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| Mott Lake, Pacific Crest Trail/John Muir Trail, California. August 2015 |
Among all of the camp chores, pumping water seems to be the most skillfully avoided. I’m not carrying a water pump, I’m still good from yesterday, I’ll just set my Nalgene out in the rain, I have to go to the bathroom, and we had— you know—chili last night. In contrast, if the question is, who wants to build a fire? or who wants to start making dinner?, there is an emphatically different response.
So why the hesitance?
First, after fifteen miles, two passes, and two thousand feet of
elevation gain, a strained tricep is to be avoided like the plague. Second, if
the air is cold, water is cold. Third, if the air is warm, there is no reason
to drink water when you can be swimming in it. Fourth, we can just pick up
water at the next stream or the next campsite or tomorrow morning or tomorrow
night. It falls from the skies in the Sierras!
Time and time again, we find ourselves eight miles in, low on water,
low on morale, and fully willing to take out that water pump to risk a strained
tricep.
While the hesitance to pump is real (in my experience), pumping water
happens to be one of the most intimate relationships that one can have with the
Earth while out in the wilderness. As many a backpacker will tell you, we are
vastly separated from our wild-born, instinctive selves by the intervention of modern
technology. If we are hungry, we no longer wear elk skins to catch rabbits. If
we are sick, the doctor gives us pills instead of herbs. If we are tired, we
lay down in a bed instead of on the ground. Experiencing any type of intimacy
with the Earth takes man a step closer to our foundations.
To drink the water from the ground is to drink the fruits of the Earth.
It is a direct contact between the natural cycles of geologic breakdown and the
natural cycles of human physiology. Water bubbles up from an underground well,
or it falls from the sky, or it melts from a glacier and flows into a lake and
tumbles into a stream and lands at our feet. Man then drinks it into his blood
and lets it nourish the faculties of his system, and then returns it to the
soil.
No longer do we hunt for food, so the Earth is not producing those
spoils—we are. No longer do we pick roots and herbs from the ground, but rather,
farm them in rows and irrigate them accordingly. The intimacy is lost when
humans use their mechanical hand to manufacture the work of the Earth.
Pumping water brings us back to the cycle of intimacy. We get and then
we give and then we get and then we remember that if we take care of her, she
will take care of us.