(WARNING: May contain non-political content.)
For those of you who may not know, I’m currently off on vacation. The picture above is the view from my window in the evening, just as the moon was coming up. It is only through the miracle of modern satellite technology that I’m able to check in with you, as the word “remote” only begins to describe my current location. It’s on the rocky edge of a mountain lake at the northern reaches of the Adirondack Range, not far from the Canadian border. Just getting here involves an extensive trip which includes phrases such as, “after the paved roads end” and a significant journey by boat after vehicles can go no further.
The place is hauntingly beautiful in a savage, untamed way, and very special to our family. All around the lakes, the land – such as it is – is characterized by massive expanses of stone where trees find only tenuous purchase in thin amounts of soil. This is a lake that was carved out by glaciers some ten thousand years ago, and the massive granite foundation is pure bedrock. It’s like standing on the very Bones of the Earth which, incidentally, is a loose translation of the name given to this area by the indiginous Native American tribes.
It’s a place which can push a person – even a cynical old, obsessive political hack like yours truly – towards dangerous levels of introspection. Last night, after most of the family had retired for the evening, I went out onto the rocky point the camp sits on, lay down upon the stone and just stared up into the night sky. If you live anywhere near a populated area of the lowlands, you tend to forget what the night really looks like. The haze in the atmosphere and the ambient light of civilization blurs and dims the view. Up here in the mountains, far from the nearest collection of buildings which could only charitably be called a “town” with a population breaking three digits, the view changes. To call it breathtaking doesn’t really do it justice. The number of stars that are visible boggles the mind, and the belt of the milky way is clearly in view. The absolute silence, broken only softly and occasionally by the lapping of water on rock or the nocturnal scurrying of unseen wildlife, quickly drags my mind off on seldom travelled paths.
Looking up at such a stark view of the universe I find the old, big questions coming back to haunt me. Could such a remarkable collection of jewels in the sky really be random? Was it all truly just a cosmic crapshoot of dust particles blindly following the random whim of gravity? And what of us? Are we nothing more than walking bags of meat and water, stumbling around blindly, cursed by the evolution of a brain that grew too large until we gained the ability to ponder our own existence, then being immediately doomed to obsess over it until we die and fall back to dust? Or could it all mean something more?
Perhaps we really are more than the sum of our molecular parts. We might be physical extensions of greater beings – a spark of divinity hiding inside these bodies, all connected together by invisible bonds of force as we struggle to refine ourselves, step by step coming closer to the perfection of some unseen creator. To lie down on the Bones of the Earth and stare into the terrible, yawning abyss of the galaxy in a place like this can make a man feel very small and timid in the face of eternity. Then again, sometimes it can make you feel like you’re a part of something larger – something perfect and beyond the reach of corruption or decay.
If you click on this second image to the left, you’ll get a full resolution picture of the morning view from my temporary “office” as the mist rolls in over the lake from the mountains. At six o’clock this morning I was out in a canoe paddling across that lake. By the time I returned to our cabin the wind was whipping the water into whitetops and thunder was rumbling in the West. Storms come up fast in the mountains, turning a pleasant, mild day into a demonstration of the real sound and fury of Mother Nature in a matter of minutes. It’s a humbling experience, and one to which everyone should submit every now and again if only to remind us that there are things in this brief, fleeting life more important than how the Supreme Court voted on some case last week. I may be reverting to some sort of wild thing… and I think I like it.