Fortuna, Seneca and A Golden Eagle Pass

I drove to the forests of Maine to see if I could shut-up.

I could not.

Torrents of monologue were pouring through my head and would not be damned or re-directed. I was off-balance and ill. I was preoccupied. I needed this vacation.

For days I spent at least 20% of my time looking for keys, money and the flashlight that I misplaced in rotation. I chatted to myself while I searched. It was as if my things were swimming away from me like trout seeking quiet spots amid the splash and roar.

They could not be blamed. They were only doing what I was trying to do . . . find peace.

It had been 19 years since my last solo camping trip. That adventure had been out west where they admire all kinds of independent eccentrics, uncritically and on principle. I traveled for 3 ½ months, lived in my Mitsubishi Gallant and felt pretty cool. New Englander’s love eccentrics too, but new-comer eccentrics, of a certain age, car-camping in national parks, well, somehow it had a whole different ambience.

I had kept everything from my westering days in a small closet designated for that purpose so when I decided to go car camping in Acadia National Park I opened the shrine to see what the mice had left me.

The old Bic lighter still worked. The AA batteries still had some juice. Nineteen year old Sterno still heated coffee and two decade old duct tape still held up make-shift screens in the back windows of the 95 Subaru Legacy I was calling home for this trip. Each item of my earlier adventure was a little artifact, the whole closet of gear, a private shrine to faith in pilgrimage.

Yes, bad things can happen to you when you travel alone and live in a car. People politely and kindly pointed this out to me when they learned of my plan. “It’s not the same world as it was in 1993.” I listened. Their kind caution added to mine.

But what I suspected was that human beings were probably still being human. And that the world is a good place wherever you are until it suddenly becomes a bad place. But that can happen to you at home among family and friends. It is the nature of things. The Romans believed this was a result of the well- endowed, but amoral, goddess Fortuna, who delivered abundance and calamity obliviously and without regard to circumstance or merit, and the philosopher Seneca taught that the key to surviving the very real possibility of disaster with some measure of grace was to practice a profound acceptance of tragedy from the get-go.

Seneca lived at about the time of Christ and he had ample opportunity to practice his own philosophy, living, as he did, under the rule of first Caligula and then Nero.*

The world can become your worst nightmare in a second. Embrace Fortuna, implies Seneca. Let her largesse and destruction be okay with you and, as they alternate in your life, you will be happier for the equanimity you have cultivated.

Off I went with Fortuna in the heavens above me, a mattress in the back of the Legacy, $1165 in cash, my National Parks Golden Eagle Pass and some camping equipment that Norman Rockwell might have found inspiring, or at least Andy Warhol, and a brain so full of talk I’d have left it at home if I could have.

The forest floor in Acadia is strewn with lime colored moss. It flickers in sunlight. You walk cushioned in the woods, as if on 4 inches of foam. The squirrels are little, with big eyes, the darkness utterly black and moonlight splashes white fire in the interstices between branches.

In a waxing moon the clearing where a tree has fallen hosts a pillar of white light as if awaiting a ceremony or an alien landing.

Slowly I began to see and hear. I began to listen to my talk from an inner distance where it was less disruptive, more instructive and, okay, comical. I watched my old hands make coffee in four square feet of lighted surface on a wet wood table where the steam of the thermos was arresting and an ancient pot holder was so lovely I could have wept.

When the sun came out I walked. Banks of golden ferns and small red mushrooms left me momentarily without thought. No commentary was possible. Each pebble, cry of crow, shiver of water, visible pulse in my skinny wrist became a testament to the ephemeral nature of the individual items of life and the dear enduring field of energy that gives, supports and receives back it’s individuals. . . every snowflake, every soul, every word, every moment, I believe.

I had eight days in Acadia plus two days driving on each end. The first and last day there were in full sun. Every other day it rained; no phone, no computer; lots of books and audio books. I watched water sluicing down my car windows abstracting the woods into a bleeding silver, green and black brilliance and I strategized how best to plan my walks to the bathroom and the pros and cons of waiting another 24 hours before taking a 3.5 minute/ $2.00 shower at coin-op. My first adventure there had been accompanied by the sounds of a couple two stalls over having sex.

Surprisingly I had little to say to myself about this.

Last time I car-camped I was 44, cuter and unencumbered with symptoms of aging. At 67 I was often dizzy, off-balance, arthritic, allergic to the purchased food of convenience stores and most restaurants and my back was killing me. I did not feel strong and brave. I felt old and tentative. I had one jarring fall and had to walk two miles bruised and soaked. I talked to myself a lot about that. I wondered if I’d ever be able to give myself this kind of retreat again and whether or not it was doing me any good.

But you know, there were eiders at Seal Cove. I’d never seen them before. When I found them in the field guide I was as happy as I would have been to see an old friend. The water burned platinum, the water fluttered in blues, the water melted amber and jade. Layers of natural art peeled off moment by moment like sheets of acetate, revealing ever new versions of the same subjects before me. It never stopped and it is happening there now without me, the hours washing every subject with new weather and light changing them; not just how they look to an observer but what they are.

The miraculous is unfolding constantly in the wild places we have saved. And the gifts keep swimming in and out of existence in a field of creative lust, even when we cannot be there to see it happen and even if we don’t recognize that the formless ground of existence, the crucible from which this all comes, is an inexhaustible love. That’s my take on it.

Buoyed by this time aside, perhaps my encounter with the all-too-familiar people of my life, the patterns and field of my home can also be glimpsed as new . . . fleeting and more worthy of attention than I have felt them to be. The self-talk can maybe cease, or slow, as a familiar earlobe comes into view, or a patch of sunny dust on a decrepit table, a cloud tumbling in transition outside my same old window. We have been dust. We will be dust. For a few moments we have choice, and a voice.

I’m home again, temporary recipient of Fortuna’s abundance; quieter, happier for the existence of a few dozen square miles of natural beauty mercifully preserved for us. Here is a poem by Mary Oliver that illustrates what I feel about our need for wilderness and large protected natural areas as a base for human sanity. We don’t need to live there. We can't. We need to visit. We do need to know that the wilderness exists.

*Consolations of Philosophy, de Botton, Alain, 1st Vintage International ed., New York: Vintage Books, 2001,c2000.

Spring

By Mary Oliver


Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring
down the mountain.

All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring
I think of her,

her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue
like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.

There is only one question:
how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge
to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.

Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its cities,
it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her –
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.