An Excerpt from Mary Jane Wild: Two Walks & a Rant

•

I picked up my pack and started downstream. White alkaline powder and dry, cracking mud the thickness of eggshells covered the streambed, which hadn’t been wet for weeks.

The vegetation changed as I neared the mouth of another small wash coming in from my right. The water trickling out of it formed a small orange stream where it had worn away the top white layer of mud, creating the opportunity for willows and low, yellowing grasses. The small stream working its way around a fist-sized rock had formed a small pool. Although alkaline powder coated the entire surface, this was the first water I’d seen, so I stopped to fill my empty bottles. Even filtered, the water I’d pumped looked like used bath water. While I might drink it only to keep from dying of thirst, making dinner with it would be no problem.

The wash made a long turn to the east, and a few human footprints appeared, suggesting I may be re-entering ordinary reality. The hard-gray surface changed to rich brown mud the moment I noticed the sound of moving water. The significant stream was lined with willows and tamarisk, and small cottonwoods had sprouted in places. Dark-eyed juncos flitted about in the willows, their tails flashing white. I followed the trail, hopping rock to rock as it crossed the stream six times in half a mile. When the stream took a big swing to the east, I turned north without thinking—up a tiny side canyon. Had it been formed by the scouring of boulders and branches from one angry flood or over ten thousand years of relentless seasonal flows?

I climbed the first pour off easily, knowing I could get back down it if I met the feared “insurmountable obstacle.”  With no consideration, I’d changed my plan. I relaxed, knowing I had the rest of one day and part of the next to wander aimlessly if I wanted. I was confident that somewhere west of me I’d find a route I could follow back home when the time was right. 

Moving through the small canyon, walls merged and rose with the possibility of encountering a pour off I couldn’t climb. I struggled up a steep soft dune, at the top of which, hot and sweaty and with sore feet, I followed a perfect slickrock ridge for half-a-mile. I stopped in the shade of a large juniper tree, pulled my chair from my pack, and sat down. With nowhere to go and plenty of time to get there, I followed my thoughts as they wafted in and out of the washes I could see from my perch. 

I pulled out my Marías book (Infatuations) and a hard-boiled egg and fired up my stove to boil the water I’d pumped from that alkali stream. “Trump,” I thought.  “He never gets out like this.” Thinking back to the Spore and Trump’s problem activated my anger and anxiety. Getting the root of a problem only works if that’s the first step toward fixing it. Trump’s Spore infection is everything I loathe and distrust about America. Too many modern Americans see only what Trump wants them to see—that he has mastered the economic system, which landed him on their television screens—which for many, is the basis of why they trust him, and one of the reasons I don’t.

•

I’d inadvertently placed my pot off-center on the stove and it started to tilt. I grabbed for it but recoiled when I felt the heat. Helpless, I watched it fall, spilling its valuable contents, which were absorbed into the dry earth. With two quarts left, I wasn’t in trouble, but what a stupid mistake. For the Fourth Demon, the timing was perfect. Life is Beautiful, But . . .

I reached into my shirt pocket for a non-existent pen. For fun, I looked all around and felt the breeze and noted all I would have missed had I been writing. In a way, writing stops the world. I can’t be writing and being at the same time. Most of what I write about is being. The Fourth Demon could not have been suggesting that I not write. Or could she?  “Life is Beautiful AND look at all you’ve missed.” 

For me, writing is art and art is creation, is embodied imagination, an end in itself, not a means to an end. When I’ve finished writing, I feel good about it—something warm and liquid-like flows in my chest. I feel the same moving freely out in the wilds: being. The two feelings—being out in the wilds and having written something good and original—must be related, two essences between which my life vibrates. And both similar to how the sun feels on my back and my face. 

I sank deeper into my chair.  LISBB, The Fourth Demon, became more serious. “Life is Beautiful, but . . . what if your ‘One Story’ is wrong? 

Long ago, Bill Kittredge, a mentor and friend, told me that his goal as a teacher was to help his students find the ‘one story’ they will tell over and over again the rest of their lives. At first, that sounded quite boring to me. But years later, I realized that that’s exactly what I’d done. My one story is this:

We live in bodies that have not changed much since the Pleistocene. Many of our problems may be due to our living in a world vastly different from the one for which evolution designed us. This story has grown and changed, been added to and subtracted from. It has led me to believing that the length of the future is directly related to the length of the past we consider our own. If my past goes back 200,000 years to my early Pleistocene ancestors, then my future is also that long. This story gives me hope. 

What if my story is wrong? My mood plummeted. Having the wrong story, a false story, a bad story seemed as good an explanation for many of my questions as any. My story is antithetical to the American story, the most current version starring Trump. The millions of Americans who believe that story would disregard mine as false. What if they’re right? 

I struggled to my feet before the density and weight of my mood became too great to get out of my chair.  Rising even a few feet above my sitting position was enough to see that my mood had fouled the atmosphere right around my chair. Standing above it, the world brightened. My story may or may not be right. But their story—their story of unearned white male privilege and power—cannot be right as it goes against life, against biology and physics and harmony and against the meaning of life itself. 

That their story planted seeds of doubt in my story made me choke. My story was simply going through a rough patch. 

A quick check of my body found painful remnants of yesterday’s long miles over uneven terrain in my knees and thighs, but also my feet. My fitful sleep had left me tired. Based on the sun's position, I guessed it was midafternoon and that I had a few more hours of daylight. My water mishap made me consider heading home a day early, a thought at odds with how weary I felt. 

I put my pack back together, put it on, and walked west. Below me, the long reddish skirts flowing down from vertical cliffs, reoriented me. While moving along the canyon bottom was effortless, I wasn’t going in the right direction, if such a thing existed. The route I sensed would take me where I needed to go, meant climbing down into the wash below me, then crossing at least one more.  

The route into the next wash was without consequence except for a short friction section which tested my shoe rubber. The bottom showed signs of recent flow, so rather than climb directly out via an obvious route on the west side, I followed the canyon south, searching for water. Within minutes, I was walking in tiny capillaries trickling with water. The flow increased with the distance and I soon found where it had pooled deep enough to filter. I filled up three empty bottles. Moving again, I sensed my route was on the next layer above me. First, I needed to find a crack in the vertical side, an opening. 

Eons of weather and floods had formed the wash into a curving rock tube, narrow enough to touch both sides at once. The further into it I walked, the deeper the wash became. After ten minutes, I came to a forty-foot pour-over. I back-tracked to a curve in the wash, where flood-fueled boulders had crashed, breaking the wall’s smooth surface into cracks and sharp edges. I climbed them like rungs of a ladder. Reaching the rim, I faced a long nasty slog up steep red dirt. 

As I would in deep snow, I picked a reasonable angle and started moving toward the summit I could see above me. My progress was too slow so, on all fours, I climbed straight up. I found a rhythm with my crawling.  Exhausted, I could not stop. if I rested, I would slide back down in the loose dirt. 

I reached the top of the slope sweating like a pig. Part of the slope was stuck to my sweaty arms. I felt good, my heart pounding against the inside of my chest with perfect regularity. I reached for my throat and marveled as the pulse in my neck slowed.  I’d passed the age that my mother died after her second open-heart surgery. Two years younger than I, my brother had undergone two heart surgeries in the past few years. After telling my doctor about my diet and walking and weightlifting, she said, “keep doing it; it must be working.”  Intuitively, I felt that the fatigue I felt after crawling to the top of that slope had nothing to do with blocked coronary arteries but simple effort. How quickly I recovered was the key for me. And feeling generally tired made sense based on what I’d done and how poorly I’d slept. 

Looking out, I caught my breath—the trail, exactly where it was supposed to be. 

A boulder the size of a small house was perched a hundred feet off the trail, and I decided to escape the heat in its shadow. I set up my chair and fell into it. I took out my book and water bottle (the good water, not the stuff I’d pulled out of that whitened canyon) and my third egg, leaving one for the next day’s breakfast. Desperate, I reached into the bottom of my pack on the off chance I’d find a pen or even a pencil nubbin. Nothing but Coyote’s shit bag. That and a petrified orange peel. I sank deep into my chair and looked out. 

A raven flew over me and into a giant juniper fifty meters away. The joint cawing of a hundred pinion jays erupted the second the raven landed. The jays flew past me undulating in formation—a shape-shifting murmuration. The entire flock turned perpendicular to the sun,  flashing their brilliant blue bodies. 

I watched, aware of the winged movement in the distance in contrast to the stillness.  

Then, in the corner of my eye, color: blue, not sky blue, and red, not subdued red-rock red but bright red. A young woman in blue shorts and a red long-sleeved top bounding up the trail with such energy, trying to keep up with the invisible force carrying her.  Music I could not hear was surely playing in her ears and she was dancing to that music. I squinted and saw a mythical Indian runner carrying a message one hundred miles, overnight, difficult to track due to the great distance between her footprints.  If I’d been visiting from outer space to explore and take information back to my far-away planet, my one “sample” of life (besides birds and that lone moth) would be this young woman. I would assume Earth was a very happy place. She didn’t look my way, and I stayed still, in case my altered reality had not made me invisible. I did not want to attract her attention. Seeing an old guy wearing a weird hat sitting in a chair in the shade of a large boulder in the middle of nowhere would interrupt her bliss, something I did not want to do. I hoped that if she did see me that she wouldn’t be afraid, but then women are constantly afraid when they’re alone. I felt shame for my gender. The energy women waste worrying about their safety made me sick. How might that energy be better spent on creative approaches to the survival of our species? I wondered. The extinction of saber-toothed tigers largely freed men from this type of fear. 

This thought signaled TIP (“Trump is President”), the First Demon. Twenty-seven women had accused our new president of sexual assault. 

I could still hear the sound of her steps hitting the packed earth when the woman disappeared from my view. I thought about men I’ve known and whose work I respect, but who diminished and mistreated women, and/or were considered racist. The writers Ed Abbey and Jim Harrison come to mind, but there are many, most of them long gone. 

The times in which these men thrived allowed behaviors which are now unacceptable. I feel differently about them than I do about the misogynist, racist Trump just elected president. 

Must history ignore these men completely?  Can I open the package on these men and pull out what is essential to me now and ignore the rest? What would these men be thinking now? How would they be acting? I judge men in power is based on their evolution. Trump is part of a large boy’s club, men in power, stuck, refusing to change, lulled into floating through life on unearned privilege that has came free with their ‘Y’ Chromosome.  

While I thought about men, the earth turned and moved my shadow. The sun began burning the back of my neck. I moved my chair. 

•

Ed Abbey’s possible evolution came to mind. A few years back, we were in Vermont at the White River Junction Film Festival to see “Wrenched,” the film about Abbey and the Monkey Wrench Gang. Abbey talked about ‘night work’ the term he used to describe “sabotage” which he defined as “destroying property or dismantling machinery” to slow terrorism, which he defined as “acts of violence against life.” It hit me: the ‘machine’ is so much bigger, more expansive now, and difficult to define. And while the wilderness remains under constant threat, so is the entire planet. Had Abbey lived, I imagine that his idea of “Night work” would have evolved. 

For me ‘night work” is that personal introspection required to know the full extent to which we’re integrated with all life. Each of us has our unique piece of the machine to dismantle, and with ‘night work’ will discover what that piece is and how to deal with it.  

By doing our night work, we’ll know how the planet can make the best use of us.

The film ended. As Terry and I drove east toward the Connecticut River, I noticed a sign flashing a warning in the distance and remembered that the bridge was being repaired.  When we got close enough to read the sign, I laughed out loud. Yes, it flashed a warning, but not about the bridge. It was a warning from Ed, flashing in the darkness. 

I took that sign (hell, it was a sign) that Ed was out there letting me know that he was out there, that he knew more dead than he had known while alive, that he would have changed. 

•

More stillness, and then a pair of ravens tumbled horizontally right in front of me at high speed. They must be mating, I thought. Do they mate this time of year?  Why do we automatically assume that other organisms enjoying one another are ‘mating’?  They disappeared to my left into the rocks at the base of the cliff. Perhaps they don’t care what time of year it is. One of them, I’m assuming the male (I’m not sure why) swirled up into the sky in front of me as if something had been accomplished. He spiraled upward. He flapped his wings twice each cycle, and with each wing-flap he let out a deep chortle.  The raven made seven circles before flying east. Had I not lost my pens, I’d have been writing in my book and missed that moment. 

I dozed off until the shade moved again and the heat roused me.  I thought about moving. My next challenge would be deciding where to camp that night. From where I sat, I saw a flat spot in the distance, up off to the west . I was moments from getting up when I heard the pitter-patter of feet and saw the young woman running down the way she’d come. I stayed quiet, still, and invisible as she passed. 

•

I loaded my pack carefully, aware of the bag of Coyote shit in the bottom. I picked up my pack for the last time that day and dropped down to the trail. Where it turned right, I turned left, pulled by an invisible force into a small side canyon I’d have missed had I not been looking for a place to camp. I climbed over one low purplish slickrock dome and around another. Getting to the open flat spot I’d seen from my perch required close attention in just one spot—a tilted slickrock layer covered with small ball-bearing-like pebbles. Without one close call, I stepped onto the large open area where I would spend that night. It wasn’t as flat as it seemed from the distance, but I found one spot just big enough for my camp between sage, blackbrush, and small juniper. I sat down where I planned on sleeping to check the views. In one direction, I looked down into a deep sensuous gorge as it turned purple in the lowering light. In the other, the vast cliff-lined wilderness.  I’d spread out my stuff when I decided to spend the long dark hours until sleep around a small fire, something that hadn’t crossed my mind the night before. Small sticks littered the area, which I hunted and gathered while wandering in circles. Near the edge of the area I defined as mine, I caught rank odor when the breeze changed direction. Cat urine. Large cat urine. A mountain lion had just been seen in Castle Valley, on the street north of us. Walking Winslow the dog had become arduous, spending most of my time with him sniffing bushes to determine who had come into our territory and what that might mean for my safety (Winslow’s primary concern). Earlier, when I told Laura, our friend and neighbor, that I was going for a long walk, she asked if I was taking my mask, referring to the poet Gary Snyder’s suggestion that since big cats only attack from behind, wearing a mask on the back of one’s head is a good precaution. 

My trip took on a new dimension. My fire would supply both comfort and safety. I began living as if I was being watched. 

I carried my second armload of wood to camp and added it to my growing pile. If I kept my fire small enough the twigs I’d gathered would last the evening. I adjusted the position of my camp so that I could sit and sleep between my fire and a car-sized boulder. I used the last daylight to look for other signs that I might be sharing the neighborhood with a mountain lion. Just beyond the western edge of my territory, I found the perfectly straight line of fresh cat tracks. 

The cliffs above and beyond burned in the last sun. I settled into my chair with everything I needed within reach: to my right, my pile of twigs next to my stove and pan; to my left, the smooth hole I’d dug for my fire; in front of me my sleeping bag, positioned for me to pull it up around me when I got cold. On top of it, I’d placed my headlamp, book, hat, and gloves should they be needed. 

I watched from my perch at the bottom of a darkening sea, the cliffs above lit by an interior fire. Each night the shadows rise like a purple tide, extinguishing the red cliff-glow, which the next morning’s first light ignites from within. 

After shuffling through my memory of similar evenings, I stopped at a specific moment two years before: A piece of sky freed itself from the grey grip of overcast clouds creating an opening through which a horizontal beam of sun shot, exploding when it hit the cliffs across the valley. I’d been in the dumps most of that day, unable to pinpoint any cause beyond the thick and relentless grey clouds, without a hint of sunlight. I soared when that bright flash squeezed into the narrow gap between cloud and clifftop, setting off a glowing yellow swath on the gentle slopes beneath the eastern walls. I sighed audibly, just recalling it, and sucked in a long breath.  I realized how tied to these views, this light, I am. I’ll never get used to the late-day sun hitting those cliffs, enlightening buttes above the darkening valley. How many photos have I taken of the different shades of orange and red, the different cloud backdrops? Evenings in Castle Valley provide a nearly constant and infinite source of awe. Awe ignites something physical inside of me as if it’s a catalyst for a miraculous chemical reaction—a revelation.

•

I lit the stove to begin heating the alkaline water I’d found earlier in the day. The directions for preparing the “Cashew Curry” Tasty Bite says that the unopened foil envelope should be submerged in boiling water for five and a half minutes. I didn’t have a watch, but since I would be heating but not actually cooking it, longer was preferable. I have a great little stove, one I always travel with for cooking soup if I get stranded in a blizzard. I’ve never read the list of ingredients on the Tasty Bite package, afraid of what I might find.

•

The air temperature plummeted, and I pulled on my parka. While the water heated, I built a six-inch-high twig castle in my fire pit. I’d found an old sales receipt in my pocket, wadded it up, and pushed it through the twig castle’s front gate. I lit the edge of the paper, exploding it into a small ball of flame. By the time the water boiled on the stove, I had the most perfect fire ever built.  

The sound of boiling water rattling the lid against the pan and the escaping wisps of steam were barely audible as the desert silence flowed in around me, growing denser with time. 

The silence was thicker than my meal. I ate sacramentally. I fed the fire.

An Interview with the Author, Brooke Williams

by CMarie Fuhrman,
HDJ Nonfiction Editor

CMarie Fuhrman:  What inspired the title, Mary Jane Wild: Two Walks and A Rant?

Brooke Williams: It went through many stages, including one where it was just the first walk and a lot of me wondering what was going on. Mid-pandemic, while in the middle of it, I had the idea that I’d retake the walk post-2020 election. Thus “Two Walks.” The “Rant” was, and still may be, in question from many. I asked around, and people I trusted thought that no one wanted to read ranting. I’m realistic enough to know that most of my readers know me and will read my book regardless of whether or not “rant” is in the title. Ideally, word of mouth will be positive, and people unknown to me will read it and see that my ranting is me trying to make sense of a world no one expected. “Mary Jane” is the name of the Wilderness Study Area and has nothing to do with marijuana. 

CF:  What was the most challenging part of the book to write? 

BW: As a white, privileged, Euro-American man, I am trying to articulate who I am, how I need to change, and how I need to compensate the planet for my sins against it. This was hard to acknowledge, but more than that, now that I’ve written it and am conscious of it, how hard this is to live.  I mean that acknowledging something personally is one step, but writing it down, in a book that people might read, I’ve realized that I have to believe and embody it. 

CF:  Your love for the land, particularly the desert where you live, is evident in your writing. How did this love affair begin? What have been your most challenging moments with loving a place?

BW: An earlier book, Open Midnight, started out with me wondering if we have a genetic connection to a particular landscape or place. And while I think that exists, I also feel that learning about a place at deeper and deeper depths at some point turns into love. I majored in biology in college and spent a few semesters doing fieldwork in western deserts. I discovered that learning natural systems is watching evolution in real-time, which feels like love, is probably love. What’s hard is fighting the power of those who profit from destruction with that same love. 

CF: Throughout the term of the previous administration, COVID-19, quarantine, and the country changed. What do you think connects us as Americans? What, beyond partisanship, is our most significant division? Did COVID-19 bring us closer or tear the country further apart?

BW: I think the politicization of COVID-19 didn’t necessarily bring us closer together or drive the wedge further between us. I believe that while Trump and the Republicans exposed the wound, shined a light on just how racist a good chunk of America is, COVID-19 picked at it. COVID-19 is just the latest tool—“weapon” is a better word—the right white is using to polarize us. White people screaming “freedom” are really panicked watching what they’ve been taught and told was their supremacy dissolve. The joke is on them, however, as their so-called freedom is killing them. Unfortunately, it is killing non-thems too.

CF: Many nature writers, from Thoreau to Doug Peacock, "walk" to see things through. What is it about walking, particularly in the wild, that helped you think through the ramifications of the Trump years and the other problems facing society as a whole?

BW: So much great literature exists about walking. I learned so much reading Rebecca Solnit’s book Field Guide to Getting Lost. Yes, Doug’s Walking It Off, and Thoreau’s Walking where “In Wildness is the Preservation of the World” is found. And so many connections between smart people walking and revolutionary ideas that walking does and always has played a role in the evolution of human thought. In my book, I wonder about a spot near the ball of our feet that might absorb information coming up from the earth. Something is going on—the catalytic effect of our body, movement, the wild earth. Something afoot. Pardon the pun. 

CF: Who do you read for inspiration? For love?

BW: I just finished the longest book I’ve read in quite some time, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. It’s science fiction, which I don’t read much of. This takes place just a few years from now and shows how much of what we’re seeing and learning and wondering about climate change becomes a reality. It’s so informative and possible. And, I think, so important. What a mind.  Looking back, I see extended periods of my life spent reading one author at a time. I’ve read every book by Cormac McCarthy. Most every Murakami and Bolano. A lot of Virginia Woolf. A lot of Rebecca Solnit. And Paul Shepard is foundational. As are Jung, Austin, Kittredge, Matthiessen, and John Berger. Lately, I’m immersed in Chinese Philosophy, with two amazing writers as guides.  Bill Porter, a.k.a. Red Pine, and David Hinton got me through the isolation of the pandemic. I credit these men and their books with helping me understand where we are right now, as Americans and as humans.  Notwithstanding the poets. Merwin, Jorie Graham, Gary Snyder. Joy Harjo, Robinson Jeffers.  I’ll stop there. 

CF: You often do as much with your camera as with your words. How does photography feed or add to your writing practice?

BW: What a good question. I might not have thought about this had you not brought it up. I used to take photography seriously. Now, like most of us, I have a camera with me most of the time (who was it who first said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could take a photo with our phone?”). I think the connection between writing and photography, for me, is attention.  Both photography and writing are about capturing the results of my attention. There’s that. But then there’s the whole other world of paying attention to what attracts our attention. As if attention accesses what lives in our unconscious and brings it up where we can work with it. 

CF: What did you edit out of this book?

BW: You don’t want to know. Just before the 2016 elections, I started a practice of writing 1000 words each morning before doing anything else. My wife, Terry Tempest Williams, has always believed that we don't write much if we wait until we have something to say before we write. But if we sit down and just write, we come up with thoughts, ideas, images that we might not otherwise have had. What if I’d not been here for that, I often think, having been surprised by something I write during my practice. I wrote nearly every day for the four years between presidential elections. When the time came to make this book, I went through the files I’ve kept and pulled out material I thought might be part of this book. Writing about the state of the world, the deterioration of America under Trump, my own evolution and thought process surfaced, and I put it all into one document. 350,000 words. The publisher wanted 50-60,000 words. You ask what I edited. I edited out 300,000 words. I felt like a sculptor with a massive piece of granite, cutting, knocking, chipping away. It was so hard. 

CF: What do you find impossible to write about?

BW: What comes to mind is the respect I have for journalists writing on regular deadlines. Bill McKibben, a hero of mine, says he started working as a reporter for the daily newspaper at Harvard, writing a few stories each day about current sporting events. I have so much respect for him and others who can write like that. Writing is so hard for me. If I’m not writing about something I’m passionate about, or to be exact, if I’m not writing to discover the answer to a burning question, writing is impossible. 

CF: What book hasn't been written yet that you are already eager to read?

BW: I think that writing is about 25 years away. It’s a book about how we each uncovered our personal evolutionary tools (realizing how closely related they are to the indigenous knowledge), focused our attention on restoring the sacred feminine on earth, and as a result, each of us played a role in the success of our species and the continuation of life on earth. In short, it’s a book about how we changed our consciousness in the nick of time.

Brooke Williams has spent the last 40 years advocating for wilderness. He is the author of four books, including Open Midnight, Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness, Mary Jane Wild, and The Story of My Heart, by Richard Jeffries, as rediscovered by Brooke Williams and Terry Tempest Williams. His journalistic pieces have appeared in Outside, Huffington Post, Orion, and Saltfront. He and his wife, Terry Tempest Williams, divide their time between Utah and Cambridge, MA.