On Solitude

In addition to everything else life is a patchwork of small regrets. Last Wednesday we woke up to the first dusting of snow in almost four weeks, and maybe half a foot up high. The night before it hadn’t occurred to me to try to squeeze in a ski at dawn, and so for twenty minutes after waking up I sat nursing my coffee, paralyzed between action and inaction, hesitating to launch into the requisite flurry of activity to get out the door, into the truck, up the hill. I thought about blue winter woods, the last quiet flakes of the storm, and reconnecting with a part of how I am in the world. I thought about my warm house, another cup of coffee, and opening my email. More time passed and then—at some indefinable moment—skiing became no longer possible.

It snowed again two days later, and all day yesterday, so the private ache of those twenty minutes has mostly left me. But sometimes small regrets grow larger with the years. In the winter of 2013 / 2014 I worked as a caretaker at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, a four mile ski down a closed road from Crested Butte, Colorado. I had three neighbors and a girlfriend who visited regularly, but it could be a very real solitude, and was filled with periods of both incident and stillness that had the startling vividness of early adulthood. Yet by conscious choice I didn’t keep a journal, or write very much at all. Eight years out my memories of that time have turned fuzzy or stereotyped: reinforced by photographs, overlaid by fresh impressions of the valley I lived in from trips back in the interim. Loss sneaks up on you.

Why didn’t I write that winter? What I remember telling myself is that I had nothing to say, that the potential of the man-alone-in-nature genre was very much tapped out. George Sibley had written a book about my very position! Instead I read Rick Bass’ Winter, perhaps to set the feet of my decision in concrete, and put myself to things that were the very opposite of staid writerly contemplation. I woke early and skied manically, went to town nearly every day, and applied to grad school. "The thing about this job is that you learn who you are when no one else is watching”, one of my fellow caretakers told me. Sometimes I learned I was someone I could be proud of. Sometimes I learned I was someone who would kill a six pack and watch an entire season of Archer.

I’ve been thinking about this regret, newly raw, as I’ve read Fire Season by Philip Connors. Fire Season is a memoir about Connors’ time as a seasonal firetower lookout in the Gila, and in spite of falling in the long tradition of firetower lit (think Snyder, Kerouac, Abbey), Connors manages to find things worth saying. There’s a scene in the book where he contrasts his role and motivations with those of Continental Divide Trail thru-hikers. “Their challenges are profoundly physical”, he writes. “Mine are existential: time, space, the sweep of geologic epochs written on the view out my windows, which remind me I’m but a mote in the grand saga of Earth’s history.” I think about my own drive towards frantic movement, and I wonder what challenges I was avoiding by embracing it.

Fire Season is now eleven years old, and in the meantime, the geologic epochs seem to have sped up. My old neighbor billy barr has become a sort of climate change folk hero, his weather data a chronicle of the warming Rockies. Connors’ mountain has burned, big and hot; his next two books litanies of regrets and losses. And after two years of a pandemic where isolation has been a health necessity (or at least a social good), the appeal of living alone in the woods has somewhat lessened. There may be kinds of introspection that require you to ruthlessly pare life of its human distractions. There are also kinds of introspection that require community—meanings that can only be made collectively. The dream of solitude has always been a complicated one.