Beauty In Everything: A Collection of Stories

Photos & Stories by Lane Brugman

“Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity. ” – Leonardo da Vinci

Belong to the World, Lakewood, Colorado, Green Mountain

I grew up on Green Mountain – a large natural area west of Denver, Colorado. My friends and I would spend hours outside playing hide-n-seek, sledding or making overly ambitious home videos of Greek classics. We spent a lot of our childhood outside in an incredibly unique environment. Deer, foxes and raptors were frequent visitors to our backyard. Mountain lions showed up once year and became the talk of the neighborhood. Even as a kid, I knew that I was taking living next to such a natural place for granted. Chalk it to my ‘old soul’.

I also grew up through nearly a decade of drought. Water – as is the case throughout the West – was welcomed when and wherever it fell. Growing up in such an arid, high steppe environment I always loved how much green there was in those places gifted with more water than we had. I thought it was ‘prettier’ there and as such, I had a magnetic draw to water. Whether it be rain forests, rivers, or the ocean, I felt a pull towards it.

As I have gotten older, I have been fortunate enough to travel extensively and experience a vast diversity of incredible landscapes across the world. I have been to the Amazon and rain forests in Malaysia and Trinidad & Tobago. I have seen the sunrise over the Gulf of Thailand and set over the Atlantic surf in Portugal. And I have stood on the top of peaks in the Rockies and camped in the desert of the American west. What I’ve found, is that there is an amazing amount of beauty in every natural landscape. Water or no water, beauty abounds big and small. You just have to learn to appreciate the nuance.

With that here a couple stories of natural beauty that I’ve experienced and later, a few stories of our powerful ability to drain it…

The West

The vastness of the American West is truly one of the most unique characteristics of any place on earth. The sheer size of the visible sky quickly makes you feel inconsequential. The grandeur of the Vermilion cliffs and other rock formations is incomprehensible. Last summer, I was sitting with my legs dangling off the edge of the Grand Canyon trying to make sense of how a seemingly minuscule river cut such an enormous amount of rock away. The scale of the canyon and the billions of years of geology it displays, erode your ego. I sat and observed. Then, to my left some motion caught my eye. I turned to see a small lizard come up from the base of a salt bush and scamper across the gravel with great pace. In such a variable climate – one that can begin the day with snow and end with scorching heat – any sign of life is a treasure. In such a grand landscape, the smallest of animals can be the biggest gifts.

Wyoming

The day Kayla and I finished packing and hit the road for our year of adventure, we drove through Wyoming. That drive along I-80, for those of you who have not made it, can be described as traveling across the moon. It is a desolate, dry place that I have found depressing in previous trips. But last year, Wyoming had seen late spring rains and the landscape was spectacular. The sagebrush popped with more color than I thought possible and hundreds of antelope grazed on fresh grass. We continued our 80 MPH journey and serious thunderheads blocked out the fading sun to the west. We drove right into a massive storm system. The window wipers blazed across our Prius’ giant windshield, but the waves of rain were so intense, they could not keep up. After an hour of white-knuckle driving, the rain slowed and the sun reappeared – this time sandwiched between the bottom of the thunderheads and the top of the mountains. We pulled over and took off our shoes to walk through the standing water. As beautiful as the view was, the most memorable thing was the smell. The heavy rain impacted the sprawling tracts of sage brush and released so much aroma. Between the ozone brought down by the rain and the sagebrush, it was a smell I wish the Tide folks would concentrate and make into dryer sheets. It was the essence of freshness. We breathed deep, took some photos and greeted some nearby Angus. A good rain is so cleansing. We turned to go back to the car and a fabulous rainbow emerged to the east. The clouds began flashing dazzling colors in the sunset. Western Wyoming was showing off and we had front row tickets.

Ghana

We were stuck in the mud in Ghana – just a mile from the border of Burkina Faso. Our day trip to a hippo sanctuary turned into 3 hours of frantic weaving on heavily pot-holed roads before our mini-bus got wedged into the thick clay mud in the floodplain of the Black Volta River. As the village’s men came to help dig us out, my mom, mother-in-law, Kayla, and I walked to the nearby water pump to interact with the local kids. It was a spectacular moment. Trying our hand at using the well pump, getting laughed at by all the Ghanaian children while watching the golden orb drop over the savanna. Then, like is common along the equator, the sky went black almost instantly and the insects emerged. The amount of bugs in the air was… just hard to imagine for a kid from arid Colorado. The lack of widespread pesticide use in that part of the world ensured that our night was chock full of all types of invertebrates. As we walked back towards the van, we had to stop, not because the bugs were so dense, but because the sky was so beautiful. The sky was so black and the stars were so bright. It was the single most beautiful thing I witnessed in Ghana. An unaltered, clear, black night sky. It is funny to think about how the simplest things have become some of the most difficult to find. It is sad to realize the increasing limits of our destructive reach.

Sunset over the Savannah - Western Ghana, Belong to the World

Mexico

I put on my mask and adjusted my snorkel and cannon balled into a shallow pool. We had come to Akumal – a tiny resort village south of Cancun – which is situated in a fascinating delta environment. Mangroves climb out of limestone crags and speckle the aqua blue water with foliage. Here, fresh water emerges from underground cenotes and makes its way to the ocean. I started swimming at the surface and found the water was surprisingly chilly but crystal clear. The visibility was over a hundred yards. There was a barrier to the visibility looking down though. A plane of cloudy water was about three feet below and I could see small blobs of color moving below it. I took a deep breath and my fins waved in the air as I descended. I punctured the barrier and suddenly, the visibility went to about 3 feet. The water was clear but extremely cloudy – like everything was out of focus. The cold, less dense fresh water was mixing with the denser salt water. I swam another three feet down, equalized my ears and found myself in a plane of warm, ocean water. There, colorful reef fish swam around, grazed on algae and the visibility extended to a hundred yards again. I swam towards the surface and passed through the layers again. It was one of the coolest feelings in the world, passing through different temperature and salinity layers of the water column. A lifelong memory.

Malaysia

Unfortunately through my travels, I have also witnessed first-hand some of the environmental degradation that I only read about in magazines and saw on TV. After having a truly remarkable experience of hiking through the rain forest in Malaysia’s version of Yellowstone – Taman Negara National Park – we got on a bus to head back to Kuala Lumpur. We were tired after hiking for two days in the humidity of an old growth rain forest. We had walked past elephant footprints and some in our group caught a glimpse of an extremely rare sun bear. The risk of getting mauled by a tiger was something to be worried about out there. It felt like going through Jurassic Park and the images kept replaying in my mind as I stared outside the bus window. But as we climbed up and around the twists of the Malaysian highlands, the landscape past the road started to change drastically. The dense canopy of primal forest evaporated and cleared sections of mountainside lay bare. Bare clay and smoking piles of brush was all that was left of the jungle. Our bus passed slowly crawling semi-trailers carrying just three or four logs – their diameter nearly double my height. They were carrying the trunks of ancient trees – so tall they had to be sawed in half twice just to fit on the trailer. As we continued, the bare land turned into neat, tidy rows of palm trees. The mono-culture, palm oil plantations stretched for miles and miles. That was in 2015, when global demand was exploding and wreaking havoc on forests throughout Malaysia and Indonesia. We experienced the incredible environment of a protected forest and the destruction of it in the same day…

On that bus ride, I was appalled that someone else could do that to such a beautiful place. Then I had my own, oh shit moment…

My Impact

As the MV World Odyssey motored north up along the coast of Baja California – I tallied up the total amount of fuel we had used on our 4 month, around-the-world Semester at Sea voyage. Maritime fuel is tracked by the ton, so I started a spreadsheet and looked up conversion ratios. I divided the entire fuel usage by the number of passengers and crew.

To go from Germany to San Diego, my share of the total was 1,200 gallons of heavy diesel fuel!

Doing a bit of more research and math, I calculated I needed 18 ACRES of mangrove forest to capture that amount of carbon in a year. That was just my share!

It was a difficult moment. To grapple with the incredible journey that we were about to finish and know the staggering impact it had on the planet. While the trip massively deepened my appreciation for the environment, it also caused a lot of damage.