The Voice of One Crying Out of the Wilderness

Were you unwise enough to be in the gentlemen's restroom at the Strawberry Lodge, Strawberry CA, last weekend, you might have been somewhat puzzled if not entirely discombobulated. There you would have witnessed a bedraggled middle aged man muttering endearments and weeping unashamedly as he cast loving glances at the apparently unremarkable porcelain appliances. For those familiar with the wilderness, such behaviour should be entirely explicable. For those less so, the following should count as fair warning.

My wife had casually mentioned the possibility of going on an easy, even leisurely walking trip in a place called Yosemite. Looking at the pictures of the intimidatingly high granite peaks and lakes, I had some doubts about how relaxing such an excursion might be. More alarming still, were the pictures of rugged and hideously well equipped walkers. I then checked out the trails (I’d have much preferred strolls) on Google and the words that popped up in the descriptions most were ‘strenuous’ and ‘demanding.’ I challenged my wife and after a while she conceded that there might be easier places to start. There was this other park, I would absolutely love. It was almost entirely flat; and replete with all the bars, restaurants and modern convenience that my heart could wish for. It was called Emigrant Wilderness and we were leaving the next morning.

The hiking gear had been already ordered, so I couldn’t really back out. I’d have thought that a corkscrew was all the equipment a well-equipped modern hiker could reasonably require. My wife clearly disagreed. There was a vast backpack with oodles of strange straps and pockets; a double sleeping bag in a thing called a ‘compression sack’; a water pump and filter; plastic water bottles (I filled two with a couple of litres of Jim Beam bourbon); and a stove and some little gas cylinders. The last seemed moderately redundant given the number of excellent restaurants apparently boasted by the park. I asked my wife about this and she gave me a weird look.

Amongst the gear were two large plastic barrels. These I was informed were ‘bear canisters’. They didn’t look nearly large enough to trap one, so my initial hypothesis was that you packed the things with some kind of high explosive and lobbed them at any Grizzlies that happened to wander along. Another idea was that you filled them with rocks and dropped them from a great height onto the hairy brutes. Oddly enough, it seems that both these theories were wrong, and that they were to be filled with comestibles and - believe or not - hung from trees. My wife told me that there were, in fact, no Grizzly bears in the area we would camp, but it was best to be on the safe side. I agreed with the latter, and nervously filled a couple more of the water bottles with more bourbon.

The only item I provided was a Rambo-style survival knife. This was twelve-inches of tempered steel complete will a little compass and a sewing kit in the handle. Admittedly, the compass didn’t seem to work and I can’t sew, but the razor sharp blade and serrated back would, I felt, have impressed Bear Grylls and be extremely handy in a bear-related crisis . Laura appeared more horrified than impressed. “What are you going to do with that?” she asked.

“It’s for the wilderness,” I replied. “Some call it hell; I call it home.” I growled these words through clenched teeth doing my best Sylvester Stallone impression. Laura smiled sweetly and promptly confiscated it.

The items packed, we left the Bay Area the next morning and drove for some five hours. We parked at a place called Gianelli’s Cabin and hobbled for a couple of miles downhill (I assumed there would be ski lift, elevator or something to get us back up). The going was tough and my backpack felt extraordinarily heavy. Nevertheless, after some four hours of sheer torture we reached what looked like a pleasant enough lake although it was hard to get a good impression as the sun had long set. No bars were in evidence, but it had been a long walk, it was dark and I was far too tired to investigate. Besides, I discovered that the so-called instant tent was rather less so and was obliged to help erect the damned thing. This involved laying sheets of fabric on the ground, cursing, poking ridiculously small aluminium rods through the sheets, cursing again, pulling the thing upright and then watching it slowly collapse.

Eventually the tent was more or less standing and we crawled inside. Actually, crawled is not quite the right word for what I did. Having an atrocious sense of balance and lacking what my wife calls a ‘core’ (I thought only apples had these), I lurched from foot to foot, muttered obscenities and then violently plunged inside. My wife and small daughter were far more graceful despite fits of giggles at my magnificent performance. The bedding was absurdly uncomfortable and the mattresses so hard that you could use them as chopping boards, but my eyes were closed within minutes.

The night was disturbed by a bear attack. Acutely aware of the danger - I had thought of little else since the trip was proposed and the non-lethal canisters mentioned - and with senses finely attuned to the slightest sound of ursus horribilis, I woke to hear this malevolent slithering sound and noticed the outer cover being furtively pulled away. Not losing my presence of mind, I growled hysterically and beat the sides of the tent. For some unaccountable reason, Laura had refused to return my trusty survival knife and so the savage beast was able to run off without so much as a scratch. My wife awoke at this juncture and was very much less than appreciative. Cynically ignoring my valiant struggle, she muttered that it was simply the wind which pulled the rain fly away and that I should go back to bed and stop making such an infernal racket at once. “Bed,” I laughed bitterly looking at the pathetic excuse for a mattress, but the massive exertions of the day - those seemingly endless couple of miles - paid their toll and I was soon asleep.

Dawn touched the sky with her rosy fingers, but I snoozed on till about midday. The journey had been exhausting and the night deeply troubling. On waking, I crawled painfully out of the tent hoping for a full English breakfast in one of the many local hostelries. I was greeted with a bowl of freeze-dried mush. The packet announced that this delight was Black Bean Curry prepared by a professional cook. This seemed extraordinarily unlikely - it was mush prepared by a sadistic maniac - but my nocturnal struggles had given me a healthy appetite.

After breakfast, came the second horror of the trip. I innocently asked about sanitary matters and was told there wasn’t a bathroom in this particular part of the wilderness. Panic ensued. “No … toilet? No … shower?” I stammered incredulously feeling cold sweat running down my back and a mounting sense of disgust. “What on earth does one do?”

“You squat,” said my wife, with what could be construed as a smirk. She then proffered three strips of toilet paper and pointed grimly at the bear-infested forest.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Englishmen cannot squat especially if blessed with stomachs that have been carefully nurtured with a lifetime of gourmet nosh and untold gallons of fine wine. In my case, there was also the issue of balance. I find staying on my feet a hard enough challenge at the best of times and tumble into ditches with alarmingly improbable regularity.

I shall spare your perhaps delicate sensitivities a detailed depiction of exactly what occurred in the woods that morning. A refined and squeamish Englishman had suddenly been transported into a Boschian hell replete with mosquitoes, horse flies, besmirched granite, frantic digging, and miserable indignity. Suffice it to say that when I returned and my wife pointed to an entry in the wilderness code that said “Leave no trace,” she was greeted with hollow laughter.

It was was at about this time that my wife suffered a shock, which seemed only fair given those I had received. She discovered that all water bottles were filled with Jim Beam and, surprisingly seemed less than pleased. “I thought it better to be safe than sorry. Anyway, we don’t need water,” I explained cheerfully. “We can drink the bourbon straight.” A woman of action and few words, she thrust a filtration pump into my hands and gestured towards the lake.

Now, this was the first time I had seen a lake in the wild, but to my inexperienced eyes the was something slightly wrong. A lake should, I thought, be more than a few inches deep and should definitely not be filled with tadpole-infested mud. This was surely a puddle. Nevertheless, I decided against a confrontation and started to pump for all I was worth. After an hour or so, I had produced a couple of cupfulls of clear water. I drank these as a reward for my exertions and returned bearing the news.

To my surprise, Laura seemed not in the least nonplussed by my discovery. In fact, she was perfectly aware that this was not the lake, but due to my ‘grumbling’ the night before had decided to set up camp here. The real lake was a mile or so further South. She had already broken camp - I’d have broken it on a far more dramatic way - and those instruments of torture, the backpacks, were in a neat if sinister line. I did my utmost to persuade her that as we had experienced the wilderness in all its magnificent, heart-wrenching glory,we should head back to civilization at once. We could savour the memory at our leisure in the nearest bar; we could relish every wonderful second over chilled glasses of chardonnay. It would be such a shame to dilute the sheer intensity of the experience by spending any more time than absolutely necessary on the trail. I enhanced my rhetoric with appeals to the Romantic poets, to Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats. This would evoke “emotions recollected in tranquility, ” I argued. My arguments were cogent, I thought, and surely irresistible.

Moments later we were heading South towards Powell Lake.

Children & Art

Amongst my catalogue of societal offences, surely amongst the most heinous is inflicting your child’s ‘art’ on innocent adults. You go into a presumably intelligent and sensitive doctor’s office and there defiling the otherwise tasteful walls is a picture consisting of splurges of discordant colours and appallingly scribbled lines that represent, according to the proud mother, a ‘space dinosaur’ or, just possibly, a blue sea anemone being savaged by orange vultures. She is not entirely sure, but feels a bizarre obligation to share the wretched thing with her unfortunate patients.

In such circumstances, it is hard to know what constitutes an adequate response. My approach is to quietly ignore the daubs as one might an eructation at a formal dinner party. If pressed, I might sheepishly grin and make appreciative ‘mnnn’ noises. On the one occasion I have been forced to volunteer a more substantial opinion, I was somewhat over the top:

“It puts me in mind of the later works of the great Cy Twombly. The sheer lyric elegance of the purple bit offset by that frenzied orange splurge! The architectonics! Can it be anything else than a subtly ironic analysis of the human condition in and of itself?” This was greeted with a stunned silence as my hostess evidently considered calling in the authorities.

The urge to display one’s offspring’s artistic output should be resisted at all costs. Displaying it is not an act of love; rather, it is soft headed or guilt-ridden romanticism. The child may burst into the world “trailing paths of glory”; however, he does not enter it with a degree in fine arts. Henri Rousseau’s Tigre dans une tempête tropicale may be naive and exude a childlike view of the world, but the artist was 47 years old when he painted it and had years of experience behind him. A fir cone splattered with a dab of blue paint and adorned with a twisted paperclip is not remotely in the same league; it is neither testimony to your child’s innate artistic talents; nor is it evidence of a nascent Picasso or Braque; nor is it a uniquely valuable insight into the profundities of his infant soul. It is simply a fir cone splattered with a dab of blue paint and adorned with a twisted paperclip.

So why display the vile things? To be perfectly honest, you don’t really like little Justin’s garish daubs, but somehow feel duty-bound to treasure them; certainly his poorly paid teacher doesn’t despite describing the works as ‘awesome’ artistic expressions; and, as for Justin, he would willingly swap his entire output of sand encrusted collages and potato prints for a decent Batman poster.

The Fluffies

“Don't mention the 'F word'” was the startling advice I received when I introduced myself to the teacher of a class of 2nd grade children with autism. Brushing aside my indignant protestations, she assured me that it wasn't that 'F word' but – she lowered her voice – something infinitely worse. Glancing nervously at her young charges, she hissed that the word in question was 'Fluffies' and with a somewhat haunted expression returned to her work leaving me a mite baffled.

A somewhat circumspect perusal of the classroom as well as listening to the children and chatting to my fellow para educators eventually dispelled the mystery. It turned out that the Fluffies are creatures from a parallel dimension who entered our universe through a wormhole or rift in the temporal-spatial continuum and were promptly kidnapped by the nefarious Walt Disney Corporation. Introduced to the class by one of the children some two years ago, they have now been elevated to a cult and are driving the teachers to utter distraction. The room was full of Fluffy-related artifacts: there were books outlining their history and adventures, maps, drawings and even a board game.  

As to the exact ontological status of the Fluffies, this is somewhat unclear. For some of the children, they were merely an entertaining way of passing the time; for others, they had assumed an almost religious significance. An incredibly bright eight-year old whispered to me in a deeply sinister undertone, “the teachers don't believe in them, but they are in for a big surprise.” Sensing that this surprise might not be an entirely welcome one, I politely declined the child's invitation to help hack the Walt Disney computer system in an attempt to unleash them. To use David Lewis's terminology, there may be a possible world in which Fluffies exist, but I am damned if I am going to help make it this one.

Resisting the Fluffies was going to be a struggle judging by the quantity of artifacts littering the classroom. As well as histories of the creatures, there were maps of their world, comic book-style drawings, elaborate diagrams of the wormhole through which they had infiltrated our universe and complex plans of some kind of apocalyptic final battle that would ensue once they had been liberated. 

Were the Fluffies harmless and should one resist them? Elaborate fantasy worlds are a not uncommon feature of autism and they function as a kind of comfort blanket. For a mind in which disorder is anathema, the contingent and unpredictable actual universe is a source of constant distress. The solution is to exercise a pseudo divine fiat and create a universe from scratch. Unfortunately, the children in this class were not nascent William Blakes and the elements from which their universe was created were borrowed from popular culture – science fiction films and magazines seemed to be the main sources. There was little that could be described as genuinely enriching in the Fluffy universe; it belonged to the world of day dreams rather than to that of aesthetic creativity.

Within autism there is a centrifugal turning in on one's self and private fantasies assist in this.  Immersing oneself in recondite literature or a public mythology – say, the Homeric universe – is not in itself a solipsistic act as this is part of the common culture. The Odyssey or Joyce's Ulysses may not be common reading for the man on the street or the woman riding the Caltrain, but there are people out there for whom these works are immensely important.  Later, I decided to attempt to confront the Fluffy mythos head on.  I calculated that the story of Perseus and Medusa might fit the bill and gave a highly dramatic rendition of the myth.  Certainly, the children were captivated and their eyes grew rounder and rounder as I acted out the story.  By the time Persius pulls the head of the Gorgon out of its sack to confound Polydectes and his followers, my little audience seemed to be in my hands.  The Fluffies were down, but, as it very quickly transpired, definitely not out.

The head of the Fluffy Cult was absolutely infuriated by my heretical attempt to hijack his followers.  At the end of my story he leapt to feet, ran round the table chanting “The Fluffies are coming … the Fluffies are coming” and then ran out of the classroom before anyone could stop him.  Setting off in hot pursuit, I finally cornered the miniature cult leader by the climbing frame where he sat adding a distinctly  malevolent line to his chant: “The Fluffies are coming … The Fluffies are coming … The Fluffies are coming to get you.”  Fortunately, the day was not especially warm and eventually, the child’s temper tantrum subsided and I was able to cajole him into returning to the warm classroom.

 It seemed from my experiment that fantasy worlds can be subverted to some extent by the introduction of a more robust traditional narrative.  However, it is unwise to underestimate the strength of such fantasies.  A few months later I ran into the class at a riding school where they had been taken for a day’s outing. On asking the teacher about the “you know what's”, she told me that they had finally got on top of the cult and didn’t expect any incidents. I chatted to several of the children and was pleased to note that the “F word" didn’t come up once.  I helped tidy up after the event and was going through the children’s discarded art works (pictures of horses)  and noticed that several had rather familiar riders. One was labelled “Emperor Fluffy riding into battle”.   The war has not yet been won, but a sign of hope might be that as well as the inevitable ray gun, the Emperor was wielding what looked like a small Gorgon's head.

Under the Shadow of this Red Rock

The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.

- Ezra Pound, H. S. Mauberley

A stranger in a strange land, I have recently spent an ungodly amount of time hanging out at Red Rock Café in Mountain View at the very heart of the Silicon Valley. Starved for company during the day, I have taken to eavesdropping on my fellow imbibers as a way of finding some clue as to useful conversational gambits and possibly to gain an insight into the Californian soul. In this last regard, my research has been pretty fruitless - one searches for the essence of the onion by pulling away layers of skin, but find nothing but more skin. However, I have come to one, distinctly alarming conclusion: I am undoubtedly the sanest person here.

Not surprisingly given the area, the conversations are normally depressingly software-related.  For example, It seems that the man on my right is working on 'an awesome user experience'. He repeats this phrase some four or five times in a conversation with what I presume to be a potential client or backer.  I find myself gnashing my teeth and contemplating my study English brogues while considering giving him an experience he won't forget in a hurry.  The man on my left is selling customer relationship software.  Inanities follow inanities and everything is laced with the latest business clichés.

'Awesome' is the vogue word. A couple seem to be getting on rather well behind me and reach the point where the man tells the woman that his wife doesn't understand him.  She grips his hand sympathetically and tells him that his revelation is "an awesome coincidence" because her husband doesn't understand her either.

When the conversation does deviate from software or relationship management of one kind or another, it almost invariably turns to holidays, but this is just as dispiriting. The folk here are on absurdly high salaries and can afford to travel to the most distant and exotic of climes. However, travel seems to bring them little benefit and one is reminded of William Hazlitt's axiom that "It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse".  A man announced that he had 'done' Europe in five days.  I couldn't quite work out exactly what he had done to Europe or what the experience had done to him as his female companion immediately trumped him by saying that she had spent an equally long sojourn doing Europe herself and found it a "romantic, relationship-based culture" and she had just done India too. It seems that the 'vibe had been like awesome".

Is this lack of articulacy testimony to the ineffable substratum of existence?  If rendered speechless  by the exotic, Californians have an inordinate amount to say on the trivial.  Indeed one sometimes feels that Yamamoto Tsunetomo would feel perfectly at home here:

Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall there was this one: "Matters of great concern should be treated lightly." Master lttei commented, "Matters of small concern should be treated seriously."

On the subject of coffee, matters of small concern are treated with immense seriousness and the descriptions by the urns take on the very purplest of hues.  It seems I am drinking something that should "yield an experience reminiscent of key lime pie".   If I bore of this, I could ravish my senses with a brew which provides a "vibrant blueberry and lemony acidity ahead of an earl grey finish" or in another which introduces " a flavour profile of pink lemonade and marzipan".  I find it hard to resist hurling myself on the floor and moaning with orgasmic ecstasy about the awesome user experience I am receiving.

Hamlet could be bounded in as nutshell yet count himself a king of infinite space.  Here, in America on the edge of the Pacific, I am in a land of mind boggling distances and vast immensities, yet in many ways the place seems infinitesimally small.  In a self-proclaimed land of opportunities, those who have reached the top have nothing to spend their cash on..  Buy a Ferrari and spend a few extra weeks in tawdry, glitzy Vegas or Disneyland or escape to an awesome, relationship based culture?   If one is raised in a milieu that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing there seems little to choose and nowhere to go.

The Silicon Valley Way: The Abnegation of Parental Responsibility

For reasons that are all too easy to fathom, Laura, my wife, is being barraged with demands that she brings up her six year old daughter in the true American fashion. A true and dedicated mother – rather like the one true Scotsman - would buy into the North American system and provide her child with a relentless schedule of paid-for activities. No moment should be left idle and none spent simply enjoying her mother's company and taking part in trivial domestic activities like sewing, reading together, cooking, family theatricals and games or just basking in a rich and loving home environment: instead, every single moment should be occupied with gymnastics, ballet, dancing, science and even karate.

It is certainly true that this farming out of childhood has become the norm amongst the citizens of overpaid and overworked Silicon Valley. It is simply what 'they' do and rather than being grounds for self-reproach that one cannot provide a rich and nurturing home environment, the number of activities one has enrolled one's offspring in is something to be positively flaunted. While here on the coast, we might spend our family time catching crab, swimming in the sea, listening to music and dancing, tending the chickens, acting out the death of Caesar or visiting galleries and theaters, parents in the Bay Area spend theirs dropping off their children at their numerous activities. We strive to be as engaged and 'hands on' as possible; we are not hiring others to do all our parenting for us.

This farming out does not conduce to togetherness or shared interests. Indeed, with the parents merely the financial providers of activities, the children become deeply selfish and are merely concerned with keeping up with their peers rather than in engaging in family life. They may or may not become skilled in one or more activity; but they lose the opportunity to form a genuine connection with their parents just as the latter forgo the joys of engaged parenthood. With the bonds of parenthood weakened, the child misses out on learning the life skills, traditions and interests of the older generation. Maybe this education confirms their citizenship of such a rootless place as the Valley of Sand; it does not, however, do much for their humanity. Nor does it make for individuality.

With time with peers completely replacing that with parents, the child is in a shallow, arid environment and fashion becomes king. For instance, as an educator from Britain now involved in the local public school system, I am struck by the contrast between kids in the richer, activity-providing areas and those from areas whose populations have less affluent and more traditional backgrounds. The latter are not merely less spoiled and vapid, but they are less uniform, more self-reliant, and frankly far more interesting.

This is not an argument for home schooling or for not having some extra curricular activities. Rather, it is that the latter should not take precedence over time with parents. There needs to be adequate time for the passing on of parental values and knowledge. Nor is it a crime for a child to have time on her hands and to be forced to entertain herself.

“When in Rome do as the Greeks” says a modern take on an old maxim and we intend to stick to it. The Greeks may not have had the mere technical superiority of their Roman or later day successors, but they were far more cultured in the sense that true Americans like Henry David Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson appreciated. We will continue to give Alina a more hands on upbringing based on our values and knowledge. At a tender age she is developing a love of learning for its own sake. For example, she knows the classical orders of architecture and avidly seeks them out whenever we are in a large city. She knows a fair number of Greek and Roman myths and not merely asks to hear them retold but understands their underlying value. She is starting to comprehend that the distinction between fact and fiction is very much more complex than her peers or even the majority of prosaic adults might suspect. Just recently she sat through a full performance of Hamlet at the RSC theatre in Stratford. Far from being bored by the difficult language, she was absolutely enthralled. We will not sacrifice her interests to the tyranny of the 'they'.

PS There are two reasons for writing the above. First, it is a belief that Laura and I share that it is a mark of good, responsible parents to pass on their interests and knowledge to the children in their care. Second, I love my wife and deeply resent malicious criticism of her love for her children by those who define parenthood in terms that suit their convenience (“a good mother would do X, ., and Z”). Always a dedicated and extremely hard-working mother, Laura suffers hugely from not seeing her sons for more than three years; she is not going to have her upbringing of her much loved daughter questioned. Not only is this painful for someone easily hurt, but it is an intolerable addition of insult to injury.

How do I fit in? Well, the position of a step-father can be an awkward one, but Alina is a delightful child and it is a labor of love rather than a duty to help raise her.   I am honored by the trust Laura has shown in me and do my utmost to be worthy of it. Why am I taking it upon myself to write this? The simple answer is that I as well as being a loving husband I am the official educator in the house – largely thanks to Laura, I have certificates to prove it!