THE QUEST Hey, rich-guy adventurers like Steve Fossett and Richard Branson: Now that the earth has been circled (twice) by hot-air balloon, whaddya gonna obsess over next? We suggest the Seven Plummets—the deepest, darkest places in each of the Seven Seas. Almost all of these crannies are unvisited by man or probe, and for the first time in history, a small, speedy diving craft has been devised that could take you down and back in hours. All you need is a few million bucks and a hearty appetite for danger. At 37,000 feet, the water pressure is 17,000 pounds per square inch—that’s like stacking three SUVs on your big toe. The slightest crack in your craft would cause it to implode, turning you into plankton-size giblets.



THE VESSEL In 2000, Graham Hawkes—founder of Hawkes Ocean Technologies in Point Richmond, California, and a prolific submersible designer—completed a blueprint for a 5,000-pound “underwater airplane” called Deep Flight II. This battery-powered, ceramic-and-aluminum craft can fly through the water at six knots, withstand 25,500 pounds of pressure per square inch, and descend 500 feet per minute. The only catch: It hasn’t been built yet, because Hawkes can’t raise the dough. “The work is done,” he says. “We’re just stalled on funds.” He needs $5 million to get the thing built. Add an additional $2 mil for incidentals, and you’re ready to go deep. Which seems doable: Fossett spent at least $4 million in his six attempts to circle the globe.


Eurasian Basin, 17,257 Ft.

(Arctic Ocean: 81°20’N, 120°45’W)
Better act fast on this one. Former U.S. Navy sub captain Alfred S. McLaren is leading a team planning a 2003 plummet in a Russian Mir submersible.


Java Trench, 23,376 Ft.

(Indian Ocean: 10°19’S, 109°59’E)
Call it the Deep Muddy. This gloopy trench collects sediment from much of the Indian Ocean, including India’s Ganges River, 2,000 miles away.


Romanche Fracture Zone, 25,780 Ft.

(south atlantic: 0°16’S, 18°35’W)
This spot is paradise for plate-tectonics wonks. Thanks to the wafer-thin surface of the ocean floor, extremely rare rocks from the earth’s lower crust and upper mantle are exposed and accessible.


South Sandwich Trench, 27,312 Ft.

(Southern Ocean: 55°43’S, 25°57’W)
Your challenge here: getting Deep Flight II in the water at all; 50-foot surface swells are not uncommon.


Puerto Rico Trench, 27,493 Ft.

(North Atlantic: 19°42’N, 66°24’W)
Be on the lookout for three-legged fish: Each year between 1973 and 1981, the United States dumped about 121.2 million gallons of chemical waste here.


Tonga Trench, 35,499 Ft.
(South Pacific: 23°16’S, 174°44’W)
Practice saying, “The void down there was huge!” You could fit all of Mount Everest in this trench, with room for a Great Smoky thrown in.


Mariana Trench, 35,827 Ft.

(North Pacific: 11°22’N, 142°36’E)
Deepest spot on the planet. American adventurer Don Walsh and Swiss explorer Jacques Piccard kerplunked it in 1960 in a 366-ton bathyscaphe. They didn’t hit bottom, though, so the nadir is still up for grabs.

Mission #2: 2007: Free the noses!

They said it shouldn’t be done. Then the world went bonkers for Mount Rushmore National Climbing Park.

WILL “THE PREZ” PEREZ, 22, and climbing partner Anne May, 19, made history over Labor Day weekend when Perez red-pointed Ol’ Nail Splitter (5.15c), the trickiest route posted to date at Mount Rushmore National Climbing Park. Nail Splitter—which follows a dicey Adam’s-apple-to-forehead line up Lincoln’s stony visage—was a grail long sought by climberati, but it had repeatedly stymied the world’s best rock jocks, including Chris Sharma, Tommy Caldwell, and Beth Rodden. Hundreds gathered at the MRNCP to watch Perez’s benchmark ascent, peeping through telescopes and gasping audibly at several near-falls as the wiry North Dakotan spidered into history.

“I had no idea what I was in for,” Perez said later, still jittery about his achievement. “The crux is almost totally blank—the holds are the size of hen’s teeth.”
Mount Rushmore opened to fee-paying climbers on June 1, 2006, capping one of the unlikeliest sagas in the annals of the National Park Service. Originally denounced as a travesty by congressmen on both sides of the aisle, suspicious South Dakotans, and the angry heirs of Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum, the MRNCP became America’s only federally sponsored climbing crag after studies showed that a multi-use approach (sightseeing, climbing, BASE jumping, and the hugely popular HedSplitter Music Festival, held every year “on top o’ the skulls”) would boost Rushmore revenues by a staggering 300 percent. “After that,” says MRNCP superintendent Wally Prokop, “the only thing we heard out of Congress was, ‘Rope up!'”

Since then, some 50 routes have been established, including a few sport-climbing classics. On June 12, 2006, free-climbing ace Dean Potter sent Jefferson Direct (5.13c), despite taking a 30-foot whipper on the notorious Stiff Upper Lip. Caldwell and Rodden red-pointed Big Wig (5.14d) on March 24, 2007, and then flashed the variation Executive Branch (5.12c) the next day. Later that year, speed-climbing phenom Chris McNamara on-sighted Mr. Ted’s Wild Ride (5.12a).

With the final nose now picked, will climbers get bored?

“No way,” says McNamara, who also runs Supertopo.com, producer of the official online climbing map to the park. “There’s so much left to do here, especially if they carve another head. I’m hoping it’s Reagan’s.” Because he was a great president? “Nah. Because that hairdo of his would be at least a 5.15.”

Mission #3: 2015: Going All The Way

Break out your shovels, machetes, boots, and bikes. We’re building a 50,000-mile supertrail around the world.

THE VISION Smart-alecky backpackers will call it the Phileas Fogg Slog, but we prefer the formal name: The Global Greenway, our proposed around-the-planet hiking-and-biking trail. Starting at the northernmost tip of Alaska, this boat-and-plane-connected supertrek would traverse the Americas, hug the northern coast of Antarctica, dogleg across Africa from Cape Town to Tangier, meander through Europe and southern Asia, and cross eastern Australia, north to south. Twenty-three times longer than the Appalachian Trail, the 50,000-mile course would take the persistent hiker roughly 12 years, 132 million steps, and 18 million calories to finish. Phew!





THE ROUTE Earth is a big planet, but we’re already halfway there. If we incorporate existing or in-the-works trails—including the Trans Canada and Continental Divide trails in North America, the Mesoamerican Trail in Central America, the Sendero de Chile in South America, the E3 in Europe, and the Bicentennial National Trail in Australia—the Greenway is nearly 50 percent complete. What’s left is pretty immense, though. Organizers will have their hands full coordinating respective governments and volunteers and, of course, blazing new trail. Building costs will total about $882 million, and money isn’t the only problem. Several regions pose special obstacles.


GETTING IT DONE


Alaska (Trail needed: 1,500 MILES): A path linking Point Barrow with the Trans Canada Trail in the Yukon Territory would zigzag through some of the Last Frontier’s most beautiful wilderness. Environmentalists will have to be persuaded to allow a simple, cairn-marked way through roadless areas and precious caribou habitat.


South America (4,000 MILES): Trail builders will face narco-terrorists in Colombia and active land mines in Ecuador. The good news: 15th-century Inca trails are still serviceable in Peru, and when finished, the Sendero de Chile trail system will mean smooth sailing all the way to Tierra del Fuego.


Antarctica (2,000 MILES): With skis and a GPS, globe-trotters could navigate an unmarked path along the Weddell Sea—from the Antarctic Peninsula to Queen Maud Land—with minimal eco-impact. The 44 nations that jointly govern Antarctica aren’t likely to welcome more than a few through-skiers each year, but if everybody behaves, that could change.


Africa (12,000 MILES): The Greenway will hit major trekking highlights—the wildlife-rich East African Plateau, Mount Kilimanjaro, the Atlas Mountains—while steering clear of the jungly Congo River basin. Searing heat will be the least of trail builders’ worries in Libya and war-ravaged Sudan.


Asia (9,000 MILES): Forging a route from Istanbul to Singapore will largely be a matter of piecing together ancient trade routes and well-worn treks along the Tibetan Plateau. But ornery, heavily armed guards in the Middle East and Southeast Asia—not to mention political conflicts—will make border crossings dicey on even the best of days.

Mission #4: 2027: Mars, Ho!

When we finally knocked off Olympus Mons, the highest peak in the solar system, it took a million small steps…and one giant leap in rocket shoes

WE WERE “MOUNTAINAUTS,” not mountaineers. You don’t scale the highest known peak in the solar system with carabiners and ropes. Mars isn’t Nepal, and Olympus Mons isn’t Everest. It’s 88,000 feet high, the atmosphere is no atmosphere, and 150 degrees below zero is mild. Our giganto space suits, gridded with liquid-food pipelines, heating wires, and A/C ducts—the oxygen-distillation tank and personal sewage system trailing off behind—were so heavy they had to be autogyroscopically balanced to keep us upright.


Purist climbers sneered at the caterpillar NikeWalktrax we wore. But come on, it was 180 miles from the base to the summit, 30 days stomping over hardened lava flow on a shallow grade—more like walking Nebraska than climbing the Himalayas. So why not?

THOSE MECHANICAL YAKS: a bust from the get-go. Overheated under any kind of load, even in that cold, so the mother blimp had to rocket down supplies. Thanks lots. You needed new gloves, you got bass-fishing videos. The box marked “Telemetry Spares” contained a croquet set. Turned out the Russians had done the packing.


THE SUPPLY ROCKETS THEY FIRED DOWN from the mother blimp homed in on an infinitesimal trace of human perspiration. Lethal! Five times a day somebody would start yelling “incoming” in your earphones and you had to start zigzagging like mad. Pretty soon we just stopped asking for supplies. Better to go hungry than be reduced to Martian dust particles.

2002: King of the Road

*
Tour De Stats: Lance Armstrong’s resting heart rate in beats per minute: 32. *Rate of an ordinary healthy adult: 72. *Calories burned riding a Tour de France mountain stage: 6,000. *Lance’s average speed in the 2002 Tour: 24.6 miles per hour, covering 2,032 miles. *Number of miles he cycles every year: 21,000. *Miles covered yearly by a typical car in America: 14,400. *Three-year-old Luke Armstrong’s summary of his father’s race strategy: “Daddy makes ’em suffer In the Mountains.” *Name of Lance’s climbing-stage bike in the 2002 Tour: Daddy Yo-Yo. *Number of Trek bikes used annually by the 21-man U.S. Postal team: 64. *Lance’s 2002 speaking fee: $150,000. *Former President Bill Clinton’s fee: $150,000. *Number of residences Lance has acquired in the past four years: 4. *Favorite downtime fuel: Shiner Bock beer and Hula Hut tubular tacos. *Number of fans who attended summer 2001’s Vive Lance victory party in downtown Austin: 20,000. *Secret hobby: decorating with antiques. *Consecutive Tour de France wins (maybe you’ve already heard?): 4.


Compiled by Alan Coté

The post Mission #1: 2004: Let’s Get Down appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

By Marshall Sella


BEFORE HE VANISHED in Mexico in 1914, never to be heard from again, the formidable writer Ambrose Bierce, whose short stories often explored themes of horror and death, cobbled together his Devil’s Dictionary. It was a fiercely satirical work, filled with definitions such as “fidelity (n): a virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.” Here at ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø, we have a much brighter view of the world. In a full quarter-century of publishing, we’re proud to say, only nine members of our editorial staff have vanished in Mexico (and six of those, quite frankly, weren’t pulling their weight). More to the point, we admit that we use a fair amount of obscure terminology and slang in our pages. Phrases like “footy,” “mangy choss,” and “two-planker wanker” are tossed around with gleeful abandon. Most often, we like to tell ourselves that you’ll comprehend these terms “in context,” because it saves a lot of time and trouble in the copy-editing stage. But maybe that’s not fair to you, our cherished readers. So here’s a primer to make your next 25 years of reading a little more illuminating and a little less, shall we say, chossy.

The

°ä²¹°ù·²¹Â·²ú¾±²Ô·±ð°ù (n)

Char·is·mat·ic meg·a·fau·na (n)

²¹»å·±¹±ð²Ô·³Ù³Ü°ù±ð (n) : defying death without begrudging it.


al·pine-style climb·ing (n): ascending a mountain without porters· Curiously, valets and maids are still permitted.


²ú²¹°ù·²ú¾±±ð (n): photo of someone taken from a distant valley floor or neighboring peak. Downright disturbing if the person being photographed is, in real life, no larger than a doll.


bonk (v): to fail, quit, or conk out due to physical or mental weakness. Also British slang for casual sex, which, sadly, carries the same definition.


brain buck·et (n): a helmet· Less entertainingly colorful when the bucket is “scooped empty” by an EMT.


brick (n): a multisport workout· For instance: triathletes swimming, biking, and running in a single training session. (Compare “house,” which is seen when thousands of athletes perform these events while cemented together.)


bro deal (n): variation of “pro deal,” as in “pro purchase.” And, no, there is no such word as “brostitution.”


³¦²¹°ù·²¹Â·²ú¾±²Ô·±ð°ù (n): a wee caribou whose antlers are used in climbing; here, mainly a gratuitous excuse to use the funny-sounding word “antlers.”


³¦²¹°ù·³¦²¹²õ²õ (n): the spent remains of a happy editorial intern at the end of ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø’s “education process.”


char·is·mat·ic meg·a·fau·na (n): big-eyed, attention-grabbing mammals, such as pandas and baby seals, as opposed to rats and toads. That said, you’re on a lifeboat with an endangered scor- pion and an adorable, adorable koala, and there are only two life jackets· Which do you save? Yeah. Yeah, we thought so.


class sys·tem (n): scale for rating the difficulty of a river, in ascending difficulty from Class I to Class VI. “Class VII” is hep whitewater slang for “the afterlife.”


³¦±ô¾±±è·±ô±ð²õ²õ (adj): lacking toeclips; commonly said of bicycle pedals· (Look, folks, these aren’t all intended to be humorous. We teach· For the children.)


cord (n): (1) a climbing rope (2) the part of the spine that breaks if (1) snaps·


³¦´Ç°ù·»å³Ü·°ù´Ç²â (n): result of a snowcat’s creation of a freshly groomed trail of snow, leaving a ridged surface· Makes for fine, if very temporary, pants.


crit·ter flick (n): an animal movie&. Hyphenated, “critter-flick” is an amusing game to show little Jimmy in Yellowstone, as long as he can outrun bison.
crux (n): the most difficult section of a climb· It bears mentioning that “crux” derives from the same Latin root as “crucifixion.”


»å¾±Â·²¹±ô±ð»å (adj): to have your shit together;to have all the parts on your equipment working smoothly· As in, “Hey, I finally got that bike dialed·” Or, for indoorsy types, “Hey, I finally got that phone dialed.”


draft (v): to ride in the slipstream directly behind another cyclist, oddly conscripting him into military service in the process.


ducks (n): people standing around like decoys on the slopes or along a singletrack. Be advised that, in this sense of the word, “duck season” is illegal in 43 states.


dude (n): if you don’t know this word, stop reading this list. Seriously.

The

³Ò´Ç²Ô·³ú´Ç (adj)

Earth Day (n): annual celebration of the environment when greens gather together and leave vast amounts of unrecyclable paper litter and plastic flotsam in their nature-loving wake.


end-o (n): flying over your handlebars,then being mourned at your funeral-o.


±ð±è·¾±³¦ (adj): A quasi-bad, yet exhilarating, experience or thing; a notch coolerthan “killer.”


±ð³æ·±è±ð·»å¾±Â·³Ù¾±´Ç²Ô (n): well, you know this one, so here’s a quick joke. Grasshopper walks into a bar. Bartender says, “Hey, we’ve got a drink named after you!” Grasshopper says, “You’ve got a drink named Steve?”


±ð³æ·³Ù°ù±ð³¾±ð (adj): as with art and porn, you’ll know it when you see it, or someone will explain it to you later at the hospital.


´Ú°ù±ð±ð-³ó±ð±ð±ô·±ð°ù (n): telemark skier. Term developed by the corporation that owns and earns residuals from use of the letter “e”; immediately increased profits over the use of “telemark skier” by 67 percent.


fresh·ies/pow pow/stash (n): all terms forfresh snow. (Except for, you know, “stash.”)


get schooled (v): to wipe out or be humbled in competition· Similarly, to attend Florida State or LSU.


²µ±ô¾±²õ·²õ²¹»å±ð (n): French term referring to a downhill slide on your backside.


²µ±ô¾±²õ·²õ²¹»å±ð (n): déjàvu for a French term referring to a downhill slide on your backside.
²µ²Ô²¹°ù·±ô²â (adj): exhilarating, though a tad more severe than “epic.”


²µ´Ç²Ô·³ú´Ç (adj): describes crazy behavior while climbing, surfing, or skiing that defies Death. Yeah, go ahead, flip off Death. Mock it.It won’t be back for you.


Gör·an Kropp (n): famed adventure athlete who rode his bike to and from Everest, in the process summiting the mountain without supplemental oxygen. The achievement was subsequently diminished when it was noticed that “Göran Kropp” was obviously the name of a space alien.


²µ°ù´Ç³¾Â·³¾±ð³Ù (n): a novice surfer or very small gromm·


GU (n): gooey carbo-packed substance many athletes eat during a tough workout· Every bit the savory culinary wonder its name evokes· Bon appétit!


²µ³Ü·°ù³Ü (n): someone who professes to have a deep understanding of the world that others lack. (See “thug,” someone to call moments after a guru-sighting.)


³ó²¹³¾Â·³¾±ð°ù (v): to crank, as in “hammer a hill on a mountain bike.” (n): a remarkably strong cyclist, as in “That guy is a hammer.” (adv): actually, there is no adverb here, but grammar and parts of speech are important. Stay in school, kids!


³ó³Ü³¦°ì·±ð°ù (n): a snowboarder or mountain biker who will exploit anything for publicity, ideally while wearing a pair of fabulous new ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø® brand sunglasses ($179.95).


In·to Thin Air (n): final destination of Jon Krakauer’s comparative obscurity after his best-selling book about the 1996 Everest disaster.


°ì¾±±ô±ô·±ð°ù (adj): even more “epic” than “gnarly.” (Where’s “cool” on this scale, again? I’m lost.)


°­´Ç²Ô-°Õ¾±Â·°ì¾± (n): the 45-foot balsa-wood raft that Thor Heyerdahl sailed from Peru to the Pacific island of Raroia in 1947 during the most bizarre police chase of all time.


liv·ing the life (v): actually doing the stuff we write about in the magazine. (See “lying.”)

The

Rip (v)

moun·tain bike (n): OK, bub, so you’re still reading this, even after not comprehending “dude.” Welcome back from the coma! FYI: Nixon resigned, the Soviets lost the Cold War, and robots still haven’t “made their move.”


±·´¡³§Â·°ä´¡¸é (n): we polled the entire staff and not one of us has the vaguest clue· Anyone?
on be·lay
(adj): holding the rope for a climber· In high winds, a source of endless confusion for Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas).


±Ê²¹³Ù·²¹Â·²µ³Ü³¦Â·³¦¾± (n): Patagonia wear. Gucci is now fighting a court order that would change its name to Gonia.


peak bag·ging (v): summiting a mountain; also a failed 1989 artwork by Christo, who took a shot at swaddling K2 in a wispy cotton twill.


±è¾±²Ô·³ó±ð²¹»å (n): a telemark skier (or, you know, someone with a hilariously tiny head).


±è¾±Â·°ù´Ç²µ³Ü±ð (n): derived from the Spanish word piragua, a dugout canoe usually found in South America and Africa. Most often wooden, as plastic dugouts are exceedingly rare.


poach (v): to skip ahead of someone who is about to ski down a slope, ride a trail, summit a mountain, etc. Properly followed by a good old-fashioned ass-kicking.


±è´Ç°ù·³Ù²¹²µ±ð (v): to haul one’s boat and gear across land between bodies of water. Sound inconsequential? Yeah? You carry a 30-horsepower Evinrude outboard three miles on your back, motherfucker!


rip (v): to perform a sport aggressively, particularly the new Olympic event of paper-tearing.


road rash (n): scabs from a wreck· Compare “road rage” (n): leaving scabs on others after a near-wreck.


³§Â·°¿Â·³¢Â·
(adj): shit out of luck, as opposed to S.D.O.L., shit that’s merely down on its luck.


scree (n): see “talus.”


Sev·en Sum·mits (n): the highest peaks on all seven continents. Bagging the Seven is a coveted accomplishment for wealthy expeditioners, many of whom are gullible enough to believe that Grumpy and Sneezy are the most perilous.


³§³ó±ð°ù·±è²¹ (n): a Himalayan climbing guide, notably on Mount Everest. Relegated to the role of inferior “helpers” because of the fact that instead of climbing the mountain, Sherpas both climb the mountain and carry massive amounts of gear.


shred (v): to snowboard aggressively. But really, feel free to insert your own Enron joke here.


sick pow on the mow (n): plenty of good new snow, especially on the morning after a big storm. Completely different from “a sick POW shouting ‘Mao!'” which is kind of a Deer Hunter thing.


sick (adj): more “gnarly” than “epic,” but not quite so “epic” as “killer.” (Are you keeping track? Because I’m not.)


six-pack (n): a well-muscled stomach or a six-person chairlift, but rarely both at the same time.


³§³¾²¹°ù³Ù·°Â´Ç´Ç±ô (n): a popular brand of wool products that provide insulation without the itchiness of plain wool, named ironically as it is derived from the dumbest beast ever to tread the earth.


²õ²Ô´Ç·É·²ú´Ç²¹°ù»å (n): you’ve been warned about these easy ones, pal. Move along.


spanked (v): to be severely worn out, as in “That climb spanked me.” Less rugged-sounding if you add, “just like Mommy spanks me.”


²õ±è±ð·±ô³Ü²Ô°ì (v): the sound that Britney Spears’storso would make after a fall in whatever that caving sport is called.


sport climb·ing
(n): endeavor in which one climbs using artificial bolts, just as God intended.


‘spro (n): espresso. A real time-saver, as the full word itself suggests! Squandering time by uttering the entire word “espresso” is to be shunned within the fleeting, even whisper-quick, passage of time. I mean, life’s just too short for meaningless and excessive verbiage in this cockeyed caravan. Nothing in this world is so repugnant as verbosity and repetition and redundancy. So, for our sake, for your sake, from now on, it’s “‘spro,” not “espresso.”


stoked (adj): very excited about something, or actually ablaze—but, here again, rarely both at the same time.


SUV (n): represents 15 minutes of such a vehicle owner’s progress attempting to spell the phrase “Survival of the Earth.”

Mission #4: 2027: Mars, Ho! (Cont.)

ROCKET SHOES GOT US UP the sheer 10,000-foot basal cliff that surrounds Olympus Mons in minutes. Didn’t need those portaledges stuck on the cliffside, and just as well. The suction cups that held them there popped off after half an hour, and down they went.


NO NICE SHARP EVEREST-LIKE peak at the summit, just the rim around a 50-mile-wide crater two miles deep. Fox outbid Disney for naming rights (Mount Murdoch), and their little JetCams were everywhere. Big wrap-up show, NASA on one frequency and the Fox director on the other. America’s poet laureate had written our script, but the TelePrompTer blippoed, so they went to a commercial instead. Was the world ever miffed!
You’re three times as strong in the Martian atmosphere as you are on Earth. We felt like action figures up there. It’s no secret that all of us mountainauts were treated for depression when we got back. The letdown. Just brutal.

The

³Õ±ð±ô·³¦°ù´Ç (n)

³Ù²¹Â·±ô³Ü²õ (n): see “scree.”


The Big E (n): Everest. (Sorry, elephantiasis!)


thread the nee·dle
(v): to negotiate a dangerously tight section of singletrack, rapids, or glades. Which, incidentally, is a good time to reflect on just how cheap and replaceable actual thread is.


tight (adj): somewhere between “epic” and “gnarly,” with a “sick” pallor.


torched (adj): bone-tired, as in “My legs are torched·” Less funny when that line is uttered by someone whose legs are literally on fire and you say, “I hear you, man. I hear you.”


Tour (n): the Tour de France. Frankly, the route is more efficient by train.


tree hug·ging (v): “first base” for environmental fanatics.


tricked-out (adj): refers to a particularly cool new product, such as a bike with lots of expensive aftermarket parts. Sometimes used to describe the consumer who paid for them.


³Õ±ð±ô·³¦°ù´Ç (n): definition written by special guest Larry King: How did we ever manage without Velcro? …Bengal tigers are the only mammal that can drink salt water …For my money, Myrna Loy was the best actress of her time—or any other time! …Yellowstone is bigger than it looks in person.


vert
(n): the amount of vertical drop on a ski run. The French like to insist “vert” refers to the color green, but doesn’t that add extra incentive to change its meaning, if only to mess with their heads?
·É³ó¾±±è·±è±ð°ù (n): a fall onto a rope. Often results in a whipper-lasher-to-the-climberer.


·É³ó¾±³Ù±ð··É²¹Â·³Ù±ð°ù (n): a river characterized by rapids, used by rafters and kayakers. Little-known fact: Water is actually rather colorless unless it’s kind of churning around for some reason.


yard sale (n): a fall that spreads your gear from point of impact to its final resting place. Despite its name, rarely a moneymaker, and also hard to advertise in advance.


²â±ð·³Ù¾± (n): mythic, hairy Himalayan beast that has never been photographed, with the exception of Hollywood films in which James Caan appears without a shirt.


zonked (adj): worn out from an epic adventure of some sort, be it biking, mountaineering, or writing a list of definitions clarifying the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø lexicon. Eventually results in lacking the wit and energy to write jokes or whatever, etc., etc.

The post Devil’s Dictionary appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

The 13 Biggest Outdoor Phobias

Sure, fear itself has plenty of fans—people with the good sense to be terrified when the rope snaps, the elephant charges, or the boat capsizes. But what about PHOBIAS, those singular, irrational, often inexplicable anxieties that lurk even in nature’s happiest scenes, waiting to creep you out and propel you into the panic zone? In the confessions that follow, our 13 unlucky writers reveal the things that give them the waking nightmares—from time-tested classics like snakes and vertigo to oddities like engorged ticks and beady-eyed armadillos. But don’t fret! There’s nothing like the shivery pinprick of dread to make you feel truly alive.

Swimming

After one traumatic day at the pool, a lifelong dread

HYDROPHOBIA NAMES NOT ONLY A FEAR but a disease—a generally fatal one, rabies, whose agonies of swallowing are stimulated by the sight of water, hence the name. Of course most phobias have at their root a fear of death, and my fear of water began, I believe, when my father, treading water in a swimming pool, invited me to jump from the tile edge into his arms; I did, and slipped from his grasp, and sank, and inhaled water for a few seconds. It felt, when I gasped, as if a fist had been shoved into my throat; I saw bubbles rising in front of my face as I sank down into a blue-green darkness.

Then my father seized me and lifted me back into the air. I coughed up water for some minutes, and my mother was very angry with my father for his mistake. Even then, it seems to me in the wavery warps of this memory, I took my father’s side; he was, after all, trying to teach me to swim, a paternal duty, and it was just bad luck, a second’s slip-up, that in fact he delayed my learning for several decades. Part of our problem, that traumatic summer day, was that we had little experience of swimming pools; not only did we have no pool ourselves, but no one in our neighborhood or circle of acquaintance did, in that blue-collar Depression world. We were not country-club people. It is a mystery to me how we found ourselves at that particular pool, in bathing suits. Nor do I know exactly how old I was—small enough to be trusting but big enough to surprise my father with my sudden weight.

Henceforth I knew what it was like to look through a chain-link fence at a public pool, its seethe of naked bodies in the sunshine, and inhale its sharp scent of chlorine, but not to swim in one. At the local , the pool was a roofed-in monster whose chlorinated dragon-breath, amplified by the same acoustics that made voices echo, nearly asphyxiated me with fear. Aged twelve or thirteen now, I tried to immerse my face in the water as the instructor directed, but it was like sticking my hand into fire; nothing could override my knowledge that water was not my element and would kill me if it could. At college five years later, where one had to pass a swimming test to graduate, I managed a froggy backstroke the length of the pool, my face straining upward out of the water while a worried-looking instructor kept pace at the poolside with a pole for me to grab in case I started to sink. I think I did sink, once or twice, but eventually passed the test, and stayed dry for years.

In the movies of my adolescence, smiled through the hateful element, using it to display her rotating body, but other movies, glorifying our wartime navy, showed sinking ships and sputtering submarines. One of my nightmares was of being trapped belowdecks and needing to force myself through adamant darkness toward air and light. My lungs felt flooded at the thought; my hydrophobia extended to a fear of choking, of breathlessness. Life seemed a tight passageway, a slippery path between volumes of unbreathable earth and water.

And yet, graduating from college, I took the Coronia to England, and contemplated the ocean calmly from the height of the deck, and slept behind a sealed porthole. Adulthood strives to right the imbalance of childhood, and to soothe its terrors. My fear of water eased as, in my mid-twenties, I moved with my wife and children to a seaside town. Paternity itself, with its vicarious dip into the amniotic fluids, made me braver, and the salty buoyance and the shoreward push of seawater were marked improvements over perilously thin fresh water. We bought a house by a saltwater creek in the marshes, and that was better yet; I plunged into our private piece of creek as if I were one with the grasses, the muddy banks, the drifting current, the overhead vapory clouds—one with the water, my body mostly water. By middle age I had learned to swim and take pleasure in it, but still tended to float on my back, and to keep my face averted from the murky, suffocating depths beneath me.

Freezing

First comes uncontrollable shaking, then a numb, frosty doom

BECAUSE I WAS THE GOALIE, when I fell through the ice it wasn’t simple. My homemade foam rubber pads became two huge sponges. That it happened in a cemetery didn’t help, or that I was at an age when I pointedly ignored things even if they could hurt me. We were there because we didn’t fear death, nonchalantly tromping between the headstones and over the snowy hills into the far heart of the place and down into the bowl that held the pond. In summer, fat goldfish slid under the lily pads, but now it was solid—or so we thought.

I screamed before I realized I was standing on the bottom. The water barely came to my waist. I still needed help getting out, and then the wind hit my wet clothes and skin and I began to shiver.

I had to get inside and get dry, but first I had to take my skates off. The laces seemed tighter now that they were wet, and my fingers didn’t work. A friend had to help. I didn’t think to peel my wet tube socks off (cotton, worthless), just jammed on my Pumas and ran.

The running was uncool, and if I’d been out in the middle of nowhere it would have been dumb. Fortunately, my friend Smedley’s house was only a couple blocks away, and I made it easily.

But in my worst nightmare, I don’t. I’m out in the woods by myself. The shivering turns to even larger involuntary contractions as my body tries to create heat through muscle friction. I lose control of my hands. I stumble like a drunk, my speech slurred, muscles stiffening. The initial pain gives way to numbness. I get foggy and make poor decisions, like walking the wrong way or sitting down at the base of a tree and going to sleep. In the end, I pass out and die in the snow without a struggle, frozen solid, my skin hard as wood.

It didn’t happen—it couldn’t have—but I still have trouble walking on ponds, and forget about hauling a bobhouse out and then sitting in it waiting for a nibble. On shore, I can hear the ice creak, and know that someone’s going in. Not me, I’ll think. No way.

Sleeping Bags

There’s a reason they’re called mummy sacks

ON THE WHOLE, I love sleeping bags. When I got my first, a slippery orange thing lined with images of ducks and shotguns, I quickly discovered that no matter where I slept—the haymow, the back forty, the living room—I felt like I was lighting out for the territory. I took immediately to that snug, toasty, flannelly embryo feeling. You know the one: After a long day of hiking, you crawl in the bag and give out an involuntary little happy-shiver and hug yourself. And yet, a claustrophobic bugaboo lurks in the coziness. As a child, I once wound up head-down in my sleeping bag and went frantic, crazy-ape bonkers trying to escape. Later, I slid from the top bunk in my orange bag, panicked because I was unable to throw out my arms. Even now, I find myself opening the bag before I push my legs in, just to check for teensy wolverines hidden in the toe end. I think of bears arriving, and me unable to escape. Freud would draw conclusions based on the male preoccupation with issues of zippers and entrapment.

After years of cheapo bags, I treated myself to a military-issue mummy sack. “FOR EMERGENCY EXIT,” read a tag sewn inside, “grasp each side of the opening above the slider and spread apart quickly, forcing the slider downward.” Sweet reassurance for the claustrophobe. That night I slept in a farmhouse owned by a pair of photographers. Not wanting to muss the vintage quilts, I unrolled my new sleeping bag, slid in, zipped to chin level, hugged myself with the happy-shiver, and dozed off. It was July, and I woke up 15 minutes later drenched in sweat. Grasped each side of the opening above the slider and spread apart quickly. Nothing. The zipper was jammed. Be calm, I thought, and commenced thrashing on the bed like a prodigious eel. I jammed an arm out the face hole and, with one particularly contorted bounce, wrenched into a sitting position. Deep breath. Think. With one hand waving uselessly at the sky, I grabbed the interior zipper pull with the other. Bit down hard on the liner. Yanked and yanked. When the zipper finally gave way, cool air rushed across my skin.

Love your sleeping bag, I say, but do not trust it.

Lightning

Here’s hoping it never strikes twice

I HAVE A DEEP, incapacitating fear of lightning. On occasions too numerous to count I’ve actually, involuntarily, shrieked aloud at the terror of being struck down by a shimmering electric bolt from the sky.

The first such instance occurred the summer I was eight. My sister, grandmother, and I were alone at our cottage on a lake in Ontario. It’s a great old wooden barn of a place, a hundred years old and drafty, surrounded by pines and junipers and blueberry bushes. It could burn down easily—the cottage and the whole island with it.

One night it decided to storm. My sister and I crawled into bed with Granny while long, terrible spears of lightning lit up the sky like daylight, one after another. The thunder was deafening and constant. Through a screen door that opened onto a veranda, we watched a boathouse on the opposite shore take a bolt to the roof and catch fire. I was speechless with horror, envisioning our doomed evacuation should our cottage go up in flames. ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø, a solid crash of thunder shook the house. Then someone screamed, a long, fearsome howl. It was me.

In the morning, we inspected the damage. A 60-foot white pine, with a fresh smoldering scar through the bark, lay wedged between the kitchen and the laundry shed, having barely missed both.

Twenty-two years later, lightning no longer scares me when I’m safe inside four walls (cars count), but catch me outside as a storm moves in and the reflexive terror is always the same. With the first fork comes a silent dread, then a panicky, futile attempt to plot my getaway, followed by the grand finale: my scream.

Jumping

Sometimes the scariest thing isn’t out there, it’s inside you

IT’S NOT THAT I’M AFRAID OF FALLING; it’s that I’m tempted—unbearably, almost irresistibly, tempted—to take a leap. I don’t know how or where this developed, but at some point I realized that, whenever I was on a rooftop, all I wanted to do was take a run and then a jump, and feel myself sailing through empty space. I’m not afraid of the emptiness below; I’m afraid of my lack of fear. Some necessary inhibition that most children acquire never seemed to take hold in me.

Fear is, of course, the most irrational, even unreasonable of impulses: Heights and depths are what I tell myself I crave. I grew up in a house on a lonely mountain ridge. I drive, by choice, along ill-paved mountain roads in Ethiopia, Bhutan, Big Sur—a huge drop, and certain death, on one side of me. Yet none of that unnerves me like a hotel room with a terrace, which invites me to go out and look over the wall, see the cars down below, and imagine how I could turn my life around (and the lives of those around me) with a single radical act.

It’s bewildering to me that what I fear is entirely within my control. A few months ago, I gave myself up to fate by driving through the pitch-black mountains of Yemen, a precipice on one side, the man at the wheel furiously chewing qat to keep himself awake. Kidnappers prey on foreigners in those peaks, and teenagers waving large guns occasionally loomed out of the dark to flaunt their power at us. I was ready to surrender. But put me on a rock, a ledge, and all I want to do is act, irreversibly. I’m torn the way you are torn when drawn to a woman you know will undo you. I don’t want to get too close because I want to get close too much. I feel, I suppose, something of what an addict feels.

My phobia of heights is inherently different from the fear of spiders, or of cats or crowds, because what I’m afraid of is not what some malign outside threat will do to me; it’s what I will do to it. What fear can be so abject, and so impossible to cure, as the fear of who you really are, deep down?

Armadillos

Some say they’re cute. I say they’re evil.

THEY COME IN THE NIGHT, up from their burrows, out of prehistory, little sinister dinosaurs from South America. Across Mexican arroyo and Louisiana swamp they’ve traveled, out of the woods and into our Florida backyard, where they dig divots in the lawn, scuffing, snuffling, poking, as if looking for lost change. Genetic freaks—all born in sets of identical quadruplets, and highly susceptible to leprosy—they look half insect, half humanoid. Body of a pill bug, head of one of those poor kids who age too fast. They give my wife, H.B., the creeps.

For me the repugnance is more personal. Back in my single days as a nightlife reporter in Tallahassee I was “Barmadillo,” my byline appearing under a cartoon rendering of an inebriated armadillo. Now I’m just a totem assassin. A typical armadillo whack goes like this: I’m in my pj’s and rubber boots, down on my hands and knees under our deck. My right arm is thrust to the shoulder into a freshly dug burrow. I have a nine-banded armadillo by the tail.

It chirrups and grunts—”Nyuck nyuck, nyuck nyuck“—ratcheting itself deeper into the earth. In its element, the beast is immensely strong, like a rototiller run amok, headed for China.

“Golf club!” I say to H.B., who’s standing by with varmint tools.

I shove the club blade underneath the ‘dillo, then twist and pull. Out it comes like a bad tooth.

And it is hideous, writhing in the flashlight beam, a wizened Piglet far gone into leather and S&M. It scrabbles at my arm with its claws—the horror!—and I let go.

Breaking cover, it corners the house at a gallop, then cowers under H.B.’s car in the gravel drive. H.B. fetches her keys, starts the car, and begins to back up. Alas for Dasypus novemcinctus, its tendency to leap straight up when startled makes it synonymous with roadkill. There’s a clunk and a crunch, and the stricken ‘dillo makes one last dash, trailing viscera.

Suddenly one of our four dogs swoops in and snatches it up in a great mouthful and lopes off into the woods. Silence, and then the terrible scraping of tooth on nubby bone. In the morning, cranky with lack of sleep, we find the armadillo half buried atop a heaped-up ziggurat of dirt like a Lord of the Flies idol, the dogs arrayed in attitudes of worship. Damn. It didn’t have to go down like that.

Lima Beans

Is there anything more sinister than this hateful legume?

IT’S EASY TO BE TERRIFIED OF SPIDERS and dizzying heights and getting lost in a guano-filled cave, but it takes a certain neurotic genius, I submit, to be brought to clammy fear by the genus Phaseolus, that leguminous plant species commonly known as the lima bean.

My lima bean phobia dates back to a family dinner in my very early youth. That greasy little veggie looked to me like some slippery bivalve from under the sea, of an unhealthy gray-green color at that, and was therefore almost certain to be just as strange-tasting.

Still, I might have managed to choke my portion down as I obediently did the fried liver and other disgusting substances that every kid must learn to live with, were it not for the emotional vortex in which I was first forced to deal with the challenge of the lima bean. That dinner was presided over by my father, just home for the weekend from his job a hundred miles away in Toronto. Our attendance was mandatory, in the way of a roll call. But as we kids dutifully assembled in our places at the dining table, my oldest brother, Mike, was missing.

This threw my father, never exactly serene, into a rage. Half an hour later Mike finally straggled in from whatever diversion had warped his sense of time. Dad banished him from the dinner table amid a fusillade of threats and general contumely, followed by the sickening silence that always settles over the scene of a public execution. I stared down, head bowed, at my plate, and sublimated my roiling emotions onto my lima beans.

Mastodons in the root cellar, fire, heartburn 40,000 years before Pepto-Bismol—primitive man had much to be afraid of. But primitive man probably never came face to face with an ominous kidney-shaped legume. If he had, I bet he’d have developed a fluttery stomach and a desire to flee the vicinity, like me. After all these decades, a lima bean has never passed my lips. But I know what they taste like, without ever having tasted one. They taste like fear.

Ticks

They’ve come to suck your blood—and that’s not the worst of it

NOT TOO LONG AGO, I picked an engorged tick up off the floor of my kitchen, thinking it was a stray chocolate chip. It only took a moment for me to see more clearly the minuscule legs and the hideous crease down the underside, but the idea that I had mistaken a tick for something edible freaked me out for days. Because now that I’ve had my midlife mortality crisis and come to terms with just about every fear I used to have (and they were legion), the only one left is ticks.

I have dogs, the best of which is, unfortunately, a golden retriever. A golden retriever is a paradise for ticks—lots of hair to hide in. During tick season here in California, sometimes we see two or three dark-brown ticks crawling around the top of the dog’s head looking for a place to attach. That’s repulsive enough, but it’s the ones who found a spot, ate their fill, and dropped off that I worry about, lying there in the pattern of an oriental rug, waiting to be stepped on.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to find anyone who defends ticks. Spiders and houseflies and rattlesnakes and killer bees and even maggots and leeches have their fans, who inform the rest of us about how useful, well adapted, or beautifully designed their preferred creature actually is—but the only thing you ever hear about ticks is that they carry Lyme disease. It is typical of the malevolence of ticks that the carrier is too small to notice until after she has delivered her insidious message.

Ticks seem to exist for themselves alone. They are ugly as nymphs and grossly disgusting as engorged adults. They live only to reproduce, which females do by dropping thousands of larvae and then dying. They don’t take a meal and move on, like mosquitoes; they dangle by their mouths and get intimate. When feeding, they are motionless and passive. The worst thought when you find a tick in your hair is that it’s been there awhile, that it drank your blood without your even realizing it. You have to ask, in the parade of extinctions, why can’t we trade ticks for something we prefer, like black rhinos or snow leopards?

It happens to be summer now in California, too dry for ticks. I have some breathing room. I might even go for a walk one of these days. While I’m out there, I will visualize a world without ticks. It will be just like our world, only better.

Whitewater

Just because the boat floats doesn’t mean you will

AFTER YEARS OF TAKING FAST WATER FOR GRANTED, I learned to fear the ironic power of river rapids early last spring. The red inflatable kayak I was paddling caught a sharp rock at the top of a sizable and noisy chute coursing through the middle of an Oregon stretch of the Owyhee River, and began to sink.

In an instant I was sucked under the rock and shot over the waterfall, well beneath the surface. The shock of being pulled so quickly under the water precluded taking a decent breath, so by the time I felt the bottom of the Owyhee beneath my feet, I was already hurting for air. I looked around and realized that I was actually standing on the bottom of the river, surrounded by a surreal volume of luminous and silvery fat bubbles. I looked up to see the surface and the churning whitewater five feet above my head. I was being pummeled by a variety of powerful hits from each side and felt a consistent downward pressure on my helmet. Though I was wearing a life preserver and trying to swim, I realized that I was not rising to the surface.

Everything about the experience was dreamlike. The situation conjured no panic, and even the realization that the air-fat kayak was also being held down beside me, even the strange recall of interviews with people who’d come back from near-drowning episodes to report that the experience was not unlike going to sleep, caused a sensation beyond an abiding wonderment. I just stood there, thinking that here, beneath a river in Oregon most people had never heard of, a hundred miles from anything much more than a few earmarked steers—surrounded by the irony of gigantic white balls full of air—I would die.

I was egested from the hole as powerfully as I’d been swallowed. I bounced off six or seven rocks as I rode the rapids on my back, and I began to hear calls of concern from the others. I eventually found a conical rock I could hug downriver, and I remember thinking that no matter what, I would never let it go.

After I was helped onto the bank, I tried to imagine getting back into the red kayak. The thought sent a reverberating sensation that rattled the backs of my shaking legs. I’d once considered river whitewater no more treacherous than a roller coaster—but that had all changed now: I was afraid.

Bats

They may be worth protecting, but they can still creep you out

MAYBE YOU’RE ONE OF THOSE bat-loving types who lectures people that bats are actually very clean animals and they eat half their weight in insects every sundown and it’s a false slander that they get tangled in women’s hair. Batophilia is not that uncommon these days, as evidenced by all the people heading into the flying mammals’ very lairs: high-tech cavers armed with headlamps, special caving ropes, and the ability to use the word spelunk without laughing.

But back in that stone age when all outdoor equipment was bought at the store, caving was an amateur’s game. I was introduced to it in the late sixties by my friend Donald, whose grandmother had a house in Sewanee, Tennessee, on the Cumberland Plateau. T-ma, as the grand dame was known, was happy to share her equipment, mostly a pile of old dented lanterns that dated, probably, from the Civil War. You filled the lantern’s bottom with carbide and added water, and once it began to make a certain unmistakable sizzle, the resulting gas—as redolent as boiling ore—was flammable.

In most Tennessee caves there are several fairly unavoidable features—the big cathedral space, the mud room, the fat man’s squeeze. On one occasion, Donald’s father, a noted heart surgeon, was struggling through a fat man’s squeeze. Dr. Eddie was also bald, and every time he’d lift his head, he’d howl as a tiny stalactite dart punctured his scalp. He exited looking like a middle-aged messiah who’d just removed a crown of thorns.

I was next in the squeeze, grinding on my elbows across a gravel floor made more comfortable by a freezing stream of cave water trickling through. The spare plastic bag of carbide I kept in my pants pocket had rubbed open from all the wiggling, and my hip began to sizzle, then to warm up, and finally to burn hot as fire. I’d begun to hump pretty damn fast, squirming in a panic, as my mind foresaw a suffocating gas buildup—or, more likely, a Jerry Bruckheimer-like explosion—when a concerned Dr. Eddie bent down to shine his flame into the tunnel. “Hey, Jack, are you having any—” Boom!

Turns out there was a lot more air in the tunnel than I thought, because right then and there, ten cave bats decided to flutter through on their way out. The sudden chaos of fur—when I think about it, there must have been a hundred bats—encouraged me to discover the virgin pleasure of pressing one’s face into frigid gravel water. Fortunately, bats have that radar thing, so all one thousand of them easily found the space above my prostrate body, although it must have been difficult scrambling down my back given the vibrations caused by all the subaqueous screaming.

When I finally got out, everyone was tending to his own suffering. Dr. Eddie was stanching his head with a rag. No one cared about my encounter with ten thousand bats. Donald’s brother accused me of exaggerating. He said he’d seen only a couple of bats. I don’t know. In my mind—then and now—my ordeal resembled that encyclopedia picture of Carlsbad Caverns at dusk when a million bats roar out like demonic nuncios in a funnel of black terror.

And yet, I still cave. Because even though I fear bats, mine is an exquisitely nuanced phobia. It’s not truly activated unless I’m in a cave and I see a bunch of bats, and then my pants catch on fire.

Being Buried Alive

A convincing case that it’s the worst way to go

VIVISEPULTUROPHOBIA—the fear of being buried alive—is more sophisticated, more existentially bleak, than claustrophobia. It nullifies the most basic human egocentrism—that the universe gives a damn about our whereabouts. Rest assured: You will never be found, certainly not in this lifetime.

As a 15-year-old, camping near the Dead Sea, I blithely explored a series of caves, some natural, some clandestine cisterns carved out by Israelite zealots 2,000 years ago. More than two decades later, my throat closes up in panic at the memory of crawling on my stomach through lightless, birth-canal-narrow sandstone tunnels.

A cave is all well and good, but it still gives you room to flail, scream, and claw with bloody fingers on the rock walls. How much worse to be immobilized? Hemmed in by rock or sand—or even ice. Apparently, glaciologists in Norway have come up with a novel way to gather data: They carve tunnels into the core of a glacier using hot water, then climb through this frigid warren—hundreds and hundreds of feet down—amassing information. They have to work fast; in short order, the enormous pressure of the glacial mass overhead reduces each capacious passage to walkway to crawl space to eventually nothing at all.

Pressure is the force that separates the men from the boys, phobiawise. Think about the cumulative weight of that sand, earth, ice, what have you. It only starts with suffocation: the slow, inexorable squeezing of air from your lungs. Take it to the next level by contemplating the uncomfortable constriction of the thorax, the rush of blood out to the extremities, your hands and feet swollen and full to bursting. And what is that sound? Why, it’s the groan of your pelvis buckling under. See it all clearly as your eyes emerge -like from their sockets, the lids pried open like the gaps in a fat man’s shirt. And there you are, marking each torment as it comes. A martyrdom too gruesome even for the most devout saints.

But that’s just me.

Snakes

They lurk, they bite, they haunt your picnics forever

IT WAS THE SUMMER OF 1972, rural Illinois. A picnic along the banks of the Mississippi. My friend Elizabeth and I, both 17, were forced to attend as a disciplinary measure. We were wearing gauzy peasant shirts and sullen expressions, and were nursing stupendous, temple-clutching hangovers. While the rest of my family bustled around lighting grills and slapping hamburger into patties, Elizabeth and I winced our way barefoot down to the water’s edge to plunk stones into the current and say scathing things about my mother.

“She ought to try drinking a pint of lime vodka,” Elizabeth said darkly, “and see how it feels.” Behind her, at head height, something shifted on the low-hanging branch of a desiccated tree.

One of the worst sounds a person can hear is the heavy thump of a big snake dropping to the ground at her feet. One of the worst sights? Same snake, churning around in a wide circle, opening its mouth to reveal a pale-white interior, vaguely plush, like upholstery.

Our loyalty to each other was such that we engaged in a brief but violent shoving match, cartoon characters trying to get through a doorway. The cottonmouth unfurled itself and wound past us—four feet long and stout as a man’s wrist, but oddly flattened, like something molded out of clay and pressed into the ground. It slithered down the bank and into the river, lickety-split, like a strand of spaghetti pulled into a mouth.

Thirty years later, I experience startle responses not only to snakes but to lengths of rope, suspicious-looking sticks, and garden hoses, especially black ones draped over a fence or log. I am also spooked by snakish areas, including but not limited to grass, warm roads, stone walls, dirt paths, fields, old barns, sidewalks (trust me), tree branches, and, of course, water.

Being vigilant has worked pretty well, although not perfectly. Once I picked up a garden hose, after carefully making sure it actually was a garden hose, and there was a snake underneath. Elizabeth, on the other hand, recovered just fine and even went on to touch some kind of constrictor with a forefinger during a college biology class. Her professor said we couldn’t have seen a cottonmouth that day; too far north.

That’s what my father said, too, when we came racing up to the picnic table, hysterical and shuddering.

“Oh, boy,” he said agreeably. “Water snakes are big buggers. Scare a guy half to death.”

My mother, squinting as she flipped the burgers, cigarette corked in her mouth, turned to consider us, green-gilled and sweaty.

“People who drink too much see snakes,” she said.

Stars

There’s nothing like the universe to make you feel puny and afraid

INSIDE THE CITY, the night sky is more or less a backdrop, benign and one-dimensional. It comes on predictably, like the streetlights, and I pretty much ignore it. There is the moon. Some planets. That spread-eagled hunter who likes to show off his “belt.”

Then I go backpacking. Without warning, the stars go thick as gnats and the blackness has ominous depth. You can see the other side of our galaxy. The sudden hugeness overhead unhinges me. I’ll look up and practically drop my ramen. It’s The Universe. What frightens me, I think, is the abrupt, mind-slamming shift in scale. Like Alice after the “EAT ME” cake, I am instantly, alarmingly diminished—tiny to the point of disappearing. The longer I look up, the smaller and more vulnerable I feel, dwarfed by something huge and unknowable: God, the evil in men’s hearts, infinity. I suppose, on some level, that the fear I feel is a fear of death, of insignificance and nonexistence. Or else I’m just a sissy.

Falling stars in particular unnerve me. Forces are at work out there, and they are not human. If there’s that kind of weirdness in space, God only knows what’s in the woods ten feet away. I spook easily in the wilderness, and I blame the stars.

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My fellow Americans, as your President, my most trusted advisors tell me that real leadership begins by following their advice on what’s good for America. I am happy to do so, because they also tell me that it’s the best advice available. And frankly, that’s good enough for me, which coming from me really means something, because I am, after all, the President.

Inspirational conservation messages from our President, freshly chopped out of virgin pine forests and visible from 20,000 feet

Say “No” to sloth! Say “Yes” to energy produced by the unemployed.

Artist’s rendering of the soon-to-be-completed logging road through Central Park

Your tax dollars at work: the animal pipeline and Operation PAVE in action in Glacier National Park

The time for bipartisanship and civil debate is behind us. It’s always easier to tear down than to build up, and that is why I’m tearing down as much as I can. Energy, conservation, preservation, the environment—let’s do away with slogans and catchphrases and set national policy by humbly listening to the loudest voices.


These voices tell me that one of my dreams for America is to buy Oregon, rename it New California, and convert the “old” California into a maximum-security federal prison with a very tall fence around it. This will end the so-called California energy crisis, relieve our overcrowded jails, create thousands of jobs for screws and matrons and executioners, and save $383 trillion that will go toward a retroactive tax cut in the final weeks of my first term, allowing every American citizen to buy or lease the biggest SUV he or she can find—and incentivizing the oil industry to explore even in places where there is no oil!

It is also my dream—not the one featuring J. Lo, or the other one, where I win Poppy’s respect by getting a C-plus average at Yale—to see new logging roads crisscrossing our national parks and nature preserves, maybe even your own backyard. Because wherever Big Lumber needs to go, right now, to turn those green forests into greenbacks for the political action committees that have brought our political system to the state it is in today, is as much a part of the American Way as wood. Or there would be no Popsicle sticks or baseball bats. In fact, even as I speak, surveyors from the Army Corps of Engineers are staking out the symbolic logging road to be hacked from one end to the other of New York’s Central Park—too long a scandalously underutilized forestry resource.

And that’s not all. We need to confront America’s energy needs head-on with bold new initiatives, such as harnessing the nation’s unemployed for human power to manually turn the wheels of the thousands of electric miniturbines and treadmill generators planned for installation in parks, picnic grounds, campsites, and other useless spaces nationwide, generating billions of kilowatts of free electrical energy to keep our video games, illuminated billboards, and shoe-buffing machines—our very lifeblood—humming. Think of it: The more homeless, unfortunate, and unemployed among us, the more free electrical power!


As your President, and, for that matter, mine too, I am told that I am dedicated to solving the problem of our increasingly endangered freshwater supply. Mere half-measures may suffice for civil rights and education, but not for this. We must eliminate America’s outdated fetish for fresh, clean water within our lifetime, if not sooner. This would set industry free to turn every river and lake into the toxic brown sludge that says, loud and clear, “Costs way down, profits way up!” And it can be done, once our drinking and all water needs are met by the most plentiful and renewable water source on earth: tangy, sodium-, iodine-, and manganese-rich water from the sea. Try one sip: You’ll want more, and more, and more.

And let’s not ignore nuclear power. I think that’s spelled “nucular,” but statesmen can agree to disagree. The menace of a nuclear meltdown and runaway radiation, my fellow citizens, is exceeded only by the specter of giant utility companies being barred from using this cheap form of energy. That is why a national lottery should be conducted as the only fair way to assign the locations of all new nuclear power plants and waste storage facilities. My National Lottery Director, the former Secretary of State of Florida, reports that the results have come in even before the lottery has been held. Due to an amazing statistical quirk, she informs me that the states that voted Democratic in the last federal election will soon have a slew of nukes.


Finally, your President has our national wildlife refuges lined up in his sights. I intend to sign off as soon as I can find a pen on Operation PAVE (Protect America’s Valuable Ecology), a program already mobilizing to cover millions of square miles of fragile tundra, grasslands, marshes, and other wildlife habitats with a protective six-inch coating of fireproof asphalt. The prevention of broken buffalo ankles, skinned moose knees, and cut grizzly bear paws through the elimination of all rocks, bumps, gopher holes, and other hazards of nature can only be imagined.
Gas pipelines, oil pipelines, water pipelines—I think of these as the varicose veins of the economy. And I am now set to augment them with a new animal pipeline, sealing our wild four-footed friends into an all-steel, 2,000-mile-long habitat to keep them snug and safe from the strip-mining, oil drilling, and deforestation that I plan to get going, toot sweet.


Now I am overdue for my nap. But I promise you, my fellow Americans, and all you foreigners out there who are not yet Americans: I will sleep better knowing that I have left it up to you to carry out my responsibilities. Good luck, and good night.

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