The Joy of Getting Away From It All

Part 1: Embracing the wilderness 

(And part 4 (of 10) of my August 2020 challenge)

Out in the wild, cut off from the world: a treat.

When you read Trip Advisor or Booking.com reviews, you probably notice lots of people complaining about bad wi-fi in their hotels. 

The place we stayed in the Carpathians, in Western Ukraine, didn’t even have wi-fi. I didn’t know that before I booked it. I didn’t even check, nor did I care. When we got there and I found out, I shrugged and said ‘good!’ Less temptation. I can say goodbye to the world for 8 days of peace and solitude. No social media. No keeping in touch with people. No news. No sport. Just fresh air, hiking, relaxing, reading, eating, drinking…

[Here’s the part where more socially-connected, millennial readers will say, ‘who needs wi-fi when you have a smart phone with 3, 4 or 5G?’ And I will respond ‘but I don’t have a smartphone!’ And then they will come back at me with ‘yeah, but doesn’t your wife have one?’ and I will retort with ‘sure, but that’s her business, keep her out of it, we’re talking about me here!’]

Other than my wife, my companion on this trip was Robert Macfarlane and his magisterial, evocative and elegiac foray into the wildest, remotest, most untouched-by-people parts of Britain and Ireland: The Wild Places.

I constantly marveled at his language:

‘On almost every front, we have begun turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world…in so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlessness. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialisation. The almost infinite connectivity of the technological world, for all the benefits that it has brought, has exacted a toll in the coin of contact.’ (italics mine)

When I talk to my teenage students about switching off from their phones – again, switching off from their phones, not merely switching off their phones (just to be clear, we mean taking a total and complete break from the things for more than 24 hours) – they give me incredulous looks and think ‘yeah, yeah old man, whatever!’ But that’s a bit harsh, for I heard some lovely stories from three of my 12-13 year olds who either voluntarily gave up their phones for an extended period or were forced to by parents, and actually enjoyed the process and found it beneficial. There is hope, after all.

But it’s not just switching off. It’s getting out into the world, and absorbing nature in its entirety:

‘We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world. We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world – its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habit – as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. A constant and formidably defining exchange occurs between the physical forms of the world around us, and the cast of our inner world of imagination. The feel of a hot dry wind on the face, the smell of distant rain carried as a scent stream in the air, the touch of a bird’s sharp foot on one’s outstretched palm: such encounters shape our beings and our imaginations in ways which are beyond analysis, but also beyond doubt. There is something uncomplicatedly true in the sensation of laying hands upon sun-warmed rock, or watching a dense mutating flock of birds, or seeing snow fall irrefutably upon one’s upturned palm.’

Somewhat incongruously, for as much as I love to get away from it all, I always love, upon my return from the wilderness, to dive back into the world as quickly as possible, and to catch up on all the news I might have missed. A helluva lot can happen in the world in 8 days, and I don’t like to be too far out of the loop. There must be a happy medium somewhere, where I can escape from most of the world, but be in touch just enough not to lose touch altogether. Perfectly logical, right?

I’ve mentioned before that one of my biggest fears is missing out on an obituary of someone famous enough to merit some attention for a day or two, but not famous enough for it to last longer than that. So, for example, if a former professional athlete, a musician, a non A or B-list actor, a minor writer or journalist I like, were to move on from this world and onto a different one on a Tuesday, and I return to the fold the following Monday, then I might miss it. Big stories, I’ll eventually pick up on: Has Biden picked his Vice President yet? Has the Champions League finished? (how weird is it to say that in August?) Is there a baseball season? Is there a vaccine yet? Has the stock market tanked? Have any of my Facebook friends de-friended me for ignoring them?

For some reason, call it a hunch, I don’t think Robert Macfarlane has similar fears at all. His book is the kind that has inspired many just to leave the house early one morning with a sleeping bag, a bivouac, and a handful of clothes and snacks, and set off in search of pristine forests, barely climbed mountains, undiscovered holloways and tors in meadows. And when I say ‘tor’, it’s got nothing to do with the internet. The Wild Places is full of geographic references that had me scrambling for a dictionary, except that I didn’t have one. Nor did I need one. The beauty of the language and the images he conveyed were enough to transport me to a world far away, similar enough to where I was in the West, but far enough to allow my wind to wander.

For my local friends and readers, especially those who are familiar with Yaremche, where we stayed, you may chuckle and snort and say ‘the wild? Yaremche? That’s nowhere near the wild!’ and you’d be right. But just wait – in a post coming very soon, I will share a story of a near-death experience in the very wild of Yaremche.

(from Wikipedia: ‘the word tor is an English word referring to "a bare rock mass surmounted and surrounded by blocks and boulders", deriving from the Old English torr.’)

In 1960, the writer and conservationist Wallace Stegner wrote something called ‘The Wilderness Letter’, intended as a plea to federal officials to preserve what remained of the American wilderness. Macfarlane read this letter, part of a collection of Stegner’s essays, before embarking on his journey, but I only read it afterwards, just today in fact. 

Macfarlane, quoting Stegner: 

‘…we need wild places because they remind us of a world beyond the human. Forest, plains, prairies, deserts, mountains: the experience of these landscapes can give people ‘a sense of bigness outside themselves that has now in some way been lost.’

‘’The remnants of the natural world’ were ‘being progressively eroded’…[and] if the wild places were all to be lost, we would never again ‘have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.’ We would be ‘committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment’.’

Stegner concludes:

‘We simply need wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.’

Wallace Stegner’s letter in full: The Wilderness Letter

My first trip to the Carpathians, in May 2013: 

Where time stands still, free from technology: a reflection on the Carpathians

Part 2: coming tomorrow.

You call that 'wild'?