Last week, I spent days clicking through digital archives of personal outdoor photographs, mining ideas and brainstorming material for magazine cover possibilities. The photos spilled over my eyes like a torrential downpour – a violent, immense waterfall. Astounding enough was the seemingly endless quantity of photos emerging from dated and sorted computer files. Yet, more bewildering still was the shifting quality, the altered focus, and the changed nature of these photos over the breadth of time. The strange scope of these pictures ran from landmarks and landscapes to the singular oddities of nature and spotted animals to the social function of the outdoors and congratulatory self-portraits.
It is no earth-shattering revelation, but these reflections of my past connections with nature and outdoor adventuring set my mind to pondering the ways that time spent in the outdoors can mean entirely different things to different people. Nature may even operate wholly differently for the same person in different phases of his or her life. Often time may shift perspective, priorities, and perceptions; in my own experience, this has certainly been the case.
For instance, a trip to a mountain meant to me, when I was a younger man, little more than a kind of personal physical challenge. The crags and cliffs ominously holding up a vibrant blue sky thundered only double-dog dares. The curious rivers slipping sweetly over large boulders mocked my honor as an adventurer, promising swift and certain adrenalin born excitement. A trail tripping along tiny mountain flowers appeared to me as a taunting trial, mocking my manhood. Intense and emboldened, I would tackle a trail like a hawk falling upon its prey, beating the soil with my boots hard and fast. I furiously plowed forward, my head down – my heart beating wild and furious. These worlds were mine for the conquering.
The photos I snapped during these intense days of mountain mastery are largely triumphant and blurry drops from steep cliffs or shirtless self-portrait brags. Landscape pictures during this period are rushed and messy, clicked from the camera on the run as a second thought. Nature was then a race, a competition, a checklist and a trophy. Hardcore, week-long backpacking trips and devil-may-care sleeping-on-the-ground camping accompanied this stage of my relationship with nature. One summer, I resolutely trekked every marked trail in the Snowy Mountains, checking them off a tidy little list like groceries in a supermarket cart. The mountains operated like some beautiful open air gymnasium, a place for exercise, work and domination. The view I solemnly took in during these excursions was largely the hard dirt, the rocks on the trail, and the pounding placement of hiking boots. When hiking at high velocities, hell bent on speed, one must watch one’s feet to avoid trips and crashes. The view is, in this scenario, entirely secondary and absolutely unimportant.
At some point, my deluge of outdoor photos makes a sudden shift away from the foot-on-nature’s-throat conquistador perspective to more of a social network angle for nature and outdoor adventuring. Suddenly the focus of my images turns from individual mastery of nature to intermingling of people with nature as background. In the forefront are now photos of friends around laughing and telling stories around fires, individuals sporting strange and colorful hats or sunglasses, groups of people scrambling up hillsides or making silly poses in front of waterfalls, sunspot photos of folks jogging past aspen, and relationships forming and developing in images over the course of activities in the context of the great outdoors.
My focal point for the outdoors was for a number of years just another vehicle for finding connections with people who were into nature, not exactly personally connecting with nature per-say. During the course of these years, I met so many individuals with unique and specific personal triggers regarding outdoor recreation and adventuring. The adrenaline junkies were drawn to the mountain bike trails, the climbing, the cliff jumping, the snowboarding, white water rafting and the trail running. The exercise junkies competed in long backpacking trips, swimming in mountain lakes, road biking over mountains, kayaking quick rivers and running marathons in high altitudes. Many folks loved the hunting and the fishing, driven by both the physical competition and mental execution of the hunt. Yet, even more odd obsessions drove individuals into nature like rock collecting, mushrooming, birding, picking wild berries, animal watching and much, much more. In most cases, it is hard to tell if these activities of interest drive people (sometimes against their will) into the wild, or if a love of the wild eventually drives people to these activities of interest.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter, but for me it has clearly been the latter as I grow older. Busy by nature and driven to be productive, I often feel as though I need a kind of excuse to wonder in the wilderness, to enjoy the mountain air, to just be in a place unpeopled. A weight of guilt falls on me too often for moments spent in quiet joy on the Laramie Plains or high on a mountain peak. I hope that I’m moving past these worries and learning to enjoy the simple presence of Wyoming’s natural beauty. I strive to stand ever in awe of the mountains that stand like patient priests ministering to me the glories of life.
It is true that nature and outdoor adventuring means different things to different people. It is also true that these perspectives shift and alter over the course of the struggles and triumphs of life. These days, I quietly meander. My photographs taken most recently present themselves patient, bright, and deliberately composed (if quite amateurish and predictable), and often, probably, appear pointless and mundane to any other viewer. There is meaning enough there for me. I stumble, flat-footed and slow, over the same dirt I once wanted to conquer or co-mingle dependent on others. It is enough now to simply be there, listening and breathing deep life. This dirt, these trees, the air, the breeze now quietly, sweetly conquers me.
