to find
tubers, to navigate using the sky and wind and foliage. Most
people dont know a single constellation and couldnt point
out Jupiter or Mars in the sky if their life depended on it. We
are now a digital culture far removed from nature. Even the
typical environmentalist or conservationist what are they
doing at 10:15 in the morning? Looking at a computer screen.
August 2014 The Sun

11

Many dont know a tuber from a doorknob.

Tonino: We live in a time of great loss: fragmentations,
destructions, extinctions. At the personal level, how do you
handle this loss?
Turner: No one I know of is naive enough to think that
were going to save the world. Regardless of what we do,
the world goes on. Politics and economics arent going to
amount to all that much in the end. But that doesnt mean
we should quit. I, for one, would like to go down fighting. Its
not Armageddon coming our way; its not the so-called end
of nature. That said, with a combination of radical climate
change, war, famine, and disease, billions of people might die,
and millions of species might be lost, but nobody nobody!
knows. Water shortages are already leading to water wars
and water refugees. Its hard to predict species loss, because
most of the research focuses on coral reefs, whales: flora and
fauna you can see and count. Nobody knows whats happening with the microorganisms at Jenny Lake in Grand Teton
National Park or in the sky a mile above Maui. And this is to
say nothing of the threats to some of our more refined pleasures, such as democracy.
How do I handle it? I keep it close. I help the chickadee
out of the breezeway. I give money to people fighting on the
scale that best suits them. And I try to keep informed. But I
have lost faith in the standard liberal/progressive/conservation/environmental paradigm. The revolution needs to go
deeper than that; it lies in the realm of myth, the religious
or spiritual (a word I dont like).
Tonino: In some of your writing youve said that anger
and outrage can be healthy.
Turner: I dont think theres anything wrong with anger.
In fact, Im suspicious of people who are never angry. If youve
never gotten angry, then either youve neither been crossed
or you dont have solid values. I just laugh at certain people I
know who call themselves pacifists in our oh-so-safe world.
What would you do if somebody went after your six-year-old
daughter? Youd chase them down with an eight-inch frying
pan and beat the shit out of them, thats what youd do. Pacifism and civil disobedience are nice if your opponent is also
nice. The Nazis werent nice.
Environmental issues can be abstract, but if you pull
them close enough, to the personal level, youll get angry. Its
a natural human emotion. I once drove to California to talk
about anger with my old Zen teacher, Robert Aitken. After
we talked for a couple of hours, he showed me a photo of
Yasutani Roshi, one of the first Buddhist teachers to come to
the U.S. Boy, did he have a fierce face the guy was scowling!
Aitken told me that Yasutani spent much of his life enraged
at the St Zen hierarchy in Japan because he thought they
had abandoned the roots of their own tradition. He was a
wise, enlightened man a good man and he was enraged.
Gandhi may have agreed with nonviolent action, but if you
think he wasnt pissed off, youre nuts. Martin Luther King Jr.
was angry, too, and for good reason. There is nothing wrong
with anger, but it must be focused toward productive action
against an appropriate object.
12

The Sun August 2014

Tonino: Youve commented that we live in an age of relativism and that most folks no longer believe in evil. Do you
believe in evil?
Turner: Yes, I do. But evil seems to require a kind of
scale: the Nazis, Stalin, Mao, the leaders of the Khmer Rouge
in Cambodia. Some of my Buddhist friends dont believe in
evil; and some think that compassion is always the best response, even to evil. I usually refer them to the great Tibetan
teacher Chgyam Trungpas idea of idiot compassion. Compassion is not a panacea; it requires judgment and wisdom.
All of the virtues require judgment. You can be kind or you
can be honest but not always at the same time. Sometimes
you ought to shut up instead of being honest, and other times
you ought to tell it like it is, even if its not kind and people
will be hurt. Which to do? This requires good judgment and
wisdom and they do not come easily or quickly. We need
people in our lives, both at a personal level and at a national
level, who have judgment, courage, and compassion. As the
Buddha said, greed, hatred, and ignorance rise endlessly yes,
even in you and me. Its not as though were going to save the
world, and then everything will be OK. Well never succeed,
but still we must try. Its a constant confrontation with the
present moment.
Tonino: Would you say a little about your religious life?
Turner: I describe myself as a student of Chan Buddhism and Taoism. I first started formal Zen meditation in
1966, but my practice was very inconsistent. I spent time in
monasteries in Ladakh and Nepal. Around 1984 writer and
poet Gary Snyder came to Jackson Hole to give a talk, and
I had dinner with him afterward. I asked him to suggest a
Zen teacher, and he recommended Robert Aitken in Hawaii.
I now study with his dharma heir [successor], Nelson Foster.
I am just a student. Ive been sitting though sometimes
erratically for more than five decades; Ive studied Taoism and some other traditions of Buddhism, particularly the
Tibetan Buddhist tradition of Dzogchen, which has a number of similarities to Zen. Im not much of an institutional
guy, but I do have a tremendous amount of respect for all
those traditions. I will always be just a student, and thats
fine with me.
America tends to convert everything into commodities,
so now we have a spiritual marketplace with Zen teachers who
make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year pushing what
I think is basically snake oil. Buyer beware! But I do believe
there are still true teachers. Theyre more like mountain guides,
actually: Ive done this route forty-seven times. If you want
to do the route, bad conditions and all, then I can probably
give you some helpful tips that might, just might, get you to
the top. The teacher-guide cant move your arm and plant
your foot for you, though. You have to pee for yourself; you
have to climb the mountain yourself. Reading and talking
dont count. The form of Chan-Zen-Dzogchen I study is not
really a matter of beliefs. I dont believe; I just try to practice.
And Im no better than that practice, which is in this present
moment. Youre either here or youre not, either in contact or
youre not.

Tonino: What about the connections between mountaineering and the

practice of meditation? Both seem to be,
above all else, a practice of attention.
Turner: Theres a Zen story that
speaks to this. An apprentice monk
comes along and asks the master: What
is the secret of the great matter? And the
master says: Attention. And the young
monk says: I understand that attention
is very important, but surely there must
be something more. And the master
says: Yes, attention. The young monk
goes berserk with frustration, insistent
that there must be more. And the master says: Yes there is. The apprentice asks, What is it? The
answer: Attention, attention, attention.
There are some researchers in the field of neurophysiology who think consciousness is actually just attention. All
sports involve attention at some level there are books on
meditation and golf, meditation and tennis. The incredible
thing about surfing or rock climbing or Zen practice, though,
is risk. Risk forces you to pay attention. Its so common in
America to want the reward without the risk: Can I buy it?
Can I hire a great guide? Soloing up Everest is one thing.
Getting dragged up Everest by three Sherpas who are carrying your oxygen tanks is something else. There is no reward
without risk. In Zen you risk everything.
Tonino: In one of your essays you ask: Do we want nature to be sacred? Can this be chosen? Should it be? Can you
talk about the complexities of calling nature sacred?
Turner: There was a time in which the sacred was fairly
circumscribed. There were sacred objects. There were sacred
places to which people made pilgrimages. And there were
more, far more, profane practices. Now the word has been
so overused that its not really distinctive. At a certain point
a word like that turns into mush. Most terms have meaning
because theyre contrastive. Wildness, wilderness, spiritual these words need to be contrasted with something.
Spread them too thin, and they offer no nourishment.
Tonino: This brings to mind another of your essays, in
which you call yourself a barbarian in the original Greek
sense of the word: one who has trouble with the language of
civilization.
Turner: Just yesterday I saw an advertisement for electronic devices that said Upgrade Your Self. What an idea!
Make Yourself Better. Be a Better You. And what do you
need for this instant transformation? Well, youre going to
have to buy a new pair of headphones and a few other gadgets.
The self-help movement in the U.S. is worth billions of dollars,
yet no one has any idea what the word self means. Its meaning
is contested by psychologists, therapists, neuroscientists, and
marketers. But that doesnt stop anybody from using it to sell
electronic devices or all-too-clever books. Some words are
overused, particularly in the worlds of advertising and entertainment, to the point where they erode and dissolve. Do you

really think that buying new headphones

will be an upgrade of your self?
Heres another: spiritual practice.
Pay two thousand dollars, and you can
spend a weekend at our little place outside New York City. Well teach you to
eat correctly and to be quiet, and, of
course, youll have to buy a robe, some
special bowls, and ebony chopsticks. Its
the American way. You think that has
anything to do with Zen practice? You
think that buying a Tibetan robe is going
to make you a Tibetan monk? Or hanging a thangka [Buddhist painting] in your
apartment? If so, youve been suckered.
And how about wilderness, that sticky word? Theres
been a big fight out in California about the Drakes Bay Oyster
Company. For nearly eighty years they have farmed oysters in
a bay thats inside of Point Reyes National Seashore. Now the
park wants to close down the Drakes Bay Oyster Company
and make the bay part of a wilderness area. There are houses
on a nearby hill. Commercial fishermen work throughout
the waters just off the coast. The bay is surrounded by dairy
farms that have been there for decades. The species of oyster
farmed there isnt indigenous to the U.S. to begin with, and
theyve fundamentally changed the ecology of the bay. And
you want to call it a wilderness area? I think the term wilderness is primarily political now: we have to label places a
certain way in order to save them. This is another example
of the erosion of language. We tend to use labels that benefit
our own political position or what we can sell this weekend.
Tonino: Youve written about the wilderness as a project
of the self. What do you mean by that?
Turner: Well, since I dont really know what the self is
anymore, I misspoke. I take it back!
Real wild places allow you to sit quietly with few distractions, away from advertising, entertainment, and the rest of
the modern mind-flood. I recommend going to a wild place
for a week or two without bringing along your music or your
iPad or even a book or a journal. I call this radical hermitry.
The minds ability to generate noise is astounding. It
gorges on information, thoughts, feelings. And if you deprive
it of them, it will generate its own. For people just beginning
to do retreats of any kind, the mind is in a state of turmoil for
a while. But if you stick with it, you quiet down, and something begins to settle.
On the treks I led it was always the same story: Wealthy
people who had given me thousands of dollars to guide them
on a thirty-day trip to Everest or Annapurna arrived in their
Brooks Brothers coats and ties yes, mostly men in those
days all very impressed with their jobs and their prestige
and their spouses and kids. Then we started walking, and for
two or three days their minds churned and churned. These
people who had flown to the other side of the planet to have
a new and different experience dragged their lives along
with them. Soon enough, though, they started getting blis-

think a hermit can live a

perfectly good and full
human life. People recoil at
that response. . . . Solitude is
seen as something to be feared,
something thats not productive.

August 2014 The Sun

13

ters and having bouts of diarrhea and

had to hike up steep, snowy slopes. They
got to know each other, and themselves.
They settled into the rhythm of the trip.
After a month these people would admit,
aghast, that they were no longer thinking
about their jobs, their spouses, their kids.
The main topics of conversation were
their bodies, hunger, and thirst, what
they had seen, the next mountain pass.
When we neared the end of the trek, all
of the old stuff started rushing back in.
These bearded guys who had been out
walking for five weeks and had forgotten about the real world returned to
their hotel in Kathmandu, and immediately they were back in the whir of it
all, the gerbil wheel: their phone, their
computer, columns from The Wall Street
Journal.
A retreat doesnt have to be formal.
It doesnt have to be Zen or in the most severe wilderness.
Isolation, solitude, and silence can all come together to allow
for contemplation of the here and now. Youre never going to
get rid of your thoughts; thats not the goal. But theres no
avoiding the pain in your knee. Its here. Its close.
Tonino: Im remembering your friends who say you should
be out saving redwoods and tweeting rather than meditating
in the woods. Why should we value a mind concerned with
knee pain over a mind focused on social and environmental
issues?
Turner: I dont know how to respond to a flat-out rejection: I have no interest in contemplation. Im not interested
in total isolation for seven days in the desert. I dont care. If
you dont care, you dont care. Its the same with people who
say, Im supposed to care about giraffes? Are you serious?
Giraffes? Then they laugh at you and return to punching
numbers into their computer and transferring money to Hong
Kong. Theres nothing to be done with them. They must first
experience doubt and glimpse a different need. You cant force
people away from their values and traditions, their mortgages
and alimony payments. As Zorba the Greek says: Wife, house,
kids, everything the full catastrophe. Some folks are in
the midst of the full catastrophe, and you tell them that they
need to spend some time alone in contemplation. What can
they do? They just look at you wide-eyed. These people are
nearly drowning; they are dog-paddling as hard as they can,
their lips sealed, the water creeping into their nostrils.
If youve never had a genuine wilderness experience, even
some small version of it, then why would you be drawn to
it? Thats why its so important for those of us who love wild
places and wild animals and what happens to our minds
when were in their presence to do our best to get people
out there and help bring them into the experience. There are
many paths.
Tonino: Youve written: Without big, wild wilderness, I

doubt most of us will ever see ourselves

as part and parcel of nature. Where
does that leave children, the elderly, the
disabled, and people who cant afford the
gas to reach the trailhead, let alone the
time off work? Can we practice seeing
ourselves as part and parcel of nature
in our everyday lives?
Turner: Expand your sense of wilderness. One of the easiest things is to
go outside at night and look at the stars.
Of course, if you live in the city you cant
see the stars. I feel sorry as hell for any
dog that lives in an apartment in a highrise in New York City, and I feel sorry
for the people who live there as well. But
wilderness is still available to them. They
can drive fifty miles out of the city and
look at the night sky, maybe get a pair
of binoculars and a star chart. Contemplate the fact that you are the debris of
those stars. Contemplate the fact that the atmosphere you
are looking through is a wilderness of trillions of beings.
It doesnt require the money to go to Tibet. Central Park
is pretty wild. Your backyard is wild. Go out there and dig,
or go back there with a microscope and look at the insects
that appear, tiny claws and mouths fighting each other and
eating each other alive the food chain in action. Thoreau
watched ants battling. They were right there on the ground.
He didnt have to go to Tibet.
At root, its a matter of choice. If you never take a moment to watch an ant, never go to Central Park, never put your
hands in the soil, never glance up at the night sky, never go
to the ocean and stare into the waves, if all you do is look at
your screen for eighteen hours a day, then youre not going
to get it. If your kid has gymnastic lessons, French lessons,
woodworking lessons, swimming lessons, debate lessons,
math lessons month after month, year after year, with never
a free moment, then your kid wont get it either. If all youve
done is study so you can get into law school and get married
and get your first mortgage, then you wont find the time for
wilderness, big or little.
I cant tell you how important family car-camping was for
many of the people I know who are lovers of and advocates
for the natural world. Those experiences mean a great deal
to kids. It doesnt have to be anything fancy. All you need is
a little intention. You can get kids out. You can get the elderly out. There are wheelchair-accessible fishing holes on
the Yellowstone River. Exum Mountain Guides, Im proud to
say, has a program for taking veterans climbing. Guys missing an arm, a leg, an arm and a leg, they summit the Grand
Teton.
There was a lovely essay by the poet Donald Hall a year or
so ago in The New Yorker in which he described the experience
of looking through his back window. He sat there and looked
outside, watching the birds and the snow. He contemplated.

hese bearded guys who

had been out walking
for five weeks and had forgotten about the real world
returned to their hotel in
Kathmandu, and immediately
they were back in the whir of
it all, the gerbil wheel: their
phone, their computer, columns from The Wall Street
Journal.

14

The Sun August 2014

mike cavaroc

He could have been watching reruns of I Love Lucy with the

blinds drawn, but he wasnt. Its not a matter of money. This
really can be done. Theres no logical barrier, and theres no
financial barrier. There are all kinds of ways to have contact
with the natural world. Its that people choose not to. They
watch reruns of I Love Lucy instead.
Tonino: Youve called the Tetons your home in the deepest sense of the word. How did this happen, and what does
your life look like now?
Turner: I first came here in the summer of 1960. I was
an eighteen-year-old kid working alongside two other boys
in an oil-exploration rig south of Pinedale. After a month
on the job we drove to the Tetons looking for girls and beer.
We drove around Jenny Lake and stopped at a spot where
we could put a nickel in binoculars and look at the Grand
Teton. There were climbers on some rocks by a waterfall,
receiving instruction from the Exum Mountain Guides
Climbing School. After signing up for a basic rock-climbing
class, we headed off in search of a place to camp where we
could shoot our guns. Later we drove east, way up into the
Gros Ventre Range, and found a spot called Crystal Creek. I
still fish Crystal Creek today, fifty-four years later. My wife
and I go up there and look through our telescope. It was my
dogs favorite place in the world before she died. Ive lived
here pretty much continuously for thirty-six years, but my

relationship with the region goes back to that summer of

1960.
Ive also made it a goal to learn the plants, the wildlife, the
seasons. Two ospreys, Olivia and Othello, nest near our cabin
each year. Sometime in late April they show up, and my wife
and I welcome them back. We watch the chicks hatch and grow.
During the winter months a fox visits me at our home nearly
every day. My wife and I call her Boots. We dont feed her,
but she checks us out anyway, jumping up on the table outside
my office window and studying me, as if to ask, Where is my
Belgian waffle with whipped cream? Weve had grizzly bears
with cubs at our back window. Weve had moose lips pressed
to the glass. Weve had Marty the pine marten [a close relative
of the weasel] and his wife, Martina, as neighbors. I think of
all these animals as our friends. Of course, the Feds are aware
that naming animals or calling them friends especially
the dangerous ones is too anthropomorphic for science. So
they number them: Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem Grizzly
#399. I dont think thats an improvement. My wife and I are
not naive, though: we carry bear spray every day to protect
ourselves.
One of my essays starts: My cabin is located next to a
stream that runs through a meadow, but it is not on any map.
Its not on a map because the places Ive lived and loved are
labeled with my own names. Where Rio chases her stick. Rios
August 2014 The Sun

15

favorite pool. Where Rio ran into the bear. Its a private mapping, a personal geography projected onto the land. It requires
a long time living in one place and studying its plants and
animals. If you follow them and their lives, you gain a deeper
sense of home. Those old hermits didnt need topographic
maps.
Researchers can tell you that Concord is six degrees
warmer than it was in Thoreaus time, because they have
his journals to refer to. They can tell you that on average the
plants now bloom anywhere from two to six weeks earlier
than in his day. They can tell you the number of wildflowers
that have disappeared. Only because of individuals notekeeping and tracking and immersion in place do we have
any sense of how nature is changing. The idea of being embedded in ones environment is paramount, and Thoreau is
our great exemplar. The old Chinese hermits wrote poems
and painted pictures of their places, always presenting their
embeddedness.
I cant focus on things that I am not intimately connected with, whether ideas or places. You cant send me to Chile
to write an article about rounding up cattle, or to France to
cover the next election. I have no interest in that. I just paint
pictures of places that I love, places that have meaning for me.
I write essays. I take walks with my wife. I greet the ospreys
and free the chickadees trapped in the breezeway. Thats my
life. Thats what I believe in.
Tonino: Of being caught alone in a storm on an open
alpine plateau, you write: I wait, ruminating on the impossibility of escape and the wisdom and freedom buried in the
impossibility of escape. Can you expand on this?
Turner: One of the things we do with our minds to get
away from the present moment is generate hopes, fears, and
predictions about the world, what might be called the nothere, not-now. But I dont believe in hope. Hope is a cosmic
joke. Look at what happened to President Obama and hope.
Life is too filled with contingency to waste time on hope; hope
places you in the future, not here. And predictions? We cant
even predict the weather two days from now.
The passage you quoted describes a big storm in the
Beartooth Mountains that I weathered with my beloved dog
Rio. We were above the timberline, totally exposed, nowhere
to run to, and the flashes of lightning spooked her. She whimpered and hid behind my leg. I held on to her by her collar and
the scruff of her neck. We were lashed by hail, wind, and rain.
I didnt know if the lightning was going to hit us. What do you
do in that situation? You cant turn off the storm or retreat or
control what will happen in a minute. You just grab the scruff
of your dogs neck and hold on. Just hold on. Theres a tremendous freedom in turning off the mind-flood and holding on
to your beloved dog. You can lament the torrent I have no
control or you can accept it: here it is, this is whats happening.
Tonino: Metaphorically this notion can be applied to
global social and ecological crises. Were all stuck in a storm,
bearing with it moment by moment.
Turner: Yes. Free the chickadee. Hold on to your dog. n
16

The Sun August 2014

Mountain
Lions
Jack Turner

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake

saw my first mountain lion when I was hunting rabbits at

the southeast edge of the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps
base in Southern California. I was sixteen years old. It was
dusk. I was walking through rocky chaparral with a Fox Sterlingworth across my shoulders, my elbows hooked over the
stock and barrel and my forearms hanging free a tired boy
not expecting anything special. My mind was on the arroyo
ahead. It was sandy and open, scattered with slabs of rock that
had spalled off a nearby cliff and were now fringed with thick
brush. I decided to walk along the edge and shoot cottontails
as they broke into the sandy flats below. Approaching the arroyo, I lowered the gun, slipped the safety, crouched slightly,
and walked to the edge.
I saw a tan streak, but I remember, too, the sand flying
behind its paws, how low it was to the ground, stretched, and
especially the long tail, so long that the tail was its essential
feature. Stunned, then elated, I ran after her through the chaparral, but she for I just knew it a she was gone.
Not until I was driving home did I realize Id felt no desire to shoot the lion, an unusual reaction since I shot almost
everything then, believing firmly that the world was here for
my amusement and that killing was fun. But the lion was different. I have heard wolves howl and seen grizzlies wander high
meadows and a tiger feed on a young water buffalo, but no wild
animal has captured my imagination like that first lion. I might
say she was a totem, but I believe it is simpler than that: I was