The Tao of Travel

From his first glimpse of Yosemite, as he reminisced in

The Yosemite

(1912), his vision was apparent.

Looking eastward from the summit of the Pacheco Pass one shining morning, a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still appears as the most beautiful I have ever beheld. At my feet lay the Great Central Valley of California, level and flowery, like a lake of pure sunshine, forty or fifty miles wide, five hundred miles long, one rich furred garden of yellow compositae. And from the eastern boundary of this vast golden flower-bed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height and so gloriously colored and so radiant, it seemed not clothed with light, but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city. Along the top and extending a good way down, was a rich pearl-gray belt of snow; below it a belt of blue and dark purple, marking the extension of the forests; and stretching along the base of the range a broad belt of rose-purple; all these colors, from the blue sky to the yellow valley smoothly blending as they do in a rainbow, making a wall of light ineffably fine. Then it seemed to me that the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems above all others the Range of Light.

Peter Matthiessen: "All the Way to Heaven Is Heaven

PETER MATTHIESSEN (BORN 1927) is a happy combination of fine writer, courageous traveler, scrupulous naturalist, and spiritual soul—he has his own Buddhist dojo at his home on Long Island. A committed walker, he has traveled and written about Asia, New Guinea, Africa, and Antarctica. His The Snow Leopard is one of the great accounts of someone "paying respects to a mountain." Toward the end of the book, suffused with the spirit of the trip, exhausted but uplifted, Matthiessen writes: "I lower my gaze from the snow peaks to the glistening thorns, the snow patches, the lichens. Though I am blind to it, the Truth is near, in the reality of what I sit on—rocks. These hard rocks instruct my bones in what my brain could never grasp in the Heart Sutra, that 'form is emptiness and emptiness is form'—the Void, the emptiness of blue-black space, contained in everything. Sometimes when I meditate, the big rocks dance."

This is also an example of someone solving philosophical problems by walking, a deeply felt, subtly written, and arduously tramped-out account of Matthiessen's search for the elusive snow leopard of the Himalayas—in essence a search for his own peace of mind.

"In late September of 1973," he explains at the beginning, "I set out with GS [George Schaller] on a journey to the Crystal Mountain, walking west under Annapurna and north along the Kali Gandaki River, then west and north again, around the Dhaulagiri peaks and across the Kanjiroba, two hundred and fifty miles or more to the Land of Dolpo, on the Tibetan Plateau."

The snow leopard, the "most beautiful of the great cats," had been sighted by only two Westerners in the previous twenty-five years. To get a glimpse of one of these "near-mythic" beasts was the formal reason for the trip, but in effect this is Matthiessen's pilgrimage: a search for healing after the death of his wife, a search for the sources of Buddhism, and a contemplation of a landscape regarded as holy by the Nepalese who live in the region. If there is a journey that is the opposite of the expensive, breathless guided climbs up Everest that Jon Krakauer writes about, it is this book, which has much more in common with Bashö, whom Matthiessen quotes with approval.

In ten- and eleven-hour treks, Matthiessen and Schaller rise higher and higher into the mountains, suffering from the cold and the altitude and the difficult trail, creeping on narrow traverses above deep and precipitous valleys. Such obstacles are inevitable, as Matthiessen writes: "Tibetans say that obstacles in a hard journey, such as hailstones, wind, and unrelenting rains, are the work of demons, anxious to test the sincerity of the pilgrims and eliminate the fainthearted among them."

One of the more terrifying obstacles—this, at eleven thousand feet—are the fierce guard dogs of the Tibetan refugees who inhabit their heights. "In Tibet, where wolves and brigands prosper, the nomad's camps and remote villages are guarded by big black or brindle mastiffs. Such dogs are also found in northern Nepal." Matthiessen successfully fights off an attack by a slavering mastiff and pushes on.