View from the Grounds

View from the Grounds
Kurt Hoelting
The “View from the Grounds” appeared in Earth & Spirit: The Spiritual Dimension of the Environmental Crisis edited by Fritz Hull for Continuum Press, Copyright 1993

On a clear day from the Fairweather grounds, off the outer coast of Glacier Bay National Park, I can see an astonishing geophysical display. A hundred and twenty miles to the north looms Mt. St. Elias. At eighteen thousand feet, it is an impressive peak, even at this distance. The St. Elias range drops off into Yakutat Bay and the ecologically rich Yakutat Forelands, hidden on the northeastern horizon. Then the Earth rears back up, revealing the enormous buttress of the Fairweather Range to the east, crowned by fifteen thousand-foot Mt. Fairweather itself. Trailing off to the south, the spiny peaks of Chichagof and Baranof Islands gradually succumb to the curve of the Earth. Nowhere else on the planet does such grandeur pile itself so hard against the edge of the ocean, reaching these dizzying heights within a few miles of tidewater. At intervals I pause in my work, and lifting my gaze I am stunned all over again by the view that confronts me. Gratitude wells up, pushing against the silence of an inarticulate awe. I linger with the gift, letting it sink to my core, then turn again to my work.

On days like today I remember why I’ve come here. The clear sky and gentle swell, the steady slap and thump of blackcod as they are gaffed aboard, all contribute to a mood of pleasant engagement. Yesterday’s nasty weather dissolves in an atmosphere of steady, flowing work and good-natured camaraderie, all spiced by the stupendous view. “This is almost too nice,” I catch myself thinking. And even as I do so, I sense a freshening of the breeze.

A new wave of emotion touches me in the moment I become conscious of the wind, and I look around again, warily this time. Its meaning is not lost on me. The emotion I feel now is tinged with dread. As a commercial fisherman, I know that days of clarity and calm like this one are a rare event. The Gulf of Alaska is preeminently a place of tough, combative weather. The longline fisheries that bring me here take place during the time of year when equinoctial storms pound relentlessly on the gulf. The “mountains” I typically watch from this deck are built of slate gray water.

When a blow sets in, the mood changes fast, and it takes as much energy to stay on my feet as it does to do the work itself. Days are long and bone wearying, sleep short, the work tedious and dangerous. Contact with family and outside news is almost completely suspended. In these conditions, hammered by wind and sea, I sometimes feel marooned on a barren, inhospitable planet. My own inner landscape reflects these fierce contrasts.

As absences grow long, and the weather mean, it takes spiritual discipline to maintain my focus and presence of mind. There is not a season that passes without such moments of desolation, times when I question the sanity of my choice to return here. Experience tells me that the desolation will pass. Yet the question remains. Why do I persist in this work? Why have I relinquished my rights to a career in more comfortable places? In some ways, the impulse that brings me here is no different from the ancient call to the hunt that has captivated the male spirit since the Pleistocene. I can feel it rise in my blood with the spring thaw, with the return of the herring to spawn, with the increased activity and growing anticipation on the docks. As boats gear up, and old crews come back together, the memories of last year’s hardships fade, and a new optimism sets in. The urge to go out one more time becomes irresistible. But I am also driven by less noble impulses: the lure of big money, the aura of competition and conquest, the need to prove myself all over again. There is a lurking desire to pit technology against nature and win. These contradictions of modern life are not the exclusive domain of the city. They dog us to the ends of the Earth. My moods, and my musings, during these long days on the fishing grounds, bounce back and forth between these conflicting impulses; between my desire to embrace the natural world, to drink deep of these primal forces, and my desire for comfortable prosperity; between my desire to be present to this place, and my desire to conquer it; between my wish to honor these wild forces, both within me and around me, and my desire to exploit them for profit.

Every year it is harder for me to hold the contradictions in balance. Each season the doubts increase with my awareness of the damage being done to this part of the Earth’s ecosystem. My forebears in this work did not enter the fishing grounds with the awesome technologies I wield, nor were they prompted by the voracious appetite of a human population run out of control.

Where my predecessors in traditional cultures sought food for their families or villages to tide them through the winter, I am here to replenish my winter bank account, compressing a year’s earnings into a few months. I am catching thousands of times what my personal needs warrant, and few of these fish will find their way to my table. Instead, they will travel through an elaborate processing and marketing system that will eventually carry them around the globe. And where I once could go all day without seeing another boat, I now look out on a horizon that is strewn with longliners and factory trawlers, assaulting not only the fish stocks, but the rich ocean ecosystems that sustain them. My attention ricochets back and forth between the work at hand – the tedium and challenge and exhilaration of this oceangoing craft, and my growing awareness that it is not fun anymore, it’s not working, it can’t go on. Worse yet, I won’t escape this dilemma by going somewhere else. I’m already out on the “edge” of the Last Frontier. This is a painful reckoning, no doubt about it. There is anguish in the thought that I am watching something die; that in my craving to be out here, to be a part of this life, I am inadvertently participating in its demise. I grieve to think that my children may not have a chance to stand here in my place, may not be able to watch this spectacle, or answer this ancient call. But I also know that I am not alone in this grieving.

What I am feeling is rapidly becoming a collective anguish, looming over the full spectrum of livelihoods, from fishing and woodworking to medicine, law, and high finance. There is no place to hide, no reasonable grounds left for denying that an ecological catastrophe of global dimensions is pending. The wounds we have inflicted on the Earth are beginning to gather us into themselves, claiming us as part of the cost. As CNN’s Ted Turner has said, “It’s no fun being rich on a dying planet.”

This is “the pain / of the work / of wrecking the world” that poet Gary Snyder has named so aptly. I am convinced it is a new breed of pain, more virulent than any that has preceded it. Since the dawn of time we have had our private griefs, our train of human sorrows. But the pain I am working with here is different. Because it grows out of unprecedented threats to our planetary life-support systems, it spills over the old ego boundaries. We cannot “resolve” it in therapy, or bury it in the psychic landfills of ever more work and money. We cannot dish it off on bureaucrats and regulators, politicians and special interest groups. We cannot look outside ourselves for the blame. The wounded Earth is itself a colossal mirror, reflecting exactly what we are doing to ourselves. No matter where we look now, we are staring into this mirror. It should not surprise us, then, to find our spirits crying out in grief and rage.

Out here on the grounds, I have plenty of time to ponder these thoughts. No phone is ringing, no TV blaring, no children clamoring for my attention. Just the incessant motion of the boat, the sting of wind and salt spray, the pungent smell of dressed blackcod. It is important to keep my mind on my work. A slack attention can be deadly when the hooks are flying out the chute, or when the strain on the fishing gear grows intense. But the skill required is a mechanical skill, and there are long spaces when I forget myself in my work, and my mind goes where it will. Sometimes lively conversation moves into these spaces. Other times no one speaks for hours, lulled by the relentless progression of work to be performed. Then the mind truly can spring loose. The opportunity for untrammeled thought is a rich by-product of this work. And so I find myself returning to the nagging discomfort in my soul. I wince when it comes, wanting to push it away, and yet knowing I cannot. The very intransigence of the pain begins to open cracks in my thinking. One does not linger with pain indefinitely. Sooner or later I must turn to face it, and when I do, I encounter a fateful choice. Will I face the pain as an enemy or as a friend? Is it an obstacle to be overcome, or a messenger pointing the way I now must go? What are the opportunities embedded in this pain? I am clear that, for me, something profound and important is moving here. I want to hear it, to allow myself to be moved by it. Deep down in my bones, I know that the anguish I feel is a good thing. It is a useful pain. It has my attention. To embrace legitimate anguish is a healing, a cleansing thing. It opens the way to move ahead to a stronger place. And so it is now. Something new is being required of us. A new way of being in the world is beckoning. On the deepest level, this is the message I am receiving from my pain. The Earth itself is speaking through me, and I am being shaped to answer.

Where do I find the wisdom to respond? I know now that the assumptions I brought here have failed. The world is not a package of commodities, a collection of “resources” to be “harvested.” The ocean does not exist for my sake. And I am not apart. This view is deadly precisely because it is “dead.” The world is abundant with life, through and through, far beyond what I can see. The universe is alive! Real wisdom starts with the realization that, as Timothy Weiskel has said, “We cannot survive in a world that we alone can imagine.” A natural world that is reduced to the status of “commodities” is a world of impoverished imagination. It is a “stupid” world. What I see with my human intelligence is only a tiny clearing in the forest of natural phenomenon. It is most remarkable, perhaps, for what it leaves unseen. When I am able to embrace my own immense ignorance about the natural world, to include in the loop that which I cannot myself imagine, I do not demean my intelligence, but elevate it. Only then can I see the world rightly, or wonder well at the mystery of our existence. Only then can I disarm the arrogance of what I think I know. Even here on this far northern ocean I see what this arrogance is costing us. Clearly, a wider field of vision is called for. “Knowledge” must be opened back up to “wisdom,” and wisdom must include not only things yet to be seen, but things forgotten. A configuration of consciousness beckons that is both ancient and new. As always, Gary Snyder has taught me much in thisregard: [The] fundamental myth to which a people subscribe moves at glacial speed but is almost implacable . . . . We stand on the lateral moraine of the glacier eased along by Newton and Descartes. The revivified Goddess Gaia glacier is coming down another valley, from our distant pagan past, and another arm of ice is sliding in from another angle: the no-nonsense meditation view of Buddhism with its emphasis on compassion and insight in an empty universe. Someday they will probably all converge, and yet carry streaks on each section that testify to their place of origin.

I ease the boat ahead into the swell, clearing hooks and gaffing fish aboard, mesmerized by the parade of surprises that the hooks bring with them from the deep. I’m reflecting now on these glacial “streaks” as they have appeared in my own life. Trained in the classical Judeo-Christian tradition at divinity school, I tested the waters of a career in the ministry, then opted for a very different kind of life. My move to the north was a spiritual as well as a geographic leap into uncharted waters. It pushed against caution, and my very real fear of the unknown. But I resisted my impulse to go back, and for that I am grateful.

Coming to Alaska was a turning point, an important fork in the road. I sensed when I came that pieces were missing from my experience that no amount of academic study could supply. I sensed spiritual depths that my own tradition had betrayed, or forgotten. The “side glaciers” needed visiting, and this was as good a place to do that as any. I trusted that in this place, with this work, a neglected part of myself would come forth. Now, as I come around on the gear, mindful of tide and the direction of the swell, I forget that I was ever anywhere else. I know that I have found the convergence of spirit and place that I was seeking.

Ultimately, the power and magic of a place lie not in its particular features, but in our choice to inhabit it, our willingness to truly make it “home.” Strictly speaking, the road could have led anywhere with similar effect. But for me it led here. There is unmistakable beauty in this lonely stretch of ocean. A dark, menacing spirit broods here as well. But the real essence of this place lies in my response to being here, in my capacity to see reflected here a measure of my own inner depth. That is the hardest part of the work, and the most important. What I seek most earnestly is knowledge of the wider, encompassing Nature that contains and upholds my human nature. With naturalist Richard Nelson, I yearn to correct “the accident of being born to a culture that separates nature and home.” To my continuing surprise, that fork in the road has never led back to the highway I left behind. I have learned to love the rhythms of a life that tie me so directly to the seasons, that anchor me in the daily progression of tide and weather, anticipation and fatigue. I have come to know by experience the annual rites of hunting and fishing when the time is right for each, the satisfaction of intense physical work followed by periods of inwardness and rest. I have learned that we do not serve the world more authentically when we confine ourselves to a human social and political arena. We do not escape complicity in the depletion of natural resources by placing ourselves at the far end of the supermarket chain as anonymous consumers. And so I feel a purpose here no less valid than the one I left behind.

Precisely because I am so far from the halls of power, the centers of human culture, I am in a good place to ask the questions that now most need asking. Being in this elemental setting does much to temper the illusion that we control our destiny, that we can remake the world in our own image, with minimal reference to the ecosystems that actually uphold our life. Here I must factor into my queries the danger that lurks in this rising gale, and the fact that I am too far out on the ocean to run for cover. I must take account of the natural fear and wonder that accompanies tempestuous forces.

In the presence of so much grandeur, I see my limitations in sharper relief. This too must be factored into the questions themselves. What is the sustaining value of human culture? What gives it that value? Some places cannot be “sacred” while others are “profane.” New York is not intrinsically less “natural” than the Fairweather Range. The wild forces that confront me here are alive in the city as well. They may be temporarily dormant or diminished in places where we have most crudely left our stamp. We may trick ourselves into thinking that we have banished them from the room. But we cannot. Snyder has observed that “wilderness may temporarily dwindle, but wildness won’t go away. A ghost wilderness hovers over the entire planet: the millions of tiny seeds of the original vegetation are hiding in the mud on the foot of an arctic tern, in the dry desert sands, or in the wind, . . . always preserving the germ.” The Earth is far more patient and resilient than we have allowed ourselves to believe.

We will find a new resonance with the Earth. Only the shape of that resonance is up for grabs. We must still determine whether or not we will remain central players in the life drama of this planet. But the wild seed that is within us will go on. It does not belong to us, and we cannot destroy it. Our primary hope is not in ever larger storehouses of human knowledge, but in the wild corridors of an emerging, ever-renewing, always-sufficient natural world. We can still learn to cooperate with the Earth. Our part does not have to end here. Like the Earth itself, we are products of four billion years of evolution. The memory of that journey is recorded in every cell of our body, as it is in every niche of the created order. That memory will live in us until we are ready to hear its voice again.

That is what I am listening for. What I seek now is the courage to face the contradictions I carry within as I continue on this journey; the mindfulness to notice my fellow travelers, human and nonhuman, and take pleasure in their companionship; the willingness to feel the cold wind and sharp swell coursing through my body. I want to be here. I want my children to carry this precious seed forward. The grief that is in my heart is a messenger from that place of deep yearning. It is not unwelcome. It pulls me toward a future that can still be graced with human presence and wonder, one that is sustained by hope, and as rich with possibility as this very moment itself.

©1993 Continuum Press