Movie Time!

The footage in this video came from all of us, filmed at various times throughout the trip and was all captured at the discomfort of the one behind the lense. It was always a challenge capturing images on this trip due to the cold-batteries refused to work, our hands and fingers refused to work and all the extra effort needed to set up a shot and get it taxed our already tired bodies.  Luckily the only casualty of the trip was my 32g memory card, which after two weeks, and over 20 gigs worth of images and videos, decided it had had enough and never worked again (taking along all of the data with it).  

So after spending pert near as many hours staring at the holy glowing box (my computer) as we spent on trail and breaking new personal records of both swearing quantity and foul tongued originality aimed at this cantankerous technological gizmo's cheapskate editing software...It's Movie Time! 

Answering the Call or The Benefits of Running Your Mouth

“The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with the competence and courage the danger fades.” Joseph Campbell, “The Hero With a Thousand Faces”

How did I get myself into this? I like to ponder questions like these, letting them playfully swirl around my mind like the dark water lazily eddying behind a boulder in a cold freestone river. My mind is particularly peaked in this matter when I hear stories about people, who by any number of causes (mean and sublime) have found themselves in a difficult/ trying/ ridiculous/ adventurous/ precarious situation; say, on the saddle of a 10,000 foot mountain in a whiteout blizzard with friends who have on little more than blue jeans and cotton sweatshirts or perhaps in the middle of the two mile wide Mississippi River floating helplessly in a canoe towards an oncoming 200 ton freight barge. In each story there seems to be a moment, say less than a minute where the protagonist, in the  midst of the maelstrom, is given respite, sanctuary from all that is chaotic and gains the detached wherewithal to acknowledge their place in space and time on a grander scale. I get lost in the incongruous absurdity of those moments- the chaos vs. the tranquil; that single short span of existence when time coagulates into a thick gooey mass and then briefly solidifies allowing for, even in the midst of the entropy of normality, the gift of clarity; the chance to temporarily transcend the immediate reality and with open eyes, take in all that is happening.

Whoa, but what I find even more interesting is that first question- how did I get myself into this?

Some people will say “it was my calling” to do these things- as in “it was my calling to climb mountains, to sail deep water, to enter ice cream eating contests”...and I bow to such self aware individuals who have heard to call and are following it. To respond to such supernatural voices drives many to the extrema, the poles of ability, to approach our own event horizon and to go beyond the boundary of the known world and take that first tenuous step into the otherness. That lucidity of self awareness is great if you have it, but luckily for the rest of us there are other ways of enticing the spirit of adventure.

As I have found repeatedly in life, there is a tried and true way of beckoning adventure instead of idly waiting for adventure to call you, and fortunately it requires much less mystic self-awareness than it takes “to hear the call to adventure” and instead relies more on your ability to speak or act without thinking-that is to blunder. I like the verb to blunder, it is underrated as a life plan in these hyper scheduled times; after all, if you don't plan, nothing can go wrong, right? As Joseph Campbell says “A blunder-apparently the merest chance- reveals an unsuspected world, and the individual is drawn into relationship with forces that are not rightly understood...[blunders] are ripples on the surface of life...and these may be very deep, deep as the soul itself...the blunder may amount to the opening of destiny.”

My preferred mode of blunder is to run my mouth, usually with one hand cooled by an icy beverage and the other with index finger extended to aid in proving my seriousness (for some reason this usually happens between the hours of midnight and two in the morning). It was this technique that propelled me to attempt and rightfully claim the record at an international ice cream eating contest and, more recently, to commit to a winter trek across the Boundary Waters. The hard thing is recognizing the moment when you just have to let go and embrace a life that seems outlandish. 

Another short cut to adventure: instead of opting for the “let go and embrace” method just stated (which can go awry without the proper self discipline), I prefer the back-yourself-into-a-corner approach to living life because it (assuming you are person of integrity who values keeping their word) prevents you from flippantly dismissing the call to adventure, which on the good-bad scale is bad; the gods of adventure don't take kindly to being ignored. Another benefit to running your mouth: it will forever slew the tri-headed beast of apathy, ennui and malaise that torments so many poor souls these days. I can't tell you how many times I told people about this idea to “walk from the end of the road (the Gunflint Trail) and go right into downtown Ely in the heart of the winter” but it reached a frequency that required either total commitment to seeing the idea through or else compulsory reclusion from society (or at least from your friends who heard you boast such outlandish claims).

So go out for the night, maybe get a few ideas in your head before you go so you have some options in case the first one falls flat and fails to raise an eyebrow or fails to bait your company into taking interest in your plan or in case your idea has already been logged into the history books of humanity (not that that is an immediate disqualifier, only that you should rethink some of your plan's details to ensure a high degree of originality). Don't be dismayed by naysayers, remember you have a plan and you're not looking for others' approval, only their interest to fully back yourself into a corner. At times like this it is helpful to your cause to be able to offer up some other information or a juicy detail of said idea, like you're not only going to walk from New York to L.A., you're going to do so in the buff or without stopping or by eating only banana Laffy Taffy- you know, something to sell the deal. And remember, you are doing this for you, of course you like sharing stories with friends, but the ultimate goal is to give you that iron clad excuse to get out and do something crazy.

I recommend starting small, say maybe by claiming you could read all the books in the children's department at your local library in a month or that you are going to try all 30 of the micro beers on tap at the bar, in one night (remember, the larger the audience that hears such claims the greater to motivation to complete the challenge, so talk loudly). Then work up to something like a major trail hike, the AT or the PCT, canoeing across lake Superior or drinking a shot of each liquor behind the bar, in one night. Be careful though, blundering into adventures can take on an addictive and compounding nature; after all, no one including yourself will get excited about your new idea if it is somehow less than your last one. This situation, like runaway evolution, can take on a shocking autonomy, where each claim that is made has to be exponentially greater than the last, and the next thing you know you'll be in the middle of a howlin' storm in the Pacific in a small sailboat, wind and water becoming one tumultuous squalling wall of white, up and down losing meaning, one hand clasped to the wheel (sailboats have wheels right?) and the other clutching the hat your new friends in Australia gave you for luck that night in the Barrier Reef bar in Sydney when you, around bar time, proclaimed that you were going to go out the next morning, buy a boat and sail to Green Bay for the Packer's home opener in the fall. At least now, as you're standing there getting pelted by rain and gritting your teeth at the wind, in that brief moment of clarity, you don't have to wonder “how did I get myself into this?”- consider yourself warned.

There and Back Again

It's been a little over a week since we packed up my truck in Ely, said our goodbyes and left the Boundary Waters behind to return to our lives that, by all appearances, have continued on just fine in our absence. My tent (yes I traded life on trail in the winter in a tent to life at home in the winter in a tent) is in the state I left it, save for the new mouse nest I found that was a compilation of chewed up tye-dyed tapestry and fringe from my wool rug. The wood pile was just as pathetic as I left it, my dear wood stove was cold and quiet and the trails that I made meandering around my property became the favored paths of the deer and coyotes.  It has taken a week to catch up with life (catch up? what is this, a race?) and to start collecting the distilled droplets of condensed thoughts and reflections from this experience. I am not a great record keeper despite at least a dozen attempts at keeping a journal, so I will piece together the day-to-day aspects of this trip amongst my more typical free range thoughts. Yukon (his Appalachian Trail name) is writing another blog on this trip, so if you want his view of the trip or more detail on our adventure, be sure to check out his blog at:  http://yukonsquest.blogspot.com/

Coming off trail from this type of adventure is hard; you begin to become institutionalized to life in the Wild to the point where you wonder how or if you can function back in the modern world. As Ernest Shackleton on his Nimrod expedition to Antarctica said “We are now reveling in the indescribable freshness of the Antarctic that seems to permeate one's being, and which must be responsible for that longing to go again which assails each returned explorer...” You don't have to visit the polar regions to become addicted to or assailed by that freshness- it exists anywhere where the human spirit can live free from the artificial bonds and drudgerous toils of modern life. That freshness lives precariously teetering on the edge between this life and that life, within grasp of anyone with the heart to try but far enough out over the void that there is no guarantee if you reach just a bit too far and tread out on the crumbling threshold betwixt the two worlds that you won' tumble off the edge of existence, perhaps never to make it back to share your story or if you do you may forever become that solitary creature sitting at the end of the bar with the 100 mile gaze, searching the darkness for memories of your last taste of freshness and the route to your next fix. All of us who pin the word “explorer” or “adventurer” high upon our being know full well that by chasing that freshness we pay a steep toll and are required to sacrifice much, but once that life is experienced, our blood is never again still in our veins.

Perhaps what Shackleton was alluding to is the vivacity and simplicity of life on trail or the freedom from the frenetic and overwhelming milieu we learn to live with in our daily lives. Maybe he is speaking to that moment, that beautifully intense moment when you realize you are out there; after months of planning, organizing, and waiting, you are there, and you love every iota of it- perfection. Shackleton was Thoreauvian philosophy in action, living Henry David's iconic statement “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life...to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to it's lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole meanness of it, and publish it's meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know by experience and be able to give a true account of it.” From “The Worst Journey in the World” to “The Heart of the Antarctic” the cannon of South Pole exploration has reports on the frozen continent's meanness and sublimity- accounts from the people who drove life into that cold, dark and windy corner. Explorers get the meanness and the sublime oftentimes in a concoction of the two- a little of both- the good with the bad, after all too much of one or the other and you can get either complacent or disenchanted (or worse). Shackleton was a master of converting the meanness to the sublime, as alchemist of perspective and situation- not all polar explorers were so lucky just as not all of us modern explorers who take to the empty places on the map are so lucky, but fortunately for our group of five we got meanness in tolerable amounts and came home with much more of the latter.

Oh the sublime- your face gets burned by the wind and the sun, your muscles become toned and surprisingly bulgy from the continuous labor and your spirit gets a layer of gristle from the intense presence of reality- a good thing for the adventurous type. The problem with the sublime is that it is ethereal and that all those highly prized side effects of this type of adventure fade quickly when exposed to life at home.  You acquire a softness at an alarming speed- all that hard won edge/hard won toughness dissolves like a setting sun, you blink and its gone.

Instead of doing the dishes from the trip which have been sitting on my porch for over a week now, I choose to let my mind wander into the blank spaces, into the roadless areas of our consciousness in order to draw meaning from this experience, and also I suspect, as a way to avoid doing the dishes. I speak of all this as that is where my mind has been since getting back to life after our trip...oh yeah our trip.

By the numbers:

5 guys

5 toboggans

2 canvas tents

400,000 calories

1,000,000 acres (1,500 sq.miles) of wilderness

70+ miles traveled

19 days on trail

1 frostbitten finger (which healed on trail)

-55 below wind chills

3'+ of snow

1 close call with thin ice

1 otter

3 broken snow shoes (3 fixed snowshoes)

1 mile (slowest day)

9 miles (fastest day)

16 days with no signs of other people

The Group: