Pecked to death by ducks

by Cahill, Tim

  The finish line was where you cashed in on your bets, but the races was generally won or lost at the starting gate. It is the

  starter's job to see that both teams—all four horses—are looking forward and have all their feet on the ground. The gun sounds, the gate slams open, and the horses break, hard. The driver is crouched down in the chariot, his elbows over a front rail built for the purpose. Drivers who don't hook their elbows over the chariot end up lying on their back just this side of the gate. On the first jump after the gun a chariot will actually be airborne for as much as forty feet.

  The second move a driver makes is to transfer the reins from both hands to his driving hand. He takes the whip from his mouth with the other hand, and on the second jump, he should be whipping his slowest horse. A team that is mismatched in stride will not only be slow, it will careen all over the track. After that, the race is, as Cal Murdock says, not much more "than a controlled runaway."

  I was thinking about Cal's words as I stood in the chariot behind two anxious horses. These particular animals were big fellows, old and not necessarily fast anymore, but big and strong and eager. These days, the horses whose back ends I contemplated are used to train younger, faster horses. Trainers yoke up one of these big, savvy old fellows to a promising but perhaps skittish colt they think might make the grade. The older horse will break from the chute when the gate snaps open. The younger horse, must, willy-nilly, floor it for maximum horsepower or be dragged into a humiliating stumble. Horses have their pride.

  "You ready?" Therol Brown asked. I had my elbows over the top rail of the chariot, and I said, "Yeah." When the gates popped open, there was a sensation of speed beyond anything I've ever felt in any vehicle, beyond what you feel astride the fastest horse. The ground is right there, whipping by at thirty or forty miles an hour, and the chariot doesn't feel entirely stable. I tried to remember to keep the reins tight so that the horses wouldn't lower their heads and flounder. Still, you can't pull back too hard, otherwise the horses will throw their heads up, slow, and eventually stop. It's a fine line. Therol Brown's advice —"Most important, remember this, don't fall out"—boomed in my brain with biblical force.

  It took about twenty-six seconds, all told. After it was over, Therol Brown said, "I was happy to give you a run, but I can't believe you drove five hours through a blizzard for twenty-six seconds. That's just crazy."

  I remembered a story Cal Murdock told me: "I was just on a training walk, if you can believe this, trotting around. Well, there's a tongue that goes between the two horses and holds all the weight of the chariot, and it snapped. Dumped me right between the horses, and my arms were in the double trees, and my weight held me there. My head was right between their legs, and they were running scared, just kicking away at my head. I came to in front of the grandstand, bleeding pretty bad. Most of my teeth had been kicked out, and my lower lip was cut off. I was in the hospital I don't know how long, but I lost forty pounds there."

  The doctors had to wait for the swelling to go down before they could do any reconstructive surgery, but Cal continued to race. He wore a rubber mask for a while, to keep the dirt from flying into the place where his lower lip had once been. That was the year Cal Murdock won the championship.

  I thought about driving five hours through a blizzard to run a couple of horses for twenty-six seconds and decided that when a chariot racer says you're crazy, it's a high compliment.

  "I've been buried alive." The thought began tugging at the edges of my mind, punching little holes in a dream I can't recall. It felt like morning, but the world was black and seamless, dark as death. I was still half-asleep, and it would be, oh, minutes until Panic Central kicked in. I fumbled around in what must have been my own sleeping bag and got a hand free. The black world was solid as rock and bitterly cold to the touch. Fascinating: not only buried alive but packed in ice to boot.

  Panic Central attempted to activate the scream-and-gibber mechanism, but it was too early for anything as strenuous as full-bore hysteria. And then it occurred to me, in the midst of a yawn, that I had done this thing to myself. I had just spent my first full night in a snow cave. And survived. Comfortably.

  The concepts of survival and comfort were on my mind because my projected three-day trip had turned grim. I had come out to the mountains to do some late-spring ski camping, and had driven to the trailhead confident of good weather. But the jet stream had confounded forecasters: It had unexpectedly looped down over southwestern Montana, bringing cold and snow and

  wind in such abundance that I felt as if I were being crushed under a fast-moving glacier.

  No matter. A man who ventures into the northern Rockies, even as late as April, had better be prepared regardless of the forecast. From the skin out I had worn four layers of chemical clothing, bundled up against what the tiny thermometer hanging from the zipper of my parka had said was an honest 20 below.

  I had packed a good mountain tent along with a light, collapsible aluminum shovel. Having set up the tent as a backup, I began digging the cave. Every woodsy survival book you read about this process says it's a piece of cake. This is a lie. Three times I had attempted to build snow caves; three times I had failed.

  On my third attempt I discovered that digging through the powder into a sloping drift is a good way to find snow amenable to shaping, and for the first time my cave did not collapse. But I was still both cold and wet. When I mentioned the problem to an acquaintance who had taken a military pilot's survival course in Antarctica, he asked how high I had made my sleeping ledge. "You have to build a ledge?" I asked.

  The ledge, I was told, is what keeps a person warm and dry. Cold, dense air sinks to the bottom of the cave, where I had tried to sleep. There had also been an icy puddle there, on the floor of the shelter, because I had cooked dinner, and the camp stove had set the walls to sweating. The ceiling had dripped steadily—it was like living in Seattle—and I evacuated to my backup tent in the dead of night.

  This time I had managed to put it all together. Even built a right-angle tunnel into the cave to keep out the wind. Now, my watch said it was 9:00 a.m., but there was no light at the end of the tunnel where the entrance should have been.

  I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that blowing snow must have drifted over the mouth of the cave, and Panic Central went back on alert. I began to move for the entrance, hit the drift at a crawl that approached warp speed, and came bursting out in an explosion of powder.

  The sky was a silvery sheen; the world was white and unmarked, and it hurt my eyes to look at it. Above, at about ten thousand feet, the wind was whipping sheets of powdery snow off cornices that hung cantilevered over the steepest slopes. I was in the lee of the range, sheltered from the high, blasting wind that was pushing the storm east across the valley and into the face of the mountains that rose beyond.

  My camp offered an unobstructed view of the valley and the summits to the east. I dug a kind of futuristic snow chair into the slope, lined it with the foam pad that I use under my sleeping bag, and settled back to watch wind and weather in battle with the land. I found myself thinking about the snow cave as fact and the snow cave as fantasy; thinking, in other words, about survival.

  My survival fantasies usually involve some unexpected but unavoidable catastrophe followed by heroic efforts on my part. Equipment is minimal, sometimes nonexistent, and I often have to outwit small, furry animals that become my dinner. In my fantasy everything works. Snow caves don't collapse. Bunnies blunder blindly into my traps. Trout leap into the waiting pan. I am seldom uncomfortable in these waking dreams.

  Reality is less pleasant. On one memorable summer trip my brother and I actually wandered into the mountains for a weekend carrying only a bag of gorp, two knives, and a pair of space blankets. We failed to build a fish trap that would trap fish. The lean-to fell over. We froze to death and died, or at least felt as if we had.

  What had gone wrong? Hadn't I spent days poring over the woodcraft manuals, imagining
various clever scenarios? "Visualizing," the sports psychologists call it. Mentally rehearsing an activity, so the theory runs, is a form of preparation. What I discovered, shivering under the space blanket, is the difference between imagination and visualization. In fantasy the snow cave is a solution, cleverly conceived, and it sort of digs itself. In proper visualization you concentrate on the mechanics of excavation, a process that is impossible unless you have attempted to dig

  at least one snow cave before. In other words, visualization without some small experience is mere fantasy.

  And it is just this sort of fantasy I see being sold these days on television in the form of what I like to call the Amazing Survival Knife. The thing costs ten bucks, but if you order now, you also get: a needle and some thread (shot of a guy sewing up his tent), and a hook and line (shot of some fellow landing a three-pound fish at the edge of a lake), and a saw actually capable of cutting down small trees (shot of two guys using this saw, crosscut fashion, to topple a small tree). All of this gear fits into the hilt of the knife. Order within twenty-four hours and the distributor will add, absolutely free, a camouflage sheath for the Amazing Survival Knife.

  The commercial did not claim that the knife slices, dices, or makes hundreds and hundreds of julienne fries in just seconds, but it was pretty clear that the distributor was selling survival in the manner that others sell kitchen aids. Clearly, the concept—or more precisely, the fantasy—of self-sufficiency and survival in the wilderness has become a salable item.

  The same fantasy accounts for the popularity of James Fenimore Cooper's Leather stocking Tales in the early 1800s; or the blizzard of newspaper stories about Joseph Knowles nearly a century later. In 1913 Knowles, a part-time illustrator, stripped naked in front of a phalanx of reporters and strode boldly into the Maine woods. Two months later he returned, presumably none the worse for wear. "My God is the wilderness," he told the newspapers. "My church is the church of the forest."

  We like to think that the rigors of this wild land shaped the national character. We believe that in the ability to survive there is nobility and grace. And for ten bucks you can buy a knife that will ensure your survival. Carry it through the mosquitoes into some woodsy noble church and you're prepared for all eventualities. Or so the commercial seemed to imply.

  It is a dangerous dream, I think, the fantasy of the knife. There is an unsupported supposition lurking in the subtext of the sales pitch: that survival is a matter of owning the proper gear. In point of fact, owning such a knife is rather like eating chicken

  soup to cure a cold: It can't hurt, and maybe it'll help. Just so. Toting the Amazing Survival Knife into the forest won't turn a novice into a competent woodsman, just as owning a fine set of tools doesn't necessarily make a man a good carpenter. We need to practice survival skills, to draw lessons out of early failure.

  I had used my cheapest and most sissified piece of high-tech camping gear—a ninety-nine cent butane lighter—to build a small fire, which was now sinking into the snow with a satisfying hiss. The two hours' supply of wood I'd collected from a nearby creek bank was stacked in such a way that I could feed the fire without rising from my wilderness recliner.

  In the distance the snow was no longer snow. It was a dirty silver cloud that completely engulfed the eastern mountains, and it lay like a blanket a thousand feet above the valley floor. Directly above, the sky was an impossible cobalt blue, that bright, soaring, clear blue color that comes in the aftermath of a storm.

  And now, to the east, the sun—which had been a small silver disk feebly glowing behind the cloud—burst above the snow and weather. It caught the edge of the cloud for a moment so that its full light was momentarily broken and prismatic pinks played across the wall of cloud. Sunrise at noon.

  The fact that I had finally succeeded in building a proper snow cave somehow enhanced the view. I had turned a longtime fantasy into reality, building on three successive failures. Nobody ever wants to tell you that you must pay for your fantasy, and that the price is early failure and frustration.

  It was still cold—ten below—and there was snow in the air under the blue sky. Tiny diamond crystals, remnants of the night's storm, were drifting about on the wind and catching the sun's light so that, in the valley, above the blanket of cloud, dull pastel rainbows formed. I thought about all those collapsed snow caves, about the Amazing Survival Knife and the failures of fantasy, while the sun and snow made kaleidoscopic patterns in the sky.

  Ike TomfooUky ^acto*

  When a jackass flies, no one asks how far or how fast. When a jackass flies, people stand amazed. Follow me through on this. One day last October I played my harmonica hanging from a half-mile-long rope anchored at the top of El Capitan. Even though absolutely no one was there to stand amazed, the jackass had sprouted wings. I am absurdly smug about this accomplishment.

  The rope had been rigged by a group of rappellers I had once worked with in the southeast, led by a man named Dan Twilley. El Cap is one of the longest overhanging cliffs in the world, and this was the second-longest free-fall rappel ever made on a single rope: 2,650 feet to be exact. The longest was a 3,280-foot drop made in 1980 off Mount Thor on Baffin Island, also led by Twilley.

  The rappel was wonderfully terrifying fun. The whole of Yosemite Valley was spread out below me, and as I'd chosen to make my descent just at twilight, I owned half an hour's worth of sunset. Somewhere toward the bottom of the cliff, about three hundred feet above the tops of the trees, I tied off for a few minutes and played some slow and slightly breathless blues.

  These blues were not committed on pure impulse. In fact, I had planned it all out ahead of time, had put my harp in a shirt pocket where I could get to it easily, and had even practiced the solo I wanted to play.

  It should be understood here that I'm not really any good at the harmonica. People who've heard me often offer such helpful advice as "Shut up with that noise." It's not really my fault, of course. I figure that if I had a nickname, my playing might improve. Hard-blues players all have nicknames: Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, Magic Dick. Some people probably go to hear Norton Buffalo play for his name alone. Buffalo is an incredible harmonica player, no doubt about it. And those who think they can play harp will, after attending a concert by Mr. Buffalo, go home contemplating suicide. I mean, Norton, I admire him— but has he ever played harp in free-fall rappel?

  I think I can safely say that my harp solo was the very best ever played while hanging from a half-mile-long rope.

  This is the sort of attitude my friend Rick Ridgeway calls rank tomfoolery, defined here as the urge to perform essentially civilized acts in uncivilized or extraordinary places. Some people, for instance, have played Frisbee on glaciers, wearing crampons; and a hot campfire topic among climbers has always been the highest-known performance of the sex act. (Ridgeway's estimate of the current record is twenty-six thousand feet.)

  Incidentally, I don't count marriages performed in unusual places as tomfoolery. Those who have tied the knot in free-fall while skydiving, for instance, may seem to fit the definition. This is, after all, a civilized act committed in a hostile environment. Marriage, however, is a chancy endeavor. Presumably, the skydiving couple has some experience in free-fall relative work, and reason, history, and experience all conspire to inform them that they will land on their feet. There are no such guarantees about the marriage. It is risk incarnate.

  No, tomfoolery doesn't put a person at any emotional risk. On the contrary, I think the impulse is an antidote to fear, and some small comfort in a situation where comfort is hard to come by. It

  is a form of pioneering, a way of making a hostile environment your own. And in my case it may have something to do with incompetence: Those who lack great skill in some human endeavor—say, playing the harmonica—are spiritually buoyed by the fact that perhaps no one else, ever, has committed this particular act under these exact circumstances.

  For some reason golf lends itself to the cold comfort of pe
rennial tomfoolery. I suspect this is because it's a game that daily slaps people in the face with their own incompetence. "The game may frustrate me," people seem to say, "but I'm the only person in the world to be frustrated in this precise spot." Yvon Chouinard, for instance, once played a short game at the base of Fitzroy, in Patagonia.

  Probably the height of tomfoolery—the highest-known incident —occurred in February of 1971, when Alan Shepard swatted a golf ball. He had a dusty lie, his swing was cramped, bunched up, and he missed the sweet spot. The guy really didn't connect well. No big deal—the point is not that it wasn't done well, but that it was done at all. Shepard played golf on the lunar highlands, in temperatures that stood near 230 degrees Fahrenheit. It was sublime tomfoolery.

  True, the force required to drive a golf ball three hundred yards on the earth would translate to a milelong drive on the moon, but a space suit tends to hamper the swing. The longest drive ever recorded anywhere in the universe was an entirely earthbound effort. In 1962 an Australian meteorologist named Nils Lied teed off just outside Mawson Base in Antarctica and drove the ball about a mile and a half across the ice.

  Rick Ridgeway is also guilty of some astounding tomfoolery in Antarctica. I'm thinking specifically of the time he went water-skiing just before winter closed down the continent. "We were staying at this Argentine base down there," says Rick, "and those people treated us like kings. Well, we wanted to give them something, but we were traveling light and didn't have anything of material value for them. The only thing we could do was provide a little entertainment."

  Ridgeway and his companion, Mike Graber, rigged up a sixteen-foot rubber raft with a twenty-five-horsepower Evinrude and tied a rope to the raft. This left the problem of finding suitable skis. Somehow they'd forgotten their water skis when they'd packed for Antarctica. "We finally decided to try our cross-country sleds," says Rick. 'These were fiberglass gadgets, about eight feet long, and instead of runners we had plates of Teflon on the bottom."