There's a Wilderness Area I've been visiting for over a decade, a beautiful place, with cliffs overlooking a steep forested valley. Sometimes I camp on the cliffs, walk out to watch the sunset, the sunrise, the night's stars spinning slowly. Or I hike down an old road to the river, and spend the day playing in the rocks and pools and waterfalls. The water's clear and cold all year round, and there are few things more satisfying than jumping into a cold deep pool, and then splashing out to dry in the sun on warm rocks.
What I love about this place is that there's nothing but nature upstream - the whole watershed is protected. I've built up an intimate map of this place over the years, still remember my first visits, remember getting lost and finding trails, remember the unknowns and discoveries, remember floods and storms and mist and mornings and seasons, remember cold nights and campfires, hunger and feasts, climbing cliffs and waterfalls, padding barefoot panther-happy over boulders, crow-calling echoes across the valley, remember fields of wildflowers in bloom, lightning and shooting stars across the sky. It's one of the few places i feel perfectly comfortable.
I only come out here every year or two, so each visit is a reminder of who I was and what I was thinking on previous visits. The memories of place trigger memories of self. In younger, more reckless phases, I took great satisfaction from pushing my limits, taking risks - hiking to exhaustion, making jumps I wasn't sure I could make, taking pleasure from the challenges like wood takes from burning. I used to think that surviving these experiences was an affirmation that my existence was worthwhile, that my survival confirmed a beneficient universe. I put my neck against the blade like Abraham did Isaac's. I would not have been able to describe it like this at the time.
I still take risks, but more comfortable ones. There's one jump, over a 30-foot drop, to a large boulder that's broken off from the main cliffs, atilt impending, jutting out over the valley, wind streaming like the prow of a ship. It's worth the jump, and the more challenging return jump, even though it's right close to my boundaries of confidence. I always stop and breathe before jumping, make sure I know I can make it. I haven't missed yet. But am never sure of my next jump.
And admittedly, I love midair, caught in gravity's arc, love the parabola-rush of air past my ears like a deity about to speak, suspended in that long-short moment of flight, attuned to the aftermath, quickfiltering space and distance and body and rock and wind and destination, happily dazedly trapped within my choice, my jump, vulnerable to chance and mistake and weakness, mind flashing on blood and broken bones. There's no good reason to make jumps like this. But I love it. I love moving fast through the river's boulderscape, quick jumps and balances, scouting the route as I move through it, perception reaction cascading, so all that's in my mind is the next step, and everything: the wide cathedral of the sky, the blur green of the valley and each tree within, the vulture slow-whorling overhead, and the precise texture and friction of the rock beneath my foot, the sun-baked austerity of logs worn smooth by floods, sun carrying the inevitability of my next step as it drenches my back, I'm as hot as my next swim, the next pool, water deepdark, reflecting that bright sky, midair again, anticipatory, hit the water and break through, swallowed, transformed, somewhere within the impact a shock of cold, and each time I break the surface and breathe again I'm grateful, glad of my still-beating heart and warm blood, glad of skin and bone and eyes and life, glad of hands and feet to swim and climb out, and take slow warmth from the sun like a lizard, chilled by breezes as I dry, listening to the liquid choral Messiah of water flowing over a thousand rocks.
I did spin fire on the cliffs on this trip, took a thick burning stick from the fire, tied 10ft of p-cord to it, carried it out to the cliffs like a torch, and then spun it out, a wild roaring streak of sparks, small within the wide dark valley, moon cresting over the trees, but bright to me, like a world I'd created, brighter than the stars and warmer than the night. Abraham went up that mountain following God, and I come out to this place seeking something similar, a power within nature that's hard to believe in, living in a city, surrounded by cars and pavement and scientific predictions of environmental collapse.
I want to believe there is a force in nature stronger than all this, all the human wrongness, and over the years, I've found that in this mountain valley. And in myself. I have faith now that I didn't have when I first started coming here. I have confidence in the work I'm doing as an environmentalist that I didn't have when I first started coming here. I don't doubt there are apocalypses ahead, but now I don't doubt nature's resilience, and am grateful that I've found ways to work towards things I believe in. When I was younger, I jumped because I was practicing, because I wanted to make myself stronger, better. Now I jump because I need to, because it gives me strength, because I have faith.
And I spin fire for the same reason.