We deeply need the humility to know ourselves as the dependent members of a great community of life, and this can indeed be one of the spiritual benefits of a wilderness experience. We have become as proud over what we can do as ever our ancestors could have been over themselves as the center of the universe. As our new understanding has come - through science - science also has brought us many other new and wonderful discoveries, and the new knowledge of what we are has been overlooked by many of us in our eagerness for the new knowledge of what we can do.
It is not long since man thought of himself as the center of the universe, thought even of the Sun - the very source of all our life - as a light by day revolving about the Earth. And listen again to its sounds: get far enough away so that the noise of falling tons of water does not stun the ears, and hear how much is going on underneath - a whole symphony of smaller sounds, hiss and splash and gurgle, the small talk of side channels, the whisper of blown and scattered spray gathering itself and beginning to flow again, secret and irresistible, among the wet rocks. Watch its racing current, its steady renewal of force: it is transient and eternal. Taste it, feel its chill on the teeth: it is purity absolute.
And at sunup it was still there, powerful and incessant, with the slant sun tangled in its rainbow spray, the grass blue with the wetness, and the air heady as ether and scented with campfire smolder.īy such a river it is impossible to believe that one will ever be tired or old. It was a prayer and comforting to wake in late and hear the undiminished shouting of the water in the night. I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shattering to foam again.
It sends us back to the edge of the sea, where the drama of life played its first scene on earth and perhaps even its prelude where the forces of evolution are at work today, as they have been since the appearance of what we know as life and where the spectacle of living creatures faced by the cosmic realities of their world is crystal clear. It is the elusiveness of that meaning that haunts us, that sends us again and again into the natural world where the key to the riddle is hidden. Underlying the beauty of the spectacle there is meaning and significance. There is a common thread that links these scenes and memories - the spectacle of life in all its varied manifestations as it has appeared, evolved, and sometimes died out. Each time that I enter it, I gain some new awareness of its beauty and its deeper meanings, sensing that intricate fabric of life by which one creature is linked with another, and each with its surroundings. Yet it is a world that keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and of the relentless drive of life. The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water.
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