Sauntering Solo
Or what dwarf mistletoe has to do with hiking alone.
Standard mountaineering technique for remote summits dictates parties of climbers aided by porters and supported by a range of technical gear, from harnesses and pitons to tents and camp kitchens. It’s a high-altitude buddy system, with hot meals and a dry place to sleep out of the worst of the wind. Muir might have gone that route as he explored the Sierra Nevada, but didn’t. He had no choice, he wrote in his 1876 memoir:
Because no one would go with me, I went alone.
Muir was being disingenuous. Even if solitude ran against received wisdom, he relished aloneness.
Muir’s first all-on-his-own excursion into the wild came after he dropped out of the University of Wisconsin to see the wider world and crossed into Canada. Starting at the point where Great Lakes Superior, Huron, and Michigan flow together, he headed into what is now Ontario, botanizing southward, traveling light, sleeping rough without blankets, and sustaining himself on bread bought from settlers’ kitchens. Thus rested and fueled, he was:
able to wander many a long, wild mile, free as the winds in the glorious forests and bogs, gathering plants and feeding on God’s abounding, inexhaustible spiritual beauty bread.
Only once did fear overtake him, when wolves howling into the night sent shivers up and down his spine. Feeling all too alone, he “got up in haste to replenish the fire.” The rest of the time, solitude sat just fine with Muir.
He did his thousand-mile walk to the Gulf alone as well, seeking companionship only when he was looking for a solid meal, clean sheets, and a hot bath. And he continued this mode of wild walking — sauntering in his parlance — after he reached California and Yosemite and set out to explore the High Sierra. He was, as he wrote, “sauntering free and alone in a continual state of overenjoyment.”
Had Muir walked the wild side with companions, much of his energy would have been drawn into conversations and interactions with those friends. Attending deeply to wild place required him to go it alone, to focus outward on the world and inward on its effect on his soul.
My own experience has been much the same. As a child, I slipped away from my chaotic, sometimes-dangerous family to follow faint paths in a large woodlot 20 bicycling minutes away. In that Midwestern, mixed-hardwood forest, bobwhite quail, cottontails, and occasional possums and raccoons revealed themselves to my solitary self. I watched, too, as the seasons changed the plant world, from mayapples fruiting in the spring and blackberries sweetening in summer to autumn reddening the oaks and winter sending the woods into deep sleep. Had I gone with a kid pal, the chatter and noise would have scared the critters off and pushed the flora too deep into the background to be noticed. Quiet changed everything.
These days, I often hit the woods with one or both of two hiking pals, both marvelously good men well experienced in the wild. Yet when we walk together, we attend more to our conversation than to woods and hills. Humans are social animals, and the three of us are, as our DNA dictates, being social.
When I go into the wild alone, my social being is put on hold and something else kicks in. In solitude I attend to what surrounds me and takes me in. My focus goes to identifying the birds I hear and see, checking whether that rustling in the brush is rabbit or rattlesnake, wondering why this year there are fewer turkey toms than last. I become one creature among other creatures and pay attention to my wild neighbors. Then unexpected things happen.
On a recent morning I took off alone, hitting the trail just before sunrise to enjoy the cool before the midday furnace. The route was familiar, one I have done many times before. Yet as I followed a well-known section of trail, something new caught my eye. Along the south-facing slope of a deep stream canyon, dozens of gray pines displayed infestations of dwarf mistletoe.
This isn’t the traditional mistletoe that decorates the winter holidays. In this stretch of Northern California’s Diablo Range, that well-known species occurs mostly on oak trees. It grows on its host and taps into it for water and some nutrients, but oak mistletoe does contain chlorophyll so it photosynthesizes much of its own food. In the technical vocabulary of botany, oak mistletoe is a hemiparasite, a part-time freeloader unlikely to prove fatal to its host.
Dwarf mistletoe is something else altogether. It infests conifers, primarily gray and Coulter pines in these parts. It grows differently from oak mistletoe — mostly under the host’s bark and within its tissues like the invader it is — and little resembles its traditional cousin: orangish in color, with short, bristling, leafless branches that remind me of the murderous, zombie-making fungus in the HBO series The Last of Us. Like the fungal villain in that post-apocalyptic thriller, dwarf mistletoe is a full-time, cholorophyll-free parasite, one that sucks everything its own life requires from the host tree, depleting and weakening it. If the infestation circles a limb or the main trunk, it effectively girdles and kills. Parasite becomes predator.
To the undoubted relief of the local pines, dwarf mistletoe isn’t common. Yet here I had passed by a growing infestation many times before and failed to see it. This time, in solitude, I paid deeper attention. And I noticed.
Entering and embracing solitude turns us humans into wild things, and that transformation offers up unexpected realities about ourselves as well as our natural neighborhood. Mystics of all persuasions, from the Catholics Francis of Assisi and Thomas Merton to Hindu holy men and Buddhist monks, seek out mountain, forest, and desert for contemplation. Following their path, I have gone there, too, seeking wild revelation.
Next up I’ll be laying out such an experience, one that happened way back when yet vibrates still in my being.
Two weeks from today, Healdsburg
On Thursday, Sept. 25, 7 p.m., I'll be in conversation with poet Denise Low (Lenape/Munsee) about John Muir and Native resilience as part of her Indigenous Voices series at THE 222, 222 Healdsburg Ave, Healdsburg, Calif. For more information about the event and to fetch tickets, go here.