I am reclining, like a somewhat anorexic seal, on a plinth of speckled pink granite by the Loch Etive foreshore. It is two hours to high tide, but I have portaged my canoe above the high water mark, where she lies inverted like an elongated green turtle, hitched to a birch tree with a Mason knot[1]. It is mid April, the moon is in her first quarter and it is perhaps an hour after sunset, but I can see to write by the archived sunlight of the pine knots blazing on my campfire. It might be about half past nine - I don't know, and don't care, much. Only the natural rhythms - season, sunset, moonstate and tide – matter, because they affect my decisions. Numbers in a glass dial are just a virtual unreality.
And I feel the connectedness out there- from the faint hot-charcoal glow in the west to the sickle in the southern sky. I think of the hard rock beneath me, once a liquid incandescence, flowing, glowing, but now fused with the earth itself. I sense cool sea-scented wind on my face, hear waves on the sea loch in front of me, vaguely sense the birches dancing in the wind at the frontier of my vision. I think of the day, of miles of boot on rock, and nautical miles of varnished maple through saltwater. I feel an ecstatic tiredness.
The pine knots have gone and the darkness steals in.
I fall asleep on the bedrock.
It might be about three in the morning - I don't know, and don't care, much, but I know why I have woken. Once I read about the 'Apache alarm clock' – supposedly the canny brave made sure he got up early for hunting trips by drinking copiously just before hitting the sack. I reflect that this is another primitive skill I have yet to master, and extricate myself from the bivvy bag.
A minute later and I am back in the warm bivvy, gazing up and north at the seven stars of Arctos shining like pinprick holes in a black curtain. I’m very much awake, and I am thinking.
The wilderness experience, like ecology, is about connectedness.
Connectedness has many filaments, the warp and weft linking plants and beasts, hunter and quarry, sea and sky, science and spirit, but the thread I am holding now is the connection between man and land.
It is a connection deeper than we know, living in our complex world of artifice and invention. At the dawn of the Neolithic, ten thousand years ago, man became farmer, and since then man has shaped the land. But before that first plough and that first stock fence, it was the land that shaped man, throughout many millennia of evolutionary change.
Thoreau saw people working ever harder to buy, maintain and improve their homes, and wrote that many men think they own their house, but in reality, the house owns them. With land it is different. Though we may make the error of thinking we own land, neither does it own us. It merely influences us, and its influence, whether directly or through our inherited genes, is deep and subtle. Land moulds us like a parent and changes us like a partner.
The land-as-parent concept can be dangerous - under Hitler and Stalin, millions died for their Vaterland or Rodina - but the idea should not be perverted into nationalism. I might call myself a Scot, but go back further and I’m really an African, and so are you. So what about the land as partner analogy?
It is fashionable to talk of man being divorced from the land or separated from nature. Sure, divorce is messy and makes you poorer, but there is more to it than that. There is a fate worse than divorce.
As a doctor I often see patients who have abusive partners. The striking thing about abusive partners is that they all behave in exactly the same way – it is almost as if they work off a script. They are controlling and possessive, preventing their victim from doing anything that doesn’t involve them. They expect their partner to provide for them constantly, to be always there for them. They can be superficially charming, and are often ‘good people’ outside the abusive relationship. At root they are insecure and dependent on the partner they abuse, and they become overwhelmingly contrite when threatened with her leaving. Sometimes it is too late.
So it is with man and land. Man is the domineering abusive partner. Nearly all land is managed –a euphemism for controlled - in some way, bar a few precious and diminishing outposts of wilderness where land and nature run free. We make our unsustainable demands, and like the abusive partner, one day we will be sorry. We are in urgent need of some serious relationship counselling.
If wilderness is land that shows no imprint of man whatsoever, then we have already blown it – there is no wilderness. Even in the polar regions, the effect of man - climate change and air pollution - can be detected with instruments. Here in Scotland there is certainly no wilderness, only ‘wild country’ – a lesser designation, where the effect of man, like fading bruises on a battered wife, is in some way apparent.
Consider the unstable highland ecosystem. Three hundred years ago, the last Scottish wolf died. Without predation, deer numbers have risen, and in turn this has prevented regeneration of ancient Caledonian pine forest.
So now man is attempting to restore the forest, controlling the deer with fences. But the rare and beautiful capercaillie flies low and hits the fences with bone-breaking force. Our solutions create problems. Giving your partner second-rate first aid is a poor substitute for not hitting her in the first place.
It might be 0630 - I don't know, and don't care, much. I wake to find the eastern flank of my bivvy bag is warm, awash in amber light, while the shadow side is stiffened by a sugar frosting of ice. I get up, set the Trangia for coffee, and scramble over a slippery – I cannot say treacherous, because it looks slippery - scree of boulders and seaweed for a look around.
I stand on the borderland of the foreshore and study the sea, the sky and the land. As if to emphasise the connectedness, the loch is in a reflective mood, and I can see all three without moving my gaze. I look, and listen, and wonder, and consider the promise of the new day.
Abusive partners almost never change their behaviour, and perhaps I should feel pessimistic for the future of man and nature. But those of us who have camped in wild country know how beautiful that relationship can be. If we can see it, so can others.
And like the dawn over Loch Etive, that gives me hope.
[1] Bill Mason, Canadian outdoorsman: ‘I don’t really know any knots. But when it matters, I tie lots of them.’
