Immersed in Robert Macfarlane’s excellent book, Mountains of the Mind, I came across a passage in a chapter on glaciers that had me laughing loudly for a good 10 minutes.
Mark Twain
Quoting the inimitable Mark Twain from his book, A Tramp Abroad, Macfarlane pulls out an anecdote from Twain’s visit to Switzerland in 1878. Twain and his family, probably along with some guides, had climbed up Zermatt and were pondering a way to get down, when Twain insisted that they use the route of the Gorner glacier. Twain recounts:
I marched the Expedition down the steep and tedious mule-path and took up as good a position as I could upon the middle of the glacier – because Baedeker (the famous travel guide books) said the middle part travels the fastest. As a measure of economy, however, I put some of the heavier baggage on the shoreward parts, to go as slow freight. I waited and waited, but the glacier did not move. Night was coming on, and the darkness began to gather – still we would not budge. It occurred to me then, that there might be a time-table in Baedeker; it would be well to find out the hours of starting. I soon found a sentence which threw dazzling light upon the matter. It said, ‘The Gorner Glacier travels at an average rate of a little less than an inch a day.’ I have seldom felt so outraged. I have seldom had my confidence so wantonly betrayed. I made a small calculation: One inch a day, say thirty feet a year; estimated distance to Zermatt, three and one-eighteenth miles. Time required to go by the glacier, a little over five hundred years! The passenger part of this glacier – the central part – the lightning express part, so to speak – was not due in Zermatt till the summer of 2378, and that the baggage, coming down along the slow edge, would not arrive until some generations later . . . As a means of passenger transportation, I consider the glacier a failure . . .
Macfarlane, in his books, Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places, shares many such anecdotes about how human beings perceive nature around them. A running theme across his two books (I haven’t read the recently released Old Ways) is the intrinsic human need to control nature. Mountains of the Mind has entire chapters devoted to the perceptions that mountains have occupied in the human mind, beginning from how they were considered ugly as they stood against the neatly manicured landscapes of human civilisation.
I couldn’t agree with Macfarlane more, and have witnessed first-hand this need to control nature. Maybe it stems from a lack of understanding, but in my own opinion, it stems from the premium we put on convenience and this falsified sense of ‘now’.
One of the reasons I have come to love forests, and particularly trees, is the lack of deadlines. This prejudice against deadlines is an occupational hazard that comes with working in the media industry and you have to be somewhere close to a towering giant, like Douglas Adams, to have the ability to laugh at them. Compared to the aeons of time that glaciers, trees and forests hold within themselves, the human notion of time is just plainly laughable. Macfarlane was awed by glaciers and the time spans they occupy and it’s a sentiment that took me back a year ago, when I found myself staring at a part of the trunk of a deodar tree that had lived for 700 years! That section can still be viewed at the museum of the Forest Research Institute in Dehradun. That day, standing in front of that huge trunk, with a nearby board detailing all the major events in India’s history that the tree had lived through (including Akbar’s coronation), my small little life felt incredibly trivial.
That, in a nutshell, is what nature can do once you take off the tourist goggles. You are suddenly confronted by the fact that you are no more than a mere character artiste. Just like that scrawny git who would become the sunflower in the school play and stand in the background.
The Good Gardeners 