All-Natural Nightmare, Part 6

“Did you realize…that you’re a champion in their eyes?”

Groggily I realized that I wasn’t dead.  More surprising still, awakening to international douchebag Kanye West’s voice on my alarm clock meant I had fallen asleep at some point in the night.  I sprung out of the tent.  It wasn’t yet light out.  The sky resembled a backlit canopy which had been viciously attacked by a holepunch. 

I spent a moment pondering life, the universe and everything.  We survived.  Mortality had been considered and our lives examined as they flashed before our eyes.  Being lost, dehydrated, then hypothermic and exposed hadn’t cost us anything permanent. 

Contrarily, it provided a gift which seems permanent.  Contemplating one’s life in movies always ends with some clown finding religion or regretting actions both undertaken and unachieved.  I never felt that way, I realized.  I doubt my companions did either.  I went into this experience as a convicted lover of science and the world around me, proud of what I’ve accomplished and knowing I’ve screwed up quite potently on multiple occasions.  Lying awake listening to my potential cause of death arcing across the sky invited me to question those characteristics, but didn’t compel me to change my mind.

I kept on pondering this while cooking breakfast and breaking down the tent.  I pondered it while we set out at dawn for base camp.  I continued doing so during our inconsiderately steep ascents and descents throughout the afternoon.  Did I really have that tv moment wherein everything makes sense and everything is messed up all at once?  When we reach base camp and hugged and laughed and yelled and limped to the store to buy ice cream, I was certain I had. 

So as we reach the conclusion to this story, one which was inevitable because, duh, I wrote it, so I must have survived, it becomes time to do conclusion-ey things.  Typically this is the time and place for broad, sweeping generalizations.  What was learned here?  How does one turn a weekend away into easily digestible facts and nuggets to put into print and feel good about?  Live your life such that if you’re trapped in a tent in a lightning storm with your friends, that you emerge from that tent as the same person.  There is no more rewarding experience than performing a potentially last-minute soul search and discovering that it’s been there all along, and that you’re totally satisfied with the product.  

All-Natural Nightmare, Part 5

Irony: īrənē

the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect

Irony is frequently misused.  Alanis Morrissette famously ruined this word in the 90’s anthem of the same name, wherein she posited rhetorically whether a number of downright awful events were “a little bit ironic.  Don’t you think?”

“No, damn it,” I’ve often ranted to imaginary Alanis, ”You’re abusing the hell out of that term.  Rain on your wedding day just sucks.  A fly in your chardonnay just sucks.  Things don’t even have to be bad to be ironic.  Read a book.”

Spa knows I feel this way.  The subject had been covered in detail at some point along the hike, in the glory days when imminent death wasn’t yet the topic du jour. But he then proceeded to point out the alleged irony of the way a lack of water had not so long ago threatened us, and we had begged aloud for rain.  His words were punctuated by a thunderclap so loud and close it could have come from inside my own head.

“Spa?”

“Yeah?”

“If we live through this, I might have to kill you for that.”

            “This is bad.”

            “Agreed.  What can we do?”

            “He needs to stay active.  Mobile. “

           “Pushups, jumping jacks, that kinda stuff?”

           “Yeah.”

           “That’s gonna look kinda funny in his underwear.”

           “Wasn’t he your pledge brother?  Didn’t you guys cover this in initial hazing?”

            “He was, but we were pussies.  We hazed like Girl Scouts.”

Schil was in a bind.  Every article of clothing was soaked through with freezing rain, including the clothes on his body, which we instructed him to remove for that reason.  To an uneducated onlooker, we seemed to want to dress the cacti surrounding the small clearing we had pegged for a campsite. 

Schil’s 165-pound, 6’4” frame, a splicing of James Franco and Ichabod Crane, lacked any insulation.  The temperature was dropping and the wind was picking up.  Hypothermia was taking hold – his hands and feet lost feeling, and he was shivering like a marital aid plugged into a car battery. 

Spa and I needed action.  And action we provided.  I tore through my camping pack and found our stove.  Thankfully my shoulders are naturally loose, or I could have pulled something while patting my own back for fixing this device the day before.  I pressurized the fuel source, lit the pilot, threw open the valve, and was greeted with the friendly roar of blue butane flames.  I poured water, our frenemy, into the small pot and silently willed it to heat faster.  I looked over at Spa to see if he could join me in being uselessly frustrated at thermodynamics, but he was busy erecting our tent.  Schil, I then confirmed, did look ridiculous doing bare-ass pushups in the middle of a National Park. 

“Schil, c’mere.” I beckoned, remembering the gravity of the situation. 

“Put this on.” My sleeping bag, due to the advice of Spa, had been wrapped in a garbage bag during the downpour.  At the time of this advice, I had ungratefully considered Spa out of his mother-loving mind for suggesting it might rain on this barren hellscape.  Oops.  The water then reached a boil, and I poured it into canteens.  These I wrapped in my own somewhat damp clothes. “And put these in there with you.” Schil thusly wound up in a sleeping bag clutching heated water bottles like Teddy Bears.

Then we ate.  And ate some more.  Finding we had additional rice leftover we then continued eating.  We were full.  We were stable.  Schil had once again not died despite our best efforts at poor camping planning.  So it was time to go to sleep.  Our alarms set for the wee hours and our minds already on the commute home, we settled into the tent to sleep off any residual bad luck. 

Then the storm came back, and any certainty we felt about our safety evaporated into the night air.

All-Natural Nightmare, Part 4

               Most people can’t tell you the last time they were afraid for their life.  They almost certainly can’t tell you the last time they willingly placed themselves in a situation of mortal peril, let alone paid for it and made tremendous effort to ensure it occurred.  But we can. 

Lying awake, helpless but for our advanced half-assed yoga knowledge, our tent somehow seemed even smaller.  The tent fit three six-foot-plus men inside of it, with sleeping bags and not much else.  At its apex, it stood four and a half feet above the ground.  Its two canvas layers were supported by a system of aluminum poles. 

“Would lightning melt the poles?” Schil asked no one in particular, as the thunder grew audibly closer.  With two friends within elbowing distance, somehow it was still clear that this question was only asked to himself. 

“Think the tent would melt onto us?  Wonder if that’ll make us harder to ID.” I semi-responded, also not expecting my query to be fielded.

Schil started to reply, but was stopped midsentence by thunder so close it could have come from one of us. 

“What’d you say?” I followed up.

“I said, just don’t decide you’re cold and need warmth right before we fry.  My parents will have enough to be sad about without wondering if we Brokeback’ed it.”

The water fundamentally changed our individual worldviews.  The mere sight of the cache from a quarter mile out replaced Spa and I’s blood with rocket fuel, Mentos and Diet Coke.  Schil couldn’t exactly move any more – dehydration and sunstroke had left him shivering, slurring, and incapable of productivity.  He rested in the shade while Spa and I nearly sprinted to the bearbox storing our treasure. 

With 5 gallons of our own water plus a few marked “free” and “yummy,” Spa and I returned to the ranchhouse.  We were in a verbal pissing contest over who was happier.  This ended in a tie when we saw the bounty of trail mix and snacks Schil had artlessly arranged on the cold dusty hardwood.  I hooked up the stove and we soon learned what it feels like to consume, in 15 minutes, 2 quarts of water, 2 packets of oatmeal and 1000 calories of trail mix.  Each. 

The demon of dehydration behind us, we decided to march onward.  The three of us are unburdened by the weight of financial inheritance, and were all looking forward to the 9 hour drive home, and work on Monday, with the same utter lack of optimism.  The more miles we crunched tonight, the more hours we could sleep Sunday.  Plus the temperature was dropping precipitously, which we welcomed.  Onward.

The arid, bleached mountain terrain gradually gave way to greener, equally frustrating mountain terrain.  Ever the optimist, Spa posited that this could mean wildlife sightings.  Ever the pain in Spa’s ass, I countered that with our luck that wildlife would be large, hungry and toothy.  He conceded.

We hiked into a canyon shallow enough that calling it a canyon could be written off on my taxes.  The hard, dirt path of the previous lifeless wasteland gave way to a thick layer of gravel, giving our calves a workout akin to playing soccer on a beach.  Kick us while we’re down, Big Bend.

And then it did.

“Wait…is that rain?”

Big Bend National Park averages about an inch of rain per month.  At the time of our visit, no celestial water had graced it for over four months.  To say we were underprepared would be to say Hitler wasn’t a big bagel guy. Schil’s clothes were exclusively cotton.  Half of mine were.  We had two garbage bags to our name and zero rain gear.  But by this time it was 2 miles back to the ranch house.  We had to push through it.

We chose poorly.  Rather than pass us by as a minor inconvenience, the storm settled on us like Pig Pen’s dirt cloud.  Worse still, once the storm zeroed in on its target, it deployed all available ordnance.  Pea-sized hail struck our necks, prompting the return of our soaked hats and bandana-cum-turbans.  Thunder threatened in the distance.  Swirling winds propelled us according to their caprices, and the temperature dropped into the low thirties.

“I don’t think the heavy stuff’s gonna come down for a while,” my attempt at Caddy Shack referencing was ignored.  Spa was busily navigating, while Schil, I soon realized, was once again busily trying not to die. 

“You ok dude?”

“Little chilly,” Schil deadpanned.

“Keep moving.  It’ll keep us warm.  We might actually have a situation here.  Hypothermia is real.  You have only cotton clothes?”

“Yes,” Schil audibly shivered.’

“Shit.”

All-Natural Nightmare, Part 3

“So guys, a question.” I posed, trying to reverse the negative vibes ,“Remember when we had the opposite problem, and thought we’d never drink water again, and Spa mentioned we still had whiskey in the bag?”

“Yes.  Awful.” Schill unsurprisingly recalled. 

“And I told him ‘I’d sooner fellate a terrorist?’  What’d you guys think of that?”

“Loved it.  Thought I might die smiling,” Schil replied.

Spa confirmed “Yep.  Anything with terrorists is funny.”

We laughed through thunder and lightning surrounding us.  It almost buried our uncomfortably unavoidable thoughts about the temporary nature of life.  Almost.

             We were sharing  Spa’s map, while he broke a mental sweat with a compass and GPS. 

“I’m not too bummed.  We lost time but got that extra water earlier.  Shouldn’t be a problem.” I answered, oblivious to the fact that no one had asked me. “This view’s pretty spectacular.”

Aside from the lack of a visible path or trail, the view rivalled any form of substance abuse to make the mind go blank.  After reaching an impasse in the drainage ditch we assumed was the trail, we took the path of least resistance out of the ditch.  “Least Resistance” soon became a relative term.  The path we optimistically imagined we were on deteriorated to waist-high scrubs and cacti of equal proportions in all directions, leaving us with only one option: climb.  Roughly 1,500 vertical feet and an hour later, we stood atop a real life Pride Rock crowning  a huge thorny hill or a tiny thorny mountain.  And the view knocked our $19 wool hiking socks off.

“How’s my bandana flow?” I asked, offering Schil my camera.  Despite the impossibilities of sharing the Big Bend scenery with the world, I was determined to proselytize via facebook photos at least enough to make men jealous and make women wonder how I’m still single. 

“Adequate.” Schil responded.  My red bandana and blue fishing shirt flapped freely in the wind.  I heard the shutter snap and looked into the wilderness, feigning pensive. 

“So how boned are we, Spa?” I inquired. 

“Minimally,” he responded, “We need to head about 400 meters that way,” he gesticulated accordingly, “and we should hit the trail again.”

Schill and I’s telepathically agreed not to argue.  Onward we trudged through the bramble, both wondering who the hell uses meters.

“Seriously though, you’ll need a callsign upgrade,” I informed Spa, “Schil is a decently tough name for a mountain man.  And look at the beard.  He’s like a homeless Chuck Norris.”

“Yeah, I could use some rugged-ing up.” Spa replied, “but you already called me Spa in the Costa Rica chronicles. Consistency is crucial to my character development.”

“True. But your name makes me think of a middle aged woman with cucumbers on her eyes and a golf pro in her mouth.”

“Dude, there was a golf pro at the country club I grew up at, and if one tenth of the stories I heard about that guy were true, you’re gonna see a lot of pro golfers who all look alike coming out of Denver in the next few years.”  Schil contributed.

“I chose my career poorly.  How about WipesWithRocks?  I still think that’s crazy.” I responded.

Schil and I laughed.  Spa had earned a legitimate bachelors of science in alpine survival on his Alaskan adventure.  This expedition taught him some of the less-than-fine arts of wilderness life. I was more eager to adopt some kernels of wisdom than others.  To keep my mind on more savory subjects, I wondered aloud about the appropriateness of using my borrowed military-issued Ka-bar knife to cut cheese and salami. We agreed that since the cheese was not French, but “Murrican,” I could go without penalty.  Huge relief. 

“How are we on water?” I probed.  My gallon jug was considerably lighter than when we left the unexpected cache.  I doubted any strength gains were responsible for this weight difference. 

“Not good,” Schil and Spa echoed in unison.  Schil tried to take a pull from his camelback.  The hiss of air through the nozzle added audible emphasis to the statement immediately prior.

“This four quarts a day thing…is that for people?  Or for small lizards?”  We shared an uneasy laugh at my comment.  This laughter stemmed far more from not wanting to acknowledge the gravity of the situation than actual humor content.  Remoteness and dry water bottles could make Newt Gingrich think he’s Jerry Seinfeld. 

Onward we marched.  Some hours later, we settled for a break. 

“You’re dry too?” I asked Spa, already knowing the answer.  He merely nodded, his makeshift turban adding a Darth Vader-esque gravity to the confirmation.  Realizing the pointlessness of this water break with no water, we took a moment to survey what lay in front of us.  The beauty of the landscape decried its obvious danger.  Generously distributed iron gave the local stratigraphy the illusion of being life-bearing, or at minimum friendly.  Canyons seemingly hand-shoveled out of the Earth danced in unpredictable patterns for miles in every direction.  The path ahead sloped gently downward until disappearing out of sight around the mountain we would next descend. 

Dehydration has curious effects on a body.  It saps the muscles of their strength and handicaps coordination and balance.  But moreover it cripples the mind.  Focus is impossible, and in narrow mountainous paths this is particularly dangerous.  I thought back to the Hampton Inn at Fort Stockton.  Arriving after 1am and leaving after only a few short hours, we had been surrounded by more food and water in that time than in the 48 since.  The powdered fake eggs at the breakfast buffet weren’t so bad, in retrospect.  Even the 4 hours of sleep, paltry by modern yuppy standards, reigned supreme over tossing and turning in a tiny tent on top of rocks and unforgiving caliche.  The towel service woul-

“SHIT!”

Pain.  Much pain.  Lack of focus led me to step on unworthy terrain, and rewarded me with road rash which felt like a napalm splash on my right thigh.  I searched for the camouflaged Taliban sniper who had just shot my knee, which was now 9 months pregnant with a pain baby.  Not my finest hour. 

“Ugh…how far are we from the cache?” I inquired, righting myself wholly without dignity or grace.  We had previously stashed water near the phony touristy ranchhouse we had been approaching for the last two days.

“Does it matter?” Spa contritely replied.  This was less of a smart-ass quip than a simple rhetorical statement of logistics.  We had passed the point of no return.  If we wanted water, we had to walk to the water.  It was closer to go forward than back. 

“Shit…” I reiterated, illustrating the diversity of the word. Glancing from Spa to Schill, I noticed the dazed look of a Loony Toon freshly struck by a frying pan.  I then realized that while my water supply had been on empty for an hour or two, he had been out since lunch.  The heat was palpable, and he was wilting.

“I don’t feel so good. How do I look?” Schil’s highly technical medical complaint was as slurred and dry, like a drunk high-schooler who just rinsed his mouth out with sand.

Eloquence begets eloquence, and Spa calmly replied, “Like shit.”

All-Natural Nightmare, Part 2

“There is one thing we can do, I guess…” Spa began, clearly having racked his brain for the type of action-oriented precautions I prefer.  “There’s a thing called lightning position.  Hands and knees on the ground.  Keep your head up so when we get fried your brain won’t explode.”

“Like a plank?” Schill tried to clarify. 

“No it’s more like a girl push-up.” I explained.  I tricked myself into believing that when our tent was struck by lightning a half-assed yoga pose would leave me unharmed.  And able to hike 3 miles to the nearest road.  And thumb a ride.  From a car driving by at midnight during a thunderstorm.  On Easter.  Copacetic. 

That morning, the group’s spirits were downright festive.  Schil had pointed out the bearbox first.  He certainly needed its contents the most– the previous day’s 11 mile hike had carved bloody teebox divots into his heels, and more egregiously drained most of his water supply.   

“There’s at least 5 quarts in here unclaimed,” I said unnecessarily.  My companions were gainfully employed college grads.  I reckon they had mastered the art of counting on fingers. 

“What about the emergency stash?” Schil pointed out the gallons of cached water thusly identified.

“We already have 4 quarts per person per day.  The rest is just bonus.  We’re rich.  Leave the emergency stash for someone who needs it.”  Spa came close to showing real human emotion as he summarized.  Spa’s intense focus, sharpened during a month glacier hiking in Alaska and years as a strategic consultant, gave his words authority which could not be argued against.  This stoicism defined Spa, making him perhaps out of place at Austin City Limits, surrounded by drug-addled festival folk losing their mind to “Sex is on Fire.”  This trait also rendered him indispensable on a hiking trip which would, much to our surprise, wind up with us trying to determine the least compromising position for our bodies to be found in.

Thirty pound packs strapped on, we marched through the arid mountain paradise, making great time.  Silence proved an unspoken law during the many climbs and steep descents.  Air was thin, packs were heavy and focus was critical.  During straightaways, however, all the world’s problems were ripe to be solved. 

“I wonder if you could compute exactly how much hotter a chick we’d meet out here would be compared to meeting her at Ice House or whatever,” I pondered.

“I think it’s a solid plus-two.”

“You’re dumb.  That would make a two only a four, but by your own statement you wouldn’t touch a four with a ten foot pole.  If you’ve been wandering out here for two weeks you’d get halfway through hearing her first name before you very politely propositioned her.  ”

“So the Mountain Nymph Factor is multiplicative or exponential?”

“So it’s a flat rate boost, but with a ‘time since civilization’ factor recalculated hourly. MNF equals sum of raw score plus two, raised to the power of 1 plus hours doing this shit divided by 100.”

“You lost me.”

“You’re hopeless.”

“So I think the path came out of this dry drainage creek before we did.  We missed a cairn.” Spa cut us off, rudely not contributing. 

“What?” Schil and I responded identically.

“Yeah.  We’re lost.”

All-Natural Nightmare, Part 1

“You had to know you wouldn’t be alive to write the best one of these, right?”

I reluctantly conceded the truth in Spa’s quip.  A strong desire to write rules my life.  Lack of legitimate writing talent complicates things.  It requires me to keep my life as exciting as possible to prevent reader boredom.  Turns out mortal peril is a real people-pleaser. 

In between screaming wind gusts and rolling thunder, I replied “You’re right.  But think about the guy who finds the bodies.  His life sucks worse than ours.” 

               Many stories start with obvious fate-goading foreshadowing.  Statements like “The weekend began innocently enough” or “they were such nice young boys.”  Such half-baked clichés have no place here.  We aren’t idyllic nice young boys, and the weekend was riddled with subtle hints to quit and turn back from an early point.  Heeding those warnings would have saved a lot of grief.

               Arriving at a Hampton Inn near Fort Stockton at 1am didn’t bring our spirits down, even though we could have been asleep by midnight had our navigation skills not lacked luster.  Waking before the Sun to stash water at mile 24 of Big Bend’s 35 mile Outer Mountain Loop Trail was met with grins and optimism.  A tree fell directly on our path less than a mile into the journey, and less than 20 feet from the protagonists.  No heed was paid. If any divine message was intended by bloodying Schil’s heels after mile 2 with blisters, then it was completely ignored.  After 12 miles of hiking, even a malfunctioning stove couldn’t turn us back.  Repairs ensued, tunes emanated from Spa’s iphone, and instant rice-and-beans flowed like the Salmon of Capistrano.  We had an answer, it seemed, for whatever this trail threw at us.

               We just. Wouldn’t. Listen.