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Hunting The World

By Ken Wright

Found in: | Outside | Hunting | Rifle |

"Let the beauty we love be what we do. "

- Rumi

"You guys have any luck?"

"Hell, yeah!" I chirped out our window and into theirs.

"I mean, neither of us got an elk. Hell, we didn't even see one, did we?" - Matt shrugged his shoulders and smiled at the three guys dressed in blaze orange vests and caps in the other truck - "but we were still successful."

"How so?" the driver asked, looking quizzical.

"No animals ... but we moved through some lovely country," I answered philosophically. "And, truth be told, isn't that what we're all really hunting for, after all?"

The three guys look at each other, nodding in agreement.

Then the driver looked back, leaning out his window and beaming with new-found understanding.

"Yeah," he said. "I guess you're right."

Yeah. Right.

Truth be told, Matt and I just said, "Nope. No luck," waved, and drove on.

Sometimes, it's just better if people find things by hunting them themselves.

I have long had this peculiar proclivity.

There I am, young and on my own - my friends have taken the road on their bikes - walking the three miles of dying New England railroad line from my house to town. Why? Well, the woods, I guess. And the views of the backsides of apple orchards, especially in the fall. And probably the musky and frog-filled swamps that I didn't know if many others saw, but I wanted to see. So I did.

And in college, on the mill-town coast of New Hampshire, there was out the back door of our apartment an abandoned set of tracks. To head south along them strung together the backsides of a half-dozen brick-built towns until the port city was reached. If I headed the other way, turning left out my backdoor, it was five miles to campus - an easy two-hour walk to class. I often made it.

When I moved between those towns along this personal section of rail-line wilderness, I was following a corridor that cut a gently curving swath through oak and maple forest, and bridged dozens of lazy streams and tidal estuaries. Deer lived there. Ghostly bobcats left lines of prints alongside the rusting rails. Under a particular trestle over a slack river a mile from home I had stashed a fishing pole and a shovel for worm-digging, and was never denied catfish to bring home for dinner.

After college, following a year of earnest effort at the professional life in Boston - I'm quick to admit my deficiencies, and corporate culture is one of them - I moved West to ski bum for a season. Or twenty five. So far.

I'm still living in the Rocky Mountain West thanks in large part to the fifteen-mile section of the Denver and Rio Grande West Rail Road that is etched into the hard-rock meanders of the Fraser River's Tabernash Canyon. In my first several high-country seasons, I got to know the West thoroughly, deeply and intimately by moving, hunting, fishing, and sleeping out a lot along those still-working rails.

Truth be told, I never got an elk there, either - maybe hunting is another personal deficiency - but the fact I'm still out here proves I was successful nonetheless.

I'll skip the literary hunt, and get right to butchering the philosophical prey.

I have a theory: We live in a mediated world.

I don't mean that as analogy or metaphor: I posit that the world we physically inhabit, perceive, act and function within is a manufactured projection that filters for us our experience of the tangible, wild, and self-willing world we were born into and built for.

I further suggest that this mediation is done by the machinery of our Mass Culture, through its physical places, psychic spaces, sensory replacements, and temporal paces. It's how we're raised. It's the way we live. It's our scheduled time. It's what fills our senses. It's what we think about. It's where we're told to go. It's how we get around. Our culture is a machine deliberately designed to hijack our senses, distract our minds, pre-empt our presence, and redirect our attention - to mediate the world.

This process is outlined clearly by the very same diagram I use to illustrate the "communication model" when I teach Introduction to Mass Media: There's a "sender" sending a "message" to a "receiver," but the message must first pass through a "black box," which is the medium - TV, radio, magazine or newspaper, video game, website, etc. And the goal, of course, of any mass medium is to shape the message so as to attract an audience that can then be delivered to a paying customer.

In the case at hand, the mediating "black box" is everything unique to our present Mass Culture: Our comfortable, convenient, climate-controlled houses. Our quick and efficient transportation. Our non-stop omnipresent smorgasbord of stimuli - the aforementioned TV, radio, music, movies, video games, reading material, etc. It's also where we spend our days: our schools and workplaces, neighborhoods and towns and cities. It's how we are delivered our physical needs: food and clothing and shelter. It's even our guiding notions of things to be done: Our careers, routines, vacations, educations, retirement plans, self-improvement programs, and even our fully scheduled jam-packed "normal" days.

And what is this "message" Mass Culture mediates for us?

It is, I propose, nothing less than our physical experience of living in the tangible world. It displaces whatever messages the real Real World is trying to send.

I have kids now. A house to take care of. A job - several of them, actually. With all that, though, it seems I'm a pretty busy guy. I don't have time to wander the tracks much anymore. But that's okay. I, fortunately have other peculiar proclivities to tide me over.

For example, while I will quickly admit to the deficiency of being a shameless and teary-eyed tree hugger, I like to think I am far from hippie, granola, rasta, or "New Ager." Still, I do go barefoot a lot. Around the house. Walking through neighborhoods. Doing errands. Picking up my kids at school. Hiking around the back country. I even climbed a 13,000-foot peak barefoot a couple of summers ago, just to see if I could do it.

I do other stuff, too. I walk to work. To all my works, in fact. When I do have to drive, I always drive with the window down, even in the winter when I have to wear gloves and a hat to keep from growing too numb to feel the wheel. Still, I drive as little as possible, so to cover that middle ground to places too far or urgent to walk to but not so far as to drive, I recently got a cruiser bicycle. You know: one gear, big seat, fat tires, sweeping handlebars, and a frame that makes you sit straight up. I like it because it's less like riding a bike, and more like driving a slow and hulking car, like a convertible 1967 Cadillac Fleetwood or Olds Delta 88.

Well, maybe more like a 1979 Volkswagen Thing, but it's a cool way to get around anyway.

I wonder.

Perhaps there was a time when our lives were unmediated: we walked, and hunted, and fished, and every day was fresh and the world itself constantly unfolded in unpredictable, beautiful ways that filled our hunter's senses and surprised our stalking minds.

There's nothing to wonder about now, though. Our lives are not like that today.

But I have a hypothesis: You don't live a life, you live days. No matter what our Culture attempts to tell you about how to live, your days are the matter that makes your life.

I want, more than anything, to pass this idea on to my kids. But I'm not sure I have to. You see, my son has been showing signs of his own peculiar proclivity: He sleeps out a lot. Every night, basically. And at least once a week, I join him.

Truth be told, sleeping out is another one of my peculiar proclivities, too. I'm proud to say that while I've, of course, slept out in the backcountry, I've also spent nights in the foothills above Boulder, on a town-home porch outside of New York City, on a picnic table on the plains of Saskatchewan, on a park bench in Germany, in the bushes on a common in a Swiss village, and on the ground in the African Kalahari where I found lion tracks outside my tent the next morning.

But with my son on the little deck above our backyard has become my favorite place to sleep out. This is because I'm hoping that by doing this with him, by following his lead, that I won't have to tell him my latest theory: That to have the good days that will comprise a good life, you have to have good moments, because moments are the atomic structure of days. And we always - always - can choose how we move through our moments.

I'd rather not just tell him that because that would be so much more mediation, would it not? I'm thinking that instead, to be successful, maybe that truth ought not be told. Maybe we'll have our best luck if we just hunt for those real moments together.

Ken Wright unmediates his living in Durango.