by James Duthie
Seriously. We are deeeeeep. I swear I see one of those Kalahari Bushmen running past me saying: “Dude, this is way too scary for me. I'm out.” I'm figuring Jane Goodall is about to tiptoe out of the mist, whispering: “Shhhh. The gorillas are mating now. Crouch and observe. Crouch and observe.”
Plus, it was night. Nothing like wandering through the jungle in pitch-black trying to find your hut while hearing 187 creepy sounds you've never heard before.
“Hmm. Honey. . . was that python swallowing rat, or jaguar crapping? Hard to tell really.”
The huts were actually quite spacious. In fact, there was room for more than 300 species of insects. I felt like Agent freakin' Starling stumbling into Buffalo Bill's bug room in Silence of the Lambs.
Moths. Spiders. Beetles. Mosquitoes. Each one three times the size of North American bugs. Seriously. These suckers are on both The Clear and The Cream. This one coackroachy thing was roughly the size of my shoe, and had antennae longer than our roll of dental floss. It was a 1950s B–monster movie. Thankfully, it also made for an all-you-can-eat buffet for the two dozen or so geckos co-tenanting with us.
We spent most of the night with our tiny flashlight pointed at the wall, watching the lizards eat the bugs. Darn fine entertainment, actually. Should be a Fox show. I think I got a solid 40 minutes of sleep. Before the howler monkeys started screaming.
You know. . . that scream they scream before they abandon their boring fruit and berries diet, and decide to swarm and eat helpless tourists. Yeah, that scream.
Happy birthday, honey.
Any chance there's a Westin nearby?
• • •
Postscript: See next column.
Chapter 60
Jungle Love, Part 2
September 2005
Hey! Any Hollywood director–types out there putting the final touches on a new horror flick? Well, I have found your soundtrack. There are few noises weirder and eerier than the 5 a.m. jungle wake-up call that is the scream of the howler monkey.
It is night one in a hut in the Costa Rican jungle. For hours, we have listened to a live performance of the hot new CD “Strange Animal Noises Just Outside Your Door Which You Can't and Don't Want To Identify!” (Club mix.) Then, just before dawn comes this ghostly wail. Apparently, howler monkeys fancy themselves as the jungle's wake-up call.
Panther: “Hey, guys, could I get a 5:15 tomorrow?”
Monkeys: “No problem, Larry. Goin' huntin'?”
Panther: “Nah. Just want to get an early start on lickin' myself.”
Each morning, the howlers scream their monkey lungs out in unison, like some warped Primate Vienna Boys' Choir. The sound echoes through the trees up to four kilometres away. And when you are pure city folk who have just spent your first sleepless night in the jungle. . . well. . . it's creepier than that baby crying in the woods in The Blair Witch Project.
“Josh!?! Josh!!?!”
The only thing more frightening was the fact I was about to do two hours of yoga at 6 a.m.
Background: My wife has been training to be a yoga instructor for the past year. She found this trip by Googling “yoga retreat,” though I believe it can also be located by Googling “Medieval torture methods.”
I jest (partially). Truth is, since she started yoga, I'd been pondering trying it. Like most guys, I am about as flexible as wood. And I now routinely pull my hamstring putting on socks. So I figured a little yoga would help me pretend to be an athlete for a few years longer.
I probably should have practised a little. The jungle isn't really a place for a yoga virgin. If yogis did rookie hazing, it would probably be here.
“OK, rook! Hold that backbend! Don't worry about the scorpion climbing your inner thigh!”
There were about 15 of us. Most of them yoga instructors from Chicago and New York, so bleepin' flexible they probably just pretzeled themselves up in the suitcase to save the airfare. They had legs wrapped over shoulders, shoulders bent under butt cheeks, butt cheeks curled around biceps. There were snakes peeking in saying: “Dang, I can't even bend that!”
And then me.
My poses were unrecognizable. My Downward Dog needed to be put to sleep. My Triangle Pose looked like a rhombus. The only Yogi I resembled was. . . Bear.
Though I was proficient at something they call Corpse Pose, where you lie on your back at the end of the workout like you're dead. Which was close to accurate.
Yoga may be the single toughest workout I've ever had. I can see why it is one of the trendiest training regimens for NFL players. I did more than 20 hours' worth in my one week in the jungle. That's just plain nutty. By the end, I could almost touch my. . . knees. And I was uttering things like: “Hey, girlfriend, your asana was perfect today! I think I'll work a little Kundalini in with my Ashtanga next week, just to focus on my pranayama. Know what I'm sayin'?”
The yoga classes bookended every day. Here's some of the stuff we did in between:
ZIP-LINING: You've probably seen this on The Amazing Race. (Aside: Do they have to keep telling us the rules on that show? It's been on for. . . like 10 seasons. I believe I know “a Detour is a choice between two tasks,” OK, Phil!?! I figured it out, oh, by about the second episode of Season One. And by the way, does any host in television have a better gig than Phil? He travels to every exotic spot on the planet, and while the contestants are shovelling camel dung in the desert or something, Phil probably lounges by the pool getting loaded while receiving a Thai massage. Then he gets chauffeured to his plastic mat just so he can say: “You're Team Number Three!”)
Zip-lining is basically sliding along a metal clothesline through the jungle. I always figured it was one long ride, but instead there are a bunch of platforms spread through the trees. You zip from one to another. Get unfastened, refastened, and off you go. The kind of thing Tarzan would have thought of if he had a little more MacGyver in him. Some of the rides were several hundred metres long, with a good 10-storey drop. I challenge anyone to do it without yelling “Wheeeeeeeeeee!” Can't be done.
My favourite part was trash-talking the odd monkey we'd go whizzing past.
“Hey there, Maggie's cousin, check me out! If you'd only evolved a little more, this all could have been yours, sucker! Who's your Lord of the Jungle now, bee-otch! Wheeeeeeeeeeee!”
(See. Told ya.)
WHITE-WATER RAFTING: The Pacuare, Spanish for “Holy crap, I'm glad I wore a helmet!” is one of the top white-water rivers in the world. The scenery is gorgeous and there are Class 4 rapids galore.
Of course, I was stuck on a raft with four women (including my girl) who weighed a total of roughly 300 pounds. This is not your ideal rafting crew. If it were Disneyland, they wouldn't have met the size requirements for the Tea Cup ride. I figured we'd hit a big wave, and just float off into the sky, like Chitty freakin' Bang Bang. Two of them could barely reach the water with their paddles. I may as well have been rafting with cats.
Not to brag, but I carried us down that river. It was heroic. I kept imagining I was Meryl Streep in The River Wild and Kevin Bacon had a gun to my head.
Bacon: “You get me down this river, Duthie, or you and your lady friends are dead!”
Me: “Ah, OK, Kev. But if I do, will you recreate your dance solo from Footloose? 'Cause man, that still kills me.”
ATTEMPTING TO GET CULTURED: One day, a local guide took a handful of us to one of the most remote parts of the country, on the border of Panama. (We actually crossed the border illegally to swim in a waterfall. That would have been a great phone call to the boss: “Hey listen, about that opening night NHL on TSN doubleheader. . . Uh. . . just brainstorming here but. . . what about hosting it via satellite from a Panamanian jail?”) We took a boat an hour upriver to visit an ancient tribe that makes raw chocolate from cacao plants. Isolated indigenous tribes aren't what they used to be. I was expecting loincloths and blow darts.
They had iPods.
THE BLACK HOLE: For our eight days in the jungle, we had no access t
o the outside world. No TV. No papers. No Internet. No phone. I brought one lousy Sports Illustrated, which I read so many times, I can recite every statistic from the “Faces in the Crowd” section. My favourite athlete is now Lori, a three-time National High School Fencing Champion from Rhode Island. She has great teeth.
This week will be an eternal sports black hole in my brain. Do not ever ask me anything about weeks two and three of the NFL season. It doesn't exist in my mind's hard drive. The Ryder Cup? I got nothin'. (Which, from what I hear, is the same way Phil Mickelson will remember it.)
What my mind retains instead are the memories of meshing body and spirit while practising an ancient art in one of the most lush, beautiful places on earth.
Oh yeah, and the fact my wife owes me one mother of a present when my birthday comes.
• • •
Postscript: I actually took up yoga full-time after that trip. And by full-time, I mean once a month or so. After five years, I can now bend over and almost touch my. . . thighs. Yoga has actually become very trendy with professional athletes. Yoga vacations in remote jungle huts with screaming monkeys have not.
Chapter 61
NHL Standings Should be Pointless
December 2007
A couple of weeks back, when Toronto GM John Ferguson Jr. bore a striking resemblance to Sean Penn in Dead Man Walking, he kept desperately spewing the stat that his team was only “three games under .500.” Today, he will proudly tell you his team is .500. A virtual juggernaut! Time for a Dear John letter:
Dear John,
I'm sorry to report that your Leafs are actually 12-18. That would be six games under .500.
I shouldn't pick on JFJ (his own boss, Richard Peddie, takes care of that), because every general manager and coach in the league omits the final column of the standings when spin-doctoring his team's record.
You see, NHL teams don't count overtime or shootout defeats as losses. Most of their fans don't either. Everyone pretends it's a tie, as if anything that happens after 60 minutes is just some DVD Extra.
Oh sure, when you win in OT or a shootout, it's a pure W. But losses are simply deemed “not quite wins.”
“At least we got the point” has replaced “It is what it is” as the silliest quote of our (ice) time.
Pssst! That guy who dangled past your D-man and went five-hole in the first minute of overtime? That was not a skills exhibition. You LOST!
The extra point has so mangled NHL standings and altered players' psyches, sometimes they don't even know if they're slumping or streaking. Let's say Ottawa plays six games with these results: win, OT loss, loss, win, shootout loss, OT loss. One sportscaster will say: “The Sens are really slumping! They have only one win in their last five!” The next sportscaster will report: “The Sens are rolling! They have points in five of their last six!”
You need Stephen Hawking to figure this stuff out.
The solution is simple: it's time to kill hockey's version of The Rouge. Here's a radical idea: two points for a win, zero points for a loss. No in-betweens. No consolation prizes. No lovely parting gifts.
What other league rewards losing? Did the Tennessee Titans get anything for taking the Chargers to overtime on Sunday? Do the Blue Jays gain a half-game in the standings when they lose to the Yankees in 11? When Chris Bosh misses a buzzer-beater in double OT, does he say to himself “Oh well, at least we got something out of it!”?
Professional sports should be cut and dried. You win or you lose. You can't kinda-sorta lose. If a tie is like kissing your sister, a point for an OT/shootout loss is like kissing your creepy aunt with the mustache.
I don't care if you skated your J-Lo off for 65 minutes, only to be defeated in a “lousy freakin' shootout.” If a shootout can decide soccer's World Cup, it can decide who gets two points and who gets none in a regular season hockey game.
One of the reasons hockey suffers in many US markets is fans can't even figure out how to read the standings. In some papers, the NHL has more columns than the stock market page: W, L, OTL, SOL, LWBPMPF (Loss When Your Best Player Was Maimed by a Philadelphia Flyer).
This is how the standings would read in my Utopian world (where, by the way, I would be reading the standings while getting a foot rub from Jessica Biel): one column for wins, one for losses, one for points. That's it. Easier to read than Marmaduke. Heck, you don't even need the points column. But since hockey is the only sport that has it, I'll throw the purists a bone.
The NHL, of course, will never go for this. It sees The Rouge as a way to keep lousy teams in the playoff race longer, an argument that has economic merit but reeks of desperation. General managers and coaches hate my idea because they are junkies when it comes to points.
“I'd rather play overtime for 10 minutes and only give the winner the two points,” says Senators GM Bryan Murray. “If it's not settled, then one point each as it was before. But 4 on 4 and shootouts are different, and in my thinking, even if you lose, you should get a point. I'm too much of a traditionalist.”
The only coach I could find who shares my distaste for the extra point is Calgary's Mike Keenan.
“I hate it. This game was made to be won or lost. No middle ground,” Keenan says.
It should be noted that Keenan despises the shootout, and would prefer an overtime that started 4 on 4, and then went to 3 on 3 to decide the outcome. That has merit, but it's a whole other column. I'm just working with the tools the NHL has given me.
And the one point I'm trying to make is that you should never make one point.
There. For once, a column of mine that actually intended to be. . . pointless.
• • •
Postscript: My emails on this one were equally split between support and hate mail. By the way, much of the hate mail came from executives of lousy NHL teams. Keenan was fired after the 2009 season. The only coach who supported my plan. . . gone. It reeks of a conspiracy.
Chapter 62
Mountain View
January 2004
The highest peak in Canada is Mt. Logan, in the St. Elias mountain range in the Yukon, standing 5,950 metres or close to 20,000 feet.
The second highest, pending official measurement, is the snowbank in front of my house.
Seriously. This sucker is huge. . . Gigantic. . . HUGANTIC!
We now refer to my front porch as “Base Camp.” Last night, I let the dog out and there were three Sherpas pitching a tent. When I looked out the upstairs window this morning, I swear I saw a yeti.
You see, Mr. Plow apparently believes I'm sleeping with his wife. Or mother. For after each storm, he carefully gathers every fallen flake in the neighbourhood and piles them directly in front of our place.
For a while, I stalked him. Hiding behind the drapes at dawn, then leaping out onto the street when he showed up to drop off another couple of tons. (Note: In the circle of life, I believe this was the moment I officially became “Crazy Old Man Duthie,” frightening children at the school bus stop as I shook my fist, muttering nonsensical curses while stumbling after Plowboy in my plaid jammies. All that was missing was the cane. I really must get a cane to shake.)
It was fruitless. He'd just smirk, dump and drive off. Satan in a City of Markham toque. And I was left to sit and stew, and plot vengeance before the next snowfall.
“Look, Crazy Old Man Duthie's setting traps again! Run!”
I was becoming obsessed with Plowjerk in a destructive House of Sand and Fog kind of way. That is, until the kid set me straight.
After school one day, my four-year-old dropped his Bob the Builder backpack off at Base Camp and started climbing. And not just any side of my snowbank: the treacherous north face.
“Nooooo!” I screamed inside my head. “You forgot your oxygen canisters!”
By dinner, he had almost reached the summit. Sir Edmund Freakin' Duthie.
Soon, the other kids in the neighbourhood had joined him, keeping one wary eye on the door for the Crazy Old Man.
But he
didn't come. He just watched.
Before long, they'd fetched sleds, and were plummeting down my Everest. Then one kid brought a snowboard. Then a skateboard. Then a bike. (Really.) Suddenly, it was the Winter X Games. I envisioned a scene from The Simpsons trampoline episode, kids scattered across my front yard with legs and arms pointing in wrong directions. But I couldn't stop them.
And haven't since (though I did intervene when my two-year-old tried to ride down on her Big Wheel). They're back every afternoon. Heck, sometimes I even join them.
Hey, it's just like the touching end of Home Alone! The Old Man isn't scary!
My mountain rules! I may put in a gondola. Intrawest called. They want to build a hotel and condos at the base. I'm considering a bid for the 2006 World Alpine Championships.
Problem is, it hasn't snowed in days. It's getting icy up there. The course is faster than the Hahnenkamm. So now Crazy Old Man Duthie and his kids sit at the window waiting for snow.
And when it falls?
Bring it on, Mr. Plow. Bring it on.
• • •
Postscript: A few mild winters followed, and our snowbank never again reached the Himalayan heights of that winter. In 2008, we moved to Aurora, a town 20 minutes further north, in the middle of a snow belt. Our new Plowguy is much less evil. He pushes everything to the centre of our cul-de-sac, forming a ginormous three-peak mountain range, which my kids have yet to summit. My youngest daughter plans on leading an expedition up the south face sometime this February. I smell a Jon Krakauer book. Pray for her.
Chapter 63
Geno Comes Out Of the Shadows
March 2009