I have had to come so far away from it in order to understand it all.
—LAWRENCE DURRELL
I’M NOT SURE WHAT I FEARED MORE: THE SHEER FIFTY-FOOT DROP behind me or another minute without coffee.
For reasons lost to time and memory, I had chosen this particular week to try to kick my coffee habit. Perhaps I’d gotten it in my head that my addiction to the bitter bean was out of control, and thought that I should curtail my caffeine intake. After all, I was living in Los Angeles at the time, surrounded by people who saw self-betterment as an extreme sport, and maybe I thought if I gave up my vices I might be able to improve my figure, clear my head, and land a $20 million contract with MGM Studios. Why, in my youthful idealism, I figured the best week to go cold turkey was when taking a group of thirty middle schoolers rock climbing in Joshua Tree is beyond me. What I do know is that in terms of stupid things I’ve done in my life, it ranks right up there with the time I peed on an electric fence.
I gingerly edged along the crack that was leading me where I needed to go—the apex of a huge, vaguely pyramid-shaped rock outcropping. At the very top was a wedged boulder that looked like a keystone in an arch-way. It would be perfect, I thought, to anchor a top rope there so the kids could try to scramble up the face. It was early morning and the sun was barely up. The kids were back at our camp ensconced in their tents. There was still a nighttime chill to the air, but I was sweating buckets from both fear and exertion, as well as caffeine withdrawal delirium tremens.
The gritty stone face I was on was rounded, so my body was being pushed ever so slightly outward. I felt exposed and unbalanced, with only a few feet to go before the wedged boulder. My harness, though jangling with cams and nuts (little metal anchors of various kinds that rock climbers wedge into cracks to secure ropes), wasn’t tied to anything. I was “free climbing” without a rope, an uncaffeinated Alex Honnold copycat.
I had “back-climbed” the pyramid-shaped cliff, easily getting nearly all the way to the top up the slanted slope on the other side. But the only way to get to the spot where I wanted to anchor our ropes was along this hairline crack, into which I’d wedged my climbing shoes and was now inching along. There were no handholds on the big flat face on which my body was pressed, so my arms were outstretched and I was trying to adhere my open hands to the rock gecko style.
Breathing hard, heart hammering, I pushed my foot another little bit along the crack. Not much more to go. I had to move in tiny increments, keeping my body as flat as possible to avoid pitching backward. It had seemed at first glance that this was a relatively easy way to access the spot I needed. Now that I was somewhat stranded on this sheer wall with no handholds, however, the idea that I could do this without being roped seemed idiotic. Pausing for breath, I craned my head slightly to look back over my shoulder. The desert was lighting up with the morning sun. My head was aching from caffeine deprivation and my thoughts were muzzy, but as I looked out over the expanse of desert and at the cruel rocks four stories below me, I realized I’d put myself in a predicament where I could, very possibly, die. This was deeply depressing to me, because I knew that if I pitched backward and fell to a bloody death on the rocks below, my last thought wouldn’t be of loved ones or family. I wouldn’t see my life flash before my eyes, a parade of people I cared for and experienced life with. I wouldn’t behold my wife’s face, or imagine my daughter’s hand in mine as we crossed the street. I would die with only one thought in my head: Sure would love a coffee right about now
I took another baby step, stretching out my right hand toward the big rock at the top of the climb. A few more inches. Almost there. I kept my balance—barely—and was able to finally get a handhold. I threw an anchor in one of the cracks and made myself fast to the rock. My body was slack with relief, and sweat soaked my shirt. I began to shake, the aftereffects of adrenaline and fear coursing through my body. That was close, I thought. The next thought came with such ringing clarity I can still remember it after all these years; it was like a billboard was instantaneously constructed right in front of my eyeballs with my thoughts emblazoned in neon: What am I doing out here?
A fair question. I had been leading outdoor adventures since I was nineteen. I could’ve been a lot of things: tube sock model, professional bikini-sniffer, Vanilla Ice impersonator. But I had, by dint of desire and fate, become an outdoor educator. I made a dubious living dragging young people out into the deserts, forests, and mountains to build self-reliance, develop teamwork, and poop in holes like a troglodyte.
Especially when I was younger, I’d head out into these open places on adventures and see myself as the star of the movie of my life, the plucky protagonist we’re all rooting for. What I didn’t get was that my own tiny story was being enacted against a backdrop of a much larger and more vicious tale. The story of white settlers clearing the land of its Indigenous people to create an untrammeled playground for people like me. After all, as a six-foot, three-inch white guy, I looked like the poster child for Manifest Destiny.
I headed out into these places that were “unpeopled” and “wild”—vast landscapes with nothing but chaparral and rocks and lizards. I would stride about these natural vistas like some colonial baron, overseeing my domain and acting as though I owned the place. I was like the gouty early colonists who purchased the entire western half of the Mississippi River basin without even thinking about the millions of Native Americans who lived there. The modern equivalent would be selling someone a “lovely undeveloped thirteen-mile-long island at the mouth of the Hudson River.” It’s painful to admit, but I gradually came to realize the cruel truth: White people like me are goombahs. We’re the elevator farters of history.
As hard as I tried, I couldn’t stay ignorant forever. I gradually came to see that the myth of virgin, pristine wilderness was exactly that, a myth. Accounts differ, but most historians and anthropologists and number-crunching geeks agree that before Columbus arrived in 1492, there were tens of millions of Native Americans occupying every corner of the Western Hemisphere, from the frozen ice of the North Sea to the wind-whipped mountains of Patagonia. What I saw initially as a tabula rasa where I could adventure to write my own epic life story, I realized was a landscape that already held countless stories. That I was, in effect, a visitor. A tourist. I was walking through a landscape soaked with the blood of Indigenous peoples, and my own ancestors—furriers from Minnesota and Mennonites from Pennsylvania—were the cause of their demise.
I know, I know: It sounds like sententious soapboxing. But the complication, as I saw it, was that while I acknowledged the memories of these places and the trauma that had played out there, I also loved it. The trees, mountaintops, valleys; the whole fresh air thing just clicked with me. Whether scrabbling up the rocks in Joshua Tree or wading through the swamps of Florida, I felt like myself when I was in nature, despite the creeping realization that I was a usurper.
I also knew I was woefully underequipped to deal with the real world, or a real job. I’d tried and failed spectacularly in a number of professions. I just can’t seem to care about institutional priorities or the machinations of business. I agree with humorist Dave Barry who wrote, “If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.’”
I knew, as I clung to that rock wall—and I know it now—that there is something in my temperament that is ill-suited for profitable, normal employment; deep-seated personality flaws I seem incapable of overcoming. I think many folks who seek respite in the outdoors do it because they just don’t feel like they belong anywhere else. The boardrooms and cubicles and classrooms feel like involuntary confinement, and so they strike out in search of a place where they can be themselves.
I always sought out experiences outdoors. Even from a young age, I was driven by an urge to get outdoors and wander around. The two factors that have defined the course of my life are a love of inclement weather and poor decision-making capabilities.
The first is equally a product of circumstance and genetics. I was raised in the mountains of Vermont, where the weather is so predictably awful there’s an added season to the normal rotation of spring, summer, fall, and winter to fully capture the schizophrenic meteorology of the state: “mud season.” In addition, my father’s side of the family is Scandinavian, my mother’s Scottish, so a love of rainy, cold, depressingly cloudy landscapes is a birthright. I am told that this affection for unpleasant climes is shared by others, particularly the British, whose famously rainy weather has driven them to solutions such as Wellington boots and the colonization of India.
This propensity for grinning cheerfully into the face of a driving rain or whistling happily like a man-child as I tromp through snow in subzero temperatures is, I fully acknowledge, a major character flaw. Worse, it’s a proclivity that has veered into sadomasochistic tendencies, as it makes me especially happy to inflict exposure to adverse elements on children.
The inability to make thoughtful choices has plagued me my whole life. A normal adult weighs options, considers stakeholders, then acts in accordance with common sense and an understanding of cause and effect. I, on the other hand, tend to act impulsively, making major life choices on a whim, driven more by fanciful notions than prudence. The reins of my brain have been given over to the overenthusiastic golden retriever of my worst impulses.
Case in point: I grew up in the Green Mountains in a forested valley. My parents ran a bed-and-breakfast and Nordic ski center out of a nineteenth-century farmhouse. There was still a working dairy farm on the property run by an old couple that lived nearby, George and Elise. My earliest memories are of a house full of strangers, and parents who were so frightfully busy cooking and cleaning for inn guests that I enjoyed radical liberty through benign neglect.
I’d often wander about the farm and fields, poking around for something to do or hanging out with the taciturn George, an iconic Vermonter who rarely spoke a word. My greatest joy was when “Uncle” George, as I called him, would hoist me up to ride beside him on his tractor as he headed out into the hay fields to spread manure. To a kid like me, getting to witness firsthand several hundred gallons of bovine poop flung twenty feet into the air in a great, splattering rooster tail bordered on the sublime.
One March day in particular stands out. There’s a saying in Vermont: “If you don’t like the weather, wait twenty minutes.” The previous day had been warm, so the deep snow had begun to soften. Overnight, the temperature plummeted to single digits. The result was that the snow acquired an icy glaze on the surface: a thick, hardened veneer of glass-like ice covered the ground. An adult trying to walk on the snow would crunch through, but the frozen layer could support a child just fine. My sister and I strapped on our ice skates and skated around on top of the snow through the fields and forests, slaloming through trees and racing across meadows.
We eventually began exploring an old logging road that ascended the side of the valley. We came to a spot at the top where a steep hill dropped away at our feet. It was forested by a mixed stand of maple and pine, but there was just enough space between the trunks for a straight shot down the vertiginous pitch. We’d already discovered that the icy surface of the snow and our light bodies turned every hill, no matter how gentle the slope, into a slick slide. We didn’t even need sleds; our butts worked just fine.
But this hill was of a different order. Steep and forested. A kid who slid down would be putting themselves in danger of grievous bodily harm.
“Let’s go!” I yelled. But my sister—older by two years—was the ranking sibling, so she got to go first. She shoved herself off, scooching on her butt but quickly picking up speed, rocketing down the hill like some pint-sized bobsledder with a death wish. As she neared light speed, I watched her face hit a low branch and her head snap back. Even from the top of the hill, I could see the bright red blood on the snow where she spun to a stop.
This was the defining moment. A normal kid would view the destruction laid out before them, wrought by the Arctic Hill of Death, and work out in the reptilian part of their brain the basic calculus that it was dangerous. I, on the other hand, scooted forward and followed my sister, picking up speed and rocketing down on my bum as she sat bleeding and wailing below.
I crashed—spectacularly—into a more forgiving evergreen. The rest is a blur: my parents arriving to scoop up my crying, bloodied sister, a trip to the hospital, her return with stitches in her lip.
Here we have the germinal seed of my personality: a deep-seated ignorance of cause and effect. But something else as well: a love of the unpredictable, an eagerness for experience seasoned with inappropriate amounts of blithe disregard for propriety. Despite the narrow confines of my life, I’ve tried to get out and about and see what the world has to offer. While I acknowledge it’s a fault, I’m not particularly keen on analysis and contemplation (to which my children, who’ve consumed meals I’ve made that go beyond fusion and enter into the gastronomical realm of the multiverse, can attest), and would prefer, whenever possible, to just do something rather than talk about it. So it’s hardly surprising that one of my first jobs was as an Outward Bound instructor, leading incarcerated youth on river trips in Florida. Which makes sense, as I’m temperamentally incapable of tucking in my shirt.
I’d go on to lead trips in the Sierra, Vermont, Puget Sound, even Mexico and Europe. I would take students into landscapes that weren’t mine, really. I was colonizing—dressing up in organic wool pullovers and recycled-plastic puffy jackets and preaching Leave No Trace ethics, but colonizing nonetheless. I played the part of a bumbling, anodyne conquistador.
But none of this was on my mind as I secured the anchors on the top of the pyramid-shaped boulder in the middle of Joshua Tree National Park. Despite the fact that I’d almost killed myself due to a deeply flawed and quickly abandoned attempt at self-improvement, I began to feel tiny sparks of what resembled happiness. I was tired and coffee-deprived, and also entertaining growing fears about how the regularity of my bowel movements would be affected sans caffeine, but I was able to enjoy, at least a little, the beauty of the place I was in. Once I was sure I’d double-anchored the top rope, I clipped in and began to rappel down. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw the desert and the sun, the rocks and the sand, and felt, for a fleeting instant, that I was right where I should be.