I notice how much more satisfying it is to climb a steep canyon in pursuit of an animal than to hike the same feature for the vague sake of recreation or exercise. Scott and I don’t hike much, but we have started cross-country skiing together, which is like hiking on skis. Scott has skied his whole life. I went downhill skiing a couple of times in high school and college, but haven’t cross-country skied before.
On one of our first outings, we drive to the Edison Sno-Park, a network of trails with electricity-related names. We peruse the map and decide to ski to the AC/DC shelter because it has the best name. Most of the route to the hut is uphill, which is difficult on skis but not impossible. Directly under each foot, the base of my skis is etched into a fish-scale pattern. By stomping it into the snow, I can grip the trail. Or I can point the tips of my skis outward and walk straight up, leaving a herringbone pattern in the snow. Or, on steeper terrain, I can turn my skis perpendicular to the hill and sidestep up it. Most of the time, no matter what I choose, I still manage to slip backward, catching myself only with my poles.
Just as I start to get tired, we ski past a sign declaring that the shelter is one and a half miles away. About ten minutes later, we pass a second sign saying the same thing. By the time we reach the third sign, I am imagining myself in a horror movie. It would end with me collapsing, dehydrated and exhausted but still one and a half miles from the AC/DC shelter. I imagine myself as a modern-day Sisyphus and also the boulder, doomed to futilely push myself uphill.
Shortly after the third sign, I slide off the trail and land on my back in a pile of snow, soft enough that it doesn’t hurt. It’s so soft, however, that I can’t stand up—there’s no surface to push off. I thrash and wiggle, trying to find a magical position that somehow gives me leverage. I grunt. I sweat. I swear. I grunt some more. Eventually, I pack down enough snow to stand up. Tears and snot drip off my chin. Sweat glues to my skin all the clothing layers under my waterproof jacket.
Since my first day of skiing, I have struggled to notice when I start to feel warm or chilled. Scott seems to have an internal thermometer with an alarm attached. He stops skiing occasionally and peels off a layer, or yanks a sweater out of his pack and pulls it over his head. “If you’re already hot or cold,” he has warned me, “it’s too late. It takes too much work for your body to warm itself back up, or dry off sweat.” But my climate-controlled life has stripped away any sensitivity I might have had to these dips and rises in body temperature. I notice only when I am hot enough to sweat, or cold enough to shiver.
I stomp up the hill. Scott is out of sight, which is for the best. I whimper as I slip and slide along the path. Why do people do this to themselves? The trail weaves around a tree and there is Scott, waiting for me.
“How’re you doing?” He sounds so cheerful I could throttle him.
“I hate this.” I look away from him, instead focusing on the empty trail in front of me.
“Do you want to stop? Take a break?”
“No. I want to hurry up and get to the damn shelter.” If I say any more, I could start crying again.
He glides—how does he do that?—behind me and says gently, “Hey, are you okay?”
“No. I just want to get there.” I shuffle my skis a few more times and then ask, “How much farther is it?”
“Probably not too far.”
Probably? Tears flood my eyes. Then Scott says: “You can do it, Lily.”
“No,” I mumble, “I can’t.”
He’s still right behind me, and I know that he is about to deliver a pep talk. I can practically feel the obnoxious encouragement on the back of my neck. He’s going to say that yes, I can do it. I’m stronger than I think. We’re almost there. When we get there I’ll be so glad I did this.
Instead, he says: “We can turn back if you want. But either way, it’s more skiing. You’re in Fortitude Valley, Lil.”
For a moment, I forget how miserable I am. I look around, as if he has told me, literally, where we are. But this is the AC/DC trail. I already know that. I’ve seen the map.
“Where is that?” I finally ask. “Fortitude Valley? I don’t know where that is.”
“Yeah you do. Everyone does. Fortitude Valley is…” He waits for the right words, perhaps aware of how short my fuse is. “You don’t choose to come here, but when things get tough, it’s where you are. And you just have to get through it.”
Gray sky. Mounds of tricky, evil snow. Scrawny lodgepole pines judging me as I limp past, sniffling. Behind us, more obnoxiously cheerful skiers who say things like “What a lovely day!” when I step off the trail so they may glide past. Scott is right: This is Fortitude Valley. Or hell. He’s also right that there’s nothing to do but keep going. I resolve to save what little energy I have left for skiing, and not waste it on anger or whining.
And then, just like that, the heavens part and the angels sing. A stout log cabin appears before me, with a few pairs of skis poking out of the snow in front.
“Shelter ahoy!” I pump my fists in the air, poles dangling from my wrists and slapping my sides.
Scott snaps my picture and kisses me. He’s so proud of me that I am ashamed at my grumpy, childish behavior. It shouldn’t be such a big deal to ski to the top of a ridge. All around me children are doing it, for goodness’ sake. We drink water and eat granola bars next to the woodstove, where other skiers have already stoked a hot fire. The downhill is fast and treacherous. But I gladly accept the fear of flying down a slippery hill over the miserable slog of shoving myself up it.
As the winter wears on, we ski almost every day that we don’t have to work. For me, the physical challenge is just one part of the hardship of skiing. The other part is figuring out how to occupy my mind during a seemingly endless trudge.
Early in the day, when I’m feeling energetic, I daydream. Once I get too tired to be anything but practical, I make mental lists of articles I want to write. Next, I compose pneumonic devices to remember my lists. Eventually, exhausted, I resort to the only thing I can think to do: count my steps. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Around 250, I start getting sloppy. And then something else happens: nothing. If I ski long enough, my mind becomes so exhausted that it almost shuts off. The novelty of not thinking about anything is sort of fun. John Cage, the composer and poet, once wrote: “In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.” At the tipping point of exhaustion, I veer as close to meditation as I ever have, and it feels like I’ve reached Nirvana.
In the spring, we return to the site of my infamous breakdown. I have knots in my stomach as I click my boots into the bindings. I tell myself that whatever happens, however hard it gets, I will not cry. Fortitude Valley, here I come.
But this time, the trail to the AC/DC shelter is apparently diverted around Fortitude Valley. We arrive—both of us—in good spirits. I am tired and of course I’ve fallen more times than I wanted to count, but I remain positive. I feel as if, in one winter, cross-country skiing has transformed me from a whimpering child into a capable adult. As we sit down on a rustic wooden bench next to the woodstove, a family with two young children—probably eight and ten years old—gets up to leave.
Children who willingly cross-country ski amaze me. There is no grand finale, no reward, no intoxicating sensation of flying like you get downhill skiing. It is hard work one way and hard work on the way back. I watch as the youngest child, a boy, snaps his boots into his ski bindings. He looks so matter-of-fact, so calm. Never mind that he is about to slide down a hill that reduced me—an adult—to tears.
“I think I would be a better person,” I whisper to Scott, “if I’d grown up cross-country skiing.”
He swallows a mouthful of water and laughs. “How so?”
“I don’t know, exactly… I guess I’d be more patient, more able to live in the moment, enjoy the journe
y. Something like that, anyway.”
Although I’ve always liked the abstract idea of hiking, I never really understood the point of it before. But now, bird hunting, I find myself enjoying these long treks through difficult terrain. Even on days when I don’t see a single chukar, I take pleasure in the hike. My heightened senses occupy my mind, so there’s no need for games or counting. With no trail to follow, I stay focused and scrutinize each step. I look for possible nesting sites or the flash of a red beak. I listen for calls and cackles. I know I am nearing the top of a steep canyon when I smell the citrusy sagebrush that grows above, on flat ground. I feel completely present; taking in the land around me and interpreting it, in real time, with no distractions. I don’t daydream or compose lists or check my BlackBerry.
Perhaps what I needed to become a hiker was a specific goal, a reason to traipse for miles. Hunting and gathering are, after all, the primary reasons that humans developed stamina to travel long distances on foot. Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, believes that the uniquely human capacity for long-distance running (think 26.2-mile marathons or even longer ultra-marathons) is a vestige of our ancient method of “persistence” hunting, or chasing a wild animal to exhaustion and eventually death. Hiking was once an integral part of the human experience of the hunt, just as fetching was key to the dog’s experience of it.
Yet our lives have moved so far away from hunting that we no longer recognize the origins of these daily routines. Even our language is filled with words and phrases derived from hunting. “Buck,” the word for a male deer, for example, is slang for one dollar because in the nineteenth century, Americans could buy one deer carcass for a dollar. A “sitting duck” is the easiest shot a hunter will ever get (so easy it’s considered unsportsmanlike).
When you remove hunting from human life, this is what you get: aimless hiking and “hanging out” with our dogs, who are bred to catch Frisbees or to not shed fur. How bizarre, then, that something as passive as hiking has become the domain of environmentalists. After all, we assume that any solstice-worshipping hippie loves to hike. Hunting, on the other hand, is for rednecks who couldn’t care less about the health of the planet.
The truth, of course, is that many hunters care greatly about the environment. In fact, most of the hunters I know go hunting in search of an outdoor experience first and wild, healthy meat second. Drinking beer in the woods or nabbing a giant set of antlers—these possibilities don’t enter their consciousness.
Until I moved to Oregon, I made no distinction between hunters who pursued animals for different purposes. Now I know: There are hunters and there are trophy hunters. The people who aim to bring home tasty meat don’t usually worry about the size of an animal’s rack. In his cookbook, Roy Wall writes, “The sportsman who bags a noble head, a monarch of a wilderness glade, has a just right to be proud, but in doing so he imposes double duty upon the camp cook, for, in most cases, the finer the head, the tougher the meat.”
Scott and I don’t get cable television at home, but whenever we stay in a hotel, I flip through the cable stations to find a hunting show. In some parts of the country, there are around-the-clock channels devoted to hunting. But most of these shows display little if any footage of the actual pursuit, instead focusing solely on the kill. A typical program tells the story of one hunt in about five minutes. It begins with a quick introduction of the hunter and the guide, then shares a little information about the guns each is carrying. The bulk of the footage is a rapid sequence of spotting the animal, setting up the shot and taking it. The hunter and guide spend a few seconds admiring the animal and remarking on its gargantuan size. Then the show switches to a new hunt. There is no map to situate viewers, no insight into the species’ behavior, no indication that the pursuit took hours or days or weeks. Just wham, bam, boom, cut to commercial.
Serious trophy hunters spend hundreds of thousands of dollars traveling to remote countries and hiring guides to help them stalk the biggest animals. The Boone and Crockett Club, co-founded by Theodore Roosevelt, is still a major force in habitat conservation. It also plays another, more nefarious role in modern big-game hunting: record keeping. The club has a formula for determining the score of any antlered animal killed, based on the width of the horns and the number of tines, or points, jutting out of them. In keeping and promoting these records, the club perpetuates an obsession with gargantuan size that is likely detrimental to wildlife. A study in 2009 found that the horns of Canadian bighorn sheep have shrunk because of hunting. By targeting individuals with the largest horns, trophy hunters are systematically altering the gene pool of the entire species. The lead researcher of this study told National Geographic, “Human-harvested organisms are the fastest-changing organisms yet observed in the wild.”
In central Oregon, every outdoors supply store has a “brag board” near the entrance. This is a bulletin board where customers can tack photos of themselves with their prey. I used to scurry past these displays, averting my eyes. It seemed so cruel and twisted for people to pose, grinning, with a dead animal. The creature’s teeth are often stained with the blood that dribbled out of its mouth during its last breath. Its tongue hangs out, looking unnaturally long and seeming to mock the dignity that the animal possessed during life.
In a way, I get it now. I understand how much work goes into tracking and killing wild game. Where I used to see a grisly image of mockery, I now see a memento of a hard-fought victory. Still, some of these pictures tug at my insides.
That fall, after buying my duck stamp and other tags needed to hunt birds, I stand at the brag board of a local outdoors supply store, entranced by one photo of a man straddling a prone bear. There’s something about photos of dead bears, in particular, that startles and saddens me. In life, bears are so elusive. And they seem, to me at least, more dog-like than most wild game. A bear’s forehead slopes to its nose at the same angle as my Sylvia’s. This particular bear is a grizzly. Its paws are the size of dinner plates, with claws like switchblades. No doubt it was a huge, threatening animal during life. But it’s been reduced now to an impotent mound, disarmed and stretched out, with a burly, grinning man standing over it. It’s not even cold and already it looks more rug than bear.
CHAPTER 10
FRIENDS FOR DINNER
In July 2008, after weeks filled with planning, Scott and I take a fishing vacation with four friends in the Alaskan wilderness. On the Fourth, Scott and I land in Anchorage at midnight. Fireworks ignite around the city, though the night sky never gets dark enough to see them very well.
The next morning, armed with a long list, we purchase food for the next eight days. Then we take a cab from the grocery store to a tiny floatplane operation, where we meet our friends. There’s Andy and Jessie, from Missoula. There’s our friend Ryan, who lives in Bend and is a regular fishing buddy of ours. And then there’s Evan, a friend of Andy’s from Minnesota whom we haven’t met before.
Andy was a fishing guide in this area during college, so he knows the river well and has made arrangements to hire the planes and rent the rafts. We load our clothing and fishing gear, along with two white coolers and two inflatable rafts, onto two tiny airplanes. We fly for an hour before landing near the shore of a small lake. We wade to shore, assemble and inflate the rafts and stuff our gear into dry bags.
I’m nervous as the pilots wave and their planes lift off to return to Anchorage, leaving behind a whitecapped wake. We’re on our own in a veritable wilderness, and if anything goes wrong we will have no chance of getting help. This will be the first time I have been in clear danger from predators; grizzly bears are plentiful here, and will fish the same river we do, for the same king salmon. Andy has told us that for the most part, bears try to avoid humans. But any bear, particularly a protective mama with cubs, could become aggressive if startled.
Before we left Anchorage, Scott and I purchased a fifty-dollar can of aerosol bear spray, a spicy concoction that could temporarily disarm an attacking bear i
f sprayed directly in its face. Andy has packed a 12-gauge shotgun, too, which means that for the first time I (or at least our group) will be armed for self-protection. Andy gives us a gentle reminder that anyone who heads into the woods—even just to go to the bathroom—needs to carry the gun or spray. My pulse quickens when he says that. I’m not sure which I’m more afraid of: the threat of a snarling bear or the idea of using a gun for self-defense. What really makes me nervous, though, is that I’m not sure whether I’ll enjoy myself with nothing to do but fish for eight days.
The sun is warm, though, and the mood jovial as we push off from shore. We laugh and whoop, rowing across the lake and into a tiny stream: Talachulitna Creek. The weather quickly turns awful—a cold rain moves in on the second day and follows us for the rest of the trip. Andy says he’s never seen the mosquitoes so thick. We wear head nets all day, every day, and I shudder to think how I would fare without one—bugs buzzing in my ears, up my nose and in my eyes. The river is blown out by all the rain, so the fishing is slow.
And yet, every day is adventure. Each curve of the river brings new scenery and a new stretch of fish habitat to try to solve. Where will we stop for lunch? How will we find enough dry wood to start a fire? I bond with Jessie, and sometimes it only takes one word to make us erupt in laughter. I start to cast like a professional, flinging out more line and heavier flies than I ever have before. We manage to catch rainbow trout, arctic grayling and, on occasion, massive king salmon. We eat fresh salmon for dinner almost every night, and even make grayling sushi. (So much for all the food we’ve packed in coolers.) The biggest surprise of the trip is how much I enjoy it.
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