The Rhythms of the Earth

Beyond "Touching Grass", Part 1

I’m writing this from the city.

I grew up in the suburbs of a great city. I loved going into the city. I loved living in the suburbs. There was always something going on—excitement, adventure, really wild things.

Also the occasional home invasion and serial killer (but thankfully not in the same week), but hey, you take the rough with the smooth. Given that I currently live in a neighborhood filled with predators who don’t give a flying fuck about laws, I hardly feel comfortable complaining that the place where I grew up had its occasional bout of lawlessness (and they were occasional—I mostly lived in safe neighborhoods and went into the high-crime areas recreationally).¹

There are things in the city you can’t get anywhere else (at least, not all in one place): book tours, conventions, film industry junkets, venture capital open mic nights, comedy open mic nights, festivals devoted to the world’s most obscure interests, clothing-optional marathons, astonishing architecture from bygone eras, ethnic foods of all sorts, gatherings of great (or, at least, famous) minds, science museums, cathedrals, auto shows, and Shakespeare-in-the-Park. And this isn’t an exhaustive list.

I don’t go into the city much, anymore. The city was done with me before I was done with it. As a younger Dan I had planned to eventually retire to parts rural, but twists of fate saw me priced out of my longtime home before I’d graduated from my mid-thirties, sending me down a decade-long winding road that ended on the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere—not in a luxurious retirement, but in a lean, sometimes hardscrabble-level struggle for survival.

I wanted a quiet place to write my books and articles, where I wouldn’t be constantly looking over my shoulder for landlords and repo men if the feast-and-famine of freelancing went too long into famine and finally fucked me over.

But I found a lot more.

There is a whole world that lies beyond the simple expedient of “touching grass.” It stretches far into the beating heart of the natural world, and walking in it changes the way you work, the way you think, and your entire understanding of life.

And it lets you see things that you’re generally not allowed (or, in fact, able) to see.

Gone to Pound Sand

My stumble towards the wilderness started with the simple expedient of money:

I didn’t have much, so I needed to move somewhere cheaper.

The solution? A beach house.

And what a view it had!

Okay, not so much a house as an apartment, but hey. It was in an economically depressed little town on the north pacific coast, and there were a lot of other writers there already, many of whom I’d gotten to know through convention bars and internet flame wars.

I’d been hoping that getting away from the hustle-and-bustle of life in the San Francisco Bay Area would give me the elbow room to seriously up my book-and-audiobook production.

And, as if it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, my production went from 1-2 books and a few short stories per year to 4-6 books and a handful of short stories per year. Being around writers, I thought, was the secret. A much lower cost-of-living didn’t hurt, either.

But there was something else at play. Living on the beach, watching the waves, hearing their pounding, being subject to the violent pacific weather (we had several hurricane-force storms per year), provoked something primal deep in my creative soul.

I’d always been a walker—I chalked it up to being a restless soul that couldn’t sit still without a mile or two of strolling every day—but once I got to the beach my walking quickly went to five or six miles per day.

That extra time outside, in the fresh air, in the sun (when it deigned to show its face) changed my rhythms. My sleep schedules shifted, I slept better, I ate a lot less, my mind was clearer, my cluster headaches (a lifelong problem) came less frequently.

Even so, I didn’t really appreciate the extent of the difference until a couple months later when I returned to San Francisco to finish out a couple consulting contracts in person.

Despite now living less than 40 yards from the pounding surf of the Pacific Northwest, and despite staying way up in the hills away from the hustle-and-bustle on my return trip to San Francisco, the city was loud.

Road noise, not wind, filtered through the trees. White noise is white noise, right?

Not really.

The white noise generated by cars on the road isn’t the same as the white noise of the wind and the waves. I could go into the technical details (I’m an audio nerd. I ran a spectrum analysis at the time and I still remember the gist of it), but my limbic system didn’t need to know the technical details to know that there was something wrong.

Clearing the Ground

Over the course of this three-article series, I’m going to be sharing the strange and surprising differences I’ve found between rural life and the city—as well as the ways that cities have changed over the past decade since I left.

Before I get into the meat of things here, though, I should make something plain:

You’re about to be subject to a set of observations about the urban life vs. the rural life, and their valence may lead you to conclude that I’m making a not-so-stealthy case that everyone should live on the land with a minimum of modern technology.

If I may beg your indulgence:

Please, resist that conclusion.

I’m heading somewhere else—and it’s a much more interesting place. Promise.

The Rhythms of Life

All good things—indeed, all things—come to an end, and that includes beach life. After the beach, I went on a bit of an odyssey around the United States, sampling rural life in the North East, briefly in the Midwest, and in the high mountains everywhere (mountains, it turns out, are less expensive than the beach).²

In all these places, I found the same thing:

Life.

Specifically, life of a different sort than you get in the city.³

The throbbing rhythms of the city—from the fantastic nightlife to the crush of rush hour and the vast asphalt wasteland—is made for, and by, machines. It has its upsides, to be sure—upsides I found very appealing as a younger Dan—but those rhythms are fundamentally inhuman.

Life out here is different.

When I walk out of my door in the morning, I’m greeted by animals, trees, wind, and the sun. Wild things. The core of my camp is a thoroughly domesticated space, and is ringed by construction projects past, present, and future, but step one foot outside that small ring of sheds and patio furniture, and you’re in the wild.

And you see things out here that you just don’t see (or don’t notice) in the city.

You see death, every day. Walking through the woods you stumble on the remains of recent cougar and coyote kills. Toodling around camp you sometimes stumble upon the remains of rabbits, pack rats, chipmunks, squirrels, and mice that the cats and dogs have caught and eaten.

You see life, too. You mark time by the blooming of the flowers, the leaf-shapes of the trees, the swarming of the mosquitoes, the smell of wildfires in the air, the color of fur on the rabbits and ermine, who each cycle from winter-white to summer brown every year.

You feel change—the barometric pressure drops and spikes, and you’re mostly outdoors, so the walls of your home don’t insulate you from the ear-popping moodiness of the planet. You smell the rain before it comes. You smell the change in the forest a couple days before a new species comes into flower. You feel the way the textures of the leaves and grasses change as they go from growing to bolting.

Sex is all around you. The cats and livestock come into heat and they copulate and they breed. The wild birds engage in courtship dances over your head. The squirrels chatter with each other in their courtship rituals. You see bird’s nests for everything from the robin to the bald eagle. The dogs wrestle and flirt. You inhale the pollen (which is, after all, plant semen) and you watch the bees and the dragonflies doing their bit to help the plants get it on.

And all of this happens as the planet breathes beneath you and above you, as the clouds dance and swirl and swell and weep.

Being out here goes far beyond “touching grass.” Out here you’re trapped between the eternity of the geology poking up through the earth and weeping fossils and (alas, not very valuable) gemstones at you, and the temporality of the ever-changing sky and the near-eternal stars in the depths beyond it. On that thin layer between you watch the drama of life, love, loss, death, and rebirth play out every day—and you help it along.

Every time you eat a berry, or harvest forage, or cut firewood or lumber, or piss on a bush, or eat an animal, or scatter ashes over the berry patches and gardens, you’re participating in the endless unfolding drama created by the delicate, persistent, and irresistible flow of energy and signal and stuff from sky to earth to sky and back.

And when allow your walls to fall, you start to understand how much of the depression in the world comes from the luxuries we’ve built to insulate us from this world.

The world is rich and bursting with endless detail. After years on the same (relatively) small patch of ground, there are still new things to discover.

And, perhaps most importantly, there are new things to do every day. It’s possible to get bored, but you have to actually work at cultivating a depressed and apathetic state of mind.

All this variety and change means that the act of walking outdoors without your defensive walls deployed is deeply satisfying. It tickles the same part of your brain as does a well-composed symphony, or a top-notch story.

This saturation with complexity makes you a better writer. It makes you a better reader. And it can—if you’re willing to put your focus in the right place—make you a better friend, lover, thinker, and neighbor.

And—the part that came as the greatest surprise to me—it makes life feel meaningful by showing you, day in and day out, how utterly insignificant your efforts are in the face of the towers of eternity carved in stone and wood that surround you on your small patch of Earth. Being reminded every day of the smallness of your life makes it very hard to take bullshit seriously. The urgency of the marketers, the politicos, and the friends who are wrapped up in drama rings as hollow and farcical as does the schedule-related fretting of the White Rabbit from Wonderland. It shows how fake and empty most of it is. And by doing that, it sets you free.

Free to care about the things that matter to you. To care about the people you love—even when “caring” means “letting them go and wreck themselves,” because sometimes loving somebody means honoring their individuality even in its self-destruction, just as you honor the foolishness of the hare that runs in front of the cougar while taking a short cut home.

The world gets on perfectly well without you, so you are free to get on about living, and breathing, and surviving with your hands in the dirt and your head in the clouds, making meaning as you dance, endlessly, with the cosmic forces that make possible the brief, guttering candle of your singular, shining life.

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In the next installment I will take a look at the one phenomenon that unites all the strange forms of dissatisfaction experienced by city-dwellers, as I explore afresh The Mediated Life.

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1. This is not a joke or an exaggeration. I was a teenage boy and had extra testosterone to burn, and, while I couldn’t afford to go skydiving, I could afford to go and socialize with guys on the low end of the local organized crime totem pole.

2. This is true for more than just rent. Non-foraged climate-appropriate food is cheaper in the mountains (presumably because farms are closer), tools and other secondary-market goods tend to be cheaper, and almost everything can be had for trade as well as for cash. The only exception to this is new stuff that has to come in overland (out-of-season produce, electronics, and anything you might buy on Amazon).

3. Note: Throughout this series when I specify “the city” I mean, specifically, “American cities and suburbs built (or rebuilt, or massively expanded) from the post-war era forward.”