Tonight’s Menu: 1 quick side note and 1 full-on digression (in other words you can check out now) …
Side Note: I made fun of speed walking in my last post. Today I googled something about running and walking speeds and stumbled upon an article about “race walking” – I did not know that it is an Olympic sport – I did not know that the fastest race walking mile time is 5:36 … WHAT????? SOMEONE CAN WALK A 5:36????? THAT’S ABOUT 3 TIMES FASTER THAN I WALK! … I COULDN’T DO A 5:36 ON A MOPED RIGHT NOW! … I’m sincerely sorry I poked fun at walking fast … Now I’m thinking a mile matchup between Usain Bolt running and the world’s fastest race walker would make great reality TV …
Digression: Now, where was I? Oh yeah, the song that made me think of something, that made me think of something, that made me … so I was out walking a couple weeks ago, and I had my phone on shuffle (a dangerous thing with 6 people in the house all sharing the same music), and I was pretty fired up because I’d just gotten a pace-boost from We’re All in this Together followed by Roll with the Changes – laugh if you will, but any man who says the best song off the High School Musical soundtrack or good Speedwagon doesn’t make them run faster (in my case, walk faster) is a born freakin’ liar. And then BOOM, on comes … All Along the Watchtower. And I don’t mean the Dylan version either (no offense Bob) – I’m talking about Hendrix’s greatest-guitar-song-ever version – rolling thunder riffs with a touch of psychedelia … man, oh man, If I wasn’t afraid a surgical wire or staple would pop right outta my chest, I might have started sprinting. Killer song for sure, but it made me think of something very specific (it always does) – a very specific memory actually … 1999, Argentina, Mt. Aconcagua, summit day. How do I set the stage here? I kept a journal each night that trip (picture attached), but I haven’t looked at it in many years until now – here are some verbatim excerpts of the days leading up to our summit bid (excuse the language):
2/11/99 Camp II (17,700 feet)
Spent 3 hours axing ice to make camp sites in high winds. Was about to tell Mike (guide) to f*** off over water in site. If he’s such a f***ing badass, why doesn’t he sleep in the water … The wind right now is blowing steady around 50 mph – enough to blow your ass over while pissing – can’t wait to try to sleep – hope tent is rocked down well enough.
2/12/99 High Camp (19,200 feet)
Sitting in what amounts to an ice cave (tent) in a blizzard. Storm should last 3-4 days … Guides are forcing half the group to go down. Eric and Dave are going to try to wait it out. Ed has frostbite. Tara and Michelle are near collapse. Jim A. hasn’t shit in 4 days. Jim G. says he isn’t strong enough. Renee wants to go home.
2/13/99 High Camp
Tara, Renee, Michelle, and Ed headed down. Gave Tara note to call C with when she gets down to a phone – made me sick.
2/14/99 High Camp
3rd night high camp … Apparently we’re going for it tomorrow no matter what the weather. In the last 48 hours, a guide fell down the Canaletta and broke his leg (was rescued). The Canadian couple went up the Polish Glacier and had to bivy in the Canaletta w/some guy named Ray? (the Canadians made it down this morning). Ray went up and is still M.I.A. Team RMI had a woman collapse with HACE in the Canaletta. They were roped up so she didn’t fall?, but they had to rush her back here and are currently taking her all the way to Camp I.
2/15/99 Summit Day
Awoke to high winds but go for it anyway. Diarrhea in cold wind. Leave at 7:30 a.m. for summit – way too late. Start off awful – frustrated, etc. Think about quitting immediately … Put on tunes and take off. Stronger than EVER. Pass everybody in practical trot. Catch John (guide). Friends and family arrive in my head but only watch. Stop but don’t talk. Let’s keep moving. Reach Independencia with John (21,000 feet) … Mike comes up and says he is turning back rest of group – says I’m only one with shot before turnaround time. Continue with John in a rush. Over rise and towards The Finger (John’s previous high point). Still feel strong. Approach Canaletta – start to feel strange. Hypoxic. “Why’s everything so white?” “You’re climbing mountain in Argentina, dumbass.” … lose moments and minutes. Sit down w/John at 21,700 feet – talk about turning around. Stepping through door. Continue to 22,000 feet and decide not to cross threshold. Descent from hell. Falling everywhere. 3 weird kind of blackouts. Ask John for quick self-arrest lesson (at The Finger) in case fall on ice. Congrats back at camp.
It’s strange reading this now – it’s like looking at something slightly outta focus because the memories I have differ slightly from what I wrote at the time. But the words “Put on tunes and take off. Stronger than EVER,” stand out. That memory’s crystal clear – I was on fire for a stretch and the song that kickstarted it, that made me forget everything except putting one foot in front of the other, was All Along the Watchtower. Seriously, queue it up if you get the chance. Then close your eyes and imagine being way high up on the highest mountain in the world outside of the Himalayas, the world outside your goggles all rock and ice and blowing snow, the wind’s howling, you’re sick as a dog from days of being tent-bound at altitude … now hit play and soak up those guitar riffs … Okay never mind, just trust me, it was really cool – without a doubt one of the most vivid memories of my entire life.
Anyway, so Jimi Hendrix gets me thinking about that trip to Argentina, why I went on it, what I took from it, what it took from me, etc. … There are a few reasons it stands out as a kind of landmark event in my life. For starters, no matter how I slice it, it will always go down in the record book as an epic failure. Aconcagua’s a weird mountain. At 22,840 feet, it’s most definitely high enough to kill you – if memory serves, I think there were 8+ deaths on the mountain the year before our expedition and several the climbing season we were there. But it’s also a “walk-up” – meaning, although it has some world-class technical routes, there are several routes you can, indeed, just walk up. Bottom line: if things go smoothly, Aconcagua is not really that big a deal. Our expedition took the Polish Glacier Traverse Route. It’s a cool, hybrid route that provides a few thrills but requires little skill – just the ability to suffer. I’ll be honest, it never occurred to me I would not summit. At least not until our expedition fell apart at the seams – horrible guide leadership, bad weather, 3 nights stuck at high camp in a storm, etc. etc. By summit day, half our team had already gone down and headed for home, and the rest of us were hammered to dust, just going through the motions. Me and one guide got to within 800 vertical feet of the summit, but that was it. In the end, Jimi wasn’t enough for me personally, and our entire team came away with a goose egg. Ironically, although I turned around because I thought I was in trouble (it was late in the day, the weather sucked, and I was kinda hallucinating), I actually ended up in worse trouble two days later, 10,000 feet lower, when I elected not to wait for our mules and tried to cross the swollen Vacas River on my own, but that’s another embarrassing story for another day.
Failure or not, that trip to Argentina was a classic. But as I turn it over in my head now, I think of something else … it’s taken me 20+ years to see it for what it really was – the end of one part of my life and the beginning of another.
Maybe it’s because we’d lived in Seattle, Oregon, California, Guatemala City, and Kansas all by my 5th birthday. Or maybe it’s because once we settled in Virginia, each summer my parents would load all four of us kids in our station wagon and we’d drive to Kansas for a month. Or maybe it’s because, from Kansas, my dad and us kids (and my uncle and cousin) would then drive to Colorado or New Mexico to camp and fish for a week. I don’t know, but somewhere along the line I picked up a full-on addiction to what? Travel? Adventure? Drifting? That hardly makes me unique. A while back I wrote a post where I said something like we all need adventure – that we’re designed to get lost and find our way back. Then, in another post I said we’re all born to run. Now, I think I’ll just say this: we are all made to GO, plain and simple.
TS Eliot wrote: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Nice. I like that. But if a poetic explanation isn’t your thing (I confess, I’d rather be kicked in the shins than read poetry myself), there’s plenty of anthropological evidence to back up the “made to GO” theory. It’s no secret that for 99% of our history, humans lived a nomadic lifestyle. Before the advent of agriculture – the ability to harvest crops in one place, and the efficiencies and security that development brought us – we were movers and shakers, ready to pack up and roll at a moment’s notice in order to either find food or avoid becoming food ourselves. That urge is woven into our genes, and 10,000 years of farming isn’t going to change it. No matter how you slice it, we are all made to go, and I spent a good deal of my younger years doing just that.
When I was 19, fueled by a heavy dose of melodramatic, late-teen existential angst, I quit my summer job a month early, packed my car up, and hit the road. I had $800 in my pocket, some camping gear, and about a month to burn. I told my parents I was going to Kansas to see family. Instead, for no particular reason, I drove straight to Dallas, Texas. I think it ended up taking me about 20 hours – 30+ years later, it remains the longest single, solo drive I’ve ever made. But I didn’t stop there. I went up to Kansas and visited family, but when I left, I didn’t head back east – I drove back south, down to Austin … then to San Diego … then San Francisco … then Seattle … I spent close to a month, in all, driving around the country. I stayed in a few motels here and there, but a lot of times I just parked on Federal land, Indian reservations, or at rest stops. I slept in my car or sometimes just out on the ground in a sleeping bag (for you kids out there, it’s no longer okay to sleep outside on the ground at a rest stop). I had no plan, no ultimate destination – each morning, I’d roll into a Denny’s, order the Grand Slam Breakfast, pull out the Rand McNally, and pick a direction. This wasn’t sightseeing either – I didn’t tour historical landmarks or really even learn much about any place I went – I just … went. I had an old video camera with me, but there was no real purpose behind it either. I filmed an oil refinery fire in Galveston, an impromptu conversation with a guy who’d just been released from prison, a herd of antelope in the Badlands of South Dakota, and myself redlining my car, trying to get it above 110 mph in the Nevada desert. (Side note: those videos still exist but they remain under lock and key due to the sick, sick, sick mullet I was rockin’ back then).
This cross-country drifting would become an annual ritual. The next few summers, I did the same thing – work til August 1, then set out for destinations unknown. And it wasn’t just summers. I became addicted to movement, hitting the road every chance I got. Fall breaks, Christmas breaks, Spring breaks, I went. One time me and a buddy came up with a three-day weekend plan to drive straight from JMU to Vegas (about 40 hours?) to watch the Evander Holyfield/Buster Douglas fight and then straight back. We made it as far as St. Louis, only to find out the tickets we thought we’d secured had fallen through. At that point, you’d think we’d just turn around and head straight home, but we didn’t. We went to Chicago, then Canada, then through New England, THEN home. (If anyone’s wondering, no, I did not have a high GPA at JMU). (And yes Nels, the next time I see you my brother, we are going to pour a few drinks, get out the map, and try to remember once and for all exactly where all we went on that trip).
Even when I was already far from home, in a foreign land, I couldn’t resist the urge to go. I did a semester abroad in Florence, Italy (favorite city in the world me thinks), and when spring break rolled around, me and my buddies (that’s you Z, Mase, and again Nels) went skiing for a day in Austria, then on to Munich, then Amsterdam. I hung with the boys for a day or two there, but I couldn’t take it – I had to keep moving. I walked to the train station late one night and just took off – to Copenhagen, then Stockholm, then Oslo, then as far north as the train would take me, Bodo, Norway, just above the Arctic Circle. When I got there, I walked from the train station to a bar, shot a game of pool, then walked back to the station to catch the next train south.
By my mid-20s, that urge to go had taken on more sensible forms: a job that involved constant travel, and planned wilderness adventures (often involving mountains) when I wasn’t working. Sometimes the two intersected … I ended up in Tanzania and Kenya because I got stuck on a snowy runway in Newark for five hours. I’d been traveling for work non-stop, I was burned out, and that airport fiasco was the final straw. Sitting on the runway, I decided I needed to go big and go far. By the time I landed in Atlanta, I’d gotten it in my head I’d climb Kilimanjaro. A couple days later, I walked into my boss’s office and told her, job or no job, I was going to Africa for three weeks.
Some of the best memories I have are from those random, cross-country “drifting sessions” when I was young and the travel that came later with work and other adventures. It’s easy to romanticize it all, and as you can tell, I’ve got a lot of stories and I like to tell them (if my kids are reading this, they are definitely rolling their eyes by now). But of course my addiction to GOing wasn’t that simple – I wasn’t just some intrepid explorer setting out for lands unknown. In fact, one could easily say I was just driving around in (very large) circles much of the time. It’s true I went for all the obvious reasons: I wanted to see new places, meet new people, and in the case of some of the adventures, push myself physically, but there were subtler reasons, as well. Was I running from something? Sometimes … maybe. Looking for something? Absolutely. But more than anything, I think I was just taking comfort in the knowledge the world was a much larger place than the one I occupied at the time.
By the time I headed to South America to climb Aconcagua, something had shifted. It was the first time I’d ever hit the road that I stopped to consider what I was leaving behind – the first time the allure of what might be paled in comparison to the allure of what was. You can probably guess why. I’d actually proposed to Christie two weeks before I left for Argentina. And the rest is history – the life we made together expanded rapidly, and fatherhood further doused that pure drifting spirit. Within a few years, a couple nights away from my wife and kids became, dare I say, miserable. That’s not to say I didn’t retain my love of exploration, travel, and adventure, but I’d found what I was looking for, and there were grander journeys to take, inner journeys involving marriage, parenting, and faith.
I’m thinking of all this now, because one, All Along the Watchtower popped up on my shuffle the other day, and two, because tomorrow Christie and Tegan and I are jumping into our car and returning home from the first non-cancer-related trip we’ve taken in about 15 months. We’ve been down in Atlanta visiting family. A pretty tame reboot of my drifting days, but there are other plans taking shape too. In fact, not a day goes by that someone in the house (okay, usually me) doesn’t come up with some new scheme to get up and go. At this point, we’ve got so many freaking travel plans it’ll take a lifetime to squeeze them all in. For the first time in decades I went out and got an old school Rand McNally roadmap of the U.S. (yes, they still make them). I’m not sure a rematch with Aconcagua is in my future, but God willing, I might just pack up the car, point it west, and put it in drive with no particular destination in mind (I’m assuming they still serve the Grand Slam Breakfast?). Of course, this time I wouldn’t be going alone. For as much as we all want our children to have direction, ambition, and purpose, I think young people need wide open spaces to find their way, and a little aimless drifting is good for the soul – I know it was for mine. So, start packing, kids.
After the year we’ve all had, I’m guessing we’re not the only ones itching to hit the road these days. Assuming that’s the case, travel safe friends. Hopefully, we’ll see you out there. In the meantime, thanks again for all the prayers and support. Peace out!