5 Hills I Am Willing to Die On

Before I fell in love with my wife, I thought it was okay, noble even, if I died while rock climbing. At least that's what I thought when climbers and alpinists I admired lost their lives in the mountains. "They died doing something they loved," or some nonsense like that. Nowadays, I'd really rather not die doing something so silly. And rock climbing is silly. There are, however, still some hills I am willing to die on.

Though technically a mountain, Lookout is not only a hill I am willing do die on, I'd actually prefer to die there. Not in a "my belayer and I miscommunicated about how I was going to lower from the top of a rock climb" kind of death. Lord, no. I'm thinking more of a, "I have one hour to live so I am going to the top of my favorite mountain in the world to say my final goodbyes" kind of way. Is that morbid? I don't think so. Spread my ashes from these sandstone cliffs, okay? (And pour some out at the Wacissa River back home). 

Don't tell my employer that the coach of their rock climbing team doesn't think so, but it's not. I mean, it definitely is. Rock climbing is in the olympics now. But it shouldn't be. Why? Because rock climbing, at its best, is a mystical union between human and stone; "the freedom of the hills," if you will. It is, at least, an act of rebellion, an eschewing of societal norms and constructs to retreat to the mountains or woods, doing something that has absolutely zero productive value. Grades and points and comps ruin all that. There's a reason John Sherman, who developed bouldering's V-Scale, later lamented grades as "the excrement of rock climbing." I want the kids on my team to fall in love with the activity and, more importantly, the outdoors. That's it. Seeing former students getting out there, sleeping in the dirt, eating Vienna sausages like a dirtbag, and sending the gnar, whatever "the gnar" is for them, is one of the things I'm most proud of. I don't care about winning competitions or "making the playoffs;" I've never even looked at our scores. Leave points and scores to the meat-headed, thick-necked jocks. Go rock climbing for the sake of climbing a rock. 

Relax, e-commuters. I'm talking about six-figure salaried, able-bodied goonies taking the easy way to the top of the MTB trails so they can blast back down. The only acceptable reason to ride an E-bike on trails is if you're eligible to receive Medicare and Social Security from the federal government. Otherwise, learn how to pedal uphill. Or get off and push it, like me. 

Refusing to leash your dog on public trails is anti-social behavior. You are a trail-runner. I am a mountain biker. It is our common interest to be outside. We are responsible to one another. That responsibility is our freedom. To avoid it is to lose our freedom. (Yes, I'm plagiarizing Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed.) We should build a giant crane big enough to hurl all the people who don't leash their dog into the ocean. Simple as that. Keep the dogs. Fling their owners into a deep watery grave. 

Politics and religion. The best burger in town. Hurling selfish dog owners into the sea. "I reserve the right to be wrong about everything." The highlight of my teaching career is a graduating student using this as her senior quote in the yearbook and attributing it to me (I heard it from Will D. Campbell). 

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A Place Called Providence

Providence Canyon, Georgia

Between Chattanooga and my hometown, I drive a long stretch of Highway 27 through the prosaic farmlands of southwest Georgia. In the early 1800s, plantation owners and other farmers clearcut the native forests of Stewart County to grow cotton mostly, also peanuts. Being the big-brained geniuses they were, they failed to consider rain runoff, which cut the soft soil like a hot knife in butter. By the 1850s, a vast network of ditches 3-5 feet deep ran throughout the county. By the end of the nineteenth century, those ditches became gullies, and the gullies became canyons that now descend as deep as 150 feet into the earth.

They call it Providence Canyon. It's a state park now; considered one of Georgia's "seven wonders" with hiking trails, scenic overlooks, and backcountry campsites. All of this, even though there is nothing naturally wonderful about the place. Georgia's "Little Grand Canyon" is the product of human activity: the forced removal of the Muscogee by European settlers, the destruction of native forests, and the short-sighted implementation of unsustainable farming practices. 

It took God, the Everlasting Song of the Universe, eons to carve the many canyons of the world. It took careless Georgians less than a century.

Without getting too deep in the theological weeds, certain reformed protestant traditions understand providence to mean that God governs the course of nature and history down to its minute details. I think this view of things is bogus but it is held by a great many people, both in its hardline Calvinist and slightly softer Augustinian formulations. 

According to this view, God orchestrated (Calvin) or oversaw (Augustine) the Creek Wars of 1812 and 1836, the clear-cutting of native pine forests, and the implementation of unsustainable farming practices fueled by the horrors and human misery of the Atlantic slave trade. And finally, God pushed the rainwaters through the fields in such a way that a canyon worthy of a spaghetti western formed in the coastal plain region of southwest Georgia.

If this view of things is correct, then it would also be true that God breached the human-made earthen work dam on Pennsylvania's south fork of the Little Conemaugh River that killed 2,200 people in 1889. The private owners of the dam even argued in court that the dam's failure was the product of divine providence rather than human negligence, despite overwhelming evidence of the latter. They won. Think about that. Their legal defense was "God did it" and they paid zero dollars in legal compensation for the losses. If folks want to fill up the Sunday morning pews to worship a god like that, I cannot stop them; but I will not. 

It seems much more likely, moral, and coherent that God's initial aim for the world is one of beauty and flourishing for both the human and non-human world. Humans inhabit a space of open possibilities and may accept this aim or reject it. Because God is love and love, by nature is noncontrolling, then God needs humans to actively participate in working towards that aim or expectation of wholeness, order, and flourishing -- what the Hebrew writers called shalom.

Pope Francis wrote in the 2015 encyclical Lautado Si that "The present world system is certainly unsustainable from a number of points of view, for we have stopped thinking about the goals of human activity." He continues, "If we scan the regions of our planet, we immediately see that humanity has disappointed God’s expectations." We often reject the "initial aims" or "goals of human activities" for short-term gain, private interests, and profit margins.  

Hence Providence Canyon, hence the Johnstown Flood, hence a lot of things. 

The walls of Providence Canyon are diminutive compared to the canyons of the Four Corners region. The destruction is also small compared to the man-made disaster of the Johnstown Flood. But Providence Canyon does bear witness to the awful potential of human ignorance and avarice. That's not to say you shouldn't visit it. It is truly something to behold. So go. Hike. Picnic. And when you do, consider the irony of its name because Ignorance and Avarice Canyon State Park doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well.

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