By Gary Topping–
By now summer is fully upon us, and most of us, following a snowy winter and a long, drizzly spring, are breaking out our camping gear and fishing gear and getting ready for outdoors things that we can only do in the summer. This week I’m reminiscing about my own outdoors involvements during my years in Utah and offering some (perhaps unpopular) reflections on the spiritual value of outdoor living.
I arrived in Utah in 1972, to begin my graduate work at the University of Utah. I never planned to stay; my intention was to get the degree and leave, perhaps to return to the Oregon coast where I had grown up. Consequently, during the years I was in graduate school, I made only the most minimal and grudging accommodations to life in Utah, a way of life that struck me as no less strange than life on Jupiter. Just the climate was bad enough: the temperature dropped to fifteen degrees below zero that first winter, only to climb to over one hundred the next summer. But the culture was equally weird, with the pervasive presence of Mormonism in everything (“When the Deseret News refers to the President, they don’t mean Nixon,” one of my new Utah friends warned.). The liquor stores resembled the old Navajo trading posts, where all the merchandise was behind a screen, and one ordered by filling out a card from a printed list in the lobby (“Gee, can just looking at a bottle of booze corrupt you”? I used to ask). And the terms were strictly cash on the barrelhead. Later I learned that the great Utah historian Dale Morgan, a native of the state, had said, “There’s nothing wrong with Utah that a wholesale exchange of population wouldn’t fix.” I would wholeheartedly have agreed.
Things changed in 1977. I got my degree, and by the greatest stroke of good fortune, blundered into a job working, of all things, in Utah history! It was a temporary, “soft money” job, but I did well enough at it that I was offered a full-time staff position at the Utah State Historical Society. So much for my plans to return to my homeland; now I had to become a Utahn.
Looking back, I now see that I went about becoming a “naturalized” Utahn much more systematically than I realized at the time. I began by realizing that Utah itself wasn’t going to change; I was going to have to be the one to do that. I was going to have to learn to love Utah for what it was rather than hating it for what it could never become. Initially I turned my back on the weird cultural stuff, which I reasoned wasn’t going to change (I was wrong about that; the liquor laws, for example, while still riddled with mysterious policies, have vastly improved).
I figured my best chances for accommodation with Utah lay in taking advantage of its myriad opportunities for outdoor activities. I had grown up in a family of campers, hunters and fishermen and had done a lot of backpacking. Each of Utah’s three geophysical provinces held tempting possibilities for me: I quickly learned to love pursuing cutthroat trout in its Rocky Mountains Province and even learned to cross-country ski; I began backpacking and river running in the Colorado Plateau Province (this led, after almost twenty years’ happy research, to my writing a book, Glen Canyon and the San Juan Country), and I bought a sailboat and learned to sail on the Great Salt Lake in the Great Basin Province (and leading to another book, Great Salt Lake: An Anthology).
And now, after that vast introductory digression, I come to the point of this essay. During all of my years in the outdoors, I have had many, many friends who have professed to find in outdoor living a means of communing with God. Even Stan Jones (“Mister Lake Powell”), who had no formal religion at all (even though his son was a Protestant minister) used to gesture out over Glen Canyon and say, “That’s my cathedral out there”! And how many Christian friends, practicing Catholics and Protestants, have told me they find God in the outdoors.
Well, I don’t. Now don’t get me wrong: I find solitude in the outdoors a wonderful, restorative reprieve from jangling telephones, road rage on the freeways and the tyranny of appointment calendars with their interminable mandatory meetings. How often, with a dutch oven stew in my stomach and a cup of bourbon in my hand, have I said the rosary by the campfire as day turned to dusk. Restorative, for sure. But when I look out at Nature, I tend to see science, not God. God’s handiwork, yes, as worked out through millions of years of erosion and upheaval in the crust of the earth, but not God Himself. Creation might point to the Creator, but I’m careful not to confuse the two.
When I want to worship God, I go to church, not to Grand Gulch. We Catholics, especially, have the Eucharist, the real presence of God in the forms of bread and wine. I won’t trade that for any number of desert sunsets and fast-flowing mountain streams.
My friends who profess to find God in the outdoors all seem to be pulled up short when I quote, to the contrary, none other than the great guru of the Canyon Country, Edward Abbey. “What does the desert say”? he asks in Desert Solitaire. “The desert says nothing.”
