Mountain Eros
Anna Mills
The first time I took my friend Elissa to Yosemite, she taught me the term “geogasm.” Past the park entrance, the road climbed through groves of fir draped with green lichen. We wound on and on up the narrow aisle of sunlight. Then we surfaced. I pulled over as soon as I could and stepped out onto the shoulder of a great white dome. Wind lifted the hairs on my arms. A juniper clung to a crack past the guardrail. The air tasted mineral. We looked down a river of pines toward Yosemite Valley, bound by the wall of Cloud’s Rest and the thumb of Half Dome. “My God. Geogasm,” Elissa said. I nodded. I hadn’t heard that fused word before, but it pointed to a truth I took as a given. Nature arouses. The wild is erotic.
Every July or August, I camp near Tioga Lake at the crest of the Sierra. I have touched and tasted that region each summer for the last 20 years. I lie on hot granite by the river; I roll pinesap between my fingers and smell it; I suck on sharp wild onion. My raptures over the ice water, the glacier polish and the curled petals of the rein orchids approach sexual excitement. For a long time, I thought this unusual. It embarrassed and pleased me to think myself unique. When I began to read literature about nature, however, I found erotic feelings for rock, tree and fruit everywhere, even in the classics. Thoreau declares, “All nature is my bride.” Whitman cries, “I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, // I am mad for it to be in contact with me.” The long-celibate John Muir beholds a vista and feels a “passionate ecstatic pleasure-glow not explainable” through all his flesh. Contemporary writers speak even more plainly. Terry Tempest Williams argues for “an erotics of place.” Edward Abbey sails down the Colorado on a thin raft and experiences “a pleasure almost equivalent to that first entrance—from the outside—into the neck of the womb.”
What is this connection between sex and nature appreci-ation? For my part, I respond to wilderness with a suite of moods as varied as sexual moods. The itches and hungers are stubbornly suggestive, if rarely explicit. First, there’s the voluptuous. I investigate animal, vegetable and mineral the way I might lie with my lover on a languorous Sunday morning and explore the delicate bones in his hands. Last July, in a dry streambed, I came upon alpine lady ferns. Each clump sprang up bright green and unruly like a clown’s wig. I bent to immerse my face, and the tips traced my cheeks and nose. I closed my eyes to the tickling, the slight stickiness. I breathed in the smell of cut grass and brushed my face back and forth.
Most flowers tolerate a careful finger. Indian paintbrush feels smooth like a rabbit’s foot. Jewel flower seedpods dangle, bumpy like string beans. I like rosewort, a succulent, with waxy leaves that circle the stem. Giant blazing star grows a crop of stamens like corn silk—I pause on the trail to stroke them. Pygmy stonecrop sprouts between boulders—red-stemmed, red-leaved, little and brittle. At its base, the leaves glisten like grapes. I want to squeeze one until a drop of liquid shows.
It’s tempting to pat a fat, golden marmot while he waddles. Anytime I get near, though, he chirps and runs. Only a few animals in the Sierra submit to human touch. Plump tadpoles remind me of grapes or eyeballs. They squirm to the surface of a pond to feed and then hover until my shadow sends them under a rock. I’d like to catch one between two fingers and press a little to feel the jelly. The only creature easy to hold, though, is a Caddis fly larva. An inch-long stick lies in the shallows of the lake, covered in grains of sand, bits of wood and glints of mica. I pick it up and let it drift in my palm under the surface. A black dot of a head emerges, and the legs tickle.
My partner Sam will taste anything, as if poisons do not exist. He’ll dart his tongue to any berry. I’ve seen him stand eye to eye with a leaf and then tilt his head and close his teeth around it. This he calls “grazing.” Once, emboldened, I cracked open a furred lupine pod and tasted a tiny pea—bitter. Usually, though, I pore over my Sierra Nevada Natural History to make sure a gooseberry is a gooseberry. Then Sam and I stand around a prickly bush and eat one sour, furry red bead each, as if taking communion. On one of our first dates, he introduced me to another sacrament—rocks. He eats them. Now I, too, have tried chalky slate and gritty sandstone. Sam mulls over a crumb and finally nods, “I like that one.”
Perhaps the most playful, transcendent thing to eat, how-ever, is ice or snow. After a storm, I look for hailstones in the pine branches. Fat ones the size of blueberries are best; I slip them in my mouth and taste the pine. Then I roll the balls around and suck until they soften enough to chew. I used to scoop up snow in a cup and mix in powdered lemonade for a sorbet. Now I just savor old summer snow, grainy with dirt and ice-granules. You use as much water to melt snow as your body drinks in, so a thirsty person can suck for hours and never stop wanting more. I scrape at the surface to clear the hot-pink “watermelon” algae that might disturb my stomach. Then I stick fingers into the white and dig out chunks. My hands smart and glow.
Sometimes the thin air and the distances above the tree line overwhelm me. I need a womb. Curled under the lip of a snow bank in the rocky no-man’s land above Tioga Pass, I feel the good solidity around me, the shelter from wind and light. I push in as far as I can, where there is just enough room for the fetus of my body. The walls curve under my hand, slick with melt water. Later, I arrive back at camp, cold, dehydrated and spent. A little-girl song of helplessness starts in the back of my head. I change into wool tights and a turtleneck and crawl into my mummy bag. There I lie until dinner, cocooned. Then I pick some mountain pennyroyal and brew a brown tea with the flavor of limes and straw. I nurse it in my tin cup, leaning over the warmth as the trees grow blacker and their needles disappear.
French philosopher Luce Irigaray describes a diffuse, fluid eroticism—a slow, supposedly feminine sexuality that merges with sensuality. This fits my lolling, tender mood in nature to a tee. At times, I wish I could spend my life in this voluptuous trance. But I can’t sustain it. In truth, it grows tedious and demands too much focus. As in sex, I eventually need more acute sensation. For me, this takes the form of a frontier ambition and macho stereotype: conquest. Lakes wink; granite rises; corn lilies bloom by the creek—I want to inhale it and have it for my own. I worm into a cranny in a cliff in a thunderstorm or traverse a string of lakes to the tiniest blip on the map. The sight of a talus slope or an unnamed mountain makes me restless. Even on a leisurely stroll, I determine which ridges might prove accessible without rope. Like a frat boy counting sexual exploits, I keep track of my summits.
On one backpacking trip, my mother and I boot-skied down Fletcher Peak, a gray bulwark with a sandy crater. To get there, you slog up loose gravel, slipping one step for every two steps up. Finally, you reach a row of crags, eat your hummus and pita and let the sweat dry. Your gaze rises from the yellow strip of Lyell Canyon up the dark green flanks of the mountains to the rock outcroppings like birds’ beaks. Then you pack up and prepare for 10 minutes of bliss. Spread your arms, let your feet jig, sink and slide down the sand. You careen, hands out, conscious only of pounding legs that get smarter and faster. The blood rushes to your face; you pant; you yell without thinking. You are mistress of everything: sand, air, your body.
The desire for conquest makes me possessive. I enjoy the exclusiveness of touch and taste. No one else strokes the blue-green hemlock needles when I do. Each summer new friends come along; I give them my best tour and hope they will acknowledge my prior claim. I try not to bore them with anecdotes, but the impulse gets the better of me. It’s sweet to be the expert. I bring Elissa to the ferns or show her how to run down a snow-filled ravine, proud to initiate someone into my signature madness.
Usually only weather and social pressure get me to vacation outside the Sierra. When the passes close for the winter, I stay home in San Francisco. Occasionally, I go for a hike near the city with friends. As we stroll among oak and manzanita over the “golden rolling hills of California,” I keep mentioning the mountains. When I travel elsewhere, I seek out the un-smothered, un-manicured spots. In the Blue Ridge Mountains, a forest of azaleas or a 100-foot rock crowned with blueberries can captivate me. Yet they do not set me ablaze. It seems I lean toward something approaching one-sided monogamy with the Sierra. If I could claim Muir’s whole “Range of Light” for myself and make other humans merely visitors, I might be tempted.
Pleasure, of course, comes as much from surrender as from conquest. The desire to claim blends with the desire to be overwhelmed. To triumph on a peak is to be dwarfed by the stone. To fly down a gravel slope is to turn myself over. I want the land to get ahold of my body, and it does. Minutes after I open the car door, dust, coal and mosquitoes mark me. No sooner do I drive in the tent stakes but my knees are smudged and my fingernails lined with black. When I get going away from the road, I feel less like an urban plastic figure and more like an animal full of blood. A package of clothes can’t contain me; physicality seeps through. Sweat runs into my eyes and stings. Nose and mouth dry out, and the tips of my toes glow from rubbing the boot. After a day of hiking, brown waves appear on my arms, dried eddies of sweat. Dust floats up my pants and coats my legs. At the creek, I scrub with gravel to get my palms pink. Still, my skin is a wreck. Cracks on my hands deepen like cuts and line with dirt, a mosaic. My hair hangs so limp that people ask if it is wet. All this shames me a little when I go to the store for candy, yet I relish becoming Caliban.
I even find it a pleasure to pee in this country. A spot with a view is best. I squat. For a moment, the inside of me opens toward the earth. Flat pieces of granite serve as toilet paper. I take care picking them out, as rocks soaked in noonday sun can scorch. I pee a clear jet because I drink continuously, four gallons a day. Above 9,000 feet, I have to. I become little more than a conduit, an aqueduct for some arctic daisies and tinker’s penny.
I like to imagine losing my body among boulders the size of humans, like the broken granite leading to the summit of White Mountain. I pick my way, placing my hands on sandpaper surfaces. I wish I had climbing shoes, so my feet could cling to each bump through the rubber. What if I took off my sports bra and climbed with my breasts swinging? No armor. The softest part of me next to the million-year stone.
Many people lounge on summer afternoons by the glacial lakes, but I want to shock my body. I strip; the wind tickles and raises goose bumps. My body says to sit down and clutch my knees, not enter that water. But I need to enter it. In a second, I know I will put my palms together and roll in. Still, I hesitate. I count to three and I count to three again. Again. Then I tip. The sharpness all around seems to stop the day. The sound I make when I surface is more a bark than a cry. My legs propel me to the bank. I flail and prance on the grass and slap drops from my legs. My skin burns like champagne bubbles, peppermint, electric current, the mildest orgasm.
I find it easy to slide from surrender to masochism. It’s good when the land hurts me a little. In my teens, I hiked in shorts and collected scratches that faded to white. Once, a willow twig made a gash a half-inch deep in my knee. By the time we backpacked out and drove to a clinic, it was too late for stitches. The nurse reassured me, “My husband says he likes a girl with scars on her legs—it means she knows how to have fun.”
I used to tan and burn like wildfire. Oh for the days. Now they’ve scraped a minor skin cancer off my nose, and I’m not supposed to expose myself. At high elevations the sun shines like a beam through a magnifying glass. All summer I used to forget sunscreen and tan and burn and let my hair fry until I had yellow streaks, and my arms didn’t look Caucasian. On one expedition off trail through a granite amphitheater, I squinted against the glare in my bright blue tank top, sweating and drinking gallons. We crossed a ridge so high and bare it seemed we were the only animals for miles. For a week, my lobster back reminded me of that ridge. I half enjoyed the pain that woke the nerve cells across my shoulders. From time to time, there was the pleasure of aloe, gobs of cool gel on smarting skin.
The furthest extreme of masochism would be suicide. We have known for millennia that Eros is intertwined with Thanatos, the death wish. Most romances with nature flirt with death or the idea of death and search for ecstasy on the edge of the abyss. On Muir’s first expedition into the high country, he climbed to the brink of Yosemite Falls and gazed at the “grand plunge” of the stream as it “with sublime, fateful confidence springs out free in the air.” On that day, he experienced “enjoyment enough to kill if that were possible.”
In milder, cowardly fashion, I, too, court danger in the Sierra. Every improvised expedition turns out longer than I can safely manage. Every scramble ends with my hands shaking in a crack seven feet off the ground. Last summer, I raced out of a snow cave as a piece of ceiling fell behind me. At these times, details of body and place come into focus. Once, as thunder echoed a mile away, I placed hands and feet ever so gently over the humps and pockmarks of Lembert Dome. The poppy seed flecks on the rose-colored stone seemed luminous, hypnotic, dear to me. I would have made a perfect lightning rod.
It could be that these games of sensuality, power and help-lessness bear no relation to sexuality. Perhaps I compare one impulse to another in metaphor, as I might compare a body’s thirst for water to a nation’s thirst for oil. But arousal in nature and arousal in sex do not separate so easily. In tree trunks, boulders and petals, I see phallic, yonic and mammary symbols. The associations are often fleeting and whimsical. Pussypaws! How did they get such a lewd name? The flowers don’t look like cat’s feet but more like pompoms—fuzzy balls at the end of bare stalks. I’m not sure which sexual part they resemble, but they stir me. Pussypaws grow in the driest gravelly soils above the tree line. I discovered them on a barren plateau and bent every few yards to rub the softness and reassure myself this wasn’t the moon. In another godforsaken spot by Marie Lakes, the pussypaws grew taller and fluffier than anywhere else. Some popped up an improbably vibrant crimson. A few feet on they faded again to rose-white, only to light up neon several paces later. I crouched and fondled them but got embarrassed when Sam caught up. Something about the way I was fingering the little puff seemed as indecent as its name.
Last summer I discovered another suggestive flower—the dwarf bilberry. I must have stepped on it for years without noticing. One night, I saw it in my wildflower book—a pink jug like a manzanita blossom. The next morning, I filtered water before sunup, veiled by mosquito netting. As I sat on a mat of grass and sedge by the creek, some pea-sized leaves caught my eye. I reached out and bent back a stalk. Sure enough, a pink and white bubble emerged from under the leaves like a tongue from a mouth. A yellow pistil poked out of the tip. I began to fold the other plants back. Each one hid a bud. I tapped at the underside of one globe, and the thought snuck into my mind that the blossom resembled a clitoris: hidden, asking to be stroked. I liked knowing that the green matting held these everywhere in July. I could uncover a dwarf bilberry bloom anytime.
Sexual images are not always so coy. The Grand Tetons, Twin Peaks, Georgia O’Keefe’s flowers and the sandstone towers of Wyoming and New Mexico often figure in the public imagination as sexual parts. Whitman famously foists such associations upon us. In his wilderness, there are the “leafy lips… the polish’d breasts of melons.” Calamus or “Sweet-flag” is code for the phallus. In the forest, he senses “echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch, and vine.”
One could dismiss such eroticism as projection. Does my petting of stones and leaves and feathery fronds suggest that I’m aching for something I should seek in bed? It would be easy to make cracks about a loon like me who rubs her face in ferns. And flirting with nature does make me feel sexy. In my adolescence, sex seemed like other people’s territory. Even now, despite a healthy romantic life, I often feel less than attractive. In the Sierra, the way I work my body and revel in my surroundings makes me feel worthy of desire. Among my friends, I encourage a minor legend about my swimming proclivities. When there’s a private spot, I get naked. If my friends feel uncomfortable, I go around a bend or ask them to turn their backs, but I still like them to know about my lunacy. It’s obnoxious and vain, I know, to make them witness my special relation with ice water. Some get tired of this routine. However, quite a few encourage me.
If Sam gets withdrawn at any point on a trip, it consoles me to turn to the landscape. I ooh and ah over woolly mullein leaves or the heady scent of mountain spiraea. The plants accept my attentions. I tell myself I am innocent like a maid in the meadow, but at another level I know I’ve created an erotic triangle. Sam gets annoyed.
Even alone, I perform. I find myself strutting through the campground in filthy, sagging jeans, a lock of greasy hair escaped from my ponytail, my face spotted with acne. Yet I feel attractive because I am the woman who climbed North Peak and swam in Greenstone, who inhaled the good stink of sagebrush and crushed its leaves in her fingers.
Nature eroticism does more than feed my self-image; it elicits a physical response. Even Muir writes about this. He seems surprised when the mountains overwhelm his senses. At Salt Lake, Utah, he reports:
Without any definite determination I found myself undressed, as if some one else had taken me in hand; and while one of the largest waves was ringing out its message and spending itself on the beach, I ran out with open arms to the next, ducked beneath its breaking top, and got myself into right lusty relationship with the brave old lake.
In profane, modern terms, a song called “The Mountain Low” by Will Oldham announces, “If I could fuck a mountain, Lord I would fuck a mountain.” I wonder which mountain I would make love to. Mount Dana—13,053 feet, a massive red-brown tower above Tioga Lake. I’ve climbed it twice and seen it dusted with hail and orange with alpenglow. I’ve pushed through fields of lupine on its flank and swum in a bowl carved by the Dana glacier. I must have woken up on a hundred mornings to see its bulk filling the sky.
But does eroticism mean genital excitement? For some, it can. Rousseau considers the forest an aphrodisiac and hints that he retreats there to masturbate. Terry Tempest Williams finds a way to let the land pleasure her directly. Alone in a stream, she asks, “Do I dare? My legs open. The rushing water turns my body and touches me with a fast finger that does not tire.” For others, no touch is needed. I read once about a shamanic teacher who communed with a boulder that lay across a stream. She had an orgasm without any stimulation.
I feel a certain complicity when I read these accounts. Still a secretive girl, I like holding round rocks in my pockets, a form of “self-soothing.” I used to show the rocks to people I was attracted to. I would take a small green egg out of my pocket and invite them to see how smooth it was. The gesture felt naïve, trusting and obscene. Yet the notion of actually climaxing in nature frightens me—I would feel so exposed, so undone. Once I hiked a half-mile from the campground up the shoulder of Gaylor Peak and found a trickle of snowmelt. I shucked off clothes and looked down at my wobbly white body. I rubbed sunscreen all over and especially on my nipples, so they wouldn’t burn. They wrinkled in the breeze. Then I crouched in the stream and splashed, gasping. I jumped around on the grass, ridiculous and bare, a manic elf in the quiet pines. Why didn’t I then lie down behind a willow and slip a finger into myself? It didn’t occur to me. All that carousing didn’t require it. If it had occurred to me, I would have been chicken.
Part of me revels in sexualizing nature, and another part resists. Freud made the leering claim that all longings are sublimations of sexual drives. But why should sex sit on a pedestal and all other sensuality slouch underneath? If the pleasure and intimacy I feel with the bilberry flower and the granite substitute for a few acts I could do with my genitals or a partner’s, then expeditions into nature seem rather silly. Why not stay at home and jack or jill off? The Basque shepherds who traveled the Sierra a century ago etched female figures into the aspen bark. Clearly they would have preferred the real thing. But I don’t explore the mountains to substitute for human-on-human relations. Nature is not merely a sex toy. I might see a trunk as phallic one day, and the next day I might find myself drawn to the silver, clattering leaves. Whitman stands accused of using “landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden” as a way to code desire for men. But to reduce his delight in “a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,” the mouse that “is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels” all to sublimation is to miss his vision. He addresses things in themselves and seeks intimacy through his desire.
Psychologists suggest that we often have sex when we want affection. What if we also have sex when we want erotic connection with nature? Perhaps we make love when we’d rather be dancing in a hailstorm or rolling in a meadow on a clear October afternoon. A broad concept of eroticism allows a kind of sex with the world. Whitman asks, “Does not all matter, aching, attract all matter? // So the body of me to all I meet or know.” Erotic exploration may not guarantee intimacy, but it reaches in that direction. Instead of an observer, a scientist or an aesthete, I agree to be part of the land. If I touch and taste and desire, I must be a creature; I must be mortal; I must be kin.
Martin Buber, the Jewish mystic philosopher, calls on us to seek an “I-Thou” rather than an “I-It” relationship with the natural world. When he addresses a tree, he tries to see it as a being in its own right, not as an object. Buber believes that, “It can… come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it.” He recognizes the tree on its own terms and lets it affect him sensually. Then the tree “is bodied over against me and has to do with me, as I with it.”
Like Buber, I have the presumptuous sense that a relation-ship with nature can be mutual. Brushing a jeffrey pine’s long tassels of needles and smelling its flaky butterscotch bark feels like closeness, not molestation. The jeffrey probably cannot sense me and if it does it may not like me. But in Buber’s vision, any I-Thou relationship becomes a relationship with the divine. As I approach the tree, I offer reverence and something of my being to God.
Though I don’t hesitate to believe in something, I have never codified my theology. I say “God” to name whatever force the universe holds. I feel, too, that the pine needles and bark are not merely matter. There is presence in them and presence in the granite and ice. I don’t know exactly what I mean, but I say with ease that the earth is God’s body. Nature eroticism reaches for closeness with this body—perhaps the most visceral way to worship.
Nature and God, of course, remain opaque. My attempts to commune do not yield verbal maps of the cosmos. At moments of greatest absorption, with my face in the ferns or my limbs writhing in the lake, I know least what is going on and who or what the divine might be. But I am lucky to sense a presence at all. I seek it with my body. And I give my body to it.