The Bikepacking Trip That Wasn't: Days 5-6
Okay, I’m waaaaaaay behind on this. I don’t really understand why I can find more time to write while I’m traveling than I can while I’m at home. Travel Me has always been better at stress management than Work Me, but apparently he’s better at time management too. Which makes sense, now that I think about it. He doesn’t hit snooze as often in the morning, he’s busy pretty much from the moment he wakes up, and his to-do list is wonderfully uncontaminated by house care, yard work, etc. It’s like the old saying goes: if you want to get something done, ask a busy person with no dog to walk or floors to vacuum.
Good thing for me, I’m traveling again. Lounging in Montreal’s airport at the moment, en route to Casablanca. I’m off to do some hiking and light mountaineering with a group of travel buddies. So with some time on my hands and all my throat-clearing out of the way, I’ll jump back to my conference at Javeriana.
Right from the outset, this group proved it understands real philosophy at a much deeper level than most philosophers I’ve worked with. What they understand is that you don’t have to do philosophy in sterile laboratory conditions. You can do it outside.
Nietzsche saw this. He said, “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” I don’t think he’s quite right; it seems to me Stephen Hawking had his share of truly great thoughts, and he wasn’t a hiker. But the means of locomotion isn’t really the point. The point is getting out in nature is good for your thinking.
Right before the conference began, a bunch of these philosophers took the funicular up to the summit of Monserrate, the lush, verdant mountain that looms over Bogota’s eastern hills. They didn’t walk because it’s steep as hell and because in the recent past, tourists used to get jumped on that trail. Being outside is good for your thinking; being mugged, not so much.
I didn’t join them. Instead, I stayed behind to finish my paper, because I am a Very Good Boy. But I did manage to get up there later in the week, in good philosophical company. Conversation outside tends to stray away from the books and articles, venturing deeper into what really matters. In this case, we talked a lot about death, loss, and how to cope with them; how to make a university a more just place; how safety works; what counts as dangerous; whether I should buy my niece and nephew fun things made of plastic. The difference is like a carefully manicured English garden versus untamed rainforest. I like a good garden, but it’s a controlled experience. It doesn’t quite conflict with my maxim choose luck, but I find I’m much more likely to encounter a genuinely new idea in the forest than in the garden.
That’s what happened again and again at this conference, and happens so seldom at the American Philosophical Association that I just won’t go anymore. It’s amazing what a difference it makes to the quality of the conversation if you all go on a walking tour together before you start arguing about ideas. There was a kinship here that I experience in my department all the time, but almost never at national and international meetings. Start outside, start with a walk, and you can bring that camaraderie inside with you. Start in sterile laboratory conditions—i.e. a PowerPoint presentation in an auditorium—and that rarely happens. (Never, in my experience.)
The last excursion of the conference was to Chicaque Biological Park, in the cloud forest of Cundinamarca. “30 minutes outside of Bogota,” the internet will tell you, but traffic tells a different story. An hour or more on a bumpy bus was enough for me to learn coca leaves do wonders for nausea. (Motion sickness was never a problem for me until one fateful scuba diving adventure in high seas in the Gulf of Mexico. After that, it has been my steadfast companion.) But it was worth it. Oh, I do love a cloud forest.
The trail was slippery as hell, and my shoes were only barely up to the task. What can I say? Cloud forests are wet. More than once I went skating, but I managed not to fall and break anything. Hopefully they’ll do better in Morocco’s High Atlas mountains. I’m not anticipating much humidity in the desert.
Our hiking party had a wide range of age and physical ability, so it was slow going. And conversation was characteristically excellent, which is enjoyable but also rules out any chance of seeing wildlife. Animals aren’t dummies; they know to hide from the local apex predator. So after our group hike, I cut out on lunch early and went on my own to go see a nearby waterfall. Photos never do these things justice, but here’s one anyway.
Trust me, it’s bigger and cooler than this. But even if it hadn’t been, four kilometers of high-speed solitude was just what I needed to cap off an excellent week. I didn’t see much in the way of photographable wildlife, but the bugs and flowers were lovely.
After Chicaque came another bumpy bus ride, with plenty of lively debate among philosophers I now count as friends. Some of us went out for one last Colombian dinner together, and by sheer coincidence a couple of us ended up on the same flight back to the US. I even gave up my aisle seat to sit next to my new friend Karolin.
This turned out to be a problem with a built-in solution. I ended up sitting between Karolin and a man with the worst case of bad breath I’ve ever encountered. It was so bad that when he yawned, even Karolin could smell it.
But choose luck! Karolin had nice minty gum in her carryon, which I magnanimously shared with Stinky as often as I could. And maybe he knows about his halitosis, because he never turned me down. Thanks to covid I had a mask with me, and filling that with my own minty breath was (barely) enough to ward off Stinky for the four-hour flight back to Atlanta.