Formative Experience

I grew up with the immense privilege of growing up in one of the most naturally beautiful places on the planet, and having a family with the financial means to make that natural beauty accessible to me. I remember the first time someone pointed that out to me. I was 8-years-old and my dad had finally taken me on the Church Mountain hike in the North Cascades– up until that point it had been a yearly bonding experience for him and his sister but she couldn't make it up from Dallas that year and I'd been begging so he relented. I vividly remember the feeling in the pit of my stomach when suddenly the forest disappeared and I was surrounded by a magnificent alpine meadow. It was mid-August, probably, and the flowers were in full bloom. Miles and miles of blues and pinks and purples and whites sprawled out over the jagged mountain peaks and crevices, crisscrossed by the trail that lay before us. There’s something innate about that sublime shock of natural beauty, I think. That was the first time I remember experiencing it, but it certainly wasn't my last. It’s something deeper than anything else I've experienced. Perhaps it’s religious. It’s a feeling of overwhelming terror and joy, of humility before something that is far larger and older than you will ever be.

I rode on the high of this strange new emotion for the remainder of the walk to the top. At the peak my dad and I sat on a huge rock, ate landjaegers and cheese, and said the names of the things we could see. Mt. Shuksan, Mt. Baker, the Nooksack river, the nearest town, Glacier. And if I looked hard enough right where my dad was pointing… “The swimming pool!” You could barely see a patch of blue that marked the pool that was open to the inhabitants of the housing community where my grandparents’ recently purchased “cabin” was (it’s a house. I hate it when wealthy people call houses cabins or shacks just because they aren’t in the city.) That’s when my dad told me how lucky I was. Actually I think he laughed and called me a “spoiled brat.” Growing up in Central Texas, he could never have dreamed of such a landscape as a child, and if he could, he certainly never would have been able to spend much time there. Most people in the world never get to experience that feeling in the pit of their stomach, and they certainly don’t get to at the age of 8.

I recall that moment as a simultaneous birth of my love of the natural world and my social consciousness. Now I’m taking this class in order to develop both, because the two are deeply connected, inseparable from each other in fact because they both require the exact same skill– humility. And as a privileged white man at a prestigious University, my education is a complete waste of time if I do not spend it trying to develop that skill.