into the wild to “just have a bit of a think about things,” bringing an animal skin with them for shelter. (“Someone would ask, where’s this or that member of the community gone, I haven’t seen him in a bit. And people would say, ‘Oh, him? He’s gone under the hide.’ ”) We were more or less unique in our own time and culture, in fact, in having no such common ritual. It was Andres’s contention that the wilderness solo was not just a transformative experience for an individual, a means of reaching a deeper connection with the wild and with oneself, but a practice that, were it to be widely adopted, would change our culture’s entire relationship to nature.
“The way we live in our everyday lives,” he told me one day, “is in disenchanted form. Increasingly since the Scientific Revolution, since Descartes and Newton, we have treated the world as a kind of machine that we control and manipulate, that we change with mechanical movements and levers.”
This was our problem as a civilization, in his view, or the root of it. And this was what the solo was about. How were we supposed to care for something if we didn’t know it? If we were not, as he put it, in any kind of personal relationship with it?
Having marked out my circle, I sat down on the grass and became immediately preoccupied by the question of how I was going to pass the next twenty-four hours. The view that my situation presented me with, the slope of a mountain descending sheer and grassy toward the river, was undoubtedly very beautiful, but I really couldn’t see it holding my attention in the long term. As regards activity, my options were extremely limited. I understood, of course, that having nothing to do was a significant dimension of the solo experience, that it was in a way the whole point of it, but now that I was in the situation, as opposed to merely thinking about it, it had come to seem radically untenable. I am, in theory, a huge fan of doing nothing. As an option, I will typically go with it in any situation where I’m supposed to be doing pretty much anything. But my method of doing nothing, I reflected as I reclined on the soft grass, in fact almost always involved the doing of something, however meaningless or untaxing—scrolling through Instagram or Twitter on my phone, drinking coffee, reading a book or a magazine, going for a walk. None of these things were now possible. I did have my phone with me, but I hadn’t had any mobile coverage since we’d left Inverness on Monday morning, and its only practical use at this point was as an alarm clock to alert me, at noon the following day, to the fact that the solo was over. I’d even deleted the New Yorker app on my phone, for fear that I might be tempted to fire it up and start reading through back issues of the magazine, immersing myself not in nature, but in long-form reportage.
The only possible activity, in fact, presented itself in the form of half a packet of Marks & Spencer nut and berry mix I’d decided at the last minute to bring with me. This decision ran somewhat against the spirit of the enterprise, in that, although there were no rules or guidelines as such, Andres had recommended that people not bring food, for the simple reason that a packed sandwich or Tupperware container of bean salad or a packet of nut and berry mix would, even if you weren’t actually eating it—in fact especially if you weren’t actually eating it—become a disproportionate focus of mental energy, in that if you’d decided to wait until late in the evening to eat the sandwich or container of bean salad, the whole rest of the day up to that point would become a kind of prelude to the eating of the snack, and you would find yourself being able to think of almost nothing else until you did eat it—not because of hunger per se, but because of a hunger for something, anything, to occupy your time. But it seemed to me that hunger itself would present a far more formidable distraction than the prospect of its alleviation ever would. If I were to decide to go twenty-four hours without eating, I would be completely preoccupied by the physical sensation of hunger, and increasingly consumed with irritation