The reality of my situation, to be clear, was that I was stuck there, with nothing to do, for a full day and night, in what was probably the most remote location in the entire British Isles, and so there was nothing for it but to begin in earnest my immersive experience of nature. The problem was that I had no idea how to go about having this experience—whether it was something that would simply happen, as it were naturally, and as a direct consequence of my simply being present in nature, or whether some kind of action was required on my part, the deliberate cultivation of an inner state of openness and receptivity. Perhaps, I thought, the two things were not mutually exclusive. I took off my hiking boots and my alpaca wool hiking socks and walked barefoot around the inner perimeter of my little circle a couple of times, focusing all my attention on the sensation of the grass beneath my feet, which was cool and damp, and not entirely unpleasant, but not exactly outright pleasant either. Andres had at some point mentioned that, while doing Qigong exercises out in nature, he always removed his shoes and socks, because it gave him a sensation of “rootedness” in the place he was in, in the Earth itself. This idea appealed to me in theory, but in practice I found that in my bare feet I was unnecessarily preoccupied by the possibility that I might step on a jagged piece of rock, or God forbid an ants’ nest, and so in a gesture of compromise I put my alpaca socks back on, though not my boots, reasoning that the socks were at least made from entirely natural materials and so would constitute at worst a kind of buffer zone between myself and nature. I then sat down in front of my tent, assumed the lotus position, and passed perhaps a further twenty minutes to half an hour in failing miserably to focus on my breathing.
At one point, I looked down and saw a tiny creature crawling up the length of my forearm. I had no idea what it was, this creature, though for once in my life I felt no immediate inclination to rid myself of an insect’s company. I observed its halting progress toward the crook of my elbow, wondering vaguely what its intentions were, if any, until it suddenly struck me that the creature might well be a tick, and I flicked it off with my forefinger, instinctively rubbing the recently vacated patch of forearm with the palm of my hand. There had throughout the week been a certain amount of low-level hysteria about ticks. We’d been advised to check ourselves for their presence first thing in the morning and last thing at night—because there was a large number of deer in the area, and where there were deer there were probably ticks, and where there were ticks there was the possibility of Lyme disease—cases of which I had recently read had exploded since the 1990s as a result of climate change. Before traveling, I’d done some research about ticks and had watched a video that explained how they operated. They were pretty amazing animals, in a lot of ways. They sense the presence of humans and other large animals by the carbon dioxide we give off. Once they’ve alighted on our skin, they crawl around in search of a suitable location on which to break the surface and begin feeding. Unlike mosquitoes—whose custom it is to land, get stuck in, and get out of there within a matter of seconds—ticks take their time. It can take them an hour or two to pick the right spot, like tourists with too much time on their hands who can’t decide on where they want to eat. Most ticks, I learned, live about three years and eat only three times in their lives—one for each stage of development, from larvae, to nymph, to full adulthood—a fact that, it seemed to me, completely vindicated their seemingly excessive fastidiousness. Once it settles on the right spot, it gets out its elaborate eating gear, including two sets of hooked proboscis, with which it digs into the host’s skin, pushing the flesh out of the way and holding it aside to allow for the entry of the harpoon-like hypostome, anchoring the tick firmly in the flesh and allowing it to extract its feed of blood, which blood it prevents from clotting by excreting into the host its own home-brew anticoagulant. Provided the tick isn’t found, it will often stay there glutting itself, and swelling to comparatively gigantic proportions, for up to three days, at which point it simply rolls off and goes about its business.
Though I was by no means keen to play host to such a creature—and even less keen to accommodate Lyme disease, with its fevers and its facial paralysis and its debilitating agonies—I could not help but feel some sympathy and respect for its methods. It behooves us humans, I’ve always felt, to grant at least some grudging admiration to the humbler parasites, on the basic game-recognize-game principle. Their attitude toward us, after all, is strikingly similar to our own approach toward the world in general. Consider the mosquito, statistically the only animal more deadly to humans than we are to ourselves, causing almost twice as many deaths per year as are caused globally by homicide. Mosquitoes have no more against us than we do against the countless species whose extinctions we have caused through hunting or habitat destruction. We simply have something they need in order to live: blood. And the means by which they extract it from us is, it seems to me, uncanny in its similarity to the way in which we ourselves extract minerals from the Earth. To watch a close-up video of a mosquito biting a human—separating its proboscis out into a mechanism of serrated needles, some of which it uses to make deeper incisions into the flesh, others to hold the flesh back for ease of extraction—is to witness something weirdly reminiscent of a sophisticated mining operation. Mosquitoes and ticks and other bloodsucking insects, I thought, checking myself uneasily for any further creatures that might have designs on the precious nectar beneath my skin, are our dark doubles, our brothers in ingenuity and destruction.
What felt like at least an hour must have passed—although it may admittedly have been no more than fifteen or twenty minutes—wherein my sole occupation was the fondling of grass. I ran my fingers through it, plucked it and scattered it to the breeze, held up individual stalks to the light of the sun and inspected them at frankly absurd length. I was deriving a certain aesthetic pleasure from this activity, and had even begun to feel as though I might well have entered into a state of mindful receptivity. I seemed to myself suddenly like a character in a film by Terrence Malick, luxuriating at length in the unconsidered minutiae of nature, cultivating in a moment of complete stillness a kind of quiet aesthetic rapture that verged on the spiritual. But then, of course, it occurred to me that a character in a film by Terrence Malick would never entertain this kind of notion of himself, would never think of himself as a character in a film. What I was, I thought, was a character in a television advertisement whose director was shamelessly, and perhaps even to the point of plagiarism, influenced by Malick, which is to say that my experience was a cheap imitation of the kind of authentically intimate experience of nature you might see in a film by Malick, a filmmaker for whose work I had never had much time to begin with.
As the afternoon wore on, though, this self-consciousness gradually receded, and I began to be able to look at things—the rippling of the grass in the breeze, the glistening of sunlight on the river—without the fact of my looking at them constantly presenting itself to me as evidence of my communion with nature. For several minutes, I watched a minuscule spider meander haltingly across a page of my notebook, before eventually insinuating itself into the little foldable paper pocket inside its rear cover, so that I had to fish it out by means of the concertinaed cream-colored leaflet inside the pocket, which leaflet I then instinctively and reflexively set about reading. I read about how this notebook of mine was heir and successor to the legendary stationery favored by such giants of nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture as Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway and Bruce Chatwin. According to the blurb, it was Chatwin, a particularly obsessive fan of this small black notebook, who gave it the name Moleskine. Chatwin’s name was firmly associated in my mind with a kind of stylish writerly ruggedness, and I began to wonder whether, just as my notebook was heir and successor to the legendary stationery favored by Chatwin, I myself, given the kind of literary exercise I was currently engaged in, might one day come to be seen as an heir and successor to Chatwin, of whose writing I had admittedly never read so much as a word, but whom I imagined, perhaps even correctly, to be the kind of writer who went out into the wilderness alone, wearing stylishly practical apparel, featuring many pockets for notebooks and other useful appurtenances, and then came back and wrote about it in prose that was as stylish and practical as his apparel.