Trail Life

Dear LMU.

I grew up in various suburbs and exurbs of large American cities: New Orleans, Houston, Phoenix, Las Vegas. By the time I stepped on campus at LMU, my encounters with nature were mostly facilitated by turf fields and brief stints between the air-conditioned boxes of cars and the larger air-conditioned boxes of home and school. I had begun to value the idea of wildness, but I believed it was out there somewhere, apart from me. I wanted to find it.

In May 2014, five days after Commencement, I began walking over 2,600 miles from the Mexico-U.S. border to the U.S.-Canada border on a two-foot-wide ribbon of space-time known as the Pacific Crest Trail. Each day for over four months I would wake and walk as far as I could. I trudged and sang my way through the grit and thorns of the Mojave, through groves of towering sequoias, endless expanses of Douglas fir, and clusters of krummholz junipers bent like reverent grandmothers in the subalpine scree. 

For the first time, my mind and spirit had breathing room from the spell of our cultural mythology: the constant whispers of human exceptionalism and entitlement, the insistence that the rest of nature is inert and ours to dominate. 

Spending months hiking didn’t bring me any closer to the more-than-human world, it just revealed to me that I am and have always been intricately and inescapably entangled with it. The separation was never real. 

I learned there is exactly as much magic in the world as we are willing to pay attention to; that the only real currencies are presence, wonder, and gratitude, and I had been pinching pennies. I began to see that like the black bear, the trillium, the brook trout, the wind, I am complete — natural — just as I am. I belong to and with the earth.

After 135 days, I reached Canada. I was left to wonder what responsibility we are gifted by the re-membering of our place in the broader collective of life. What does it mean to be a human animal amongst kin: a creature and expression of the breathing and burning earth? What can we learn from the relatives around us in this time of upheaval — from the salmon in the straitjacketed creek and the coyote under the streetlight? 

Ten years have passed. I’ve spent them dedicated to dispelling this story of separation, within myself and through my work in climate justice organizing, regenerative land care, and storytelling. For all that, I am still in near constant need of reminders to hold these questions in my heart. It took wearing through a few pairs of shoes and offering many gallons of sweat as prayer for me to enter this conversation, but there are infinitely many (and far more accessible) paths in.

Connor DeVane ’14 lives in Sonoma County where he is co-creating a just transition with and for immigrant and Indigenous farmworkers out of the wine industry into climate resilience careers that pay family-sustaining wages. He is a poet, a musician, and the director of the film, “Hike the Divide: A Conversation about Climate Action on the Continental Divide Trail.”