Poop On The Mountain: The Shunning Of Civilization And A Grifter Of The Past.

There has grown a fertile and glorious bounty of writing and fantastical stories about white men who love nature, the outdoors, camping, hiking, hunting and the mountains. Start a white man talking about the land and he’ll always get to feeling very quickly like he has a right to all of it. He’ll even go so far as to station himself on public land with military hardware and occupy it and demand the government bring him snacks. He’ll go all the way out there on the edges of the wild alone in a fit of rage that’s disguised as calm and love and die. Something about modern society has continuously sent white men running for shelter into the open. Still, there’s more concentrated risks that come from living outside. Perpetually with mountain climbers who take the brunt share of the obstacle hazards like falling, exhaustion, altitude sickness, brain damage, strokes, heart attacks, exposure, avalanches and just going missing. 2023 saw the most fatal year that has ever been recorded on Everest. There were eighteen deaths and at least five bodies unrecovered on the mountain. As spring climbing season is underway Nepal officials announced their new set of rules for mountaineers in the Himalayas, including one that orders that climbers are required to carry small GPS Tracking devices called “passive trackers” which can be sewn right into a coat and don’t need any power source. They can be detected through packed snow up to twenty yards away and further when tracked from the air using a handheld detector. These trackers are mandatory for climbers starting in 2024, so that if there is an incident their location can be precisely detected. In February of 2024 authorities in Nepal also announced that Everest climbers are now required to bring their solid body waste back to their base camp in bags after summiting the peak. The new regulations followed rising objections to the sheer bulk of human excreta lining the paths on the mountain which has been consistently prevented from degrading naturally due to extremely cold temperatures. White men’s shit has been forever cluttering up more than just the mountains literally and figuratively. White men going missing in the woods is as much as part of our culture now as the romanticism that leads them up there to begin with. It’s fully absorbed into us with dreamy tales about the pioneers and the early English settlers. The hardest consequences being The Donner party. Despite continuous tales of things going wrong out there like a hiker in 2003 who told nobody where he was going and got his armed trapped between a boulder and the canyon and had to resort to amputating his arm to free himself all the mountain men continue to go out. In January of 2023 British Actor Julian Sands went missing in California’s Mt. Baldy Area. Sand’s remains were found in June of that same year. Sands often went on long hikes alone and to Sands and many hikers especially the ones who go it solo the idea of a tracking device that gives people your location likely defeats the purpose of being out there on your own and off the grid. Whether hikers or climbers will bend to carrying GPS devices to give their locations remains to be seen but I would imagine it’s better than having their remains to be seen instead of their location when they’re still alive. But stubbornness and irrationality are major foundations that make up the character of nature’s bad boys. You have to be somewhat egocentric, maybe even maniacal, to believe that you could climb such a mammoth mountain and cross such brutal terrain or that you even should. If you desire to accomplish such feats, you certainly cannot be afraid or have any modesty and reticence that is holding you back. These principles remain true for people who compete in extreme sports and even for skiers, snowboarders, and surfers. But if you get hurt inside an arena people don’t need helicopters and detectives to find you. Not being able to have your location revealed in the woods has had even more severe outcomes. In 1993 the world was introduced to the story of Christopher McCandless. A young man who seemed to think he was more like Christopher Columbus when he went off on his own to the wilds of Alaska in 1991. McCandless was twenty-four years old when starved to death in the mountains. His story was the basis for the 1993 book “Into The Wild” by Mountaineer and nature enthusiast Jon Krakauer. The book was turned into a movie in 2007 by director Sean Penn. Both Krakauer’s book and Penn’s film spend a great deal of time waxing lyrically about McCandless and what they name his great Alaskan adventure. Though it’s certainly questionable whether McCandless was even sane enough to realize the full consequences of the adventure he was about to embark on. The springboard for McCandless shunning of civilization is often driven by his defenders as possible abuse by his parents, his parents fighting, his Father’s alcoholism and his Father having children and a marriage with another woman. McCandless’ self-appointed storytellers want to feed us hay about how McCandless wanted this all-grown-up life, but he wasn’t even adult enough to manage his immediate family strife in a mature and grown-up away. Family problems are standard difficulties that every child and young man and young woman face. McCandless answer was to simply run away from his problems to a place he read about in books and articles, but it’s a place that didn’t really exist it only existed inside his imagination. It helped nobody McCandless felt was the victim of cruelty at the hands of individuals and Government. It certainly didn’t help McCandless in the end. For all his contempt over the selfishness of people and society, finally what could be more selfish that abandoning your family, never telling them where you’re going, where you are or assuring them that you’re okay even though your chances of dying out there are great. Neither the “Into The Wild” book nor the movie delve into exactly how the type of writing McCandless was devouring in college may have been what led to him being manipulated and radicalized to finally go on his wildly unprepared forever sabbatical from society in one of the most dangerous areas of the world. One of the fixations that aided in radicalizing McCandless, and which filled his head with such irrational pessimism about the world was the writing of David Henry Thoreau. Thoreau was a philosopher who embraced radicalism. Thoreau was one of the leaders inside the Transcendentalism crusade. A literary movement which was driven to be philosophical and spiritual as it was cultivated in New England in the late 1820’s. A core belief of Transcendentalism is having faith in the inherent goodness of people and nature. Believing that it’s society and its institutions which have corrupted the purity of the individual. That people are at their best when truly “self-reliant” and “independent.” Transcendentalists supposedly see divine occurrences inherent in everyday life, rather than believing in a hazy far away heaven. Transcendentalists perceive physical and spiritual sensations as part of dynamic processes rather than discrete entities. It makes no sense because part of life is and always has been living around others and having setbacks, disappointments and disagreements and learning how to get through those. There’s a razor thin line between Transcendentalist ideology and the political declarations and talking points that come out of hardline Republicans about the importance of rugged individualism and anti-Government radicalism. I suppose the major separation is that Transcendentalists find heaven on earth now while they’re alive instead of waiting for the afterlife. People like McCandless were used by bonkers men like Thoreau and their empathy is weaponized against them even by their own hand. They develop a need to assess these new ideologies in real life and eventually have an unrelenting need to feed the extreme. It’s an odd overlap of naturalists and right wingers. A type of republican who’s into organic foods and rigorous exercise obsessed with their bodies and physical appearance making themselves as manly as possible but also refuse the idea of certain established and effective health tools and medicine such as safe and effective vaccines or telling people where the fuck you’re going in case something happens. McCandless may have been highly intelligent yet possibly didn’t maintain the mental competence to distinguish between his own reality and the fantasy of the books and writing he consumed and courses he had taken and mistakenly took Thoreau’s and others rhetoric much too literally. There’s a correlation with McCandless’ peculiar fate and the hardline leftist “Bernie Or Bust” and now “Free Palestine” circle. They are a group whose empathy has also been used against them by Islamic terrorists and all Governments in their mind whether Israel or America are guilty bloodthirsty tyrants just trying to kill, kill, kill yet somehow the Palestinian Government of Hamas are righteous victims and freedom fighters. Thoreau is in fact a huge influence on the political horseshoe fringe union. His own traits embody this faction’s disposition. Self-obsessed, narcissistic, fanatical about self-control, unwavering that they require nothing beyond themselves and what they initially heard, read, or thought to understand and thrive in the world. The unwillingness to examine their own ideology and have their hard stance opinions change with any new information that may come to light. Thoreau’s most recognized work “Walden” has been couched for so long as a cornerstone work of environmental literature. It’s in actuality just one of the original heavily manipulative compositions by a grifter. It’s a fantasy about a rustic and rugged individualist’s life yet it’s detached from reality and any outcomes of actually living in the woods. It’s a fantasy about escaping the predicaments and obligations of living among other human beings and there’s no consequences to anything you do. It also completely leaves out the idea that things in society have the possibility of actually getting better. For Thoreau just as with the grifter of today, people thinking things can get better is actually death to their grift. “Walden” is a novel of sorts. It’s the compression of a two-year stay at Walden Pond and a narrative of its writer Henry David Thoreau. Yet there is not a real person there, it’s simply a literary persona. Within retelling a tragic story of a group of Irish immigrants who drowned at sea while trying to reach the United States Thoreau described their deaths as “beautiful”. McCandless likely felt as do some of his defenders that his death was also beautiful. The term Beautiful has been used to describe the horrific events of the terrorist attack on October 7th in Israel by Islamic terrorists and their leftist American sympathizers. Subconsciously McCandless may have even been striving for that. To be beautiful in the eyes of his spirit animal Thoreau. American men have valorized Thoreau as an iconic character and a man of high principles. Of course, it’s only because his principles match what they perceive as their own. Unless you’re living off the land, independent and free, in a tiny cabin built with your own hands you’re a sellout. It’s their version of the anti-establishment fantasy inside their own heads. In 2015 in a blistering critical New Yorker piece called “Pond Scum,” Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Kathryn Schulz took a relentless and heavy hatchet to Thoreau and “Walden” and the manipulation of his writing and his persona. Basically, writing that he was a contradiction and a hypocrite, and his fiction should not have been taken literally by readers like Christopher McCandless. Yet most people rejected her assessment and embrace the narrative of the men like Krakauer and Penn. Cartoonish leftist outlets like “The Atlantic”, “Vox” and even “The Boston Globe” countered Schulz criticism with a rapid-fire succession of indignant articles that were just vexed self-absorbed attacks written in Defense of Thoreau of course all written by kooky and sexist leftist men who hero worship Thoreau and take his writing literally. They love Thoreau and believe he matters more just because he’s a man which has given him the easier opportunity to dazzle them with his illusions. In the end whether it’s Republicans or Leftists it’s all just white man worship. Thoreau was simply a goofy leftist grifter. If he was alive today, he would have a podcast and be telling us all to vote for Trump to save the woods. He’d be the cellmate of the QAnon Shaman demanding organic prison food or he’s not eating after his arrest at the capitol riots. Grifters of today worship grifters of the past. Men who want to run away from society leave their poop on the mountain literally just as they continue to leave all of their shit all over America for us to clean up. But it’s supposed to be beautiful because after all it’s just nature.