Several years ago, my best friend and I had been planning a hut-to-hut trip through the landscape encompassed by the 10th Mountain Division's cabins, when dueling ACL/MCL incidents left both of us in no-condition to even contemplate skiing. We had already locked in the vacation time and, the fact that he'd be leaving Colorado for his next duty station in just over a month made us scramble for an alternative. After quite a bit of head scratching, "Hmmm...What kind of prolonged outdoor activity that one can engage in no more than a days' drive from Colorado goes best with freshly-snapped ligaments..." we settled on a week-long canoe trip into the canyons found flanking the shores of Lake Powell in its Escalante Arm. What followed was a series of minor debacles, most of which I recorded in a trip-report I intended to share with my closest friends and my family. I was scrolling through my hard-drive the other day, looking for something else, when I happened upon the file, and remembered a passage that seemed kind of appropos considering the events on Mount Hood and the ensuing media frenzy.
Here's the passage:
"Gradually my own thoughts turned away from Ruess and back to our own situation. Although I had been thoroughly enjoying this outing, I had been beset by a certain amount of anxiety ever since we passed the midpoint of the Hole-in-the-Rock. More specifically, I was trying to figure out just how in the hell we were going to get the canoe back to the truck. Upon the first realization that we had passed the point of no return, and would not be able to get out the way we came, it was easy enough to shrug off a problem that was little more than an abstraction at that point and get back to the slowering.* Once that was over with I had hoped that eventually we would paddle around, survey the landscape, and a solution would….present itself to us, but the walls only seemed to grow steeper and more precipitous with each stroke of the paddle. We broke out the map and looked for any marinas or roads in the vicinity that we may have overlooked, but saw none. We discussed having one guy paddle the canoe to a marina at Halls crossing and the other going for the truck - for about a second - before realizing that such a course of action had a very high probability of being recreated in a cheap dramatization on the Outdoor Life Network, in which the scene of our parting – one heading for the truck on foot, on paddling towards the darkening horizon - would be accompanied by a grave declaration that “This was a miscalculation that would cost them dearly in the days ahead....”
After chronicling an ever-escalating series of small-but-rapidly-compounding blunders that ultimately resulted in our demise, the viewers would no doubt be treated to a post-mortem analysis by at least one overweight “Full-time engineer, former part-time Search-and-Rescue Team Member” type who would shake his head in morbid befuddlement as he thoughtfully bemoaned our woeful lack of preparation and experience, evinced in this case by the conspicous absence of the requisite flare-gun, satellite phone, and personal-locator-beacon. From his perspective, these objects would no doubt be cited as simple rudiments of preparedness that any desert sojourner with a modicum of common sense would be sure to pack along for the average day hike, let alone a week-long paddle in the depths of winter.
There was also a distinct possibility that the viewing public would be treated to another staple of the “Adventure Gone Bad” show - the Indian thoughtfully pondering our fate. The segment would commence with a profile shot of The Wise One perched atop a desolate mesa, ruefully contemplating our fate while surveying the stark contours of his ancestral homeland. “This…is the land…of the four winds. The North…The South….The East…The West. They have spoken….to my people….” Then they’d finish things off with the landscape-flyover shot, itself accompanied by the voiceover in which the Oracle of Ancient Wisdom somberly meditates on our fate and issues forth wise pronouncements which leave no doubt that if…if only...we had only listened to…the voice of the land - which he knew for a fact had been belting-out a literal chorus of warnings to us at the top of its lungs for days on end - we might have been spared our tragic end. I could see millions of overweight housewives in pastel sweatsuits sitting on pottery barn recliners, knowingly nodding along in unison as The Old One dispensed wisdom channeled from the Earth itself, then turning to their still more corpulent, comatose, recliner-bound husbands, throwing their hands up in disbelief and shaking their heads while exclaiming in suitably exasperated tones “I mean, I thought like..everyone knew that you have to listen to the voice of the Earth Spirit! I mean this was the goddamned Earth Sprit! Talking to…THEM! But did they listen…nooooo” before throwing up her hands in disgust and turning back to the sale section of the latest Land’s End catalogue. “Hmmm. The desert-sage-colored polar-fleece bathrobe with the matching slippers and the optional Ben-and-Jerry’s pint-cozy really would go well with the scented candle-set on page 38….”
The prospect of being second-guessed by several million members of the genus sedentarius americanus while channel-surfing between episodes of “Trading Spaces” was chilling indeed, and we immediately set about formulating a better plan. Or rather, agreed to set about formulating a better plan once we got back to the campsite. As we made our way back through the shadowy confines of Davis Gulch I had a minor epiphany concerning the nature of adventure. I realized that my own definition of “adventure” pretty much included just about anything that entailed a bit of risk in the outdoors, with the level of adventure increasing in direct proportion to the amount of damage one’s body would likely sustain if something were to go wrong. In light of our present circumstances, however, I began to reconsider this view. An increasing level of risk did not necessarily mean an increasing level of adventure, I thought, but rather an increasing level of risk simply meant an increasing level of, well - risk - and risk, I was beginning to see, was not necessarily the same thing as adventure. Adventure meant uncertainty, an inability to determine in advance what the outcome or resolution of a particular journey would be. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the adventure involved in a particular exploit. Skydiving, for example, involves a fair amount of risk but very little in the way of adventure as there are only two possible outcomes; you’ll either impart a fair amount of momentum to the earth upon impact if your chute doesn’t open, or return to the earth at a much lower velocity if it does. Of your final destination there is no doubt.
As we drew nearer to the water I continued to ponder the nature of adventure still further, and concluded that the greatest adventures involved scenarios which combined two essential components; the greatest number of possible outcomes, and the lowest probability that any of those possible outcomes results in survival. A necessary correlate of this theory of adventures, then, is that the more interesting the adventure is to read about, the less pleasant it was for the protagonist to endure.
So by that definition I concluded that we were in the midst of an honest-to-goodness adventure, albeit a minor one, as at present I had no idea how we were going to get the canoe out of the lake and back to the truck. We would, of course, be able to get ourselves and the rest of our gear back to the truck without too much difficulty, so the number of probable outcomes involving the two of us failing to make it to the canyon rim and/or the occupants of a 54 foot houseboat spotting our skeletal remains doggedly clutching the canoe at the base of the cliffline were very few indeed. At the same time, however, I never really viewed leaving the canoe behind as a viable option, as doing so would necessitate paying for it, which would in turn plunge me into the depths of a fiscal adventure that I would endure just about any hardship short of amputation to avoid."
*Definition of Slowering.
"Homeboy was clearly the master of understatement. I shook my head, squinted my eyes, and read it again just in case I had missed something, perhaps an asterisk at the conclusion of the paragraph that would direct the reader’s eyes to a sentence explaining that the preceding paragraph was written in the author’s own private code-language. Perhaps it would further explain that in his language the verb “Drove” meant “Negotiated terrain that would rip the undercarriage and three-fourths of the passenger compartment off-of a typical sedan. Owners of four wheel drive vehicles should come equipped not only with adequate clearance, but a healthy disregard, if not outright contempt, for their vehicle if they wish to transverse it.” Finding no such clues anywhere on the sheet, we went on to discover for ourselves what his private interpretations of words like “lowering” and “sliding” meant in practice.
In its conventional use, the word lowering implies a significant degree of control over the object that one is moving from a greater to lower height. Sliding entails the movement of one body across the surface of another, and suggests that the motion in question is not restrained by a significant amount of friction. The deeper we descended into the narrow confines of this tilted sandstone corridor, the less our tactics came to resemble anything like the orthodox meaning of these words. The two became one, and we reverted to something resembling a primitive fusion of the two. Slowering.
As is often the case with neologisms, the term slowering is ripe with nuance, and in order to fully apprehend all that it entails one must often revert to further explanation and example. Slowering involves elements of sliding and lowering minus the rational criteria by which one decides to use one or the other. It contains components of both while lacking the advantages of either. One doesn’t choose to slower an object - it just happens on its own, a spontaneous occurrence made possible only by the haphazard interplay of uneven ground and gravity. For us slowering was defined by the guy at one end of the canoe spewing forth a constant stream of exotic profanity and straining to arrest the impending free-fall of the canoe while he lowered it down yet another #$%*ing gritty eight foot step while crossing his fingers and hoping that he wouldn’t lose his %#$#ing footing and blow out the rest of the ligaments in his $#@*ing knee in the process. It also meant the guy at the bottom of the step silently swearing that if that weak-assed son-of-a-bitch couldn’t hang on to the *@$#ing end of the the goddamned boat until he could at least get his %#$ing hands on the goddamned thing and keep the bow from crashing into the *%#ing rocks again he was just going to chuck the %#*ing thing right off the edge of the %$#ing cliff and get it over with.
Slowly the welfare of the canoe’s hitherto unblemished exterior beacame quite a bit less important than preventing several months worth of additional rehab, and after surmounting a succession of ever more challenging obstacles on our way down we began to measure our success not by how well we kept the canoe off of the rocks, but by the skill with which we had used the friction afforded by the rocks to control the canoe’s speed and trajectory. We took the fact that despite all of the gouges we’d allowed to defile the hull, we had yet to allow the rocks to tear a gash straight through it as tangible proof of our skill. By the time we had reached what we hoped was the midpoint of the ravine we’d stripped so many ribbons of plastic off of the bottom that we began to suspect that we’d be able to see through it in places if we were to hold it up to the sunlight, which was by now fading as quickly as our energy and enthusiasm."
Slowering.
The scenery. Photo upside down (reflection on top, sky on bottom).
En-route to the happy ending. Note duct-tape on hull.
