Andrew Blackwell - Visit Sunny Chernobyl - And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

The second idea was that nature is good, and good for you. The best way for a person to strive for spiritual perfection, he argued, is through the direct experience of wild, untamed nature, which will free the mind from civilization’s clotting noise. Thoreau wasn’t the only one to espouse this idea—the 1800s saw a whole transcendental crew on the loose—but he expressed it with such humor and good nature, and in a way still so accessible to readers, that we might as well give him most of the credit. Every time someone goes for a run in the woods, or donates to the Sierra Club, or maxes out their credit card at REI, the man with the neck beard and the bean patch ought to get royalties.

If there was one way that Thoreau thought was best for getting in touch with the environment, it was walking. The guy made a yatra of every afternoon. He championed not only walking but also ambling, strolling, moseying, and above all, sauntering. In his essay Walking, he makes the wry assertion that “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is of taking walks—who had a genius, so to speak, for SAUNTERING.” From those rhapsodic capitals, he moves directly to the task of blurring the line between loafing and sacred pilgrimage, arguing that to saunter effectively is to be on a holy journey to nowhere in particular.

The transcendental notion is that nature and wildness aren’t mere symbols of cosmic truth, but its actual embodiment. So to steep yourself in them, it follows, is to allow your spirit to unfurl. But it requires more than your mere physical presence. You must saunter mentally as well, losing yourself in your senses, coaxing your mind to meander into nature as surely as your feet have. “What business have I in the woods,” Thoreau asks, “if I am thinking of something out of the woods?”

But if you believe, as I do, that the concept of nature is pretty bankrupt these days, then the question becomes just where to meet your sauntering needs. It’s easy to understand what’s nice about a walk in the woods, but will less obvious places do the trick as well? Can you properly saunter across an oil sands mine? What about around a soy field? Is the tired ground of Spindletop somehow inherently unsaunterable?

Even Thoreau acknowledged that his own sauntering grounds—around Concord, Massachusetts—were only semi-wild at best, shot through as they were with logging trails, and old native American footpaths, and homesteads, and farms. And when he went to Maine, in 1846, in search of a truly primeval nature experience, Thoreau found himself badly freaked out by the more serious wildness he found. Nature wasn’t always beautiful or sacred-seeming. It could be uncaring and inhuman. Nature could crush your spirit as surely as it could raise it. He was honest enough to admit it, though, and incorporated the experience into his ideas, deciding that the healthiest thing for a person was to have one foot in nature and one in civilization. Nature’s American prophet preferred his wildness benign.

From our vantage point 150 years after his death, there are also darker undercurrents to be found in the environmental ecstasy of Thoreau’s ideas. In Walking, he goes to great lengths to point out not only that he sauntered, and where, but also in which direction. He went West, and it was no accident. A deeply moral man, an energetic campaigner for the abolition of slavery, and a founder of civil disobedience, he was nevertheless a kind of imperialist. He believed in his civilization, and in its growth. “I must walk toward Oregon,” he wrote from the East Coast. “And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west.” There was a continent to despoil and plunder, and in his good-natured, wildness-loving way, Henry David helped carry the flag.

Thoreau and company have something else to answer for, too, if you ask me. It has to do with that mystical experience of nature they were so keen on. On the one hand, they convinced the world that the forest was essentially good—an idea that sparked the environmental movement and continues to nourish it today. But there was a side effect. Because they also convinced the world that the way for people to benefit from nature’s virtue was to go get it. Direct, individual experience was the ticket.

And so environmental rapture became yet another commodity to be extracted from the forest, or the savannah, or the ocean. And all the nature-loving, green-friendly people of the world are merely coveting the spiritual goods. We’re desperate to preserve what we call nature, but maybe that’s just because it’s the best place we know of to go mining for enlightenment.

In the morning they walked, but in the afternoon the sadhus napped. You shouldn’t overexert yourself in such heat.

We camped in a dusty grove a hundred yards off the road. After lunch, Mansi and I lounged in an open tent with Jai and Sunil and M.P., who had brought me the gift of a religious booklet called Preparations for Higher Life.

Sunil played his regular game: trying to get us to walk all the way to Delhi.

“You can’t leave!” he cried. “We love having you here. We’re going to put chains on you both!” He reached out and seized us each by an ankle.

Although he was a sadhu like everyone else, Sunil wore jeans and a shirt instead of robes. His parents hadn’t liked the idea of him becoming a holy man, he told us. “At least dress normally,” they had said, and so he did. The street clothes were appropriate to his air of easy competence. As yatra manager, he was the brains of the operation and by far the most sensible sadhu of the bunch. But he counterbalanced this with a maniacal sense of humor.

“Name change!” he shouted, pointing at me. “Gore Krishna!”

Mansi laughed. “He’s calling you white krishna ,” she said. “He says you’re substituting the pen and the camera for the flute.”

Sunil rocked back and forth, slapping the floor of the tent as he laughed.

I asked them exactly what made a person a sadhu. Did you sign up? Did you have to be ordained?

“It’s someone’s way of life,” Sunil said. “Someone who just wants to be with God, who wants to serve.”

“Like you,” said Jai. “You’ve come here. You’re concerned for the world. Those who think for others are sadhus.”

“So I’m a sadhu?” I asked. Could you become a sadhu involuntarily?

Jai ignored the question. “This is not an easy fight,” he said. “Without pen and ink, it’s not possible.” And he wanted to make sure I had my story straight. “People used to drink Yamuna to purify themselves,” he said. “Now you can’t even touch it. Recently some pilgrims drank some Yamuna water and had to be hospitalized that same night.” The villages along the river couldn’t use it as a water source anymore.

“Can’t government provide people clean water?” he demanded. “If the government can put a Metro train a hundred feet underground, it can do this.” He chopped one hand against the other. Someone had to purify the purifier. “Until Yamuna is clean, we are not going to back off. This is higher than religion. Higher than human beings.”

Hiking with the sadhus is cheaper than taking the bus, and more scenic, but you will have to come to terms with crapping in the open, which for Westerners can be profoundly difficult. In the past, I had mocked people who worried too much about the bathroom arrangements of faraway places, but I now saw that I was one of them. Worrying about bathroom access, I realized, was a fundamental expression of my cultural heritage. All of Western civilization, in fact, had been built on a set of technologies whose only purpose was to abstract the process of dealing with one’s own feces. (Germany is the exception to this rule, with its lay-and-display toilet bowls.) In any case, I would happily have parted with a thick stack of rupees for some time alone with a chunk of porcelain.