Adam M. Sowards
Wild Times
non-fiction
From Big Creek Trail, you have to cross a bridge to get to Taylor Wilderness Research Station; from the station, you have to cross the bridge to get to the wilderness. I often stand on that bridge, pulled in either or neither direction, toward the station and its basic, primitive modernity with connections to people, technology, and the outside world, or toward the wild and its fundamental, physical terrain, alone, in the present, and beyond history—or so it seems.
I don’t recall how I got here, teaching environmental history to college students who are spending their semester in the wilderness. My friend and colleague Jenn first described the program to me, how faculty flew in on a small plane to teach for a week in this remote outpost and where students embraced experiential learning and absorbed all things wild. I thought it sounded life-changing, like studying abroad, but not quite my thing: I went to college a ninety-minute drive from home, at the same university and with the same major as my oldest brother, and I never studied outside its zip code. I take few risks in life; I seek comfort and routine. While I could appreciate the transformative nature of Semester in the Wild, I like my pathways to be well-worn and comfortable, secure and safe. I love the wilderness, I tell myself, but the wilderness I love is an idea.
This is embarrassing to admit, but the wilderness scares me. Snakes, especially rattlesnakes, raise dread from the primordial reaches of my otherwise evolved brain. The mere prospect of hearing a rattle or seeing a slither pumps cortisol and adrenaline in equal parts to blood and ensures that I’m exhausted from hiking on high alert. And let me be frank, backpacking without a bathroom discomforts (and discomfits) me. So I’m inexperienced in actual wild places. My professional and social circles teem with people who value wilderness, seek time in it, revel in its raw biological truths. To their expertise, I’m a novice, and the gap between us strikes me too often as unbridgeable with me too old or stubborn or afraid to change.
Yet somehow, the year after Jenn, an erstwhile wilderness ranger, introduced me to the program, I became one of the faculty, full of uncertainty and insecurity, which is why I’m on this bridge taking a break, getting my bearings. Looking down Big Creek, eastward, the stream disappears in a bend, and the ridges from the north and south seem to dive beneath the water. Upstream, the landscape opens a bit. There are endless ridges here, but those to the west don’t pinch into Big Creek so hard. The relative spaciousness in that direction allows me to see several ridges crowding the stream. The brownness of late summer has turned to the leaf-yellow of autumn and even some snow dusts the mountains high above as the season shifts toward the darkness of winter. But mostly on the bridge, I listen to and watch the water.
Big Creek is substantial, a river more than a creek by most measures. The water rushes over rounded stones so big I’d never be able to move them, even with a pry bar. Both the sound and the motion at the surface mesmerize me, soothing in the way only moving water does. After a morning of intense discussions about American history, the bridge is close enough and far enough away for me to escape and reset my nerves and mind. The day’s lesson is not particularly contentious, but it is compressed—I have only a week out here—and that means the pace presses us all to read, write, and understand faster. At the bridge, my breath slows, my heart matching the pace. And while I need the respite after the overwhelm of teaching, I marvel at my good fortune and privilege to be spending time here amid one of the wildest landscapes in the lower forty-eight, the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, the largest contiguous such area outside Alaska at nearly 2.4 million acres, larger than Rhode Island or Delaware.
I know this place is changing me. Something that had only been abstract now is becoming tangible. And teaching students in this inholding in a national forest, living among them, backpacking with them, observing them learn, and learning from them—these things are adding to my experiences and shifting my perspectives. Reflecting on her own experience here, Jenn describes what she calls “Taylor Time,” where you slow down and notice “every movement and every creature around you, . . . intuiting a sense of how you fit into the wider world.” As I stand here breathing in Big Creek sounds and smelling the cottonwoods, rocks, and water, I mull time, too.
**
You’re a historian. You have to go see the pictographs. You’ll love them. I don’t recall who first directed this gentle command toward me, but the oft-shared sentiment followed me to the backcountry. Although no doubt well-meaning, the imposed expectations bugged me, laced through as they were with imperatives and assumptions about what I might appreciate concerning the human history of this wilderness. Wilderness attracts expectations. We expect nature on a grand scale to inspire us. We expect experiences of solitude and connections to the earth. The American wilderness tradition is infused with such expectations, and perhaps the principal one, as codified in the 1964 Wilderness Act, is that the wilderness is a place “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” This is a fiction made true through violence physical and rhetorical, political and cultural. It’s a fiction those pictographs belie. Eventually, I had to confront them.
About halfway between Taylor Ranch (what we typically call the research station) and the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, Big Creek Gorge stands imposing. Almost nothing in Big Creek country is flat or even gradual, but the topography here is practically vertical. The creek squeezes through the rocks that rise several hundred feet, high enough that I cannot see the top. I enter the gorge in the soft morning light a few days before the autumn equinox. The eastern sun lights up the far end and beckons around the bend, while the entrance and passage through remain shaded. Bushes cling improbably to rocks on the south side and two tall evergreens hug the north, like sentinels. The gorge itself is limited—the trail travels through it for about 1000 feet—but is dramatic nonetheless.
The sound in this canyon is striking and asserts itself in compounding ways. The stream is compressed between the narrowing space of the rocks. This means the water is active, faster, more energetic as it spills over the boulders in the streambed. Also, the rock walls that lean toward one another like long-separated friends bounce the sound to echo the quickened water and magnify its music. And after walking for miles accompanied by the low constant hum of water, I am lulled by its peacefulness. But the gorge booms with the tumbling stream, the echoes above, and the wind funneled through the cliffs.
Amid the cacophony from the green water picking up pace, rounding on itself with white-topped waves, I slow and clamber off the trail down to Big Creek’s edge. The noise blankets everything else, a sound-proofing that forces the senses inward. It is too loud to talk to my companions, so I settle in alone on a gray rock and contemplate where—and when—I am. From the shadows, I look upstream toward the gorge’s opening where I finally notice that some of the brush is starting to redden, anticipating fall, and the sun hits the big ponderosa pine which brightens everything like a lamp. The river flows from past to future with the present in front of me for just one moment.
Staying with the present becomes difficult, even with persistent sounds and cool air wafting above the stream pulling me to now because the deep past is etched here. Fifty feet across Big Creek’s uneven surface, a concave gap in the rock face fades in three or four feet above the water. At the edge, in a crack, some meager bush has taken hold. But what draws my attention and captures my breath are the ruddy markings. I cannot see them all well, and I understand none of them. In one area, something that resembles an old-style coffee percolator stains the rock and there are animals clearly present, but mostly there are hash marks, dozens of them in rows atop rows. I wonder what was being kept track of. Given the squeezed-in space, I imagine men fished here, harvesting salmon as the fish pushed upstream to spawn and complete their life cycle, but I don’t know. No Tribal members are here to share any wisdom or insight. No archaeologists are with me to share expertise. For me, “we were here” is a profound enough message and one that seeps into me. It is one thing to know this country had been home since time immemorial to the Duku-deka’, the Sheepeaters, the Shoshone, the Newe. It is another to see it and face what it means, the abstraction realized.
A reminder of all of that sits just above the gorge in an isolated landmark that forces me to confront bare facts. A grave marker is erected on a five-foot pyramid of cemented boulders. Harry Eagan has lain here since August 20, 1879, after having been shot through his thighs and unable to survive the emergency amputations. Private Eagan participated in the Sheepeater Campaign, sometimes inflated to the “Sheepeater War,” and became its only fatality. Some months before, the murder of five Chinese miners and two white ranchers pushed US Army soldiers into Big Creek country, despite no real evidence of Duku-deka’ complicity. This is a history we expect: trumped up charges mingling with rumors precipitating military pursuit and engagement followed by Indigenous resistance, surrender, and relocation. Eagan’s death came as the Army and their Cayuse, or Liksiyu, scouts followed signs of the retreating Shoshone band. On the south side of Big Creek, before entering the gorge, they climbed a few hundred feet to “a plateau, several acres in extent, with excellent grazing and a good spring,” according to a veteran of the campaign. Amid ten abandoned homes, the party promptly destroyed “the Indian village” and camped, raiding the food caches left behind by those hurrying to escape the invading troops. Private Eagan followed them up the pitched slopes over rocks and downed trees only to be wounded and jostled back down in what must have been agonizing pain punctuated with screams to where he died. This plateau is one of the rare, relatively flat spots in the backcountry and is now used as a US Forest Service airstrip, known as Soldier Bar. The memorial grave and the name overwrite the Native homes and their much deeper history here. These two markers of time, the pictographs at the river and Eagan’s headstone overlooking the destroyed village, are always closer than we think, just a rifle shot away.
The history nearly overwhelms me. And although I may wish to dream time by the river, I must return upstream. Halfway back to the research station, in one of the occasional places where the floodplain widens just a bit, I walk through the gap with bunchgrasses and a few trees. Along Big Creek, a flat couple of acres is unusual—maybe three or four such spots exist between Taylor and the confluence with the Middle Fork, averaging one every other mile.
I’m walking with Pete, one of the station managers. He’s lived out here, year-round, with his spouse and their young daughter for several years. Few people have ever known this backcountry as well as he. I admire him immensely and eagerly gather his answers to my many questions, as if they are huckleberries that can sweeten life. He points out the indentations scattered across this meadow—remnants of pit houses. Nothing of the structures remains, of course. After the Sheepeater Campaign, the Duku-deka’ were eventually relocated to the Fort Hall Reservation some 150 air miles away. The passage of time weathered all the materials, now reclaimed by the earth or by fire or flood. But the dented ground, the depressions that dip here and there all across the flat, compels attention. The soil and what grows in it take on slightly different hues. From one angle, they are unimpressive: small, shallow, and narrow, not big, deep, and wide. Yet they are also among the most poignant spaces anywhere out here, because they hearken to homes, still evident a century and a half after use. A handful of families might have comfortably stayed here, close to water and good hunting, fishing, and gathering. Scanning between Big Creek and where the mountain starts angling up sharply, I see them now everywhere, the ghost homes of a community. Girls and boys learned to run; stories were told, and lessons shared; elders died. These pit houses are reminders of that past. They prick at my conscience, my sense of history, and dampen my celebration of the wild. Americans think “wild” means unpeopled, and those sunken spots between the pines and the boulders say, like the pictographs, “We were here,” and, adding on the wind, “We did not leave by choice.”
Pete pulls me on, his long legs and brisk pace taking me to the next flat the trail bisects another half-mile upstream. He veers left off the trail, and I follow him through the sagebrush that fills this area. Pete slows and circles a bit, looking for something that isn’t exactly where he remembers. After meandering a moment, he stops in front of a rock, four to five feet in diameter, a couple feet high, covered in multi-colored lichens, with a noticeable indentation that held maybe a cupful of rainwater. Next to the stone, Pete picks up another rock, cylindrical and longer than a fist, that fits perfectly into the small divot. Not for the first time, I’m missing something but am embarrassed to say so. But Pete sees my quizzical expression. “A mortar and pestle,” he explains, and my brain snaps into place. “Back down the trail, where we saw all those pit houses was where the Duku-deka’ slept. Here was their kitchen. Which makes sense, I think. You want to sleep away from where you process food.” I think of the bears, wolves, cougars, all predators who live here. Turning, I see below me toward a bend in Big Creek the biggest pit house I’ve witnessed yet, long rather than round, and I wonder if it is a place for storing food. I think of Indigenous women preparing salmon, drying meat for winter and for travel. I’m awed by the generations here—and the generations of silence. Thinking about this place and its history keeps mugging my voice. We walk the rest of the way to the station barely speaking.
I’m quiet but my brain is churning, trying to grab hold of the fragments of the past I’ve encountered this morning, striving to make sense of the presence of this absence—or is it the absence of this presence?—reckoning with history in this wild place. Throughout my morning, walking in a wilderness “untrammeled by man”—another lexical legacy from the Wilderness Act—I have felt connected to these earlier homelands. I am witnessing this wilderness not as an untouched, pristine place, but as a home, a place people knew and altered. A place where people lived and died. A place where they recorded their lives on the land and stones, still evident fourteen decades after the Army swept them out and long after the miners and ranchers, who swarmed in after them, disappeared.
Terry Tempest Williams once wrote, “To bear witness is not a passive act.” Williams announced this as she shared difficult stories of people on the Gulf Coast whose lives were altered, wrecked even, by the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. She wrote about the ecological, political, and spiritual crises that intersected there as a way to “give voice to the beauty and devastation” of those citizens and that place. Williams was their witness, preserving stories of a landscape and people tucked away, far from view, bringing them to light so that a record showed these lives mattered—the Cajun shrimpers’ lives, the sea turtles’, the cleanup workers’. No, bearing witness is not passive at all.
When I first read her words, I immediately recognized that bearing witness occurs across time, too. Historians, I think, serve this role for societies, excavating stories and reminding us all of where we have been and what has happened so that we can remember and understand. Without that, justice to lives already lived cannot be obtained. All morning, I’ve been bearing witness to the past—the pictographs, the pithouses, the mortar and pestle, even the memory of Harry Eagan. My expectations under this enormous sky shift. Wilderness has not been a place to escape history, but a place to see it up close.
**
At Taylor Ranch, huge ponderosa pines shade the original Dave Lewis Cabin, cooling it on warm summer days and keeping it frigid beginning in late fall. It sits at the back of the property, perched, overlooking the research station and across the pasture toward Big Creek. To the east of the cabin, only fifty feet away, an incline blocks off wind and is so steep I’ve only climbed the trail there once and remember it as the hardest hike I’ve done out here, so steep I could reach forward and touch the ground. To the west, hidden by trees and bushes, the property’s water supply, Pioneer Creek, trickles by. Standing beside the cabin or inside with windows and doors open, I can hear the flowing water and rustling leaves mingle, making music as pleasurable as any sound anywhere. Since it is prime habitat, bird songs and chirps add soft notes with an occasional fluttering crescendo of grouse that always startles me with an insistent flapping that reminds me of helicopter blades.
A slight man of 5’ 9” and 130 pounds in his 60s, according to one of his hunting permits, Dave Lewis moved to this land in the 1910s and applied for a patent in the early 1920s (sources differ and he shared sketchy details). The patent formally turned the public domain that had once been Duku-deka’ territory into his own private property. He first saw this spot during the Sheepeater Campaign decades before when he had been contracted as a packer for the Army following the troops who were chasing the band right down the Big Creek drainage. During the intervening time, he stalked these mountains often in the employ of the Forest Service. For $75 per month in 1910, he was paid “to exterminate predatory wild animals,” earning the sobriquet “Cougar Dave.” Learning every draw and peak, Lewis guided hunters seeking all manner of quarry. He stayed until 1936, when he handed over his property to Jess Taylor, left Big Creek, and died a couple of weeks later.
During my temporary residencies at Taylor Wilderness Research Station, I’ve stayed in the Hornocker Cabin (named after a pathbreaking wildlife biologist) and the DeVlieg Cabin (named after a donor). But I prefer the Lewis. I like being able to survey the property—the other cabins, storage buildings, and cookhouse—to Big Creek and beyond. Horse Mountain hulks into view to the north and slightly west. Its rocky slopes seemingly rise straight out of the stream, steep enough and rocky enough to repel me. I’ll leave it to the snakes and for the bighorn sheep that sometimes scramble across its face. Straight ahead, Cliff Creek creeps down through the tan landscape of rocks, dried grass, and standing snags left from a wildfire in 2000. Only brush has rebounded and greens up the creek’s narrow curves until it spills into Big Creek. It comes from somewhere beyond Horse Mountain, hidden from view and now in shade, enticing all the more for its unknown source. Cliff Creek not only collects runoff from Horse but also from the other half of the watershed. Three treeless benches rise, each a few hundred feet, like a giant’s stair step that ascends toward the ridgeline behind it. That rocky ridge emerges from behind Horse and above Cliff Creek, then curves across the northern horizon before bending south and forming a wall to the east that drops to Big Creek. The scene feels self-contained: a mountain slope in the left foreground, a ridgeline half-circling behind it, leveled-off slopes, all drained by the creek, topped by clouds that shadow the sparse trees. It’s a scene that sparks reflection and conversation.
Sitting with students, we stare at this view that seems, other than the snags, to be roughly what it would have looked like when Lewis first traipsed by with his packtrain in 1879 or when he settled it after 1910 or when he rode out in 1936 or when the Wilderness Act went into effect in 1964 or when this wilderness was officially established in 1980. “If you were a homesteader coming through here in the nineteenth century, what would you see?” I ask, hoping to spark students’ historical thinking and empathy.
“Beauty,” one says. Just the single word. Others murmur agreement and nod. There seems to be nothing more to say. The speaker is the student who is most at home in wildness. She seems to embody it with her curly hair and constant motion and generous smiles. She thrives in these mountains, and her enthusiasm outpaces mine.
I don’t respond for a while as we all gaze up and think about what it would have been like to see this wilderness bowl with fresh eyes. I scan the rocky slopes and notice that we can’t see far east or west. “I don’t think so. This is a terrible place.” I’m overstating it, trying to provoke deeper thought, but it backfires. They fidget and fume. They feel attacked and defensive. Their sensibilities are shocked. They look offended, especially the one who spoke and now, I notice, will not make eye contact with me. I’ve already played up my inexperience in the outdoors, and now I worry that they’ll suspect me of being a closet nature hater, an academic divorced from the real world of wilderness, a man too much in his mind—and thus clearly out of it.
“If I’m a homesteader,” I try to explain, “I want access to resources. There’s little timber here. No minerals. There’s little forage for animals. There are few places where I could plant crops. And there’s no way to get to a market and none close anyhow. Given the values of homesteaders, this is a terrible place.” The mini-lecture barely stifles the brewing mutiny.
I’m trying to move us to consider time and change. The temptation can be to view the wilderness as timeless, a place where the processes of evolution move so imperceptibly as to seemingly stand still. Early advocates for preserving the wilderness often compared it to a museum, reinforcing the sense of stopping time. It is obviously not true that the wilderness is timeless, but it is easy to forget because we slow down here too. We don’t check our phones for the time. There are no back-to-back meetings to race off to. Daylight sets the schedule. Still, we need reminders to think about time. To help us, the geologist Marcia Bjornerud coined the word timefulness to encourage a “polytemporal worldview,” where we are aware of all time scales—past, present, and future—and how they operate on the earth, now. Timefulness helps us understand “how things have come to be the way they are, what has perished, and what has persisted,” and that “makes it easier to recognize the difference between the ephemeral and the eternal.” Her mission to get us to recognize the deep time of forces still shaping the earth on geological timeframes resembles my similar mission to encourage us to recognize the ongoing human imprints on the land. The space between the geologist and the historian—measured in millions of years—is not so big, and we agree that the past plays with the present and influences the future. Both of us are timeful, in other words, believing that longer-term thinking is an antidote to the all-too-common hubris of our myopic species. The land is full of time—rather times—and that requires us to hold complicated, but richer, notions of chronology, causation, and choice together at once. Certainty relinquishes some control, and we can perhaps practice humility.
The students accept the lesson somewhat reluctantly in their heads, finding it hard to believe in their hearts that anyone ever could find this spot not beautiful. “Of course, I think it’s beautiful, too,” I mumble to myself. And I mean it.
**
Besides the view that can inspire such reveries and lessons, if I were to be honest, I’d admit that I like staying in the Lewis Cabin because he hewed the walls himself. I can see the same log walls in front of me and in the grainy black and white photos. I’m not much of a romantic, but there in his cabin, with photos of him on the wall, I cannot help but see this place through historical eyes. And this spot lends itself to that.
Between the cabin and Pioneer Creek a campfire ring pulls people to it. Logs split lengthwise provide seats, and big stones give the outer circle space for plenty of others to rest. A bench sits behind the ring looking out, its back carved in a rough approximation of the mountain scene it faces. A table, sturdy and wooden, was placed nearby, and on several occasions, we have set up dinners or s’mores there while we gathered around the flames in the evening, awaiting dark. It is one of the times when students and I visit with little agenda. No lessons to be taught. No lecturing. No assessments. But sometimes debates unfold. Not to be proved right so much as to test ideas. It may be the fire circle’s purpose—this one, or maybe all of them—to explore possibilities and push limits.
I do teach one lesson at the campfire, because at this very spot ninety-some years before a few powerful men considered the vast country they were sitting in and decided they’d like to keep it something exclusive. In October 1927, Idaho’s governor; a district forester from Ogden, Utah; a photographer from Boise; a mining executive from northern Idaho; and a timber executive from all over circled around Dave Lewis’s campfire and decided the land should be protected “as it was inhabited by Indians,” but without the Indigenous people of course. The men gathered here as hunters and envisioned all of central Idaho remaining undeveloped to preserve what the Idaho Sunday Statesman called a “glorious hunting ground,” second to none in the United States for its variety and quantity of big game. To be sure, the privileged men sitting around this campfire were focused on their own interests. The Idaho wilderness might be, in the words of the timber lobbyist, “protected and that many more people, many many more citizens of Idaho and our friends may enjoy it.”
No matter how self-interested they might have been—protecting game so they and their friends could kill it—their idea looked beyond. No roads, no improvements, just keep it primitive and call it the Idaho Primitive Area. The area would be a “monument to the generations to come.” One eye gazed to the future while the other looked to the past. The proposal outlined by conservationists and government officials in Boise in 1930 stated that preserving this land was for “those who cherish the early traditions and history of this country and desire to keep in some degree the traits, qualities, and characteristics upon which this nation was founded.” And if the future and the past were in focus, so was the present, because in 1930, it seemed necessary for “people to detach themselves, at least temporarily, from the strain and turmoil of modern existence.”
Wild places, it seemed, were all about time, but sometimes the chronological logic bends my brain: by acting now to escape present ills, they would ensure the future would be like the past. So I sit at that spot, smelling the smoke, and think about that past. I imagine the conversations held right here, plans being hatched that changed history and make my present—right now—possible. This is, after all, how the present is produced—countless decisions, day after day, building up to this very moment.
This region remained the Idaho Primitive Area for nearly half a century until it became the River of No Return Wilderness in 1980 with a name change four years later to honor Idaho senator Frank Church. The plan’s genius in keeping this roadless and limiting mechanization means that if I picked up a s’more and started walking up the trail from that campfire ring, I could continue for more than 30 miles before I’d find a road.
**
I don’t go that far, but late one afternoon, the day before I leave, I head off by myself. I want to discover someplace I’ve never been. I cross the bridge and lumber up the three benches, a walk that takes me up a thousand feet in a couple of miles with the long switchbacks across the grassy and treeless slopes, the south sun beating down in a nice temperature for late October. When I hit the third bench, I veer off the trail to a place I’ve never been or seen from Taylor. I aim toward the gap between Horse Mountain and a rock face where Cliff Creek spills out from its hidden source.
To get there I pick my own path. You forget the choices involved in walking when you stay on paths. In his lovely meditation, On Trails, Robert Moor explains this simplicity, “Every morning, the hiker’s options are reduced to two: walk or quit.” Yet the space between me on the third bench and the creek I aim for includes far more options. I gaze across a pick-up sticks table of fallen logs, ponderosa pines burned two decades ago in the big fire and now windblown any which way. The scene reminds me of photographs of war zones after combat: burned over bodies of trees, trunks broken and split, a few survivors tall and green saved by sheer luck. Tracing a way through this landscape demands care. Moor says, “The brilliance of trails stems from the fact that they can preserve the most fruitful of our own wanderings, as well as the wanderings of others; then, as those paths are followed, their wisdom further improves and spreads.” But here I find no wisdom-in-the-making, no evidence of fruitful wanderings because Cliff Creek dead-ends in a mountain. Since there is no need to go where I am going, no trails exist. Instead: freedom, which means endless choices.
I climb over logs, walk along some and around others. My boots scuff charred bark and wood, my legs brush through the dry tall grass. I’m hopeful the rattlers are underground for their winter brumation. As I drop off the bench and meander toward Cliff Creek, fewer trees have survived the fire as I get lower, but strangely, fewer have fallen. So I walk through a vertical graveyard of branchless trunks, mute witnesses to passing time and a changing landscape. They stand out against the backdrop, a mountainside in shade and a cliff still absorbing the sun. These boundaries close in around the trees I wander through as I pick my way down to the creek.
I’m finally close enough to the water to hear it, trickling down, coursing along the base of Horse Mountain’s bulk, which rises to just a hair below 6900 feet. From this angle, I realize that from the research station you can’t see its real summit; I’ve been staring instead just at its base that rises so steeply it obscures the true apex that sits back further north. In Horse’s shadow, an intriguing feature catches my eye. Light stone, mostly gray but with a dusty rose tint, in a dozen or so layers, and the creek cuts through it, leaving a gap and making the rocks seem almost like columns.
I push through the thickening brush to investigate and scramble up. From the top of the near stone stack, I look across to its twin and down to the stream ten feet below amid a series of waterfalls, or steps. Cliff Creek drops maybe five feet over a stretch of thirty. I want to get closer to the water, so I shimmy down the rocks, hanging on to whatever I can. I see the naked purple willow branches overstretching the stream, and the currant leaves, browning along their edges and veins, are clinging to their last days next to my legs by the streamside. I use my hiking poles to steady myself so I can stand on wet and mossy stones in the creekbed and stare at the water falling directly in front of me.
Anyone who finds a stream on a warm mountain day knows the experience, the feeling of temperatures dropping, the air infused with water, with some quality beyond coolness. The atmosphere feels both lighter and thicker than air. You can smell the water, and it smells like fresh. And even though it isn’t misting or splashing, you can feel it brush your face and bare arms. These oases exist beyond physical properties of water and rock and plants.
But something more happens. Squatting there, leaning into the stream, I enter something like another dimension where molecules of air and water and rock and mind and muscle disperse and then reassemble, all interwoven into this moment and all moments. Time itself changes. There in those shadows, I feel timelessness—no, timefulness. It isn’t history, or even the day, passing by in an instant. Nor is it like time stopping, the way people sometimes describe the experience of an accident. It isn’t like witnessing all of history compressed in a moment or the seamless moment-after-moment-after-moment that meditators notice. What is happening is something else. Time, solids, liquids, air, and bodies, merge and mingle and reorder. I feel rested, refreshed, as though energy and time no longer follow the rules I have come to know or expect.
Near the close of his astounding exploration The Firmament of Time, Loren Eiseley, the great writer and paleontologist, tells of a recurring nightmarish vision that visits him. Standing in a lecture hall, someone asks him a question, but, behind the questioner, Eiseley glimpses not a person, but all of evolutionary time unfolding: “It writhes, it crawls, it barks and snuffles and roars, and the odor of the swamp exhales from it.” His ability to see all of time and life unsettles Eiseley. “I have no refuge in time,” he laments.
I know a similar feeling. If Eiseley envisions the tree of life going back into darkness, I see human cultures and decisions cycling backward and ramifying forward. This wilderness, where humans only visit, is full of their history, a landscape embedded in stories. As I’ve learned the past and seen the signs, the wilderness seems like less of a refuge to me, too.
But I realize that time isn’t a refuge any more than the wilderness is an escape from people. You cannot go into it or out of it. You cannot choose to participate in or avoid time. Time beats on in a constant, connected continuum. Standing in Cliff Creek, the collapsing of divisions tells me this is so. I’ve escaped nothing, because I’m participating fully in the wild times that swirl here, now, then and always.
Adam M. Sowards is an award-winning environmental historian, writer, and former professor. His most recent book is Making America's Public Lands: The Contested History of Conservation on Federal Lands. His work typically explores democracy and nature across time. You can find more of his work through https://adamsowards.net.