fifteen minutes, not doing anything in particular. Different groups of
subjects would be doing a similar nothing while sitting at the edge of
a parking lot in Salt Lake City and in a lab with a computer.
This was all an elaborate field experiment that grew out of the
previous year’s Moab gathering. Strayer wanted to find a biomarker
that could show a brain under the influence of nature. If, as most
seemed to agree, something is happening to our brains, is there some
way to see the transformation? Adam Gazzaley, our rooftop margarita
maker from the University of California, San Francisco, had lured
Strayer with the idea of measuring midline frontal theta waves.
Because these brain waves increase in power when the frontal cortex
is engaged in an executive task, Strayer and Gazzaley were hoping the
opposite would be true during a wilderness mind-blow: the thetas
would quiet down, potentially indicating a rousing of the dreamy
default network instead.
If a river can’t transfix my brain, then nothing can. I’ve spent a lot
of time in this book talking about trees, but when I crave wild places,
it’s often the desert I want. In his wilderness-defense classic Desert
Solitaire, Edward Abbey named a chapter “ Bedrock and Paradox”
after towns not far from here. It’s the perfect nomenclature for a
landscape that is chaotic and static at the same time, the rock as dry
as a cow skull but broken by lush shocks of green. In the aridity, the
greens are greener and the blues are bluer, and, as Abbey puts it, “all
things are in motion, all is in process, nothing abides, nothing will
ever change in this eternal moment.” Ellen Meloy, an essayist more
subtle and interior than Abbey and who lived and died near Bluff,
remarked that this county was the size of Belize and contained not
one traffic light. “The nights are coal-black and water-deep, the light
often too bright to understand. . . . No one is ever sure if we are
hostages of isolation or the freest people in four states.”
Of course, the ultimate paradox is that humans need both
wilderness and civilization, and that one makes us all the more poised