COMMUNITY ARCHIVES

Take a Walk: SBFC Final Presentation

claire voris - 2016 wilderness ranger intern on the Bitterroot national forest

For every one step that Juraj (Ury) Sovcik takes down the trail, I take two. I’m not a particularly speedy hiker, but I’m not slow and it offends my pride when I can’t keep pace with him.  As he outruns me in his Euro-chic Capri-pants, I chalk up the difference in our strides to things beyond my control – safe things that leave my dignity in tact: leg length, his Eastern European metabolism, perhaps it’s the Grizzly Wintergreen he tucks behind his lower lip in the morning. Most days sheer will (some call it ego) keeps me tethered to his pace, but it isn’t comfortable.  I should be satisfied with the fact that we can’t all be 6’4” Slovakian ice-climbers.  Kelsey Johanson, who taps in at just over 5’2”, necessitates three steps for every one of Ury’s.  At a run of the mill height of 5’8”, I suppose I at least have that.

Kelsey’s feet work the same way her mind does – delicately and with piercing attentiveness to her surroundings.  She takes small strides, so enraptured by the details of the grouse whortleberries and the trillium and vetch species sliding underfoot that I sometimes wonder how she gets anywhere.  If I had her ear and eye for the minutia of the wilderness environment, I know I wouldn’t.  Ask Kelsey at the end of the day how many planes she has heard overhead and, without blinking, she will tell you the exact number.  On August 12th, when we hiked 10 miles from Boulder Lake to the trailhead at Sam Billings Campground, she counted 13 planes before 2:00 p.m. – or at least that’s what Kelsey says.  I heard 1… maybe… and, honestly, that noise could have been my stomach.  Kelsey keeps me present and attuned to the little things I might otherwise have missed, stepped on, overlooked.  

Behind Kelsey walks Courtney Wall, our crew lead, who, I admit, is still an ambulatory mystery to me.  I’ve seen her run as much as I’ve seen her mosey, both speeds obtained intentionally, maintained with ease.  I’ve been walking with her for 3 months and I still don’t know what her natural pace is.  She’s just good at staying cool and blending in.  Unlike some people with a more rigid sense of rhythm, her body doesn’t seem to fight what she finds when she walks with the group.  It’s an amazing skill, one that I am envious of.  I chalk up her talents to her yoga practice, her strong pelvic floor, her parsnip-based diet.

Our crew spends most of our time, between logs, walking in a line like this: Ury in the front; me struggling, winded, behind him; Kelsey trucking quietly a few yards further down the trail; and Courtney, playing doting parent to us all, bringing up the rear.  I pay attention to our pace obsessively.  Who is where, when, and for how long? How hard are they breathing compared to me?  Someone’s hard hat is swinging loosely on their pack. The six-foot long cross cut is catching brush as we pass by.  The rocks in the shade are still slick.  Watch your step.  Watch the mis-steps of the person ahead of you.  If I put my head down, tune out and follow Ury’s footsteps, we can comfortably break 3 miles an hour.  If I stop to tie a shoe, to adjust my pack, to hit the canyon creek for water, to silky a wayward pack-bump along the trail, the delay equates to distance lost – tenths of a mile that wriggle in my brain and taunt me because, although distance is not the name of the game in trail work, efficient miles are something I can’t quite let go of yet.  I realize this makes me sound neurotic, anal, competitive… and maybe I am those things.  Or was.  Or am recovering from them?  Chalk it up to a strange sort of addiction.  

In 2013, I hiked the Appalachian Trail – 2,000 miles in a season – which gave me a lot of time to think about walking, specifically, the way I walk.  It was a selfish time when I could put my head down and go: feet flying, brain empty, body churning and numb; a time when there was no one to perform for, stop for, worry for, or send timesheets to.  Isaiah, a member of an Apostolic Christian cult on the east coast that I met along the trail and made conversation with over the course of an egg and cheese breakfast sandwich, was the first person to point out my meditative self-absorption.  We didn’t agree on very many things – his views on the federal government, homebirths, child-labor laws, deodorant – but on this point, the self-serving nature of time spent alone in the woods, I’ll give the man some credit.  Disappearing requires a certain amount of entitlement.  To drop responsibility and hide in the woods demands a laying aside not just of personal comforts, but also sacrifices the sound sleeping of family and friends back home. And to maintain that sort of auto-centrism for five months? Sure, I’d call it gratuitous, something only a special kind of narcissist could accomplish.  I hiked trails through 14 states that were the products of other people’s labors – generations of boot-heels that packed that earthen highway, thousands of hours on the parts of crews with saws and picks and shovels, whose work allowed me to tune-out, disappear, self-serve.  I didn’t appreciate it then.  I don’t think I was able to.  I didn’t understand the bigger picture – the plight of public lands, the idea of wilderness (with and without a capital “W”), the definitions of “access”(both the liberal and conservative versions).  I was too worried about getting places, keeping up with a pace I wasn’t sure who had set, but was determined to keep.  That’s what a headspace dedicated to disappearing does to you.  And yet, I also believe everyone deserves a dose of uninterrupted selfishness.  I think self-indulgence and self-preservation tow the same line in our lives more frequently than we give credit. 

When I came to Montana from Illinois last fall for graduate school at the University of Montana, I wasn’t comfortable with the day-hikes I was taking.  They made me nervous.  I walked too fast, trying to get places quickly, efficiently.  Before I’d even started out, I was worrying about making camp, finding water, meeting the wrong sort of people, when, all the while, I had a Suburu waiting for me in a parking lot just a mile or two down a bald slope overlooking a metropolitan area of 70,000 people.  I was haunted by neurotic phantoms: where was my 40 lb. backpack?  What had happened to my fast, oblivious, inflexible pace?  Why couldn’t I just let go? 

My hikes got shorter, less frequent, and, ultimately, pushed aside for other recreation.  I applied for a job through SBFC because I wanted to have a reason to get back out in the woods, something that would take me places in my new environment and give me a reason to stay put, slow down, enjoy that world again.  Because I knew how to walk on a trail, I thought I knew how to maintain one.  I didn’t, but I would learn. 

The SBFC Wilderness Ranger Internship has given me the opportunity to work in parts of the wild that I knew I could love, but had forgotten how to go about loving.  As a thru-hiker, a downed tree was a nuisance that required a quick detour, an unwieldy jump, or, more often than not in my case, an unflattering ass-scoot.  As a trail worker, a downed tree is also a nuisance, but one that demands attention to detail, a slowing down, an appreciation of binds and bark and sharp saws and the sheer force of winds and rains and sediments and, eventually, of Ramen Noodle fueled bodies pushing, sweating and stinking together.  I’m so thankful I’ve had the opportunity to relearn how to walk this summer – thankful to have had strong, intelligent, kind, and passionate people to walk with.  To my crew, I will miss the sound of your footsteps. Thank you for helping to anchor mine.  To people like Sally Ferguson, Adam Washebek, and Jack Ader: thank you for creating opportunities and making room for people like me to learn.  Thank you SBFC supporters who made our trainings and certifications possible. Thank you to the Bitterroot National Forest for sharing your lands, your tools, your knowledge.  Through us, you are ensuring a future for these wild places.

Tying this all together at the end now: I’m supposed to tell you who I am and what I’ve learned and how I’ve grown.  Well, my name is Claire.  And I’ve learned to slip the long end of a saw through the right shoulder strap of my backpack, to take the weight of it on my hip belt as I walk – it’s a bitch to carry either way, but that’s the best I’ve come up with so far. I’ve learned that to put my head down and walk the way I walked 2,000 miles out East cannot be done in the wilderness without the help of people who are passionate: people who love the idea of something wild; people who have taken the time to lose themselves, selfishly at times, to that idea, and yet, also understand the importance of coming together.  Preserving Wilderness requires equal parts communication and commiseration – a coming together over accomplishments, as well as disappointments. Those with the power to open doors for Wilderness education could also, without open discussion, lean on them until they slip quietly closed.  To prevent that, inviting many voices to the table is a necessary action, some voices which, politically, may always, heartily, viciously disagree.  But, by my estimation, if you’ve bothered to engage in the Wilderness discussion at all, it’s a signal that we’ve headed down the right path. Right now, we may not define words like use, access, and recreation, in the same ways, but I urge both parties to just keep walking – in the woods preferably – because I think we might just stumble on some common ground.  

about claire voris

2016 Wilderness Ranger Intern on the Bitterroot National Forest

Hometown:  Barrington, IL

Education:  University of Montana, MFA in Creative Writing, Spring 2017. Washington University, St. Louis, Bachelor of Arts Degree, May 2011 Major: Anthropology; Minors: Spanish and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, May 2013-October 2013.