Timing is Everything

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 1 Comment

I don’t remember much about the request except that it was probably objectively reasonable. I remember feeling slighted at his response that if I needed an answer right that moment, then it was a no.

He was under the thumb of some looming work deadline, probably, or another of the banal inconveniences of adult life that are unfathomable to an eight-year-old. If I’d asked earlier in the day or at dinner it would likely have yielded a quick permission.

“Timing,” my father still reminds me, “is everything.”

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That pithy phrase is one of those paternal legacies from growing up that is simple and neatly packaged enough it might have come from a shitty action movie: A child is told “timing is everything” by his father, and as a man, now a secret agent, remembers that bit of advice and uses it to defuse a bomb or something. [Father’s voiceover, flashback montage, etc].

But it extends well beyond the demands of some impatient child.

A moment’s delay in telling a joke is the difference between laughter and one of those awkward pauses where everyone looks at their shoes. An hour in the sun can turn a couloir from an icy death-gully to an avalanche hazard, and for a few minutes in the middle that otherwise dangerous place might hold blissful corn skiing.

There’s a Tom Waits album that rattles around in your head, and at home it’s background music while you finish the dishes. But as the sun sets around you behind the wheel and the miles tic by it means a little more. His growl sounds off through the tinny speakers in the dash, but there’s no denying Diamonds on my Windshield is the American anthem for a long drive. The radio’s gone off the air, it gives you time to think … and blazing through this midnight jungle remember someone that you met, and one more block, the engine talks, whispers ‘home at last,” it whispers, ‘home at last.’

It’s not so different from Desert Solitaire, that book they told you to read in college by that guy who measured driving distances in six-packs of beer (litter isn’t ugly, the highway is ugly). I guess it’s a better influence than The Monkey Wrench Gang. Maybe you didn’t read it, or maybe you’ve forgotten. But somehow when you crack that book while coffee steams around your bare feet and a new day paints the Kaibab red it becomes our greatest and most heartbreaking ode to the natural world.

And sometimes people come into your life only to fade away again by no fault but that you crossed each other’s paths a bit too early or a bit too late.

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The Sustainable Trails Coalition: Our Narcissistic Relationship with Wilderness

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 3 Comments

“Show me a picture of myself,” she said. He acquiesced. She looked at the photo on his cellphone and for only a moment was mesmerized. “Show me another one.”

The dinner party nursed stemless glasses of Turkish red wine and laughed. Of course her narcissism can be excused: she’s two years old. We brandished our glasses and wondered together when in life a person grows beyond self interest, and settled on some time between two and our own respective ages.

A while later the friends left. Sometimes a room can be overcrowded with  loved ones so that after they go away laughter radiates from the walls and furniture the way a pan is still hot after it’s been removed from the stove. (Maybe I was just drunk?)

But there was a glow to the kitchen while I washed a few dishes before putting off most of them for the morning. I felt warm, and loved, and my mind wandered a bit to a short piece I’d read earlier in the day about the Sustainable Trails Coalition.

If you haven’t heard of the Sustainable Trails Coalition (STC), it’s a proposed piece of legislation that would allow regional land managers the discretion to open designated Wilderness areas to mountain bikes, where they’re currently banned. It confronts a long simmering issue head on, and is controversial to say the least. The issue has pitted sandals-with-socks traditionalists against the loud talking, neon wearing new schoolers that are positioned to inherit a legacy of land stewardship in the west.

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Photo: Anders Broste (I found it on the Facebook) – Thanks Anders!

While the article itself is perhaps a fair treatment of one point of view, what’s interesting is the larger sample size of opinions that come to light in the comments section:

“Personally, I hope I never see a bicycle on the trail I am hiking.”

“I thought a fair portion of the [Wilderness Act] was to get people outdoors into the land, be active and not fat. Many people like biking and think hiking is boring.”

“I like seeing wildlife when I hike, but bikers make that hard to do since they scare them away.”

“My family enjoys all these types of quiet recreation, including biking. We enjoy it without conflict.”

There is a prevailing use of the first person.

Whether we agree or disagree with the premise that bicycles should be allowed in designated Wilderness areas, the real issue at hand is the personal and emotional response to such a far reaching piece of legislation.

Some outspoken citizens appear to believe that Wilderness management policy should somehow be based on how they like to spend their Saturdays, which is about as narcissistic as truly believing that God (architect of the universe) was watching your football game and helped you throw a touchdown.

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Regardless of how we recreate, I like to think that most of the people in the room for these conversations feel strongly about the value of open space and public land.

Which brings me to another comment that I read:

“This is when I sympathize with the states’-rights-take-over-federal-lands movement.”

Both advocates for the Sustainable Trails Coalition and more resistant conservation groups are right in some of their talking points. But the conversation needs to be about strengthening Wilderness, not about individual user experience.

In this election cycle it’s easy to get distracted from the fact that public lands are under attack. Headline grabbing standoffs like in Burns Oregon or on the Bundy Ranch in Nevada are sensational, but really serve to highlight an underlying resentment of protections that we’ve come to take for granted.

The public land debate is not so different from the anti-vaccine movement. Those people out there who refuse to vaccinate their kids don’t know anyone who is paralyzed from Polio. They haven’t lost a loved one to Smallpox. The horror of the diseases that we’ve eradicated are alien to most of the people alive today.

We take vaccine protections for granted the same way that a discussion of land management policy can so quickly be reduced to how it suits our own hobbies. It’s apparently so secure in our minds that we can’t imagine it ever being taken away. The only thing to discuss, it seems, is how we should go enjoy what will always be there.

This approach to policy making is no less narcissistic than a toddler who is only interested in pictures of herself, and only slightly less so than that Tebow guy.

Both sides of the bikes-in-Wilderness issue have valid points for how their proposal serves the greater good. It’s our responsibility as citizens, and yes, as recreators, to keep the conversation on the resource and away from our next vacation.

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Switcheroo Guest Post: Passion and Human Factor with David Steele

~ David Steele ~ Leave a comment

Good morning, gentlewomen and gentlemen. Yes, it’s Tuesday. Yes: this is a new post. Yes, your browser is not lying: this is still The Gentleman At Large. But unfortunately, your regularly scheduled blogging programming has been hijacked in a backcountry blogging switcharoo: you can find what Ben would have normally posted here over at skinningwithbearspray.com once he gets it to me.

And as the other part of that hijacking, and your gentlemanly eye on the forest keeper for the week, allow me to introduce myself. My name is David Steele. I hail from Kalispell, and often purpose my poetry degree towards writing about backcountry skiing and alpine capers in the mountains around northwest Montana. Check out the link above to see Ben’s post on my home e-turf.

We cooked up this switcharoo idea a while back, and like many of our good ideas, it didn’t come to fruition. I then committed and the backed out on his hut trip at Downing Mountain Lodge. And maybe another trip he proposed up in the Great White North. Then, through the intervention of fate and the vast social whirlpool that is Missoula, we ended up on a four day trip together into the Pioneer Hut outside of Ketchum two weeks ago. Friends have equated spending a day in the mountains as the equivalent of a few months of casual acquaintance: at such a pace our yurt experience felt like a year of good times and close proximity. My apologies for the underwear that I accidentally bombed on the bunk below, Courtney. Skin track conversations lead to me remembering the blog trade thing I said I’d like to do, and here it is. I don’t actually know if Horan has one for me as of this writing, which is both hilarious and totally acceptable.

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Horan documenting in his natural habitat.

Human factor issues have received a lot of press and attention in backcountry travel circles the past few years. I’ve found them particularly fascinating and essential to my own decision making  while trying to ski cool things with various groups—heading in for a few days in a foreign snowpack with mostly new people proved a good opportunity to study how human factors in that setting could play out for me.

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Yeah. The answer came on Day 1, and it was not good. As a group, we had traveled the six miles in, and hauled our gear to the yurt in the morning. The storm from the day previous brought significant new accumulations that had not yet been attacked the ferocious winds common to the area. We headed out for an afternoon of turns that saw us skiing the new snow on a SW aspect that, days prior, had been a bare slope of grass. Most of the group then switched to a N aspect on the opposite side of the canyon (shown in the photo above), an area called the Peanut Gallery.

Above the open area you can see in the photo, we saw, felt and heard multiple large collapses in the snow while skinning to the ridgetop. Our pit revealed a preserved layer of surface hoar nearly a meter down, which accounted for the activity we’d seen on similar aspects on the way in. It failed with energy in the twenties on our ECT. The seven of us decided to ski the lower angle aspects skiers right; once out of the trees, it was glorious. Three of the group split off to head back to the yurt, while Michael, Mike, Ben, and I headed back up for another lap.

I’d eyed up the natural takeoff in the center of the field from the get-go. It seemed perfect for a big air. We dug again before the four of us ascended, and found more problems in the lower pack: the buried surface hoar hadn’t been cooked, wind-killed, or magic’d away. Yet the light was gorgeous as the sun slid toward the horizon. Michael had his camera and wanted to shoot it. As I ripped my skins, I unconsciously switched from all the red flags we’d seen, all the reasons to be cautious, all the info that blatantly told a clear message to back down. I was thinking about the mechanics of how I might hit the roller, how fast I could go, whether there was enough speed to properly flip it into the perfect, classic, convex roll start zone of the landing.

Thus did I drop in and send. If you look at the photo, you can see my landing on the upper looker’s left of the crown. I remember coming around on my backflip, spotting the landing, the impact, and seeing the slab break below and off to my right. Instinct immediately veered me right and I skied off the slab as it started to break up. I traversed into the lower angle terrain and then into the trees. It broke several feet deep, propagated fairly wide, and remote triggered another larger slab on steeper terrain out of frame to the right of the above photo.

None of the rest of the four of us were involved, swept, or injured, and they came down shortly after to look at the wildness I’d just unleashed. The group that had headed back to the yurt watched from the other side of the valley in horror, and eventually saw us head down.

Careful observers will have already noted the many failures we had: a large group of people who didn’t know each other super well, a touchy snowpack that we confirmed (twice) to be reactive, and a commitment/acceptance issue in my decision making about whether and what to hit with the camera rolling. I completely ignored the caution that should be obvious in each of those areas, and endangered myself and my group in the process. I let them down. All of those are actions I desperately wish I could take back. It’s a very lucky thing that it came out as benign as it did.
Traveling in avalanche terrain offers heaping helpings of positive, incorrect feedback. We manage to get away with quite a bit, and sometimes push the envelope having no idea how close we might have been to disaster. Having now stepped over that line in dramatic yet non-catastrophic fashion, I can’t emphasize enough that we have a responsibility to properly treat with the passions and joy that cause us to go and play in avalanche terrain.

It’s easy to work through human factor problems with logic. Yet the heat of the moment and the draw of what we love to do is precisely the danger. Passion was the missing ingredient in all my analyses of how human factors might be affecting me. The work is cut out for me: those moments of excitement and joy need to be well insulated from the parts of me steering the decision ship. There’s nothing abstract about how our loves blind us to the facts of situations, yet that battle is precisely the one we need to think and to fight while making decisions in the mountains.

So count this as yet another testament to the examined life in avalanche terrain. I want to learn more, think more, back down more, and through all that, ski a whole hell of a lot more.

Thanks to all the Squirrel Baits, Snow Scooters, and Blowholes for a great trip. Thanks especially to Ben for lending me his ranting space. You can check out more of my work at skinningwithbearspray.com or follow along on Instagram.

Lifestyle Inertia

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

Precisely one week ago I was sitting in a canvas yurt filled with strangers. By the time the sun went down the woodstove was hot, the beers were very cold, and we were starting to make friends with people we’d never met before.

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Each of us knew a person or two before we met for dinner in Ketchum, but no one knew everyone. Avalanche conditions in this little corner of Idaho were spooky, and feeling out risk tolerance as a newly formed group forged a kind of bond early on. In the first twenty four hours we became friends over card games, stories, and private jokes.

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We also shot a lot of photographs; at least half the group identified as a photographer in some way or another. I’ve spent the last few afternoons sorting through pictures of a ski trip that fit even the most rigorous definition of fantastic. The weather was perfect, the skiing was tremendous, and living in a yurt is about the best way you can spend a week. But while I was sorting through photos my mind wandered to what might be next. I’ve been back in the groove of life in Missoula for fewer than 72 hours, but can’t help but scheme on the next thing.

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I may have a predisposition to restlessness. I’ve at least got a bad habit of quitting good jobs to leave the country. But I plan hundreds more trips than I take. Since we shussed out of the Pioneer mountains a couple of days ago I’ve laid plans for a ski trip in the Sawtooths and another in Kootenais. I’ve penciled out ski tours across Switzerland and Poland. I’ve researched and begun writing proposals for a month in Japan, and, because of course it stands to reason that a month in Japan will segue smoothly into a bicycle tour of Thailand and Laos, that itinerary ballooned to approach three months.

Twenty minutes after sliding out of my ski boots at the end of this last trip I was racking my brain on the best way to reorganize my assets into a sailboat worthy enough for a year long cruise in the Pacific. Never mind that I get seasick.

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Looking back through pictures and journal entries from trips of the last year or two scratches a certain itch. Memories of  loneliness, mosquitoes, and diarrhea fade and are replaced by the sunsets and powder turns that we photograph to remember. There’s a nostalgia for time we’ve spent on the road and friends we’ll never see again. But in planning the next thing there’s excitement and hope.

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I don’t pretend that even a fraction of the adventures I scheme on or plan will happen. That’s part of the fun. If you reject the real constraints of budgets (money, time, and responsibility in equal parts) and imagine a trip unfettered by an anemic checking account or a 2,080 hour work-year or a dog you adopted from the pound in the midst of an existential crisis (bless her heart), you get comfortable with thinking beyond the back yard. If you allow your mind to wander enough you might find, eventually, that an idea or two resonates and begins to ache.

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If that idea aches for long enough, you might allow yourself to think about the next step. You might find that you can eek out a living while working from the road. That the 40 hour work week is something that’s best left behind. And even that you really can just drive across the border while your mangy pound dog glares at you from the back seat. You might even swallow the hard pill that inertia is not confined to objects with mass, and that the only way to make tomorrow different from yesterday is through deliberate effort.

And who knows, maybe I’ll see you in the south Pacific.

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Why So Angry?

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 1 Comment

It’s one of those days. You know the ones. One of those days where you lurch out of bed to find that the hot water’s gone out, so you grit your teeth through a cold shower and take your coffee dry. Traffic is snarled and it’s that time of year where your phone rings off the hook with robots telling you to vote for the conservative alderman on your city council ballot.

It’s one of those days where you excuse yourself to the restroom at work, lock the door, and cherish one of those little airline bottles of Jim Beam that you save for emergencies. You haven’t even gone to the Verizon store yet. You look at yourself in the mirror and ask, “Why so angry?” between nips on that tiny little bottle.

Fortunately for you, my friend, smart, observant people have been wondering about that for years. Of course we’ve all heard of Murphy’s Law, but the pudding is murkier than that. Here’s a few rules of thumb for why you’re always angry.

  • Peter Principle – Employees tend to be promoted to the limit of their incompetence. It stands to reason that when a person performs well at work, they are promoted. When a person performs poorly at work, they are not promoted. This is a kind of conveyor belt to mediocrity. It funnels workers past the jobs at which they excel and deposits them at a job in which they don’t excel. And it happens everywhere, all the time. Ever wonder why you’ve never had a pleasant experience at the Verizon store?
  • Claasen’s Law – Usefulness = log(Technology). In 1969 NASA either put a man on the moon or staged the most influential hoax since those jolly pranksters pulled Jesus of a cave. Either way, they did it with the processing power available on a $3 pocket calculator. Now we all walk around with powerful computers in our pockets and mostly what we’ve got to show for it is an expansive character set of emojis.
  • Parkinson’s Law – The time required to complete a task will tend to fill the time allocated for that task. I got a call from a supervisor at work once. He said, “how’s that [project] coming?” I swallowed hard and replied, “IS IT DUE!?” This triggered a semi-pedantic conversation/lecture about the nuances of Parkinson’s Law which, in retrospect, is not one that I recommend having with your boss.
  • Hofstadter’s Law – It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. In conjunction with Parkinson’s Law, Hofstadter’s Law seems to cause a lot of stress.
  • This being an election year, there are a number of eponymous laws that seem particularly relevant. Of course if you notice a trend, it’s probably a product of confirmation bias.
    • Benford’s Law – Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.
    • Cunningham’s Law – There are those who give and those who take. You can tell [them apart] by what they write.
    • Dunning-Kruger Effect – “a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority,” as well as it’s corollary that, “highly skilled individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.”
    • Reilly’s Law of Retail Gravitation – People generally patronize the largest mall in the area.
    • Shirky Principle – Institutions will try to preserve the problems to which they are the solution.
  • Wiio’s Law – Communication usually fails, except by accident.
  • Hanlon’s Razor – Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity. The silver lining in all of this is to remember that the world is probably not out to get you, specifically.