Creek Running North

If there is, as some have written persuasively, no real boundary between nature and the human world; if what is and what is not nature are as enmeshed as placenta and uterus, a fractally ramified surface between them with more allowed to pass than is barred passage; if we are wholly part of nature and the distinction between us and nature a metaphoric convenience; if this is true, then we are wilderness.

I do not speak here in vague metaphor. The aortic eddies, the howling wild alveoli, the interstices between long muscle fibers and narrow channels in the lymphatic bayous are wilderness, a complex biome of varied habitats, with browsers and predators making their livings in syncopated balance and imbalance. The fact that the wilderness you are bears as its matrix an organism with a measure of self awareness, while the sentience of matrices of forest or coral reef have not yet been proven conclusively, changes little for the purposes of this discussion.

To wit: we are as divorced from the wilderness inside as from the one outside.

We were not meant to be teleological, but I feel compelled to ascribe purpose to the wilderness inside me — though projection it may be. This wilderness wants to move. It started raining at two this afternoon. I left my desk and went out.

According to one source of information I’ve seen, the average person in the United States walks one and a half miles a day. Assuming this “average” is a median, as seems likely, that means half the people in the United States walk less than a mile and a half a day. Seven miles a day will take you across the country in a year. Increments pile on increments. I cannot imagine failing to walk more than a mile and a half in a day, though I have done just that on more occasions than I can count. Depressed, I find myself divorced from the wilderness that is my body, and the wilderness it lives in. When then is left for me to be? A shade to haunt the spaces between, and there is little sustenance there, so the ghost eats to compensate. Scant comfort.

A mile and a quarter, my little walk in the rain, and up the Filbert Street steps again to the top of Telegraph Hill. I pass a plaque at Sansome and Green: The site of the laboratory in which Philo T. Farnsworth invented the cathode ray tube, one of two grounds zero in the explosion of sedention that now afflicts us. And how appropriate that the other horseman is named “Sprawl.”

Up the steps, 260 vertical feet of them. An older couple, tourists from India, climb ahead of me. “We came to see the parrots!” the woman tells me, smiling from beneath her umbrella. “Yes, we saw the movie and we came to see them here,” adds the man. A handful of green conures fly overhead, but the tourists are unaccustomed to their speed and miss each pass. No matter: they are happy to climb endless steps in the rain, misty views of the Bay growing more grandly gray, the shrieks of wet parrots passing overhead.

I am pleased that I am only a little out of breath at the top. Last night I ran far past my limit, the effort itself filling me, and I tapped the post where last week I flagged after Herculean effort and turned around and ran back. A puny distance, really: the distance the average American walks in a day. Not worth the brag. But it is more than I could run last week.

Consumption marks our relationship to the wild. The wild is commodified. Trees become board feet. Hills become plats. A glint of quartz in a stony cliff face becomes bullion and poison tailings piles. Views that extend a hundred miles become peak use visitor-days. We appraise ourselves in the mirror as through a loupe or transit. We play the numbers. We regard the wilderness within as hostile territory to be colonized, its appetites dammed, its calls for moderation or indulgence ignored. Its hungers are met with convenience or denial, the slow savor of waiting decried. Food is a thing to be consumed, not experienced. We move strapped to treadmills.

Today the ceanothus blooms drip blue shards on wet ground. I have not owned an umbrella in years and do not plan to. I am not made of corn syrup: I will not dissolve. The wild ache of calves still tired from running is sweeter than any fructose as they push me up 260 feet of stairs.