Can You Tell A Book By Its Cover?

The old addage goes: "You cannot tell a book by its cover."  It sounds cute and does about as much good or harm as a Disney movie full of morals, which is to say none.  No I do not have anything against "Happy Feet".  It was darling, but I know it will not lead to a generation who connect their behaviors with the well being of the world, or to more recycling, or anything less direct than donations made to penguin refuges or that ilk.  I hope I am wrong, and I do believe that watching "Dumbo" (my mother still hates it/loves it as it gave her free time, but only at the expense of listening to the same 6 songs over and over) 3 times daily for about 7 years taught me slowly and without my noticing to never apologize for my many flaws.  As a fine author I am reading right now, Naseem Nicholas Taleb, he of "Black Swan", and "Fooled by Randomness" (the better book, and the one with a more likeable audio book narrator) fame says, (approximately, I don't have it front of me to check wording) "I have never felt the need to apologize for my character flaws, as they are simply part of the makeup of my soul and personality, anymore than I feel the need to put on a wig before I go out my front door, or wear lifts in my shoes."  I heartily conquer.  If you find the sum of my merits less than that of my demerits, stop talking to me.  If I am a bad employee, fire me, don't lecture me.  A bad boyfriend?  Dump me.  Only stop with the nagging and the air of a persecuted martyr who must bear me.  I am not the wart on the back of your tricep.  But, the trail has wound away from our addage.

Why can't we tell a book from its cover?  I can tell from the cover of a Stephen King book that I will not like it.  They have a distinct look, one that says, little thought went into this, and its just like all the others, here is a cheap font on a slant to give you cheap thrills.  Don't worry, indifferent style means you will know before you a turn a page to hold your breath for the fright on the next.  We will give you all the proper cues.  There are no surprises here.  And looking at the cover of say, Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time", I know that I am looking at an established, self-satisfied, maybe even snobbish work, whose editor and publisher believe only a few people will like.  The book is being marketed to those who already know they want it.  There is nothing, usually, to the cover, but the name of author, name of book, and sometimes, the editor, or the translator.  This is not a book seeking impulse buyers.  For they will bring it back, thumping the heavy tome down with the irascible or untiring impotence of a Faulkner hero how bad the book was.  (His heroes are often impotent; not sexually, but with impotent rage, impotent will, etcetera.  This is one of the things I always notice in Faulkner as a man with a nutrition degree; and I wonder if in post-Civil War southern areas where people had been so long without good, or much, food, if the men suffered from a general impotence.  A lack of red meat and iron would be, certainly, suspected contributors to impotence.  So I wonder every time I see the word, if it is meant in a sexual way, on some level.  That this impotence was all throughout the land.  Inability to bump and grind and to even begin fixing what was burned or overgrown or ruined, to even want to bring it all back.  Come, you knew I liked Faulkner with all my parantheses.  The other thing to note in Faulkner is what is missing: mosquitos.  They are rarely mentioned at all, though there would have been a lot more of them.  An interesting study would try to determine what amount of insects were needed to make people crazy.  I expect it maximum irritation would occur in the middle somewhere, when one is not swarmed and they are not infrequent at buzzing by the ear either.  Or perhaps they were so obvious a blight that he left them out of fiction, which is, still for all it tries to be, still for many, an escape, from reality or tedium.  Or he did not feel the need to put those mosquitoes there, anymore than we need to be told the sun rises in the morning.  We know it.) To say a thing is bad when one what means is, I do not like this thing, is another of the many traits of modern life I despise.  The fault for everything now lies with the creator.  If you watch a TV you do not enjoy, you write a letter, or send off an angry text more likely, to let everyone know how wronged you were.  Why did you not just stop watching?  That would send the message louder.  You only give out free publicity when you complain about a place.  Publicity is like a tomato seed.  The tomato, chomped up, does not care where the seeds lie, or how they travel (in a beast's belly, through its stool, falling out of its whiskers; only that it does travel.)  It is a personal insult if you do not like this blog.  As if I knew you when writing it.  Once a young lady I was getting to know accused me of writing a poem to make her feel stupid, because she could not understand it, which made her feel stupid (and was accusing poetry in general of seeking to obscure and make people feel stupid.  It was all rather, well, stupid..  I said something along the lines of perhaps it was her stupidity that made her feel stupid.  We did not get to know each other any better, for some reason.  As if she had existed when I wrote the thing.  Or I had.

As relating to judging people shallowly, well our book by its cover wisdom does not do there either.  It would only do to say, never judge a book that is self-published by its cover, and that would be false too.  For a self-published book's cover could reveal to us such things as the author's vision, intent, artistic and aesthetic skill, ambition, and the size of the book tells us something to.  And in people, who are self-published books, well I agree that the size of one's nose is not relevant to the person (except perhaps it was in forming them, as society and school fellows treat a big-nosed child differently than a small nosed one, so that even when the effect seems absent, its absence is an effect), and am not promoting shallowness.  I am the only shallow man in the world though, you may not have known.  I once said with incredulity that I had a coworker who was stalking a 300 pound woman, and everyone gave me a look as if to say, what an awful man I was.  Though no 300 pound women were sitting on the laps of the man, and these young women were not sitting in the laps of slobs.  I was offended by their being offended.  I am actually not so very shallow.  But what I do mean, is it is quite easy to take the cut of a person almost instantly.  Not handsome or plain or ugly, but what kind of person they are.  There are the always obvious non-verbal cues.  Body language, posture, stride length, velocity of walk.  This tells us if the person is in a hurry, moves with purpose, has confidence.  Though it is lost on most people.  Now that is something to muse upon: we can forget instincts, which by definition is what we did not know we knew.  And so we can be, though educated, less perceptive and often clueless.  So much of communication I find vapid for this very reason.  When a person asks me, "how was work?"  (The most asked question there is and one I always respond to with a sort of sneer- why not just ask, how is your painful stubbed toe?), I cannot answer.  I am simply too aghast that they would ask.  How could they need to.  For one, they work, and two, it should have been evident already in the 1/3 of a second since we saw one another to you.  "How are you doing?"  Fits in the same boat. I play the Sherlock Holmes game, describing a person in detail from across a room based on first impressions and what you can see.  And everyone I spend a little time with starts showing off spy skills to me.  Trying to sneak up on me, commenting on the color of some bozo's tie and then flinging their eyebrows up to tip me off that I should be impressed.  Learning to read body language that any dimwitted little baby chimp hardly old enough to blink could get instantly.  This is after that stage when people argue with me, accuse me of making things up, of audacity and delusions of grandeur (which I have no doubt, which I need certainly, but not in this). 

Besides this poorly developed sort of cue though, there is the advertising. The outright, intentional, and directed campaigning.  Could we live any other way.  That is the result of ads now, not so much to make us buy, but to make us do it.  Twitter and Facebook are the obvious epidemic results of being unable to turn away from the assault of sales pitches.  Now we simply are commercials, reduced to slogans, reducable to such, our own cliff's notes of cliff's notes.  I offer you the following situation: You are at a party and two twins are standing nearby.  One twin is very tan, has blonde highlights, is wearing track shorts, tennis shoes, and a tee shirt that reads "Horizontal Moonlit Marathon Champion" with a copy of Sports Illustrated tucked into armpit.  The other is wearing spectacles, dress clothes, fine patent leather shoes, has impeccably brushed hair, and a volume of Hafiz in hand.

Do you position yourself between these twins and make eye contact with both until it is established which, if either, you have something in common with to talk on?  Or do you gravitate towards one or the other automatically?  Or find both appalling?  Do the covers tell you nothing?

A modern American has so many choices in presentation that there is nothing not revealed by the cover.  Tee shirt, or dress shirt?  Skirt or slacks.  Tall boots or hiking boots.  Big earrings or no earrings.  Tattoo or no.  Tramp stamp on a female, barbed wire bicep for a man, or a german line of Goerthe across the ribs?  What kind of phone?  Hair dye, style.  Piercings?  It is all advertising.  Meant to attract or deter, to identify and signal.  It is like a peacock spreading feathers.  It is the cover, but it certainly tells you all you need to know, if you pay attention.  To go up to someone with a pink mohawk and ask them if they like Beethoven would be to invite their appropriate snarl back at you, as if you were quite dense: Whotheeven?  Though I doubt they would be so clever.  And getting a little shallower, can we not infer from body type much of a person?  I know some big-boned people, and I prefer my women Boticcelean, but flab says something.  Something like, look at me, I don't care.  Or, look at me, I sure am not up for a hike tomorrow at sunrise.  How about sleeping all day and then watching painfully predictable movies all night with soda?  I do not consider myself a body, yet I cannot shake the pride in being well formed.  Beauty was once linked to fitness, to health.  A well-built man offered health and vigor and protection.  An endowed woman would survive a bout with consumption.  The appeal of the anorexic is a further proof of our disconnection, our disinheritence to use a phrasing I liked in Czeslaw Milosz the other morning, with what would be a natural environment.  But it is too late.  This is all obvious and rambling.  The point is made.  If I say little structural, it is because before you can ask me how I am, or what is new, I have already transferred the information to you and learned your answer.  And so I grumble nothing and do not ask in return.  It goes deeper with practice, how much of the book you can guess.  And so I do not start most books.  My teachers all told me not to judge without reading at least 3 chapters when I quit on books quickly.  I had made my decision before the second page, often at the cover, despite their warning.  And I find when I do force myself to start the story, I am usually not wrong.  But so often one is forced to start the story and then abort it.  One is pressed and pressed into it, with the mind made up already.  And maybe I don't need to read every Stephen King book, for that is the thing about a Stephen King book, while one is perhaps worth the trouble, any given one, the thing is none of them sits there sighing about how its just another Stephen King book.  No each thinks of itself an individual who must be read in full and commented upon in a book club.  That's part of mediocrity, is not knowing it is mediocre.  But I meet people and try to politely decline to show curiosity or interest in them, and this subtlety on my part is taken for a sort of malfunction, or disability, which they in turn, must politely help me around.  So as if guiding me across the street, a male for instance, the other day, kept coming and coming.  It turned into a real sparring match.  He introduced himself, I said okay and limply took his hand.  So he prompted me, "and your name?..."  As if trying to delicately skirt my faux pas.  Oh no sir, it was intentional.  And after a few minutes of this, one has to be rude and slam the book closed.

If you Use a Camelback, you're a sucker

When hiking I rarely meet anyone without a Camelback these days.  I find them unnecessary and silly.  They are difficult to clean, the hose can break or rupture, there are several parts to replace, they can tear (mine did when I had one), the twist cap where one fills the bladder can slip and leak (mine did) or slip and cause tearing around the rim for permanent leaking (mine did).  And it costs $40 or more for a decent one, and is annoying to store unless in a specially designed backup.  Those are all the bad.  What is good about them?  Well everyone assures me it is essential to get a constant and steady influx of water, which is nonsense, and counter-productive.  First, studies and experimentation will show you that your body and mind attain more satisfaction from one gulp than an equal quantity of water in sips.  Second, sipping a little water at a time encourages your body to sweat, as it gets the idea that you have water to spare.  Third, if you are worried about hydration, then replacing what you lose is idiotic.  Would you rather replace hubcaps the neighborhood punks steal, or not have them stolen to begin with?  A better plan therefore, is to soak your shirt.  Start wet and your body is tricked into thinking it has already sweated, or at very least, will not sweat.  You sweat more as the sweat beads evaporate, so with a layer of water atop your skin, the sweat does not come out, or much slower.  Last, off the top of my head, having a water bladder and sipping from it makes you weak.  Either you have water nearby (a creek, rain, a waterfall) or not.  If you do, then you need not carry water.  It is silly too.  More weight on your knees and back are bad for the body and the stamina.  I suggest you lose more stamina with the weight of the water than you gain by the constant rehydrating.  If you do not have water nearby, then you need to be working on wilderness skills: how to not only read, but interpret a topographic map, for one.  If crossing desert or leaving a canyon or creek bed, study the map for stream crossings, and try to guess based on the terrain around you (color of leaves/bushes/brittleness of ground/recent weather if you know it, or what you can guess of it) which will be running and how deep.  Or seek out springs, estimate how far you will travel until you hit water again.  Then carry a little more water than you think you need.  And never drink water (this is my best advice for all hikers) until you start to need it.  If you baby yourself you will be a baby.  I don't know when it came into fashion to coddle one's tummy while punishing the muscles, but people these days will work out like demons, all the while making sure to get a perfect influx of electrolytes and all that.  Let's call this the marine principle- but I needed a new paragraph about a paragraph ago.

How marines train (if every memoir I have read was not making up the same lies; I have no direct evidence or experience): you get no gatorade and no protein bars.  You get water, and food.  Large meals, in a hurry, not snacks, and water only rarely, mostly at the end of the day.  Snacking, and I have mentioned this on my food blog, fits into the same principles as water bladder sipping, with the nozzle right an inch from your mouth so you never take a parched step is a scam.  Let us get there the Socratic way.  I will ask you this: why do we keep seeing million dollar studies on vitamin C and colds?  Do you think the benefit of vitamin C is yet in doubt?  If so, then why are the orange juice companies promising us good health and fewer colds?  Are they lying?  The link is quite proven, conclusively, to put you at ease.  Orange juice industry people are not lying to you.  But why then the studies?  Is this all the doing of scientific experts and specialists who with 25 years of vitamin C behind them are too old and settled to try a new line?  Well they are abettors, but how do they get money?  Begging.  And by producing desired results regularly.  Who would want these results regularly, in press releases, and tied to famous big name scientists at big name research labs and universities?  Well in our vitamin C example, the orange juice industry.  Out of sight out of mind.  But every few months, particularly near the beginning of a new growing season, you will see lots of vitamin C and colds studies popping up in magazines.  So back to snacking.  Why would hundreds of studies prove "grazing" is better than meals?  Who would want these studies?  Right, the food industry.  Any branch of it, but snack companies in particular.  Companies are always looking for ways to get you to pay more for food (over your dead body as they find, Americans think of food as quantity only, not quality, we want more, not good, food for our money, which makes sense since Americans have bad taste in everything and pick loud and long movies over thoughtful and meaningful ones) or if not more for the same food, than to eat more food.  Thus we have all these studies, funded by the food industry where nutritionists discover and prove it is better to have 6 small meals than 3 and even better still to have 12 than 6.  Why?  Because you eat more, stupid.  People are not satiated by a snack.  It does not even register in the brain, nor does it trigger much in the way of digestive hormones.  It is a non-event, like a small earthquake you sleep through and have to read about in the paper.  What's more, look at all the new products we have, all with sickening amounts of packaging to dispose of, though that is beside the main point: 100 calorie snack packs (a genius move by the food industry- people pay up to 10X more per calorie for these to stay thin, and the people buying them are often not thin, and these same people if served a 1/4 pound burger at a sit down restaurant rather than 1/3 pound burger would cause a scene or not come back), single serve yogurts, slim jims, and on and on.

And this allegedly to stop the spread of diabetes, which became a problem about when the "grazing" theory came out and became popular.  This also did away with the family dinner (well it was a nail in a very tightly sealed coffin anyway) which is better for the various food industries, because if the kids aren't going to sit with Mom, why should she bother making something from scratch when there are TV dinners and boil in a bag dinners and all that sort of thing with much wider profit margins.  I have strayed again, but I will find my way back.  Would you believe I adore the book Tristram Shandy?  It is a mock auto biography by an author who is barely born by the end of the book, as he keeps getting distracted and going into details about friends of his father, philosophical debates between cardinals about whether a baby trapped in the mother's womb can be baptized by "squirt" or no before both expire at the hands of the clumsy midwife, the correct pronunciation of things in Latin, and so on.  At first (and here was my problem at age 12 when I first tried to read it and threw it away in disgust) one thinks, my blessed soul, I am 50 pages into this book and this clod has not gotten himself born yet!  And then, poor woman, his mother has been in labor near 100 pages!  But then by the 200th page, it is really just a marvel that the author could draw the thing out.  I am listening to the audio version right now and I have never laughed so hard as when this comic genius reading the thing, takes a shallow breath to drawl out in fine classical british accent the single word "foot...note".  And now, I need a new paragraph again or we shall never see the light.

You are told to snack to sell you 100 calorie wheat thin packs.  You are told to sip water constantly to sell you a water bladder with replacable parts, that, if they are marketed as replacable on the label, you can be sure, will need replacing.  There's more money to be had that way.  And also to make you a week sissy weenie, there I've said it.  The weenier you are, the more crap REI can convince you you need.  I know how you feel.  They spend the few sentences of every paragraph enticing you in these outdoor magazines.  Then they tell you how prepared you must be.  Which involves a staggering expense of gear.  Now I learned the hard way that some gear is necessary.  One cannot simply live in a fine place like Utah and throw on old beat up tennis shoes and go sally up a mountain for a day.  I tried that first thing on moving here.  And ran out of water on a dry trail, had to eat some dirty snow (I found two handfuls of it between some rocks in a miserable gully in late August) because all the small creeks and springs in the area were dry, sucked a pebble for three hours to keep my throat from getting too dry, resisted blowing my nose or spitting for fear of wasting the fluids, got so dehydrated I could not walk anymore, and just rolled myself down the steep gravely slope, ruining clothing and skin in the process, but recovering when I heard a creek some hundreds of feet below me, enough to drag myself to it, plunge in, cool my overheated body, gobble up water until I threw up (I knew better but you try stopping yourself sometime- torture is pure audacity, it is sexual frustration acted out.  There is no need for it.  Simply do not give a man water for 24 hours and keep him in the sun.  There is nothing worse I promise you. If you disagree you have not been thirsty, you only think you have.)  I dreamt of water for miles, I could think of nothing for an hour but the word "water, water, water."  I learned a valuable lesson and went water bladder shopping the next day.  Which took things too far.  Only after the thing broke and I was too cheap to replace it (let me here insert that those who tell you something like a Camelback will last years do not hike much.  My roomate has a tent that has lasted him 6 years and he will scold me with superiority when I find a small tear in a backpack or sleeping bag.  Well, he has never used his tent.  So I would hope it did not tear by being stored in a dry closet.  And he hikes at most 2 days per year, so his Camelback is still in fine condition, true.  But even taking care of my things, which I do, they wear out and break.  This leads me to believe I must post on products very soon, in a more general blog.

Back to water bladders.  Once it broke, I began to just let myself get thirsty, because the water bottles were on my back.  I could not drink easily by walking.  So I would just stop for a gulp every hour.  Then that got tedious, day after day, so I went to every 2 hours, then 4, then I was only sipping water at noon, and rehydrating when I stopped around 4 to set up a camp.  As I was not drinking, I stopped eating.  Now I eat only a few handfuls to start the day and the rest when I stop.  It is wonderful convenient if you want to make big miles in a day, and it is not even close to a hardship anymore.  That's the thing about hardship is you get used to anything.  When people sipping their waterhose (IVs will be sold in a few years) and eating a handful of trailmix or a 100 calorie craisin pack every 45 minutes by a timer meet me, and imagine what I must be going through, they cannot imagine.  Well it is this: much less than they.  Every 40 minutes they start to crave that snack, and every 5 steps, to want water.  My body and I are in perfect concert.  I demand that it endure, and when we stop, I will take the boots off, not put them back on, and pamper my body fully.  I know how to rest and I know how to push.  For my troubles, I get no hunger pangs.  I can go a whole day without food and not even get much of a rumble.  I love it.  I start to notice hunger as I am eating.  I have to press myself to eat at first.  I get thirsty when I am drinking.  There is no constant denial that the Camelback kids believe I must go through.  I suffer so much less having suffered.  For one gets to the other side, or over the crest, well, use your own analogy.  Its better, trust me.  And you can lighten your load.  I am all about a light load and will blog on that soon too.  The other consideration, even if you do not want to be a mighty man of blood and iron, is that when something goes wrong, such as you run out of water and are lost, if you are not used to getting water all the time, you will be able to endure without it.  This summer I got myself into trouble with a friend who always sips water and politely suggested to me I was silly not to take care of my body.  Well we were nowhere near water and wound up on our feet for 18 hours, covering 20 miles, going up or over 2 peaks, climbing all told 8,000 feet of elevation, much of it on broken vegetated cliffs with loose rock, debris, and with lots of exposure.  It was stupid and should have been avoidable, but the difference in our staminas was rather shocking.  He noticed it too, and I think I may have won in some part a convert to my method of thinking.  I only wore out at the very end, when I had been without water and food for 10 or so hours, though I hid it from him, as I'd been a pillar till then and it was dark and I did not want to worry him.  I ate some snow every few feet.  He had more water on the day as he had his Camelback, but his bag was enough heavier for it that he dumped some expensive and nice equipment.  And this is a very fit person.  In ideal conditions, he can whip me: that is, running a marathon on asphault he would run circles around me.  I had 1 liter of water in those 18 hours.  I have also done 12 mile desert hikes in the last year on 90+ degree days with 1 liter or less of water.  I usually bring a few swallows back with me and ritualistically pour them out or over my head when I reach my car.  I do not ever want to be truly thirsty again.

So, carry either: a 1 liter bottle to refill, or if going more than 5 miles from road or town or car, then I suggest taking 2 bottles of that size.  One should be narrow-mouthed and one wide-mouthed at the opening.  Why?  The narrow is easier to drink from when walking, the wide can be stuffed full of snow if you cannot find water.  Try stuffing snow into a small opening sometime and you will see how frustrating it is,and time consuming.  Also, eat all she snow you want I say.  I have never gotten sick from it.  Beware of water though.  However, consider that guardia and other viruses won't get you sick for a few days to a few weeks usually.  So do what you need to to make it through the day, then worry about the cramps later.  When you are in your own comfortable house and have people to listen to your moans and pity you.  Priorities.  For purification, there are 2 good options, and one decent one.  The decent is to carry an emergency filter straw by Aquamira.  It costs $6, will work for 20 liters of water or so, and will kill most anything.  It weighs one ounce.  A better choice is a water pump.  I prefer the Katadyn Hiker Pro, by far, to any other.  The next best option is the Katadyn Hiker, which is the same pump but a less stylish color, and with a lower quality filter that will need replacing faster.  However, if you will use the pump less than often, go with that one and save $10 or so.  They weigh about 1 pound, have a fine carrying case, are an up and down easily pumped device which it would be hard to break, and offer some hose features that I lack the power of words to communicate, but which will make sense reading the instructions.  Those I know with other brands are envious as the Katadyn is easier to clean, store, and use.  I do not like the MSR as it has a swing hinge pump and will wear out over time, I expect.  Let us say it is an established fact that a swing hinge on a single pivot is more vulnerable to physical stresses and forces than a pump that simply goes up and down, though I have no evidence that the MSR will break faster.  I only know, that it should, in most cases.  A hypothesis.  Also I like the bottle adaptor with the Katadyn pump, as it has fit snug onto every bottle I have tried it with, to prevent spills and make for even easier pumping.  The MSR would not fit a narrow-mouth Nalgene bottle and spilling was a problem.  The Katadyn is a really fine product and at $79 or so, in the middle of the pack on pricing.  The other option I used to prefer is Aquamira (not iodine) droplets.  The trouble is, the bottles leak, though if you leave the foil seal mostly on under the cap, and press it down after using, it is better.  But for each liter of water, you need to mix a few pipette drops from Bottle A with Bottle B.  And scrambling around, they do leak.  So you need to bag them.  But they will kill anything, with even more certainty than a filter, so if going into a wilderness area where there will be cows (yes the government allows herds of non-native animals into wilderness areas to do much harm to it; the original definition of wilderness area explains that they are needed to keep jerks from overgrazing and destroying the lands, but assumes the right to graze; perhaps I will blog about the trip some of you have heard about where a herd of mother cows and I had a showdown and four of the ladies marched in line towards me snorting before I noticed I was between the herd and a wobbling little calf that had strayed off) or sheep (Uintahs, Wind Rivers), you may want to go with these to be sure you don't get infected from cowpies in the water.  Also they weigh about 2 ounces and will not leak on flat terrain.  And cost $15, which will last you for a hiking season, unless you are on the Appalachian Trail, and then they will last you a month to six weeks.

This has been another smug and exuberant rant where I come off as a superior know it all.  I hope you enjoyed it.

Life Without Ropes:  My Manifesto (Or some Shrapnel From it)

People are always telling me to be careful.  This usually comes after several questions such as: "You hike alone?"  "You do use ropes don't you?" and my personal favorite "Are you crazy?"  Actually, my all time favorite question was simply the word "Why?" from two larger girls who were confused about a photo I was showing them.  It was of a cliff, looking down.  They asked how I got the picture and I said I climbed the cliff.  Then they asked my all time favorite question.  I simply replied with what I hope was politeness, that I was not sure how to answer that one.  It really did stump me.  What does one say?  The cliche and blase, "because it's there"?  I've never been much impressed by that answer, though it does have a blunt metaphysics to it.  I suppose one climbs for the same reason another paints, or tries to sleep with hundreds of women, or make millions of dollars.  Because it is what I feel compelled to do.  It is what I enjoy.  And it is something to do that feels right, or makes sense, to me.  I don't think you should hike alone, climb without ropes, ignore storm clouds, risk everything routinely, and camp 10 miles from the next nearest human being on the planet.  But I do feel I must.  And if you want to try it, or something close, that might be good.  If you ever start hyperventilating because you feel so trapped by your life, or because you hate shiny bright stores and rows of perfect identical bottles, or not being able to walk without stepping over trash, or find privacy without slipping headphones over your ears, then maybe you do need to go and find the still wild parts of America.  There are worse things to try.

I never feel I am doing anything dangerous out in nature.  Which brings us back to that question: "Are you crazy?"  Okay, a bear could maul me while I sleep, or a large boulder could come loose randomly and land on me, or start a slide I can't dance away from, or lightning might get me, or I might get careless or tired and slip, or grab a handful of stone only to have it break off, or a crazy person might come to play a game of tag with my guts, or any other number of things could happen- but they are all things I can mostly prepare for and thus control to some extent.  Those that I cannot remedy are of such small probability that I do not consider them worth stressing over.  Besides, for all the fun, escape, thrill, and high I get, the risks are well worth it.  I certainly in any case, feel much safer on a mountain where I only need account for myself and fate, than I do in an automobile cruising at near 70 miles per hour, with such unknowns as: the inner workings of a complex and powerful machinery, road conditions including potentially tire-piercing debris, and especially other motorists.  I know me.  Sure I might make mistakes, and I tend to hike without sitting down or stopping or eating at all until I nearly pass out (this is a good way to train yourself into fitness; you are always pushing the bar farther and get used to great endurance) and when I do this, I start to get fickle in my resolutions, stray off trails, make bad decisions, and get wishy washy and lose confidence, falling into a "why am I out here" or "woe is me" state (though this happens less and less as I gain in endurance each trip and season and get myself out of jams), but that is much less frightening than being at the mercy of other people.  Have you met people?  People believe they are intelligent, logical, and skilled.  Trust me, they are not.

I have had so many near accidents I have lost count.  And of those, I believe only one was my fault.  Others have usually been the result of someone else not paying attention, someone being a reckless bully and refusing to get over to another lane, slow down, speed up, or some such thing, or simply misjudging completely.  Some people panic in snow flurries, others drive faster in a blizzard figuring, one way or another let's get this over!  I do not enjoy being around either sort.  I'll take my chances with the bears.  Bears know what they are.  Your average suburbanite has a confusing mix of feelings they cannot master: urges to mate, throw spears at elk, beat their chest, and to sip tea at the same hour every afternoon, enunciate properly, and maintain a perfect lawn.  You find people who scream at a cashier with the ferocity of a Mongol Warrior over the price of a pair of jeans and who come home from the grocery store every morning showing off their bargains as if they were out combing a thick and shaded forest floor for hidden mushrooms and beat out the other primates.  Freud said we are children of vikings and that buttons force us to become obsessive at things like antiquing.  The suppressed urge to drag a woman off by the hair or to hunt for our sustenance comes out in some marketable way or another such as collecting snowglobes.  Then too in our fine modern world you get people who claim to be atheists and tailgate outside the local football team's stadium before every home game.  The same inner need and drive is satisfied in the sports fan as the cleric: faith, devotion, and so forth.  Beware the superfan who wears team jerseys and never misses church.  He has too masters.

Well the point is, this sort of thing is fun to read about in the best novels of the best novelists, and in poetry, but not to deal with day in and day out.  Wading through this world, I feel like I am trapped in a sewer.  There is ever more noise, signifying ever less.  More on this at another time perhaps.  I hike to get away.  And you can't do that on a trail so popular that getting to a waterfall feels like being at Disney Land, you can't do it climbing a mountain in the midst of a team of bored professionals who slog up the same route every day and in a monotone, well passed curiosity and interest, wave you to every best spot, their very auto-pilotry reminding you of just how many people there are in the world and just how many have snapped the pictures you are snapping.  All of this is lost on most people though.  Well is it surprising?  What does 7 billion mean to a person who could barely do long division with two digit numbers in high school?  Technology and society change, but our wiring does not.  We have invented every form of boredom, which parents try to save their children from.  For boredom is an accusation, or so parents react.  As if boredom is not the child's problem to solve, but Mom's failing.  So ever more toys and games are piled around the child, when dealing with boredom is perhaps a skill that helps a soul to develop.  But there is no alternative when raising Junior in a maze of other assembly line houses, with little yard, little chance for adventure, the prairie long gone, and the mountains designated dangerous.  We are all bored as adults too, and yet people think me crazy too for cooking food from scratch.  How can I get anything done, they seem to wonder, failing to notice they get nothing done worth doing.  Our surroundings change, but every man and woman still feels original and unique.  That is our wiring.  And so John can meet 100 other Johns without this bothering him.  Mary can take comfort in knowing she dresses like other people, likes popular movies and music and is pretty average.  She believes this makes up a personality.  I on the contrary, believe I have met perhaps 10 people in my life.  Except for a foible, a fetish, and a phobia, most people are just people, not an individual.  I think of them as you think of cattle.  Sure the steer who made your hamburger might have led an unhappy life eating the wrong foods in ugly places, with little exercise (who does this remind you of?  PETA asks for sympathy for the four legged sufferers and most people are probably just thinking, hey at least my meat was sad too), but after all, how much could it really suffer? You ask.  It was just a cow. 

But I am one who is struck by my unimportance, my redundancy within a species doing too well.  I look at tulips and think, well I am just a tulip.  I am just one person.  The species would do fine without me.  My liking 1980s pop music does nothing for 1980s pop music.  It would get along fine without me.  So I seek out places others are not, where I can count.  Where I can exist.  And get a feeling of deeper reality.  Sometimes in nature, climbing, after I get a cut, say, I will look at a hand and see it for the first time, dwell for a moment on how much we are taking for granted, with all our hands can do.  A computer, for all its voodoo complexity beyond most of those who use them, has nothing on a simple human hand.  It is a thing of real beauty.  Am I willing to risk dying for that thought?  Yes.  If that is what I am doing, though again, I rarely feel I do anything dangerous, compared with what we all do everyday, just to drive down the street.  I like to go places where others are not, and more than that, where others can not, or have not been.  A mountain is not good enough, it must be an obscure one, one not on popular trails.  I detest pictures that everyone else has.  Most of the photographers I run into seem to want to prove themselves by going where other photographers go, to a few mecca spots (In Utah, say Bryce Canyon and "The Wave"), but I don't want to compete.  Why run through a wall when you can go around it?  I feel important taking in some vista few others have seen, as if I am validating the artisan care of some angel who put together the Uintah mountain range, with exquisite detail, only to find out, that the star of the show, the pride and joy of the boss, mankind, would not need his place, would not drink in his fine and well-planned views.  And then for thousands of years it sat, with only now and again someone bothering to travel to this corner of the world that took as much time as the flat plains where Chicago and Salt Lake were thrown.  So I do not simply admire it, I try to adore it, to memorize it, to fill myself with it.  It is a medicine, a chapel, a salve, a sanctuary, and somewhere that with my eyes upon it that becomes more real, more vivid, which shines I expect, brighter.  Every grove once had a local god or power to it.  There were spirits on every mountain, good or bad, petty or wise, who could be appealed to, or had to be appeased, avoided, thanked.  Perhaps there still are, though mostly forgotten, and it is they who, out of gratitude and fellowship, with communion and dignity, steer the storm cloud away from me rather than at me as it seemed to be coming.  Perhaps it is I who give the sagging mountains and the lonely deep valleys hope again, who remind them they were put there for a reason.  And beauty, if harsh, or if hidden, well it is better.  It is poetry, the kind one does not write, but which flows throughout, which one must live everyday, while being called an odd duck, while being made to apologize for it, to feel ashamed of standing out, while oblivious or trying to be that one does, to all that, to the disapproval of inferior beings, who have not risked what you have, who would not, even if the rewards were certain, who do not feel chained to sit and watch others living, doing, all day on various channels, as if that were enough, or were the proper (the kind of beings who have watched so long and so naturally that they can no longer think of God as anything but a viewer, who must be entertained, or His attentions will drift, and who with the power of ratings in their hand, judge themselves not by self-satisfaction but by friend counts on facebook and the approval of others; as if it is better to be watched than to be good, as if what matters is being liked, and not being likeable) state, who say it is fine to eat meat as long as they do not have to kill it themselves and believe this backwards morality (though if murder is wrong, then by bypassing the murder, you are dooming another to your added share of it; not only to his own share of it, as a being with the cravings and the teeth of both a wolf and an ox, but to yours too, so that if there is a doom in it, a shame to it, you pass the buck.  If there will be a penalty for that flesh, that chicken wing, then we do not own up to it anymore, but try to avoid it, and then every slaughterhouse worker is a deportable Christ, a single-serving, disposable martyr, and if we know that people who work in slaughterhouses become sadistic over time, then by not taking up the knife ourself when we desire pork, we are endangering the families of these workers, who haunted by squeals, by screams, will lash out at their children, having been trained into a rapidity and an automatic brutality through the necessities of industrial efficiency and de-assembly lines), the kind of people who fall asleep to classical music which involves ten more tones than the standard pop beat.  It is poetry to believe that a Cezanne Painting loses its impact over time not only from the sun fading it, but from eyes draining it, that there must be some essence and potency drained away from it.  I still expect and demand of movie stars that they deflate and age badly; the appropriate price for having been viewed so often.

But the masterpieces in dark corners, the women who are not studied usually, these remain vital.  For the very reason of having not been viewed.  And a man by doing stupid things, Dostoevsky wrote this, proves he is a man, and not an animal, not a soft and warm machine.  Convince a man on paper of what he should do, or more so, must, and he will do the opposite, for the very reason of confounding, for the very reason he should not.  And he is brilliant to do so, for at least then, he knows it was not some gene, some instinct, which provoked him.  We cannot trust true love.  When it fades, when it ends too often in divorce, cannot trust it as anything but a marketing device, to sell greeting cards, or the shape that comes out when the dough of primal urges are shoved through a press, through society and custom.  We cannot trust it to be true love still the morning after, ten thousand mornings after, when me might find that all along it was only our biological programming, endocrine function and pheremones at play with hormones.  But stupidity, irrationality?  That we can trust, must trust.  It is malfunction perhaps, but the malfunction makes the man.

All of this is poetry, the kind which overwhelms, though it may be just a gene too, some mutant one which twitches in me, easily disguised as elegance.  And I do not speak, out loud.  How could one begin to say any of this sort of, whatever it is?  How could this remain, alert, by the time one is through with pleasantries about the weather and the exchange of names?  No it is napping then, it is gone outside already.  It will not wait, and then for the rest of the day I am alone, am cold and empty and dark like a room that has been left and does not know there is a world outside, only that nothing is happening.  No it is not expressible, why I go out alone, where even thoughts cannot keep pace, and I recede into a reptile brain which does not think, but rather moves my limbs for me, so that I am only watching or waiting, as removed as a spectator would be, when the danger comes.  Nor is it sensible to try, and so I usually do not.  I say, that I am crazy, and that is true enough.  Either the whole world is or I am, and personally I think the world is, but well, is that not the definition of craziness?  There is a line I paraphrase: They all pointed at me and said I was mad, and I pointed at all of them and said they were mad, and they out-voted me, so here I am, locked up away from them.  It is only going away that makes the world bearable.  I do not come back, desperate for a shower, ecstatic to have a rocking chair to snuggle into and a roof over head.  I return with resignation, able to endure again what cannot be escaped.  I could move to Alaska true, but the barbarians would come.  And quickly, to complain of cell phone reception and mosquitos, and of how they cannot post their clever observations of how wonderful it is to get away from it all, in real time.  They would come and demand a Pizza Hut and a mini mall, and seethe over the price of every little bauble in every little store.  I come back recharged, having been alive for a few days, having faced uncertainty, shivered, slept with a rock in my back (oh it is not good to get everything we want, to have to tolerate nothing; stress is like love, you go your whole life certain you've had it, and finding now and again you have not; at 12 you kiss, and you say, oh so this is love, but it is not love, and you know that at 18, when you are in love, and then your heart broken, you say, oh I will never love again, but at 25 you find you had yet to love, but do love now, and that what you thought was love, was more so fury, was more so the angst of not having it, the attempt at it- as one flails and thrashes about in a pool before one knows how to swim gracefully, achieving little but making a lot of noise, and proud all the while; and stress too, we think we have, fear, we think we are right to feel, over what should not even bother us.  With the risk of yellow fever always near at hand, do you think the first Americans worried about paying the bills 2 years down the line?  Yet people think it sad when I say a thing like, well if I'm alive in 6 months, I will figure out...oh you who have no plan, the less idea and drive there is to your life, the more you demand it of me, the more you point out the absence of one to me; I think we should have a government Viking program.  We will send thugs and brutes out randomly, they shall be immune to all the laws that others face, and will be shot on sight, will recieve no quarter, or mercy, and so give none, who will maraud about randomly destroying, stealing, burning, pillaging; with that threat real again, maybe housewives will stop moaning about not having time to balance the check book); I return from each trip, able to bear the circus lights, the infectious frivolity of pointless people, and the madness of weenies, and cowards who think they have really lived, who think they have lived like no people have ever lived before, because they alone have had Ipads and 6 color Tetrus.

It is not ignorance of danger that makes me march right into danger's midst.  The exact opposite is true.  I never have so much fun as picking out a little cliff I am not sure I can climb, which I think I can.  Anything I know I cannot climb would be terrible to try to climb and anything I know I can climb is tedious.  It is pure matadorship that drives me.  I enjoy expertly getting myself out of trouble that I invented to begin with.  I am a genius at this, or I have been to this point.  One day, I will fail to extract myself.  And then you can all say, what a fool I was, or how crazy, or whatever you like.