Verge: An ode to time spent outdoors, Part II
By Annalise Grueter
Taking off into the woods simplifies, beyond just material life: it minimizes psychological pressure. “Can I live with myself?” seems a much smaller question than “Can I be involved with everything that interests me and be good at it?”
In my last three years of ski school (ages 10, 11, and 12) I was that annoying kid, nervous about everything. When I was 9, I had been in a ski group with a bunch of boys and never stopped long enough to be nervous — too busy trying to be macho and keep up with the guys. But for the final three years I was in an all-girls group, and we were transitioning from regularly skiing black diamonds, to regularly skiing double-black diamonds and some sidecountry. Most of the other girls just skied. Whatever, right? I was the little girl who was nervous, who would stall and have to be coaxed by the instructor into dropping into a slot, fearful of the steepness, speed and proximity of trees. Finally, after holding up the group, I took the first several turns, succumbed to the adrenaline and skied.
Afterward, while the rest of the group was still content to just ski, I was the one raving about how awesome that intense double black diamond had been, about how much fun it was and how we should go ski another one right away. These incidents repeated almost every Saturday. I was unaware of how my fear-rooted enthusiasm annoyed the other girls, instead basking in the thrill and the nerves. To me, the social dynamic became inconsequential, for I had broken through from feeling reluctant to feeling alive.
In my late adolescence, I grew more attentive to the quick transition between terror and captivation. When I was in high school, a sports psychologist spoke to my ski club about how fear and thrill are chemically the same and the difference is all in the intellectual perception. I was a cross-country skier, so I had less of that — at least on snow. But to me, learning about the correlation between fear and thrill wasn’t just some new information. It was a revelation. And it certainly explained the changeable nature of some of my most “terrifying” memories up to age 19 or 20.
Fear. Thrill. Adrenaline. I went through a phase of loving cycling, loving the rush downhill with the wind in my face and stuffing my ears — the rushing whoosh blocking out most other sounds. When I skied competitively, my coach clocked my descent speed on the bike at 48 miles per hour — a bit of a turnaround from my preteen, near-death experience. I don’t know why terror is so irresistible. Through my twenties, many of my most vivid and even favorite memories drifted along the line of some kind of abyss, a near-death experience or a life-changing decision or mistake. How is it that I could love what I fear?
The answer to that question is another question. In moments of terror, in running away to the woods, in solitary immersion in a place not yet utterly dominated by people, when seeking things I used to, or even still, fear, the cause d’être changes. The question changes. And the perfectionist impulse becomes much easier to meet. In place of countless goals and expectations, there is just one question. A long hike with a finite amount of water. A breathtaking descent down a ski mountain or the hard pavement of a road. Rock climbing. These things eliminate the complications and imposed meanings of human society, of status and achievement and variably quantified success — and forget about those within myself. At the brink of disaster, everything clarifies to a much simpler equation: “Can I live?”
What the Stratollite?!
“What the heck is that?!” many a Carbondalian may have been wondering after noticing a strange object floating high in the sky on Friday the 13th. Coincidently, the same day as Snowmass’ Hot Air Balloon Festival, Tommy Sands looked captured this image of the Stratollite balloon that’s been circulating Colorado as of late. This unmanned balloon was launched by World View Enterprises in Arizona and is, according to 9News, “measuring solar radiation in the stratosphere above the 40th parallel” on behalf of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
