Pecked to death by ducks

by Cahill, Tim

  The next morning I was sent up one of the three likely trails in company with another volunteer searcher, a local rancher named Larry Lovely. Incident commander for the search Park County sheriff's deputy Brad Wilson had given me a roll of yellow duct tape. If the man was found, and he was dead, I was to tape off the area and touch nothing. What Wilson didn't say, but what every search-and-rescue volunteer knows, is that sometimes hik-

  ers are found injured and in a state of shock. Often they are irrational, and sometimes violent. Occasionally, a hypothermic hiker has to be subdued, and duct tape works almost as well as handcuffs.

  There was no sign of McGee up at Lady of the Lake, or at Lower Aero Lake or along the Broadwater River trail.

  Over the next few days, fifty searchers combed the trails east of Cooke City. A helicopter and a fixed-wing aircraft joined the search. Pictures of McGee were posted at trailheads.

  One of the aircraft spotted McGee's backpack and sleeping bag about five miles west of the area I had searched, at the north end of Goose Lake. There the land rises to rocky slopes and plateaus, all above the timberline. The trail, however, was a week old, cold, and the dogs couldn't find McGee's scent.

  I suspect the man tried for Granite Peak. He left his pack and bag—another mistake—expecting to make a high-speed run up the bad south face of the mountain. He was alone, climbing on bad rock, in the wilderness, where something as simple as a badly sprained ankle is deadly. On Thursday, August 4, the search was suspended. A light snow was falling at eleven thousand feet, and the nighttime temperature at that altitude was expected to drop below freezing.

  Some of Peter McGee's friends like to think that he is still out there, that his luck held. Some think that, for totally inexplicable reasons, he decided to disappear into the mountains. He had left his bag and pack to confuse the issue. It's a comforting fiction, especially today, when the temperature is well below freezing and the snow is falling.

  Author's Note:

  "Peter McGee's" body was found a year later, near the summit of Fox Peak, a mountain he may have mistaken for Granite Peak. It appears as if a rock ledge collapsed under him and that he suffered massive head injuries.

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  seeming to accelerate in my direction—I was on the verge of one of these character-shaping disasters.

  It had started innocently enough. I was pedaling my old coaster-brake Schwinn bike around Waukesha, Wisconsin, when I met up with a gaggle of unimaginably sophisticated older boys, thirteen-year-olds so "cool," some of them called their parents by their first names. We stopped for a chat at the top of the steepest hill in town: a paved one-block-long clifflike drop-off on Hartwell Street. Kids called the run "steep Hartwell," as in, "Wouldn't it be neat to roll a tire down steep Hartwell?"

  In point of fact, I had seen this done. The tire worked up incredible speed. At the bottom of the run, where the land flattened out into swamp, there was a wooden guardrail, four feet high, consisting of three stout boards. The tire hit the curb, bounced up, and went through the boards like a mule through October cornstalks. It sailed through the air, trailing bits of broken two-by-fours, and hit the swamp water in a huge, viscous explosion of green algae.

  So I had some idea of the velocity an unbraked rolling missile could achieve on steep Hartwell. Still, the cool thirteen-year-olds insisted that a brave individual who knew how to handle a bike could hurtle down the plunge without ever once using his brakes and still make the ninety-degree righthand turn at the bottom. I argued that reason, history, and experience would suggest that such an experiment was doomed to punishing failure. Or words to that effect. I had little faith.

  My ineffably cool pals, however, demonstrated that the deed could be done. One by one they set off down steep Hartwell. I watched, but none of them used their brakes. No one pedaled backward at all. Indeed, they all seemed to be pedaling forward, fast, in a manner movie cowboys might describe as "hell-bent for leather." The faster they pedaled, the slower their bikes seemed to go. I imagined there might be some sort of gyroscopic aberration in the works, a quirky law of relativity that might be expressed: The faster cool persons can get a bicycle to move, the slower it will go.

  Convinced by the evidence of my own eyes and seduced by my

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  own theory, I pushed off the pavement—"Here goes nothing!"— and began pedaling hell-bent for leather, lickety-split, down steep Hartwell. Soon enough, the iron laws of physics informed me that my theory was completely defective. I stopped pedaling because the bike had begun to buffet. I had seen a movie about the first guy to break the sound barrier. His plane had buffeted like my bike. It was all I could do to hold on, to keep the old Schwinn upright.

  My choices at this point were limited to varying degrees of disaster. The bike was shuttering in such a way that braking would upset my equilibrium. I saw myself sliding one hundred feet or more along the pavement, contemplated the nature of the subsequent road rash, and discarded that option. I could try to make the righthand turn, but inertia, in the form of acceleration times velocity, said, "No way." In the end I opted to do nothing. Fear, my copilot, made that decision for me.

  I hit the curb at the bottom of steep Hartwell and vaulted skyward while assuming a somewhat more horizontal position in regard to the ground. I didn't seem to be astride my bike any longer. "Woof" . . . through the top board of the fence with my chest and ribs. The collision had a kind of three-dimensional pin-ball effect, so that for a moment I was looking at the sky through my legs. Above and somewhat behind, I could see the Schwinn pinwheeling along a similar arc. All this seemed to be taking an incredibly long time to happen. Presently, I found myself oriented toward the green muck of the swamp, and it rushed up to meet me—face dive, face dive—with indifferent vehemence.

  My forehead hit something sharp and rocky below the surface of the muck. Something else, a submerged and muddy hillock, loosened my teeth, cut my lips. The Schwinn landed on the back of my head. For the nonce life did not seem to be a bowl of cherries.

  But, strangely, neither was it a bed of pain. I was dazed, certainly, but getting my head out of the water and mud seemed to be a wise move. I came up bleeding from the mouth, from a cut on the front of my head and one on the back. Both bled profusely, as even the most superficial head wounds are wont to do.

  Long strands of mossy green algae hung from my face. I suppose I looked like an explosion in a spinach factory, something alien and terrifying and inexplicably undead. The thirteen-year-olds had gathered by the break in the fence, and I lurched toward them, green and bleeding.

  "Let's get out of here," one of the boys shouted, and off they pedaled, bang-flash-zoom, with terror howling after them and nipping at their back wheels. Cool guys, indeed. Ho, ho, it was to laugh. I managed to limp five blocks home. Hours later, after a visit to the hospital and a number of stitches, just as the pain finally arrived, my father saw fit to explain that some people liked to play practical jokes and that some bikes were equipped with hand brakes.

  One learns from errors in judgment, especially those that result in stitches and defunct bicycles. Even infants, who have not yet learned the nature of pain, know something of fear. In an elegant experiment conducted with children barely able to crawl, psychologists have shown that falling may be our first and most primal fear. The scientists constructed a glass surface about the size of a tabletop. Just under the glass, clearly visible, was a wooden surface, but halfway across the glass apparent solidity gave way to a yawning abyss of some four feet. Infants were placed on the glass and encouraged to crawl toward their mothers. None of them would venture out into the void.

  So if children know fear, why is it that most are inveterate climbers? A few years ago I was having dinner with Yvon Chouinard and Rick Ridgeway, two of America's finest mountaineers. Rick's daughter, Carissa, a toddler, was scaling the heights of the coffee table. Bang splat. Tears. A bit of fatherly comfort. Soon enough, there she was, attempting to conquer the gr
eat looming arm of Chouinard's sofa.

  We discussed Carissa's efforts and mountaineering altogether. One day she could climb Everest; either that or become a buyer for Bloomingdale's. The conversation that night centered around the question of why some of us abandon a universal early urge to pit our skills and knowledge against fear.

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  I suppose one answer is that pain teaches lessons in the synapses and that different people seem to interpret the lesson differently. The Debacle of Steep Hartwell is a good example. Perfectly reasonable people might conclude that riding a bicycle down a very steep hill is stupid. This is the "never do that again" approach. ('Til teach you!") And yet ... as I examine the event, the light that shines through the core of it, for me, is this: Know the secret, and you can ride fear right up to the edge of pain and never fall. Never. Not if you are prepared, physically and mentally. Not if you understand how to apply the hand brakes.

  So why do people put themselves at risk? Isn't the experience stressful and frightening? Some people don't understand. The urge annoys them beyond all tolerance.

  I know. Over the past dozen years various publications have paid me to dive with sharks, jump out of airplanes, climb mountains in Africa and South America, trek through equatorial jungles, plumb the deepest caves in America, and generally scare myself silly.

  I found it was always a good idea to find a mentor, some man or woman expert in the endeavor I had chosen. If you are going shark diving, for instance, you want a dive master possessed of a complete set of arms and legs. It is best to put the mentor's professional reputation on the line: "If I get hurt, you look bad." That way you tend to hear about the various hand brakes you need up front.

  So you prepare. You learn. You train. And there comes a time when your heart is beating fast, when flight is battling with fight, when the scream-and-gibber mechanism wants to engage itself. Then you take steep Hartwell, apply your hand brakes, and make the turn, just so.

  There is a kind of euphoria here, a biochemical reward edge workers of my acquaintance strive to achieve. Some of them call themselves adrenaline junkies. The adrenal glands—little triangular meatballs located on the north pole of each kidney—secrete two hormones, adrenaline and noradrenaline. In the blood these

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  substances prepare a person for emergency action: Respiration increases, the heart beats faster, the central nervous system is stimulated. The effects can be felt subjectively as fear or anxiety combined with increased mental alertness.

  Now the problem here is separating anxiety and fear from euphoria and alertness. Scientists studying anxiety subjected monkeys to stress at odd intervals, and these monkeys behaved like basket cases. They were drenched in adrenaline. A second group, however, suffered the same stress, except they were given a brief warning signal before the stress was applied. These monkeys easily adjusted. It was found that the monkeys in the second group had greater concentrations of noradrenaline in the blood.

  Noradrenaline affects those systems in the brain that are concerned with emotions: especially euphoria, well-being, and alertness. In situations of self-imposed stress, feeling good means minimizing adrenaline and maximizing noradrenaline. A period of training helps; a thorough study of the dangers helps. Knowing where the hand brakes are gets the good stuff pumping.

  In many cases the biochemical rewards of informed risk taking can, in the words of one psychologist, take the "individual . . . beyond the apparent limitations of the self." Mihaly Csik-szentmihalyi of the University of Chicago has been studying "exceptional people," risk takers of all varieties, including rock climbers, artists, dancers, and surgeons. All, he noticed, describe a euphoric feeling, a clarity of purpose combined with an ability to make time work for them. Neurosurgeons experienced three-hour operations as matters of minutes while ballerinas felt the exhilaration of performing a pirouette in what felt like extreme slow motion. Additionally, irrelevant stimuli were rejected: composers at work, for instance, didn't hear the doorbell ring. Csik-szentmihalyi calls this state of mind "the flow." Children, he says, are eager to match their skills against new challenges and "have flow states all the time."

  Adults seek out risk and challenge, Csikszentmihalyi believes, "because the pleasure deriving from the flow state has an autonomous reality that has to be understood on its own terms."

  So why isn't everyone out jumping out of airplanes or climbing

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  El Cap every day? Ralph Keyes, in his book Chancing It: Why We Take Risks, explains that recent research has shown that "high sensation seekers seem to produce less of the mood-regulating opiates released by stress than do low sensation seekers. This could explain the frequently noted anti-depressant quality of thrill seeking." In a way this sounds very much like the Scottish proverb that states "Some men are born two drinks short of par." As children, we learn the pleasure and pain of risk: We know in some cobwebby corner of the mind whether we are the ones who need physical challenges to find the flow, whether we can be content as a buyer for Bloomingdale's or whether we will have to climb Mount Everest.

  Risk, and the flow state it stimulates, can be understood in terms that become almost mystical. Measurements of brain activity taken during *low states actually show a decrease in cortical activity. Csikszentmihalyi thinks we might "get into the flow not by exerting more effort but rather by screening out distortions. That would mean flow resembles Oriental meditation practices— the notion of learning to stop the world."

  Some people can sit-cross legged in a room and stop the world. Others of us need a little biochemical cocktail to enter into the flow: We need to take steep Hartwell without brakes.

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  ing in the wind, we were taking occasional air rides: fifty- and sixty-foot pendulum swings fueled by gusting winds.

  At this point, in this exceedingly inconvenient situation, six hundred feet above the rocks (and two feet above me), Nick needed a men's room.

  He's a clever man, Nick, and he had had persuasive reasons for wanting to climb first. On the scree he had pointed out that if I led, his photos, taken from below, would feature my back end silhouetted against the clear blue Yosemite sky. "No one would look at a picture like that," he reasoned cogently. "See," Nick said, "if I lead and shoot down on you, we'll get your face and the drop below." It made good sense, but now I saw, in his demand to lead, motives that had to do with his own personal convenience; sinister motives that lay in a realm entirely beyond photographic professionalism.

  We had expected the climb to take perhaps six hours, and we each carried a mere quart and a half of water. Dehydration could be a problem. Nick had drunk a half gallon standing on the scree slope waiting to hook into the rope. It had been a bit too much for his body to process all at once. "This is almost painful," he whined.

  "You should have thought of that before we started," I said, sounding precisely the way my father had when one of the kids had to "go" one hour into an all-day car trip. My father grumbled, but he always stopped at some gas station, and I realized, on the rope, that no matter how much I protested, Nick was going to stop at his personal gas station.

  "There are people watching us from the road," I argued. "People with binoculars." It was a feeble effort. "Cops," I said. "You could be arrested for indecent exposure. I can see the headlines now: 'Disgraced Photographer Commits Bizarre Sex Crime Involving World's Longest Rope!' Is that what you want? Can you imagine trying to tell your mother?"

  But Nick was fumbling about near his seat harness. "Wait," I screamed. And then, with iron calm: "There's a way to do this."

  The plan was simple enough. I would climb up so that my head was just under Nick's right foot, then unhook my top Jumar, one

  of three devices that held me into the rope. This I would position above the rope-holding devices hooked to Nick's feet and, with a few more technical moves, climb to a point at which my feet were just below his. Thus, at the crucial moment, I would be hanging beh
ind Nick and holding him in a kind of bear hug.

  We would both be indicted, of course, but the alternative was unthinkable.

  I hadn't done any rope work in almost two years. It had been some relatively hairy stuff then: dropping five hundred feet into the deepest cave pits in America, in total darkness. I got reasonably good at it, so when the folks I worked with in those Alabama and Georgia and Tennessee pits asked if I wanted to join them in Yosemite for a little rope sport, I jumped at the chance.

  The men and women who "yo-yo" those southern pits are all cavers, and their passion is called vertical caving. There are limestone outcroppings in the southeast corner of America, great prehistoric ocean beds that rose out of the sea and wrinkled into a rough hill country. In this thickly vegetated land, surface water picks up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, creating weakly acidic rivers that dissolve limestone and form caves. There are subterranean tubes, slanting slightly downward, shaped by these rivers. Occasionally, underground water finds a fault in the limestone, or it breaks through from one series of horizontal tunnels to a lower series. A waterfall is formed. Over the millennia such a falls will form a pit. The deepest of these, Fantastic Pit in Georgia, is over six hundred feet deep.

  Imagine: Here you are, half a mile below the surface of the earth, crawling merrily along, and you come on a hole into which you could fit the entire Bank of America building.

  Some few adventurous folk found these pits to be a challenge, or more properly, the challenge of a lifetime. In the last thirty years rope work in these pits has been refined to an amazing degree. And the technique of vertical caving—vertical cavers call it SRT, single rope technique—has become a sport in and of itself, a not-so-simple matter of sliding down (rappelling) and climbing back up a rope.