Losing the known?

Yvon Chouinard said, “Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all.” That may be true. Perhaps Chouinard’s statement needs a nuance. Jiddu Krishamurti said, “One is not afraid of the unknown, one is afraid of the known coming to an end.” I don’t know if the two ever met.

Lately I ask myself if it is beneficial to practice leaping into darkness. FYI, I am not off my rocker, at least not any more than I usually am. Like many things, there is a backstory to any persistent thought.

A few years back I was at a family reunion sitting at a campfire. Somebody was probably playing the guitar. Earlier in the day we went to a swimming hole on a river. The right bank had a rope swing that launched you into the stratosphere, or so it seemed. The opposite side of the river is a cliff about 10 meters high. Just in case you aren’t familiar with  river trash lingo, the right bank is the bank on the right facing downstream, "river trash" describes people that spend their lives rafting and/or kayaking, and 10 meters is about 35 feet. The rope swing  scared me enough that only did it once. I jumped off the cliff a few times after we determined the water was so deep that you couldn’t swim to the bottom. Just downriver there was a gravel bar on the left bank where you could swim out.

Juneau is down there somewhere in the unknown.

Later we were sitting at the fire and somebody suggested we jump off that cliff again. Many dares were made and I seemed to have the most bravado at the fire. Alcohol  was not involved in our decision. My bravado waned as the situation became more real. I was the last to jump.

We got to the top of the cliff and there was nothing down there but dark. I don’t know what metrics they use to measure darkness but there was not a single photon reflecting off the water. Light is measured in photons and perhaps dark is measured in fear, at least when jumping into it. The moon illuminated the gravel bar enough that we knew where to swim out.  

We weren't leaping into the unknown but it seemed like it. Jumping off that cliff wasn’t fundamentally different than it was earlier in the day. The water was still deep and the cliff was still about 10 meters high. Yet, my bravado was gone.

Deep water solo, near Skagway, Alaska. 
I don't have a photo of the cliff we jumped off in the dark.

My brothers jumped first and swam to the gravel bar. I stood on top the cliff for a while. There was no logical reason to walk down so peer pressure gave way. I jumped and it seemed like it took a long time to splash down. Certainly, it took the same amount of time as it did in the day but it didn’t seem that way. Under water I closed my eyes and followed gravity and buoyancy to the surface.. Yet, the forces of physics feel different in the dark. Maybe it isn’t only the dark that changes our perspective. Maybe it’s a good idea to practice leaping into the unknown because without practice you fail badly when faced with a novel experience.

Yvon Chouinard could be mostly right. The unknown might be the greatest fear of all precisely for evolutionary reasons. Evolution tells us not to eat an unknown mushroom. Evolution tells us not to jump off a cliff unless we know the water is deep enough. I am not sure if there is any evolutionary benefit to jumping off a cliff into water on a dare. Yet, dares have been around a long time and people who take dares haven’t been eliminated from the gene pool.  

Half my family jumped off that cliff. The other half would have joined but they had gone to sleep by the time we thought to do it. I have a big family. We were raised by parents with a sense of adventure. I have several friends that took major leaps into the unknown, in very different ways. The common denominator in their stories is that unlike most people they recognize that the familiar world and is just as dangerous as he unfamiliar world.

Interstate 405 in Los Angeles. There is at least one breathing human in each of those metal boxes and most of them base at part of their self worth upon the make and model they drive.

I know two people that saved some cash, bought a sailboat, and floated out to sea in search of foreign lands. People told them all manner of risks and none of the naysayers knew squat about sailing. Few of them knew squat about foreign lands. Astoundingly the naysayers didn’t know that the US has a crime problem yet they warned that you might find crime in foreign lands. Six months after sailing away, my friends made it to Tahiti. They were gone almost two years and had a great time.

I know a guy who quit his job and moved to Latin America to travel around for the rest of his life. He figures he can live indefinitely on $15K/year and that is the interest on his savings. He doesn’t have a work visa in any Latin American country so if he runs out of money, he must return to the States. People warned him that $15K isn’t a lot of money. They still warn him even after he’s been living well on $15K for years. They also warned he might get robbed or killed by cartels and narcos. All manner of rotten predictions were made and so far he’s doing just fine. He currently lives in Belize near the beach and volunteers with an organization trying to preserve coral reefs. I don’t know how his safety compares to life in Alaska. Neither does anyone else unless they spent time in Belize. If by any chance he runs out of money and must return to the States, he still won’t fear the unknown. Once you learn the unknown isn’t any more dangerous than the known, you can’t easily unlearn it. Once you see what drives human behavior, people living in industrial society start to look like a flock of scared chickens with destructive social habits.

White Faced Monkey, Cahuita National Park, Costa Rica

There’s a cliff and it’s dark down below. I am not interested in living full time out of a backpack like my expat friend. I don’t want to live on boat either like my sailboat friends. I like knowing where my home is.  However, I think we could all learn from them. 

Is it possible that Jiddu Krishamurti was right? That we don’t fear the unknown but fear letting go of the known. It takes more courage to question what we think we know than it does to jump off a cliff into the dark. Jumping off a cliff into the dark is an adrenaline jump but embracing the unknown feels bonkers. It’s scary to embrace the unknown when what we know might come to an end. My friend living in Belize made two important choices. He first chose to say "no" to a consumerist  lifestyles and second he chose to move to Belize.  I think his first choice required more courage than the second.  Sometimes it requires as much or more courage to say no to something we do not want than it does to say yes to a leap into the dark.

I once thought I “knew” that if I followed set of instructions and worked hard, I could become a captain of industry. I could rule my own little kingdom but what I thought I knew was wrong for at least two reasons. If you work hard sometimes you still don’t become a captain of industry; you become a meaningless peon. But the most important lie is that it’s a false win even if you succeed at becoming a captain of industry. I mistakenly “knew” that I wanted to be a captain of industry even though ruling anybody runs counter to my personality. I don’t even like being in charge over anybody at work. It took me a long time to question why would want a rule over a bunch of people because the metrics of “success” are so heavily ingrained. We are taught measure ourselves by a contest to see who can obtain the biggest house, the fanciest car, etc. Our success (as we perceive it) is measured by how many commodities we obtain. Foreign lands and/or foreign ideals seem tamer and less dangerous once we recognize the dangers of the world we inhabit. By most definitions Bill Gates is a “success” but my friend living in Belize presumably isn’t a success because he’s living on $15K/year. 

Sometimes we  mistakenly think we know that even experience is a commodity. Bungee jumping or riding the zipline can be distractions from facing real fears. Those things aren’t any more dangerous than my leap into the river at night. Too often we define adventure as a commodity purchased from a vendor. Tourists in Juneau are commodities to the cruise ship industry. Cruise reps use fear to con people out of their cash. They tell tourists not to go on a hike without a cruise ship certified guide because you could be killed by bears. There are three trailheads near the cruise ship docks but cruise reps are instructed not to tell anybody how to find a trailhead in Juneau.  Hint from a guy that hikes all the time in bear country, you won’t get killed by bears.  You get the same con when you try to plan hikes elsewhere. I have been looking at activities in Costa Rica because I am going there with my wife in May. We get told it’s too dangerous to do the most basic things unless we pay somebody to hold our hand. We get told hiking is dangerous without any explanation for why except that you need a guide.  People hike in Costa Rica without guides all the time.  Deep down most of us understand that consumerism is a con but we fear the unknown. Letting go of what we think we know is harder sometimes than embracing the unknown.

Eyelash Viper, Costa Rica

Bears are real. Paying a guide to take you into bear habitat won’t change that.  Don’t eat strange mushrooms. Don't get addicted to television.  Poisonous snakes live in the jungle.  Don't die of boredom or meaninglessness. Don’t jump off cliffs unless you know the water is deep.  Don't jump off cliffs unless you want to. 

It is possible to jump off the cliff and into the dark. People do it every day and they are just fine.

Amalga Shore, Juneau

I have a dream. It's a climbing thing, mostly

Mount Lemmon, Arizona. MLK Day, 2020

I have a dream. Yeah, this story is partly about Martin Luther King but it isn’t only about him. I went on a climbing trip on MLK Day. Many years I go skiing but this year I was in Arizona.

The Battle of Picacho Peak was a Civil War battle that occurred in what is now the state of Arizona and it was more of a skirmish. Thirteen US soldiers met up with 10 Confederate soldiers and three people got killed. Afterward an American army went to Tucson to find that the Confederates had already left for Texas. As it turns out, territorial Arizonans didn’t much care what side of the Civil War they were on. Slavery didn't matter to them.  They cared which side sent troops to fight the Apaches.  Some 150 years ago Cochise felt like a real threat to white supremacy so they slaughtered Chiricahua Apaches. Now there’s a plaque at a rest stop on I-10 commemorating the battle and there is a mountain in southern Arizona named after Cochise. The plaque doesn’t mention slavery or Native American genocide. I happened to be at Picacho Peak about sunrise on Martin Luther King Day. A few yards away from the Civil War plaque there was a sign warning people that dangerous snakes and lizards inhabit the area. Some things don’t change. I got back in my rental car and continued toward Tucson and finally Mount Lemmon, the tallest peak in the Santa Catalina Mountains.

Alex on a trad route.

I was in Arizona because I have family there and I was able snag some cheap plane tickets. I also met up with a friend who is living in Tucson and we went climbing up Mount Lemmon. I have spent years in Arizona and mostly ignored Mount Lemmon. It’s a great climbing destination. There is a ton of exposed granite with very little loose rock. The highway leaves Tucson at about 2,500 feet above sea level and climbs to the 9,159-foot summit. Summer and winter there is always a place with the right temperature for climbing somewhere along the road. There was snow on the summit this January. We drove up to about 6,000 feet and found some sport routes. Climbing on Mount Lemmon is also great because of Eric Fazio Rhicard and Sara Plummer Lemmon.

Mount Lemmon, as the spelling might indicate, is not named after citrus but after a feminist pioneer Sara Plummer Lemmon. In 1871 Ms. Lemmon traveled solo through Panama and continued up the Pacific Coast. This was just nine years after the Battle of Picacho Peak and nine years after  Cochise and the Chiricahua Apaches fought off the Confederate army at what is now called Cochise Stronghold. Cochise's victory was short lived. 

Sara Plummer Lemmon was a botanist in a time when women weren’t usually allowed in the halls of science.  Sara cataloged the plants of Santa Catalina Mountains. She eventually married John Lemmon but the mountain is named after her.

Several decades back, Eric Fazio Rhicard got a good deal on a thousand climbing bolts. For those of you unfamiliar with climbing, bolts are sometimes put in rock so you don’t fall to your death. Eric thought his bolt purchase would last his whole life but once he started looking at all the options on Mount Lemmon he quickly ran out of bolts. He obtained more bolts. Eric and the rest of the Tucson climbing community have been careful to not place bolts on routes that could climbed as trad. Trad routes are climbs where you protect yourself from falling with cams and nuts placed in cracks. Most of the bolted routes are close to the road on routes that don’t have cracks.  There are great trad routes on Mount Lemmon.  Other people helped Eric develop the mountain of course but it’s fair to credit Eric Fazio Rhicard with elevating climbing in Tucson. He also had a goal to climb 60, 5.12 routes during his sixtieth year and surpassed his goal and climbed 63 routes.  If I ever meet him, I am going to buy him a beverage for sure.

I got to Alex’s house in Tucson a little after 9AM and we headed up the mountain. We started the day at Windy Gap. There’s a parking area there and a magnificent view of the desert headed to the west. Parking is free and so is entrance to the National Forest. The weather was about perfect but clearly it had been colder. There were remnants of snow in shady areas. The place was a little busy with folks but not too crowded, especially since it was a holiday. I was impressed with the type of routes because climbing felt more three dimensional than I am accustomed. I spend a lot time in the gym.

Driving back to my sister’s house in Gilbert, I decided to listen to MLK’s speech on my phone. It was only then that I remembered the people on Mount Lemmon were almost exclusively white, myself included. I might not have noticed everybody we met on the mountain was white if it weren’t Martin Luther King Day and I had not read the plaque about the Civil War. The Civil War was about slavery and the plaque didn’t say squat about that. I have a dream that we remember what the Civil War was about. I have a dream the we don’t forget that Robert E. Lee wasn’t a hero.  I have a dream that we recall that Cochise was a hero, even though the Chiricahua Apaches eventually lost. After the Civil War the US Army returned in larger numbers.

Photo Credit, Alex Hughes

 Tucson is an ethnically diverse city. It has an incredible culinary tradition as a result. Tucson also has the benefit that the Santa Catalina Mountains sit just east of town. The mountain range is part of the Coronado National Forest. Mount Lemmon is also great because somebody had to foresight to designate the land as National Forest. The Catalinas are a “Sky Island,” which is an ecosystem separated from other montane environments by a ‘sea of desert.” The Catalinas are the north end of a chain of sky islands that stretches into Mexico. Rare ocelots, jaguars, and coatis live in the sky islands of southern Arizona and these species survive only through transport corridors to Mexico. Endemic species of plants and animals live up there and they are distinct because they have not had contact with species from other sky islands for thousands of years. It’s an evolutionary experiment in action where species survival depends upon subpopulation connectedness. At the same time some new species were formed by years of spatial separation. Darwin would love the American West. 

So I have a dream. Everybody should have a dream, not only Martin Luther King. I have a dream that we don’t sell it off. I have a dream that we don’t let public lands get polluted or turned into a commodity only available to the wealthy. I have a dream that we don’t kill off endangered ocelots, jaguars, and coatis with a racially motivated wall on the Mexican border.  I have a dream that we don’t treat any ethnic group like they are subhuman. I have a dream that we actualize the phrase in the Declaration of Independence that states that all men and women are created equal and entitled to certain inalienable rights. I have a dream that everyone regardless of ethnic background or economic status will feel equally welcome on public land. I don’t think I am in a position to know if everyone feels welcome.

I am glad that I can climb and hike and ski etc. on public land.  Everybody should have that opportunity, now and in future generations. Public land really is a part of our freedom. If we lose access to public land we lose part of our ability to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Freedom becomes the choice of consumer products or a choice of television shows.  We can’t take public land for granted and we can’t let corporations gain more access to it.

Cochise (photo from AccessGeneology)