Leave No Trace

Leave No Trace

Start with the classic. Wilderness, though incredibly resilient, is also incredibly vulnerable. Accordingly, it should be treated with care, should be engaged and enjoyed but not abused. Please, travel on durable surfaces, pack out your garbage, and “take only pictures,” i.e. resist the urge to pocket that sweet arrowhead partially hidden in the gravel, to jack that funky elk antler tangled in ferns. And never, repeat never, poo near a water source. You don’t poo in the kitchen sink, do you?

Let’s dive deeper, stretch further. At dusk, when ten million faint sounds—insects, wind, boulders slowly eroding—come together to hum the gentlest hum, do you really need to crank Jethro Tull or the Grateful Dead from your phone’s junky-ass speaker? And having muted that crazed rock ‘n’ roll flutist or incessantly noodling and epically stoned guitarist (much appreciated), do you really need to talk at full volume about, well, anything? Imagine the human voice as a pair of boots. We can stomp or we can tiptoe. Better yet, we can kick the dang stinky clunkers off and stroll around the campsite barefoot, in silence.

There are instances when shutting your trap is merely a beginning, a baseline effort. The mind, dear reader—oh, the chattering, blathering, tail-chasing, relentlessly gerbil-wheel-spinning mind! If you cultivate stillness in the backcountry, you might sense that the outer landscape and the inner landscape are, in fact, of a piece, and that this continuous, binary-transcending environment is (surprise, surprise) incredibly vulnerable. Pay attention. Ask and ask again: Am I gunking up my experience? Am I trashing the mood, the subtle powers of this place? Certain ugly thoughts are far worse than wayward candy wrappers and mislaid Kleenex. Which thoughts are litter—which thoughts pollute—is for you to decide.

Lastly, there’s this. Give up. Accept that leaving no trace is impossible, a bogus dream, a fantasy born of the false notion that humans and the rest of nature are separated, divorced. Existence means impact and impact is fine. That’s not to imply that any impact is fine. It’s just to say that, ultimately, the only path forward for us is to somehow render trace-leaving itself a leave-no-trace practice. So experiment, create. Make your trace a smile sent across the fire, through the shifting screens of smoke, to a sad friend. Make it an oily black sunflower seed held aloft, freely and gladly offered to a hungry chickadee on a subzero morning. Make it a looping sentence, elegant cursive script in the beach’s damp sand, the tide rising—wave after wave after wave—and the fog creeping in. Make it a coyote’s howl against the darkness. Make it a golden larch needle slanting to earth, a crimson maple leaf riding the sky’s empty blue. Make your trace helpful, useful, pretty, good. Make it delicate. Make it mysterious. And if all else fails, return to basics: never, repeat never, poo near a water source. That’s plain shitty.