Life in McLeod unfolds; we have our permanent residence now, a high-ceilinged room with a side kitchen and private bathroom, complete with a large balcony facing the valley. It's nice, but it's inhumanely cold for the moment, despite our space heater, until we make some progress on insulating the room; we spend quite a lot of time in bed, for the moment. There's not a lot else to tell; most of my time has been spent studying Buddhist literature, attending lectures given by prominent monks or else practicing my as yet lamentable powers of meditation (it is my experience that learning to meditate meaningfully is approximately as long and difficult as weathering a second childhood, only without the advantage of utter credulity). Since expouding on Buddhist theology and metaphyisics isn't likely what anyone reading this is after, I'll offer an extended anecdote instead.
Five days ago I did my first true and proper stupid (linguistic jiggering dedicated to Sam) that, following the ensuing segue I'll relate or, perhaps, confess [those who prefer succinct retellings, this is your cue to skip ahead]. I'm not precisely renowned for being the most thorough or cautious fellow, but generally I like to think of myself as an intelligent risk taker; since my history of escaping all varieties of tight squeeze by breathtakingly narrow margins defies chance, I prefer to imagine that it reflects some variety of skill. Indeed, a skill I've tried to develop. Some five years ago I was offered a piece of advice that came with an implicit challenge, the latter being an accusation that I was almost certainly incapable of appreciating said advice, and therefore that it would regretfully be many years before I'd likely benefit from it. Two things ought to be said about this. Firstly, I now realize that such a 'challenge' is almost invariably true of all good advice given to young people, so the advisor in question was, in his way, cheating, not clairvoyant. Secondly, since I was then twenty-one, it was nonetheless a perfectly sound and accurate prediction. Yet, by that culpable age I had acquired at least enough humility to guess that any understanding I imagined I had of my newfound aphorism was inevitably inadequate or even flatly wrong. So I determined immediately to try and grasp that advice as early as I could, hoping to spend the least possible time without its benefit (and, admittedly, in a vain and uncessary attempt to prove my self). While exploring the rabbit-hole opened by this advice continues as an expedition unending, by now the meager insight I've gained has generally helped me quite a lot. On this occasion, however, I utterly ignored it, much to my detrement. Now, for the moment you've all been waiting for; what is the advice in question? I've introduced it at such length because of it's deceptive simplicity, and so it goes: don't take stupid risks. Innocuous, I know; had it not been offered with its challenge as a qualifying hook, I would almost certainly have dismissed this out of hand as obvious and uninteresting. But instead I've contemplated it rather at length, and so felt quite foolish this week to discover how badly I'd bungled abiding it.
In a nutshell, I have come to three ways of identifying a stupid risk: 1) a stupid risk is one where in the the magnitude of the smallest possible benefit is less than the magnitude of the smallest possible harm; 2) if the smallest possible benefit is less likely than the least possible harm, the risk is stupid; and 3) if the possible harms are both of enduring consequence and essentially a matter of chance the risk is either a vitally important or profoundly stupid one. Counterfactuals abound, I realize; they're not hard and fast rules. But in the economy of lived experience these investments have paid worthy returns. Therefore, and regretfully, I can categorically say that I took a stupid risk late last week. I am, however, lucky enough to have learned, rather than died, from it. Parents and other people of greater life-learnedness than I, please read the following and appreciate that I won't do this again, so lectures and subsequent instruction not to become dead will be quite redundant. Thus concludes the prologue.
I had been itching to get up into the mountains; I can't explain the compulsion I feel to climb, but it's insatiable, absolutely primal and often quite capable of surmounting reason and common sense alike. I suspect that it's genetic, it's just too strong, too much like a biological urge. It's very honestly like a sexual attraction, not characteristically, you understand, but instrumentally; I just gotta climb stuff. Now there are a plethora of trails to go trekking along, but these are too easy for my liking (they amount to climbing several thousand stairs, which has precious little sense of adventure) and also they're invariably populated, which rather spoils my Crusoe-cum-mountaineer fantasies as well. So, I just went off in any old direction, off trail and up the mountainside. Since you can always see the towns strewn about the valley floor, it's quite impossible to get truly lost. I had water and proper attire and so I felt as though I was satisfactorily equipped for a morning trek. Here's what I didn't do: any research into the local flora or fauna, tell Ninotchka where I was going, or bring any means whatsoever of communication with me. Nor did I bring the ankle brace that I brought from home specifically for my bum ankle. The rest is quite easy to surmise.
Before I come to the truly stupid bit, there is one marginally stupid bit I'll share by way of warning and a laugh at my expense: always find out what the local plants can do to you before you go traipsing through them. While I didn't find any sort of lethally poisonous plants, I did find a variety of thorn bush that seems to have quite maliciously coated barbs indeed. In the forests of home, I learned early on that with jeans and a sweater on, one can tuck their head in and barge harmlessly through thorns, and so, employing my tried-and-true thorn-traversal strategy, was grievously defeated. Walking through them left me with many dozens of raised welts from chin to shin that burned exactly like wasp-stings, for about an hour. In a word, it sucked.
Five days ago I did my first true and proper stupid (linguistic jiggering dedicated to Sam) that, following the ensuing segue I'll relate or, perhaps, confess [those who prefer succinct retellings, this is your cue to skip ahead]. I'm not precisely renowned for being the most thorough or cautious fellow, but generally I like to think of myself as an intelligent risk taker; since my history of escaping all varieties of tight squeeze by breathtakingly narrow margins defies chance, I prefer to imagine that it reflects some variety of skill. Indeed, a skill I've tried to develop. Some five years ago I was offered a piece of advice that came with an implicit challenge, the latter being an accusation that I was almost certainly incapable of appreciating said advice, and therefore that it would regretfully be many years before I'd likely benefit from it. Two things ought to be said about this. Firstly, I now realize that such a 'challenge' is almost invariably true of all good advice given to young people, so the advisor in question was, in his way, cheating, not clairvoyant. Secondly, since I was then twenty-one, it was nonetheless a perfectly sound and accurate prediction. Yet, by that culpable age I had acquired at least enough humility to guess that any understanding I imagined I had of my newfound aphorism was inevitably inadequate or even flatly wrong. So I determined immediately to try and grasp that advice as early as I could, hoping to spend the least possible time without its benefit (and, admittedly, in a vain and uncessary attempt to prove my self). While exploring the rabbit-hole opened by this advice continues as an expedition unending, by now the meager insight I've gained has generally helped me quite a lot. On this occasion, however, I utterly ignored it, much to my detrement. Now, for the moment you've all been waiting for; what is the advice in question? I've introduced it at such length because of it's deceptive simplicity, and so it goes: don't take stupid risks. Innocuous, I know; had it not been offered with its challenge as a qualifying hook, I would almost certainly have dismissed this out of hand as obvious and uninteresting. But instead I've contemplated it rather at length, and so felt quite foolish this week to discover how badly I'd bungled abiding it.
In a nutshell, I have come to three ways of identifying a stupid risk: 1) a stupid risk is one where in the the magnitude of the smallest possible benefit is less than the magnitude of the smallest possible harm; 2) if the smallest possible benefit is less likely than the least possible harm, the risk is stupid; and 3) if the possible harms are both of enduring consequence and essentially a matter of chance the risk is either a vitally important or profoundly stupid one. Counterfactuals abound, I realize; they're not hard and fast rules. But in the economy of lived experience these investments have paid worthy returns. Therefore, and regretfully, I can categorically say that I took a stupid risk late last week. I am, however, lucky enough to have learned, rather than died, from it. Parents and other people of greater life-learnedness than I, please read the following and appreciate that I won't do this again, so lectures and subsequent instruction not to become dead will be quite redundant. Thus concludes the prologue.
I had been itching to get up into the mountains; I can't explain the compulsion I feel to climb, but it's insatiable, absolutely primal and often quite capable of surmounting reason and common sense alike. I suspect that it's genetic, it's just too strong, too much like a biological urge. It's very honestly like a sexual attraction, not characteristically, you understand, but instrumentally; I just gotta climb stuff. Now there are a plethora of trails to go trekking along, but these are too easy for my liking (they amount to climbing several thousand stairs, which has precious little sense of adventure) and also they're invariably populated, which rather spoils my Crusoe-cum-mountaineer fantasies as well. So, I just went off in any old direction, off trail and up the mountainside. Since you can always see the towns strewn about the valley floor, it's quite impossible to get truly lost. I had water and proper attire and so I felt as though I was satisfactorily equipped for a morning trek. Here's what I didn't do: any research into the local flora or fauna, tell Ninotchka where I was going, or bring any means whatsoever of communication with me. Nor did I bring the ankle brace that I brought from home specifically for my bum ankle. The rest is quite easy to surmise.
Before I come to the truly stupid bit, there is one marginally stupid bit I'll share by way of warning and a laugh at my expense: always find out what the local plants can do to you before you go traipsing through them. While I didn't find any sort of lethally poisonous plants, I did find a variety of thorn bush that seems to have quite maliciously coated barbs indeed. In the forests of home, I learned early on that with jeans and a sweater on, one can tuck their head in and barge harmlessly through thorns, and so, employing my tried-and-true thorn-traversal strategy, was grievously defeated. Walking through them left me with many dozens of raised welts from chin to shin that burned exactly like wasp-stings, for about an hour. In a word, it sucked.
But this proved to be the least of my worries. Moving around on a steep rocky slope half-way up the mountain, a piece of shale (appearing much sturdier that it actually proved to be) shot out from beneath my foot like a scared rabbit and took my weight with it. Sadly, my ankle went in precisely the opposite direction, and moments later, we were all quite unanimous in our heading, which was rapidly downward. Now, I wasn't on a cliff face (nor did I try to climb or navigate any without gear or a companion—there are limits to even my stupidity). But I was quite suddenly two kilometers up, neither on or aware of how to find the trail, without communication and with a very sprained ankle. Having already broken this ankle once and sprained it, oh, four or five times now, I knew quite instantly what I'd done. The initial pain of this particular injury by now feels like an old, familiar and recurring enemy from some existential comic book, and as it subsided, I felt very foolish. To be perfectly honest, my very first thought was for my capacity to walk, and upon finding that it was marginally possible, my very second thought went out to the purveyor of the afore-mentioned advice. It went something like "if I get out of this, he's going to kill me".
The thing about an ankle sprain (or at least mine) is that my ankle will bear weight sturdily and comfortably if burdened in some directions, but buckle with immediate and excruciating pain when imposed upon in others. And thing about walking is, we do it altogether intuitively, shifting our weight amongst and between our tendons without concern or regard. These two truths do not an efficient system make, and the bearer of an ankle thus busted is invariably required to suffer the tender experimentaion required to adapt their stride to ambiguous locomotive restrictions. On flat terrain, a sprain like the one I had is a painful inconvenience that slows progress to a pitiful stumbling gait. On the slippery shale of a mountain side, the thing was all but completely debilitating and very, very precarious. The rest of the story (thankfully) isn't very exciting, though it was unduly long and painful. I managed to go down the worst of the scree slopes on my ass, occasionally finding a brief respite on animal paths that offered a gentler way down (there are thousands of these crisscrossing the surrounding countryside; the goats and cattle roam freely through town and mountain alike, returning home on their own each night). But I had no idea where the nearest road was, and so was locally, though not absolutely lost. Civilization was in sight, of course, but ravines, cliffs and other impassable terrain (at least in my condition) made a geographical labyrinth of the way back. I ass-wriggled my way to the terraced gardens of an Indian community living in the hills. Winding back and forth along the mountain face (many dozens of times longer a route than was the vertical path I travelled on the ascent) I basically limped along the edges of gardens until I found a pathway into the courtyards of a few homes. There I was discovered by some very surprised Indian women—I don't think tourists make it out to that part of the mountain much—who were kind enough to point in me in the right direction, wearing sympathetic and deprecating faces which clearly suggested that foreigners have, perhaps as a consequence of too much time not spent trying to survive, bizarre yet inspired ways of being completely foolish. In the end, though, it was an old man who got me straightened out.
A man of at least seventy, bent and utterly reliant on his cane, came across me limping my way through his yard on the return from his walk. He spoke exactly this much English: 'no English'. But my limping was obvious, and by repeating the name of McLeod Ganj and waving my finger around ambiguously, it was quite clear that I was sorely (pun intended) in need of direction. So, together, we limped at a pitiable pace to the nearest road, each complaining in muffled grunts about our respective impediments. The road, I should note, I would absolutely not have found without him, because it required walking a small maze of foot paths, make-shift bridges and hidden stairwells. I thanked him with a deep bow, and limped home. The rest of the journey was a dreadful three or four kilometer walk back to McLeod that was completely uneventful and relentlessly lacking in ibuproferin.
To conclude: my ankle, initially half again as thick as it ought to have been, is now fine, I am fine, and in retrospect nothing but a painful lesson actually transpired. I don't think I was ever in mortal danger, to be honest. But I certainly could have been if the fall had been a tiny bit worse, or if I'd been in a slightly more precarious bit of the mountain, or if I had been much farther from town. So, the next day I proceded to get a cell phone for myself, thus putting Ninotchka and I in permanent contact, and to wear my ankle brace a little more diligently. But, there you have it, a confession of a clear-cut case of a stupid risk, not to be repeated but worth sharing, if not to save anyone the trouble of learning it by the same means, then at least to have a laugh and a worried sigh at my expense.
The thing about an ankle sprain (or at least mine) is that my ankle will bear weight sturdily and comfortably if burdened in some directions, but buckle with immediate and excruciating pain when imposed upon in others. And thing about walking is, we do it altogether intuitively, shifting our weight amongst and between our tendons without concern or regard. These two truths do not an efficient system make, and the bearer of an ankle thus busted is invariably required to suffer the tender experimentaion required to adapt their stride to ambiguous locomotive restrictions. On flat terrain, a sprain like the one I had is a painful inconvenience that slows progress to a pitiful stumbling gait. On the slippery shale of a mountain side, the thing was all but completely debilitating and very, very precarious. The rest of the story (thankfully) isn't very exciting, though it was unduly long and painful. I managed to go down the worst of the scree slopes on my ass, occasionally finding a brief respite on animal paths that offered a gentler way down (there are thousands of these crisscrossing the surrounding countryside; the goats and cattle roam freely through town and mountain alike, returning home on their own each night). But I had no idea where the nearest road was, and so was locally, though not absolutely lost. Civilization was in sight, of course, but ravines, cliffs and other impassable terrain (at least in my condition) made a geographical labyrinth of the way back. I ass-wriggled my way to the terraced gardens of an Indian community living in the hills. Winding back and forth along the mountain face (many dozens of times longer a route than was the vertical path I travelled on the ascent) I basically limped along the edges of gardens until I found a pathway into the courtyards of a few homes. There I was discovered by some very surprised Indian women—I don't think tourists make it out to that part of the mountain much—who were kind enough to point in me in the right direction, wearing sympathetic and deprecating faces which clearly suggested that foreigners have, perhaps as a consequence of too much time not spent trying to survive, bizarre yet inspired ways of being completely foolish. In the end, though, it was an old man who got me straightened out.
A man of at least seventy, bent and utterly reliant on his cane, came across me limping my way through his yard on the return from his walk. He spoke exactly this much English: 'no English'. But my limping was obvious, and by repeating the name of McLeod Ganj and waving my finger around ambiguously, it was quite clear that I was sorely (pun intended) in need of direction. So, together, we limped at a pitiable pace to the nearest road, each complaining in muffled grunts about our respective impediments. The road, I should note, I would absolutely not have found without him, because it required walking a small maze of foot paths, make-shift bridges and hidden stairwells. I thanked him with a deep bow, and limped home. The rest of the journey was a dreadful three or four kilometer walk back to McLeod that was completely uneventful and relentlessly lacking in ibuproferin.
To conclude: my ankle, initially half again as thick as it ought to have been, is now fine, I am fine, and in retrospect nothing but a painful lesson actually transpired. I don't think I was ever in mortal danger, to be honest. But I certainly could have been if the fall had been a tiny bit worse, or if I'd been in a slightly more precarious bit of the mountain, or if I had been much farther from town. So, the next day I proceded to get a cell phone for myself, thus putting Ninotchka and I in permanent contact, and to wear my ankle brace a little more diligently. But, there you have it, a confession of a clear-cut case of a stupid risk, not to be repeated but worth sharing, if not to save anyone the trouble of learning it by the same means, then at least to have a laugh and a worried sigh at my expense.
Les Stroud would be proud (of lesson learned).
ReplyDeleteThanks for the jiggering. While most things in life can be negotiated by just going on them, this approach should not be taken with mountaineering. A mountain, I fear, goes on you.
ReplyDelete