Translator: Helena Bowen Reviewer: Denise RQ
This is a wonderful place to find ourselves inside of,
but we're not supposed to be here.
We spend so much of our time
underneath a ceiling that closes out the sky,
so much time with walls around us,
where you can't smell what's outside,
where the breeze is kept from touching you.
You don't know right now if it's day or night.
It's good to have the shelters, to be underneath a roof sometimes,
but we didn't evolve for this.
We come from a different world.
For most of human evolution, we were in the outside world.
We were beyond these walls.
We were made to be out there, where you can smell what's happening,
where you can see the change of light,
where you can hear the cars outside,
maybe birds, maybe the wind.
You know what happens, we all know what happens when you open the doors.
We open the doors outside, and the world changes.
It becomes possible in a way that just can't happen indoors.
Everything out there is full of potential,
everything out there is full of scents,
full of experience.
You look back at human evolution and sure,
we spent some time in caves,
maybe long enough to paint on the walls
and leave an archaeological record, fire hearth, and stone tools,
but most of those lives were spent out there,
with animals, with weather.
That's how we evolved,
and I look back at the Paleolithic,
when the human brain was actually five percent larger than our brains now,
and I wonder if that five percent isn't us losing our faculties,
us losing access to something so powerful,
something that's not human:
the whole world beyond us.
We can benefit from being in nature, physically.
When you're in a forest,
your immune system is actually boosted by the green.
The sound of running water can lower your heart rate,
can lower blood pressure.
But I'm not really here to talk about the empirical value of nature,
I'm here to talk about the thing itself,
about the visceral experience of opening that door and going outside,
what it's like to be out there beyond the human realm.
(Video) (Running water)
This is my youngest son,
we're in Utah right after a rain,
when those dry arroyos and canyons open up with running water,
and this is what you do, this is the world you see out there.
When it rains, you start moving, you start following that water,
you follow your kid up that drainage,
and look at this place, look how this is designed,
not by human architecture, but by geography, by gravity,
by fluid dynamics,
and it carries you, it sends you out there.
And he wants to go up higher, of course,
to go to the source of where this water is coming form.
Where is the source?
You would go up over this cliff, up into the valleys beyond,
you would go up into the sky, into the clouds.
(Video ends)
That's the thing about being out there: it doesn't end.
There's not a boundary, there's not a place.
You end up with the imaginary lines of the Bureau of Land Management Property,
of private land,
but really out there, there are no boundaries
other than the shape of the boulder in front of you,
other than your foot on the ground.
We learn languages inside, about civility,
we learn languages about economics,
which help us discuss things with each other.
These languages help us relate to each other,
but what about the languages that help us relate to the world?
To a place that is more than human?
What about those languages that tell us how to move on the ground,
how to follow scents; and when I mean scents,
I mean finding a fresh track of a bear on the ground,
and dropping to it on your knees and smelling it
to see if you can pick up that fine, fine scent
that smells like wet grass,
the smell of a bear traveling through.
This is what I'm looking for.
I'm looking for this place that does not smell of us,
this place that smells of the larger world,
of the world that just unfolds in front of you
and keeps on moving, and moving,
and you don't control it.
We don't make it; it makes itself.
A couple weeks ago, I went out backpacking with my older kid, a 12-year-old.
Here was his request, or maybe I should say demand.
He said, "OK, no trails,
no maps, no tent, no stove."
(Laughter)
And that's how we go together.
We do this, we put on packs, and when we went out,
I didn't even know the road network where we were going,
we just went out on a dirt road, drove to this place and that place,
turned off at dusk on a spur road,
and I looked through the trees looking for a little bit of horizon,
so we could park the car some place that we could look out and say,
"OK, this is where we need to come back to."
I love traveling this way.
When we were preparing the imagery beforehand,
the stage manager came up to me and said, "So how do you keep from getting lost?"
and I thought, "I want to get lost."
(Laughter)
I want that sensation of not knowing where I am,
of just everything is fresh, everything is new.
Every next step is a possibility where you have to decide,
you have to make that choice with every step.
When I went out with my 12-year-old,
we just followed animal trails, and we moved through the drainages,
and you make decisions, whereas a trail sends you in one direction.
I'm not saying run off into the wilderness and lose your maps.
You may never come back.
(Laughter)
That may be worth it for that last moment,
but maybe not if there is another thing to do.
(Laughter)
But we're moving slowly.
We're just exploring this place,
stopping at a creek here
where we followed bear tracks down to the creek,
knowing if a bear knows the way through,
then it's going to know the way up the other side.
You learn these things, you learn the language of being out there
that just sends you along where you become part of something else.
Being outside of the human world gives you an access
that maybe we forget.
It gives us a way through.
We dropped onto the ground for lunch,
he put his head on my chest and I remember him singing and singing.
We were in tall grass, and so I took this picture just to remember this moment
of feeling his voice on my chest,
and then I got up, walked over to my pack, looked behind me,
and there was a bear about 20 feet away.
(Laughter)
I think it could hear the singing, but it couldn't see us in the grass
so it was just coming closer to see what was going on.
There was that spectacular moment:
when you're looking right at the bear, and it's looking back at you.
I know you're not supposed to make eye contact
(Laughter)
but sometimes it's rude not to make eye contact!
(Laughter)
It just wouldn't work.
Just that moment of seeing the bear and being able to almost speak to it,
because in the old stories there was a time
when animals and people spoke the same language,
when we were all people, or we were all animals,
and I think we're not that far from it.
You can still run into a bear and be speaking with it.
The bear turned and ran, and I told Jasper, "There's a bear here."
He stood up, and we watched it.
It didn't run too far; it ran maybe another 20 feet, turned around,
and stood on its hind legs just to get a better look at us.
Jasper said, "Can I take a picture of it?"
I said, "We better just put our packs on and keep moving."
(Laughter)
Because the bear is saying something right now.
It's saying, "I'm very interested in you."
Well, we moved out there through this place,
we moved out there in ways that feel so natural,
where Jasper was in charge of the fire,
and over his lifetime he's gone from a bow drill
to a striker with a knife,
and this last trip, he learned how to use a lighter.
(Laughter)
Which was a beautiful moment because he could just--
I remember him finally figuring it out, after I popped off the child restraint.
(Laughter)
And he said, "It's a tool of justice!"
(Laughter)
Yeah, fire!
We did this 1.6 million years ago, we figured it out and it's still exciting.
This is the language of being out there, the language of moving around,
of dropping onto the ground and sleeping right there
because that is the place where you're tired,
because you're scanning the sky for storms,
because you're looking for a flat place on top of a boulder.
You learn how to move around in this landscape.
It shapes you, you bend to it.
We spend so much time making the land adjust to us,
making the world change for what we want.
Going out there and changing for the world is something else,
something that feels much older,
and when you're looking for routes, you find them.
You find spaces, and cracks, and crevices.
You're following geology,
you're following your eye,
you're following the way to move.
Look at this place, look at how this place is shaped.
There aren't trails through this, or railings, or steps.
There are just ways, and you figure it out step by step.
You adjust to this, you adjust yourself to the shape of the earth.
A number of years ago, I went out with Allen Steck,
who is one of the great 20th century mountaineers.
We went into the Grand Canyon for several days, backpacking,
and he was in his 70s at the time.
We moved slowly, because I'm a slow mover out there.
You can tell I'm not an ultra-marathon runner.
(Laughter)
Even though I walk thousands of miles,
it's thousands of slow miles.
(Laughter)
Thousands of miles of sitting on top of boulders,
and watching the light change,
and he and I traveled that way through the canyon.
I remember him yodeling from his time in the Alps.
He just stood there at the head of some canyon yodeling,
and it's echoing everywhere.
He said, "You know, we were so focused on the mountain back then."
Because he did some serious climbs,
climbs that many people had not survived before him,
and he said, "We just didn't take this kind of time.
We missed so much."
He was basically saying, "This is what I always wanted to do.
I didn't want to climb all those mountains;
I wanted to be here, experiencing it in this way."
When you move that slowly, you take it all in,
you take in the whole world.
I go back to the same places over and over again.
I go back in July, I go back in January.
I want to see how the sunrise affects this canyon in a different way every time.
I go out for months, sometimes.
My first book in my 20s was based on four months
that I spent wandering around Canyonlands National Park in the winter,
four months of just route-finding inside and out,
and I learned over the decades this whole landscape
until I didn't carry a map out there.
The cracks were my routes, the map was one to one,
the land itself was the map, I was the map!
I became that place.
I pitched this idea that it's about children,
about taking children out there,
or them taking you out there, as is often the case for me.
But this is also about us, about adults, because we need this too.
We need to travel out there, and we don't have to suffer out there.
When you watch kids, it's not just all blood and guts.
This morning I was watching an ad on TV with my two boys
for Bear Grylls in "Man vs. Wild" and watching him suffer,
and one of my kids said
- I wrote this on my palm to make sure I got it right -
"It's not always that hard.
You don't really need to drink snake piss."
(Laughter)
And it's true!
It doesn't have to be way-the-hell out there.
It can be right here.
It can be just opening the door and walking out of the building.
It's everywhere out there; you don't have to crawl on your knees.
You just have to experience it.
But I do go back to the children.
I go back to my youngest,
when we were on the coast of South Central Alaska.
(Video) (Boy humming)
Craig Childs: Jaden, what are you doing?
Jaden Childs: Humming to make them come out.
CC: To make what come out? JC: The snails.
CC: So you hum and the snails come out of their shells?
JC: Yeah, but it takes an hour to get them to come out.
(Laughter)
(Boy humming) (Video ends)
CC: That's not suffering.
(Laughter)
That's just being out there and understanding.
That's looking for routes.
Routes aren't just what you're walking, they're how you're experiencing the place.
It's out there, it's past this building.
Take off the ceiling, move these walls out.
This is a beautiful spot in here, but out there goes on forever.
It covers the whole planet, fractal mountain ranges and coasts.
Go out there.
When you open the door, you will experience it,
we will know what it's like the second we step out there.
We will know the smell, see clouds, see the sky, and feel the sunlight.
That's all it takes.
Build up that language, enter that world.
When you leave this place, open your senses,
and the doors are all over the place.
Go out there!
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)