The Sierra Club cup

 Someone told me about a website that offers recipes for meals that can be made in a Sierra Club cup.

The cup, named for the famous outdoors club or environmental group, was an icon, hanging from the belts of hikers of an earlier day. Perhaps it still is.

The steel cup had a shallow bowl with a flat bottom. It had a curved wire handle you could hang from your belt.

The cup was controversial 50 years ago, when I first saw one. Critics said the steel conducted heat too well. You’d burn yourself drinking coffee. Critics also said the cups were too small to cook in and that steel was too heavy for a serious hiker to fool with.

Aficionados praised the cup’s versatility. You could cook in one, and, if you’re hiking, carrying a Sierra Club cup beats carrying a drinking cup and a cooking pot.

Even back then, aficionados shared recipes tailored for Sierra Club cups. I remember hearing a discourse on a concoction involving dried beans, oatmeal and pemmican.

Having never owned a Sierra Club cup, I have no part in the argument.

I like the cup but could do without the icon.

What struck me 50 years ago still strikes me now: How people — perhaps Americans, especially — can turn the experience of the outdoors into something that involves products, consumer ratings, status. It seems far afield for those who love to go far afield.

One clue that it's good

 You find yourself wanting to go see something you’ve seen many times before because you suspect you might see it in a new light.

It’s one clue that the book you just finished is a good one.

Nan Shepherd, in writing about the Cairngorms in Scotland, points out that the alpine flora is Arctic. That means that those plants that cling to rock faces were around when ice sheets covered Europe.

 

I can imagine the antiquity of rock, but the antiquity of a living flower — that is harder. It means that these toughs of the mountaintop, with their angelic inflorescence and the devil in their roots, have had the cunning and effrontery to cheat, not only a winter, but an Ice Age.

 

I read that passage and thought of the elf-orpine that seemingly grows out of the rock at Arabia Mountain. Elf-orpine is a primitive little plant. It’s pollinated by ants, having evolved before bees did.

In February, we went to see the little plants turn from green to red. A month later, we saw them put on little white flowers.

It’s summer, and I want to see what they’re doing. I just want to see them again.

• Source and notes: Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain; New York: Scribner, 2025, p. 59.

Leslie Edwards, Jonathan Ambrose and L. Katherine Kirkman, The Natural Communities of Georgia; Athens, Ga.: The University of Georgia Press, 2013. You can find a photograph of elf-orpine here:

https://arabiaalliance.org/themes/natural-systems/diamorpha-blooms/The

  

Roundup

 Two hawks — young redtails — lit on the woodlot fence. They watched for a minute and then swooped down on the forest floor, which until recently had been covered in English ivy.

As I watched from an upstairs window, another hawk appeared from behind a tree, hopping along the ground. Then another appeared.

A swale runs through the woodlot, and something was in the swale. The four raptors were like cowboys that had cornered a stray.

Hawks, so graceful in the air, are awkward on the ground. The chase went behind big trees into a place I couldn’t see. I waited, but the hawks were gone.

I went to look, hoping to find the remains of a fresh kill. The Wise Woman, who had watched part of the drama with me from an upstairs window, hypothesized that the hawks had found a snake. She made me put on my boots.

I searched the woodlot but didn’t find a clue. 

What were the hawks after — a snake, a squirrel, a cat? Did it escape? Or was it carried off like lunch from the drive-through?

This happens often if you are interested in the natural world: You seek but don’t always find. You are left with a mystery.

A remarkable one-night read

 I’m going to have to revise my list of one-night reads, the books that can be read in one night. Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain deserves a place of honor.

A reviewer for The Guardian called it “the finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain.” That judgment is straightforward but strikes me as unfortunate.

First, some other outstanding writers have been interested in Britain’s landscape. To take a few examples from contemporaries, Robert Macfarlane, Ronald Blythe, Roger Deakin and Alice Oswald have written some wonderful things. I wouldn’t know how to compare them to Shepherd’s book.

A more serious problem with “the finest book ever written” judgment is that I know biologists — naturalists who are also scientists — who wouldn’t like The Living Mountain. 

The book has some wonderful descriptions of landscape, plants and wildlife, but it’s not a biology book, not a scientific book. It doesn’t have a catalog of the flora and fauna of the Cairngorms. It contains no great ecological insights. It’s about how getting familiar with a place changes a person. It’s a book about human nature and the place of a person within the cosmos.

I love The Living Mountain because it made me think about some questions that I’d only sideswiped or had somehow managed to avoid. Here are two examples:

• “I’ve been the instrument of my own discovery,” Shepherd says, and she wonders what she’s done about cleaning and sharpening her own instruments. She makes a case for paying attention and noticing things. But she also makes a case of experience a place in repose, when you’re not focused, not trying to capture ever detail. She makes a case for sleeping on the mountain, relaxing in it, finding out what the place is like when you’re not vigilantly trying to wring every lesson out of the experience.

• She also makes the case, unapologetically, for seeing things that the scientist doesn’t see, or at least doesn’t talk about. Watching an eagle hunt, she points out that you can see a scientific reason for the bird’s power and speed. But what do you say about its gracefulness?

The Living Mountain poses some deep questions but is mercifully brief. I think we can call it a one-night read. It’s 108 pages in the new edition — Macfarlane estimates 30,000 words. It took me more than one night, but I’m a slow reader.

• Source and notes: Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain; New York: Scribner, 2025.

If you’re curious about one-night reads, see “The notion of one-night reads at 20,” Oct. 28, 2021. A five-part list of my favorites ran from Oct. 29 to Nov. 2, 2021.

‘The Living Mountain’

 If you’re interested in the notion of place and in natural places, Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is excellent.

Shepherd, who taught at a college for teachers in Aberdeen, Scotland, walked the Cairngorms, a plateau with several peaks, for decades. She wrote The Living Mountain during World War II but, apparently discouraged by some remarks from a friend, put it in a drawer for 30 years.

The book was published in the 1977. It took off when Robert Macfarlane, who writes a lot about place, championed it and wrote an introduction to an edition published in 2011.

Macfarlane has a lot of interesting things to say about the book. Two remarks convinced me to read it. Macfarlane said the book had changed how he sees the world. He also said he sees something new in the book each time he reads it.

A sample of what the book is like would be more helpful than a summary of its argument.

The first impulse, in exploring mountains, is to go from peak to peak. Shepherd said she was cured when an experienced walker took her to Loch Coire an Lochain, which sits on ledge below a peak. You can’t see the lake until you’re on it. The lake, with waterfalls feeding and draining it, catches water that has run off granite. The water is clear, and so is the mountain air. The lake shines with light.

Shepherd returned to the lake with another friend, a woman, and they waded into the shining water.

 

Then I looked down; and at my feet there opened a gulf of brightness so profound that the mind stopped. We were standing on the edge of a shelf that ran some yards into the loch before plunging down to the pit that is the true bottom. And through that inordinate clearness we saw the depth of the pit. So limpid was it that every stone was clear.

 

In Shepherd’s telling, the natural world is full of elemental things: wind, light, water, mist, snow, heather, birds, deer. Those elemental things we find on the mountain can somehow awaken the elemental things within ourselves.

• Source: Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain; New York: Scribner, 2025, pp. 12-13.

The other questions

 In the age of AI, perhaps we’d be better off with IE. Instead of turning to artificial intelligence when we ask questions, what if we relied on informed enthusiasm?

The phrase comes from Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. Shepherd, a teacher of teachers, walked the Cairngorms in Scotland for decades before writing her wonderful book during World War II.

The mountains are a fascinating but forbidding place: high winds, the possibility of snow 12 months a year, sudden changes in weather, difficult trekking. Even experienced walkers sometimes die.

In the middle of nowhere, Shepherd ran across two boys bedecked in photography gadgets. They asked directions to the most difficult peak.

The teenagers were city boys, railway workers from England. They’d gotten interested in photography and had made it their ambition to photograph a golden eagle.

They’d read everything they could find on eagles. They knew their habitat and their habits. The young photographers were looking for ledges along the higher peaks.

Shepherd feared for their safety but didn’t try to dissuade them.

 

Their informed enthusiasm — even if only half informed — was the way in.

 

This is not a rant against technology but a reminder that our attitudes about technology, our approach to it, might need attention.

Perhaps I’m just an old man, but it seems to me that we have become so used to instant answers to so many of our questions that we forget that there are questions of another kind. Those questions require a part of our lives: an investment in research, yes, but also a commitment to walking into the wilderness, living life — even for just a day or two — in a way we haven’t lived before.

To forget about those questions seems tragic to me. To think they can be resolved by looking at a computer screen seems tragically wrong.

• Source: Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain; New York: Scribner, 2025, p. 64.

Solstice

 We’ve had a series of storms rolling in from the west. I had to work to cut the grass between storms. The grass was wet and clogged the rains. It was slow going.

We had more than 4 inches of rain in two weeks.

When we first came to Georgia from Texas, that’s what I saw: the almost unbelievably lush growth of the forest made possible by so much water. The average rainfall at our old place was about 25 inches. In Stone Mountain, it’s about 50.

When we arrived, it seemed as if we’d moved into a rainforest.

I’m now getting a sense of how the early settlers must have seen Georgia. I’m told that a lot of the ordinary folks who came were agricultural workers from East Anglia, fleeing economic hardship. The average rainfall in that part of the world is about 25 inches.