A Philosopher and a Lawyer Walk into the Woods

I knew a philosophy and a law student who were good friends from the time they were undergrads into their respective graduate programs. The two men were going to part ways as the philosopher got a teaching position on the other side of the country. The country in question, being Canada, these two young men would mark their parting of ways by enduring the spectacular West Coast Trail on Vancouver Island. At the time you had to arrange travel to one end of the hike and then you spent a week hiking the coast to get to the end of the trail. It is such a national treasure that if you go on this hike, you must even bring plastic bags to pick up and carry your own feces out of the nature reserve. On their return I was at another dreaded social occasion with the two friends who I had previously had no luck finding anything in common with. But here was my chance as I was a seasoned (in my view) young outdoorsman myself. My parents had always taken my by truck and trailer to campsites all across British Columbia and I too loved hiking. When I asked them how their trip was, surely a love of Nature is universal, I felt I did not get an honest answer, what I got in reply was posturing. No sooner had my question left my lips when they both exclaimed how tough and grueling it was. They made it seem like they had been lost in the woods and barely survived at all. The seeming reason for this display was to make it more impressive that the two friends had conquered Nature and returned to tell about it.

I wonder now, if I should not have been as insulted by their posturing as I was. I have learned in my many solo excursions into Nature that even the most casual foray in the woods is a risk that car campers like myself don’t often consider. Let me give you an example from my own experience. Late one summer 2 years ago, I was overwhelmed with the stresses of my life. I equated these stresses, not with the events happening or the way I was dealing with them, but with living in the city. My father was dying and work was really hard to deal with. I thought that if I had escaped the city, even for a night, I could relax my mind and find some sort of peaceful place that would give me the fortitude to tackle my stresses head on.

So I loaded my backpack with supplies enough to hike into a local mountain and spend a night with the trees and the sounds of Nature and my thoughts. Aye there’s the rub: because after all my preparations and after the hike and setting up my campsite and feeding myself, when there was nothing left to do but wait 3–4 hours for darkness, my stresses and worries came back to me. I left the city to try and escape myself, but as they say, “no matter where you go, there you are.”

On top of that, I had new worries to consider. In the woods I felt loneliness as I had no one to talk to. I found myself unable to enjoy Nature as I was distracted my not being able to check my phone every 5 minutes. And I had the epiphany that that everything there was about a city, civilization, I really actually also enjoyed. This was particularly poignant when I thought of my favourite French restaurant as I ate my simple meal of dehydrated food.

When it was finally dark enough that I had to go to bed I got onto the ground and slid inside my sleeping bag inside my bivvy bag. I felt so vulnerable to the elements, to wildlife, or to whatever nefarious souls that were wandering the woods in the middle of the night. At that point I had the feeling of dread that I had made a terrible mistake. There was no way for me to hike in the dark back to my car, I’d probably fall and twist an ankle. So I slept an uneasy sleep, listening to the footsteps of chipmunks which sounded more like cougars. I felt very much humbled by Nature, and I don’t mean this to sound like the lawyer’s and the philosopher’s posturing.

I was well prepared for a night out. Over-prepared actually, you prepare for the worst. If the worst had happened, if I had gotten lost, I had a water filter so I hopefully wouldn’t die of dehydration. I had snacks and food for two days so that would have been a problem. After 40 days unless I learned how to catch the cougar-chipmunks, I would have perished to starvation. My shelter for those 40 days would have been fine, as long as it didn’t get too damaged from wear and tear of being lost in the woods. I had a knife and I had fire making capability, and a simple first aid kit.

But I realize that all of the supplies that I depended on for survival were bought from various outdoor stores. If you are an outdoor enthusiast you really do depend on your gear to survive. None of the things I carried on me or covered my body with could I make myself. We are very fortunate that we have an entire industry that creates these survival products. So if anything were to become damaged or lost, for instance, my water filter, my life would become very difficult in the woods perhaps even shortened.

I’m going to make the bold statement that most people can survive in Nature for 40 days at the most. It would be a miserable 40 days indeed. And of course, there are exceptions, there are people who have trained and prepared for survival in Nature: I know, I have seen all of their YouTube videos. I watched them compulsively trying to glean enough information that I might be able to save myself if I were put in this miserable situation. But cast your mind back to all the stories in the news of people being lost in the woods, how many instances can you recall someone who has lasted more than 40 days.

Usually in our civilized lives Time is always our number one enemy. It is haunting how time and age will consume all of us. We see our parent get old, our children, our peers, even our pets (unless you have a pet tortoise). One day we look in the mirror and we see the face of an adult but still feel the same thoughts as we always have. The fact that we worry more about time killing us than a bear, or a cougar, dirty water, or an infected cut, is a privilege only made possible by beating Nature into submission around us.

It’s frightening and unfortunate how much we depend on this out of control train of global economics for survival of all of us on this planet. The number of ways this system can go wrong and descend us into chaos is staggering. But perhaps the most concerning one, and the subject now, is how we are changing the climate in Nature to make it inhospitable to human life.

Not only that, but I often stop to consider that, like the supplies necessary for survival in the woods, it is absolutely daunting how many things we rely on that would be impossible to source if it weren’t for the global economy. How do you make toothpaste? “Oh that’s okay,” someone says, “you can just use baking soda.” But how in the heck do you make baking soda?! Even a survivalist would admit that it’s one thing to live of the land for a little while but it’s a whole other thing to sustain millions of people day after day.

It’s cruelly ironic that in our leisure we enjoy “surviving” in Nature for leisure and that the actions of our species is making the entire planet more difficult for us to exist. What started off as being about simple survival, from creating the first spark to keep warm, has turned into a global effort to extract every spark out of every material, organic and inorganic, on the planet. The accumulation of all human thought has led to this disaster. It would almost make sense if we were destroying the planet in order that we could all survive the winters and the summers, to survive more than 40 days in Nature. But we’re not, and we may reach a point in time where 8 billion people have to survive 40 days and 40 more and 40 more in an more and more inhospitable Natural world of our making. What then would the philosopher and the lawyer have to brag about with each other.