Terror in the Whites: The Choice

It’s unclear who actually chose the route. Unclear who said, “Let’s do that one!” despite hearing the following descriptions uttered from the mouths of dirty, disheveled, delirious hikers:

• “Hardest hut-to-hut hike in the White Mountains”
• “The worst day of my life”
• “Brutal”
• “What were we thinking?”
• “Relentless”
• “Diabolical”
• “Able to be completed in the listed time of eight hours only if you are an Olympic athlete.” (Note: the listed/estimated time is 5.5 hours. That guy was a tool.)

These assessments are hardly inviting and certainly less than encouraging. What were a bunch of logical, risk-averse middle-aged people thinking? We prepare. We plan. We whole-heartedly embrace prudence. So, again I say: it’s unclear who actually chose the route, who is to blame for embarking on The Hike of Horror.

 But God knows.

And God will punish this person.

THE SUSPECTS

  People hike for many reasons: exercise, experiencing the great outdoors, facing a challenge, watching wildlife, pooping in the woods (falls under facing a challenge). I enjoy hiking for the silence, the time and space to contemplate life, the feeling of being truly away. When the hike is hard and demanding, you focus on each step lest you fall to a painful death; everything else chattering in your mind must become silent. When it is easier and relaxing, I cherish letting my mind wander as I move through trees and amble over rocks and mud. For a long time, I only wanted to hike alone. The idea of company was... of concern.

There can be no worse punishment than hiking with a jackass. And if you spend just a little bit of time on populated trails (and many aren’t), you’ll find these creatures in spades. These are the loud, know-it-alls who are compelled to pontificate about their expertise and experience to everyone in earshot (and they seem to always have booming voices the makes "within earshot" equals everyone on the mountain). The asinine part of this is that, especially in the White Mountains, there is always someone with more experience, more strength, and more wisdom. When compiling a team, you must make sure you exclude these characters lest you find yourself in an orbit of annoyance, an annoyance superseded only by swarming black flies.

Our team is perfect. Chris is both our guru and our entertainment, hilariously witty while possessing delightfully hysterical quirks that make him endlessly enjoyable. He’s also been climbing the Whites for decades, which would make you think he couldn’t get lost. We've now know better. Chris is not allowed to be in front on descents because he ditches the rest of the team, flying down like a winged creature (or an immortal, insane, daredevil teenage boy). Kevin is our power house: the most fit while also being the only one who views this as a social event rather than a workout/competition. He’s the first one to tell you that you’re doing great when you are cursing various aspects of the experience including your boots, socks, the rocks, mud, air, rain, wind, etc. Kevin is not allowed to take his shirt off because he’s ripped and it makes the rest of us look fat. Jamie is our project manager: mapping the route, printing and laminating said maps, and ensuring we are totally prepared. This includes ensuring we have the correct food, first aid supplies, ear plugs, back up maps, and -- of course -- a solid schedule. Jamie is not allowed to be in front on ascents because he sets an unfair pace. And I’m there to eavesdrop on as many conversations as possible, take mental pictures of important scenes, and then present our adventures in whatever manner I see fit, regardless of factual substance. I’m also the weakest. And I make all the above-stated rules, each of which is totally ignored by my companions.

I should note that we’re all family, connected by blood or marriage. This, therefore, introduces the elements of sibling rivalry, marital spats/threats of divorce, ripping on family members who are not there, and, of course, ripping on each other in ways only family can.

We are a perfect unit. Unless they’re conspiring to fire me from the team. In which case, they all suck.

Why You Should Be Rallying, Part II

The Top Ten Reasons Why You Should Be Rallying(Preferably with the Finger Lakes SCCA.)
(But not in my class.)


1. Be smarter! Road rallying increases your eye-hand-foot coordination, math abilities, powers of concentration, sense of direction, and determination.

2. Navigators: Work on your trust issues! As a navigator, you will have to take in on faith that what may seem like reckless, out-of-control idiotic driving is actually the result of your partner’s driving prowess.
Drivers: Work on your poker face! When your driving is reckless, out-of-control, and idiotic, a straight face will convince your partner that you are the driving expert you lied and told him you were.

3. Beat Alan! It has been done. It could be done again. It could be done by you.

4. Test the limits of your marriage! Want to know just how much you love each other? Rally together. Remember, what is screamed said in the car, stays in the car. And hopefully that’s not your daily driver.

5. Execute Extreme Quality Testing on Your Car! Perform hand-brake turns! Hear your car make new and exciting noises! Test your roll cage! See how easily you can get urine out of the passenger seat when your driving makes the navigator pee his pants.

6. Visit new and interesting places! Even if you won’t be able to see anything but the road, and even then only the ten feet ahead of you.

7. Experience the thrill of thinking you are speeding when you aren’t supposed to ever exceed local speed limits! (“Supposed to”) Note that this one will also help you calm a worried parent, spouse, friend, significant other. “But we never even go over the speed limit!” you’ll say, knowing that driving on these roads, in the snow, at night, at or even slightly under the speed limit is, at times more terrifying exciting than an outsider could imagine.

8. Perform an anthropological study on public restrooms and what those configurations reveal about the owner/operators’ views of the environment, privacy, gender issues, and cleanliness! This may not actually appeal to everyone.

9. Buy a ham! Learn about the secret grocery store deep in the southern tier that sells good half-hams at can’t-be-passed-up prices!

10. Learn why someone can be irate over a tenth of second! (Or, in some cases, a hundredth of a second). Learn also how a small mistake can be brought up year after year as the reason why a season went awry and the title slipped out of your hands.

Why You Should be Rallying, Part I

Part I: The Emotional Stages of Rallying

“Did you have fun?” This question is sprinkled over the rally group as we pour into the break or the final location, often griping about a turn that we missed, a TA that we had to take, or a particularly gnarly section of dirt, gravel, maddening twists, and one freaked out doe. We’re being reminded of the point of these rallies, even though some of us have fallen to the dark side and are threatening to fire a partner if the section he messed up causes the team to lose. That’s if we’re even talking to our partners.



So why go out there, in the middle of winter (or, in this year’s case: perpetual November) and drive around for seven hours on back “roads” (and at times, “road” is used in its loosest interpretation possible), obsessing about each turn and each second, about where the next checkpoint will be, and why your handbrake is sticking and how that will ruin the race for you? From the outside, it seems like a lot of frustration. From the outside it would. From the outside it did.


And then I was drafted, a last-minute effort for Jamie to compete this season. Jamie sits in the driver’s seat with a lot of experience. I’m in the navigator’s seat with impaired math skills, a short attention span, a tendency for motion sickness, and a nasty habit of saying “left” when I mean “right.” To make matters even more stressful for Jamie, I’m his wife. From what I understand, rallying spouses are few and far between likely due to the stress of finding your way, quickly but accurately, in the snow, in the dark, on roads that that are often unpaved and in the confines of a car which shrinks with each passing mile and curt remark. Countries have fallen over less. Small, unimportant, possibly imaginary countries made out of Legos, but countries nonetheless.


When rallying, you will experience many of the emotional stages listed below, some more than others.

INSECURITY: Will I royally mess this up?
NAUSEA: Will I puke in this car? How many Dramamine can one take in seven hours?
EXHAUSTION: If I close my eyes for a second, I’ll be fine. ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz
PANIC: Where’s the road? Did we miss the road? Should we take a TA?
FRUSTRATION: How can we still be off?
ANNOYANCE: This is your fault.
HAPPINESS: We are doing well!
BLISS: We are winning!
ANGER: We are losing!
RATIONALIZATION: Our windshield wipers weren’t working well.
ARROGANCE: We are amazing!
HUMILITY: Have you seen Alan’s score?

But it’s not just about the exciting emotional experience described above that should draw you in. No, my friends, rallying offers you one-of-a-kind experiences that will make you a better person, a better driver, and result in world-wide fame and fortune, stunning good looks, the jealousy of some, the awe of many, and a god-like status. (Results may vary.) (Significantly.)

The Hook

Dr. Thibodeau was feared. He was feared because he was one of the toughest professors at our college but you had to take Western Civ and you had to take it from him and you had darn well better go to class because his tests will filled with questions that said, "According to your professor," which mean he  had made a note about something he disagreed with in the text. (He had another phrase we all associate with him, "I'm not making this up," usually delivered after retelling some unbelievable aspect of history.) He was tough. He would stop reading a paper after the third grammatical error. His red pen crucified more than one essay. And his serious demeanour could bring fear to even the cockiest college students. Quite simply, you had to bring your best game with Dr. Thibodeau or suffer badly.

My friends and I worshiped him. We still worship him, carefully ignoring the fact that he was younger than we are now (much younger) when he started scaring students.

I still have the marked up copies of books he made use read, dry tomes that he made sound exciting and scandalous. These books were the crux of his classes and the papers associated with them were like rites of passage for us: do well and earn your spot in his good graces (or at least the feeling that if you could get a good grade out of him you were certainly a genius). As such, we obsessed over these papers, trying to make sure we got all of the information right but that we wrote it in a way that was engaging, intelligent, and error-free.

Patty, my college roommate wrote what I still regard as the best Thibodeau paper ever. It wasn't just that she nailed the content, but she wrote the paper with elements of storytelling, complete with her protagonist and shaping the information so that it remained interesting and ripe with conflict. In this case, it was Caligula and his impact on the Roman empire from sordid behavior to general ineptitude as a leader. What made her paper stand out and make me want to read the whole thing was the hook. Patty started out with this statement (or at least this is what I recall):
Caligula was dead. And the Romans rejoiced.
Who isn't going to want to read that? I loved that she started at the end and shaped her paper to bring the story to explain that end. It was brilliant (and yes, she got a well-deserved A and some rarely-seen gushing praise from Dr. Thibodeau. Also, she holds (still) the highest status of our pack of groupies, none of us able to write something better or get the same praise.

Patty's paper taught me not only how damn hard it was to really, really impress him, but that storytelling and the elements of it are not limited to personal narratives or fiction. In fact, by applying these elements to any kind of work can bring it to life, increase engagement, and yield a solid piece of engaging writing.

The Darkness

The night can be a savage place, terrors lurking within.

Terrors.

And apathies.

Each of us has walked in this darkness, thrust into it neither by choice nor design, the result of blunt-force emotional trauma or a slowly-growing virus of numb. We linger, avoiding the monsters of loss and regret, despair and loneliness, self-doubt and self-loathing, anger and rage. We linger, perhaps wallow, perhaps even start to drown in that inky blackness rather than face those gatekeepers of the path back to light. In the dark, we are silent. We are still. We are alone.  The darkness coats us in its weight. And there we can crumble.

No one wants or sets out to enter this place. It sucks you in. It infiltrates your life: your passions, your relationships, your work. Some of us are better at pushing through, keeping it at bay and let it in when it won't matter: after work, after the dinner party, after it would inconvenience others. And it is an inconvenience to others. It is hard to support someone who is next to you but not there, who can't seem to snap out of it, who can't seem to just move forward. Who "can't." It is inconvenient, certainly.

It is also inevitable.

As a society, we acknowledge but reject this inevitability. We offer elixirs and practices to avoid the darkness. We offer elixirs for the elixirs. We maintain that it shouldn't be that hard to just live, that this darkness is an unnecessary barrier one must get over, so here's a pill, here's a meditation, here's a workout which will remove that barrier and let you get on with your life. Why spend so much energy just trying to function when we can give you ways to use that energy to thrive instead? Why bother with the struggle if you don't have to? The struggle isn't relevant. It isn't helpful. It isn't part of your character. The night and the terrors that it holds are, in short order, to be avoided like a bad section of town or contaminated water. Nothing good can come of it.

And yet, there are those of us who are frequent travelers in this place, those of us who find it every bit as painful as others but find a certain sense of comfort in its familiarity. Those of us who find inspiration there, who find ourselves, our strength, our identity, our voice, and, yes, those ugly aspects of ourselves we try to hide in the folds of black. There are those of us who greet its arrival with bittersweet acceptance and free ourselves slowly, appreciating the struggle to get out, the way it will change us, the things it will teach us, the things it will allow us to see. And there are those who, once free, flee like rats from a sinking ship, never to venture close again, not matter what.
It's an understandable response. Consider how much more you can achieve and give when you are not fighting those monsters in the dark. Consider how much better your relationships could be when you have the fiery passion to embrace them, rather than one dimmed and smoldering.

Consider also the life that has always been in the light. One that has never been touched by the long fingers of heartache, anger, disappointment, despair, insecurity, embarrassment, regret, jealousy, failure. How is such a life defined? How is such a life able to grow? Is such a life really one that has even been lived? Because to live means to risk experiencing all of the light and the dark one can find. It defines itself by both love and loss. By both the songs of bliss and the wails of sorrow. To live means to walk in both the dark and the light, to embrace the terrors and the joys, each necessary to be able to say at the end of the day that you have lived.

Perhaps even thrived.

Losing My Voice

I always self-identified as one who writes (never bold or arrogant enough to actually call myself a writer).

In sixth and seventh grades, a friend and I wrote seven books together. It was one of the best memories of that time, trading the book back and forth and adding new sections for the other to react to. We regarded those books as sacred and they are still prized possessions. She will always be special because of those stories.

My closest college friends were a couple of writers, both far better than I. Thinking of them, I always see a dimly-lit room, an over-flowing ashtray, CDs spewed on the floor in front of a stereo, and three of us with our big black journals creating what we were sure was genius prose or poetry. While we had many adventures together and many stories to tell, I've lost most of those, left with that image of us which has burned into me, deeper than all others. It was the richest, most emotional writing phase of my life. We all moved away, moved on, and with their exit from my daily life, so too did my writing until it was little more than the occasional journal.


Then I met Tessa. Tessa is a wonderful writer and together we decided to start this blog, both as a means to keep up with our writing as well as something to do. Also, selfishly, I love her work and wanted her to write more. For over a year, we were mad bloggers. It was another wonderful period of writing for me and no matter how busy I was, I was still putting up blogs and writing other stories on the side. And then it started to wane.

Tessa moved to China. She couldn't access the site. Slowly, she stopped writing and then so did I. What had long been a fiery passion was waning down to embers.
I don't write. Or rather, I am not writing. And what does that mean for my sense of self, once so strongly linked to words, to writing, to creating? This was my state of mind when I started reading Lambert's "Digital Storytelling."  Reading about writing, about people being successful at writing, made me sad. Jealous. Perhaps even a bit angry. You see, I feel like part of me has gone numb and I'm waiting to see if the blood will flow back in or it it'll rot and fall off. Will I recognize gangrene when it sets in? Reading the book just reminded me of what I seem to be losing, have perhaps already lost.



And then I got to "The Story Circle." He describes the circle and its effect thusly,
"...when you gather people in a room, and listen, deeply listen, to what they are saying, and also, by example, encourage others to listen, magic happens" (2009, p.86).

That had a been a huge part of my best writing times: I not only had a live audience (even if by live it was via email), and not only did we create, share, critique, and recreate, the nature of our collaborations, our relationships, was a story unto itself. Within those two circles, I not only created better work and created it more often, I ended up with deep relationships with people who inspired me. When the circle was broken, things started to decay.

I find hope in the thought that, at least for the rest of this semester, I'll have an opportunity to be a part of a new circle, that I'll be able to reignite my passion.

Lambert, J. (2009). Digital Storytelling. Digital Diner Press: Berkely.