Doug Tompkins Taught Us to Lose Our Minds. By Brooke Williams.
Like many, I’m sick about the death of Doug Tompkins.
The first story I read about this didn’t have much information. I caught myself wondering that at his age–ten years older than me–if cancer had killed him, or if he’d died of a heart attack. I’d not heard he was sick. Then to my surprise I discovered that he and his friends were on an extended kayaking trip in Chile when a massive wind turned them all over. “Of course,” I said to myself, later when I learned what actually happened. Of course. I took this personally, realizing how much attention I now pay to different sensations in my own body, wondering what invisible killer stalks me from inside. Now, because of this good death (if there can be such a thing as a ‘good death’) I’m inspired to live where death stands boldly in front of me where I can see it and respond, where it blends almost seamlessly with life to form a rich and vibrating existence.
Having never met Doug Tompkins, I’m able to gloss over the terrible fact that he is dead and be amazed learning about the man, now, after reading a half-dozen reports written since the breaking of this tragic news. Steve Casimiro’s Adventure Journal story helped me the most—in particular the paragraph on those who inspired Tompkins to abandon the corporate world for that of deep ecology: Paul Shepard, John Muir, Henry Thoreau, among them. And how it’s been told that after the dissolution of their marriage and their business partnership, his first wife thought “he’d lost his mind, while he thought he’d found it.” They were both right, it seems to me. He lost one mind, the one designed for him by American capitalism, the same one given to everyone—the ‘good citizen, corporate consumer mind”. This reminded me of that line in Wendell Berry’s Mad Farmer poem: ….AS soon as the generals and politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn’t go…” Doug Tompkins discovered another, very different mind…his own true mind. We all have one. We’re born with it. They—the ‘generals and politicos’ (not to mention the corporate marketers) can’t control it so they do their best to bend and break or cover it up. “….When they want you to buy something, they will call you. When they want you to die for profit, they will let you know…” (Berry, again.)
I wonder about our students–all young people for that matter. Why does it seem that the one thing most people like Doug Tompkins have in common is that they, from a young age, eschewed the status quo? Hell, Doug Tompkins never went to college opting for climbing, skiing, kayaking, creating, world-seeing. How does living a more ‘wild’ life contribute to discovering one’s own true ‘wild’ mind? What business did Doug Tompkins have believing that anything is possible? (His mother’s name is ‘Faith’ after all.) Where did he get away thinking that dreams are made to come true, that one or two people can make a huge difference? And what does this say about the status quo if those people who, like Tompkins, massively shift global thinking, succeed in both personal and collective ways, have had to abandon it? How do we help our students lose their corporate consumer minds, and, having done so, find their own true and wild minds? How do we destroy the status quo, which now threatens to destroy us?
A piece of my heart sinks thinking about Doug Tompkin’s friends, Yvon Chouinard, Rick Ridgeway, and the others he’d joined on his last, ill-fated adventure. Although, more than once, they have each kissed death on the mouth, another close and trusted friend is gone. A kindred spirit, replaced by a thousand questions.
A different and larger part of my heart breaks for Kris, his wife/partner/co-conspirator. When brought together (by fate? By evolution?) Kris and Doug formed a ‘third’ thing as massive and powerful and loving as any the world has ever seen. I have no doubt that this third thing is immortal.
—Brooke Williams is an author and conservationist living in Utah and Wyoming. He recently re-released Richard Jefferies’ The Story of My Heart, first published in 1883, which features his essays and an introduction by Terry Tempest Williams.
