Dinnertime in the Wild

A hungry prose inspired by the writing of late naturalist Ellen Meloy, and listening to Braiding Sweetgrass by Native American author Robin Wall Kimmerer while I walk along the trail.

(shown here is lunch at Tyndall Creek: Tuna packet in buttery flavor instant mashed potato purée with a spicy sweet chili Dorito crumble)

Sunday June 13th, 2021

Dinner tonight is accompanied by a magnificent view of pine trees and distant dusk-colored mountaintops, birds and marmots bustling about as they join me for our evening meal. As I take a spork-full of dehydrated chicken teriyaki and feed it to my human chompers I start to wonder how I couldn’t feel more estranged from the natural eating habits of the birds and bears and marmots and wildlife all around me. To be human may not be so far removed from the animals, but the way we eat sure seems

to set us apart.

I think to myself, how and when was this ever a chicken? Never have I had to go and wring the neck of a puffy skinny legged awkwardly oversized bird in my life, let alone think about using my jaws to do the job (nor have I ever at a restaurant requested to be taken to the farm where my dinner was raised to understand its living conditions). As I continue to chomp down on orange cubes of “carrot” and still crunchy green peas (yes I am intentionally eating peas), I reminisce on the shape of an actual carrot and the way the pea pod vines I planted last summer climbed their way up my deck railing.

Something is broken when the food comes in a plastic pouch, a freeze-fried far cry from the gift of life it once was. My belly seems full but my spirit is hungry.

No these gifts of nature are certainly a bit removed from my life and my experience in society, with a market economy. It's funny how the nature of an object is so changed by the way it has come into your hands, as a gift or as a commodity.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Native American author Robin Wall Kimmerer explains the indigenous perspective that “gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.”

The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. A gift relationship with nature is a "formal give-and-take that acknowledges our participation in, and dependence upon, natural increase. We tend to respond to nature as a part of ourselves, not a stranger or alien available for exploitation.

How, in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again? I know we cannot all become hunter-gatherers -- the living world could not bear our weight -- but even in a market economy, can we behave "as if" the living world were a gift? We know that appreciation begets abundance. Why should it not be so for Mother Earth, who packs us a lunch every single day?

As hikers, the gifts of the natural earth are pretty obvious and certainly not lost on us. Shade, provided by tall old growth pines, and water of course, which in recent days has still been few and far between, the dwindling Sierra snowpack making some usually flowing creeks into a muddy gurgle. The nighttime sky with stars and meteors that shoot across in white streaks, and the morning birds that sing your weary body out of your sleeping cocoon. Even gravity that holds heavy packs against our shoulders but keeps us on the solid crumbling rock below.

Our reciprocity is to take care of the land we travel through, leaving our footprints mostly along a 1.5ft wide ribbon and taking out all of our trash to leave no trace on this place. To not harm or interfere with the creatures who call this place home as well. In this way were are able to participate and explore, also becoming part of this land.

It may not have seemed like much, or been natural, but the gift of leftover bottom of the bag chili flavored Fritos from my new trail friend sure made my lunch that much better.

(A note that writer Ellen melloy died in 2004, but for me she died today on Sunday June 13th, which is sad because it’s today that I met her as well by listening to her read her collection of essays “Seasons: Desert Sketches” on audiobook)