Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Backpacker

Backpacking is the journey from trailhead to lake. Yes, the destination could be any body of fresh water, but I don't want to complicate things. Besides, as a backpacker do you go for a line or a point on a map?

The backpacker must labor. Backpacking must be at least in part gruelling. Monotonous switchbacks are not absolutely necessary, but they are a fundamental metaphor for the experience of the trail. The trail is hot and dusty; the lake is wet and cool.

A vacation is a microcosm, or so you wish. The backpacker imagines that at the end of labor is sweetness. The trail is the arena of this imagination. It traverses uncertain terrain and arrives at the promised kingdom.

Vistas, like certain other fussed-over unveilings, must be conserved. To have a vista of the lake the whole way is obscene. Just as there must be labor, there must be blindness. You must travel under the sparse cover of millions of unremarkable trees. Continuing down the dreary viewless path proves your faith.

Not to worry. The backpacker gets a reward. You will round a bend to a revelation. That's what a vista is, no matter how many postcards you've seen. The revelation consists of three things: a lake, conifer trees, and vertical relief. You may be able to dissect these elements, but consciousness plays no part here. You will gasp. Make no mistake: this reveals no more nature than pupil dialation tests. Yet you will be equally helpless. The backpacker looks about in wonder: such a clear jewel of a lake, such bright stone, such green trees! Such a dramatic landscape!

If all the elements are in place, the felicity of the revelation is certain. The backpacker ogles rocks. The landscape beams right through you, undigestable. The backpacker often carries freeze-dried food, but doesn't have to carry Sublime Concentrate. The backpacker already inhales it through the eyes. It may be swarming with people, but we've yet to find a stronger dose than Yosemite Valley. Just look at it, and tell me it exists.

At small gaps in the trees where towers of exposed rock are visible, the backpacker stops and gapes, and exclaims. A seemly trail may tease discreetly.

Ideally, the backpacker is alone on the lake. The backpacker may smile at other backpackers, but backpackers want to avoid each other. More specifically, backpackers want to avoid seeing each other. The backpacker must imagine solitude at the lake. The backpacker is unique to the backpacker, and wants to be unique to the lake. Visible backpackers ruin it.

Sometimes, the backpacker's sense of obscenity transfers from the other backpackers to the lake. In this case, the lake is referred to as a popular spot. The backpacker seeks out less popular spots.

The Final Solution

It doesn't matter that the political motives are not immediately discernable in the plaza redesign. In Ashland, politics and The Homeless Problem are inseperable. To say that the plaza redesign is at heart an attempt to reorganize the homeless population is not jumping to a conclusion or going out on a limb. Before knowing anything, it's a reasonable assumption.

This is true because the reactives whom this assumption is a reaction to carry the same assumption: everything is about the homeless. When the Oak Knoll fire happend, the man who allegedly started it could not simply be homeless, but a part of a larger problem. The psyche of this town is such that before he was even named, the problem was waiting for him to become evidence. For the same reason, the problems of downtown businesses are not the problems of downtown businesses. Businesses are persecuted by the homeless, so business owners say, who in turn are persecuted by the bleeding hearts who defend the homeless. It's rather cozy, really--a warm blanket of infinite scapegoats.

Behind the words "plaza redesign" a whole unspoken rhetoric stands ready. The plaza is a problem because the homeless hang out there. Their presence scares off tourists, and therefore reduces the money they spend in the surrounding shops. The plaza must be made somehow unappealing to the homeless. It must be cleaned of the stain.

Imagine what kind of plaza would dissuade homeless from loitering. (The rows of metal spikes that keep birds off come to mind, personally.) Find one of those St. Vincent de Paul donation boxes put up recently downtown, and read it. Imagine, if you can, the mechanism by which the presence of or donations to these boxes could reduce panhandling downtown. If you're feeling particularly brave, try to imagine what the mastermind behind these boxes imagines panhandling to be.

On both sides of this divisive and all-subsuming issue, it appears, we await a solution. The business owners wait for the law to push the problem away, and the bleeding hearts wait for reform to address "the root of the problem" (that elusive thing to which one can always eliptically refer). Whether it's a beautiful moment of guilt-dissolving healing, or a righteous sweeping away of "the bad element" we seek, something golden awaits us at the end of our labors.

The root of the problem is the ground on which we stand. Or at the very least, on which we shop for organic produce. Not that this is the end of history, but were Capitalism to dissolve, we wouldn't have to win the aesthetic purity of downtown Ashland to lubricate the flow of tourist dollars. However, those are only the particulars of the problem. Contrary to our utopian hopes, there's always someone to agonize over.

Spelunky

There is no saving. There is no level the same as any other, but neither is there a level much different from any other. Level by level you go down as far as you can into the cave, until you die.

It's easy to die in this world composed of limited elements lifted from Indiana Jones. There are snakes (you hate those), homocidal Oriental musclemen, rolling balls of stone twice your size released when you steal a golden idol, bats, spiders, animated skeletons, and most lethal of all (because easy to forget), arrow traps.

To replenish your life, there are damsels. From the corners of this infinitely rearranged maze, these blondes scream "HELP!" They go limp when you carry them in your arms, and sometimes limper when you throw them into the paths of arrows to disarm traps or at creatures to bludgeon them to death with her body. If dead they are excellent body shields, if alive, they are cashed in for longevity at the maze's exit. She walks through the doorway, and you gain a heart: You can now be hit once more before dying. Where they go is unknown. When you go follow through that same door, you enter another, deeper maze.

So long as you live you may acquire money. On the surface this is your only desire. Your greed for gold coins, idols, and gems is as insatiable as it is casual. It is, seemingly, your reason for exploring. You use your ingenuity to access the riches scattered throughout the caves. When you die, none of this capital is preserved.

When you die, the path you have forged through the cave is not a path at all, because you can't retrace your steps. Nothing you did matters any more. Yet you continue to spelunk, the reborn you. What carries over between your numerous deaths at the bottom of each new but very similar cave? You learn better how to navigate these caves, to go further down into the world that never translates.

While it becomes a familiar background, you nonetheless attune yourself to the sonic quality of the caves. Unlike the caves themselves, their sound repeats. Each iteration is a perfect reproduction of the previous. What you attune to is the difference when the cave's patience with your presence is running out. Sound slows down, distorts. At first this is not alarming, or even noticable, because the cave's sound is defined by an eery bending of square waves. After the first time you die from a haunting of a cave ghost, the ambiguity turns over: The mundane bending sounds like it might be the end of your days. You develop an anxious ear. The familiar repetition is ever on the brink of an intimation of doom. You begin to really listen.