The Second-best Sensual Pleasure Outdoors

Sometimes you just have to slow down and soak it up.  My campsite was broadside to the west wind, coming off a large sagebrush flat near Cuba, NM. It was the hottest time indoors, 4 o'clock. But soon the shade from one large ponderosa pine would cool off my trailer. This was proof of how few trees a summer camper really needs.

I hardly ever sit outside in a chair, therefore I was paying Mother Nature a genuine honor to move a chair into the shade of that lone ponderosa, and do absolutely nothing. Normally it is more comfortable and useful to be inside my little igloo on wheels. Usually people don't use 'windy' as a compliment, but they should: not only does it cool you, but it keeps the bugs off.

But this afternoon I just sat there, indolently and contentedly, in the shade of that lone ponderosa, and took a wind-bath in la brisa fresca from the west. Since I dislike heat, and this was the hottest day since February in Yuma, it was easy to appreciate the cool breeze almost to the point of sighing. I was, as a poet once said, 'feeding on the shadow of perfection.' 

Now I know what you are thinking: somebody was playing with his Picasa or Photoshop and saturated the crap out of this sunset. But I didn't. I cheerfully set aside my prejudice against sunset postcards in order to honor this view that I got from the same campsite described in the post.

I confess to being skin-oriented (dermo-centric?) in my appreciation of nature, unlike most people, and all tourists, who are opto-centric.  But warmth causes a neglected sense to flare up: the world smells more interesting in warm weather. This can bring on waves of nostalgia for boyhood on my grandparents' farm, not unlike what Henry Adams experienced at the old president's farmhouse in Quincy, MA:

Winter and summer, cold and heat, town and country, force and freedom, marked two modes of life and thought, balanced like lobes of the brain. Town was winter confinement, school, rule, discipline; straight, gloomy streets, piled with six feet of snow in the middle; frosts that made the snow sing under wheels or runners; thaws when the streets became dangerous to cross; society of uncles, aunts, and cousins who expected children to behave themselves, and who were not always gratified; above all else, winter represented the desire to escape and go free. Town was restraint, law, unity. Country, only seven miles away, was liberty, diversity, outlawry, the endless delight of mere sense impressions given by nature for nothing, and breathed by boys without knowing it.

Boys are wild animals, rich in the treasures of sense, but the New England boy had a wider range of emotions than boys of more equable climates. He felt his nature crudely, as it was meant. To the boy Henry Adams, summer was drunken. Among senses, smell was the strongest -- smell of hot pine-woods and sweet-fern in the scorching summer noon; of new-mown hay; of ploughed earth; of box hedges; of peaches, lilacs, syringas; of stables, barns, cow-yards; of salt water and low tide on the marshes; nothing came amiss.

There he goes again, some incorrigible reader says, quoting mouldy ol' books that have nothing to do with the Here and the Now. But the quote above is not so far afield. One of the episodes that Henry Adams experienced on his presidential grandfather's farmhouse was a boyish temper tantrum, when he was forced to go to school. The old president came downstairs, grabbed little Henry by the hand, and silently led him a mile to the schoolhouse. 

Looking back on it from age 70, Henry Adams thought the silence of the old president was perhaps caused by his preoccupation with the conquest of northern Mexico by President Polk (from a slave-state.) It was that very conquest -- nasty as it was at the time -- that was responsible for me lying in the shade in New Mexico on that warm day.

Perhaps the real value of the word "classic" lies in some things being so fine that they should be immortal. Since my own carcass and memory are not long for this world, I want to believe that something transcends these limitations. I am glad to have experienced those 'ancestral acres' and the nostalgia for them, especially since it is dying as a part of our culture. Perhaps it has been preserved for all time by Henry Adams's quote above.