Remains

A hit parade of things

What remains when we depart this Earth? New Years Eve always has me thinking about death and rebirth. The remains of a pre-historic woman were exposed by a flood years ago near where I live. Some of her possessions were with her. Interestingly we refer to neither the astral being, nor the possessions we leave behind as “remains,” seemingly only the bones and flesh of the container for our soul are worthy of this title.

A few days ago, I helped my father remove his possessions from the house he had built our family back in the 1980s. I thought about how long this structure, its brick pavers, concrete foundation, and glass windows, would take to turn back into homogenized Earth…20,000 years? I’ve always wanted to live in a tipi for this reason. Although I’ve encountered in the wilderness thousand year old stone circles left by Ute people used to hold down the walls of the little cone tents, no other evidence remains of these simple elegant homes. They were there, and now they’re gone.

Being nomadic by nature lends to having fewer possessions. When I have visited the more permanent pueblo ruins in New Mexico and Arizona, often millions of potsherds litter the ground. Sometimes —as in exhibit A below— a tossed salad of pottery styles that span hundreds or even thousands of years demonstrate a very long inhabitance. I, myself, have led a rather nomadic life, which has led me to shed possessions in cycles. Still, this has always left me wondering if archaeologists in the future will be digging the layers of our contemporary landfills and find all my refuse.

Exhibit A —author’s 2024 photo of potsherds from Bandalier National Monument

Possessions have long troubled me. I think we can all agree that watching the sunset over the ocean with a loved one brings us more joy than any possession ever could. Yet, we all seek out things to make our lives easier, enriched, and even define who we are. Many of the possessions that still weigh me down are toys that have driven past identities. Once, after returning from a trip to a third world country, I suffered from such severe reverse culture shock that I wished to throw away everything I owned and return to the slums I had seen there. Ironically, I began amassing climbing gear, protein shake blenders, climbing magazines and books, and basically anything else that could keep me in that ephemeral world between the ground and the sky. My identity was “climber.”

Many climbers’ “remains” have been found out in the wild places. Most famously, Mallory and Irvine’s bodies were discovered on Mount Everest —Irvine’s being the last in 2024, 100 years after they went missing. It is still unknown whether they reached the summit but their story remains locked in history as a daring milestone in the sport. On many of my expeditions and outings, I have found pitons and other gear fixed in the rock high off the ground. These remains sometimes tell a story —a rapid retreat during a lightning storm, a hard to protect section of rock, etc. Most often, though, it just means that the gear got stuck.

Some of our possessions get stuck too. We have closets full of things we never use yet cannot stomach getting rid of. The value we ascribe to things puts a paper weight on our soul. Yet we all have let things go that we have later regretted. If we think about ourselves as our DNA, we then don’t even have control of the things our posterity will hold on to long after we are dead and gone. I’ve often wondered if my grandfather and great grandfather are laughing at the things of theirs I continue to cling to.

We all have our prize possession. If I had the time in a house fire, the one possession I would grab would be my mandolin. I’ve often even pictured myself walking barefoot through the wilderness with nothing but my mandolin strapped across my breast. Yet I still have stuff filling every corner of my house. As an artist, I have closets full of dreams, concepts I may never see through completion. This is one reason I’ve always found performance art so appealing. I can record my voice, but nothing will be as visceral as the vibration of my vocal cords tickling the hairs inside your ears.

Are memories possessions? Songs have long accompanied deeply cut memories for me. I discovered Gregory Alan Isakov during a summer I spent in Alaska. Now his voice floods my mind with visions of puffins and whales. I had been listening to Elephant Revival’s “Ring Around the Moon” when I got a flat tire on the side of Mount Eddy, a full moon rising. Railroad Earth’s “On The Banks” accompanied me on hundreds of trips up and down the Cache la Poudre River Canyon while I snapped photos of whitewater carnage. I cherish these memories, but I often wonder, should I let them go to be more present? What remains of these memories when we are on our death-bed? I’ve held on to so many in the hopes to relive them in my final hours, but perhaps that is all in vain —literally pure vanity.

I usually use New Years Eve to reflect and envision. This year I just want to let go and let the good times roll. I don’t want to possess the past or future, but rather let the sunset colors of now pour through my eye-sockets and flood my soul with the marrow of life. When my time comes, when my sunset arrives, all that matters to me is that I did my best to protect wilderness, and had a little fun along the way. That is, I hope when I’m gone, what remains will be wilderness and song.

So go out and sing in the wild, go on, like Julie Andrews in the opening scene of The Sound of Music, and the hills might just come alive!