I have never felt more free than when standing atop a challenging summit. Certainly, there are other ways than climbing to feel that absolute sense of liberation that flows through you on a hard earned summit but freedom that complete is rare. That feeling comes in music sometimes for me as well but it is rare. Perhaps it has to be. Freedom is tied to love for me too. Most of us have those moments but few can describe.
What the hell does freedom even mean? I won’t completely answer
that. Nobody ever will completely.
The summit of Split Thumb, Juneau Icefield.
Freedom is all very simple until you think more, then it isn’t. People in bondage often have music. They have love, and often they have the legs to climb, though not the freedom to do so. Those in bondage often have more courage than I will ever have. They lack the institutional structures to move forward like access to jobs, access to education, access to correct information about the world around them, and social and family stability. Climbing a mountain proves nothing. Many find freedom in the mountains.
The most widely used text on climbing is called Mountaineering, Freedom of the Hills. If you want to know how tie a knot or set up an anchor or a climbing technique, the book has it all. It is in its tenth edition. Conrad Anker called it, “The definitive guide to mountains and climbing .” The title suggests the hills are a source of freedom. How and why do hills set us free? The hills don’t give shits about human beings or anything else. They are made of rocks. Freedom is complicated.
Insert Freedom of hills
Climbing a mountain makes me feel free because nobody stops me from doing what is simultaneously sacred and completely useless. There is nothing on the summit to eat, nothing to buy, nothing to sell, no stocks to trade, and no television shows to watch. Indeed there is nothing on the summit but the face of God etched in time and rock.
Bob Marley sang a song of freedom, perhaps more than one, but I am thinking of Redemption Song. There are many definitions of the word redemption but Marley was using the biblical definition of redemption. “to set free.” “Won’t you help me sing, these songs of freedom.” Marley said that all his songs were intended to set people free. Whether he was telling us that he didn’t shoot the deputy or about the three little birds on his doorstep, he was singing songs of freedom. What is freedom? I find it on a mountain or like Marley, strumming a guitar and singing ya know… songs of freedom. And of course Jesus said, “The truth will set you free” and he might be right. Maybe there is some truth on the mountain as well.
I find the stuff I learned in school about governmental structures useful but lacking in explanation in practice. In the Preamble to Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This is brilliant stuff, albeit hypocritical. At the time Jefferson wrote his famous letter to the King of England, he owned slaves. In 1776 it was not self-evident that all men or women were created equal. Slave traders were hauling Bob Marley’s ancestors to the Americas. Old pirates yes they rob I. Sold I to the merchant ships. Redemption song is romp through time that starts in bondage and ends in liberty. Yet, the declaration of Independence was and is brilliant. The Preamble of the Declaration of Independence formed the summit of freedom that Americans have been climbing toward for 244 years. That Jefferson never accomplished the goal of human equality, doesn’t mean it isn’t a good goal. The Declaration of Independence is a blueprint freedom; it’s not freedom itself.
Guitar the campfire in the Buttermilks, Bishop, CA
I have played Redemption Song on the guitar as long as I can remember and didn’t realize I learned the lyrics wrong until last month. I learned it, “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery…” However, the lyrics are, “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.” There is a difference between “emancipate yourself” and “emancipate yourselves” because the former implies that freedom is something you can achieve on your own and the latter suggests that we must work together to emancipate ourselves. Liberty rises from the social stability which depends upon justice. We can’t be free if the cops are shooting black people and other people of color. It doesn’t matter if the cops are doing a good job 99.9% of the time, that one murder undermines the trust. It also leaves a person dead. According to Bob Marley, the path to freedom is collective. Thomas Jefferson knew this. A crowd of people signed that famous letter to King George III. He didn’t mail it to England on his own.
What is freedom? I still don’t have an answer but I think there’s a path. What holds people back from the pursuit of dreams, goals, and better lives? Emancipation requires mental emancipation before physical. I think one thing that holds us back is the ability to define what holds us back.
An important step toward emancipation is to pull our collective heads out of the snowbank and admit things are not as great in Alaska as we like to project in our tourist brochures. Remember Jesus said, “The truth will set you free.” Lies and conspiracy theories will lock you in chains. We have loads of conspiracy theories in Alaska and a herd of elephants in the room. Climate change is damn real and Joe Biden didn’t steal the election. The militia compounds in the hinterlands are packed to eyeballs with deadly force, waving flags, and they are hunkered behind paramilitary barriers but the walls look just like prison walls. They are much more likely to become tyrants than save us from them.
We have a ton of problems we don't like to talk about. Alaska has a problem with alcoholism and domestic violence. We lead the nation in rape almost every year. There are a lot of suicides. We have inadequate treatment for depression and other mental illnesses. There is unequal access to education and jobs across the state. Racism is common and it part of the above problems. For the last forty years inflation outpaced increases in wages, especially for blue collar workers. The people working the hardest gradually become poorer each year. The cost of university is rising, sending generations into debt. We are undermining universities and making it impossible for the poor and middle class to attend and in the process crippling our ability to know the truth and our ability to act upon it. The homeless alcoholic man with no prospects for a good job or a warm place to sleep does not have the same access climbing the mountains of Southeast Alaska as I do. That is true even if he sleeps next to the trailhead where nothing stops him from trudging uphill. He’s too busy trying to survive to think about climbing a mountain or the Declaration of Independence that says that men are created equal.
Lemon Creek Glacier. Out of view is the Lemon Creek Prison
The summit of a mountain feels so liberating because of the perspective it provides. The world is huge and I am small. The entirety of all the humans on earth and those that came before us are small when gazing at the expanse from the summit. The mountains were there eons before humans evolved to climb down from the trees and the mountains will still be standing when there’s nothing of the human race but fossils. Yet, I am on top of the mountain for a moment. I see the grandeur and feel the insignificance.
Won’t you help me sing, these songs of freedom? I recorded a cover of Redemption Song
