Solitude as Superlative

When the Rocky Mountain sky turns, your mood retreats into the gray along with it. Growing darker by the minute. Then the flash-crack of lightning and the menacing, mournful artillery roll of thunder. Then another, and more. Shock waves throb through storm-smelling air. One thousand one, one thousand two . . . Boom. The first stir of breeze is backed by gusts, then rain, fat slanting pellets that bounce off logs and dimple the rumps of nervous horses.

Park Ranger Dave Phillips, his head turned against the wind, tugs the last cinch and leads out from the trail head on a huge white mount named Traveler, the same as Robert E. Lee’s steed. Behind him, laden with squeaking packs: a mule called Moose and a purposeful horse named Brownie. You follow on an oversized strawberry roan with the name Jackpot.

Jackpot flinches at the lightning flashes. But not as much as you do. Rain gains intensity and rattles off your hat and drips cold down your neck, and you try to reaffirm your purpose. Which is, to get away from it all. To get away as far as you can from the everyday, and to ponder why it is that so many of us share this urge.

“I need to get away.” You hear it from friends, acquaintances and strangers, words spoken in shorthand as if to encompass a lot of other things about life.

So now you are riding out on this oversized horse, climbing up this grease-slick, muddy trail through this ridiculous weather, bound for the place that is farther away from a road than anywhere in the contiguous 48 states: the back country of southeastern Yellowstone Park.

Definitions are tricky and arbitrary. But at the end of this century, putting maximum distance between you and a road offers a plausible vantage for an inquiry into getting-awayness. Even if, as it turns out, you cannot get very many miles away from a road after all. And even if the quest seems more dubious now than it did when you climbed out of the warm security of a road and car a while ago to meet the mountainous dark fury bearing down from the sky. One thous . . . Boom.

A Life Forsaken but Not Forgotten

Getting away is an escape, but perhaps also a return.

For the urbanite, leaving the gliding surfaces of asphalt for the stumbling roughness of the mountain trail creates the sensation of departing the familiar and entering the strange. But humans have roots out here. For a long time this was home, storms and all. A strange place, yes, but forgotten, no.

In trying to explain the prevalent anxieties that swirl and fizz in our heads, Sigmund Freud’s intellectual heirs now look back to the human past. Their branch of study is called evolutionary psychology, and the premise is this: For a few million years, Homo sapiens and their progenitors evolved to meet certain kinds of life challenges and stimuli. The days and seasons had immutable rhythms.

Then, in just the last 0.005% or so of our evolutionary history, humans overcame most of those challenges. In so doing, however, they altered nature’s rhythms--gathering and preparing food no longer remains the center of the day. They established life with an unfamiliar array of complexities and stimulations. To wit, civilization.

In short, natural selection shaped us to succeed at certain things at a regular tempo. Now we require of ourselves different things entirely and at an intensified cadence. We’re fish out of water, so to speak.

The result, anxiety.

The logic of evolutionary psychology rather neatly explains today’s pervasive discontent: that somehow satisfaction refuses to keep pace with progress and material gain. Instead, progress creates alienation and mental illness along with comforts and possessions.

The consequences can be measured as well as postulated.

Richard Wright, author of the pioneering book “The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life,” reports that villagers in rural Samoa produce extraordinarily low levels of a biochemical called cortisol, a by-product of anxiety.

Which is not to advocate a blind leap back to the Stone Age. Thinkers like Wright suggest only that we not overlook, as the cliche might have it, who we were as we try to understand who we really are.

“Though evolutionary psychologists would love somehow to visit the ancestral environment, few would buy a one-way ticket,” Wright put it in a 1995 essay. “Still, to say we wouldn’t want to live in our primitive past isn’t to say we can’t learn from it. It is, after all, the world in which our currently malfunctioning minds were designed to work like a Swiss watch.”

Indeed.

A Voyage Into the Present

Flight versus fight. Wasn’t that the choice of the cavemen back in those elementary days? Well, what about fright?

From time to time as the trail climbs easily eastward into the lodgepole pines, Phillips reins Traveler to a halt. Through sheets of rain, he looks you over as if to suggest, well you wanted to get away to the ancestral past. This what you had in mind? Why, a storm like this is nothing, he says. How about the time the lightning was so close the trees exploded and wood slivers sang through the air like shrapnel?

Flash . . . boom.

The hides of the horses tremble. The trail continues, past a thicket of ripening blueberries, now over an exposed ridge and then down, steeply, into a bubbling thermal basin. Below, steam rises like campfire smoke. Above, clouds tear along, shredding themselves against distant ridgelines. The pack train spreads out, and sometimes you fall out of sight of the others. Alone.

You recall the words of the wanderer Edward Abbey: “Are men no better than sheep or cattle that they must live always in view of one another in order to feel a sense of safety?”

Probably.

You nudge Jackpot onward with your heels. A polite suggestion, not an order. But the horse keeps to his own plodding gait. He’s walked 7,000 miles in the back country. Who are you to argue?

Getting away is a quest in which you define what you seek by what you leave behind. Stop looking over your shoulder and worrying about what you did last week. Quit fretting about the tomorrow and all that work stacking up while you are away. Recall life before the advent of the monthly bank statement and the palm-top daily scheduler.

Now you find yourself deliciously in the present.

Sprays of lightning and fields of rain-glistening goldenrod--not to mention the pinch of the saddle--tend to keep you here.

Only later will you reflect about how little of your everyday life is spent entirely in the moment. It is an old realization, easy to forget, one of the evolutionary reference points that reconnects us to who we are.

Difficult to Escape Civilization

Although roads can be escaped here, Yellowstone is too popular to be a getaway from people.

This southeastern quadrant, free of snow for only a few months each season, is not the most heavily used back country in the park. Not the most dramatically scenic. But an endless trickle of hikers pound the trail anyway. As usual in such circumstances, some are garrulous while others pass by silently as if ignoring you means you haven’t intruded on their solitude.

Tonight at the Heart Lake back country ranger cabin, a retired couple who are Park Service volunteers listen on the portable radio to news of the progressing scandal in Washington.

Sodden backpackers pause here. They are tired and their assigned campsite is miles away. They ask, could they please camp closer? Two-way radios crackle. Approval is given for a nearby site. Paperwork is amended and initialed.

A wet saddle and sloppy trail, it seems, are no guarantee of getting you very far away from the Electronic Age.

Later, a grizzly bear is sighted through binoculars, rooting across a distant hillside.

That’s better, you say.

For Rangers, Pay Comes in Sunsets

Dawn brings the mountain music of bugling elk and the far-off singsong of wolves. Then with the sun, thunderstorms rise again over the closest ridge with ear-splitting force. Rain falls steady and cold.

Phillips is 52, a native of Montclair, N.J. He began seasonal work in Yellowstone in 1967 and is now an assistant subdistrict ranger for this section of the park. His wife works at the South Entrance. Before, they lived in Seal Beach, where Phillips toured inner-city schools with a live cow on behalf of the California Dairy Council. He tried to help urban youngsters understand where their food came from.

For nine summers, he lived and raised a family as a back country ranger. Where does he go now to get away?

“Here.”

There is a saying among rangers: Pay comes in sunsets.

Today’s route follows a patrol trail that bisects the grassy Heart Lake basin, then angles south down Heart Creek to the confluence of the Snake River, just below its mountain headwaters.

The horses pick their river crossings carefully, hooves making a glummph sound through the fast water.

In a thicket of lodgepole, two bull moose with heavy racks and shimmering wet hides prance alongside nervously as we pass. Jackpot, at 1,200 pounds, is larger than these 900-pound moose but also uneasy at the encounter. Later, through the rain, a lyrical babble-song rises from a mating pair of trumpeter swans, and, once, the lonely crying of a loon resounds through the trees. A bald eagle stands silent sentry on a snag.

An Inventory of Assorted Threats

Ten miles to go today.

Up the Snake River Canyon, climbing on the Continental Divide Trail, the horses stumble and lunge over ground now supersaturated and threatening to give way underfoot. You are supersaturated too, doused to the skin.

As the canyon narrows, the trail rises in switchbacks. Soon the river is hundreds of feet below--almost straight below. A free fall.

You are quite riveted on this present. Flash . . . boom. Stumble, lunge. Drip.

Phillips is from a school of outdoor guides that believes in the enhancement power of high tension. Under other circumstances, he would be the fellow to interrupt a group relaxing around a campfire by suddenly freezing his movement and whispering “Shush!” He would do this just for the fun of watching everyone’s eyes widen.

So today, calmly and one by one, he manages to inventory the assorted threats to your well-being, just in case you haven’t yet dwelled on the perils of getting away.

On ridges and in the open, lightning can take you down. Through the great ghost forests, where Yellowstone’s fires burned one-third of the park 10 years ago, wind gusts can send the skeletons of pines crashing on you. And because the dead forests no longer hold the soil, the cliffhanging trail is soupy and can give way in a fatal glissade of mud, horseflesh and you.

The horses have taken up the anxiety game too. Every so often, one of them panics and hurtles forward skittishly.

Phillips carries a .45 automatic to enforce park rules on people. He carries nothing in the event of encountering a grizzly bear who might wish to claim its favored place atop the food chain. No shotgun. No pepper spray.

“You see? See?” Phillips says as he tight-reins the frightened Traveler under control again. “He’s been charged five times by bears. Everything he looks at now has fur and teeth. . . .

“There’s a big difference,” he says with a grin, “between ‘wildlife’ as one word and ‘wild life’ as two words. Isn’t there?”

You do not ask how many times Jackpot has been charged on the trail. That’s one of those numbers more disconcerting than enlightening--like knowing exactly how many cars behind you on the freeway have faulty brakes.

But you do let slip a question. So, what is likely to happen when a bear charges a horse?

“Anything is likely to happen,” Phillips replies, grinning again.

Thus, another essential element to getting away and visiting your ancestral self: The uncertainty of the experience.

How much uncertainty and in what form are matters of taste. Those who unstrap their beepers and cell phones and enter a spiritual retreat sometimes describe their own kind of tingling uncertainty arising from self-discovery and fellowship in the close presence of the Divine.

In fact, religious retreats and back country outings are not entirely dissimilar, which may account for today’s convergence of spiritual and environmental thinking.

“The form is different but the function the same,” says Bill Lesher, president emeritus of the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. “Both cut the link with daily routine and place us in the present. Both provide elements of danger and the unexpected. . . . Retreats open the door to your inside self. And the biggest threat to anyone is meaning: God. Does life have any meaning?”

‘We Are Part of the Natural World’

Long before evolutionary psychology was a science, it was a philosophy. “I went to the woods,” wrote Henry Thoreau, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Thoreau, both genius and crackpot, is sometimes pigeonholed, and diminished, as an antisocial nature mystic. The same with other important conservationists he inspired, like Edward Abbey and Joseph Wood Krutch.

However, those familiar with the ideas of these writers, both their friends and foes, understand them to be humanists first: believing that the natural world provides vital sustenance for human satisfaction and survival.

In his book “Hermits: The Insights of Solitude,” Peter France argues, “We are part of the natural world and should allow our personalities to be shaped by natural forces.”

Not that there aren’t anti-humanist extremists who espouse the same thinking. No better evidence of this exists than in Unabomber Theodore J. Kaczynski. In his so-called manifesto, he attributed “the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved.”

To this, Wright, the student of evolutionary psychology, responded: “There’s a little bit of the Unabomber in most of us.”

The Spot Farthest From a Road

Dawn, 40 degrees. Wisps of ground fog radiate from a meadow where a great gray owl cruises silently for breakfast.

Fresh wolf tracks almost as big as an outstretched hand are freshly cast in the mud as Phillips leads east, climbing up to the rolling hills and Oz-like flowered meadows of the 9,600-foot Two Oceans Plateau. Sun fills the sky behind cotton ball clouds. The air is thin and restless.

The plateau ends at a dizzying fall-away escarpment.

There it is, spread below in a steep-walled river canyon: the Thorofare region of Yellowstone, near the convergence of the Yellowstone River and Thorofare Creek. The spot farthest from a road in the Lower 48. North 44 degrees, 11 minutes, 28.6 seconds; west 110 degrees, 14 minutes and 48.2 seconds.

Exactly how far from a road?

As the crow flies, 20.3 miles. Meaning that Americans can get no farther away from cars anywhere in the country than the distance from the Los Angeles Civic Center to LAX.

The calculation was done by Cartographic Technologies Inc. in Brattleboro, Vt. Their methodology was simple. Using government inventories of every road in the country, “we drew all the roads so that they had an actual width of 10 miles,” explains cartographer Susan Seymour. “Any area that was not within 10 miles of a road would show as a white area on the map.”

The white showing the greatest point-to-point distance between roads was here at the southeast edge of the park, with the Yellowstone back country and national forest wilderness providing buffers.

Cartographic Technologies was hired to do its study by Land Rover. The company wanted to know the farthest place from a road to commercialize the achievement of driving its 4-wheel-drives there.

But cars are not permitted in parks or designated wilderness, so Land Rover recalibrated its request. By measuring the distance both from roads and human settlements, it found the “loneliest” place in America in the Escalante region of southern Utah, where cars are not prohibited.

This impulse to want to drive as far as possible from a road worries Phillips. Will horseback campers and backpackers also find the novelty irresistible? Will today’s story about the Thorofare throw out of balance the natural flow of visitors to the park?

You wonder. Maybe not. For one thing, the straight-line 20.3-mile measure really translates into 35 miles by trail, one way. En route one encounters not solitude but fishing camps maintained by regional outfitters. Then on arrival, a concentration of law enforcement awaits visitors. Three government patrol cabins are located within two miles, one belonging to the Park Service, another to the Forest Service and the last to Wyoming Game and Fish.

No place for mischief, this roadless remote.

Wolves Retake Their Ancestral Lands

Two biologists arrive for dinner. Traveling by horse and under the canopies of vast cowboy hats, Douglas Smith and Kerry Murphy are studying the park’s newest inhabitants, wolves.

Extirpated in the 1930s, the gray wolf has been given a second chance here. In 1995 and 1996, 31 wolves from Canada were released into the park. Now there are perhaps 100, and they are spilling across the boundaries of Yellowstone, rekindling old feuds with ranchers and hunting outfitters.

Using a portable receiver with a hand-held antenna, Smith and Murphy are tracking packs from the signals of radio collars. Today they located the skeletons of a female and her pup. Smith believes the two were chased by other wolves into an unfamiliar canyon, where their movements triggered an avalanche that buried them.

“Want to see the skulls?” he asks.

The heads of the animals, unwrapped from plastic bags, crawl with maggots. The incisors are gleaming white and 2 inches long. The radio collar from the mother wolf still sends beeping signals.

Fossil evidence in Asia indicates that early humanoids shared food and space with wolves as far back as 500,000 years. Their reappearance in Yellowstone adds a decidedly ancestral feel to the landscape, although the wolf is oblivious to the fact that it has enemies as well as friends among people.

Smith tells of a benefactor of the wolf reintroduction program who called him in a rage one morning from her ranchette just north of the park boundary. Wolves had killed her dog. “Do something!” she demanded.

Leaving Nature for the Unnatural

Going home today: The trail over Big Game Ridge rises to 10,965 feet. Overhead, the glint of jetliners. Underfoot, the fresh tracks and spoor of a small grizzly.

From up here, where the horizon is so vast that it takes on the curve of the planet, it is possible to gaze upon much of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.

By some measures, this is a vast wilderness. In 1991, a single-engine plane, painted red, went down in these mountains. The wreckage was not found for five years.

But there is no illusion of boundlessness. If you waited on this ridge until nightfall, you would see headlights on the park highway, the glow of villages on Lake Yellowstone, the dazzling lights of tourism from Jackson Hole, Wyo. The Park Service reports receiving 911 calls via cellular phones from footsore backpackers who cannot find their campsites on the trail.

Still, you can get no farther away. This will have to do for reawakening your ancestral self.

In small ways, it does. You find yourself aware of the direction of the wind at all times. Subconsciously you calculate whether you are heading into the breeze and might surprise a sleeping grizzly that has no opportunity to catch your scent.

Where did that instinct come from, if not from the genes?

The trail winds down through more ghost forests, the skeletons of trees creaking in the afternoon breeze. Then into the marshy bottom land, where the hooves of horses make sucking noises in the black mud and the air carries the nose-clearing odor of sulfur springs. From the saddle, you can sometimes reach down and harvest a ripe huckleberry, the sweetest of all berries.

Before long, a fresh anxiety creeps into your thinking and pulls you gradually from the present. Not the worry of charging bears or landsliding trails or falling trees, but of horn-honks and pounding blood pressure in the congested front country of Yellowstone Park.

After 10 hours, the pack team galoumps across the last river. Water sounds fade and are replaced by a mechanical rumble. Phillips nods and points ahead with the wrinkled brim of his ranger hat.

“It hits me every time,” he says. “How strange it is to hear a car again.”

Researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.