Nothing like a trip to shake up some preconceptions and connect directly with other realities without relying on filters, digital or otherwise.

While traveling across the Great Basin last week, we found more than a few snowed mountain passes and dangerous black ice in at least one. I’m not fond of sitting in traffic commutes, but I do like road trips.

When driving across the West, there is nature and open spaces, spare conversations, moments of wonder, and a lot of music of all genres.

There’s also rumination, which I successfully turn into introspection. When driving, I let my mind wander as I focus on the road, especially when conditions aren’t ideal, and I have to keep an eye on “not known knowns.” Say, an icy turn, a foggy and treacherous (they go hand in hand in winter) road section, or signs of animal activity.

Life of one mule deer

I wasn’t amused when, as we were leaving Missoula, Montana, in the direction to the Idaho panhandle, I found out why there was a sudden traffic jam right out of town: a big deer with big antlers was lying dying in the middle of the road, its body twisted and its strong neck releasing muscular tension until it finally let go.

Right on the side of our lane, the small Toyota Yaris that had hit the deer had the hood destroyed, and the car was probably totaled.

As we passed, each one of us drivers and the very few extra occupants in every car made sure that the single driver, who shook his head as if he didn’t believe what had just happened, was okay; he was looking at us as we passed, for the big airbag didn’t allow him otherwise. He was probably trying to bring some stoicism to his already packed morning, trying to figure out how to proceed.

There wasn’t much to do, nor could we help, especially as the deer seemed to have stopped suffering; and, despite remaining in the middle of the road in between the two lanes, it didn’t seem to make sense to stop the traffic in rush hour to take the animal to the side, for it wasn’t dangerous and no one could save it.

Western Montana morning story

That morning, Kirsten and I had gone on our own for a run in the hills of Missoula, a city we like and one of the many gentle, outdoorsy towns we had fantasized about since the early 2010s, never quite making a move. Another town we enjoy in Montana, Bozeman, has visibly grown and become more expensive since I attended a summer camp on free market environmentalism at PERC in 2008; this time, however, we didn’t go through town.

As we left Missoula and climbed the mountain passes of the Idaho panhandle, we didn’t talk much and listened to music; the kids were flying from the Bay Area to Seattle to be reunited with us at a relatives’ home the day after, and we had many hours of road ahead to cover before reaching our first destination about one hour north of Spokane, where it had snowed heavily. Our goal was to reach the place before it was too late, for we had an interview, and it would get dark fast in late November.

Luckily, our host had confirmed that the day looked good in his place high in the mountain, even if his town, down in the valley, was covered in snow and fog after the bomb cyclone.

As we tried to drive safely across the Lookout Pass along Interstate 90, where we spotted some black ice and it snowed here and there, I kept thinking about the majestic deer in the middle of the road, letting his head touch the tarmac as it left this world.

People in every car going in both directions looked at the animal in silence, perhaps expressing awe at its sheer size: the big, expansive horns forking twice signaled an adult, powerful male on its unlucky last day. The Toyota Yaris driver also looked at the deer and didn’t seem to want the attention.

Aldo Leopold confronting the death of a random wolf

That image, the fear seen in the animal and the frustrated exhaustion in the crashed Toyota Yaris commuter, brought back memories of one read that can change people’s perspective about the meaning of life and also about the importance of what we call “nature” (which is partly “us,” the animal and the human, and also the “divine” in an Emersonian or Spinozian way): Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, a 1949 classic of environmental philosophy —all substance, no rants.

There’s a pivotal passage in that book; in it, Leopold explains how his life was transformed forever due to one special encounter with an animal early in his formative years, when he’d go hunting with his father as a youngster, an event that would become crucial in one of his most celebrated holistic concepts regarding conservation, which he called “thinking like a mountain.” When he uses it in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold refers to adopting a long-term, ecological perspective that considers that all elements in a given ecosystem are interconnected. Hence, the mountain needs wolves, so they keep other animals that might graze too much and damage the soil in check. And so forth.

During one of their hunting outings, Aldo Leopold has an encounter with a dying wolf, which wasn’t dying for natural causes but because one of his hunting companions had shot the animal, thinking it was a doe:

“We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming mêlée of wagging tails and playful maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock.

“In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks…. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise.”

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold 1949/1987, pp. 129-30

Of mountains and animals

Upon writing the encounter in his essay, 56-year-old Aldo Leopold goes back to the moment he saw something fade away forever in the wolf’s eyes at 22 —to change his life forever:

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes — something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger­ itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But af­ter seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the moun­tain agreed with such a view.”

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold 1949/1987, p. 129

As he watched the light in the wolf’s eyes disappear, Leopold “saw” the animal as a sentient being for the first time, and in a way, it became a part of him. With the concept of Thinking Like a Mountain, Leopold rememorates the dying wolf —and the place of wolves in the great scheme of “mountains” (read “nature”).

“A deep chesty bawl echoes from rimrock to rimrock, rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far blackness of the night . . . . To the deer it is a reminder of the way of all flesh, to the pine a forecast of midnight scuffles and of blood upon the snow, to the coyote a promise of gleanings to come, to the cowman a threat of red ink at the bank, to the hunter a challenge of fang against bullet. Yet behind these obvious and immediate hopes and fears there lies a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf. Those unable to decipher the hidden meaning know nevertheless that it is there, for it is felt in all wolf country, and distinguishes that country from all other land. It tingles in the spine of all who hear wolves by night, or who scan their tracks by day. Even without sight or sound of wolf, it is implicit in a hundred small events: the midnight whinny of a pack horse, the rattle of rolling rocks, the bound of a fleeing deer, the way shadows lie under the spruces. Only the ineducable tyro can fail to sense the presence or absence of wolves, or the fact that mountains have a secret opinion about them.”

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold 1949/1987, p. 129

When at PERC in 2008, I met one of the conservationists who had reintroduced wolves in Yellowstone. He talked nonchalantly about how unpopular that measure had been among many. He recalled a day when he entered a bar somewhere in Montana or Wyoming (I can’t recall now), and some amiable customer told him, half-jokingly and half-seriously: “Hey, Mister, ain’t nobody shot you yet?”

Those sound like Western stories to me, where there’s no room for wolves in the Rockies as long as cattle are being raised. The mentality has changed, and many ranchers now understand how ecosystems work —and how the mountain “thinks.”

Intense stare at Piazza Carlo Alberto

There are, of course, other transformative stories of sensitive humans encountering animals suffering and feeling how the walls of human thinking —those stating that we’re above all else in nature, and that nature is for us to use in a mechanistic, detached way —collapse when we perceive wisdom and the connectedness of us and them, of everything, as their eyes.

On January 3, 1889, in the Piemontese city of Turin, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who had undergone serious health issues that had led him to leave academia and travel across the Alps in search of a healthier lifestyle, saw a horse being abused at one of the corners of Piazza Carlo Alberto. The event is considered a culmination of his psychological collapse.

There has been much speculation about this event, little of which is factual. For those interested (like me), Spanish writer Agustín Fernández Mallo has probably written the best lines about it for The Paris Review (Turin Stroll, November 2, 2015).

What we know: a merciless, humble owner of an old horse beat it ferociously (which, back then, right before the takeover of motored transportation, wasn’t uncommon). The German philosopher reportedly ran to the horse, looking at him attentively and throwing his arms around his neck. Nietzsche must have wept uncontrollably then, according to most accounts. Also, according to many second and third-hand recollections of the event, the shocked philosopher may have whispered comforting words to the horse, then collapsed.

Nietzsche’s vitalism, empathy, and connection with the surrounding world might have played a key role in this act of desperate empathy and acknowledgment of the horse’s status as a sentient being. Did Nietzsche’s empathy overwhelm him to the extent of “borrowing” the horse’s pain, internalizing the suffering? What we know for sure is that the philosopher’s breakdown was the result of long-standing mental health struggles that many have related to exhaustion, isolation (a malady of our time, but Nietzsche “saw” our time 150 years ago), and probably syphilis, which had no cure in the late nineteenth century.

The way we look at things

I’d say many more things about Nietzsche’s collapse. Many people will visit Turin and try to go to all the historic and chic venues. The times I’ve been, I’ve always had time to, early in the morning, go to the place where Nietzsche collapsed; what is fascinating about cities, where most relevant things happen, is the accumulation of such apparently anodyne (at least for most people) events; there’s always a place where something happened, and we can visit the same corner, recollecting how the whole thing must have developed. French theorist Guy Debord called this way of seeing places “psychogeography,” or the exploration of urban environments emphasizing interpersonal connections.

Which brings me to the importance of seeing the beauty in nature, interconnectedness, life, animals and people, or people with people (death or alive, real or imaginary: some prefer to visit Paris with a guide, and some others go to the places mentioned in The Three Musketeers or the books by Patrick Modiano). As the world became more advanced and bureaucracies made human life more normative, the world’s enchantment partially vanished.

People like Thoreau, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Baudelaire, among others, viewed this disenchantment process as a catastrophe for the human soul. That’s why Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, aka Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin (not idiot at all but on some enlightened spectrum, of course, and that’s the point of that particular book) claims to whoever wants to listen that “Beauty will save the world.”

That particular phrase, which reminds us of characters like the mentioned idiot but also Alyosha, the good-hearted little brother from The Brothers Karamazov, or Konstantin Levin, the gentleman farmer from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, is pronounced by somebody who has looked at all things, including the eyes of dying animals, with an enchanted, open-hearted empathy.

Can the world be “re-enchanted” when all we talk about is the ugly side of things, from the social, political, or natural perspective? I recall, for example, the strange reaction of one commenter to one video we shared about William’s life in the southern tip of the Big Island of Hawaii (and US’s southernmost point). The comment said something like: “Yeah, yeah, I like it, not bad, but there are lots of cockroaches in Hawaii, I can’t stand it.” I found the comment:

“Having lived in Hawaii for a few years. His house is a cockroach infested dump. You can’t get away from them.”

That sort of comment rang very strange to me; it felt odd that, among many things, one would just come with such a narrow-minded view of reality when commenting on William’s beautiful insights about life and his property. The world is disenchanted, I thought, because of the triumph of such mentalities. Convenience can just be brought too far, perhaps to the point of no return, because when we see ugliness everywhere, and we mistrust everyone and everything, we are lost and have lost, no matter how wealthy and relatively safe we are.

So I respectfully replied to him:

“Such an interesting comment. Why somebody would say that after watching such a video is beyond me. I could say a lot of things about William’s place, and I would never bring an attitude of “beware the critters in Hawaii; they spoil happiness.” Like reading Thoreau’s Walden and arriving at the conclusion that “BUT mosquitoes, especially in summer, they’ll eat you alive.”

A bad moment, or a good moment; it’s how you look at it

If there’s one thing we can choose at every moment, no matter the circumstances, is how we look at the world. Lev Tolstoy tries to explain this hard-learned lesson to many (never learned by many others) in War and Peace through a secondary character representing the Russian peasantry, Plato Karataev, a humble and spiritual moujik that is made captive by the French Army when it enters Moscow along with many Russian soldiers, the protagonist Pierre Bezukhov among them.

Karataev will show Bezukhov, who is used to intellectual discussions and all the fine food in the world, how two humans in distress can choose how to connect in a deep manner despite the cruelty surrounding them.

Karataev, who believes in the interconnectedness of all people and the beauty of simple acts, decides to share his scarce food with Pierre Bezukhov, which symbolizes Pierre’s spiritual awakening. Sometimes, the simplest food becomes the most exquisite thing we’ve ever tasted —if we know how to look at it. The opposite also holds true: some people with access to everything do it with such a miserable demeanor that there will be no act of appreciation.

All these, and many other similar diatribes, rushed to my mind while driving and listening to music. So you can see me now, as I was going through the Lookout Pass right before the town of Wallace, which we’ve heard great things about, while talking to Kirsten at intervals and listening to all sorts of music, including that of one musician we were about to visit a few days later at his homestead an hour from Seattle.

An old Japanese poem

When we reached Seattle the day after, we reunited with our kids, who had flown from California. Then we went to British Columbia to visit some friends there, returning just in time to visit our musician friends and celebrate Thanksgiving in Seattle with Kirsten’s sister, my brother-in-law, and their kids (our kids’ cousins).

I finally had time to go through some messages and emails I had received during the week, and I found a very relevant message from another brother-in-law, this time my sister’s husband (they live in Oxford, England).

He had just photographed a text he had stumbled upon, thinking of me as he read it (perhaps because we had talked about such matters during one of our walks in Barcelona last winter). Called “Restoring Our Connections with the World,” it’s a text published by Japanese philosopher Daisaku Ikeda in The Japan Times, which starts with a waka-style poem written 1,300 years ago:

The cloud-seas of the heavens are riled by waves.
The moon a ship rowed into hiding behind a forest of stars.

Ikeda goes on to build upon this poem:

“Today, we have sent human beings beyond the reaches of Earth’s atmosphere; we have stood on the surface of the moon. Yet, reading this poem, one has to wonder if people in ancient times didn’t sense the presence of the moon and stars more intimately than we do today. Is it possible they lived richer, more expansive lives than we, who for all our material comfort, rarely remember to look up to the sky?

“Immersed in material concerns, clamor and bustle, contemporary humanity has been cut off from the vastness of the universe, from the eternal flow of time. We struggle against feelings of isolation and alienation. We seek to slake the heart’s thirst by pursuing pleasures, only to find that our cravings have grown that much more fierce.

“This separation and estrangement is, in my view, the underlying tragedy of contemporary civilization. Divorced from the cosmos, from nature, from society and from each other, we have become fractured and fragmented.”

Restoring Our Connections with the World, Daisaku Ikeda (From a 12-part essay series by Daisaku Ikeda carried in The Japan Times, a leading English-language daily published in Japan, from May 2006 through April 2007)

Conversation at a food joint in Eugene, Oregon

Daisaku Ikeda makes the case for the need to “re-enchant” the world by reminding ourselves that we can choose how to look at reality, and how to appreciate the interconnectedness around us (and, of course, the beauty we see, whether in the eyes of a dying deer in Missoula, or in the distant stars, or while sharing a table with relatives).

“The poetic spirit has the power to “retune” and reconnect a discordant, divided world. True poets stand firm, confronting life’s conflicts and complexities. Harm done to anyone, anywhere, causes agony in the poet’s heart.

“A poet is one who offers people words of courage and hope, seeking the perspective — one step deeper, one step higher — that makes tangible the enduring spiritual realities of our lives.”

Restoring Our Connections with the World, Daisaku Ikeda (From a 12-part essay series by Daisaku Ikeda carried in The Japan Times, a leading English-language daily published in Japan, from May 2006 through April 2007)

We had to leave on Friday. We wanted to drive most of the distance from Seattle to the San Francisco Bay Area on that day, so we could use Saturday and Sunday to get back on track with school, house chores, errands, work, etc.

We didn’t expect to find heavy traffic between Portland and Eugene, Oregon. We thought it was due to one or many accidents, but then we realized that the congestion was mainly the byproduct of people driving to a big outlet store on the side of the highway, for it was Black Friday.

By the time we reached Eugene (the city of our “food, not lawns” friends from back in the day, as well as original runners and running technology), our kids rioted in the car to get some food, so we stopped at one joint we knew. It wasn’t where you would expect anything to happen other than our kids getting food and charging electronics.

And that’s what I was doing when a man in his sixties or early seventies approached the queue at the restaurant; he looked quickly at Kirsten, who was going to the table with the kids, then at me, standing in front of me. He introduced himself.

“I know who you are. Well, well, I’m amazed. Thank you! Thank you!” —said the man, named Richard List.
“Thank you for what?”
“I watch all of your channel’s videos! I’m a fan of Kirsten’s videos. I’ve watched many!” —As he tried to recollect some reference to give me, he kept going:
“Can I give you guys some money? Can I invite you over?”
“Thank you, that’s nice of you. We’ve just eaten; it’s just the kids, and they already ordered. But thank you.”
I asked his name, and then I offered to call Kirsten to take a picture with them both, but he wasn’t interested in that.
“Man, I wish I had a nice place to show you. But you can stay with me if you’re too tired.”
“Thanks, that’s nice of you,” I replied, smiling. “But we have to keep going; it’s already so late, and we want to make it as close as possible to the Bay Area.”
“You live there now? I thought you lived in Barcelona or someplace else. Oh, man, I wish I had something to show you.”
“Do you live in Eugene?”
“I live nearby, a few miles outside town. I haven’t much to show you, though. I’d love to, however.”

Curious about our life in the Bay Area, he gave us many interesting references from his days in San Francisco, right before he went to Oregon to volunteer in the first organic farms.

Among the trees

Richard was so nice to us, even though he didn’t seem interested in having a picture with us as a souvenir, LOL. He seemed to have forgotten why he was there at the food joint, for we kept talking for a few minutes.

That’s how he told me a story that circled back to the deer accident I had seen a few days back in Missoula in the cold early morning as we were leaving town: people called him “Deer Man” (“not ‘dear’ but ‘deer,’ he clarified).

“Why?” —I asked.
“Well, in and near my property there are many bushes, berry bushes, especially blackberry bushes, they get very thick. I trim them neatly to build hollow spaces.”
“Like plant caves.”
“Exactly, little burrows where animals like to go. I’m friends with many deer, they like my place. Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t my pets, they’re wild, and I want to keep them that way, but they like to come and say hi, and they go in the bushes, and they seem to love it.”

In a way, Richard from outside Eugene, Oregon, was re-enchanting his corner of the world. And upon talking to him, I knew I had to write a little article about the need to restore our connections with the world.

And pass the word along. There’s a redemptive power in seeing poetry around us —instead of falling for the trendy siege mentality rooting for the total disenchantment of the world.

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

Mary Oliver, from the poem “When I Am Among the Trees.”