Mindfulness: Moonshine Hollow and Thich Nhat Hanh

The locals call it Moonshine Hollow, or Mooner’s Hollow, partly because of the haunting character of the moonlight in this small, isolated valley. It forces you to pay attention to the thousand shades of shadow and light you’d never thought to distinguish before. The phenomenon has something to do with the curvature of the ravine here, as light reflects off stone cliffs above and the lithe, white limbs of sycamore trees below. Whatever accounts for it, Moonshine Hollow is well named. Up from Coonville Creek in St. Francois State Park in southeast Missouri, it lies along the eleven-mile Pike Run backpacking trail. A small trickle of water flows year-round from the base of the cliff where I usually camp. During Prohibition it’s said that bootleggers operated a still in this remote hollow, making hooch, white lightning, or panther’s breath (as it was variously called). Hidden deep in the Ozarks, with cornfields nearby, a steady supply of cold water, and sufficient wood to keep a fire going, it was an ideal site for producing “mountain dew.” In fact, Missouri law still allows its citizens to distill up to two hundred gallons of whiskey a year for personal and family use. All of this lends Moonshine Hollow its unique appeal. What creates the ambience or “sense of place” that we associate with a singular locale? For Moonshine Hollow, it’s a combination of sheltered seclusion, the distinctive play of shadows on a moonlit night, even an edge of lawlessness. It’s a place where time has stopped. It invites you to linger. The moonshiner’s art is a slow and demanding one. The corn has to soak in a wet burlap sack for ten days. The mash has to be fermented with water, yeast, and malt for another ten days or more. Then, in being gently heated over a low fire, the alcohol has to evaporate, passing through a copper coil inside a barrel of cold branch water, dripping leisurely into a stoneware jug. The process can’t be hurried. Nothing should be rushed in Moonshine Hollow.

Solitude: Bell Mountain Wilderness and Søren Kierkegaard

It is an uncommon gift to have a mountain to yourself. Pulling up to the trailhead for the Bell Mountain Wilderness Area, I saw no other vehicles parked there and began to hope for as much. I noticed that the dirt road into the area hadn’t been graded recently. Another good sign was my having to wipe spider webs from my face every hundred yards or so as I hit the trail. Obviously no one had been there for a while. But the real treat was reaching the top of the mountain and finding nothing. A favorite campsite lay empty, nestled in the rocks just above the treetops. From there you can look out onto thousands of acres of oak- and hickory-covered hills to the east. Not a road or a building in sight, nothing but trees. Bell Mountain is one of eight protected wilderness areas in Missouri. It is named after a family that once lived and farmed along its 1,700-foot ridge. I’d gotten a late start that day and the sun was going down by the time I set up camp. But sunlight on a late April afternoon, filtered through the yellow-green growth of new leaves, can be stunning. I sat on a rock ledge, cutting up potatoes, onions, and carrots for mulligan stew, watching shadows creep up the hills across the hollow. Putting the vegetables in a pot, I added fresh basil and rosemary, topped it off with ground beef, and washed it down with a shot of Grand Marnier as night came on. I delight in the solitude of these trips, but I’m not always sworn to a monastic austerity. Bell Mountain is a good place for the study and practice of solitude. I’ve sat there for hours with only the dog beside me, watching red-tailed hawks and turkey vultures soar on thermals rising from the forest below. Now and then you’ll see a lone eagle high overhead, though generally they nest closer to the river. Bald eagles are common in Missouri, especially in winter.

The Risk-Taking Character of Wilderness Reading

Spiritual reading can be dangerous. I’m not talking about the devotional pabulum you find in most religious bookstores, but the truly risky stuff—from Hāfez and Eckhart to Toni Morrison and Oscar Romero. This is especially true of the spiritual “classics,” says theologian David Tracy. They confront us with the disturbing notion that “something else might be the case.” They haunt us with fundamental questions, overthrowing our previous ways of viewing the world. Reading a potentially dangerous book in a landscape perceived to be dangerous can be doubly hazardous. The place heightens the vulnerability occasioned by the text. Challenging books lose their bite when they’re read comfortably at home in a favorite armchair. Their riskiness increases, however, when read by firelight in a forest glade, ten miles from the nearest road. The place where you encounter a book indelibly affects the way you receive it. Claus Westermann read the Psalms in a Russian prison camp, discovering patterns that changed his life as well as his approach to biblical scholarship. Eldridge Cleaver read Thomas Merton in Folsom Prison. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn read Dostoyevsky in a Soviet cancer ward. Karl Marx read the history of capitalism in the elegance of the British Museum. Potentially revolutionary changes occur when people read explosive texts in unsettling places. The stories of the saints are filled with instances of this. Isaac of Nineveh’s world was turned upside down as he read the Scriptures in the desert solitude of the Zagros Mountains in sixth-century Persia. He allegedly made himself blind through his constant pondering of the tear-stained pages. Near the end of his life, Francis of Assisi read the story of Christ’s passion not simply from the pages of the Gospels, but from the huge, split rocks atop Mt. La Verna. He said these cracks had appeared on Good Friday when the stones on Calvary were also rent. He experienced their truth in the opening of wounds in his body through the gift of the stigmata. The mountainous terrain and his body’s interaction with it became active participants in his reading of the text.

Venturing Out: The Irish Wilderness and Columba of Iona

I put in at Greer Crossing, planning to float the twenty-one miles to Riverton over the next three days. Canoeing the Eleven Point River—a National Wild and Scenic Riverway near the Arkansas border—is a quintessential Ozark experience. The stream skirts the western boundary of the Irish Wilderness, a 16,500-acre area of the National Wilderness system. It’s a pocket of dense forest, sparkling creeks, and limestone caves as wild as the wooded glens of Ireland’s Wicklow Mountains. The place abounds with white-tailed deer, bobcats, raccoons, gray foxes, brown trout, and songbirds galore. A Celtic mystery lurks in this secluded Missouri landscape. I like to think of the Irish Wilderness as connecting me with my family roots in Ireland and Cornwall, near Land’s End in southwest England. It takes me back to a spiritual practice of wilderness wandering firmly rooted in the Celtic tradition. The Druids would have loved this part of southern Missouri. A dozen species of oak spread their branches overhead. Colonies of mayapples thrive along the trail. The limestone bluffs above the river are scattered with dolomite crystals. Canoeing downstream, you hear the sound of a beaver tail slapping the water to warn its kits as you round a bend. Ducking under the branches of an overhanging sycamore tree, you’re surprised by a harmless rat snake resting on a limb. With each stroke, the paddle dips into crystal-clear water rising from underground springs. There are times in your life when you realize you need a discipline. You have to decide about where you’re going (or not going). That’s why I’m here—to renew a spiritual regimen in my life, venturing out so as to find my way back in again. Salmon do it instinctively as a part of their life cycle, swimming upstream to their source. Naturalist Freeman House says that humans and salmon are a lot alike: “We are related by virtue of the places to which we choose to return.” I, too, need to revert from time to time to the primeval wonders of great blue herons and hazelnut trees . . . to an untamed Celtic landscape.

The Allure of the Wild: Backpacking as Spiritual Practice

For years i’ve been making solo backpacking trips into the wilderness of the Missouri Ozarks. Leaving on a Friday afternoon, I’ll invariably stuff a copy of one of the spiritual classics into my well-worn Kelty pack. I hike at times with John Ruysbroeck or Hildegard of Bingen, now and then with Rumi or Lao-tzu. Old mountains seem to invite the company of old teachers. Some of the oldest rock on the continent lies in the St. Francois Mountains of southeast Missouri. The creek beds are lined with Precambrian granite and pink rhyolite, rocks over a billion and a half years old. In terrain like this, the earth itself is an ancient teacher, illuminating in unexpected ways the text I bring with me. These trips into backcountry are my way of occasionally retreating like a hermit into an isolated place, receiving spiritual direction from an old master. Without this regular discipline every few months, my life would move off center. Experience in backcountry feeds me like nothing else in my life. I’m fascinated by how the chosen site, the embrace of solitude, and the spiritual guide I happen to take along often have a way of coming together for me. I discover the holy in the smell of pine needles, the dread of gathering storm clouds, and the ache of shoulder muscles at the end of the day. The purpose of this book is to show how wilderness backpacking can be a form of spiritual practice, what Bill Plotkin calls a “soulcraft” exercise. Exposure to the harsh realities and fierce beauties of a world not aimed at my comfort has a way of cutting through the self-absorption of my life. The uncontrolled mystery of nature puts the ego in check and invites the soul back (in more than one way) to the ground of its being. It elicits the soul’s deepest desire, enforces a rigorous discipline, and demands a life marked by activism and resistance. It reminds me, in short, that spiritual practice—far from being anything ethereal—is a highly tactile, embodied, and visceral affair.

Desire: Rockpile Mountain Wilderness and Thomas Traherne

A wilderness place triggers desire in unexpected ways. It plants an itch that can’t easily be satisfied. Take Rockpile Mountain in the Arcadia Valley region of the St. Francois Mountains in southeast Missouri. I’ve hiked its wilderness area numerous times, taking Little Grass Mountain Trail south to hook up with the loop trail that circles from the rocky shut-ins near the mountain’s foot to the strange “rock pile” at its crest. The place awakens desire in me every time I come. It’s nothing remarkable—a 1,305-foot knoll covered by an oak-hickory forest. Its name derives from a circle of blue granite stones atop its ridge. White settlers noticed the oddity in the early nineteenth century. Prior to their arrival, Osage and Illini peoples lived in the area, descendants of earlier Oneonta and Mississippian cultures in central Missouri and eastern Illinois. Whatever purpose it originally served, the place carries a sense of mystery to this day. The stone circle is fifteen feet in diameter. An anvil-shaped rock stands near its center, with two small cedar trees nearby. Archaeologists have excavated similar stone circles in the upper Midwest. They appear to have been ceremonial sites, possibly used by flint knappers in making stone tools or weapons. It is a good place for cutting to the heart of things—for recognizing desire as one of the soul’s hardest disciplines. Giving yourself to desire isn’t an exercise for the faint-hearted. The desert novice who passes through disillusionment is gripped by a hunger for what she has sensed but never seen in the surrounding wilderness. Stripped of grandiosity (her initial confidence in mastering challenges), she’s had a taste of something grander yet. But she lacks proof that the “elusive lion” of her deepest desire was anything more than her imagination. Keeping desire aflame in the absence of what one seeks requires stoutness of heart. It demands the relinquishment of lesser longings as well. A holy desire isn’t a warm feeling that sweeps you off your feet. It is a discipline, something you choose. The greatest desires are beyond fulfillment. They thrive on the wanting itself.

Disillusionment: Laramie Peak and Thérèse of Lisieux

Making mistakes in the spiritual life is an essential part of growth—as important as forest fires, blow-downs, and insects are to the life of a thriving forest. You grow only in being burnt, bent, and bitten. You have to stumble before you can walk. My error this time wasn’t intentional. I saw no signs at the trailhead and didn’t think to ask. I simply hauled my backpack up Laramie Peak in the Medicine Bow Wilderness of eastern Wyoming, planning to spend the night somewhere near the top. Only later did I learn that camping isn’t allowed anywhere on the mountain. Sometimes ignorance is bliss. More often it’s simply dangerous. Yet I had the mountain to myself that night, or I should say that it had me. I was new to backpacking at the time. But I don’t remember ever being so overwhelmed by deep silence and a haunting sense of presence as I was that night at 10,000 feet near the mountain’s peak. Fallen limbs, rock outcroppings, and thick ground cover made it impossible to venture very far off the trail. It was hard even to find a semi-flat piece of ground to sleep on in the dense, moss covered undergrowth. Everything resisted my being there. Still more disturbing was the feeling that I was being watched—studied from beyond the shadows by something I couldn’t see. I’ve seldom felt so ill at ease in wilderness. Something was out there, frightening in its apparent indifference to my well-being. Laramie Peak stands alone on the easternmost edge of the Rocky Mountains. At 10,272 feet, it is smaller than the Colorado fourteeners to the southwest. But it offers an imposing silhouette, jutting up from the northern plains like Mt. Fuji rising above the mountains west of Tokyo. One can see it for miles along Highway I-25 in eastern Wyoming. Nineteenth-century settlers on the Oregon Trail caught sight of it from Scotts Bluff in the Nebraska Territory, 120 miles to the east. It was their first warning of the foreboding mountains that lay ahead.

Holy Folly: Aravaipa Canyon and Thomas Merton

The trip didn’t make sense at the time. Most backpacking trips don’t. There are always more pressing things to do. We didn’t have the time or the money, but we went anyway. Sometimes you just gotta drive to the end of a long dirt road in the middle of the desert and keep walking. When Aravaipa Canyon lies at the end of that road, you know you won’t be disappointed. Mike and I had come to southeastern Arizona to hike the twelve-mile length of the Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness Area. “Laughing Waters” is the name the Apaches gave to the site. The Aravaipa band of the Western Apache lived here in the nineteenth century. They did well at first—hunting deer in the side canyons; gathering saguaro fruit, mesquite beans, and pinyon nuts; catching native fish that thrived in the creek. But by the 1870s, drought drove them out. When they sought relief at Camp Grant a few miles away a Tucson mob organized a massacre that left them decimated. The government relocated the remainder of the tribe in the White Mountain Reservation to the north. These canyon walls, reaching a thousand feet high in places, hold memories of children playing under reddish-brown hoodoos and dark stories etched in the desert varnish of the rock. Today the Bureau of Land Management regulates entry into the canyon, limiting permits to thirty hikers a day at the western entrance. For much of the way you slog through ankle- to knee-deep water, stopping at every bend to marvel at what rises before you. Towering red cliffs, stands of green willows and cottonwoods, jimson weed and desert marigolds, cactuses of every sort. This is a place where humans are outnumbered by bighorn sheep, where poisonous centipedes hide in thick grass, and serpentine side canyons darken ominously in the late afternoon sun. I’ve loved it since I first set eyes on it. At the start of this book I mentioned a night I’d spent alone in the desert near here a few years earlier. What I experienced that night would finally make sense on this subsequent trip into the canyon proper.

Justice: The Meramec River at Times Beach and Mohandas Gandhi

The spring-fed Meramec River wanders for 218 miles through six Missouri counties before it flows into the Mississippi eighteen miles south of St. Louis. It cuts across the northeastern corner of the Ozark Plateau, carving out bluffs of white dolomite limestone along its way. The stream passes by Onondaga Cave, Meramec State Park, and Meramec Caverns, becoming a lazy river fed by smaller tributaries and floated by weekend adventurers. Overhanging sycamores and cottonwoods crowd its banks. Springs and caves invite floaters to tie up their canoes and explore. Mussel beds are plentiful, as are crappie, rainbow trout, and channel cat. The name “Meramec,” in fact, comes from an Algonquin word meaning “ugly fish” or “catfish.” I’ve put the kayak into the water at the river’s Allenton access south of I-44 near Eureka, Missouri. Paddling eight miles downstream, I’ve stopped for the night just past the old Route 66 bridge near Times Beach. Today Times Beach is a ghost town, but it’s still remembered as the site of the worst environmental disaster in Missouri history. In the early 1970s, the country’s largest civilian exposure to dioxin (TCDD) occurred here along the banks of the Meramec. Waste oil containing the toxic chemical used in making Agent Orange was spread on the town streets in order to keep down the dust. The Environmental Protection Agency ended up buying out the entire town and incinerating everything. All that’s left of Times Beach today is what locals refer to as the “town mound,” a long raised embankment of incinerated dirt covered with grass. Since 1999, the site has been turned into Route 66 State Park, commemorating the Mother Road of public highways, begun in 1926. Historic Route 66 was the first of America’s cross-country highways, extending from Chicago to Los Angeles. It crossed the Meramec River at this point. Known as “The Main Street of America,” the road symbolized the nation’s fascination with the automobile and the movement west. “Get your kicks on Route Sixty- Six” crooned Nat King Cole in his R & B classic of the 1940s. Today the old concrete bridge over the river goes nowhere.