Walmart And The Death Of The Hunter Gatherer
Yesterday I might as well have been dead.
Have you ever done that thing where you hop in the car, and suddenly you are parked at Walmart and have no idea how you got there? That happened to me last Tuesday. I fastened my seatbelt and from there on I might as well have been a cadaver for how conscious I was of my surroundings on the road, not that I ignored other drivers and ran redlights, but my actions were so automated that my conscious self was utterly separated from the world it was living in. I call this “the death of awareness” and it is spreading across society at a plague-like scale. It is silent and unspoken, nearly undetectable. That is unless we are pushed out of our comfy routines and find ourselves facing the unknown.
“Your turn”, Jacques said as we hopped out of the truck. I stared at him for a moment incredulously, then replied with all the confidence I could muster, “Yebbo, ok…” I was now about to plunge into thick African scrub after a black rhino.
I was beginning my fourth month of safari guide training in South Africa and had just been asked to follow the tracks of a black rhinoceros by the anti-poaching ranger I was doing a patrol with. This was my first attempt at tracking a potentially dangerous animal through the bush, and I was doing it with a tracking professional watching me. I looked at the fresh tracks on the road in front of me, took a breath, and walked into the bush.
Now I was facing one of the first major tests of guiding in Africa, tracking down a dangerous wild animal, and I wanted to succeed. I started confidently leaving the road, head down, watching the tracks of the rhino in front of my eyes. They were large, about the size of a dinner plate, with three distinctive toes. Then as soon as I stepped off the road, they were gone.
No tracks.
I could see that the grass was all bent in one direction, making a sort of bent grass trail through the bush. I followed the bent grass stalks and about 3 meters later the bent grass trail split into three different trails! The rhino had gone down one of them, but I had no idea which.
I was barely off the road and had lost the trail already. I picked the middle trail and walked resolutely in its direction. It seemed like a good choice, the rhino probably hadn't suddenly changed direction, it was the straight trail in front. “That's where I would walk if I were a rhino,” I thought to myself.
Jacques let me walk about another 4 meters down the trail before he whistled gently. I stopped and looked back, he motioned me to where he was standing. Sheepishly I walked back. He gestured to the ground. I didn't see any tracks, there was nothing but a small patch of dirt that had been turned over, kicked by a large toe. And it was at the entrance to the left-hand grass trail. Determined to be more observant, I started in the new direction, but I still couldn't see any evidence of a multi-ton herbivore! I walked down the correct grass trail and soon lost the trail again. Trying not to grin, Jaques pointed with his tracking stick at a marula leaf that had been freshly crushed on the ground.
Tracking wildlife has opened a door into another world for me, a world that is vanishing quickly. And I don’t mean the world of the critically endangered black rhino. I don’t even mean the world of nature. I mean the world inside our minds when we resume our ancestral place as hunter gatherers, facing unknowns on a daily basis.
This, above all other reasons, is why I believe strongly in not only conservation, but in the need for every single human on the earth to learn about and experience nature: their psychological salvation depends on it. We are asleep to our senses, numbed in the overstimulating and well mapped world we live in, and it’s turning us blind and deaf.
The species Homo sapiens evolved many thousands of years ago as a persistence hunter and highly adaptable omnivore. 300,000 thousand years ago our direct parents were running down antelope in the African Serengeti. Their blood is my blood. Their blood is yours too. Approximately 200 years ago we moved into town and started becoming a primarily urban and sedentary species. This means that 0.00067% of our history has been spent in something resembling our current lifestyles.
Let that sink in for a moment.
In the course of our history as a unique creature we have been primarily urban for less than a thousandth of a percent.
That means we made a dramatic shift in lifestyle in an incredibly short period of time. We did not evolve in a box with four walls, a few windows, some fluorescent lights, and tiktok. When society and the hinges of history made this decision to move indoors we gained much. We live longer. We eat better. We can watch funny cat videos. But something was exchanged.
I wander Walmart and am nearly drowned by the brilliant reds, yellows, and blues that surround me. The crowd presses in and I weave my way through a writhing, chattering, or perhaps utterly silent crowd as oblivious and unaware of me as I am of each of them.
I drive to the store and have no idea what happened on my way there. I walk on my college campus and am unaware of the billboard proclaiming free donuts as I round a corner. I say hello to no one.
I am there, but not there. Not really. I am more engaged in ignoring my environment than being attentive to it. Our attention has been numbed, but this process can be reversed.
Over the next hour I followed a trail, left by a large black rhinoceros, without seeing more than four tracks that looked remotely like a rhino track. I was mostly following scuff marks in the dirt, nibbled on twigs, and crushed vegetation. I even followed fresh elephant spoor for a while before realizing I was on the wrong trail! It was difficult to say the least, but I gradually began to see the little signs and disturbances that Jacques was seeing. And whenever the trail I followed led to a complete rhino footprint, I'd look back at Jacques with a grin.
I was waking up. I could feel my senses stretching out. What was that slight woody crack carried on the breeze? The pungent, earthy smell of the woods. The crunching of the ground beneath my feet started to sound like mini firecrackers going off with every step. I ceased to exist within my mind and body alone. I felt what can only be described as a sixth sense start to form, just as vibrantly tactile as touch and as beautiful as sight. I was awake in a new and exhilarating way by becoming part of my environment through patient awareness, not merely pushing through it.
As I followed these new neural pathways in my mind it was only to discover that they had been there all along, just dusty and atrophied from lack of use. I was rediscovering something that was so intrinsically within my nervous system that it was impossible to imagine my earlier ignorance of it. It was unthinkable. It would have been like an amputation to lose this sense.
That something is in all of us. It is conscious awareness of the immediate.
That is what nature offers all of us. When we forsook the fields for the townhouse and traded our feet for wheels, we had to give up the ability to be completely conscious of everything around us. It would have been too overwhelming, like a small child at a heavy metal concert: too much input for our minds to compute, resulting in systemwide crashes. So, we developed blinders. We had to find a way to filter out what was important to our immediate needs and what was not. We evolved earplugs and eye protection and as a result became blind and deaf.
I never did find that rhino. But a week later when I flew back to the States, I was a new kind of human. Or perhaps an older kind. A kind that had existed before the Industrial Revolution. A kind of human that could notice the different bird calls as he walked through the parking lot. A kind who was able to see the beauty in a muddy puddle reflecting the image of a far-off mountain. My world had changed into a place of infinite wonder.
More than anything else, this is why it matters that we take time out from our busy, neurotic lives, and visit the proverbial and literal hills. Take time to sit, to listen, and to watch: because we are depriving ourselves of a daily feast of wonder and delight. Yes, we live in a modern world and cannot go back to the stone age, and I don’t think we should. But we are ignoring our very biological makeup if we do not acknowledge and act on the reality that we are strangers in these sheetrock and stucco castles we have made.