Awe

In fact, it is hard to imagine a single thing you can do that is better for your body and mind than finding awe outdoors. Doing so leads to the reduced likelihood of cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, diabetes, depression, anxiety, and cancer. It reduces asthma in children. It leads to reductions in everyday aches and pains, allergies, vertigo, and eczema. These benefits of being in nature have been observed across the life span, ranging from newborns (who enjoy higher birth weight when born near green spaces) to the very elderly. Our bodies respond to healthy doses of awe-inspiring nature like we respond to a delicious and nutritious meal, a good sleep, a quenching drink of water, or an uplifting gathering with friends or family: we feel nourished, strengthened, empowered, and alive.

Our need for wild awe is strong.

Wild Awe on a River

When Stacy Bare finished climbing the Flatirons and was back on his feet, he would get outdoors with force, rock climbing, hiking, backpacking, skiing, and rafting. He was struck by an idea about the inflaming traumas of combat. When deployed, people in the armed services find awe in the places where they serve and people they meet, in their sense of family, in the transcendent intensity of being on tour, and in the frequent courage seen in combat. It is often a dark, threat-filled awe that can quickly shift to horror at carnage, chaos, violence, perpetrating harm, and watching young people die. But there is awe there. And the transition to civilian life leaves veterans hungering for awe.

Moved by this idea, Stacy dedicated his life to giving wild awe away. In his work with the Sierra Club, he created programs for hundreds of thousands of people each year to find wild awe on walks, hikes, backpacking, rafting, and rock climbing. He took veterans who had lost limbs in combat and climbed with them up sheer rock faces. He has returned with veterans to places of combat but for purposes of recreation, skiing with locals in the beautiful mountains of Iraq and Afghanistan. For this giving away of wild awe he was named a National Geographic Adventurer of the Year.

When Stacy heard about our study showing how awe reduces inflammation, he suggested we collaborate on a study of wild awe. Our lab was a collection of rafts on the American River, a 120-mile-long watercourse that begins in the Sierra Nevada mountains and winds its way through the foothills to Sacramento, passing through the hills that Rolf and I wandered throughout our brotherhood. Rafting the river alternates between lazy, daydreaming meandering and exhilarating, at times frightful, moments navigating class II rapids with names like Meat Grinder, Satan’s Cesspool, Dead Man’s Drop, and Hospital Bar, which if navigated poorly lands you on Catcher’s Mitt, a big rock that has a penchant for trapping rafts. After the Hospital Bar, though, rafters can heal their banged-up bodies in the Recovery Room. Some of my fondest memories from my childhood are navigating that river in rafts and inner tubes with Rolf and our parents and their friends, drifting in the sun, looking for hours at light on the water, seeing the shadowy brown outlines of rainbow trout below, and feeling the flow and character of the river currents move our bodies and laughter and conversation into a sun-saturated, sparkling unison.

We had two groups of participants. The first included students from underresourced high schools in Oakland and Richmond, California, schools lacking the green spaces and organic gardens often present in private schools and well-to-do suburban public schools. Many of the teens had never been camping. Growing up in poverty, like these teens did, leads to elevated stress, a greater likelihood of anxiety and depression, and chronic inflammation. Veterans comprised our other group. Veterans can show the same trauma-shaped stress profile as kids raised in poverty: disrupted sleep, intrusive thoughts, difficulties concentrating, and the vigilant sense that peril hovers nearby.

Prior to the rafting trip and one week after, I and my collaborators at UC Berkeley, Craig Anderson and Maria Monroy, gathered measures of stress, well-being, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the latter based on reports of sleep disruption, intrusive memories, flashbacks, and feeling on edge. Before and after the rafting trip, participants spat into little vials so that we could assay changes in stress-related cortisol over the course of the excursion. We mounted GoPros on the fronts of the rafts, allowing us to film, up close, coordinated rowing, synchronized hoots and hollers, collective laughter, oar touching and celebratory calls after navigating dangerous rapids, shrieks of fear, and vocal bursts of awe—wow, oooooh, aah, whoa. After lunch on the day of the rafting trip, we asked our teenagers and veterans to write about their experiences on the river, to tell their stories of wild awe.