If it wasn’t for the photo Uncle Dick took, I wouldn’t even remember what those two Canadian guys looked like, and I can’t recall their names.

Which is odd, since I still have vivid memories of them and the 33-mile Alaska-to-­Yukon hike I did in the 1970s, on the Chilkoot Trail. The opening stage of the thing: a long, welcome-to-low-self-esteem uphill out of Dyea that to my ten-year-old legs felt like an assault on the Matterhorn. My brother, Mike, and I breaking camp on the foggy second morning, after Dick temporarily shut down with a nasty migraine (probably embellished a little to force a lesson in self-reliance on us boys).

For all the milestone memories, though, it’s the fleeting yet intense friendship we forged with the Canadians that has remained central to my recollections of that trip. They were buddies, maybe late twenties, on active duty in the Canadian Armed Forces. One was dark haired with a mustache; the other was lighter and clean-shaven. Friendly, rugged, wisecracking. To me they were like the Canuck version of Starsky and Hutch, the kind of cool guys I imagined myself knocking around with someday. Only these two were real.

After we bumped into them on the trail, my uncle mentioned that he’d brought a pistol for self-defense against bears.

“Keep that firearm buried in the bottom of your pack,” one of the guys calmly warned near the border station at the top of the pass. “You’re not supposed to bring that over to the Canadian side.”

During the next three days, they became our best pals—and then we never saw them again. After riding the train with us from Ben­nett Lake and shaking hands outside the campsite we shared in Whitehorse, they were gone from our lives forever. Except that they weren’t really. In the decades since, every conversation about the hike that Dick, Mike, and I have had inevitably swings around to “those two Canadian military guys.”

Our farewell went down long before there was e-mail, much less Instagram. But that’s not why we didn’t keep in touch. No matter how much they meant to us in the moment, our Canadian pals turned out to be BFFNs—best friends for now.

The phenomenon of intense new friendships dissolving into memories as fast as they formed has repeated for me over the years. A guy named Charles from Los Angeles who I fell in with on a trek through Mexico’s Copper Canyon. Crew members aboard a sailboat named Swan in the North Sea. An unrepentant Austrian named Eckhard. During a two-day ascent of Mount Apo in the Philippines, he borrowed half my gear, food, and cash, repaying me only by somehow being the most charming and hilarious freeloader in Southeast Asia.

Each of these people—all of these friendships—were deeply important to me. Yet each expired at about the same time as the backcountry permit that led to them. I know that some serendipitous travel encounters blossom into long-term bonds, even marriages, but I’m not interested in those. It’s the loved-and-quickly-lost variety I find intriguing. And kinda sad, because they’re so fleeting.

“Short-term friendships, or ‘activity friendships,’ are usually built on the experience that is being shared, rather than a deeper connection between individuals,” says Suzanne Degges-White, chair of the department of counseling and higher education at Northern Illinois University. After I contact Degges-White to ask what accounts for all the BFFNs littering my past, she offers one of those explanations that reduces everything to primal biological imperatives. As a Sunday humanist, I always find these dissatisfying but tricky to refute.

“Being thrown into new and unpredictable circumstances can generate the need to build what could be considered a social security support net,” she says. “Evolution has programmed us to build and rely on such systems when we’re working toward a new or challenging goal, so we are more willing to establish relationships with people we might never have befriended in our everyday lives.”

Then there’s the matter of personal space. At home we tend to behave like NFL linemen, aggressively guarding against territory breaches. That isn’t always possible when you’re crammed with strangers on a dive boat or in a mountain hut. Once our carefully maintained personal walls are penetrated, Degges-White says, “our brains are tricked into assuming we are also more emotionally intimate and connected to the people who are surrounding our physical selves.”

In other words, temporary relationships are to genuine friendships what golden flavoring is to movie popcorn—a sneaky facsimile of the real thing that gets us by.

There don’t appear to have been any peer-reviewed studies published on the subject of short-term friendships—­surprising, given that serious research has been carried out in recent years to prove that electric fans can help keep you cool in hot weather—but Degges-White isn’t the only person who’s spent time pondering them. Another keen observer of shallow roots is Irene Levine.

For nearly ten years, Levine wrote a column called for Psychology Today. Until 2017, she ran the popular Friendship Blog. Levine says factors that drive quick friendships include convenience and proximity. She also adds a splash of cold water on short-term friendships, describing what makes them as flimsy as my widely discredited camp-stove pancakes.

“When travelers return home, they have more commitments and less time and opportunity to nurture new friendships,” she told me in an e-mail. “In essence, the friendship has lost the convenience it once had.”

This makes sense, but the reduction of emotional connections to grinding logistics and antiseptic neurological synapses is alienating to me. What about those Canadian military guys? After the passage of so much time, that experience feels like it deserves more than a we’re-just-wired-this-way clinical breakdown.

Levine offers an explanation. “More than the friendships per se, it sounds like these were seminal trips or memorable accomplishments for you, and these individuals were part of the context of those meaningful experiences,” she says. It’s a little unsettling: the gist is that every special relationship in my life has been all about me, not them.

One big problem with adventure friend­ships is the follow-up. BFFNs can discover that bonds developed on the trail don’t always hold up if you reconnect in regular life, when you’re likely to find out you have less in common than you thought.

No post-trip reunion I’m aware of induced more awkward disappointment than one that involved four travelers who met some years back on the slopes of Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica. A pair of backpackers I know—my wife, Joyce, and her friend Melissa—bonded with a couple from the Southwest. By day they hiked through the forest while macaws, toucans, and parrots soared overhead like psychedelic apparitions. Back at the guest lodge, they debriefed over drinks and dinners. First-timers in Central America, Joyce and Melissa weren’t just thrilled that their new friends seemed so cool—and had a rental car to share—but that they knew so much about the local flora and fauna.

“We run a bird shop back home,” the couple told them. “If you’re ever in the area, you have to stop by!”

An impromptu reunion happened a few years later, when Joyce and Melissa traveled to their friends’ home state. The experience didn’t exactly match their sepia memories.

“We dropped into their store unan­nounced,” Joyce says. “The aisles were really cramped. The fluorescent lighting was dingy. But the worst was that all these incredible birds we’d seen flying around Costa Rica were in cages, and the whole place smelled like pet shit. No one knew what to say to each other. We left pretty quickly.”

Despite stories like this, most travelers seem to have a positive view of short-term friendships. Online message boards dedicated to the topic heave with perfumed tributes to ephemeral relationships that have en­­riched treks ­everywhere from Borneo to Belgium.

“I met a great person in Nicaragua who is 19,” reads a comment from somebody called ayngelina. “At 33 I would never be friends with her at home, the differences would be too great, but traveling we have so much in common.”

A traveler named Stephanie posted that she’d met someone in Colombia who “felt like a long lost best friend, despite being Peruvian-born and living in Switzerland. The immediate openness and willing to connect was there from the start.”

The shortest BFFNship I’ve had lasted all of 30 minutes. One late-fall afternoon in Washington State, I was hiking alone in the Cascades when I crossed paths with a woman in her early twenties. She was nearing the end of a big undertaking: solo-hiking the entire 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail.

She told me she was on the journey to get closer to God. My day hike hadn’t been intended as a spiritual quest, but it happened that I was in the middle of a complicated personal period. I can’t recall how the conversation unfolded—I might have mentioned that I hadn’t been near a church since my mother’s funeral—but during that half-hour, I said things that I hadn’t said aloud in years, if ever. It was an absorbing and perplexing connection, one I still value with an almost mystical attachment, partly for what happened when it was over.

Not two minutes after the woman turned to keep going up the trail and I headed down, I felt more than heard a powerful whoosh in the trees behind me. I looked and saw an enormous barred owl settling onto a cedar branch no more than ten feet from me. Eye level. Broad daylight.

We stared at each other for an eerie, timeless interlude, absorbed in some primal tie amid the quiet of the forest. The second the idea of reaching for my camera entered my mind, the owl swiveled its head 180 degrees and flew off backward with a nearly silent flap of its huge wings. I was heartbroken. Then I realized something: I hadn’t even asked the woman her name.

If there is a literary patron saint of BFFNs, it’s Lynn Schooler, an Alaskan guide who famously wrote about his enduring friendship with photographer Michio Hoshino in 2002’s , one of my favorite adventure books.

The story of their developing relationship, and of Schooler and Hoshino’s pursuit of Southeast Alaska’s mythic glacier bear, provides the narrative arc of the story. But it’s a toss-off line early on that stuck in a dark little corner of my mind.

“The trip’s end was quickly approaching, and one of the harsher realities of the guide business, I’d learned, is that most friendships are temporary,” Schooler wrote. “Contacts with clients, no matter how companionable, dissipate quickly after the customary end-of-trip dinner, drinks and handshakes.”

When I reach Schooler on the phone, he’s game to reflect on what John Lennon called “people and things that went before.”

“There is a very sad and tragic element to it,” he says. “It’s definitely collateral damage to the lifestyle of being a guide.”

Like many of us, Schooler has pursued a few real-world friendships with BFFNs but generally found them unsustainable. He tells me about a dull dinner he had in Paris with two French photographers who he’d guided for a thrilling week.

“We had great grizzly encounters and got wonderful photos and knocked their whole assignment out of the park,” he says. “But in their home, you’re in a completely different place. They’d experienced me as a wild Alaska guide. In Paris or San Diego or Salt Lake City, I’m just another middle-aged guy.”

To Schooler, the general rule is this: the greater the initial adventure, the more ill-fated the follow-up is likely to be.

“You have a once-in-a-lifetime expe­rience together, and that’s what you have in common,” he says. “How do we add to that when we already kind of peaked in the first week?”

The Blue Bear concludes on a reflective note. Before Schooler and Hoshino could find their elusive quarry, the photographer was killed by a brown bear in Kamchatka. Life is short. Friendships shorter. Schooler and I hang up without ceremony, and I feel like I’ve just met and lost another BFFN.

Afterward, something Schooler said about bonding with strangers while watching humpback whales clicked in my mind. Degges-White was right—our brains do get tricked in unfamiliar circumstances. Just maybe not the way she imagines.

The familiar form that BFFNs assume makes us think of road relationships as genuine friendships, ones we feel obligated to maintain, which is followed by guilt when we fail to do so. Ignoring a friend says as much about you as it does the other person. I think that’s a big part of what I’d been struggling with.

In fact, short-term companions are elements of a far wilder and more enigmatic ecosystem that we can’t possibly hang on to. Whether they’re from Peru, Paris, or the Philippines, carrying BFFNs back home with us is no more realistic than bringing home a tropical bird, a humpback whale, or a messenger owl.

After talking to Schooler, I phone Uncle Dick in Ohio to ask what he remembers most about the Canadians. “Real nice fellas,” he says. “They took a genuine interest in you two boys.”

Dick sends me a photo I don’t recall ever seeing. In it, Mike and I are posing with the Canadians in front of their car at our campsite outside Whitehorse. Gear stored in colorful stuffsacks is strapped to the top of the old Datsun. Dick captured the moment just before those guys drove out of our lives forever.

“I had their names written down somewhere, but I lost all that stuff years ago,” he tells me. “You can read the license of their car in the picture. Ontario plates. Maybe you could track them down with that somehow. I’ll bet the Canadians are a lot more friendly about that sort of thing than we are in this country.”

I’ll bet they are, too, I say, promising to let him know if I manage to turn anything up. But the truth is I’m not interested in any more detective work. I don’t need to find the Canadians—or Copper Canyon Charles or the crew of the Swan or Eckhard the Austrian freeloader—to know that I’ve finally got out of this march of memories what I need.

I was there. Nobody’s waiting for me to go back. Whatever it was that once spoke to me has long since flown away.

Chuck Thompson () wrote about totem-pole artist Roy Vickers in October 2018.

The post Why Outdoor Friendships Don’t Last appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Chief Roy Henry Vickers wants my shirt. I can’t blame him. Faded green checkered Wrangler Retro. Mother-of-pearl snaps. Worn, not dingy. Everybody loves this shirt. Me most of all. I wear it whenever I think cameras might be around.

“You know what you’re supposed to do when you’re in a chief’s house and he says he likes something you have?” Vickers asks.

Some distant raven song bends a note in my mind. I take off the shirt and hand it over.

“All yours,” I say, dying a little inside. Vickers grabs it without hesitation.

“You’ve just done something very traditional in this part of the world,” he says, running a thumb over those flashy buttons I’ll never unsnap again.

“I feel totally authentic,” I say.

This gets a big laugh out of Vickers—pretty much any joke gets a big laugh out of Vickers—because he’s just finished telling me that there’s no such thing as authentic. Also, he really digs the shirt. As Roy has said, “I’m an Indian cowboy.”

If it seems unlikely that a 72-year-old First Nations chief and one of —who happens to be in the midst of carving a replica of a famous totem pole, which he calls the biggest and most intimidating challenge of his career—would take time to pilfer a piece of shitkicker plaid off a visiting whitey, you don’t know much about Roy Vickers.

Or about this part of the world, a First Nations outpost in northern British Columbia called the Skeena Valley. Here, the difference between a gift and a theft isn’t always so easy to discern, and the payoff can take generations to play out.

For a work of art considered to be one of the most aesthetically advanced of its type, a surprising amount of mystery surrounds the totem pole that has consumed Roy Vickers for decades.

People can’t even agree what to call it. In Vancouver, at the (MOA)—where the pole commands pride of place amid one of the world’s most important collections of Northwest Coast Native art—curators refer to it as the Raven Pole, because there’s a discernible image of a raven (along with two eagles) on its face.

Originally it was 21 feet tall, but because of damage to the bottom section it’s now less than 18. Vickers insists that the totem, which has a distinctive 11-foot-long beak, depicts not a raven but a mythical bird known as a hok hok, a fearsome creature that crushes human skulls. Lately he’s taken to calling it the Hosumdas Totem—hosumdas being a term used to denote the head chieftain of B.C.’s Oweekeno people.

No one knows who carved the pole or when it was raised. The MOA says circa 1890. Vickers guesses it could date back to the mid-1800s. But at this point it’s impossible to be sure.

There’s also disagreement about how the pole got from its location near the village of Oweekeno to the MOA. The museum’s website says it acquired the pole from the British Columbia Totem Pole Preservation Committee in 1956. (The committee, now defunct, was a partnership of business and academic interests, formed to purchase and preserve totem poles around the province.) It wasn’t put on display until many years later. Vickers and the eldest person in Oweekeno—his ninety-something Auntie Evelyn, who happens to be one of 50 people who speak the critically endangered Oweekeno language—believe that someone, possibly loggers, may have taken the pole from the village in the 1960s.

When I first heard about the pole, it supposedly had been stolen around the turn of the century. This is not implausible. , and subsequent amendments, became the tacitly genocidal legal instrument through which the Canadian government suppressed First Nations cultures across the country until reforms began in the 1950s. In addition to tearing families apart and forcing children to attend residential schools, the Indian Act outlawed the custom of potlatch, a gift-giving feast that included the raising of totem poles, crucial to Northwest Coast indigenous identity.

The decades that followed, roughly 1875 until the 1930s, are referred to as the Great Scramble—a period when the landmark museums of America and Europe, and a handful of private collectors, ransacked the Pacific coast, plundering almost all known First Nations art. With their exotic representations of ravens, eagles, bears, killer whales, beavers, frogs, and other fauna, totem poles have long transfixed outsiders. In his book , Douglas Cole grimly describes the white world’s locust determination to “salvage in the last hour a residue of a dying culture.”

One thing everyone does agree on is that the Hosumdas Totem originally served as a house-entry pole for Oweekeno chief Simon Walkus, who died in 1913. Like the unknowable designs carved into the pole itself, the rest remains an intricate puzzle.

In the 1970s, Vickers visited the MOA regularly to study the art of his ancestors. Each time, he felt an inexplicable pull from the pole. Something about the abnormal artwork—except for the raven and eagle faces, the pole is mostly free-flowing, abstract designs—and the remnant spirit inside the wood wouldn’t let him go.

“In those days, you could walk right up and touch it,” Vickers remembers. “Growing up in Kitkatla, we used to climb on the old totem poles. No one told us not to. No one said they were sacred.”

In 1994, an unexpected development sent Vickers on what he now sees as his destined journey. After a long association with an Oweekeno family, Vickers—whose ancestry is Tsimshian, Haida, Heiltsuk, and English—was adopted into the House of Walkus, hereditary chieftains in Oweekeno. He had suddenly become the adoptive grandson of an important figure: Simon Walkus, the chief who owned the pole, which stood in front of Walkus’s house for decades.

By this time, Vickers had become a wildly successful artist. His was a tourist destination. A mini cathedral of cedar, it now draws 500,000 visitors a year from around the world. He’d created major works of art for the 1994 Commonwealth Games in Victoria and was an adviser for the opening ceremonies at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. In 2006, he received the Order of Canada, the nation’s second-highest civilian honor. His painting A Meeting of Chiefs had once been presented as an official state gift to Queen Elizabeth II. (Vickers now howls at the memory of that. “My painting, a gift to the queen of the colonizers!”) In 2018, he designed the bentwood box and all the artwork for the Grateful Dead’s 19-disc box set .

In 2014, Vickers decided he needed to do something about the pole, whose presence in the university’s museum he’d come to resent as a literal representation of cultural theft. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was then in full swing, promoting explicit acts of healing between the government and the First Nations. Petitioning the museum to repatriate the pole back to Oweekeno made sense as a symbolic gesture. But transporting the fragile wood to the region could have damaged it further.

Gradually, the idea of carving a full-size replica began taking shape. A new pole would embody a reborn spirit. It also fit the modern fashion for reconciliation. You hear that word a lot in Canada these days, though when I mention the theme to Vickers during my visit last June, his usually cheerful expression clouds over.

“Reconciliation is a political word some people have put together to mean something,” he says, standing in his open-air workshop, sounding a lot like Morgan Freeman sitting in front of the parole board in : “Rehabilitated? 
 I know what you think it means, sonny. To me it’s just a made-up word. A politician’s word.”

“It’s not even possible in this world to reconcile the cultural genocide that’s happened to our people,” Vickers says. “You can’t fix it. You can’t make cultural genocide better. What is possible, what I want, is to regenerate a new culture, a new strength for people who seem to have lost their power. It’s not lost. I’m proof.”

Vickers hadÌęthe will, but even for a man of limitless vision the way forward seemed unclear. The original pole was carved from a red cedar so massive that, Vickers estimates, it was probably 1,000 years old. In addition to permission and cost, the logistics of finding, felling, and hauling a centuries-old tree out of the dense B.C. backwoods seemed beyond his considerable abilities.

Then the spirits of the ancestors intervened—at least, that’s how Vickers sees it. On a sunny summer evening in August 2015, at a fishing lodge not far from Oweekeno, Vickers was introduced to a couple of middle-aged logging men who were in from Vancouver. Because he’s a storyteller, he began telling the strangers about the Hosumdas Totem.

“If I wanted to find a really big cedar for a totem pole, who would I need to talk to?” Vickers eventually asked.

“How big?” one of the men replied.

“About two meters in diameter,” Vickers said.

“Well, after jumping through a lot of hoops, eventually you’d have to talk to me,” the man said. “I’m Ric Slaco, vice president and chief forester at Interfor.” The Canadian company is one of the world’s largest lumber producers.

Later, when I repeat this piece of remembered dialogue to Slaco in downtown Vancouver, he says that’s exactly how it went down.

“You could just see it was something special. I bought into Roy’s dream right away,” Slaco says. “I said, ‘We’ll get a log for you.’ ”

On February 1, 2016, Interfor flew Vickers and Ted Walkus—his adoptive brother and the hereditary Oweekeno chief—into the Great Bear Rainforest to look at seven monumental cedar trees identified by field crews as totem candidates. None of the first trees were quite right—too wide, not straight enough, not
 sincere enough, to borrow from Linus Van Pelt.

“You look for a spiritual connection to the living,” Vickers says. “Each tree is like a human being, with its own personality. Same with people. Usually, something will jump out at you.”

As the men continued their search in the Sandell River Valley, the last tree they hoped to see was the most difficult to reach, requiring a tough hike. Vickers was walking on a four-times-broken, 69-year-old ankle and a couple of cracked neck vertebrae, the result of being thrown from a horse. Both eyes would soon require surgery. But when he saw the tree, which probably weighed 17,500 pounds with all its limbs, he had no doubts.

“As soon as we saw it, Ted and I put a hand on the tree and started crying,” Vickers says. “We knew it was the one.”

After the men delivered a traditional blessing, a crew moved in and dropped the ancient tree in less than an hour. To accommodate its massive girth—its widest diameter was roughly 16 feet—they doubled up on the number of thick steel cables typically used for such operations. A Sikorsky Skycrane heli-copter lifted the great log out of the forest.

By his own accounting, Vickers has carved some 30 totem poles. But when he began to examine the Hosumdas Totem—during multiple trips to the MOA, which let him in before opening hours to take measurements and photos—he noticed something he’d never before appreciated. From top to bottom, the pole has a unique sense of flow that’s different from typical pole designs, which tend to feature a stack of distinct sections.

“The artist who carved this pole was way ahead of his time,” says Vickers. “When I began trying to copy his work, it twisted my mind. This brilliant artist also had the courage to do something totally out of the ordinary. There was no carver alive who could help me understand what he did.”

Without the aid of a computer, much less tracing paper or a ruler—Vickers guesses that the carver probably did his designing with a pencil, string, and some pieces of bark—the artist had rendered a 2-D design onto a 3-D pole with supernatural accuracy.

In his workshop, with the new Hosumdas Totem about two-thirds complete, Vickers walks me around it, explaining the innovative design in musical terms. In the same way a visionary composer might juxtapose major and minor keys and sharps and flats in ways that break convention, the pole’s sections and shapes—ovoids, nested ovoids, U’s, split U’s, elongated S’s—flow together like nothing Vickers has ever seen.

“He took the totally rigid forms of Northwest Coast art and bent them to his own way of design,” Vickers says. “I am certain this pole is one of the most powerful statements a chief on this coast has ever made.”

Music has long been a big part of Vickers’s identity. In conversation, he’ll spontaneously burst into one of the elegiac songs of his ancestors. One afternoon, he picks up a custom-made guitar—featuring cool raven-shaped sound holes—and sings me a haunting version of “Drums,” Johnny Cash’s virulently anti-colonial lament, delivered from the view of “just another empty Indian.” It’s an inspiring and unsettling interlude in his work on the pole.

“A carver who doesn’t sing and dance doesn’t get it,” Vickers says.

Vickers knew he couldn’t carve the new Hosumdas pole alone. Using hook knives, chisels, and adzes to “move wood” on a giant log demands Sasquatchean strength and endurance. After a lifetime of abusing his body, Vickers has no business carrying a load of laundry down to the basement.

In the 1970s, he fractured three vertebrae after being thrown off a rodeo bronc. He broke a bone in his face, lost four teeth, and fractured vertebrae in his neck in a motocross wipeout. His oft-broken ankle finally had to be fused in 2016. In 2017, he had surgery in both eyes to repair corneal growths likely caused by excessive exposure to sun, wind, and dust.

To complete the pole, Vickers assembled a dream team of carvers. One was , a gifted Nuxalk sculptor originally from Bella Coola who makes masks that sell for well into five figures. He was brought in to help finish the pole’s raven face and beak, and to texturize the overall piece. Another recruit was an artist and instructor known throughout B.C. A Tlingit-Kaska from the Yukon, he says he had to adjust to what he refers to as the pole’s “southern style.”

“There’s only one V cut on this entire pole,” he says, pinpointing a typical difference between Tlingits and carvers down the coast. “All I did was work on the model pole the first two weeks I was here. The hardest part was figuring out the face.”

The linchpin of the operation—the first person Vickers asked for help—is a local timber framer named Matt Lewis. Vickers calls him Magic Matt, and anyone who’s ever employed the hit-or-mostly-miss services of an independent contractor quickly learns to stand in amazement at Lewis’s brute strength, feather-touch artistry, and beers-can-wait work ethic. It was Lewis who muscled out the raw form of the pole’s 11-foot beak, cutting with a Husqvarna chainsaw.

“It’s a mind-fuck to get it right,” Lewis says, marveling at the complexity of the

totem’s design. “We measured it and broke it down into sections, but this isn’t the same piece of wood as the original pole. You can spend a lot of time chasing a knot around.”

Lewis is white—his father was a conscientious objector who moved to Canada from California to escape being drafted during the Vietnam War—and his centrality to the project raises another knotty point: the question of authenticity. Vickers has heard grumblings within the community.

“No one has the nerve to say something like that to my face, but someone will tell me so-and-so said this and that about my methods,” he says. In fact, Vickers has been defending the use of chainsaws, computer-aided design, and nonindigenous carvers as far back as the 1990s, when he started using Aldus FreeHand to draw totem templates.

“To me it’s almost like one of the ancestors created that program, it’s so suited to this type of design,” he says. “I admit there was a time I felt guilty about it, but these are the tools of our time, and we utilize them for our traditional art, just as past generations used the technology available to them.”

“Our ancestors weren’t dumb,” adds Mack. “When they got steel introduced, the first thing they did was make knives and blades.”

Vicissitudes of history aside, paternalistic worries about the ethnological integrity of Native art are almost as old as the market for that art. By the 1870s, white collectors were already expressing concerns about philistine influence on aboriginal art, as though Native cultures should remain preserved in amber for the cognoscenti’s aesthetic pleasure.

“One can only shake his head sadly to see art so corrupted and debased,” wrote an 1880s travel writer named about the evolving state of the silverwork she found among Stikine carvers in Wrangell, Alaska.

A commercial artist himself, Vickers knows that the prejudices of the marketplace have scarcely changed. When I offer an example, he finishes the scenario before I can.

“If a novice indigenous carver makes a halfway decent Haida mask, he might sell it for $1,000 in a Vancouver gallery,” I say. “But let’s say a Jewish woman from New York studies Northwest Coast art for decades and masters the form—”

“She can’t even give her work away!” Vickers shouts. “There are millions of people who think this way—including many First Nations people—but there’s no substance to it. Stopping a white man from carving a totem pole isn’t protecting the culture. It’s dividing people.”

“I notice it’s never anyone with a tool in their hand complaining about authenticity,” Lewis says, noting that this is the fifth pole he’s worked on with Vickers. “This pole was logged with a helicopter, eh? So where are we going with this?”

OweekenoÌęis a one-dirt-road village sited in a remote fjord on the hard-charging Wannock River, year-round population roughly 80. To get there last July for the potlatch and pole unveiling, I join 40 or so people in Port Hardy for a ten-hour trip on the Buttle Shuttle, a converted 1950s ferry that chugs up Rivers Inlet. July rains obscure some of the most epic scenery on the coast, but when we dock the skies lift, revealing a -landscape of vertical valleys and mountain peaks shaped like cedar hats.

Standing beneath a roaring 200-foot waterfall—anywhere else, they’d dedicate calendars and heli-seeing flights to such a natural wonder; here it’s just called Piss-Piss Falls—Vickers waves us in.

“It’s always like this before a potlatch, thunder and lighting,” he tells me. “That’s the Thunderbird welcoming visitors.”

Family and friends from up and down the coast hug, then load boxes of potlatch booty into a phalanx of muddy trucks. Vickers’s eyes go red and puffy.

“I’ve been like this all week,” he says, his voice abruptly becoming hesitant and thick. “It’s really happening.”

The legendary giveaways for which potlatches were partly banned (authorities believed they were bankrupting villages) were always only a small part of the tradition. The Walkus family potlatch is typical. Over the course of two nonstop days—endurance is a big part of the potlatch program, and newbies are rightfully terrified by the endless speechifying of old-timers—ceremonies are dedicated to honoring ancestors, noting recent deaths and births, settling disputes, commuting history and culture through song and dance, fostering business relationships, conducting coming-of-age initiations, gossiping, meeting potential mates from other villages, and lots of eating, which in Oweekeno means successive meals of salmon, elk, halibut, and crab.

The unveiling of the Hosumdas pole kicks off the festivities. When a shroud is cut away and the golden cedar pole shines in front of the village’s big house, the 250 or so guests gasp, then break into a sustained cheer and trilling whoops.

“We want to gift this to the community,” says tribal chief Ted Walkus. “This isn’t us, the Walkus family, putting our pole up there. This is us bringing something home that will enrich every one of us.”

Back when it was on its side, sitting on sawhorses back in Vickers’s carving shed, the pole was impressive. Now, standing up, it seems three times larger and more powerful. All weekend people gather at its base to talk. As if drawn by instinct, children keep returning to play in its imposing shadow.

During the potlatch, Ric Slaco is honored before the tribal chiefs, presented with a six-foot-tall replica pole and invited to join a dance. Everything at the potlatch moves counterclockwise around a great fire that’s positioned in the center of the dirt-floored big house, giving an increasingly hypnotic aura to the proceedings.

Vickers’s emotions overflow on the second day, when he formally adopts each of the three carvers—Lewis, Heron, and Mack—into his family. Lewis is given the Oweekeno name Saeis, meaning “cedar mat,” acknowledgment of his prolific facility as a woodsman and a humorous play on his given name, Matt.

After the adoption ceremony, I chase down Paul, the soft-spoken, middle-aged Oweekeno man in charge of bestowing honorific names to adoptees. I want to pin down the English spelling of Lewis’s tribal name. Paul doesn’t seem to appreciate my zeal for fact-checking.

You could start the name with an S or an O or an X, he advises unhelpfully. I turn my notebook around and show him my transliteration: Saeis.

Paul shakes his head, then scans the horizon for some imaginary spirit. There’s no way to accurately convey what a dork I feel like at this moment.

“Maybe. The last sound is too difficult to translate,” he finally says.

The meaning in his grimace is clear. Write it down however you want, it says. You’re gonna get it wrong no matter what.

“We’ve always underestimated the power of the written word,” one elder says during the potlatch. “Our culture can only be understood through visions and dances.”

That’s undeniable—no business is finished at a potlatch until it’s been sealed with a performance—but for Vickers, nothing conveys the culture like a blade moving through cedar, transforming a historic theft into an improbable gift.

“It doesn’t matter how or why the pole was taken from the village,” he told me before the festivities got underway. “I’m glad it happened. The museum acquired it and valued it. If not for that, we wouldn’t have created this monument today.

“Think about this,” he adds. “Not so long ago it was illegal to do what I’m doing, just carving a pole for a potlatch! It feels like I was meant to do this. It feels like everything I have done in my life is all about getting this pole done.”

Through the rain, you could see what a relief it was to finally move on.Ìę

Chuck Thompson () wrote about whitewater paddling on British Columbia’s Klinaklini River in July 2016.

The post Totem Recall: One Chief’s Mission to Reclaim the Past appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

I’d like to ask that you not judge me for what I’m about to say. Though I know you probably will.

Two years ago, I made an important discovery—that Thin Lizzy, specifically the Jailbreak album recorded by those star-crossed Irish legends, actually enhanced the experience of hiking in Central Oregon’s Mount Jefferson Wilderness.

It happened by accident, more or less. All I knew that morning, with eight miles and lots of elevation gain lying ahead, was that I needed a few classic jams to help push me through. So I brought my iPod and earbuds, just like I do when I’m out for a run in my neighborhood.

What I didn’t know was that I’d taken the first strides into a thicket of backwoods recrimination and guilt-inducing moral ambiguities. Do electronics belong in the wilderness? If so, to what extent? And what kinds? These questions are currently being debated by ideological progressives and puritans alike, not just on outdoor-related websites but in the medical community and the halls of Congress. Opinions come from a bewildering range of people, everybody from peer-reviewed scientists to borderline cranks, and it’s not always easy to tell who’s who.

On that promising morning, though, discord was but a faint abstraction as I began to learn how much I loved packing tunes into the woods. Then, after merely hiking with music, I graduated to camping with music. The breakthrough was the acquisition of one of my favorite gadgets ever—the iHome iHM60 rechargeable mini speaker. About the size of a racquetball, this featherweight little gizmo pumps out surprisingly resonant beats. It works whether the lakeside mood calls for Drake or Thy Art Is Murder. Or, for that matter, Lakeside.

After these bands became part of my rustic jamboree, I went further into the production end. My tasteful campfire playlist now includes acoustic and semiacoustic leaf-rustlers from the Marshall Tucker Band, Robert Earl Keen, Israel Nash, First Aid Kit, Jolie Holland, the profoundly uncool Spyro Gyra (no apologies—they’re from Buffalo, by the way), and a little-known Canadian folkstress named Lindsay Ferguson, whose touching ballad “Ships” never fails to stop everyone mid-s’more.

There’s no denying it. Music makes hanging around a campfire even more hypnotic than it already is. In the Yukon’s stunning Kluane National Park, it also gave our little party comfort. We let the iHM60 purr through the night in an effort (successful, apparently) to keep the park’s grizzlies at bay while we slept.

Still, while I’ve enjoyed this new world of camping wonder, I never felt completely at ease about my zeal for arriving in the backcountry with guests named 38 Special and Breakbot—a moral dilemma that’s been around longer than you’d think.

As far back as 1978, outdoor writer Patrick McManus called the bleating of transistor radios in the woods “among the most hideous sounds on earth.” In their 1993 book , Laura and Guy Waterman presented a full-on case against outdoor electronics, calling them an affront to the spirit of the occasion. “Much more important than the intrusion of noise is the intrusion of a tie back to the world of technology and civilization,” they wrote. “Wilderness has nonhuman significance…. Wilderness is a place where we leave Earth alone.”

This predicament has become exponentially more complex with the universal wireless miracle that compels us, like it or not, to remain attached to civilization wherever we roam. We’ve left the quaint world of transistor radios far behind, and most of us seem electrified to have done so. After all, only lunatics would argue for an outdoor ban on all modern technology, which includes everything from digital cameras to water purifiers to life-saving SOS devices. And goddammit, seeing as how they went to the trouble of inventing it, I’m not prepared to give up my Jetboil.

It’s connectivity that’s causing unprecedented concern.

On the surface, it would seem that my backwoods beats are harmless, so long as I’m not a jerk about inflicting my noise on other people. But the entire notion of technology in the woods turns out to be a much more significant issue than that, with ramifications that can’t just be reined in simply by using the volume control.

Even when we’re not actively interacting with the digital world, our devices are. Packing music into the toolies isn’t just about being a clueless boor with questionable habits in the field. It’s also about being a clueless boor who might be harming the environment. Literally.

Around the world, studies are proliferating on the devastating effects of “electrosmog,” the blanket of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) that we’ve cast across the planet, which could be harmful to various wild species. For example, German scientist Ulrich Warnke has argued that there’s a link between colony collapse disorder in bees and our mania for cell phones, whose RF waves discombobulate bees’ orientation and navigation mechanisms.

Then there’s FirstNet, a nationwide wireless-broadband network for emergency communications that was approved by federal law in 2012. Backed by numerous studies, the Department of the Interior has raised concerns about the harmful effects it may have on migratory birds. In a dramatically titled 2014 book, , Katie Singer reports on a Spanish study of a frog habitat located near a cell tower. Researchers found that frogs artificially shielded from the antennae’s waves had a mortality rate of 4.2 percent. Frogs left exposed to the waves reportedly suffered a whopping 90 percent mortality rate.

Singer is a consultant who works with the Vermont-based , which studies—and generally opposes—federal standards for environmental exposures to non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation associated with broadcast, radar, mobile-phone, and personal-wireless technologies. As I grew morally muddled about my habit of camping with electronics, which has come to also include a smartphone and tablet, I decided to call her at her home in northern New Mexico.

“These issues you’re raising are actually terrifying, but the questions need to be asked,” she tells me. “We have deployed all this stuff without asking: Is there any harm here to ourselves, to biodiversity, to the entire ecosystem?”

Singer talks with me on a landline; as she mentions, she has never owned a cell phone. “I don’t mind telling you that I don’t have a cell phone, except that it can trivialize the issue, because then that’s all people focus on,” she says. “They think, ‘Oh God, is she totally weird or what?’ Yes, I am weird, but that’s not what we’re talking about.”

We end up talking about the Federal Communications Commission. Singer is tweaked by the FCC’s July 2016 that it is taking steps to enable rapid development of next-generation 5G technologies and mandate the spread of wireless to rural areas.

To deliver the expected huge leap in performance, 5G will likely depend on “millimeter waves,” signals in the high frequency range. Scientists are already looking at the health risks these pose. Singer speaks emphatically about the potential harm to wildlife.

Albert Manville, a former biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and now an adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins University, echoes Singer’s view that there is legitimate cause for worry. “Complicating the issue is the fact that there currently are no standards for wildlife exposure,” he says. “That includes the licensing and regulatory rules and procedures of the FCC.”

The FCC hasn’t updated its guidelines for power-density exposure to humans since the passage of the Telecommunications Act in 1996. Singer points out that section 704 of the act includes a clause that forbids state and local governments from regulating “wireless service facilities on the basis of the environmental effects of radio frequency emissions.” According to critics like Singer, this verbiage means that even if everyone in your town agrees that a proposed new cell tower is going to kill all the birds, bees, and frogs, your city council is legally prohibited from denying a permit based on emissions. In effect, telecom profits trump environmental health.

During his remaining time in office, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler isn’t expected to exercise the hand of restraint in this Wild West of wireless. Prior to assuming his post in 2013, Wheeler was a famed advocate for telecom-industry interests. From 1992 to 2004, he served as president and CEO of the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, a group that describes itself as lobbying for the industry “at all levels of government.” That’s no bullshit, either. President Obama once called him “the Bo Jackson of telecom.”

I thought Wheeler might be able to shed some useful light on the government’s plans for backcountry wireless. But the FCC media office ignored no fewer than five e-mail and phone requests for statements from him or anybody else—about 5G, section 704, or anything that touches on the wireless wilderness.

Meanwhile, the news from the government is relentlessly pro-wireless. In January 2016, five Democratic congressmen, led by Jared Huffman of California, sent a letter to Obama urging funding to extend Wi-Fi and cell service throughout all of America’s national parks.

The effort sparked the expected Internet opprobrium, but when I get Huffman on the phone, he comes across as a thoughtful guy who’s simply in favor of a popular proposal.

“I’m not hearing any blowback to the idea that our visitor centers and park facilities should have basic connectivity,” he tells me. “Overwhelmingly, people agree that it’s a good idea.”

Huffman’s Second Congressional District stretches from the Oregon border all the way to Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and it includes heavy hitters like Redwoods National Park.

“We have to recognize that a new generation is coming up, and they access information differently and experience the parks differently,” Huffman says. “We need to keep up with the times.”

Huffman also waves off environmental teeth-gnashing. As a member of the California State Assembly, he says, he worked with the state’s Council of Science and Technology to survey the land use and produce a report after public concerns arose because the California Public Utilities Commission authorized the installation of new wireless smart meters throughout the state.

“I’m aware that there are a number of people who worry about [electrosmog], but it has never been validated by any peerreviewed science,” he says. “The California Council on Science and Technology did not validate concerns about EMFs and health risks.

“I really don’t think it’s an issue,” he adds. “From what I’m told, there are far greater EMF exposures that people should be concerned about from their microwave ovens.”

I’m cynical about all politicians, but Huffman doesn’t strike me as unreasonable. Even so, his “everybody just chill out” position is cold comfort for people like Singer, who are perpetually frustrated by government agendas and roadblocks in the face of a danger they perceive as self-evident. Approach this byzantine subject from any angle and you’re in danger of tumbling into an enormous gulf of misunderstanding and distrust of Big Government. Given my own frustrating experience trying to pry an official word or two out of the FCC, it’s easy to see how cynicism develops around the issue.

When I first called Singer, I was stone in love with pumping up my campfire sounds. An hour on the phone with her was like rayeeain on my wedding day, a black fly in my chardonnay. But it was also, still, the good advice that I just couldn’t take. I might not be as gaga over wireless as the rest of the planet, but I’m not as freaked out as people like Singer seem to think I should be. And I’d gotten attached to having Norah Jones in my tent at night.

It was that damn frog study that kept nagging at me. Ninety percent mortality rate? Jesus!

I decided to take my problems, literally, to Nancy Messinger. A cofounder of the Portland Natural Medicine clinic in Oregon, Messinger is a cardiac nurse and electromagnetic-radiation specialist certified by the International Institute for Building Biology and Ecology in Santa Fe. I wanted her to give me a precise sense of my personal electronic footprint in the wild. Messinger’s EMF-mitigated office—it’s surrounded by poured-concrete walls that are two feet thick—is rigged with an impressive set of research-grade meters, gizmos, and assessment instruments for detecting radiation and radio frequencies. “The Europeans, especially the Germans, are light-years ahead of us in understanding this stuff,” she says.

I lay out my favorite backwoods toys—iPhone, iPod, iPad, the adorable iHome mini speaker. She breaks out Gigahertz Solutions’ HFE59B meter with a UBB 27 omnidirectional antenna (to measure radio frequencies) and a Gigahertz NFA 1000 EMF/gauss meter that measures magnetic and electrical fields.

The unit of irradiance we’re measuring is microwatts per square meter, or ”W/mÂČ. “Anything over 1,000 microwatts per square meter is a serious concern,” Messinger says, because increased exposure may create health risks.

She begins by waving the HFE59B over my iPhone. Bursts of loud static tear through the room. The meter surges between 4,720 and 6,000 ”W/mÂČ.

“That’s not bad compared with my Android phone,” she says. She tests her phone to demonstrate. The meter crackles and pops like an angry bug zapper as it bounces between 8,530 and 15,140 ”W/mÂČ. The iPad fares better, registering anywhere between 1,770 and 4,050 ”W/mÂČ while it pulses, searching in vain for a wireless connection in the bunker office.

The iPod is a disaster. It blows the meter to 14,000 ”W/mÂČ when it’s turned on and finally settles in at 13,830 ”W/mÂČ as it cries out for an electronic mama every two seconds like an orphan in a barren field.

The numbers certainly seem ominous, but what do they actually mean?

Messinger whips out a chart of reported health effects associated with RF radiation. The data on it comes from , a report issued by 29 international scientists and health experts who warn of possible risks from wireless technologies and electromagnetic fields, based on information from more than 1,800 studies. Exposure to a given source of radiation varies depending on how far away you are, and Messinger appears to have peppered the chart with a few examples (“Microwave oven at 4 ft.,” “Cell phone at 30 ft.”), benchmarks for predicting exposure levels herself.

According to the studies in the BioInitiative report, adverse conditions connected with exposure to a power density of 100 ”W/mÂČ include headaches, sleep loss, and concentration problems. At 10,000 ”W/mÂČ, studies indicate emotional and behavioral changes, weakened immune systems, and a doubled leukemia risk in adults. At 100,000 ”W/mÂČ and up, you’re looking at DNA damage, loss of critical cell functions, and learning problems in children.

There are just two entries at the 10,000,000 mark on the top of Messinger’s chart: “DNA damage exceeds repair ability” and “FCC Limit.”

“The FCC is ridiculous,” Messinger says, laughing hard when I bring up my attempts to talk with someone there. “There’s going to be major fallout from all this wireless,” she adds. “We can’t feel what it’s doing to us, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.”

Messinger seems like a grounded person, but a lot of people will tell you that the scare science is dubious. She shows me a 2013 Swedish study linking cordless and cellular phones with increased risk of brain tumors. It includes spooky MRI scans of microwave-absorption damage in brains, particularly among children.

When I call Dr. Jill Barnholtz-Sloan, a lead epidemiologist at the Central Brain Tumor Registry of the United States, she’s more equivocal. “In the past 12 to 15 years, the incidence of malignant brain tumors in the U.S. has not increased,” she says from her cell phone while riding in a car between Cleveland and Detroit. Recent increases in reports of nonmalignant brain tumors are attributable to changes in ways that information is being collected and recorded, she says.

But what about studies linking brain tumors to radiation emitted by cell phones and wireless gadgets?

“Data so far has been very inconsistent,” she says. “I think we all believe the jury is still out on that because of the inconsistency of the current evidence.”

I went into this process seeking clarity—or at least some assurance that bringing Golden Smog into the woods didn’t mean I was actually polluting the place. What emerged instead were passionate responses from people with clashing agendas that played out like a Taylor Swift–Kanye West feud—which is tough for me, because I like them both.

The problem with my fretting all along, however, has been the spectral understanding that none of it really matters. No matter how much malignant data we keep amassing, does anyone really ever expect the clock to be turned back on wireless technology?

“Having a little bit of wireless connectivity does not necessarily compromise the wilderness experience. It doesn’t mean PokĂ©mon Go,” Congressman Huffman has assured me. “It’s not a sinister plot, it’s not a conspiracy.”

However you feel about that statement, it’s happening. So what does it matter that I stop hiking with my electronics if people like Huffman and Tom Wheeler are determined to “enhance” the wilderness with wireless waves?

Of course, leaving gadgets at home doesn’t have to mean leaving music at home.

Maybe on my next hike, before it’s too late, I’ll place my iPod on the kitchen counter, lace up my boots, and walk out into the country, as far as I can get from the wireless cage. Another kind of jailbreak.

I’ll imagine Tom Wheeler hiking alongside me. Maybe, just after we’ve started down that dusty trail, I’ll turn to him and, invoking yet another classic, let him know that, even without digital support, we can still be men in harmony with the wilderness. “You do know how to whistle, don’t you, Tom?” I’ll say. “You just put your lips together and blow.”

is the author of five books, including .

The post Are Backwoods Beats Really Harmless? appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

They don't even ask for ID at the Port hardy airport. IÌęjust give the woman at the counter my name and she prints my ticket, no further questions.Ìę

There’s no security check. No body scanner, either. This means my Dasani water bottle and nail clippers, not to mention the two knives in my daypack, will get on the plane with me. Did someone slip Canada a couple of Xanax while no one was watching?

It’s a promising start. Here on the north end of Vancouver Island, the trials of what Joseph Conrad once called “the hazardous enterprise of living” already feel distant.Ìę

Which basically means everything is going according to plan.

If you fly up the Inside Passage between Seattle and Juneau and look inland as the Alaska Airlines 737 is cruising north of Vancouver Island, you’ll see an untouched horizon of serrated peaks, alpine valleys, electric blue glacial tarns, twisting river narrows, and what other­wise appears to be the most uninhabited, unspoiled territory imaginable. Do that flight as many times as I have—I grew up in southeast Alaska—and at some point you’ll wonder: What’s down there? How do I get to it? And once I do, how am I supposed to traverse that lonely wilderness and come out the other side?

As it happens, there are answers to these questions. After decades of fascination from above, and a recent burst of research that included rambling phone conversations with ­every Tom, Dick, Bob, and Doug who has a gnarly B.C. story to tell, I’ve ­finally found a way to experience what may be the least visited world-class backcountry in North America.

The most dramatic way to explore British Columbia’s central coast is to paddle the Klinaklini River, a 125-mile ribbon of white­water that runs on a northeast-southwest diagonal through the Coast Range, from B.C.’s central plateau to the Pacific Ocean. It’s an otherworldly passage where peak flows can reach 4,500 cubic feet per second.

In addition to miles of pushy rapids, the Klinaklini runs through gargantuan mountain scenery (including B.C.’s highest peak, , at 13,186 feet), hanging glaciers, and watery chicanes, as well as grizzly, moose, mountain goat, eagle, and salmon habitat. It finishes alongside orcas and First Nations villages, the river dumping into wide Knight Inlet.

The Klinaklini was part of the region’s fabled grease trail, a network of overland routes that connected inland native communities with coastal tribes who prospered by harvesting eulachon, a small smelt fish rendered into a prized cooking oil and used for trading.Ìę

Through this ruthless wilderness, coastal natives marched with huge caribou- and moose-hide packs filled with eulachon to trade for meat and furs. Eulachon were (and, during rare good years, still are) harvested in heavy quantities up and down the coast, especially in the lower estuaries of the Klinaklini.Ìę

Paul Mick's Footage of the Klinaklini Trip

This highlight reel offers a glimpse of just how intense the Klinaklini can beÌę

Although it runs through one of the most spectacular landscapes in the world—the Coast Range stood in for the Himalayas in —there are no settlements along the river, making it ideal for those weary of the set-up-an-account-first mandate of modern times. Paddling the thing is such a hazardous and logistically heavy effort that almost ­nobody does it.Ìę

“Float the Grand Canyon and on any given day you’ll be doing the trip alongside 200 other people,” says Brian McCutcheon, owner of the B.C.-based adventure company Rivers, Oceans, and Mountains. “On the Klinaklini, maybe 200 people total have done the trip. Ever.” In 1997, the Canadian adventurer, now 53, led the first known rafting expedition down its length.

“We took two rafts, a crew of guides, and a French chef and ran it,” McCutcheon says. “We had no idea what was around every corner.”
Sometimes called Canuck Norris—you can see a little physical resemblance—McCutcheon has since guided every known commercial trip but one down the river. Eighteen by his count.

“The Klinaklini is one of the best river trips on the planet,” McCutcheon e-mailed me in the winter of 2015. “It’s got Tatshen­shini mountain and glacier scenery with ­Futa-like whitewater and Yangtze-like conse­quences. Best of all, there’s no one else there. I’m doing a trip in July. Let me know if you want in.”

At six-foot-five and 235 pounds, McCutcheon has the kind of deceptively athletic build you get in the woods, not the gym. Hair the color of an old dirt road. Salt and pepper stubble. Hands that have tied and untied a million knots. He’s most himself in a flannel shirt, a down vest, lightweight outdoor pants, and river sandals. “Classic lumbersexual” is how he describes the look.

One reason McCutcheon keeps running this daredevil trip is that he’s convinced we’re all becoming pussies—his word, used a lot—and he’s not the type to take bad news lying down.

The bottom is dropping out of the adventure-guiding market, he tells me.

“Kids don’t want to come out and do this stuff,” he grumbles. “The two biggest questions we get from people coming to my lodge are ‘Do your tents have en suite bathrooms?’ and ‘Do you have Wi-Fi?’ ”

On July 5, 2015, we fly from a small settlement at Nimpo Lake to the put-in at Schilling Lake—which doesn’t appear on most maps—in a 1949 Canadian-built de Havilland Beaver. Serial number 55. That means it was the 55th one ever made.Ìę

According to its owner-pilot, Duncan Stewart, another of the typically ramble-tamble older guys you meet in this corner of the world, it’s the longest-serving Beaver in operation.

“We know how to build ’em in Canada,” Duncan says.Ìę

“We just don’t know how to sell ’em,” McCutcheon adds.

The put-in is a watery blip on the gums of B.C.’s flat central plateau, which provides access to the toothy Coast Range.

This is everyone’s first chance to size up the expedition party: nine people, including McCutcheon, stalwart Canadian river guide Mark Trueman, and Maranda Stopol, our safety and scout kayaker.Ìę

Trueman brings an irresistible enthusi­asm to the proceedings with his home­steader beard, bashed-out front tooth (the result of an errant oar handle), and unstoppable drive. He’s the kind of guy who’d carry you, your broken leg, and your lacerated kidney out of the wilderness after fighting off a bear with a cedar branch, then apologize for not getting you to the doctor fast enough.Ìę

Maranda is an experienced river guide and kayaker from Idaho who’s currently a collegeÌęstudent in B.C. She’ll paddle up and down the river assessing rapids ahead of our two rafts—18-foot, center-mounted, paddle-assist boats that weigh about 1,800 pounds each with gear.Ìę

I’ll be in Trueman’s raft, along with John and Cole Vangel, a father-son duo from Southern California. John is a fit corporate attorney. Cole is a beefy 20-year-old with long brown hair that hangs across his eyes. McCutcheon tells me he’s a physics prodigy at a university on the West Coast known for its super-bright student body.Ìę

In McCutcheon’s raft are Blair French and Paul Mick, a veteran paddler couple in their mid-thirties from Kelowna, the third-largest town in B.C. Paul is an ear, nose, and throat surgeon. Blair spent his childhood in Hope, B.C., where the immortal Rambo movie was shot.

The last figure is, without doubt, the most startling any of us have ever encountered on a high-consequences backcountry expedition.

Before we all got here, Mc­Cutch­eon had walked me through the roster of paddlers, briefly mentioning “a wealthy widow who’s big on adventure trips.” I’d imagined one of those wiry dynamos in their mid-­sixties who look primed to challenge the senior record for crossing the ­English Channel.Ìę

Instead, Jean Hollands dodders out of the Beaver, appearing not a day under 80, brittle as an egg, unsteady as the Indonesian stock market.Ìę

What this Hummel figurine is doing on a trip like this is anybody’s guess, but there’s no time for awkward questions. Once the whine of the Beaver’s engine has faded into the cloudless sky, we’re put to work rigging the boats.

“Say goodbye to civilization,” McCutcheon says.

For the first couple of miles on day one, it feels like we’re paddling through a big-budget Molson’s ad. Snow-crested granite spires and bright blue glaciers provide the background scenery.

The first major challenge, about four miles from the put-in, is a Class V rapid dubbed Little Drop of Horrors. (It was christened by McCutcheon, who named most of the features on the river.) It’s a satanic shard of whitewater that combines everything in a policy writer’s nightmare—a steep, narrow plunge, barely submerged rocks, pushy rip currents, swirling eddies, frothing rapids, and the disposition of an injured wolverine.Ìę

McCutcheon’s boat goes first. It glides through the initial bumps before nose-­diving into a yawning hole. The raft tacos into an almost perfect V before launching completely out of the water. In the rear, packed between gear ­boxes and dry bags as tightly as ­McCutcheon can wedge her, is Jean. Her head pitches forward, then jerks back in a way you normally associate with wide receivers getting nailed on pass routes across the middle.

With a lot of shouting from Canuck Norris—“Back-paddle! Back-paddle! Hold on! Hold the fuck on!”—he and the Blair-Paul paddle pros steady the raft, which disappears safely around a bend.

Our turn next. We bounce through the ferocious hole in good shape but get tossed violently by a standing wave and end up barreling headlong into a set of submerged logs on the far bank. While we’re high-centered atop the mini logjam, the river hits us broadside, twisting the raft perpendicular to the current. We start to tilt—five degrees, ten, fifteen—until the right side of the boat is sagging beneath the waterline.Ìę

“Left over! Left over! Left over!” Trueman shouts. Cole and I clamber atop stacks of gear like a pair of rheumatic chimps.Ìę

It works. With our weight shifted and Trueman and John leaning as far out from the edge as they can, the boat levels and we’re able to push off the logs. Hurling himself at his double oars, Trueman pivots the raft. We bounce off a rock, then careen backward into an alder thicket on the bank.Ìę

A flurry of branches rips across the boat at head level. My new “river ready” sunglasses snap in half. Cole takes the worst of it, picking up a set of bright red slashes across his cheek and neck. It’s a spooky moment. When those branches slap you at ramming speed, they can flip you out of the boat quick as a hiccup.Ìę

“Now that’s a classic class-five B.C. rapid!” Trueman shouts as John, Cole, and I struggle to regain equilibrium.

In camp, all the chatter focuses on our shared survival. Cole keeps talking about how he was totally in the water when we­ ­nearly capsized. John says he figured we were all goners when he saw his son’s water bottle floating downstream. For the first time, we interact as a group instead of a collection of strangers.

The campfire confessional leads to the Jean Story. Born in the UK, she survived the Blitz as a schoolgirl during World War II and emigrated to Canada in 1973. The slow pace of provincial Canadians shocked her on arrival, and it’s still a point of exasperation. Her first job was as a project director at an electronics firm, where she earned a reputation for being a hard-ass.Ìę

“One day another manager came up to me and said, ‘You know what you are, Jean?’ ” she tells us, somewhat proudly. “ ‘You’re a pushy limey broad!’

“I said, ‘Well, that’s exactly right. Thank you.’ ”

In Canada, Jean became a kayaker. Fanatical. The sport gave her an appreciation for nature she’d never had. Other than her two children, rivers became her passion.
Now, with a failing body but a strong spirit, she’s after “one last grand adventure.” The KK is it—she’s had this river in the back of her mind since she saw it on TV in the late 1990s. Like it or not, we’re to be her last accomplices and helpmeets.Ìę
Jean might be pushy, but she’s also clever. In the space of an hour, she’s gone from quietly resented appendage to the source of communal purpose. One and all seem united in seeing to it that this gritty old bird gets a final feather in her cap.Ìę

As we find out on day two, butchering through virgin wilderness isn’t just difficult. It’s often boring. At regular intervals, the KK is blocked by massive logjams and epic blowdowns. We’re forced to beach the rafts and watch from shore while McCutcheon clears the way, using a portable Stihl MH-170 chainsaw with a 16-inch bar.Ìę

For those ­unfamiliar with chainsaw specs, the MH-170 is the kind of tool you might deploy to prune branches from the apple tree in your backyard. McCutcheon some­how uses this humble implement to cut fallen century-old pine trees in half.Ìę

The process usually takes a couple of hours. While the group roasts in the sun on a river bank, McCutcheon wades into waist-deep currents or straps himself to the same log he’s cutting, buzzing away, precariously balanced above the menacing current.

“Brian’s great talent is the ability to muster people to follow him on these big, preposterous expeditions,” Trueman tells me while we watch. “He’s so charismatic, I have to check myself from time to time and remember to ask, ‘Is this really a good idea?’ ”

I ask why we’re encountering so many logjams.Ìę

“As a result of a late-season snowfall and a very hot spring, we’ve had extremely high water through here this year,” he says. “There are also thousands of weak trees along the shore diseased by pine beetles.”

Now, in an unseasonably hot summer, the water level is low, exposing obstacles, debris, and gravel bars you normally wouldn’t see.Ìę

“All the downed logs are forcing the river to divert, creating new channels everywhere,” Trueman says. “This is a completely different river from the one we last ran in 2012.”Ìę

“We’re going to run this stretch of rapids to where that fork is,” McCutcheon shouts above a roaring wave train. We’re standing on a sandbar listening and looking. “Right after it, we’re going to eddy out on the right bank.”

It’s around 1 P.M. With the morning’s chainsawing done, we’ve encountered aÌępeculiar bend in the river—a wide, fast channel veering left off the main flow. There’s no way to tell where it leads.Ìę

“Whatever happens, do not miss that right bank eddy!” McCutcheon commands. “Do not go left. The results could be fatal to the expedition.”

We get back in the rafts. McCutcheon’s rocks up and down through the rapids and makes the right bank eddy without ­difficulty. Behind him, we set off with a confident stroke. Halfway through I sense that we’ve paddled too far left to make the eddy.Ìę

Trueman nearly pops a vein with his “Hard left!” bellowing. It doesn’t help. We boomerang off a downed log and ­careen sideways into the dreaded left channel, which quickly widens into something that looks like Louisiana swamp. Before, I hadn’t understood what McCutcheon was so freaked out about. Now I do. We’re rafting through a flooded forest—one with a raging current going into it. Ever driven a minivan at 20 miles per hour through dense woods, then tossed the steering wheel out the window? Me neither, but I think this is what it would be like.

Trueman pilots us into what looks like the safest spot—a small logjam pushed up against a stand of rotted trees. The idea is to get us stabilized on something before we crash into a tree, break a few limbs, and capsize.Ìę
But the log pile is no haven. As soon as we’ve lurched to a stop against it, the current turns us broadside and lifts us onto the logs. We’re wrapped on the pile; water begins bucketing into the raft.

The next few minutes are complicated and, for anyone interested in sizing up river-guide skills, remarkable. Trueman leaps into the current and secures the raft to a tree with a line. McCutcheon—who’s run after us like a boar through the dense woods—crawls over from the opposite shore, across the tops of more downed logs, and tosses us ­another line. Pulling the ropes against each, we stabilize the raft and eventually tie up on an almost nonexistent bank.Ìę
Unfortunately, there’s no feasible direction to go. Plowing forward in a 1,800-pound raft in whitewater through a flooded ­forest is suicide.

The dense, brushy woods along the riverbank are nearly impassable. No way to horse an 18-foot boat through them.Ìę

The only option looks to be the way we came in—which means backing out against current that a 125-horsepower motor would have trouble bucking. Four guys with plastic paddles have no chance fighting it. Instead, we’ll walk the boat upriver along the shallow bank.Ìę

It seems like an OK plan. Except that, in 30 minutes, we manage to coax the boat all of 20 yards. The decision is made to lighten the load and then retrieve it later. Stacking dozens of bags and boxes of gear in the swampy woods takes another hour.

Pulling the empty raft against the river is still a Fitzcarraldo effort. The bank is a vile thicket of alder, poplar, cedar, spruce, pine, cottonwood, willow, devil’s club, and berry bushes. Several times, Trueman and I drop into holes in the river. We sink up to our shoulders, frantically grasping for handfuls of slippery branches.Ìę

“This is not what I signed up for,” Cole grumbles. “Why are we doing this?”

“Don’t worry, we have a sat phone, we can always call in a helicopter,” John says, apparently forgetting that his son is an academic savant gifted with keen observational powers.

“Where the hell would a helicopter land? It can’t land here,” Cole shoots back.Ìę

A revised plan is formed. Instead of grinding all the way back upstream, we’ll draggle the raft another 20 yards or so upriver. This will put us in position to make a long-odds attempt to paddle across a shallow section. Make it and theoretically we’ll shoot through the flood zone into another mystery ­channel that appears to be flowing in the general ­direction of the main river.Ìę

I’ve paddled against a lot of tough currents in my life, but the desperation behind this upriver slog adds to my appreciation of the survival instinct. Or maybe I’m just good at taking orders, since Trueman is issuing them like the skipper on a Viking slaver.Ìę

“Fight it! Fight it!” he bellows “If we hit that logjam, push off it as hard as you can! Chuck, stick your paddle out. Break it on that sonofabitch if you have to!”

There’s no need for that. Trueman digs an oar deep into the water, finds a miracle seam in the current, and swoops us into the new channel. A quarter-mile later, we spot the rest of our party back on the main river­bank, waving to us like they just solved global warming.Ìę

After a five-hour detour through hell and high water, we’re back on the main river.

In places, the river is calm and we’re able to beach up for sandwiches, stretching, and conversation—during which things like the provenance of Cole’s overall skittishness are revealed.Ìę

At age 11, on his and John’s second father-son raft trip, on California’s Tuolumne River, Cole’s boat flipped in a rapid. He went into the water, lost contact with the craft, and ended up submerged for about 15 terrifying seconds.Ìę

Cole and John persevered, and Cole has grown to enjoy river trips, but that initial terror left a scar. The KK is the most ambitious expedition Cole and John have undertaken; the memory of the Tuolumne is always under the surface.Ìę
Ìę

McCutcheon nods and confesses that, on previous trips through Little Drop of Horrors, his groups have flipped two rafts. Neither he nor Trueman were at the helm, but veteran, trusted guides were.Ìę

The worst capsized almost instantly, with six people going under, two for an uncomfortably long time. No one died or was seri­ously hurt, but there was a long moment when it was unclear who was coming up and who wasn’t.Ìę

“Don never ran another trip with us ­after that,” Brian tells the group. “He was a great guide, 15 years experience, perfect record. It wasn’t a guide error, but just the idea of being responsible for killing a group of people shook him up.”

Nobody Move, a rapid we do at the start of day three, is a monster Class V. Its primary features are a six-foot drop at the end of a rocky approach, followed by a 100-yard, boulder-strewn whitewater wave train that ends with a bone-clanging ten-foot drop into a flushing hole.

“This is one of the most dangerous parts of the river,” McCutcheon tells us as we inspect the run from atop a rock outcropping. “Strap your PFDs down tight.”

His group goes first. When the raft ­plunges into the bottom of the hole, it folds almost in half. Jean, sitting amid stacks of cargo in the rear right position, pitches forward, then whiplashes back like a crash dummy. Somehow she stays in the boat.Ìę

Our raft—the one that seems to be bearing the brunt of misfortune—sails through the main drop with unex­pected ease.

“We’re getting the hang of this!” I shout at John as we click paddles high-five style. Behind us, though, there’s theater.

“We’ve got a swimmer! Cole’s in the ­water!” Trueman cries.

On most rapids, the fold and subsequent retraction of the rubber raft rocks the back more violently than the front. After our bow had barreled through Nobody Move, the stern kicked out of the water at a steep angle, pitching Cole from the boat like a beanbag.

“Back-paddle! Back-­paddle!” Trueman yells.

It’s impossible to halt our momentum, but we go for it anyway. We can’t stop our ­descent, but if we can slow it, Cole will have a better chance of reaching the raft.

In a roil of whitewater, his head pops up 15 feet behind the boat. He keeps disap­pearing beneath the waterline, then bobbing up again. Each time he resurfaces, he coughs up water.

At the stern, rescue kit in hand, Trueman barks commands, steers the raft, and shouts encouragement to everybody. But the current is vicious. Caught in some invisible rip, Cole shoots like a Ping-Pong ball past Trueman’s outstretched ­paddle and goes underwater. When he resurfaces, he’s swirling next to my side of the raft.Ìę

Leaning out, I try to guide his hand onto the raft’s perimeter line. Our fingertips brush, but Cole is in a washing machine, and we can’t close the loop. He slips back into whitewater.Ìę

I flip my paddle around and extend the grip end as far as I can. Cole manages to grab the handle.Ìę

Got him! The adrenaline-fueled elation of this moment is as profound as anything I’ve experienced in the outdoors. I really believed this kid was going to drown.Ìę

But the fright has apparently sent every twitchy nerve in my body straight to my right arm. I yank way too hard, and Cole’s hand slips off the handle.Ìę

Two seconds from salvation, it’s as if some river monster has grabbed his ankle. He’s pulled straight down. I watch as his head goes under the raft, trapping him squarely beneath 1,800-plus pounds of rubber.Ìę

“He’ll come up, he’ll come up!” Trueman shouts.

Three seconds? Four? Five? Impossible to say. But when Cole pops back up—­coughing, sputtering—he’s only a foot from me. I grab his PFD at the shoulder straps and hurl my body back into the boat. The wetsuit’s buoyancy works in Cole’s favor. He’s a big guy—190 pounds—but the top half of his body slides easily over the raft, and he lands in my lap like an exhausted halibut.Ìę

After a couple of moments coughing out water and recovering his breath, Cole lifts his head, stares into my eyes, and, through long threads of drool, croaks, “No more whitewater. No more whitewater.” It’s a haunting epitaph for the trip.

With the Cole episode leaving everyone unsettled, it seems like fate when, an hour ­later, our ­progress is halted again. Two or three hundred logs, assorted rocks, brush, and detritus have collected in a broad swath across a wide section of river. No one wants to say the word out loud, but we’re looking at a ­mother of a portage to get past this, and ­everybody knows it.Ìę

There’s no way Jean is walking across a wet logjam, so McCutcheon gets the show started by fireman-­carrying her. Twice he skitters on the slick bark and nearly falls over. Jean’s body sags against his shoulders like a sack of rice.
“Forget the portage, if he drops her we’ll be dealing with a much more grave issue,” Blair says to me. “Like an actual grave.”

For five hours, we move a couple thousand pounds of equipment, piece by piece, from both boats. With no sure footing, everyone teeters along with the careful steps of a newborn fawn. We grind out an ad hoc path to a shallow side channel that skirts the logjam and dribbles its way back to the river.Ìę

Once the rafts have been completely emptied and derigged, it takes six people to heave each one across the logjam.

For all the physical exertion, the emotional setbacks are the biggest toll. For me, the hardest moment of the trip comes when Maranda, sent ahead to scout for camping spots, returns with the news that yet another logjam is blocking the river just downstream.Ìę

“Scariest scout of my life,” she adds helpfully. “Twilight closing in and bear and wolf tracks everywhere. Anyone have some repellent handy? I’ve never been so chewed up by mosquitoes.”

The reaction to Maranda’s “this ain’t over yet” bombshell is severe. At the end of the beastly portage, some of the group had posed for a photo, arms raised in triumph. By the looks on their faces now, you’d think everyone had just drawn the middle seat on a red-eye to Caracas. Even the irrepressible Trueman falls silent.Ìę

“If you guys are discussing a refund for the trip, fuck off!” McCutcheon shouts cheerfully from his raft, attempting to inject levity into the proceedings.Ìę

No one laughs. Not because they really want a refund, but because they’re too physically shot and crushed by disappointment to respond.

That night, after we set up camp on a gravel bar scouted by Maranda, McCutcheon wanders into the bushes with his sat phone. Thirty minutes later he gathers the troops.

“OK, here’s the plan,” he says. “A helicopter is gonna come in here tomorrow at noon to take us out of here.” There’s not even a whimper of resistance.

“We’ll fly up to camp at the Klinaklini Glacier and continue the trip from there,” McCutcheon says.Ìę

The airlift will effectively knock out the day-four itinerary—about 30 river miles—and drop us within a few hours, by paddle, to trip’s end at Knight Inlet. So far we’ve covered about 20 miles. In three days.Ìę

The helo pickup isn’t a rescue so much as an abdication. The B.C. wilderness is wild and mighty, and this time it has beaten us. Pushing ahead would be just short of lunacy.Ìę

“Of all the trips we’ve done on this river, this is by far the hardest,” Trueman tells me the next day while we wait for the distant whoomp of rotors. “This trip is on the verge of commercial viability. That’s why we’re the only ones who run it. And that’s because Brian has a huge sack. He’s willing to take the risks and take people out to do this stuff ­because he believes in it.”

It’s true, but even McCutcheon’s tolerance for risk has a limit.

“I’m dealing with a real liability issue here,” McCutcheon says. “Jesus Christ, Jean is 82! She told me she was 72. I have it in writing. When I saw her come doddering off the plane I thought, You’re 72? No goddamn way.”

When I ask Jean about this later, she allows that there may have been a mistake made on a personal information form, but she’dÌęnever intentionally mislead McCutcheon or anyone else about “such a silly thing.”

“I’m not worried about her suing me,” McCutcheon tells me on the river. “She’s a tough old Brit. She told me yesterday, ‘Brian, if I die out here, that’s OK.’ I said, ‘Jean, it’s not you I’m worried about. I’m worried about your family coming after me.’ ”

When all three guides are out of earshot, and the group is sitting around our piles of staged gear, I follow up on McCutcheon’s earlier joke and ask if anyone has actually considered asking for a refund.Ìę

“Not at all,” says Dr. Paul. “You understand the risks on a trip like this and assume things won’t go as planned. This is an expedition on a river no one’s seen in three years. Anyway, the trip isn’t over yet.”

Being taken off the river is frustrating. Everyone regrets not being able to complete a mission they’ve been prep­-ping so long to do.

On another level, it’s a relief. Two days of hiking in the high alpine around our new camp at the terminal moraine of the Klina­klini Glacier is a tonic. An ocean of mountain peaks spreads across a limitless horizon. Between each one are pools of deep purple, neon blue, glacial-silt green, rusty copper—the mineral composition left behind by ancient glaciers gives each its unique hue.Ìę

On the last morning, Jean and I are the first paddlers up. McCutcheon is at the mess table making coffee.

“How are you this morning, Jean?” he asks.

“Well, my knees are a bit stiff, but otherwise I’m fine.”

“At your age, it’s a triumph just not waking up a stiff.”

Jean chuckles indulgently.Ìę

McCutcheon’s got a ton of these. What do you get when you cross an insomniac, a dyslexic, and a philosopher? A guy who lies awake all night wondering if there really is a dog.

Despite the recuperative days at the glacier, and McCutcheon’s jocular chatter, the grim-faced gang breaks camp for the final push as if preparing for an amphibious invasion.Ìę

Some of this has to do with the weather. The afternoon before, when it was 97 degrees, we’d swum beneath a waterfall. This morning it’s a marrow-thickening 46, and the sky looks like a piece of old meat.Ìę

Last day blues, I think. Trip’s almost over. No one wants to get back to work, overdue bills, the a-hole neighbors who keep letting their dog take a dump in my yard


“Was that a raindrop?” Blair asks, squinting at the ashen sky.

Below the terminus of the Klinaklini Glacier, heavy wind and rain descend, and the river picks up speed. Furious rapids twist and boil.Ìę

Perhaps “boil” isn’t the best description of water that’s almost 100 percent glacial runoff. But it does burn when the first bathtub-size torrents of icy greetings slam you in the face.

“Wow, I’ve never seen the rapids so high here!” Trueman cries.

McCutcheon estimates the waves at 20 feet from crest to bottom. Our rafts are a little more than 18 feet long. We start riding the waves. If this sounds fun to you, it’s not.Ìę

These are the spookiest rapids yet. Not just because your body clenches against the nut-shriveling glacier water with each rude slap, but because the force actually pushes you backward. You have to lean into them to avoid being unseated.

“It’s all gradient,” McCutcheon explains. “Over eight kilometers, we’re dropping several hundred feet. And the water is full of silt with all the glacial rock flour pounding in there. That’s why it feels like a punch when it hits you.”

The guides call these “glacial facials” or “nasal douches.” I call it four hours of reliving the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. This is how long we have to paddle to reach Knight Inlet for our rendezvous with the pickup boat, which at the moment is feeling more like a rescue vessel.Ìę

“Anyone feeling hypothermic?” Trueman asks.

We’re all busy suppressing the shivering instinct. Does that count?Ìę

Ahead of us, Jean is rammed down as far into the floor of the boat as McCutcheon can force her, popsicled into immobility. Her face is a death mask.

Before we’d set off this morning, she’d given Blair her e-mail address, along with the e-mail address of a friend of hers.Ìę

“That way, if you contact me and don’t get a reply, she can let you know if I’m dead or not,” she told him.

We round a bend to find McCutcheon’s boat beached. He’s lashing Maranda’s bright red kayak to the top of his raft. She stands beside him, her hands clenched in front of her like baby pterodactyl claws. In her kayak, she’s been taking the most punishment in the KK ice bath. She climbs into the back of our raft with a gutsy expression and forces her fingers around a paddle.Ìę

As we set off again, Trueman begins cackling like an incoherent hyena. John wants to know what’s so funny.

“This whole thing, this entire experience!” he shrieks, beard swinging in the breeze. “You didn’t think the KK was going to let us finish this trip without a slap on the back of the head, did you?”

We smell the ocean before we see it. A shift in the wind carries a briny tang over the top of the riverine air. Off our bow, a curious seal trains its glossy black eyes on the raft.

Through a mist of low clouds and beating rain, a blue and white speck bobs on the surface of the water. After hoisting aboard a group of frozen paddlers who have just endured three hours of Arctic-blast conditions, the first thing the boat’s captain thinks to do is reach into his cooler and shove a cold beer into each of our frozen paws.Ìę

We all make polite efforts to partake, but by the time anyone can get halfway through a can, we’ve fallen asleep in the boat’s warm, steamy cabin.

“I’m the last expedition company running multi-day river trips in B.C.,” McCutcheon tells me later. “I’m the youngest of the old guys who do this stuff. This place is one of the last bastions of this type of trip.”

After the KK group’s goodbye on the public dock in Vancouver Island’s Port McNeill, I spend a couple of weeks driving around B.C. On the way home, I detour to McCutcheon’s Bear Camp headquarters near Chilko Lake to return some gear.

I’m lucky to find him in a rare sitting mood.Ìę

“Day river-rafting has become so orchestrated, it’s like Disneyland,” he says, hitting a now familiar theme. “Bus leaves at 8:30. Stop for snack at 10:30. Lunch at 12:30. Back by 4 p.m.”

Given his pessimism about the adventure market, I ask about the viability of future runs down the Klinaklini.Ìę

“The reality is that this was not a profitable trip,” he says. “This KK trip was definitely the most challenging we’ve done.”

Did he think twice about having us airlifted out of trouble?

“The concern I had was, the way our luck had been going, it’s almost for certain we’d have needed it at some point. The province has been sequestering helis for forest fires, so you take the machine when you can get it. That was my thinking.”

Inevitably, the talk turns to Jean.

“I gotta admit, it’s pretty ballsy to come out here at her age,” McCutcheon says. “From my perspective it’s terrifying, but it’s also pretty cool.

“She said as much to me afterward. She said, ‘Brian, it’s not my job anymore to worry about how old I am.’ ”

Jean has already sent an e-mail to the group, so we open that up. It’s a witty and touching thank-you note that ends on a line that’s as apt an explanation for running this river as any of us are likely to write.

“It was the best trip (expedition? suicide mission?) of my life,” she writes. “But the best part is that when I returned home, my piled-up mail included a missive from UK Pensions asking me to prove that I was still alive.
 Was there any doubt?”

Chuck Thompson is the authorÌęof five books, including Smile When You’re Lying and Better Off Without ’Em.

The post Paddling One of the Most Hazardous, Remote Rivers in the World appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

THE GUY IN THE FLANNEL SHIRT really wanted me to eat his crab. “Have a claw!” he said, waving a steaming pincer in my face with a two-foot pair of metal tongs. “No, thanks. I’m good. You go ahead,” I said. Really, it’s all yours. Take the claw. It’s the best part.” “No, seriously. I don’t want it.”

Something embarrassing was about to happen. I knew because I’d suffered through this gastronomic showdown a million times, from Paris to Paducah, and it always ends the same way. I turn down food I don’t want to eat. At best I offend somebody. At worst I make a new un-friend.

The crab pusher came at me last summer at a beach party in Gustavus, Alaska, a little town on the fringes of Glacier Bay National Park. An easy scene to visualize: Golden sun shining off the water. Friendly locals. Cans of Rainier on ice. Alaskan king crab pulled from the frigid Pacific just hours earlier, now boiling in a giant kettle. A big-hearted fisherman rattling his tongs in the pot, working through the steam, pulling out my prize.

“Have a claw!”

After my third refusal, the cheery offer started to sound more like a prison warden’s order to get back in line. The fisherman’s expression said, I am the executor of your once-in-a-lifetime experience. So take the goddamn claw and we’ll both walk away happy.

Now here it was, the inevitable moment when the personal capital I’d accrued was about to get squandered with a single confession: I don’t eat crab. I don’t care how much butter and garlic you soak it in, that sea spider’s gnarled clamper is not coming anywhere near my mouth.

“Don’t eat crab?” His mariner eyes narrowed. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“Any seafood, actually,” I said. “I don’t eat fish. Period.”

BEING A PICKY EATER is more than a simple nuisance or emasculating badge of shame. For someone like me, who has spent most of his adult life as an international traveler in search of adventure and work, it’s a flaw that has ruined dinner parties, derailed relationships, and led to countless hungry nights.

Economy class, parasites, and crappy hotel pillows I can handle. What torments me is the prospect of being the honored guest at some exotic native banquet, presented with a sizzling plate of halibut ovaries or octopus eyeballs. All watery creatures are on my verboten list—fresh-water and salt-water fish, shrimp, turtles, any form of mussels, scallops, ceviche, calamari—but it doesn’t stop there. A short version of my “No thanks, I’m good” food roster includes: eggs, ham, tofu, milk, jellies, jams, cocktail wieners, convenience-store pump cheese, game animals, inexplicably trendy vegetables (kale? seriously?), most things pickled, all face parts, the entire organ oeuvre, chicken thighs and legs, anything in casings, cream of whatever, cheeses that float in jars of cloudy liquid, wheatgrass shots, anything associated with lactation or reptiles, bok choy, raisins (would it kill someone in this country to make a plain oatmeal cookie?), the spines of romaine lettuce leaves, apricots, most plums, orange juice pulp (grapefruit pulp is OK), the last bite of a banana, green tomato sludge, and all mushrooms, which to me taste like soil and have the mouthfeel of sputum.

Then there are my maddening inconsistencies. Tomatoes are magnificent in pizza and spaghetti, edible as soup, fatal as a juice. Black beans are an impenetrable mystery. Sometimes they’re perfect, but sometimes they’re a pile of repulsive goop, and there’s no way to explain why to a layman.

Beef is fine, as long as it’s well-done. For you, steakhouses are places to reconnect with masculinity and big, bold cabernets. For me, they’re places to confront supercilious waiters who act like it’s an outrage to leave my goddamn $45 rib eye on the grill a few extra minutes.

So much for my reputation as a man of means on seven continents. If you’re ordering a dish with more than four ingredients, I’m probably looking for the exit.

WE HIDE OURSELVES well, but we are legion. There are so many fussy eaters in the world, in fact, that we’re now being studied.

No one knows precisely what causes people to become weirdly picky, but the editors of the (the bible of psychiatric reference books) have added a description of our plight to the 2013 edition’s list of officially recognized pathologies.

“There will be a diagnosis called avoidant restrictive food intake disorder that will apply primarily to children but which theoretically could apply to adults,” says Marsha Marcus, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. “But I’m not sure it would apply to someone like you who is merely uncomfortable with many foods. Where the line between picky eating and a syndrome lies is not known.”

I called Marcus because, for two years now, she’s been one of the lead researchers on a Duke Medical School–University of Pittsburgh study of more than 10,000 self-professed “selective eaters.” (The preferred scientific term, apparently. I would have gone with “persons of discerning taste.”)

Whatever we’re labeled, most of us don’t like our condition, and I ask Marcus if there’s hope for a cure. She says the causes of the problem are unknown, but that some people, with great effort, “have expanded their dietary repertoires.” I take this to mean that I might be able to stand orange juice pulp someday if I really work at it.

The biggest problem picky eaters face is peer pressure from people who simply cannot believe that we don’t share their precise culinary preferences, and that if we “just have a taste” everything will be fine. Oxtail soup in Italy. Beetroot in Australia. Plantains in Honduras. I’ve shocked the world by refusing them all, but the world keeps coming. The evangelists of squid ink, mayonnaise, and rhubarb have ruined so many nights for me that I’ve often pondered what motivates people to ceaselessly badger others into eating things they don’t want to eat.

Marcus thinks it’s a form of positive cultural exchange. “Food sharing is often meant to cement and reinforce human connection and show caring and appreciation,” she says. “If you reject peoples’ food, there’s the mistaken notion that you reject them.”

Jason Sheehan, a former chef and current food editor at , has suggested an even deeper resonance.

“While an anthem may be stirring and a flag might flutter in the breeze, neither tastes very good. Neither gets internalized, both literally and figuratively, the way food does,” he wrote last year. “To [reject] a country’s food is to say something nasty about its mothers and grandmothers, about the most dearly held traditions and tenderest moments.”

In other words, politely decline someone’s sweet potato bisque and you’re not just saying no. You’re telling them their nana’s mustache needs waxing.

ON THE PLUS SIDE, some of the deepest friendships of my life have been sealed over the common denominator of food hate. Seafood is a big theme for many of us.

Back in the nineties, I taught English as a second language at a college in Okayama, Japan. During my first month on the job, I barely spoke to an aloof colleague named Glasser. One lunch hour, we discovered a mutual aversion to nori, that repulsive dried sea alga that the Japanese use to wrap, sprinkle, and flavor everything from rice to soup to spaghetti. Glasser and I became great buddies and have remained so ever since. We still talk about foods we can’t tolerate the way some guys talk about women or Xbox.

In retrospect, Asia may not have been the wisest choice for me. During my travels, cuttlefish, mutton shanks, yak milk, and thousands of other culinary indignities of the Oriental table have been a constant torture. A Hong Kong writer I know recently published the following paragraph in a guide to local food. She said she was thinking of me when she typed it: “There comes a point when every visitor to Hong Kong has to confront his or her food phobias. Whether it’s bones, heads of animals or food that smells like garbage, it’s likely that you’ll find it on your plate and you won’t know what to do with it.”

Having a paragraph like this dedicated to you feels a little like having a drink named for you at the corner bar—nice to be recognized, but also a sign that you’ve got a problem.

I grew up in Southeast Alaska, dodging cedar-planked salmon flesh and venison chili, my mother keeping me alive with a steady supply of grilled-cheese sandwiches and tater tots. I thought moving to Japan would finally teach me how to eat fish. Instead it taught me how to say no.

I remember the night I finally declared that enough is enough. As the visiting gaijin in a rural town, I was the guest of honor at a banquet thrown by the local Rotary Club. I’d been in Japan long enough to have endured a number of these miseries, forcing tortured smiles while compliantly swallowing chunks of rubbery sea carnage and glugging down pails of Asahi Super Dry to keep the eels and clams and tentacles from coming back up.

At the Rotary dinner, I’d vowed that my days as a human disposal were over. Steeling myself against the suffocating intensity of Japanese protocol, I refused each passing plate of aji, ahi, anago, awabi, and every other gelatinous lump of marine life in the hiragana alphabet. Halfway through the meal, darkness spread over the face of affable Mori-san, the local Rotary Club president and a man for whom the term respected elder was invented.

“Chakku-sensei, you do not eat,” he said, gritting his teeth and sucking in air—an intensely polite display of Japanese opprobrium. “You do not like our sushi?”

In previous weeks, I might have defused the situation by bowing my head, muttering some half-memorized excuse, and swallowing whatever aquatic atrocity was put in front of me. Now I straightened my back and laid the bad news on Mori-san and his klatch of drunken cronies.

“Yes,” I said. “I do not like your sushi. Not just your sushi. The whole country’s sushi. Every country’s sushi. I cannot stomach this food.”

I was fed up. Or, rather, I was fed up at not being fed up.

This show of foreigner impudence might have sent the already unbearable pressure in the room to Bataan levels, but Mori-san hadn’t risen to the position of village poo-bah for lack of diplomatic skills.

“This is no trouble,” he said warmly. “You are American, so you must like beef. Would you like us to order you some beef?”

I nearly kissed the man. Yes, beef would be good. Beef would be a goddamn miracle.

Huzzahs filled the room. Waiters were dispatched to bring the honored guest the finest cut of beef in the house. Beer glasses were overfilled; sloppy cheers were exchanged.

Then came the beef. A full plate of it, set in front of me like a Tokugawa treasure. Two pounds at least, sliced in perfect thin little pieces. All of it as raw and bloody as open-heart surgery.

Mori-san showed me how to savor the meat, chewing it provocatively, then leaning back and letting the fleshy mulch slide down his throat. He was enjoying his revenge.

I looked at the man. I looked at the sweaty circle of expectant faces around the room. I looked at the plate of shiny, wet meat. Then I reached for my beer.

Only the eternally crucified picky eater can fully appreciate the sense of deliverance that comes with working up the nerve to say “No, thank you” to a roomful of samurai Rotarians who have just dropped $300 on a plate of inedible meat in your honor. If the experience didn’t completely change me, it did empower me. At least for a little while.

The thing is, no matter how good you get at rejecting the culinary kindness of strangers, there are some people you really do wish you could please—that crabber in Gustavus comes to mind. So invite us over for dinner; despite our phobic ways, we really are a sociable lot, and we may even make a valiant stab at your mango-encrusted trout casserole. But if the culinary going gets too tough for our tender sense of taste, please allow us both to maintain some dignity by graciously ignoring our gag reflex and accepting a simple but emphatic “No, thank you.”ÌęÌę

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NOTHING LETS YOU KNOW it’s raining bulls and buffaloes like a sheet-metal roof outside your hotel-room window. Indians say the monsoon is the best weather for sleeping, but on my second night in the mountain town of Munnar, in the southern state of Kerala, I’m up and down constantly. Mostly this is from excitement—the monsoon, finally!—but Indian mattresses are also a factor. Spend a few weeks flopping around on one and you’ll understand why they had to invent yoga here.

Monsoon revelers

Monsoon revelers

Map

Monsoon weather pattern

Chris Philpot)

“It is raining bulls and buffaloes!” my driver, nature guide, and new best friend, Baiju, says when he greets me in the morning. “Now you are happy.”

At the nadir of my monthlong monsoon quest, under Indian skies as sunny as the Disney Channel, I came across Baiju in the Kerala seaside town of Cochin. For the first day or two he was a rock of courtesy and professionalism, all “Yes, sir” and “Let me carry that, sir” and “Don’t purchase tea in that shop, sir—it is known to be operated by a criminal element.” Now that he’s gotten comfortable around me, his more local tendencies have begun to flower.

An amateur photographer, Baiju is even more rabid for high-impact monsoon photos than I am. In a windshield-fogging deluge, approaching a corner so flooded that it has its own whitecaps, he points at an old woman making her way up the side of the road with a sack of vegetables.

“Get your camera ready!” he says, punching the gas and rocking the steering wheel like a six-year-old in a video arcade. “Watch the spray when we pass her!”

Baiju downshifts the white Ambassador sedan, turns up the volume on Best of Bollywood Duets, and veers for the woman like a cornerback closing in on a gimpy receiver.

“No, hey, Baiju, that’s not necessary. I don’t think we should—”

“You not like? It’s no problem! She won’t mind!”

“No! I not like!”

“Great picture!”

We plow into the mini-lake and a wall of brown water—backed-up sewers are a big problem during the monsoon—explodes ten feet into the air. I click a few shots through the window because… well, because who doesn’t love seeing a sheet of water suspended in mid­air? The old lady disappears inside the curl like a North Shore pro. Baiju speeds on, crazy for more prey, while BB’s of rain pop like firecrackers across the hood of the car.

That’s one thing about the monsoon: Even with a roof over your head, you never really escape it. If you’re not outside being relentlessly moisturized, you’re getting your socks damp on someone’s living-room rug. Like an effective branding campaign, the monsoon is an insidiously pervasive force that seeps into the background of Indian life, sometimes slapping you in the face for not paying attention.

WHAT MOST OF INDIA is to the hyper-reality of Slumdog Millionaire, the coastal state of Kerala is to high mountains, sandalwood forests, and, most important, the monsoon. Each summer, along this narrow state occupying the southwestern edge of India, the ferocious rains and wind that originate in the Indian Ocean first strike.

This happens, with remarkable consistency, starting around June 1, when the monsoon rolls into Kerala and begins blowing through the country, advancing steadily north through India in a storm system that produces strong northeasterly winds. By June 10 it has usually hit Mumbai and Calcutta. By July 15, all of India will lie beneath a claustrophobic dome of pewter that settles over the country like a garbage-can lid. In the north, along the Pakistan border, even hardscrabble villages in the great Thar Desert will get a month of rain.

But Kerala is the sweet spot. During the monsoon’s nearly half-year cycle of rain, it will never completely leave this soaked, subtropical Eden. In a typical monsoon, the northeast and west coasts of India receive about 118 inches of rain. That’s both a glorious and dangerous amount of freshwater for a four-to-six-month stretch, but it’s only an average. In July 2005, Mumbai got 37 inches in one day. Last September, 900,000 villagers fled their homes after the Kosi River burst its banks, turning much of the state of Bihar into a sprawling lake.

For travelers, the monsoon period is considered the most wretched time to visit India, but wretched was what I wanted. I’ve spent my life in the eternal rainforests of Southeast Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, so you might assume I’ve already experienced enough rain for one incarnation. But I haven’t. Surprising as it might seem coming from someone who owns 14 rain jackets, I mostly feel cheated where precipitation is concerned.

Rain in the Northwest is, like the locals, misty, pleasant, and polite; often gloomy but rarely flamboyant. Rain we get, but almost never the opening-of-the-heavens theatrics of midwestern or southeastern thunderstorms. As my aunt Gay told friends upon returning to Ohio after a two-week visit to Juneau, “It’s the craziest thing—it rains all the time, but you never get wet.”

Decades of congenial drizzle have left me with a powerful craving for authentic rain. Belligerent rain. Rain so hard and steady that the fish complain about it. Thinking this way about the rain inevitably got me thinking about India. This in turn made every Indian I contacted about traveling to Kerala in June ask if I’d lost my mind.

“It will rain every day,” they warned. “You will not be able to tolerate the heat.” “June is the absolute worst time of all in India, and a perfect hell in Kerala.”

This was a surprise. I thought Indians were supposed to love the monsoon. Ancient ragas have woven it into the national mythology. The country’s entire life cycle supposedly revolves around a weather system that, at its climax, covers one-third of the planet.

The more Indians I talked to, however, the more I got the sense that the monsoon may not be the cause cĂ©lĂšbre it once was. Seasonal rains used to mean survival in a country with little assured irrigation, but advances in food preservation have eliminated the worst rural starvation. Improved transportation means villages are no longer isolated by annual flooding. Even Bollywood’s famed wet-sari dances—for decades the only legitimate T&A that Indians were allowed to enjoy—have been rendered quaint by the high heels and micro-miniskirts of the “Bombabes” who are bringing skank fashion to every corner of the country.

More important, motorists hate the legendary traffic jams the rains bring, and it’s motorists who are driving (literally, figuratively) India in its manic aspirational push to keep up with China’s manic aspirational push to overtake the United States’ position of global economic primacy.

“And we come to the same story…which is repeated every year,” bitches a typical Times of India article. “The monsoon showers playing havoc on the city roads, and the harried commuters praying for relief and cursing the authorities all the while.”

Given that no one likes an outsider who’s been in their country all of three weeks lecturing them about their culture, I assumed locals would be angered by my position that the modern state has blown past the monsoon. From train platforms to spice shops, I’ve been springing my monsoon-is-dead thesis on every Indian who will talk to me, yet, astonishingly, not one seems all that offended by my outlandish challenge to the national identity. After road-testing it on an endless array of bystanders in Delhi and Mumbai, I decided my old rain jacket was ready for the ultimate shakedown in Kerala.

THE PLAN WAS TO HEAD into the Kerala countryside and, not unlike Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin, find the most sincere place to await the rain. After a fair amount of research I chose Munnar, a mountain town in the Western Ghats coastal range. In addition to being impossibly beautiful, these are some of the wettest mountains in the world.

At a shop in Cochin, a providential encounter led me to Baiju, who insisted that his only real deficiency was his height. “Too short for the Indian army,” he said in a tone suggesting that a life of target= practice and drilling at dawn would have been just the one for him. “The army’s minimum-height requirement for permanent commissions is 157.5 centimeters.”

That’s about five-two. Baiju missed the cut by three-quarters of an inch.

It took nearly a month, but I think I finally pulled an honest man out of India’s endless stable of crooked drivers. Barrel-chested and bearded, Baiju is exemplary. His 2004 Ambassador is clean, and he keeps it in the kind of shape my engineer grandfather kept his Caprice Classic in. He senses the moments to be quiet and let the scenery do the talking. And, as an amateur photographer himself, he’s savvy about light and angles and stopping points whenever I see a photo op, which is often.

The Western Ghats are India’s highest peaks south of the Himalayas, massive rock towers rising to 8,000 feet, so the four-hour drive from Cochin to Munnar is spectacular. The lower slopes are covered with fluorescent-green tea plantations. As we gain elevation, fragrances of cinnamon, carda­mom, coriander, cumin, vanilla, pepper, ginger, garlic, and clove pour through our open windows—Kerala grows half your spice caddy—along with smoke from small cooking fires.

At a scenic viewpoint, we get out to immerse ourselves in a steady patter of rain and assess a promising mass of dark clouds on the horizon. Across the parking lot, four guys in their late thirties, leaning unsteadily on the hood of an SUV and passing around a shot glass, are rolling like a whiskey bottle down a set of stadium stairs.

“Hello! What is your country?” the friendliest of the crew yells. Then he lurches toward me with an insane grin and the apparent idea of planting a wet-bearded welcome on my lips. I turn my head just in time to get a sandpaper slurp that starts on my cheek and slides down my neck.

Baiju and I have stumbled onto an Indian version of the weekend roader. Buddies out to drink in the monsoon. Or just drink. Like a trip to the AutoZone Liberty Bowl, the main event is really just an excuse to get out of town.

“We are four from Cochin,” one of the guys tells me, tilting his head to catch a spray of warm rain and thrusting a filthy glass into my hand. “This is our annual trip to the mountains. No wives and children. Now, toast the monsoon!”

Normally, I’m pretty sociable in these situations, but drunks on windy mountain roads shouldn’t be encouraged, especially when they’re chugging something called White Mischief, which turns out to be a popular Indian vodka. I consent only to a quick courtesy snort before we shove off.

WHEN THE FULL FURY of the monsoon finally does arrive in Munnar, two days after our arrival, it’s heralded by a thick, solemn wind that gathers itself with the singular purpose of a wrecking ball. Cats and dogs run for cover. Birds disappear. Within seconds the air is filled with dust, branches, leaves, plastic bags, sheets of newspaper, food wrappers, and every other piece of stray garbage—this in a place that specializes in stray garbage.

Rain bounces like grapeshot across canvas awnings at outdoor markets. Chattering crowds disperse—a thousand directions for a thousand people. Women struggle to control their saris. Men on bicycles and mopeds lower their heads into the onslaught. Within half an hour, gutters rage like small rivers and clogged sewer drains cough up pungent backwash.

Prompted by a recent newspaper op-ed bemoaning the fact that Indians are now more likely to stay inside playing video games than enjoy the rain, I hit an older Keralan with my monsoon theory. “I grew up in the 1940s,” he says in a cranky tone suggesting a pending hip replacement. “We walked to school in the heavy monsoon, and by the time we reached the school our clothes were completely drenched. Nowadays children travel only by car and bus. They can sit during the monsoon and be dry.”

A younger guy is slightly less equivocal. “Of course, you may be right,” he says. “Now there is no monsoon poetry. There are no new monsoon stories.”

The next day, up with the roosters and on the road by daylight, Baiju and I come upon a monsoon casualty. Twenty feet below a two-lane mountain road, four guys are trying to push a Kawasaki motorcycle up a steep, muddy embankment. Moments ago, a jeep barreling into a blind curve in the wrong lane—a move as common in India as barreling into a blind curve in the correct lane—had set up a potential head-on collision.

“I braked suddenly and the bike slid from under me,” the Kawasaki rider tells me, still half in shock. “I was saved by the bushes. My bike tumbled down the hill.”

Kerala is known throughout India for the “trail of blood” caused by winding roads, wet asphalt, and what the government Trans­port Department ungraciously labels “inept motorists.” Despite having only 3 percent of India’s population, Kerala racks up 10 percent of the nation’s traffic accidents. In 2007 it accounted for 3,778 deaths in 39,918 wrecks. That’s more than ten traffic fatalities a day.

The Kawasaki is so heavy that the guys below look like they’re struggling with an injured cow. Finally, someone arrives with a line of strong cord. One end is tied to the bike, the other thrown up the hill. It lands a yard from my feet.

Southern Indians are notably short and wiry, and since I’m six-three and unapol­ogetically rumbled past 200 years ago, I’m the obvious choice to anchor the ad hoc rope gang. With four guys pushing from below and five guys pulling from above, you’d think a motorcycle would be pretty easy to rescue. You’d be wrong. Still, the organization required to get eight screaming Hindus and Muslims and one gung-ho American to do anything in concert makes for an inspiring cultural moment.

With great effort, we haul the hunk of steel and rubber over roots, logs, trees, bushes, and boulders. Once the limping Kawasaki is back on the pavement, Baiju and I return to the car with the self-satisfaction of Good Samaritans. Baiju is feeling a little down about one thing, though.

“Had there been a serious injury,” he grouses as we move down the road, “we might have gotten better photographs.”

THE DAY’S BIG DRAMA comes during a late-afternoon lull in the rain, when the ever-alert Baiju spots three elephants—a bull, a female, and a baby—drinking at the farthest edge of a lake about half a mile from the road. We’re so far away that looking at them is like taking an eye exam.

“See the baby standing behind the mother?” I say.

“Oh, yes, I see it now,” Baiju replies.

“That male looks like he could be pretty big.”

“Yes. But he also looks quite small from here.”

After a few minutes of this, an older man wearing a steeply peaked policeman’s cap pops out of the nearby woods. He’s a local game officer who, following a brief chat with Baiju, shows us a spot where the fence protecting the elephants’ habitat has been cut. If we’re so interested in elephants, he says, holding out his palms, why don’t we climb through the fence and hike down to the edge of the lake while he looks the other way?

The “pay to play” game is, of course, slightly older in India than it is in Illinois. I decide to help the guy maintain the integrity of his position.

“No, we’re fine,” I say, trying to convey the immense personal satisfaction I derive from respecting the terrain of wild animals. “We’re happy to watch from here.”

Baiju, however, has no intention of letting an official offer to skirt the law pass him by, especially since it gives him a rare opportunity for close-up wildlife photography. He charges into the brush, shouting “Come on, come on!” Not because he’s afraid I’ll miss out on anything but because he knows that my pricey Canon 200mm zoom lens will fit right onto his shitty old EOS body. In place of his knockoff 50mm lens, my optical beast will make him four times the photographer.

I follow Baiju through the fence. (The Thompson coat of arms depicts a man being handed a beer while someone twists his arm.) We sidestep down a slippery hillside covered with tall razor grass. Pellets of rain tickle our faces. At the bottom of the hill we get a clear shot of the elephants across the water, barely 50 yards away. I hand Baiju the 200mm.

“I can see the hairs on his ass! It is fantastic!” Baiju clicks off 20 identical frames. He shakes with delight each time he lines up a trunk in the viewfinder, but with a new rain attack suddenly thundering above us, I can’t help but worry about my lens. I shove my camera under my shirt for protection, but Baiju waves his/my equipment around as though it’s made of Gore-Tex.

After snuffling by the lakeshore for a bit, the elephants make an unexpected plunge into the water and start swimming directly for our position. Judging by the fresh turds, flattened grass, and rapid approach of the great gray dreadnoughts, it’s clear that Baiju and I are standing in the middle of a popular elephant hangout. I mutter something about our possibly illegal and certainly uncool encroachment on pachyderm turf, but Baiju stays crouched in the reeds.

While Baiju burns chip memory, I detect a slight itching near my ankle. Through the wet grass I look down at my Teva’d feet and find two slimy, purplish-black streaks, like squiggles of dark snot, writhing on top of my right foot. At first I have no idea what I’m looking at. Then it becomes painfully clear.

“Leeches! Baiju, goddammit, leeches! Let’s get the hell out of here!”

The downpour has brought the bloodsuckers out in force. I swipe at my feet and shout at the leeches like a gorilla hoping to intimidate a rival.

Holding his ground, Baiju is blind to my horror. I haul ass up the elephant track and back to the road. The game officer is still there, standing in the rain next to our car, smiling as though he’s expecting a tip. I ignore him and conduct a deeply personal leech search, toenails to taint. Baiju pops out of the bushes five minutes behind me, out of breath, out of battery power, and, most alarmingly, out of professional boundaries.

“There were many leeches where I was standing,” he says. He peels one off his calf, as though he’s picking lint off a sweater, and holds it up for me to examine. “I must ask you the generosity of allowing me to take a hot shower in your hotel room tonight. You may have to call for an extra towel.”

FOR TWO DAYS AFTER the motorcycle wreck and elephants and leeches, Baiju and I drive through magnificent countryside, exposing ourselves to the full intensity of all-encompassing showers. We return the welcoming laughter of strangers huddled for shelter in doorways. We watch village boys slip, slide, and howl through mud-soccer games. We laugh as two men race out of a bus and literally dance a jig amid drops of rain so big they look like meteors. Because temperatures are so high, you can stay out in the rain forever and never get cold.

It’s all pretty great except that, with every inch that falls, I feel my monsoon theory being swept away in a tide of collective joy. Far from being hostile or even indifferent to the monsoon, the people of Kerala embrace it, clearly drawing from the storms a reaffirming, communal assurance. Nature still matters, at least to these Indians.

At some point during all this, the old woman and the wall of brown water return to haunt my sleep. Between this nagging guilt and the bad mattress, my last night in India becomes such a restless hell that, by the time Baiju picks me up on the morning of my flight home, I’m in an uncharacteristically pissy mood.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I complain as we claw through city traffic.

“Tell you what?”

“That I was wrong. My theory. We talked about it for a week. You translated interviews. You told me I was a man blessed with keen insight.”

“I believe you have a good theory five days a week,” he says. “Look out the window. It is Monday again.” Baiju motions at the traffic. “The soccer games and dancing you will find only on the weekend. Now the people are going, as they say, back to the real world. It is just another gloomy Monday.”

One of the great things about travel is getting to the point where you forget what day of the week it is. I roll down the window. Dirty rain, diesel exhaust, and angry blares of late-for-work car horns roll into the Ambassador. It feels like modern India again. I recline in the seat, close my eyes, and settle in for the slog to the airport.

For the schmoes on their way to jobs in threatening IT office parks, predatory call centers, and world-altering auto factories, it most certainly is another gloomy Monday. For me, though, things are looking good. Thanks to Baiju, I have some decent, if gore-free, monsoon pictures; a reliable ride back to the mellow drizzle of the real world; and at least five-sevenths of a theory that, like the clothes in my suitcase, still holds a little bit of ancient water.

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