Getting Out: My hope is that by telling you about interesting
places to go, you will be inspired to grab the fanny pack and some
comfortable walking shoes and get out there. The exercise is great.
The fresh air is great. But, beyond that, a walk in the woods
offers something greater.
My hope is that by telling you about interesting places to go, you will be inspired to grab the fanny pack and some comfortable walking shoes and get out there. The exercise is great. The fresh air is great. But, beyond that, a walk in the woods offers something greater.
I have always had a near-fanatical quasireligious notion that connecting with nature brings us closer to something transcendent. If I had a smidge of charisma, I would buy a big-top tent, travel from town to town and whip crowds into a nature-revival frenzy. I’d get folks swaying from side to side, arms overhead and singing the glory of nature’s wisdom. I’d spread the word and preach the glory of nature’s wisdom. Hallelujah.
So, I am interested when I find words written by someone who has felt the magic and can express it elegantly. I just finished “A Sense of the World,” a book about a remarkable man. In the first half of the 1800s, James Holman traveled the world alone. He endured frigid conditions and captivity traveling to the furthest reaches of Siberia. In the 1820s, he helped establish a British colony on a small malaria-infested island off the coast of Africa and fought the slave trade there. He visited China, South America, Australia; he hunted elephants in Ceylon and finally circled the globe — a rare feat back then — all unescorted. Holman was totally blind.
How could he do it? How could a blind man travel to such wild places alone? The immensity of the feat is staggering, but equally interesting is how accurately he was able to perceive the world around him. Sound rather than touch — a blind person’s usual means of perception — told Holman a great deal about his surroundings. The tap of his special cane and the echoed response allowed him to sense the location of things around him and navigate smoothly through unfamiliar terrain.
Holman’s methods of compensating for his blindness did not simply restore normal sensory perception. He could clearly sense far more than we who are blessed with sight. I didn’t truly understand that until I read this quote in the afterword of this book:
“On the summit of the precipice, and in the heart of the green woods … there was an intelligence in the winds of the hills, and in the solemn stillness of the buried foliage, that could not be mistaken. It entered into my heart, and I could have wept, not that I did not see, but that I could not portray all that I felt.”
How many of us, with the benefit of all our senses, can ever say we stood “on the summit of a precipice” and perceived “an intelligence in the winds?”
How many of us can say that we “could have wept” for all that we feel in such places?
This is the ultimate experience of travel in the peace and solitude of nature, and it was realized and beautifully expressed by a man who cannot see. His four senses perceived so much more than we are able to with five.
We will continue to journey to wild places because we love it. The fresh air, the beauty and the solitude are there waiting for us. But Holman has inspired me to dust off my senses. The next time I am “on the summit of a precipice,” I will reach out more attentively with all five of my senses and hope to feel as much as this special blind man.
