Under Pressure: a quest examined

“What’s the happiest you’ve ever been,” she asks.

We’re on a bench beneath a deep blue sky waiting for Old Faithful to erupt. I’m on my back on the bench, my head nestled in her lap. I look up and find a pair of black sunglasses hiding her eyes. The usual contingent of eco-jet setters mill around. Children with chocolate-smudged chins. Men wearing expedition khaki pants and LL Bean hiking boots, cameras at the ready.

My mind works backward through a litany of fond memories.

“There’s a night a little more than a year back when I lay with a girl in the back of a pickup in the high mountains of Colorado. The sky was so clear, the moon so big. There were puffy clouds marching across the sky. She looked up at the clouds and marveled at how their edges glowed all silvery. Mostly, though, it was just comfortable. I’ve never been that comfortable. There was a beautiful simplicity to it. Naked bodies beneath a pile of sleeping bags. The stars. The chill. The mountains. The silver lining.”

“The sliver lining,” she repeats. “Have you found it?”

I don’t answer. A man with a European accent shuffles by explaining to the girl on his arm something about the predictable nature of Old Faithful’s eruptions. Industrial-strength tourism in the middle of nowhere. It seems we’ve found a way to package and sell just about anything.

“OK,” she continues. “What’s the most unhappy you’ve ever been?” She slips the sunglasses down her nose, and her brown eyes glow in the sunlight.

“That one’s easier,” I say. “That would be the day I decided love doesn’t exist.”

I think that ought to elicit a response, but it doesn’t. When I look again she’s returned the glasses to the bridge of her eyes, and she’s smiling at the view. Sara’s an interesting, eclectic woman, and to say she’s adventurous would be a monumental understatement. A nurse who works in Denver, she rides a Harley and is working on a Master’s to go along with the three undergraduate degrees she’s got in biology, psychology and chemistry. She’s the only woman I’ve ever dated who I met on the Internet. The depth of my on-line ad was designed to ward off people who lack substance. And substance Sara certainly has, along with spiked blonde hair and a sexy figure. She’s as adept at talking about psychology as she is about Bible thumping—or changing a muffler.

“Are you still decided?” she eventually asks without looking.

“Still decided about what?”

“That love doesn’t exist.”

I like the way she so nonchalantly gets to the point.

“I know we’re sort of dating and all, Sara, but I suppose I’m still hung up on her. I guess I’m still waiting for her to prove whether it exists or not.”

“Maybe you’re looking in the wrong place.”

“Obviously.”

I left yesterday from the office in Sun Valley to drive across the Snake River Plain toward Jackson as Sara embarked for the same destination on a tangent from Denver. When she was pulled over in rural Wyoming she says the police officer, an apparently rough-looking fellow, had admired, simply: “nice hair.” It wasn’t enough to get her out of a speeding ticket.

The notable thing that happened during my drive was a telephone call from my mom, who shared that her father was about to die. It wasn’t a huge surprise since he’s been fighting Alzheimer’s for a solid seven years, but since he’ll be my first grandparent to pass I told her there was no way I’d not return for a funeral.

“It’s not for him. It’s for Grammy, for you, the people who are still around,” I told her. “I’ll be there. Just let me know when it happens, although I might need some help paying for a flight.”

Sara and I arrived late in Jackson, where we paid for a room and had sex. Awkward first-time sex. The problem is, I don’t really want to be intimate with anyone. It’s to move on, I guess. Something I feel like I’m supposed to do at this point.

Some people are beginning to crowd near an oval of benches positioned in a semicircle around Old Faithful, so Sara and I work our way a little closer and stand beneath the shade of a tree. Yellowstone is a fascinating place for a myriad reasons, international hoards the least among them. Created in 1872 with President Ulysses S. Grant’s signature, Yellowstone is the world’s first national park and includes 2.2 million acres of wilderness “set apart as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” And pleasure them it does. There’s ample pristine backcountry in Yellowstone, but on the beaten path it’s crowded and overused, controversy brimming in the winter in particular among snowmobilers and skiers, whose recreational pursuits are distinctly incompatible.

Old Faithful begins to burble from its mineralized cone, water splashing up in a steadily increasing stream that falls back on itself.

The literature on Old Faithful says it emits between four and eight thousand gallons of hot-spring-heated water with each eruption, and eruptions tower more than a hundred feet into the thin Wyoming air. The neat thing about geysers is that they’re all about pressure, water heating deep beneath the surface until it can escape only through narrow cracks in the earth’s plumbing. As the boiling-temperature water rises it begins to steam, which makes it expand as it nears the top of a water column. At some critical point the water is actually forced through the crack, causing a geyser to overflow, water lifted from the earth’s belly by the pressure created from steam.

It’s basic physics, but it’s wonderful to see it manifest. Old Faithful hisses into the thin mountain air for three minutes or more before subsiding in a few final fits and spasms, then vanishes.

It’s like suppressed emotion, I think. You can keep it under pressure for a while, but the longer you do, the more it’s censored, the more impressive the inevitable eruption will be.

The park too crowded to find a campsite, Sara and I drive south and discover the bumpy dirt meanders of the Ashton-Flagg Ranch Road, which threads the lodgepole-coated border between Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. We drive three miles into the wilderness, find a patch of pine needles where designated sites have been established complete with bear-proof bins, and eat hummus and crackers as the sun drifts west.

We take a short walk and find the curvy meanders of the Snake River, which begins in this corner of the West before working south past the Tetons into Jackson and then angles west into the basalt canyons of Southern Idaho.

Returned to our site, I retrieve my guitar from the truck and strum a few songs but become self-conscious about making noise in the soft twilight, a man having arrived at a nearby campsite. But as night begins to settle over northwest Wyoming he ambles over to join us and produces a bundle of burritoed blue cloth. He lays it on the table and rolls it flat to reveal sleeves containing a half-dozen wooden flutes.

That’s how the day ends: chords strummed in the key of E-minor, the merry whistle of a well-played flute and a million pointed needle holes poking through the advancing cloak of night.

© Greg Stahl

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This old story is offered here as an examination of happiness, about which questions were raised in this forum last week. The story is a curious mix of dichotomies. It includes fading romance, budding romance, impending death, the beauty of life, the freedom and tranquility offered by the natural world, and the mass-marketed appeal of mainstream thought–in this case nature appreciation, which is also offered as a metaphor for conventional ideas on the mass-marketed ideas we’re fed regarding relationships. Much of the point to this story, however, is in what is not written, and so I’ll go so far as to point a few of those things out.

It’s subtle, but the narrator is not just a little bit unhappy; he is very unhappy. I think it’s subtle because the story is set in such a magnificent place and he’s traveling with such an interesting woman, but his questions and musings help paint the picture of his inner topography. In case it’s not clear, let me be clear: he has decided that love does not exist, and that’s the foundation from which all of his observations come. It’s no mistake, either, that these characters find a secluded place to rest that’s far from Yellowstone’s hoards. This shows the narrator’s inclination to search for answers away from the mainstream’s mass-market appeal.

As this is part of a much larger story, there is a reason the narrator takes so easily to the metaphor equating pressure with emotion. He is suffering from such pressure in this story, bottling things he can’t discuss with many, but searching for avenues of release. Life eventually gives him that release, and the result is as-projected. Too much pressure built up over too much time. But the release makes way for happiness to take root again.

In this forum, though, the following Benjamin Franklin quote came up last week: “There are two ways of being happy: We must either diminish our wants or augment our means – either may do – the result is the same and it is for each man to decide for himself and to do that which happens to be easier.”

This quote implies things I cannot swallow because I view it as constructed on faulty premises. At its most simplistic level, it implies that one can acquire things to attain happiness or let go of desires to attain happiness–the dollars and cents of a very personal and spiritual quest.

In some ways, of course, it is true. If loneliness is the obstacle to happiness, then one can either diminish his or her wants (learn to be lonely) or augment his or her means (join a socially-oriented group). But that reduces the question to an overly simplistic line of logic. The truth is, loneliness is unhappy, and there’s no amount of diminishing desires for companionship that will change that.

At the same time, happiness is more than a choice. A depressed person can not simply wake up and decide to confront a new day through a happy lens. The result becomes a glossy sheen, not much more than the facade we’re sold every time we open the pages of a glamor or travel magazine. That is the selling of happiness. Modern-day capitalism packages and sells happiness with every move it makes. Depressed? Buy a pill. Blue? Go on vacation. Dejected? Buy some cologne and sleep with the woman of your dreams.

Buying into this line of thinking produces unrealistic expectations, thins savings and mounts credit card debt.

The fact is, the circumstances of one’s life can be, and often are, downright depressing. It’s a simple part of living, and it’s a perfectly fair part of living. Without valleys, mountains wouldn’t be so grand. Without winter, summer wouldn’t exist. Without sadness, there would be no happiness.

To be sure, sadness is not something to be sought, but there’s a simple beauty to honoring it. By honoring it, we uncover its root. By uncovering its root, we discover ways to fix it. When we discover ways to fix it, we are well down the path toward another mountain summit, toward another summer season, toward another happy experience.

This is not a destination; it is a process. Happiness isn’t out there; it’s in here. And while diminished wants and augmented means may be part of the structure, they are very far from its foundation.