On the month of January, fire guys, and clearcuts

 

bikepacking in Prentice Cooper State Forest

I decided to keep my 2021 new year's "resolution" very conservative: sleep outside once a month. Many of these nights outside will come in the form of "microadventures."The New York Times described microadventures as "short, perspective-shifting bursts of travel closer to home." These little write-ups will serve to dicument those shifts in perspective.

On microadventure #1

Max and I bikepacked to Davis Pond campground in Prentice Cooper State Forest. We met our friends Reid and Josiah who backpacked in on the Cumberland Trail. It was a dreary day but the clouds parted long enough for a nice sunset and long campfire before the floodgates of heaven were released. It was a cold, wet, and really good time.

On the month of January

January is the month equivalent of the state of Ohio. "Ohio," of course, being Native American for a shoulder shrug. Nobody cares about Ohio outside of elections. Nobody loves January except for the first day of month and even that's about the last day of December. The initial high of New Years and its resolutions quickly wear off in the month's cold, wet, dark days. The holidays are over and everybody's exhausted and broke. The joy of fall and the hope of summer are equidistant goal posts from these, the doldrums of winter. No wonder more people die in January than any month. I used to like January for its prime Southeastern climbing conditions but the more and more I ride my bike the more and more I long for warmer days. Thank God February is our shortest month.

On campfires 

I love looking at fire. My friend Reid wrote a while back, "Around a fire, the lulls in conversation that sometimes sandbag the whole affair are changed into pleasant meditations. There’s nothing to say, but there is a fire to look at." But I don't need a lull to stare. In fact, I don't say much around the campfire (this is my modus operandi at most social gatherings). Instead, I sit listening to the conversation around me; soaking it all in. The lull is the brief moment in time in which I insert myself through a joke, anecdote, or factoid before retreating back to my warm cocoon of silence, looking at the fire, listening to the sounds. 

campfire at Davis Pond campground

 

In defense of the "fire guy" 

We all know a "fire guy:" the guy who tends to the fire throughout the night with the eagerness of a boy scout and is often derided as such. The fire guy gives off strong "eager beaver" vibes. They meticulously build tiny twig tee-pees. They tend to the small sparks with motherly care until their baby fire grows into a roaring flame. They get down on all four and they huff and they puff at the coals. They snap sticks over their knees. They tweak and they poke and they prod at the fire all night long. They seldom sit. And all the while we benefit from their action. We sit and drink and laugh and converse never minding the intense labor of love that is taking place before our eyes. We are the birds on the elephant's back. The elephant is neither helped nor harmed but the birds eat their fill and enjoy their lives. Max was our elephant and what an elephant he was! All hail, "fire guy."

On clearcutting

clearcuts along Tower Road

Clearcutting is the harvesting of an entire stand of trees in a single operation and leaves behind a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Dig a trench, add some barbed wire, throw in a horse wearing a gas mask, and a clearcut looks like every picture of World War I you’ve ever seen. The gravel ride along Tower Road passes many such atrocities.

Much of the plateau in Prentice Cooper is subject to logging prescriptions that involve clearcutting and — I cannot decide if this is shocking or not — Tennessee has no statutes regulating the quality of this high-intensity timber harvesting. The Forest Service intends that these clear cuts are re-established but as Janisse Ray says in Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, "there is no way to re-create a forest. Not quickly. And the trees will just be cut again." The replanted stand of trees near Davis Pond campground is typical of these "re-created" factory forests: systematic rows of identical trees more reminiscent of a plantation than a forest.

Clearcutting destroys biodiverse forests, accelerates climate change, contaminates watersheds, depredates healthy soils, and decimates native plant species. Monitoring already shows a drastic decline in biodiversity in Prentice Cooper. Oak and hickories fail to regenerate in the degraded soil and only poplar and invasive autumn olive remain. The volume of cutting is increasing and clearcutting is becoming the norm.

But why should I care? I mean, I still use toilet paper to wipe my butt*. I am an imperfect conservationist. But I do think that trees and forests have intrinsic value beyond unsustainable market mechanisms. "The trees encountered on a country stroll, reveal a lot about a country's soul," wrote W.H. Auden. And I fear for our country's soul for so many reasons.  

FURTHER READING:

*Toilet paper wipes out 27,000 trees a day.  (National Geographic)
Tennessee Heartwood (Tennessee state forest advocacy group)

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray

"On the Bosom Of This Grave And Wasted Land I Will Lay My Head," in Orion Magazine by Janisse Ray

Gospel of the Trees curated by Alan Jacobs

The Joy of Sharing Mountains

Emily burst into my class on the first day of school. "Mr. Butterworth!" she exclaimed, "my dad and I climbed the First Flatiron this summer!" The words sputtered out before she put her backpack down. I showed her the pictures where I also climbed the First and we spent several minutes bonding over our shared experiences on the same huge piece of rock some 1,300 miles away. Lots of people climb the Flatirons - large, orange, sandstone fins on the Colorado Front Range, loaded with long 5.easy routes - but not that many, and certainly not many teenagers in Tennessee. Emily and I were part of a special club; our own little society of mountaineers.  

With a rope and a rack, you can go to places few others have gone and despite climbing's ever-growing popularity, even fewer have stood on top of. “Climbing,” we are warned by the tiny labels on cams, quickdraws, and carabiners “is an inherently dangerous activity that may result in serious injury or death.” The alpinist RLG Irving likened the person who claims to love mountains having never risked anything to climb them to one who claims to be a sailor but who's never left the shore. And unless you're Alex Honnold, you almost always have to climb with somebody else. Rock climbing and mountaineering, for me, has always been about the shared experience: the memories and miseries made with close friends in beautiful places.

I've had the privilege of sharing fine places with great people over the years. Every summit is mentally cataloged not by its elevation or its difficulty, but by the people I was with: Eli, Paul L., Joy, Julia, Vance, Jamie, Logan, Leah, Barrett, Robin, Daniel, Josh, Becca, Evan, Andrew, Paul H., Ben, Russ, and a hundred or so teenagers I guided in Colorado. 

When asked, "what are your most cherished memories?" These are them.

The mountains belong to us all yet no one can claim them as their own, so too are our memories shared belongings. Rebecca and I still smile as we remember our time getting off route and blown off by a storm in the Canadian Rockies. And I know that the next time I see Josh we'll remember that belay ledge that was the size of a bar stool, the wind whipping our rope around, my truck, a tiny red dot in the valley below, and debating who led the next terrifying pitch. One of these days, I'll see my buddy Vance again and we'll recall that time we woke up thinking a bear was clawing at our tent but it was Barrett having another night terror. 

Psychologists say shared memories are crucial for our ability to interact with others, to form important, meaning-making social groups, and even our perceptions of the self. Many of my climbing partners are now spread across the country, but our collective memories made in the mountains preserve already established bonds. Therefore, even if I haven’t seen Eli in a long time, I know when I see him again that meaning is held between us through the conscious expression of shared memories in the mountains. That’s part of the special bond of tying into a rope with your partner. It is as if that rope becomes some kind of sacrament; the mediator of a deeper, almost transcendent, relationship. 

Shortly after Emily and I convened our meeting of mountaineers in my classroom, she went on to help start our school's first rock climbing team. It isn’t scrambling in the Canadian Rockies or jamming up splitter dihedrals at Tennessee Wall, but it is tying into a rope with another person and, to some degree, trusting them with your life -- even if the holds are plastic. Paul and I were asked to coach the ragtag group of teenagers--they were band nerds, soccer jocks, thespians, the valedictorian, and a young punk who listened to Black Flag and read Kropotkin. Kids who never talked to each other in the cafeteria were now convening between classes to discuss “the pink 5.11” in the back corner of the gym. The only thing they had in common was this shared experience of climbing rocks. It was so much fun watching them belay each other, figure out beta, and then go to Burger King together afterward. 

 

The school climbing club reminded me of all those Friday nights spent flailing at the bouldering gym with friends and then heading to Las Palmas for mango margaritas. They reminded me that I didn't have much in common with Josh when we loaded up for a multi-month road trip together. And they reminded me of the pure joy of seeing someone accomplish something they thought beyond them. The students made me hopeful that as they graduated and went their disparate ways, that one day they might crawl into a corner booth somewhere and spray about micro crimps or remember airy belay ledges. Those kids made me hopeful that they too will have the collective memories --the transcendent relationships-- that I have had the joy of having. The shared experiences of climbing connects strangers who climbed the same route in the Flatirons and deepens the bonds of friends who shared a remote summit all to themselves. 

 

This is the joy of sharing mountains, so pass it on.

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