Freedom In The Grace Of The World - American Imperialist
Wars
06 July 2010By Chris Hedges
Earl Shaffer, adrift after serving in the South
Pacific in World War II and struggling with the loss
of his childhood friend Walter Winemiller during the
assault on Iwo Jima, made his way to Mount Oglethorpe
in Georgia in 1947. He headed north toward Mount
Katahdin in Maine and for the next 124 days, averaging
16.5 miles a day, beat back the demons of war. His
goal, he said, was to ‘‘walk the Army out of my
system.’’ He was the first person to hike the full
length of the Appalachian Trail.
The beauty and tranquility of the old-growth forests,
the vistas that stretch for miles over unbroken
treetops, the waterfalls and rivers, the severance
from the noise and electronic hallucinations of modern
existence, becomes, if you stay out long enough, a
balm to wounds. It is in solitude, contemplation and a
connection with nature that we transcend the frenzied
and desperate existence imposed upon us by the
distortions of a commodity culture.
The mountains that loom on the northern part of the
trail in New Hampshire and Maine, most of them in the
White Mountain National Forest, are also forbidding,
even in summer, when winds can routinely reach 60 or
70 miles per hour accompanied by lashing rain. The
highest surface wind speed recorded on the planet, 231
miles per hour, was measured on April 12, 1934, at the
Mount Washington Observatory. Boulders and steep
inclines become slippery and treacherous when wet and
shrouded in dense fog. Thunderstorms, racing across
treeless ridge lines with the speed of a freight
train, turn the razor-backed peaks into lightning
rods. The Penacooks, one of two Native American tribes
that dominated the area, called Mount Washington, the
highest peak in the Northeast, Agiochook or “place of
the Great Spirit.”
The Penacooks, fearing the power of Agiochook to
inflict death, did not climb to its summit. The fury
you bring into the mountains is overpowered by the
fury of nature itself. Nature always extracts justice.
Defy nature and it obliterates the human species. The
more we divorce ourselves from nature, the more we
permit the natural world to be exploited and polluted
by corporations for profit, the more estranged we
become from the essence of life. Corporate systems,
which grow our food and ship it across country in
trucks, which drill deep into the ocean to extract
diminishing fossil fuels and send container ships to
bring us piles of electronics and cloths from China,
have created fragile, unsustainable man-made
infrastructures that will collapse. Corporations have,
at the same time, destroyed sustainable local
communities. We do not know how to grow our own food.
We do not know how to make our own clothes. We are
helpless appendages of the corporate state. We are
fooled by virtual mirages into mistaking the busy,
corporate hives of human activity and the salacious
images and gossip that clog our minds as real. The
natural world, the real world, on which our life
depends, is walled off from view as it is
systematically slaughtered. The oil gushing into the
Gulf of Mexico is one assault. There are thousands
more, including the coal-burning power plants dumping
gases into our atmosphere that are largely unseen.
Left unchecked, this arrogant defiance of nature will
kill us.
“We have reached a point at which we must either
consciously desire and choose and determine the future
of the Earth or submit to such an involvement in our
destructiveness that the Earth, and ourselves with it,
must certainly be destroyed,” writer-poet Wendell
Barry warns. “And we have come to this at a time when
it is hard, if not impossible, to foresee a future
that is not terrifying.”
Year after year I returned to these forbidding peaks
from conflicts in Central America, the Middle East,
Africa and the Balkans. I had a house in Maine on an
800-foot hill with no television, cell phone or
Internet service. The phone number was unlisted. It
rarely rang. I refused to give the number to my
employer, The New York Times. I brought with me the
stench of death, the cries of the wounded, the bloated
bodies on the side of the road, the fear, the
paranoia, the alienation, the insomnia, the anger and
the despair and threw it at these mountains. I
strapped my pack on in the pounding rain at trailheads
and drove myself, and later my son, up mountains. I
rarely stopped. Once, in a bitter rain, I crested the
peak of Mount Madison in August and was immediately
thrown backward by howling winds whipping across the
ridge and pelting hailstones. It was impossible to
reach the summit. On a hike in the remote Pemigewasset
Wilderness I made a wrong turn and, fearing
hypothermia, walked all night. By the time the sun
rose my blisters had turned to open sores. I wrung the
blood out of my socks. I go to the mountains to at
once spend this fury and seek renewal, to be reminded
of my tiny, insignificant place in the universe and to
confront mystery. Berry writes in “The Peace of Wild
Things”:
"When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may
be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron
feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."
I climbed my first mountain in the White Mountain
National Forest when I was 7. It was Mount Chocorua.
The mountain, capped with a rocky dome and perhaps the
most beautiful in the park, is named for a legendary
Pequawket chief who refused to flee with his tribe to
Canada and was supposedly pursued to its summit by
white settlers, where he leapt to his death. It is a
climb I have repeated nearly every year, now with my
children. I guided trips in the mountains in college.
I would lie, years later, awake in San Salvador, Gaza,
Juba or Sarajevo and try to recall the sound of the
wind, the smell of the pine forests and the cacophony
of bird song. To know the forests and mountains were
there, to know that I would return to them, gave me a
psychological and physical refuge. And as my two older
children grew to adulthood I dragged them up one peak
after another, pushing them perhaps too hard. My
college-age son is deeply connected to the mountains.
He works in the summer as a guide and has spent upward
of seven weeks at a time backpacking on the
Appalachian Trail. My teenage daughter, perhaps
reflecting her sanity, is reticent to enter the
mountains with the two of us.
I stood a few days ago in a parking lot at Crawford
Notch with Rick Sullivan, an Army captain and
Afghanistan war veteran. It was the end of our
weeklong hike in the White Mountains. Sullivan noticed
a man with a T-shirt that read “Operation Iraqi
Freedom.” The shirt had Arabic and English script
warning motorists not to come too close or risk being
shot. The man, an Iraqi veteran, was putting on a pack
and told us that he was the caretaker of a camp site.
He said he left the Army a year ago, drifted, drank
too much and worked at a bar as a bouncer. His life
was unraveling. He then answered an ad for a park
caretaker. The clouds hovering on the peaks above us
were an ominous gray. The caretaker said he planned to
beat the rain back to the tent site. I thought of Earl
Shaffer.
“You try and forget the war but you carry pieces of it
with you anyway,” the caretaker said. “In the
mountains, at least, I can finally sleep.”
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