Steven Simpson’s Blog
Please check every Monday for my most recent blog posting. When I started this website, I thought all blog entries would be about nature and other environmental topics, but now they address writing, family, and travel as often as they do personal encounters with the natural world.
Blog Archive

On the Trail, Off the Trail
The main loop of northern California’s Muir Woods is a wide and clearly marked trail. The most heavily trafficked sections have split rail fences on either side. The parts that are not fenced have signs reminding people to stay on the trail. Near the entrance is an interpretative sign explaining that the park’s redwood trees have shallow root systems and are susceptible to soil compaction. No reasonable person would threaten the health of some of the world’s tallest trees by stepping off the trail.
Yet, on my first trip to Muir Woods, I saw a curiously shaped tree fifteen yards off the main pathway, forgot where I was, and walked up to the tree to get a better look. I was a mile down the trail, well away from the crowds, but a National Park Service ranger appeared out of nowhere and told me that I had the choice of either following the park rules or being escorted out of the park.
About six months after my visit to Muir Woods, a hiking companion and I took a bus to Yosemite National Park. We got dropped off in the Valley and immediately asked a park ranger for advice about a good six-day backpacking trip. When she learned that we didn’t have a car to drive to a remote trailhead, she told us to catch the bus to Tuolumne Meadows and hike back to the Valley. “The trip,” she said, “takes only three days if you stay on the trail, so don’t stay on the trail.”
Whenever I go hiking, I stay on the trail at least 90% of the time, but it is important that I am free to venture off trail whenever I want to. Anyone who backpacks knows the feeling that comes with leaving the main pathway and setting off in a direction no one else has gone.
Muir Woods and Yosemite National Park are two very different places, so I would expect them to be managed differently. Muir Woods has over a million visitors a year, yet is smaller than New York’s Central Park. Yosemite, with the exception of Yosemite Valley itself, is underutilized and is bigger than the state of Rhode Island. Still the directives from the two National Park Service rangers sent two distinctly different messages. One ranger basically said, “Nature is right over there, but you can’t get any closer.” The other one said, “If you aren’t going to immerse yourself in untrammeled nature, what you are doing here at all?”
Comprehension
When I was seventeen years old, my girlfriend dragged me to the a movie version of Othello. Only a week earlier I’d made her go to Billy Jack, so it might have been her way of getting back at me. The movie (Othello, not Billy Jack) was two and half hours long, and I was lost for the first half. I got that Iago was a bad guy and that Othello was about to screw up, but otherwise I did not know what was going on.
Midway through the movie there was an intermission, and when the movie resumed after a fifteen minute break, it was if I’d taken a Shakespeare class during the interim. I suddenly understood dialogue that had been gibberish to me only minutes earlier, and I came close to enjoying the movie.
I recalled this old memory, because something similar happened to me last night. For the past week, I’d been struggling with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book The Message. In it, he blends trips to Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine with his belief in the power of the written word. I wasn’t buying any of it. The connections he was trying to make felt forced, and I thought the writing was more concerned with the attractive flow of the prose than with saying anything worthwhile. Had Between the World and Me not been one of my favorite books of the past ten years, I would have put The Message aside and grabbed any one of four other books waiting for me on the table next to my bed.
But I stuck with it, and this evening, from the first moment I opened the book, the message of The Message jumped off the page. I was immersed in the content, and I found myself back to my old habit of making comments in the margins. Through the first eighty-five pages, I’d been bored and confused. Starting with page 86, I was hooked. Coates hadn’t done anything differently, so the change had to be me. As with Othello, I needed to adjust myself to a style of writing not familiar to me.
With Othello and The Message, the transition from confusion to comprehension came suddenly. It doesn’t always happen that way. With one of my favorite books of all time, Walden, it came much slower. It, in fact, took years. I’d tried Thoreau’s classic a few times as a teenager and never got past the “Economy” chapter and its lengthy discussion about the price of nails and garden seed. A couple of years later I slogged through the entire book when it was required reading for an American lit course in college. There I liked it better than Sister Carrie and Bartleby the Scrivener, but not nearly as much as Huckleberry Finn. I did however, realize that Walden was not a book to be rushed through as an assigned reading. I gave it another shot the following summer and then again the summer after that. Since then I have read the book another seven or eight times. I pick it up periodically, because 1) it is brilliant in sections, and 2) it is my fallback book each time I unsuccessfully try to understand The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I am still waiting for the day when Emerson makes sense.
