MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Winter Spring 2020

19 FEET FIRST EDITOR'S MESSAGE Next stop:Adventure. CLINT TRAHAN There’s always been a draw to the wild—an inner yearning, however strong or faint, to swim near waterfalls, walk on beaches, stare at campfires, and climb up mountains just to see what’s there. Perhaps it’s because, for hundreds of thousands of years, humans lived totally in synch with nature as small clans of highly cooperative hunter/forager nomads who raised children communally and had no need for personal material possessions; and thus no sense of class or gender inequality, no wealth, no greed, and no thievery—“The best place for my extra food is in my neighbour’s stomach,” is how the old African saying goes. Those ancient forager relatives of ours also faced no pandemic diseases— those didn’t come until we began living in large, concentrated, stationary “communities” alongside domesticated animals and livestock (these days crammed tight into pens by the thousands). As well, no diabetes or heart disease because there was no sugar and part of being a nomad/forager means a mostly carb-free diet and a lot of walking around. Archaeological evidence (Jared Diamond wrote an extensive article about this in the April 1999 issue of Discover magazine) suggests that nomadic hunter/ forager communities 12,000 years ago may have spent just four hours a day gathering or catching food. Theoretically, that leaves the rest of your life to do things like play, nap, have sex, and work on carving your sickest spear yet, or crafting the dopest loincloth in the clan. It sounds kinda idyllic, doesn’t it? Certainly, a sabre-toothed tiger would sometimes eat your buddy, but is that really any worse than asking people how things are going and every single one of them responding the same way: “Busy… but good!—hoping they sound convincing enough to convince themselves. What if the biggest threat to civilization, is civilization itself, and all these “problems” we’ve been solving with all our progress are ones we came up with ourselves? What if the incredible flurry of inventions and innovations (and the too-common refusal to learn from the subsequent mistakes) is actually just us animal-instinctually knowing that the only way to get back to those napping/ spearing/sexing/play days where we truly were “living our best life!” is to totally sandbag civilization and poison, pillage and piss on planet Earth as hard as hard as possible until we almost completely out own species? Because if that happens (and these days it’s not a huge stretch), those who remain will be awfully close to right back where it all started—foraging, scrounging, wandering the earth… hard reboot, good living. If that’s the case (and even if it’s not), it’s best to keep a full tank of gas in the truck because now is time to run to the hills, get back to your inner nomad and go discover those free, natural places that still possess both the deep power of timelessness and that visceral snap of immediate, momentary perfection. Places where the snow falls and the sun shines and the river roars along—and sabre-toothed tigers are extinct. Go, go, go… and get there as fast as you can, because even if the world doesn’t end in our lifetime, the perspective we find out there in the untamed wild is what’s gonna save it.