Things that can only be adequately experienced first-hand, contemporaneously

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Spring continues to unfold - slowly, as well as quite late - here in the south of England. The trees are coming into leaf now and nature is possibly at its brightest green.

Today was a little damp and cool, but we decided to go out for a little walk and a picnic lunch. The floor of the woodland we visited was a perfect carpet of bluebells, precisely at their peak in form, scent and colour.

I will not try to describe them much further, because it is impossible, and you’re wasting your time searching for photographs of the phenomenon; there’s something anyway about this palette of colours that can never be properly captured by any mere camera in the same way that it is imbibed by the human eye, which takes in the muted tones of leaf litter, through the amethyst sea of flowers, through the brilliant green forest canopy, to the azure sky, and further still in horizontal dimensions, without imposing a brutal rectangular frame.

There’s only one way to know what it is like in an English bluebell wood - go there. There is no adequate substitute. Not even any fair representation. No way to enjoy it virtually or vicariously. You can’t Google it. Go there. Experience it directly with your own senses.

It’s something I look forward to every year, but can it really be true that I have experienced this spectacle anew on less than forty occasions?

2

My vote is for sunrise at the Clingman’s Dome observatory on a misty morning in early summer. You must make the climb up the path in the darkness with the low-hanging clouds and mist making the path invisible. The smells and sounds are muffled and indistinct. The chill goes all the way to the bone. The path is steep enough that your blood gets pumping even if you take your time making the climb.

Once you’re on the observation deck you have a 360-degree view of that section of the Great Smoky Mountains and in that season just before sunrise you can see how they got their name. Mist rises from every tree and as the rising sun begins to burn off the mist your view of the sun is like none other. No picture could even approach the spectral nature of the sun’s power over its earthly creations.

It is as humbling as anything I’ve ever seen. Even sunsets over the sea pale by comparison.

3

Working a couple of hours south of Prudhoe, every three or four days I’d drive toward the Brooks on the haul road a ways to a maintenance facility with a phone, this being in the days before cells. The slope is a gently undulating, treeless expanse there, covered with knee high willows and tussock grass. The tones are very earthy and you often can see for many, many miles.

Coming back one evening, I found myself in a valley seemingly on fire. The low sun tracking almost horizontal in the sky had hit that perfect place, generating warm light but instead of being fleeting like in lower longitudes, here, above the Arctic Circle, it was almost permanent in it’s duration.

I stopped, got on top of the truck, and for a hour or so just admired how perfect the entire place was. Unpolluted, deserted, perfectly natural. The hills were beautiful yellows, oranges and reds, the sky was clear and blue and almost distilled. The occasional bear or moose or caribou was unheard and untroubled by my presence. The only noise was the gentle wind and a variety of birds.

I tried to idelibly imprint upon my mind the beauty and serenity of the moment, knowing full well though that there was a great deal so special in the place that could never be remembered, resurrected, no matter how perfect my memory. I thought of others I wished could be there, of the tragedy of not knowing this place, of being privy to it’s secret. So I just sat, enjoyed, absorbed, and left already beginning to experience a sense of melancholy that while it was permanent, my presence there could never be.

4

The Grand Canyon. YOu see the pictures, the tourist ads, the National Geographic photos, and you say, “Hey, a really big canyon.”

Then you get there. You drive through Nowheresville, population zilch, Arizona, for what feels like days. Finally you pull into the park, wade your way through your fellow sight-seers, pitch your tent, huffing from altitude and cracking desert heat.

Then, finally, you go and you stand on the rim of the canyon, and you look across. You look down. Your gaze bounces across a few plateus, wanders off a few ledges, and finally finds, somewhere beneath the layers of red and brown and orange rock, a little green snake, a ribbon of a river. You can’t hear it and you know that it’s actually a few hundred feet wide down there, that those flecks of white are raging rapids. But from here it’s silent; it’s the Mississippi viewed from the window of a cross-country United flight.

You try to take that in; you try to tell yourself that that big flat ledge there with the tiny trail dotted with laden-down mules isn’t the bottom. Theres no river on it: that’s just a plateau. A plateau halfway down. There’s a river somewhere beyond that, somewhere nearly a mile down.

Eventually you tear your eyes away from where the Earth has been ripped open. The sun goes down and the stars come out. It’s cold - not just brisk but cold; the high desert air holds no heat. But because of that, because it’s so thin and there’s so little water in the air around you, the moon gazes down at you like nothing else, the stars are so thick in the sky you can see the Milky Way. It’s a swarm of stars, gathered like the way gnats hover above a backyard barbecue in the summer. You can see for millenia, both literally and figuratively. In the sunlight you saw the layers as a river carved it’s initials through the years; now you’re seeing the burning fire of stars that may not be there anymore, stars that are billions of miles and years away.
Really - none of the above is hyperbole in the slightest. If someone said to me that they were going to go to one National Park in the US and it was the only one they’d ever see, I would not hesitate before telling them to go to the Grand Canyon. There are no words, nor is there any film in any camera, that can do it’s enormity justice.

5

Marmite. :slight_smile:

(though I love those bluebell carpets in an English woodland as well)

6

Telemark skiing through waist-deep powder; no point describing it, you have to experience it.

7

Moving 60mph+ on skis. When the entire world becomes a narrow tunnel directly in front of you and your skis barely touch the snow and the noise in your ears from the wind drowns out every other sound except for the chatter of your skis that vibrate under you. Then the bottom drops out as you crest a ledge and there is nothing but the wind for company. Then touchdown, a compression with a swinging left hand turn that sinks your stomach and pushes the air out of your chest while you fight to keep carving a smooth turn. Then back into a tuck and accelerate out again, legs burning.

Yeah. That’s a bit special. :slight_smile:

8

Lovely thread. I am lucky also to know the indescribable grandeur of the Grand Canyon. I’ll also throw in the glaciers of Greenland from a plane, a rhododendron glade in Nepal, and sunrise over the Himalayas, as things that cannot fully be conveyed.

But taking this thread to heart, and making the most of where I am now, I also know the magic of a spring bluebell wood in England (lately, near Blenheim Palace). The sounds of the wood, muffled by the flower carpet, the mixture of chill and warmth in the air, the shafts of low sunlight, the scents, the overwhelming delight and beauty. Wonderful, and as Mangetout says, not fully explicable either.