My Life Is More Fun Than Yours

Death By Teenager (Part One)

2008-10-01T20:39:00.000-07:00

I often wonder just how it will happen.
Will it happen in a blink, before awareness sinks in? Or will I have a few seconds to realized what’s inevitable, to appreciate the hopelessness of the situation? Or maybe it will be drawn out, painful even – a dying rather than a death.
I think the second option would be worst. Like a plane crash. Knowing you’re about to die, but no chance to come to terms with it. Instantaneous death must also have its downsides, other than, you know, dying. The thought of flickering out before getting a chance to say “Ah. So this is how it happens,” seems unfair. The grim reaper tackling you from behind strikes me as wholly unsportsmanlike. And there’s not much to commend slow deaths, the sinking slowly beneath the weight of days marked only by the path of sunlight across a hospital wall.
I spend enough time thinking of death and all the ways I might die that I don’t watch horror films. I don’t need the extra arsenal provided by these movies. No matter how improbably or absurdly characters meet their demise I find myself thinking: “I wonder if I’m going to die from getting eaten by cannibalistic pigs” or “Fuck! I hadn’t even considered the possibility of getting my face ripped off and bleeding to death.” Then later, during one of these reveries about my mortality and when I’m running through all the possible ways one can shuffle off this mortal coil, I’ll realize my list has grown so long I could spend a while lifetime thinking about death.
Still, it never crossed my mind that I might depart the company of the breathing due to the foolhardy actions of an eighteen year old boy and that most dangerous of phrases: ”Don’t worry, I’ve done this before.”
As the only male hut warden, he was easy to pick out when he hopped into Jimmy’s van the first time Jimmy dropped me off in the mountains.
“That must be Sam.” I thought.
He had light skin, blond hair, and green eyes. His body had a sort of awkwardness to it. As though it was still deciding how tall it might grow and how much baby fat it was going to lose. He had thick, flat lips that struck me as a waste on a teenage boy. When he crawled into the van I prepared to introduce myself, but he stiffly refrained from eye contact and Jimmy was already launching into a new Santana Spiel, so I didn’t have the opportunity to say hi.
By the time Sam and I exchanged our first few sentences I had already fallen comfortably into the pattern of my new job. Most mornings I woke around seven or seven thirty, uncocooning myself from my toasty sleeping bag and turning on the stove to make the morning’s first cup of tea. First radio report was at eight fifteen when we would relay the number of people who checked into our hut the previous night. On warmer mornings I would sit outside on the deck watching the morning light seep down Ngauruhoe or Ruepehu. Cooler mornings would find me crouching next to my room’s small gas heater, warming my fingers on the small glass mug. After a few hours spent reading, writing, and dashing to the outhouse due to excessive tea consumption, I’d go to work on my daily duties: quick wipe of the stoves and tables and quick sweep of the hut floors. Then came the necessary clean of the long drops. This I had down to an art. Open the door crack and spray disinfectant everywhere. Let it air out a bit, then charge in with bleachy bacteriacide. Wipe, wipe, wipe, wipe, wipe. Put head out door. Deep breath. Dive back in. Wonder momentarily about the prevalence of explosive diarrhea among the latest batch of hikers. Scrub out bowl. Mouth firmly closed to prevent splash back (learned that one quickly). Put head out door. Deep breath. Sweep floor. And we’re done.
Sometimes during this I would wonder what my dad would think having paid back account draining private college fees for his only daughter only to learn that she was scrubbing outhouses. But here’s the truth: I felt happier scrubbing toilets than I ever felt in law school. Which isn’t to say I felt like I had a long-term future in the janitorial arts (despite my wicked bog scouring skills) just that I loved where I was and what I was doing, and if toiled cleaning happened to be a part of it, then so be it.
After the morning clean was over, my day was my own until the next radio call that evening. Often the hut wardens would arrange to meet, picking a place between the huts for a picnic or heading across the park for a game of cards. (Often more than four hours of hiking for just a few games,) Other days I would head alone off the track, pulling out my topo map to see if I could figure out a path over a distant ridge or going in search of places alluded to or treasure mapped in the warden’s log book: hot springs, streams, hidden valleys, interesting rock formations, even a place known as porn rock (later euphemistically renamed library rock) so called for the mysterious cache of skin rags discovered there. I never would manage to find this last one, so I can’t confirm whether the “library” was still there. Still, I spent a pleasant afternoon exploring while contemplating just how a porn collection ended up in the middle of the bust in a national park.
All of the huts were just a short walk from a stream where an alpine dip provided the only means of bathing after these excursions. Truth be told, I didn’t really care about the steady accumulation of grime and smell, but I braved the gasp inducing water for the benefit of the hutties who would usually start arriving by mid-afternoon and would ofter come within smelling distance while having a quick chat or inquiring about the weather. I would always respond to these inquiries in exactly the same way. “Well, there’s a chance it will rain at some point tomorrow, but let’s hope not.” New Zealand weather requires some mega equivocation skills considering it is as temperamental as a toddler. Even the official weather reports demonstrated a penchant for vagueness. It was not uncommon to hear phrases in the radio report like “cloudy periods at times” or “occasional showers clearing throughout the day.” Occasionally a report would predict fine weather, clouds, and heavy showers all during the course of one day. (This falls into my why bother? category.) DOC officials excused this as the necessary result of having just one weather report for the whole of the park. And it was true the one side of the mountain could be soaked in sunlight while the other would be experiencing biblical rains. Still, I couldn’t prevent the sneaking suspicion that somewhere in Taupo some bug-eyed meteorologist was standing in front of a Wheel O’ Weather and gave it a good spin to determine the report we’d hear over the radio.
After the weather report was relayed to the wardens, Jimmy would come on the radio and check in with each of us individually, inquiring how many hikers we had at our hit, if we had any problems that needed immediate attention, and also often asking us what we had gotten up to that day. The banter was kept light with Jimmy often teasing us about some thing or another. I looked forward to these calls perhaps a bit too much. In the absence of meeting up with other wardens, this call would often be the first bit of social for the day. And though I wasn’t uncomfortable with solitude, it was a nice interruption during a rainy day’s twentieth game of solitaire.
The day’s last responsibility was to collect the hut tickets that proved the hikers had paid for their vinyl mattress and outhouse privileges. I also was required to give them a “hut talk” that consisted of introducing myself, reminding them to clean up after themselves, to pack out their rubbish, etc. I was also supposed to let hikers know what to do in the event of a fire. This meant pointing out the fire exits, which in the one room hut were the front door and the windows. Most wardens skipped this part in their talk, but I loved the flight attendanty-ness of it. I also got a kick imagining someone for whom this bit of information might make a crucial difference. A dude who would respond to this information by going “Oh yeah, jump out the window if there’s a fire. I totally would never have thought of that.” Other wardens would have been content to let that guy get Darwin Awarded out of the gene pool. But not me. Guess I’m just a good person.
And that was my day. Sometimes it would end with a long chat or game of cards with the hikers, sometimes I would retire to my hut with a good book. It was simple, easy work that sent me to be with a clear conscience.
So now that I’ve set the scene to dome degree, let’s get back to Sam. Remember Sam? He’s the kid who almost got me killed.

You Can Tell By The Hat

2008-08-04T03:54:00.000-07:00

It was time to head back up to the North Island. Even though New Zealand has a land mass that is comparable to Colorado's, it takes a surprisingly long time to get anywhere. And the trip wasn't easy. A flight took me from Christchurch over Cook Strait to Wellington -- a ticket worth it's price just for the views on a clear day. Limited bus service from Wellington up to Taupo and the Tongariro National Park area meant I was forced to overnight in Wellington.

I checked into a hostel of converted office spaces. A generous person would call it utilitarian, but it struck me as distinctly Orwellian and imagined pallid inmates in the next room chanting "I love Big Brother." I was put in a room with five hulking English rugby players. This was not nearly as fun as it sounds. I was woken up at five in the morning by one of them putting his hands on me after a no doubt unsuccessful night on the prowl. (Hmm, I wonder why he came back alone. What girl wouldn't want to take home that skeevy mass of groping awkward awkwardness? Mystery of mysteries.) As soon as I realized what he was doing I had the overwhelming urge to put my heel through his jaw -- an impulse so strong my foot still itches when I think about it. But I could tell this was one fight I would lose, despite the fact that the dude and his buddies were as sauced as an enchilada. So instead I said in a fake oh-my-God-this-is-the-funniest-thing-ever voice: "Hey Dude. You look a little drunk over there. Why don't ya lie down. I bet you'll feel better. I gotta get some sleep buddy." He grinned like a dumb ogre, but soon stumbled away. A half hour later he left the room with his buddies in order to catch a flight.

I didn't find what happened traumatic. The sad reality is that most girls have experienced such episodes to the point they become if not common then at least unsurprising. And it wasn't worth my time to complain or try to track down these guys. But in retrospect, I really wish I had had some itching powder on me. I figured I could have dumped some in his backpack and all over his clothes while he stepped out to take a piss. It seems like a fair form of vigilante justice. You make me feel vigorously uncomfortable? I'm going to make you vigorously uncomfortable. Not to mention I love the idea of giving the guy a nasty nad itch for a few days.

But where was I? Oh yeah, me heading up to volcanoes and jobbiness.

The next morning I hopped a bus up to Turangi - a po dunk town just north of Tongariro National Park where DOC has its main headquarters for the region. This was where I'd be staying when not in the mountains -- a place to stash some things and take a weekly shower.

A short man with thinning brown hair arrived at the deserted bus stop where I was waiting. He looked nervous and walked over to me without making eye contact even though I was the only person to be seen.

"Are you waiting for the bus?" He asked.

"Um. No. I'm waiting for someone to pick me up from DOC."

"Oh." He paused, looking around. "That's me." He said finally.

I guessed from our correspondence that the man before me was Jimmy Johnson, Hut Warden Coordinator. I could help but use the full title, having seen several emails signed that way. He helped me with my backpack.

Despite his short stature and thinning hair, his shorts made me think of an early eighties Ken doll that once graced my bedroom shelf. One where the polyester shorts come so high on the legs that it's obscene even despite Ken's absent genitalia. I wondered if it was part of the DOC uniform that someone had failed to modify in the last two decades. I know people say New Zealand is twenty years behind the rest of the world and for the first time I was beginning to think that saying had some merit.

Jimmy helped me load my backpack into the car. Training was to begin early next day so he dropped me off at the wardens' house on a quiet residential street in the heart of Turangi. On the way over, Jimmy casually mentioned that the previous wardens' house had burned down after a fourteen year old kid had thrown a firework through the window. Turns out this kind of occurrence was not exactly unusual for Turangi, a town which may not be the arm pit of New Zealand, but might be the unwashed behind the ear of New Zealand.

The new wardens' hose was a bungalow with flaking white paint and work carpet. Flies buzzed incessantly. Jimmy introduced me to the two wardens who were spending their days off out of the hills: Krista, a pretty, gregarious Aussie whom I immediately liked and Lucy, an awkward Kiwi with a lazy eye and a tendency to sprinkle conversations with irrelevant interjections. I slumped my bags on the floor in one of the back bedrooms and took in the general shabbiness, noting a spider crawling out of a hole in the bedspread. Krista soon came in and urged me to take over a set of drawers and I realized, shabby or not, how nice it was to have some storage space to call my own. After four months of carrying my life on my back, possessions shuffled and squashed in a grubby backpack and hoofing from hostel and campsite to hostel, a plastic set of drawers seemed like the last word in luxury. Work would start the next day, but for now I was home.

Early the next morning I accompanied Jimmy Johnson, Hut Warden Coordinator as he dropped Krista and Lucy in the mountain. Within a few minutes Jimmy covered the three topics that would dominate our conversations for the next two months. What follows is a true and accurate account list of the passions of Jimmy Johnson, Hut Warden Coordinator:

1) Santana. Specifically, how many albums Jimmy Johnson possesses, how great the Santana concert is going to be, haw great the Santana concert was, how long Jimmy Johnson has been a fan of Santana, and how other fans are always surprised to learn how long Carlos Santana has been performing.

2) The poor driving habits of anyone not named Jimmy Johnson.

3) The irresponsibility of the New Zealand government in selling fast cars to anyone not named Jimmy Johnson because it's just like giving someone a toy but they saying they can't play with it *scoff of disbelief*, and the speed limit in New Zealand being only 100 kilometers per hour there is no reason for a car to be able to do 240, 260 kilometers per hour as you're just encouraging and tempting people to speed *scoff of disbelief*, and just look at that idiot going almost 60 ks in a 40 k zone; it's no wonder people get killed on this road *scoff, scoff*.

Jimmy never came across as truly angry when discussing these topics, just honestly bewildered at the preponderance of idiocy encountered on a daily basis. In any case, the only time Jimmy Johnson was not expounding on these topics was during the few hours that day where he explained to me my duties as a hut warden. Each week I would be assigned one of four huts on the Tongariro Northern Circuit. While at these huts I was responsible for checking hikers' hut passes, posting the daily weather report, recording daily rainfall, monitoring the gas and drinking water levels, trying to talk hikers into cleaning up after themselves and cleaning up after them when they inevitably failed. I also might have to help with any search and rescues that would occur, unload new gas tanks from helicopters, and wipe down long drops.

Jimmy explained that all of these duties would usually only take an hour or two and the rest of the day I was free to hike around the park or do pretty much whatever I wanted. Sweet, I thought, working for free has some perks.

We covered the working of radios and pagers, twice went over the importance of making sure the warden's tea and coffee supply didn't run out, and I was given a test of my remembrance of how Jimmy Johnson likes his coffee should he swing by one of the huts.

Jimmy also issued me a food card so I could get free groceries at the local New World Supermarket. The card provided a generous weekly budget that encouraged us to feast like kings and queens when up in the mountains (provided you could carry all that food up there). He also issued me with a regulation DOC ranger hat -- size extra large after I joked about having a big head. This green canvas hat -- chapeau? fedora? cowboy hat? I don't really know the correct hat nomenclature -- was the douchiest looking wardrobe accessory since the ruff. I loved it. It was emblazoned with the official green and yellow DOC logo and had (of course!) a cinchable chin strap. I was heartbroken when I realized I wasn't going to be able to keep it after my two months were up.

"You're not required to wear it." Jimmy said. "But most wardens find it provides good sun protection."

"Oh, I'll wear it." I enthused, thinking of how well it would match my forest green polyprops and already imagining myself hatted out telling off some littering hikers. (I've always noticed that people in positions of authority tend to be jackasses and I felt it would be improper not to follow suit.)

And that was pretty much it.

I signed an assertion that I had received one DOC hat. (Go New Zealand for keeping track of government property!) I also had to initial a list of things that Jimmy had shown me (radios, pagers, a video of how not to get decapitated by a helicopter--five minutes of slides to impart the simple injunction: duck!). The only thing that remained was a quick tour to each of the huts to learn their individual idiosyncrasies.

The first hut on the list was Mongatepopo. Only twenty minutes hike from the car park where most people start the Tongariro Crossing, it's the most easily accessible of all the huts. Jimmy and I popped up there one afternoon. As we hiked from the parking lot to the hut, Jimmy grumbled about day hikers stealing signs as souvenir and leaving litter on the trail. In between these rants, always in that same baffled tone, he pointed out the flowers along the trail -- blue stars and eye brights -- and told me the names of all the surrounding hills and mountains repeating the difficult Maori names until I could say them.

"Pukekaikiore."

"Poo kay koru what?"

"Pu. Kay. Kai. Kiore."

He also pointed out secret paths and trails for when i wanted to avoid the stampede of day hikers. There wasn't a plant he couldn't name nor a ridge he didn't seem to have some tactic for summitting. I thought of what an unusual skill it was in this day and age and realized I probably couldn't even identify half the trees on the three acres where I grew up. I was determined to pay more attention here.

"Here are the warden's quarters." Jimmy said when we arrived, opening a locked door to a small room attached to the main hut. Like the main hut, the quarters were spartan, but efforts had clearly been made to make the place a bit cosier. The bed was lofted close to the sloped wooden ceiling, and while the mattresses were thin, vinyl coated slabs like in the main hut, two had been pushed together to form a larger bed. There were also manky but serviceable pillows and blankets on a small set of shelves next to the bed's ladder. Beneath the bed was a small bookshelf with a selection of mainly yellowing novels and some leaflets on back country cooking. The floor space was mostly taken up by a rickety table on which rested the wardens' log book. There was a sink with a good amount of counter space, a gas powered stove (two burners), a small gas powered heater, and (Oh, luxury of luxuries) a solar powered light. I couldn't wait to curl up here with a cup of tea and a good book.

Jimmy picked up the log book and asked me to put the kettle on for some cups of coffee.

"Now let's see if Sam has written in the log book where he went to today and when he's getting back like you're supposed to."

Sam was the current warden at Mangatepopo and I could tell Jimmy was getting ready to use his I'm-so-bewildered-at-people's-idiocy voice. Fortunately Sam had followed protocol and had written where he was hiking and when he thought he'd get back. Jimmy seemed almost disappointed.

Among Sam's possessions I spied the book 101 Solitaire Games for One I mildly wondered at the prevalence of cabin fever up here. Flipping through the log book on the table I skimmed a few long entries that were treatises on the peculiar behaviour of day walker, detailed accounts of long drop cleanliness, and elaborate margin decorations to rival medieval manuscripts. I resolved to buy some good books.

I learned that normally new wardens would spend the next two days visiting the rest of the Northern Circuit huts with Jimmy, but as I had arrived early to fill in for a defected volunteer, Jimmy didn't have time to spare. Instead I would have the next two days to visit the huts on my own. Jimmy's knowledge of the park commanded nothing but respect; however, I had heard horror stories from the other wardens about Jimmy's proclivity for repeating bad jokes. It seems like having a few favorite topics of conversation, Jimmy had certain favorite jokes he liked to tell hikers: "You've lost your skis!" said to any and all hikers who walk with poles, or "The track is closed, you will have to turn around." Pause Pause Pause "Aw, just kidding." This last one was usually said to hikers near the end of the grueling crossing.

Apparently Jimmy would say delightedly "They're new hikers so you can tell the jokes over and over." The other wardens counted me lucky for having skipped out on the two day hike with Jimmy. I agreed feeling like I was supposed to have some sort of local premium of the telling of bad jokes and that Jimmy might cramp my style.

So I spent the next two days hiking to the three remaining huts on the Northern Circuit, visiting Lucy, Krista, and Ingrid, another long term hut warden. (Jimmy, it seemed, had a knack for surrounding himself with girls.) I learned how to switch the Ketetahi huts from rain water to drinking water so day hikers wouldn't waste the precious resource. At Oturere, Krista showed me how to assemble and operate the gas powered pump to move water from storage tanks into the main tanks and I found discovered a weird satisfaction with loud, noisy machinery. And at Waihohonu and with almost frightening glee, Lucy showed me how to set possum traps.

Hiking between the huts late that afternoon I was consumed by the peaceful solitude always heightened by cutting a lone figure in nature's vast grandeur. I've never felt such tranquility while "working". The setting sun made me squint, so I put on my dorky hat.

This was going to be fun.

Escape the Crap Job Blasé with ... Volcanoes!

2008-07-06T05:17:00.000-07:00

Pretty much the first paying job I ever got was working for my high school's wood shop teacher. For the generous sum of $4.25 an hour I swept the sawdust off the floor in a room papered with posters of people with mutilated and missing fingers. I'm sure the photos were intended to shock teenage boys into responsibility when using band saws, but perversely the only effect I ever noticed was even more enthusiastic risk taking by my male classmates. "Don't lose a finger!" One would cry as the other showed off how close he could get his knuckle to the rotating blade. The boys notwithstanding, I can't to this day use even a stapler without those black and white images surfacing in my mind.

My other duty was in the line of data entry, a task for which I shared a 5 by 5 office with the morbidly obese Mr. Register (pronounced REE-jester). The office lacked air conditioning and a radio devoted only to Rush Limbaugh's spawning of acidic ignorance. After hearing the argument that Madeline Albright looks like a dyke ergo Clinton is a bad president for maybe the thirtieth time I wondered if this being my first job also by some cosmic law meant it would also be my worst.

(My high school was right next to some commercial strawberry fields where I'd see migrant workers stopped in the midday sun and realize how lucky I was, a feeling I still have to this day. But allow me a small gripe for humor's sake.)

So, the next job I had was another choice job lined up by my christian high school: selling health food cookbooks and cultish religious material door to door. Don't ask me who came up with that combination of goods, but it seemed to work. We'd offer a cookbook and then the spiel was something along the lines of "Now that you've taken care of your physical health, why don't you take care of the health of your IMMORTAL SOUL?" People would often ante up. Mostly I think they would just take pity on the poor beskirted teenager who, without any adults around, knocked on their doors in the dark evening. I had a feeling they thought I was some Jehovah's Witness child or victim of a polygamous marriage. I played this up, too -- choosing the most thoroughly dowdy skirts and giving scared please-don't-kick-me puppy dog eyes to anyone who opened the door. I didn't believe in what I was selling and sometimes just wished I could be straight up with the people who opened their doors: "Dude, I'm pushing some whacked out religious shit that you really don't need as it's going to make you shake your head and think the world is going crazy, and I'm just looking for some cash to spend on some clothes because I'm young enough to believe that maybe I won't be so awkward and unappetizing if I just have the right outfits, and rather than spend 24 dollars on a book you don't need, why don't you just give me 5 bucks to assuage your pity and we both can be on our ways." But I kept up the ruse and insisted on the necessity of a religious tract that I found, frankly, disturbing. And so at the tender age of fourteen I sold my principles.

I quit two months later. I'd like to say that my ethics caught up to me, but the real reason was the iron maiden I saw inside a house when the owner opened the door. That shit freaked. me. out.

Over the next few years I worked the typical litany of shit jobs encountered by the young and starving, finally ending up with a job in an education company in Los Angeles. The highlights of my days were watching the continuous pump of traffic on Wilshire Boulevard and bumping into the occasional celebrity on their way to the production offices housed in the same building. When the best part of your week is getting scowled at by Paris Hilton on your way to have a pee, you know you've hit a new low.

But I had a feeling this new job was going to be different. (Beyond the fact that I wasn't getting paid.) I drew this conclusion after coming across this fact in a Guinness Book of World Records left lying around a hostel: "The 1883 eruption of Krakatau was heard 2,908 miles away by people on Rodriguez Island making it the loudest noise ever heard in human history."

Yeah, that's right. The loudest noise ever recorded came from a volcano. If it had erupted in New York the good citizens of San Francisco would have heard it, looking up from their soy lattes and group sex to wonder at the bang. That is, after the sound waves had taken almost four hours to reach them.

Now get this: The Krakatau explosion was a 6 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. A six is also known as "colossal". (I love that there's also a verbal scale for this sort of thing.) The two eruptions that formed Lake Taupo, just a few kilometers from where I was going to be working, were a 7 ("super-colossal") and an 8 ("mega-colossal") on this scale. Oh, and the scale tops out at 8. Each number up on the scale represents an explosion 10 times the size of the number below it. The eruption in 180CE (the 7 on the scale) turned the sky red in China and Rome. The material spewed from this eruption left a grey band of pumice that can still be seen today anywhere the road is cut into the earth. The other Taupo eruption (the mega-colossal number 8) happened about 28,000 years ago and was the world's largest eruption in the past 70,000 years. One can only imagine how far away people would have heard it.

The only conclusion to be drawn from this is the following: Volcanoes are fucking cool.

And I was about to spend two months working on, around, and even in volcanoes in the Taupo Volcanic Zone where some of the world's largest volcanic explosions have occurred. Paris Hilton eat your heart out.

Polyprop Leggings or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Military-Industrial Complex

2008-06-02T19:04:00.000-07:00

After Florian left I continued to Lounge around Sumner. The hostel was cheap and beach side. There were a handful of travelers who had come to Sumner for a few days and had ended up staying long term: a Finnish girl who had fallen in love with sailing and stayed on to take lessons while working every few days as a primary school teacher; a Welsh couple in their early thirties who had decided they were growing up too quickly so sold their house to travel around the world with their surf boards and were going to travel around the rest of New Zealand, you know, eventually; an older Canadian couple who at least had the excuse of being there for work and who invited me out to the independent cinema with them several times a week; an Australian woman who had wanted to change her life and conquer her fears so came to Sumner to get her solo paragliding license; and finally a grizzled and tattooed English bloke who was always there but never could explain why or what he was doing. We all formed a tight clique, having breakfast together, sharing bottles of wine in the evening, staring down all the temporary guests should they sit in out favorite chair or hog the stove.

I wanted to move there. To be a full time surf and kite boarding bum. I was prepared to do whatever it took to make this dream possible. I was prepared to get a job.

So one morning when the swell wasn't so great, I boldly took the twenty minute bus into the city. I located a cheap internet cafe, fell into a vinyl seat in front of a crusty old Dell and began to update my resume.

Name? Well that hasn't changed.

Phone Number?

Oh God, I'm so depressed.

I said this last part out loud and banged my forehead on the keys. A few people looked up warily from their emails.

There is only one thing more depressing than working on a resume and that is actually working. I despise both activities with a kind of special, limited edition loathing that I usually only reserve for republicans. I just can't bring myself to market myself and I certainly can't do it in the formal, serious, detached, antiseptic manner required in resumes. It's the kind of writing that makes me thinks of an old consumptive asylum: white, scrubbed bare, everything in its place to conceal the fact that someone is dying inside. And there's no place for humor or authenticity. I can't help wonder what would happen if people were honest and really put down what they considered to be their best skills and experience, what they were looking for in a job. Mine would look something like this:

Jessi McRockstar

Objective: To do as little work as possible while managing to support my coffee and expensive organic chocolate habit while in an environment close to the ocean and filled with good looking men who are contractually obliged to keep their shirts off at all times and pay me at least three compliments a day.

Education:
University of Drinking Games
BA in Disguised Hangovers (Honors)
Certificate in Procrastination
Relevant Course Work: Beer Pong: Strategies, Tips, and Techniques; Theories in Loafing; Modern Flirting; Practical Concert Going; Skinny Dipping 101

Experience:
Completed four months of not working and living in the pursuit of fun and adventure. Maintained a monthly 10% growth in coolness factor with a 6% decrease in the likelihood of having a mid-life crisis.

Skills and Achievements
Watched the entire Star Wars trilogy twice in one day. Just because.
Doesn't eat the animals.
Never voted for Bush.
Loves each and every family member even though they all have their own particular brand of driving me crazy.
Has great, really great taste in music.
Has more sense than money.
Perfect breasts.

Alright, so these skills don't really translate into getting hired. (Except, I've found, the last one.) So I tried to write a real one, but I couldn't help but wonder if this whole work thing spelled an end to my Magical New Zealand Adventure. Surely there had to be some other option.

Flipping through some photos of recent hikes in New Zealand it hit me. The Department of Conservation is responsible for much of the land in New Zealand and I had seen signs during my travels stating their need for volunteers. Volunteering had more of an allure than wage slaving, seemed more service than servitude. Besides, if you're working for free then it's not really work in the capitalism-owns-my-consumerist-soul sense of the word. In retrospect, it might have been questionable logic, but logic is only questionable if you take time to question it, and I was too busy perusing the Department of Conservation's website.

After a few clicks I found a listing for a volunteer hut warden position back up on the North Island in the volcanoey Tongariro National Park. I scanned the job description for any deal breaking terms like "professional appearance" or "good work ethic" but there was nothing to cause any blips on the shitty job radar. And the application didn't require a resume just a statement why we were interested in working for DoC and listing any relevant back country/conservation/tramping experience. Jackpot. Now here was something I could write about.

Within two days I had committed to eight weeks of work to start in less than a week. I had gotten extremely lucky with my timing. One person had just dropped out of the program while another had cancelled.

It was sad to leave Sumner, but I knew I could only afford to live and surf there if I started working. I had tried. I had spent at least, like, twelve minutes trying to update my resume. It just wasn't going to happen.

But there was one thing that had to be taken care of before I left. A gap in my five item wardrobe that had to be filled if I was going to blend in with all the Kiwi outdoorsy types who wear this item as if it were a back country uniform. I needed a pair of polypropylene leggings to wear under my hiking shorts. Before coming to New Zealand I had always called this item "long johns" and had secretly worn a dingy cream pair under jeans during cold Chicago winters. Here they were called "polyprops" and usually came in bright rainbow stripes with a different pattern on each leg. They had always reminded me of a jester's costume and the first time I saw someone hiking in a pair I had to resist the temptation to ask them to juggle.

Still, they seemed quite functional. I find hiking in pants annoying as they seems to always slip down when you take big steps and before long you're plumber cracking it up the trail. Shorts are great, but your legs tend to get cold in bad weather and sunburned on hot days. Leggings would solve both of these problems with the added bonus of offering a convenient disguise at the end of long treks when you haven't shaved in four or five days.

Because backpackers have an abundance of time but flea-sized coffers, there is no reason not to go bargain hunting. I hit up four or five outdoor gear stores to do some price comparison. The price for polyprops varied from $35 to $55. This struck me as a lot to pay for a pair of synthetic jester's undies no matter how much of a New Zealand style item. That's when I spied the New Zealand Army Surplus and Outdoor Supply shop.

The front windows were decked out with camouflage gear, which struck me as slightly counterproductive if the purpose of a storefront is to attract the notice of passersby. I realized I must have passed this shop four or five times over the last few weeks, but this was the first day I had paid it any attention.

Inside I found an orgy of forest green and brown through which milled five or six people all of the male variety and all either wastingly thin or equipped with imposing physiques. They examined the gear with ferocious intensity and in my robin's egg blue tee shirt and undoubtedly rosy cheeks I felt a tad self-conscious. Fortunately there were enough distractions in the store to keep me from stressing about my out of place femininity. (And seriously, that has to be the first time I've ever encountered that problem.) I just couldn't believe there could be so many different varieties of camouflage clothing in the world. Besides your run of the mill mottled green variety there were also camos in brown, in grey, in blue, two kinds of desert camo, "digital" camo which looked like a low-res pixilated version of regular camo and which I can only presume is made to help disguise hackers. There was also something called "urban" camo of mottled gray and black and which wouldn't disguise you in any urban setting I know. What they really should have sold under this heading was khakis and a black tee shirt complete with white headphones trailing into the trouser pocket. The you'd blend in perfectly with all the other nameless urbanites.

Beside the camo variety of clothing there was also a wide range of heavy duty military jackets and cool sweaters with tabs on the shoulders. I felt twinges of desire for this last item. I figure shoulder tabs are kind of like the appendix, it may be a completely useless thing but you still feel better having it..

There were M*A*S*H, CCCP, and Che Guevara tee shirts. Right beside them was a shirt that read NEW ZEALAND AIR FORCE. I couldn't tell if it was placed among these last items ironically or not as the New Zealand Air Force has all of about two jets. I wanted one for pure comedic value.

Beyond the clothing there was camo netting, camo paint, camo hats, canvas bags of all sizes, middle eastern looking scarves, gas masks, crank radios, leatherman tools, neck warmers, ear warmers, helmet liners, hundreds of different types of cables, ropes, matches, patches and canteens. There was also an enthusiastic selection of creepy looking torture pliers that evoked concrete rooms with mysterious brown stains on the walls. Eeegh.

I felt like if I got decked out in all this gear I'd be able to single-handedly invade a country. As long as it was a small one. Very small. Something like Andorra.

There was something undeniably appealing about all this gear. (With the exception of the torture pliers that made me tongue my molars, glad they were still attached.) There was something about the aura of the place that made this vegan pacifist get in touch with her inner Rambo -- hey, we all have one -- with a desire to paint my face and go running through the undergrowth. On reflection, this pretty much explains the real reason for the Iraq invasion. I mean, there were probably some generals hanging out in some military warehouse somewhere, looking at some F-16s, grenade launchers, starched uniforms galore, maybe a mountain of green berets -- basically what I was looking at but on steroids. And I bet one general turned to the other and said, "You know, if we used all this gear we'd be able to single-handedly invade a country. As long as it was a medium-sized one. Something like Iraq." To which the other general would reply, "Yeah. I'm really getting in touch with my inner Rambo here."

While pouring over this insight, I came across a dented tin bucket with the sign "New Zealand Army Issue Polyprop $20". Success. Fifteen dollars cheaper than any other pair I had seen and doused with this strange aura of military badassery. I picked a pair of extra small, forest green (of course) polyprops and bought them without trying them on. With a last gaze around the shop, I ducked back into the street.

I tried them on later that evening. They fit, but the waist length was generous enough to enable the pulling of the waist band up to the bra line. Any Rambo-esque quality they held in the shop evaporated. With my twiggy legs, I was a dead ringer for a medieval jester. But at least I'd look like all the other goofy Kiwis when working up in the mountains. I felt strangely comforted.

Of Water, Wind and Waves (Part Two)

2008-05-12T20:27:00.000-07:00

Remember that story of Samson and Delilah? Yeah, I don't really remember it either other than that in typical Biblical fashion it features a women who is a one dimensional hussy who screws things up for the menfolk. I also remember the part where Samson gets his hair cut and loses all of his strength. I know this sounds ridiculous but I'm ninety-nine percent sure the same thing would happen if you cut Fabio's hair. Anyway, I was feeling a bit like Samson except instead of losing strength I had kinda just lost momentum and instead of cutting hair on my head, I had just shaved my armpits. But, you know, details.
See, after cleaning up and deforesting myself I completely lost any will I had to keep moving around the South Island. It's as if no longer looking like a vagabond I no longer wanted to act like a vagabond. I guess appearances can really make a difference. It's like how putting on tall black heals makes you fantasize about being a dominatrix just for, you know, one night so you can stalk around a group of naked, kneeling men with a whip in one hand and force them to kiss your pedicured toes. Or something.
Though my newfound stasis maybe had less to do with the way I looked and more to do with the coastal town I found myself in just days after the big clean up.
The town was called Sumner and being just one letter off my favorite season I took as a good omen. Although it is only, say, twenty minutes from downtown Christchurch, it feels sufficiently remote cloistered between hills and ocean. Sumner beach is a reasonable popular surf break as is the beach just south of Sumner, delightfully known as Taylor's Mistake. I deliberately decided to not find out who Taylor was or what mistake he or she made because I loved the name as was having too much fun making up stories to go with it. The sinister undertones made me imagine Taylor was a mobster who had ratted out his buddies and in retaliation had been drowned off the shore and the beach renamed as a warning to any other potential rats. But the idea of a Kiwi mob seemed pretty laughable. I mean, what would they do? Run a black market in sheep? I also guessed that Taylor was an early sea captain who like Captain Cook met his end at the had of pissed off natives after making the mistake of assuming that just because they didn't have written titles to land they wouldn't try to defend it.
The business district of this small town was a two block strip that consisted of no less than four cafes, two surf shops, two Indian restaurants, and an independent cinema. And that was pretty much it. The second I arrived I realized all of my most basic needs would be catered for: coffee, surf, and entertainment.
It's a tough life I lead.
I made friends with the owner of one of the surf shops and soon secured myself ridiculously cheap board rental fees. I've learned that people feel bad charging their friends for things. This is why you should do your best to get on good terms with your local barista and video store worker -- even if the latter's got monumental acne and a slightly unhealthy attachment to anime. (Having breasts also helps in this endeavor.)
Florian came to join me a few days later after having spent a week working at a yoga retreat under the supervision of an emotionally volatile (read borderline psychotic) sexagenarian. We spent a few days surfing and rock climbing in Sumner and enjoyed sunny afternoons during one of New Zealand's hottest summers on record.
We decided that since it was Flo's last week in New Zealand we would both take kite boarding lessons. Kite surfing was a long held dream of mine. While living in Chicago just a few blocks from Lake Michigan I had often dreamed of harnessing Chicago's famous winds and going kite surfing in the shadow of Chicago's gorgeous skyline. Since surfing the lake was pretty much out of the question I figured kite surfing would provide a similar adrenaline rush. But I never managed to get the money together. Lessons weren't cheap and I was worried if I took them I'd fall in love with the sport but not be able to afford the pricey equipment. I also had fallen in love with and then been unceremoniously dumped by the captain of Northwestern's sailing team and I felt kite surfing would help me get revenge by immediately making me cooler than him. I'd cruise by on a board while those lazy fucking sailors sat in boats on their lazy fucking asses.
The dream of kite surfing persisted even once the sting of rejection had faded. So I jumped at the chance in Sumner.
Florian and I arrived at the kite surfing school one blustery morning to find a thirty-something guy with tousled brown hair sitting on a sofa staring into space. Even though there was no one else in the room, he seemed not to notice our presence but kept staring into the space in front of him. I purposely shuffled my feet a bit, hoping he would turn and greet us. Nada. I coughed. No response. Finally I addressed him directly and he slowly turned his head to look at me. His eyes were bloodshot and I immediately knew he was stoned. Off his ass. I've been there. I know what it looks like.
Now before I go on, I've got to let you know that kite surfing is a dangerous sport. Watch anyone proficient on an even mildly gusty day and you'll see them effortlessly get several feet or even several meters off the water. I've seen videos of people getting stuck in the air or being carried above rocks -- the last place you want to be when the gusts pass by.
And here was Mr. Stoner-on-the-couch greeting us for our lesson. But before any words were spoke a toll blond gentleman walked into the kite surf center. He was the antithesis of stoner: athletic, poised, lucid. He introduced himself as the owner of the shop and gave me a hearty, substance-free hand shake.
"So, are you going to be our teacher today?" I didn't even try to keep the desperate hope out of my voice.
"No, I'm going to entrust you to my capable colleague, Tim." He replied, heartily and substance-freely.
Tim gave a weak smile and squinted at us through bloodshot eyes.
He doesn't look that capable. I thought. But I kept my mouth shut.
We were presented with a release of liability form. Three pages. Eight point font. About ten times more comprehensive than any other liability form I had seem so far in New Zealand. Initial your life away here, sign away all rights to bodily integrity here, and trust your working limbs to Stoner.
This was going to be interesting.
Flo and I hopped into Stoner, I mean, Tim's van and he took us out to the estuary. On a grassy field by the water, we slipped into wetsuits clammy with the moisture of the ocean and other people's bodies. Tim handed us both harnesses to which the kite would eventually be attached and told us to put them on.
The harness he handed me looked exactly like S and M granny panties, if such a thing were to exist. And it might, who knows. In any case, it was a thick pair of black undies that came just above my belly button and a couple of inches below the curve of my ass. There were no mirrors around, but I guarantee you each ass cheek appeared to be about three feet long. My hot kite surfer chick fantasies were swiftly being replaced with weird fetish granny images. From the front of the harness a metal hook protruded out and down like a chrome Gonzo nose. A white helmet like an overturned colander completed the ensemble.
Tim pulled out two kites and showed us how to set up the rig. Four long kite lines had to be carefully untangled, spread on the ground, and attached to the kite in precisely the right way. Tim explained all this to us with as few words possible and a continued failure to quite make eye contact. In between the distracted mumbling I leaned that failure to set the kite up perfectly could lead to kite damage or even decapitation. For some reason, Tim seemed more concerned with the former possibility. Then the kite had to be inflated. An arced tube along the front edge and lateral ribs at intervals provided the structure for the kite. Before it was even fully inflated it became a horse chomping at the bit. The strong wind was picking up and we had to weight the kite down with gear.
Tim quickly walked us through the emergency procedure: a loop embroidered in red with the word EJECT that we were to yank it disaster struck. This would theoretically depower the kite if, say, we were being lifted uncontrollably through the air and over some rocks. Of course, I thought, this also meant we would then drop uncontrollably onto those rocks, but again I kept my observations to myself. I was already freaked out enough without having to vocalize my fears. Meanwhile Tim was casually running through all of the things we shouldn't do: put the kite straight overhead while on land, dive it too quickly, pull hard on the control bar. The list went on, but I was still trying to memorize the first few to take note of the whole list.
"Got all that? Good. Let's head into the water."
What? Huh? Already? I thought, but I didn't want to lose face in front of Florian.
Tim lofted the kite effortlessly and held it at 45 degrees to the ground. Leaning against the pull, he walked down the bank and into the waist deep water. Out feet squelched in the mud.
Tim's poise was solid, and I had to admit I was impressed. Either this sport wasn't as hard as I had thought or Tim was practiced at kite surfing stoned. Perhaps it was one of those things where someone has become so habituated to a substance they need it to function. I'm thinking like Hemingway and liquor, Mick Jagger and heroine, and Rush Limbaugh and prescription painkillers. Wait, scratch that last one. Rush Limbaugh isn't ever astute enough to be called functional, though I'm sure the painkillers help numb the burning from the constant shriveling of his black, black soul.
Anyway, Tim seemed to be a high functioning grasser as long as functioning didn't involve making eye contact or enunciating. Once in the water, he demonstrated the kite skill we were to practice: gliding the kite overhead and then touching it to the surface of the water on either side.
"The most important thing is keeping control of your kite." He mumbled. "So who's first?"
Florian immediately found interest in the straps of his harness so it was left to me to volunteer.
Tim attached the kite to the Gonzo hook on the harness and then stepped back. The loft of the kite caused me to instantly lose about half of my weight and I'm sure if I had jumped it would have looked exactly like those moonwalk videos. Perhaps that's how NASA faked them: by using kites to simulate low gravity.
Hanging there I felt like a fucking marionette. My feet were barely touching the mud and I was hanging from my bellybutton. I was nervous and grabbed the control bar, pulling it close to me. Of course, I remembered later, this is how you power up the kite to get speed on the water. Within half a second I was being dragged face first through the water, taking swimming pools up the nose. I felt like one of those poor suckers in an old spaghetti western who gets dragged behind the galloping stage coach. I couldn't remember the last time I had felt so much power. I honestly thought I was going to die.
I tried to stop myself and yanked the kite the other way. As the kite went vertical it lifted me almost completely out of the water and then as it plunged to my left it dragged me back the way I had come. All of this happened in about four seconds.
I lifted the kite slowly this time and managed to hold it vertical for a few seconds. Behind me I could hear Tim and Flo laughing loudly. I wanted to turn and give them a dirty look, but I too petrified to take my eyes off the kite. Eventually I managed to get the feel of the kite and move it in a somewhat controlled arc. Tim decided it was Florian's turn and disconnected the kite from my harness. I fell panting back into the water.
Florian was still laughing at me and if that wasn't enough added, "You looked zo funny. I was laughing zo hard at you."
"Yeah. Thanks. I think I got that." I grumbled. "It's harder than it looks you know." Then under my breath, "I hope you eat it."
He didn't. But still took some staggering steps under the pull of the kite and I had to take small comfort in that.
The next skill to learn was using the kite to drag us face first through the water. I lit up. I had already figured this whole dragging thing out. We spent the next half hour refining our technique, learning to move the kite in figure eights to create a steady momentum. At one point the wind picked up and the kite lifted me so only the tip of my big toe was touching the mud. Tim shouted at me to wade back towards them, but I couldn't create enough friction beneath my feet to move against the kite. I hung there, a puppet again, uselessly working my legs back and forth. Behind me Tim and Florian were laughing once more, leaving me struggling for their entertainment for several minutes before deigning to come and help me. I could have felt embarrassed, but I had kissed goodbye to dignity hours ago.
The sun was beginning to set and the changing tide was beginning to drain the estuary. Tim decided we were ready to try standing up on the board, so without any ceremony and no explanation other than a mumbled "keep your weight on your back foot" he slapped the board on my feet and told me to dive the kite.
I took a deep breath and went for it. I felt the sharp yanking in my stomach and then I was up, cruising with the rushing sound of the diving kite like the world's loudest zipper. I was grateful for the summers spent waterskiing and wakeboarding. The sensation was similar here only the lift of the kite made me feel lighter on the water -- almost like flying. It was the most profound sense of liberation -- liberation from gravity and the awkward plodding of human limbs.
And then I ate it.
I think a foot slipped out of the binding. I smacked my shin on the board and my face on the water. The kite landed with a thud.
Again I heard laughter across the water, but at this point I was so thrilled I joined in. I don't know if the face plant pulled some muscles, but there was a goofy grin on my face I couldn't get rid of for days. I also immediately warmed up to Tim. I realized in his nonchalant, stonerish way he had actually put me at ease.
Florian got up too and then also made a spectacular wipe out. I cracked up. "You looked so funny." I mimicked when he walked back over. "I was laughing so hard at you."
Florian scowled. We were even again.
The next day was Florian's last day in New Zealand. That morning we had another lesson. We both made progress and at the end I swore I was going to devote my life to kite surfing now that I had discovered the path to paradise.
That night I said a subdued farewell to my adventure buddy who was catching an airport bus before dawn the next day. We walked out to the ocean one last time. As I looked at the waves, I thought of all the friendships that had ebbed and flowed in my life. The winds that blow people together, the tides that pull us apart. I was momentarily exhausted by this change and just wanted to grab Florian and tell him not to go. That I was tired of making and losing friends. Then I realized this would be kinda creepy and definitely awkward, so I turned and walked back to the hostel.
I awoke the next morning and Florian was gone. I went out for a surf and paddled alone into the breaking waves. The ocean covers three-fourths of this planet. I felt relieved it would always be there.

Of Water, Wind, and Waves (Part One)

2008-04-24T15:07:00.000-07:00

I got shipped off to boarding school when I was 14. I write this mostly to generate sympathy and because it's a convenient cliché. The truth is it might have been my idea. I can't really remember. It's one of the many things from my teenage years I've effectively blocked. Like many people, the first few years of pubescence aren't exactly a highlight of my biography. So the exact circumstances surrounding my enrollment at boarding school are as mysterious to me as my first kiss, my first school dance, and the few years where I wore braces held in with teal rubber bands on each tooth. Photos attest to the color (including orange and black for Halloween), but I have no recollection of ever choosing such an abhorrent hue.
However it came to pass, my first year of high school saw me enrolled at a small Monterey boarding school run by a fringe Christian sect that made Martin Luther look like a libertine. Between daily worships, enforced skirt wearing for women on church days, and a pervasive suspicion of pretty much anything "secular" the school had very little to recommend itself other than its location: a mile square plot of land right on the Pacific Ocean.
I didn't make many friends there. I minced no words in telling all the other students I thought they were brainwashed and I started to get self righteous about my lack of religious righteousness. In retrospect, this might have made me hard to be around.
In lieu of friends to chill with, I ended up spending a solid amount of time hanging out with the Pacific. It's true the ocean is not the most loquacious of acquaintances, but I found it reliably mesmerizing. Many evenings and most weekends in any weather, I would had down to the beach to watch the wild sea. The Northern California beaches are not the bleached tracts of yellow sand that most foreigners imagine. The sand is often a dingy gray coated with oceanic detritus - kelp, crab skeletons, and the occasional rotting seal. The water is usually black and snarling at the shore, and more often than not mists and fogs cling leechlike to the coast. In short, it's where Cathy and Heathcliff would probably build their summer home. For a melodramatic teenager, it was the perfect antidote to the saccharine Jesus-Loves-Me-ness of a Christian boarding school.
I was in love.
It was the place I had caught my first waves -- in the beginning on a boogie board and later on a surf board -- plunging into the frigid blackness wearing enough layers of neoprene to start my own fetish company. The Pacific Coast Highway was the first place I drove when I passed my driving test, moving up the highway with both hands on the wheel, trying to concentrate on the car in front of me despite the big blue distraction to my left. And when I moved to Los Angeles I let rent consign me to perpetual dinners of noodles and instant soups for the chance to be within smelling distance of the water.
So it's no lie to say a bit part of the allure of New Zealand is its many miles of coast. After a rainy slog up and over the mountains of the Kepler Track, I was ready for some lazy days by the sea.
The first stop was Milford Sound. Here the Tasman Sea has cut deep fjords into the landscape. A temperate rain forest, each slope and cliff is sopped with dozens of waterfalls that pour into the sea whenever there is one of the frequent rains. Trees grow on impossibly steep slopes so that underneath the pelting rain, every inch of landscape drips in verdant green. And everywhere the deep roar of gallons of moisture pitching into the protected waters. The Sounds was imbued with the deep power of all landscapes that seem to defy the possibility of human habitation.
After leaving Milford Sound, Florian and I continued our tour of the remote southern end of the South Island. Much of the landscape is empty of people and the few towns that freckle the map would often turn out to be just a cluster of several tin roofed houses on the side of the road. In fact, there are so few settlements on the South Island that even an abandoned trailer would probably be given a town name and marked gamely on the map.
After a day of driving on mostly empty roads, we came to the Caitlins, a crescent of land on the south east corner of the South Island. We spent two relaxing days in a hostel on a long sandy beach. From the window a rare breed of dolphin called Hectors dolphins could frequently be seen playing in the surf. At sunset, penguins waddled on to the rock, returning from a long day of fishing to tend to their nests. And all the time there's the sense that there's nothing between you and Antarctica. Except for, you know, a couple thousand miles of ocean.
From here there whirlwind tour continued up the east coast: the city of Dunedin where our only stops were the university bookshop and a quick check of the local surf break. I fell into the easy rhythm of the road and the unhurried, unharried lifestyle of New Zealand: camping on the beach, stopping for long lunches, discovering the simple pleasure of skipping rocks on glassy lake waters, and living in pursuit of a good place to surf.
Eventually we made out way up to Christchurch. The city itself was a bit of a shock after days of driving through remote countryside, but it was a welcome change. See, Florian and I had been driving around the South Island for almost a month and after so many nights spent camping and hiking in remote areas in the same three shirts and two pairs of pants, I was beginning to feel a bit like a schlub: my favorite Yiddish word out of that language's delicious lexicon. I had lost my hairbrush months ago and was instead relying on the combination of ample conditioner and a vigorous finger brushing in the shower to keep my locks tangle free. I had adopted a lackadaisical attitude toward shaving my legs and completely neglected to remove a whole host of errant dark hairs that seem to sprout in the most unlikely places (toes, belly, even - gasp - a few on my nipples). Hairs that are the bane of brunettes everywhere. And there had been no thought of makeup for weeks - not that I had any even if I had thought about it. I was a bush woman (in more ways than one).
This feeling of schlubbiness was augmented by Florian's determined refusal to even flirt with me. Not that it really mattered; Florian wasn't enough of a hedonist to be my type. (To cite just one example, he refuses to eat lunch until exactly five hours have passed since breakfast.) But still, a girl likes to have the power of refusal while retaining the right to get upset that men can't just be platonic towards girls. (Sorry guys, it's a catch-22. You're going to have to learn to live with it.)
Despite all this, there was no real problem with being the sultan of schlub while hanging out on remote beaches out of sight of any mirrors. But once I was back in a city each shop window showed a reflection of a creeping unibrow that made me look like some severe Dickensian school matron. I realized something had to be done. I ignored the siren call of the ocean - just a few miles away - and the temptation to hunker down on the beach with nothing but a surfboard. Florian left for a week to volunteer at a yoga retreat, and I began the painful process of washing, combing, shaving, waxing, and tweezing myself into general respectability. I also spent a few days taking advantage of this outpost of civilization and shopping for a few items to augment my five item wardrobe.
It was nice to be in a city again. I spent hours each day at the Chirstchurch library reading back issues of the New Yorker, Adbusters, and celebrity gossip mags. (They're good for taking the edge off pretentious New Yorker articles with their overzealous use of umlauts.) I also located the local chapters of cults serving cheap vegetarian food (the Hare Krishnas here were beat out by the Sri Chimoy disciples in terms of general tastiness with an added bonus of having an iron pumping guru plastered on the walls.) There was also no shortage of free street entertainment in the central square. Each day the "wizard", an old bearded man in black robes, gave lectures on such random topics as how geopolitics would change if everyone suddenly decided to adopt upside down maps. Whole crows would sit at his feet and quietly listen. I imagined it was a bit like how seeing Socrates in the agora must have been. If, you know, Socrates had had just a few screws loose. The World Buskers Festival was also in town at this time, so there were plenty of unicycles, jugglers, and dated spandex costumes in the open spaces of the city. I was having a great time. I was well fed of vegan curries and the sight of myself no longer made me cringe, but the call of the Pacific never diminished and after a week in the central city, I knew it was time to move back to the ocean.
And this is how I chanced upon paradise...

Battle of the SexesFinal RoundFIGHT!

2008-03-22T15:06:00.000-07:00

Most of the United States is pretty homogenized. We've adopted the assembly line mentality with a gusto unseen almost anywhere else in the world, applying it not just to manufacturing but to culture as well. What this means is that anywhere you go in the States from Orange County to Omaha, you can find the exact same food, the exact same fashions, the exact same movies, the exact same music as anywhere else in the country. And though as an American I should be used to this, I can't help the pinch of anticlimax I feel when after flying for two thousand miles I find myself surrounded by the same smattering of corporate blasé. The result of all this is that cities in the United States are defined and distinguished lass by cultural differences and more by climatological.
So let's chat a bit about Chicago.
Although I've been accused of excessive use of superlatives, I'm pretty sure Chicago is the coldest place on the planet. I know that there are allegedly colder places. I've heard North Dakota has some mean winters, but come on, have you ever actually met someone from North Dakota who could confirm this? I didn't think so. I also suspect Canada has some cruel weather but my guess is that they're too busy eating poutine, speaking French, and taking advantage of their free health care to make accurate temperature readings. And of course Russians will claim Siberia is mostly oceanic frozen bleakness, but like any properly brainwashed child of the Cold War, I know not to trust the Russians.
I survived four winters in Chicago. Every year, sometime in late November, snowploughs would push the first snowfall down the street and then inexplicably leave it all in a mound outside my apartment window. Every blizzard and dusting that came through, the mound would grow, so that by midwinter it was about the size of an SUV and frozen into a block of dirty ice. This whole thing would usually stick around until mid May. Even during those first taunting days of spring that always come in April and encourage naive Chicagoans to wear short sleeves because the weather has poked above fifty, the ice outside my window never let me go along with the belief that winter was finally over.
And this whole, slightly irrelevant introduction is just to point out that I know ice. We're buddy buddy. It was the Romeo to my Juliet, lurking under my window for four obscenely long winters. So I wasn't completely thrilled about getting to see New Zealand's famous Fox Glacier. Don't get me wrong, I wanted to go, but only for the purpose of checking it off the New Zealand Must Dos list. This is a lot like how tourists in Paris spend hours waiting in line with other potbellied becamaeraed tourists to see the Mona Lisa even though they don't care about art and can't figure out what the big fuss is about her anyway. (I'm not a philistine, but I get this. I mean out of all the gorgeous, expansive nakedness on display in the Louvre, how a housewife with an awkward smirk captured the world's imagination I will never know.) I was thinking about this as Florian and I walked the short path to the base of the glacier.
Fox Glacier was (you guessed it) icy. Even though it was a sunny day, it made me cold looking at it. I remembered myself shivering in my poorly heated Chicago apartment and sleeping in no fewer than 18 items of clothing. I remembered jumping up and down on a snowy El platform trying to get just a little bit closer to the set of heat lamps that were always mounted a few too many feet away to be of any real use. Or that time when I got so cold that my nipples stayed erect for a full 48 hours and I finally had to put those chemical glove warming packets in my bra just to get them to thaw out.
I know some people look at ice and associate it with positive things like Wayne Gretzky or scotch on the rocks or Nederland Colorado's Frozen Dead Guy festival. I know there are even some who look at this five story deep river of ice and feel overwhelmed with awe and humility when faced with the immensity of nature while ruing man's appetite for energy and the unstoppable two step of global warming.
But that much ice just made me cranky.
I couldn't even temper this feeling with a good old fashioned jolt of adrenaline. An ice adventure might have improved my disposition in regards to water's solid incarnation. But you see, the constant movement of the glacier creates deep, often hidden fissures. You can slip through the cracks as easily as a poor person applying for health insurance. So you can't hike or climb on top of it without a hired (read expensive) guide. Screw that, I thought. And for the first time Florian agreed.
We walked back to the van and continued to drive south down the west coast. That afternoon, I felt I had reverted to my teenage years with my world weariness and sheer determination not to be impressed. I'm not usually a grumpy traveler. When I was a kid my parents would take use halfway across England each weekend just to look at antiques; I found myself learning to be excited by things in which no eight year old should be interested. ("Mom, Dad, look at this cool Edwardian marquetry!") I also learned that the destination was hardly ever the point. So I'm usually keen enough to road trip it, but that afternoon, I just couldn't get the happy machine to work. Beautiful vista? Seen it. The unexplained geological feature called Pancake Rocks? I'm hungry. It didn't help that everywhere we stopped -- for lunch, a view, a roadside pee -- those damn sand flies would kamikaze any exposed flesh. Except, unlike Kamikazes, they wouldn't die on impact. Instead that would start to suck your blood. They were like vampire kamikazes -- suicide pilots of the undead.
We drove inland to a lakeside town called Wanaka where we moved into a hostel overlooking the water and underlooking Mt. Aspiring. Florian decided he needed a few days to catch up on emails. I needed a few days to catch up on laziness.
But the apathy stuck. Even the unexpected find of a slim Delillo volume amidst all the usual hostel book exchange flotsam wasn't enough to improve my mood. Something had to be done. Something to make up for the glacier disappointment. Something quintessentially Kiwi. That's when I talked Florian into bungee jumping.
Well I didn't exactly have to talk him into it. It was more like, "Hey Florian, let's go bungee jumping."
"OK."
"You sure? 'Cus I"m going to call right now and book it."
"OK."
I was hoping for more of an "I don't know.... I'm a bit scared of heights. I don't want to plunge to my death." And so on. I was hoping for something I could work with in order to prove once and for all how bad ass I was in comparison. We had chatted a bit about bungee jumping on the Whanganui trip and Florian had expressed some reservations about it. Having undergone several serious knee surgeries, he was concerned about the effect of the deceleration force on his joints. But these fears seemed to have evaporated. Dammit.
We drove to Queenstown the day after next. Queenstown boasts the world's first commercial bungee. It also had the 134m Nevis bungee -- the highest in New Zealand. It was there we had planned to jump. Never one to accept defeat gracefully, I formulated a plan as we sped towards Queenstown. I was going to make sure I got to jump first and then I was going to do my very best to psych Florian out in the hope he would lose his nerve. I would say things like, "Wow, I really felt that in my knees. Ouch!" and "When I jumped there was an extra rope attaching me there -- they must have taken it down. But don't worry, I'm sure it's not vital." and "I heard the guy say that you were at the upper limits of the safe weight range." It was playing dirty, but I was playing to win.
After a brief weigh-in at the bungee center, Florian and I boarded the bus that would take us to the jump site -- a cable car suspended over a yawning valley. There were about twenty-five of us on the bus. The driver played U2 and hardly a word was spoken during the twenty minute drive. Grim expressions abounded, and as people stared intently into the distance you could almost see the private disaster scenarios going through their mind. I was too fixated on planning my psychological sabotage to worry about broken rope mishaps or death plunges. I glanced at Florian. He too looked calm. This wasn't going to be easy.
Upon arrival we were instructed to don a harness that went from groin to shoulders. Although during the jump we would be suspended by our ankles, a release mechanism would trigger the harness at the end of the jump so that we wouldn't be hauled back in upside down. We were told if we were smokers we would have to have our cigarettes away from the harnesses as the smoke could disintegrate the material. I found and still find this suspicious. Could something as insubstantial as smoke really dissolve such coarse material? If so, was it really something it was a good idea to trust our lives to? I shared this observation with Florian. Phase one of my Freak out Florian campaign.
He ignored me. I think he was on to my dastardly plan.
Phase two and three never came to fruition. Before I had even finished putting on my harness, Florian was whisked away on the cable car to the suspended jumping platform. As I was being briefed on the vital jumping procedure -- as if it could be complicated to throw yourself off a platform -- I saw a white figure rapidly descend between the valley walls. Florian had escaped my sinister machinations and had jumped before I could sufficiently frighten him. I discovered we were being made to jump in order from heaviest to lightest. I never stood a chance.
When my turn came to jump, I was tranquil enough to appreciate the wide angle view that can only be achieved while standing on a foot wide platform above a gorge. I've done enough sports that require altitude -- trampolining, high diving, tightrope walking (seriously) -- that I'm only really afraid of heights if there are spiders up there. The falling experience -- ostensibly eight seconds -- was such a sensory overload that it felt my brain was (nerdy joke alert) running Windows ME. The system crashed and from those eight seconds I only processed one frame of experience: the wind on my face and the feeling of my body in the middle of the canyon utterly removed from anything solid. It was only once I felt the tension on my ankles launching me back into midair that my brain began to catch up again, like an old film projector speeding up the frames until it creates the illusion of continuous movement. Despite this mental sputtering, the bungee center's DVD playback showed that I had executed a perfect, gold medal winning, instant replay deserving swan dive. Damn, I thought, I am an awesome faller.
The bus ride back had none of the gallows procession atmosphere of the ride to the jump. Strangers chatted freely with stranger united by the shared relief to still be alive. Even the oft silent Florian displayed unprecedented gregariousness.
The jump had made me woozy, and I fought against a slight dizziness that was probably the result of g forces on my brain during deceleration. I figured the jump had probably caused me to forget things, the best recipe for pancakes or a few memorized digits of Pi. I hoped that nothing essential had been shaken out of my gray matter and that I wouldn't end up forgetting my email password or the reasons I wasn't a republican. The feeling lasted only a few hours and that same afternoon Florian and I sped out of Queenstown.
I know that bungee jumping is not that dangerous or that extreme. It's not like I went base jumping or swam off the sharky coasts of South Africa with a bleeding wound. Still, there is something about jumping of a ledge that and surviving that makes you think Oh yes, oh yes, I'm alive. I'm not ready to check out just yet. I would never, ever do this without a rope pulling me back to the sky.
I realized I was happy Florian could have experienced this too. Even though part of me would have relished it if I had manged to frightened Florian out of jumping and would have loved to remind him of it at every opportunity, I was glad he too could be saturated with the life affirmingness of it all. As we drove to our next adventure -- another long hike -- I felt like the battle was over. We both had jumped. We both had won.
(But I was still the most graceful faller.)

Battle of the SexesRound TwoFIGHT!

2008-02-18T16:59:00.000-08:00

I didn't realize just how far the United States had slipped in the world's estimation until Florian asked me whether U.S. tap water was drinkable. I mean, I know we've started a stupid war -- an act that seems more suited to a small country with a moody dictator who is suffering from erectile dysfunction and wants to prove his manhood on the world stage, rather than the choice of a democratically elected government in control of the world's largest economy. And I know that because of said war we're teetering on the verge of a recession that could very well make the Great Depression look like a national Prozac binge when compared to the sheer indebtedness of the nation. I also know that because of this the dollar may soon have the value of a kleenex. And I'm not talking about those soft two-ply aloe-infused kleenex either. I'm referring to the flimsy sheets that get snotted through in one blow and leave your upper lip looking like it has tried to mate with sandpaper. But despite all this backwardness, the U.S. is still (as far as I know) considered to be a first world country, and hey, even the Romans managed to have drinkable water in urban areas.
Yet I also had to admit it might be a valid question. After all, we are talking about a country that caused Lake Erie to catch on fire, which sounds like a feat of engineering (burning water you say? Why that's almost as good as cold fusion!) until you realize the fire was due to an ungodly saturation of toxic chemicals in one of the largest sources of fresh water in the Americas. This would certainly call into doubt U.S. commitment to water quality standards.
The whole point of this discussion being that I am fully capable of admitting when someone asks a valid question or makes an interesting point. I can embrace a high degree of brow furrowedness and mutter a dignified scholarly "hmm..." while evaluating the merits of different sides of an argument or acknowledging the particular difficulties raised by a question.
Most of the time.
We were driving down the South Island's rugged West Coast two days after our exhausting hike. I had appropriated Florian's MP3 player to keep him from playing Europop -- a genre that sounds to me like a thousand tiny cats mewling in my ears, puncturing my eardrums with their tiny claws. After several months without at will music, (I had left my IPod Shuffle at home due to weight considerations. This was stupid.) I was jonesing for some classics and playlisted some James Taylor, Eric Clapton, and a few Beatles albums from Florian's music library. The long road floated between mountains and the Tasman sea. The paved strip was so think and constant it reminded me of the heavy leather strip used by barbers to sharpen their knives. This is of course a ridiculous thing to be reminded of, but I was listening to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" so what do you expect. Acid flashbacks. Every time.
Florian and I were headed down to see Fox glacier, and I would have been happy to spend the trip lost is psychedelic reverie had we not somehow, stupidly gotten on the topic of gender differences. Again.
I'm not really sure how it happened. I'm pretty sure I didn't bring the subject up, but of course once brought up, I wasn't about to let it go.
"Well how do you explain that there are more men than women in the sciences? I just think that men and women are...um...interested in different things." Florian said.
"What do you mean 'interested in different things'?" I asked calmly. "If you're saying that you don't think women are as good at science as men, just say it. It's okay to think that, really."
"Yes. Then that is what I'm saying." Florian replied.
"I can't believe you actually think that! That's not okay." I exclaimed bitterly, scoffing for extra derision. "When over half of the people in medical school in the U.S. these days are women, it's just a ridiculous thing to think."
"No, I mean math and physics. If there are the same numbers of women in medicine, then why not in physics. In my experience, most women find physics hard. For example, the women in my physics program are all not very good. It's a hard subject, probably the hardest."
I was livid.
Florian had just said that my gender was insufficient and my choice of studies weak. Incidentally, what is it about scientists that make them think they're the apogee of braininess?
I took a deep breath and gave this measured reply:
Cue erudite sounding me.
"Florian, I've always assumed men and women to have equal capabilities in all fields. It's something I've never felt the need to question, something along the lines of 'stars are only visible at night,' and 'Han Solo is cooler than Luke Skywalker.' In other words, it was a truism I assumed to be so self-evident there was no need to waste time thinking about it. But at second glance, this belief certainly doesn't have universal consensus and it definitely does not have the weight of history behind it. I can't help but think of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal...." So without the weight of history to support my belief in equality, it needs to be examined. Like Richard Dawkins says, we need to discard even the most cherished beliefs if facts emerge to refute them. But that's just the problem, what are the facts? How do we measure differences between the genders beyond basic physiognomy? Because hey, there's a lot of sexism, discrimination, and fucked up social norms out there that prevent men and women from being treated as equals and then the results that stem from this disparity of treatment are assumed to be the cause of such treatment. There's no logic in saying, 'Because women are not as represented in physics as men, then they must be worse at it, and because they're worse at it, then we should expect more men in physics.' This is the ultimate in insidious tautologies.
"Such faulty logic is by no means new." I continued. "Eighty years ago men were seriously debating whether women were capable of pursuing any kind of higher education, whether they were able to make political decisions that would make it necessary to give them the vote. Thirty years ago they were debating whether women were too emotional to be good doctors. Twenty years ago whether women could command enough respect to be good managers, whether women could master enough technique to be virtuoso musicians. Even today when men and women look at a resume with a man's name on it, they rank it as more impressive than the same resume with a woman's name on it. We can't start talking about differences between men and women's talents until we get rid of discrimination that presupposes a difference."
It was good. Disarming joke at the beginning, reference to history, well placed quote from a source Florian trusts, use of intellectualish sounding words, single swear word for added emphasis. It was convincing.
Or at least it would have been.
The truth is, I was really pissed off and offended and when these two things happen, I tend to acquire the same skills of articulation and reasoning as a head of lettuce. This is not because I am a woman or because I get "emotional." It's because when insulted I get an urge to commit acts of violence and it takes a good deal of rationalization skills to talk myself out of it.
So the truth is, I said something more like this:
"Well, most scientists are socially inept nerds and girls aren't attracted to the sciences because they don't want to spend their life around dorks." I barely restrained myself from adding a "So there!" to the end of it.
This is what is known as an I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I argument. It was last used to devastating effect in fifth grade when Blair Morganson called me a bitch for stealing his marker. Turns out, time hasn't improved this line of reasoning and it's not quite as convincing as I remembered it to be.
To be fair, I had some pretty solid support from personal experience. My high school physics teacher was the most lecherous old coot I've ever had the displeasure of knowing. He had a kitchen sink dye job, zero concept of appropriate conversation topics or personal space, and when he spoke to you, you could taste the week old fur on his teeth. Every conversation required a porn star's control of her gag reflex. Sometimes, I would look back on this and feel sorry for the man, but then I remember that I can't write F=ma without seeing his leery, mossy smile and I find pity is strangely absent.
There was also my high school chemistry teacher who consistently perspired like warm cheese, a man so obese that he had learned to be ambidextrous, no doubt because his right had couldn't make it round to the left side of his body and vice versa. He would stand in front of the board, a pen in each hand, writing two formulas simultaneously. As his hands moved further and further apart, he would sweat more and more like he was a giant sponge trying to wring himself out.
And then there was my biology teacher who had severed his thumb in a farming accident and had the popped off digit embalmed in rubber and used it as a paperweight. At first I thought this was pretty damn cool until I had to sit two feet from it day after day and I became convinced the thumb possessed some sort of malevolent power, kind of like the monkey's paw in that chilling W. W. Jacobs short story. If thumbs could stare, that thumb was giving me the stink eye.
So there's no doubt that the prospect of being surrounded by creepy, inappropriate people my whole life put me off ever considering a career in science. Though if I'm honest, I also really, genuinely hated the subject matter of physics. "What, you mean there's a formula that can predict the path of that projectile? Gee whiz mister, now my life's complete." I just can't help but feel like the formulas of Newtonian Mechanics don't even begin to have the interest of the history of Newton himself, a man who was as interested in alchemy and numerology as physics, a heretic who discovered calculus and then didn't tell anyone for several decades, a man who lived to a ripe old age, yet still in all probability died a virgin. That someone could have been that engaged in the natural world and yet have been utterly uninterested in having a quick tussle behind a haystack completely blows my mind.
In any case, a haughty declaration that scientists are nerds doesn't have much weight coming from someone who wore plywood-thick glasses most of her life and who finds herself making Star Wars references on an almost daily basis.
Besides, my reasoning sucked.
Florian, sensing opportunity, took less than a second to pounce on it.
"Vas? Are you saying that women are less likely to be socially awkward? Isn't that admitting a difference between the sexes? You can't say that men and women are different then insist they have the same capabilities."
On the stereo the Beatles started to sing "All you need is love." I couldn't help but think of that breathtaking dream of a photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono taken by Annie Liebovitz the day John died. If you haven't seen it recently, you should stop reading and take a good, long look. For some reason, I can't think of this photo and still be cynical about men and women. I tried to reargue my case; I think I did an alright job, but the fight had gone out of me. I wondered if the world would be better if we all, men and women, had just listened to the hippies when they said, "make love, not war."
Who was I kidding? I love to win and that you can't win without going to war.
What did the stupid hippies know anyway? They might have written some of the best music of the twentieth century, but all they were really good for was inventing mud wrestling and finding increasingly creative roads to Canada.
The fight was on...

Round Two Scores:
The I.M. Pompous award for arrogance: Florian
The poorest argument seen outside of a playground: Me

Battle of the SexesRound OneFIGHT!

2008-02-11T13:38:00.000-08:00

I'm not competitive. But still, there was no way I was going to let him out hike me. Even though we were entering the 11th hour of hiking. Even though the sun had long since set and our headlamps illuminated only a narrow shaft of sepia toned landscape. Even though I could feel my blisters growing like spilled ink on a white napkin. Even though it was still raining.
But Jesus Christ I was tired.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time. Florian, my German paddling buddy from the Whanganui River, was going to be on the South Island. We had decided to meet up to do a short back country hike, a hike that neither of us would probably tackle alone. We settled on a three day excursion that was part of the Travers-Sabine Loop in Nelson Lakes National Park. The first day would take us on a 1000 meter climb up a mountain where, after 19 kms of hiking, we would sleep between two lakes near the mountain top. The next two days would be spent climbing down from the mountain and looping back to the parking lot.
I was excited to have my adventure partner back. Hiking the Queen Charlotte Track alone had been interesting and liberating, but my mind, unchecked by the presence of other people, was beginning to run away with itself. I spent one whole day of the track composing an eight verse ode to the efficiency of my legs. "You never fail to take me/From point A to point B...." I also spent the better part of an afternoon trying to imagine what scripture written by cows would look like. "And the Lord spoke unto Mooses...." While these ruminations would no doubt come in handy one day, I felt conversations with Florian might prove even more illuminating. Considering his less than politically correct views concerning women and my staunch feminism, I figured maybe we could learn something from each other. And by this I mean he could learn my views were right and his were wrong.
Before we had paddled the Whanganui River together, Florian had mentioned his belief that women were weaker. I felt like I had done a good job of dispelling that notion with three day of vigorous paddling, but I still welcomed another opportunity to demonstrate the toughness of my gender. As I grunted my pack onto my shoulders, I was determined that I would outlast Florian no matter what the mountain would throw at us.
We were getting a bit of a late start. It was 2:00 in the afternoon and signs told us to expect a 6 to 7 hour hike. If we wanted to reach the hut by dusk, we would have to forgo any stops or breaks. Less than 48 hours had passed since I completed the Queen Charlotte Track, but I felt up to the challenge even as the mountain we were about to climb loomed menacingly overhead.
As we set off, I let Florian lead. I figured that as long as he was setting the pace then I couldn't be accused of slowing us down. Within one minute of hiking we were facing steep switchbacks on a path barely a foot wide. Florian was cruising. Now lest we forget, Florian is nearly 200 pounds of muscular German engineering. That's a lot of weight to pull up a mountain, but his calf muscles are about four times the size of my own. And each time I looked up from the path, his legs were farther and farther away from mine.
After about 15 minutes, Florian called out, "I'm going ahead, Ya. It's better if I can hike at my own pace."
"Sure." I replied cheerily. "I'll be right behind you."
Shit. Shit. Shit. I thought as Florian sped up and out of sight. I didn't want to fall behind at all, but to do it so soon after starting was like dropping out of a marathon after the first mile. I also hadn't exactly been subtle about what I was trying to prove. "Wow, I just can't believe how tough I feel." I had said on the drive to the mountain. "I mean, we woman have such good endurance. Tough, tough, tough...." Florian remained quiet. No doubt he was using his trademark stoicism as a way to psyche me out before the race. Sneaky bastard. Action was needed to prove my point and here I had lost sight of him in the first hour.
After another hour of switchbacks and still no sign of my companion, I came to an exposed ridge where Florian was lounging in the sun with his shirt off.
Showoff. I thought.
To make matters worse, Florian snapped a quick photo of me as I came into view. At the time it was easy enough to imagine I looked fit and healthy and sexy after conquering the first ridge, but when I saw the photo a few days later, I looked like I had been attacked by a wild hippopotamus, run over by a mini bus, and was suffering from an epic case of constipation. This photo exists somewhere on Florian's website. As I type, random German friends of his may be looking at it. I wonder how you say "your American friend looks constipated" in German.
At this point on our journey, the switchbacks subsided to a more gradual climb up and along the blade of Mt. Roberts. I finally felt my endorphins kick in, and I began to have an easier time. It may have also helped that I was genuinely afraid of slipping and falling to my death as the trail narrowed. I was on a potent cocktail of endorphins and adrenaline. Someone should make a pill. Sell it to athletes. Make a fortune.
Before long, the trail turned to into a a series of intermittent flags set into a stream of loose rocks. My good sense of balance and light weight proved an advantage and I was able to set a challenging pace. Jagged rocks and squat boulders were stacked precariously on the steep slopes of the ridge. A rock slide waiting to happen. I took comfort from the fact that if anyone were to start a rock slide and fall disastrously to his death, it would probably be Florian as he weighed so much more than me. (Hey, I was still upset from earlier, and besides, I never claimed to be a saint.)
After five and a half hours, we reached Angelus hut, a compact red structure nestled between two small alpine lakes, a pair of blue marbles in a golden bowl. We went for a quick swim before settling in for the night. (Not that anyone is counting, but I endured the frigid water longer. But as I said, I'm not competitive.)
That night, thank God I slept well.
You see, day two wasn't meant to be like that. It was going to be shorter than the day before. It was going to be a quick descent Followed by an easy hike through a valley. It was going to be a relaxing swim before a peaceful night in another hut by a lake. And things were even going according to plan. We hiked, we swam in the freezing water, we retired to the hut. We retired to the hut for exactly twenty minutes before warnings of heavy rain and the presence of sand flies convinced Florian that it would be better to hike the 15 kms back to the parking lot that night rather than wait until the next day.
The rain warnings didn't really bother me. In the alpine areas of New Zealand, you expect foul weather like you expect a hangover after that fifth shot of Cuervo Gold. But I had to admit that Florian had a point about the sand flies. These ravenous little buggers have a nose for human blood that would put Jaws to shame. Once you feel them, it's too late because by then they will have taken their tiny chompers and removed a bit of your flesh. These bites linger and defy all normal healing expectations so that two weeks later you still find yourself scratching them. The last thing I wanted was to wake up with my face covered in itchy red dots - a painful reminder of my teenage years. But I also wasn't looking forward to another few hours of hiking when I had been prepared to settle in for the night.
Of course, he said, he would leave the decision up to me. If I was "too tired" to keep hiking, he was happy to wait.
To this day, I don't know if Florian was being genuine or if, knowing I would have to be unconscious on the ground before I would admit I was tired, he was just manipulating the hell out of me. Also, the thing about taciturn people is that when they do make a suggestion, it's really, really hard to ignore them. This is a great tactic, and I would use it if I could only manage to keep my mouth shut long enough for it to work.
"Yeah, sounds like fun." I lied, struggling to keep the hatred out of my face. "Let's keep going." I wrestled my pack onto my back thinking longingly of the uneaten noodles inside. Make me miss my dinner, Flo? This means war.
Day was quickly pitching into dusk. We had about two hours of sunlight left and neither of us wanted to hike in the dark. When, just a quarter of an hour after leaving, the first giddy drops of rain began to fall, I took it as the perfect excuse to pick up the pace. I don't know if it was the thought of beating Florian or just the thought of a warm bed that inspired me to take the first jogging steps, but before long, I was leading the way with a blend of speed walking and light running. It can't have been the most graceful thing - like trying to swim in an over sized life jacket - but I was feeling indomitable as I easily put kilometer after kilometer behind me.
We kept at it on the muddy trail until the last wisps of daylight shrunk from the western sky. For two hours without stopping I tried to lose Florian behind me, but each time I snuck a glance behind, he was never more than 20 ft. down the track. I tried to get him to start talking. I wanted to run him out of breath. No such luck.
Now if you've ever tried to keep a tough physical activity up for more than two hours, you have some experience with what I was going through. At first you can jump from endorphin rush to endorphin rush, but eventually your body just decides to give up on you. This is what marathon runners ominously refer to as "the wall." As night, not evening, not dusk, but night set in, I had to use every mental trick I could think of to keep myself going. I imagined myself as Laura Croft, as Buffy, as Wonder Woman (complete with the funny bellybutton high undies) in order to try to infuse some of these women's strength into my weary body. I got pissed that I could only think of three bad ass women in popular culture while I could come up with hundreds of men. This anger fueled me for at least five minutes. I repeated mantras each step. Keep. Going. Keep. Going. I imagined Brad Pitt's abs in Fight Club. This one really works to get your mind off the pain and is like a soldier's last grenade in the battle against exhaustion. But eventually my mind ran out of tricks and after 20 minutes of hiking in the black wetness, I had to admit I was tired.
No particular muscle felt it. My legs surprisingly weren't sore. But I suffered from a deep hangdog exhaustion that, like the persistent rain, saturated everything. Of course, I didn't admit this out loud, but once again Florian was keeping up the pace as I fell behind.
Damn. It.
There were only two kilometers to go, a muddy slog up the road to the parking lot. If the van had been only two kilometers closer, I could have made it and then totally faked having a ton of energy left. I would have bounced around for a few minutes saying, "I wish there were a few more kilometers to go. I really am enjoying our little hiking excursion. Although I was, you know, hoping for a bit more of a workout. I mean, we only set out 11 hours ago." But as it was, I was having a hard time hiding my fatigue. My feet were dragging. My steps were slowing. The beam of my headlamp crept towards my feet as my neck and shoulders began to slump. I may have started to moan a little. After every corner I expected to see the parking lot. Every corner my hopes were disappointed. I began to imagine that I had died and had suffered some sort of Sisyphean fate where I would keeping hiking up dark, wet roads where I would get more and more tired but never any closer to my destination.
I could tell Florian was tired too. He looked less severe than normal. His stride lost some of its broad confidence. But still, he wasn't the one who was moaning.
When we finally reached the van, I crawled still damp into my sleeping bag in the back. It was too late to drive to a hostel.
I'm not sure which one of us fell asleep first.
I hope it was Florian.

Round One Scores:
Best looking at the top of the first peak: Florian
Best at navigating precarious rocks: Me
Best endurance in freezing alpine water: Me
Best endurance during ridiculously long hikes: Florian
Best looking in a Wonder Woman outfit (hypothetical category): Definitely me.

A Solo Start

2008-01-26T18:51:00.000-08:00

For a year ushered in with me sitting on a toilet (not that I planned it that way, but there I was at the first pop of the fireworks), 2008 has so far proved to be an eventful year. And while 2008 started with a bang, I have to admit that 2007 ended with a whimper. The whole New Zealand holiday season was a non-event really. It was a bit like the golf channel: I know it's out there, but there's not enough going on to get me to tune in. Perhaps it was the dissonance caused by a summertime Christmas (carols in 80 degree heat take on an unintentional irony), but the whole season came and went with about as much enthusiasm as I typically reserve for Arbor Day.
So after an ennui saturated holiday season, I was determined to get the new year started on the right foot. That's why dawn on January 1st saw me taking the water taxi to the Queen Charlotte Track, a 71km path that ribbons around Queen Charlotte Sound on the northern tip of the South Island.
It was going to be my first multi-day solo hike. This is not nearly as hard core as it sounds because, well, if you time it right, you can spend both nights in small coastal towns where you can order a nice cold beer before you retire to a populated campground. If that weren't enough, you can also have the ferry drop off and pick up your backpack at each town so that all you need to carry each day is water and some snacks. Because this was included in the price of the water taxi, it seemed like masochism not to avail myself of this option, so I grudgingly let the ferry take my backpack on each day. I also took the opportunity to pack things I'd never normally include if I was carrying everything - bottle of wine, heavy novel, deodorant - because if you're going to embrace yuppified hiking, you might as well go all out.
Even without a backpack the first day was grueling. Having caught the earliest water taxi with just a few other people, I realized I could at least marginally preserve the illusion of a solo back country experience. As long as I was the fastest. So I charged the first kilometers pausing only to take a few harried photos of the scenery I was swiftly passing by. My photos show secluded bays of crystal water surrounded by lush tree ferns and birch trees. I don't actually remember much of this because, as I said, I was rushing. But I bet it was quite spectacular. Even though I was chugging down the track alone, the imagination of stampeding hoards on my heels didn't quite lend to the tramp of tranquility I had been hoping to start the year with. I decided to chill out and enjoy the hike and its views. As long as that couple who were clearly in their sixties didn't catch up. A girl's gotta keep some dignity.
27 kilometers later I was pitching my tent a few meters from the ocean in the tiny town of Punga Cove - basically a pier and cafe on the edge of the trail. Now I have a complex, involved love/hate relationship going on with my tent. It weighs only 1.2 kilos (less than 3 pounds), which is quite a marvel for anything that claims to be a shelter. It's my number one boasting point whenever anyone starts to talk about tents. "You think your tent is great? Get this. Mine only weighs 1.2 kilos. You know that's less than 3 pounds? Man, that's what I call ultralight." And so on.
The thing I don't tend to mention is the inevitable trade offs that come with all this lightweight engineering. The first is size. This tends to become most noticeable when I'm forced to sit on the ground outside the door of my tent to eat my noodles because there's not enough room inside for me to sit. My tent accommodates just one position. Horizontal. It's also at this time that I tend to notice other people setting up the crossbeams of their cathedral like tents and notice them easily popping in and out. My tent is like a pair of skinny jeans - there's no way in without shimmying feet first.
The second slight flaw of my ultralight shelter is in its sheer lack of shelterishness. Some tents will stay up and taut as soon as the bars are slid or snapped into place. Not so my featherweight friend. The tension of my tent's walls fully depends on the tension achieved when staking the tent in the ground. Should any one of the stakes fail, the whole structure becomes about as dependable as a drug addict in an opium den. Even if the ground cooperates and there are not hard rocks to jeopardize peak stake placement, there are still inevitable folds and wrinkles in the outer and, well, only layer of the tent. This means that even a light morning dew proves too much water for the fabric to keep out. In the event of it actually raining, I've discovered that my tiny sleeping pad double as a flotation device if I forget to wake up every twenty minutes to bail the water out. (For future reference, plastic milk jugs cut in half are the best for these late night bailings. Much better than using a hiking boot.)
But did I mention it weighs only 1.2 kilos? That's less than three pounds you know.
Fortunately, it didn't rain that night, but the next day dawned with a blazing sun and not a single cloud to block the rays. I have negligible concerns about skin cancer. Incidentally, I blame this on California's stupid Proposition 87 that has plastered warning signs all over the state wherever there are "chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer." It's like having on every street corner a state sponsored freak with a sandwich board proclaiming "THE END IS NEAR". It also means that you start out by being paranoid, but eventually end up inured to the whole cancer risk thing. (I hate to think how much the state paid just to try to freak us out every time we have to stop for gas.)
So even though I don't worry about skin cancer, sunburn is never fun and if it was going to happen it would be on the 90 degree day with six hours of mostly exposed hiking at that time of year when the earth was at its perihelion. (I know. I didn't pay any attention in science class either. It's the time when the earth is closest to the sun. Thank you Wikipedia.)
Preventative measures were in order. Enter hat, sunglasses, long sleeves, long pants, and a bandanna tied around my neck in case the high neck of my shirt missed anything. After 20 minutes of steady climbs and sun, I was sweating like a priest in a playground, but at least I wouldn't be lobsterfied by the end of the day.
Even so, I looked fucking ridiculous. I know this because people wouldn't even wait to be out of ear shot to laugh.
But that was one of the benefits of hiking alone. There were no good looking males to impress and no one to embarrass with my profuse perspiration. I felt liberated. For a shy, wiry, closet science fiction nerd surrounded perennially by a bubble of awkwardness, looking like a dork is as close to my nature as acting like an evil megalomaniac is to Cheney's. I felt like I was being true to myself and this feeling fueled me through the next day.
It was a good way to start the new year.

Homo Sapiens Strangeus

2007-12-28T19:38:00.000-08:00

I've never been that interested in geology. Of all the sciences, I think it's the one I'd least like to devote my life to and that includes scatology - the chemical analysis of excrement. So I was pleasantly surprised at my own interest in the geology of New Zealand and how the different movements of plates have resulted in the geologic differences between the North and South Islands. I recently found out how underneath the South Island, tectonic plates are crunching together and cause the rising spine of the Southern Alps to dominate the landscape. Under the North Island however, one plate is sliding under another to create volcanoes and volcanic depressions that turn the island into a large scale version of a teenager's pimply skin. This process, called subduction for the next time you are on Jeopardy, makes the whole of the North Island geothermally quite active which is just science speak for a whole lot of heat under and often above ground.
The town of Rotorua a few hours south of Auckland pretty much only exists because of this activity. The town was set up at the end of the nineteenth century to help the sick take advantage of Rotorua's thermal hot springs and the assumed healing properties of the mineral pools. Which leads me to wonder what it was about the nineteenth century that led people to assume that anything that was acrid or pungent must undoubtedly have healing properties. In any case, as more and more sick people died and it became more and more clear that sulphur springs are not a cure all, tourists began to flock to the springs less for their medicinal benefit and more for the relaxing pleasure of basking in hot water. These days, tourists from all over the world flock to Rotorua to bask in the pools and in the town's persistent rotten egg smell. The impact of the pools on the town cannot be overstated. pretty much all of the business in the area cater to the tourists and enterprising, if somewhat disingenuous motel owners relabel ordinary bathtubs as "en suite hot pools."
I spent three days in Rotorua and completely managed to miss out on its single attraction. Even though I'm not a die hard hot springs fan, considering the dearth of things to do in Rotorua, boredom alone would have probably inspired me to check them out had I not met a colorful hostel owner named Gerard. I have always felt that the most interesting people I meet are those with few scruples who also had the good luck to be young in the seventies. Gerard was a perfect example of this with the additional advantage that he liked to talk. Within an hour of our meeting he told me stories of inadvertently picking up prostitutes in Brazil, almost crashing after partial engine failure during an imprudent Boeing 707 flight with Air Honduras, and meeting beautiful women in Thailand only to find out to his most definite dismay that they were transvestites. Hot springs and geysers couldn't compete with this fount of entertaining stories so the only experience I had of Rotorua's famous thermal activity was the frequent sulphur smell that drifted between us as we chatted.
But as I said, the North Island is geothermally quite active and only a few days later I got another change to dip in hot springs - this time on Great Barrier Island 50km off the New Zealand coast. I had hit a stalling point in my travels having reached a point of indecision as to my next adventure. The island seemed like a perfect getaway to relax and regroup in a place that is a five hour ferry ride off the beaten track and a world away from the oppressive not-so-much-tourist-trap-as-tourist-gulag of Rotorua.
The trip didn't exactly start auspiciously. Monsoon quality rains accompanied me with their drumming beat on the 40 minute walk to the pier, so I boarded the ferry with dripping hair and jeans soaked black to the thigh. The seas were unusually rough, and though I was able to sleep, it was frequently broken by the retch and splatter rhythm of other passengers vomiting on to the deck, into bags, into the water. The first night on the island I spent shivering in a damp and dirty room that reeked of cat pee.
But traveling is nothing if not self-induced manic depression. Some days are saturated with feline urine and other days have the translucent golden tint of a delicious, chilled pinot gris. After a night spent huddled with a bandanna tied over my nose and mouth, the sun came out and I checked into a different, cleaner hostel. All was good again in the traveling world.
Elsa, a French girl staying in the second hostel invited me to hike to the Great Barrier Island hot springs with her and a local friend of hers. After my chilly night, I could not have been more enthusiastic about the idea and as we hiked through the bush I was dreaming of steaming crystal pools where the water had eroded perfect hot tub shapes into the ivory rock. I should have realized I was setting myself up for disappointment when perfectly sized drink holders and half naked cabana boys serving daiquiris popped up in my imaginary hot springs scene. In any case, I wasn't expecting the muddy little stream we ended up at.
Elsa immediately stripped down to her bikini. I was already disinclined to like her because of her way of scrunching up her nose and staring whenever you asked her a question as though she was trying to decide whether or not to answer you. When I saw that she had a perfectly slender, perfectly tanned figure I decided I despised her. Her Kiwi friend, Jimmy, had wide set eyes that surged open and flat lips that curled into a smile at the sight of her in her bikini. He quickly took off his shirt and followed Elsa down to the stream. I began to ruefully suspect that Elsa had invited me just to stop the unwanted advances of her friend, but I decided to make the most of it and stripped down to my bikini as well.
The water was shallow - calf deep in most places, knee deep at the deepest - and filled with dead leaves and twigs from the most recent rain. It was also the exact temperature of a cup of coffee that has been slowly sipped for an hour while you chat up the stranger at the next table, which is to say that it was warm, but no where near the toasty category.
We sat awkwardly in the running water, trying to position ourselves between the poking twigs and submerge enough of our bodies to keep from shivering. I leant back, trying to hide my pasty stomach beneath the water. The stream was cloudy with silt, and in the murky darkness, I noticed hundreds of tiny red spore like things floating around me. At first I thought they were debris from the Pohutakawa tree, known as the New Zealand Christmas tree, which explodes with red brushes around this time of year. But as I watched their curious twisting and unfolding, I realized that I was surrounded no with hundreds of spores or seeds but with a swarm of tiny crimson worms. I watched as they propelled their little bodies toward my flesh and the stuck there like minuscule leeches.
I pointed this out to my companions. I like to think that I did this without too much panic in my voice, though it's hard to say, "I'm being eaten alive by worms" without just a little anxious vocal quivering.
Jimmy just gave a noncommittal "Yeah." examining a few on his arm before going back to ogling Elsa. Elsa just said "Vel, I can't see zem." in the decisive haughty manner that only a French person can use to put an end to a discussion.
I wasn't about to wimp out. She had a nicer body than me and there was no damned way I was going to let her be tougher than me.
I began to rationalize the situation. I remembered reading that the human body has more microorganisms on it than there are people on the planet. What difference could a few hundred worms make? I imagined myself as one of those tropical sharks with cleaner fish attached. I thought the worms were probably just munching off my dead skin cells and would leave me looking clean and refreshed. Hell, there were probably people who would pay for this, I mused, thinking of the women who buy face creams made of human foreskin. (Google if you disbelieve.) However, this line of reasoning also proves that just because people will pay for something, it doesn't mean it's a good idea. Face tattoos, vaginal plastic surgery, and little yappy dogs all fall into this category.
Fortunately there was something else to distract me from the worm vat where I was reclining and that was the presence of a new buddy called bacterial meningitis. There were strongly worded admonitions in my guidebook and ominous looking signs rife with exclamation points and bold faced type to introduce me to my new microscopic friend. I was assured that even now these little guys were floating around me in the hot springs water and that under NO CIRCUMSTANCES was I to put my head under the water or they would swim up my nose or into my ears where they would make lunch of my brain and in a few weeks I'd end up with the IQ of a toadstool or George Bush.
So there I was, reclining in puddle deep, lukewarm water, the pawn of a French girl who has caused me to seriously regress in my pasty belly acceptance journey, being eaten alive by worms and afraid that if I get one splash of water on my face that zombie bacteria will eat my brain.
In other words, I was having a blast. Hiking back, I thought the earth has never seen a stranger species that Homo Sapiens who can enjoy almost anything in pursuit of the new and untried.

Post Script
It took two more days but eventually Elsa failed to come back to her bed one night in the hostel. The day after, Jimmy greeted me with a huge, foolish grin. It has also been three weeks since the hot springs and I don't have the headaches that would suggest I had contracted bacterial meningitis. But that's not to say my brain isn't turning to mush. After all, I just made a George Bush intelligence joke, which is just too damn easy.

Survivng a Stranger

2007-12-12T20:19:00.001-08:00

There's something to be said for traveling solo. The biggest perk is that your agenda is utterly your own. There's no inconvenient other to force a compromise or criticize your behavior by saying, "Hey isn't that your third latte so far today?" or "When was the last time you actually washed that shirt?" This is especially handy on days where all you want to do is sit around in a dirty shirt imbibing caffeine for hours.
There are times, however, when having a travel buddy can be a real benefit. A travel buddy can keep you entertained when stuck in a small town with no bookshop and only a selection of 1960s German romance novels in the lounge of the hostel to read. A travel buddy can also be witness to your keen and highly developed sense of wit when you come up with brilliant observations about Kiwis and their customs. I've had lots of these, but with no travel buddy to act as my witness, I've forgotten them all. You're just going to have to take my word for it that they were really, really funny. Even a naive travel buddy can be good fun because you can usually convince them that sheep tipping is an ancient and revered Kiwi sport with predictably entertaining results once they decide to try their hand at it. But by far the best time to have a travel buddy is when you are having an adventure.
There are several reasons for this. The first reason brings to mind the old adage "If you go surfing with someone else, you are half as likely to get bitten by a shark." This strikes me as true wisdom, except in a trekking situation it might be better rephrased as "if you go hiking with someone, you're half as likely to get chopped into bits by a psycho waiting to kill the first hiker who comes along." This is known as the Buddy as Bait reason.
The second reason relates to the many risks involved with all proper adventures. It looks like this: "Aw dang. It looks like my shoelace has come undone again. I guess you will have to lead the way across that slippery, treacherous, poorly maintained stretch of track." We'll call this the Buddy as Guinea Pig reason. There's also the Buddy as Ambulance reason, and I suppose I should mention the Buddy as Company reason.
With all of these important reasons for having an adventure buddy, it's hard to justify striding out into the wilderness without one, but it had been more than a week since my last trek and I had yet to meet anyone willing to leave the idyllic surfing community of Raglan and undertake some adventuring.
Then I met Florian.
I had been surfing that morning. Two hours of activity that I felt officially exonerated me from doing anything other than sitting around for the rest of the day. This worked out well because there isn't exactly much else for one to do in Raglan. So I was perfectly happy to join the stranger in the hostel's TV room who was watching the B-movie Stilton Cheesiness that is My Super Ex-Girlfriend.
The stranger had buzzed blond hair, small features, and glasses. When the movie was over, we got to chatting and I discovered he was a physics student from Berlin who had just finished up a semester abroad in Wellington and who had a few months to kill before he went home. We chatted about physics (I love to speak authoritatively on subjects I know nothing about) and about the adventures we were having in New Zealand. Florian mentioned he was leaving in two days to do the Wanganui River Journey, a three day paddle through some of the most remote regions of New Zealand's North Island. He said he was going alone. I asked if I could come along. He said yes. And that ladies and gentlemen is how you agree to spend three days alone in the wilderness with someone you only met ten minutes before.
As I was leaving early the next day for another town to do a caving trip, we worked the details out right away. Florian would pick me up on the way to the river, we'd pick up the canoe and start paddling the morning after. With everything settled, we both got up from the tattered and sunken couches in order to go to bed.
Now I'm a pretty tall girl at 5 ft 7. (More on optimistic days.) And even though this is decidedly average for, say, a Danish girl, in America I am taller than most of the girls I meet and pretty close to the average male (who happens to measure in at 5 ft 9). This advantageous height coupled with my sincere but as of yet untested belief that I could defend myself against anyone of my height and anyone with even a few inches on me means that I'm generally not afraid of most strangers as long as they're not armed or dressed like a ninja. So I didn't really think I was doing anything dangerous until Herr Florian and I stood up and I realized he had a good nine inches on me. He was so unexpectedly tall in fact that I had to move a few steps back from the customary three ft of personal space so that I could meet his eyes without killing my neck. Even with my optimistic appraisal of my own ass kicking abilities, it was pretty clear that if this stranger turned out to be 6 ft 4 of crazy then I was 5 ft 7 of screwed.
But plans had been made. A canoe had been rented. And I didn't want to back out and be guilty of heightism so I said goodnight to the Berlin behemoth hoping I hadn't just agreed to something really stupid.
My anxiety hadn't abated when I found myself standing on the side of the road waiting to be picked up two days later. Florian and I hadn't communicated since that first short conversation. I pulled my trusty Leatherman multi tool out of my backpack and put it in my pocket. I figured it would at least give me a fighting chance if anything went bad. This was assuming I'd have time to pull it out, figure out which of the tools was the knife, get my fingernail in the slot so I could pull it out and then use it to defend myself.
He picked me up in his ancient camper van and we met with a good bit of awkwardness that quickly dissipated once we got talking. For the first hour, there were no red flags to make me worry about my safety and we began to slowly drift in our conversation from the weather and the landscape to more philosophical subjects. It was at this point Florian told me he was an atheist.
Even though I and the vast majority of my friends are atheists or at least skeptical agnostics, I come from America where such things are not mentioned in polite conversation, a country where it's more acceptable for politicians to say "Let's nuke 'em back into the Stone Age" than "I see no evidence to support the existence of God." So I was a teensy bit concerned, but decided to chalk it up to European eccentricity - kinda like Smart Cars or topless bathing at public beaches.
Then Florian mentioned that he had spent two years in the German army. I was speechless as I weighed this new bit of evidence. On the one hand, having and ex-army adventure buddy would definitely be a boon if anything happened to go wrong so many miles from civilization. The fact that he was German already helped as the Germans you meet on the track are always the ones who will hike an extra five hours just to see an interestingly shaped pebble. Being German army probably meant that Florian could hike 200km on his knees while whistling Beethoven the whole way. However, being ex-army makes the needle on the Potential Psychometer jump up a few notches (see Timothy McVeigh or the D.C. sniper for pertinent examples).
Unable to decide whether this was a good or bad revelation, I probed further. It turns out that the army is compulsory for young males in Germany (good news as he didn't have a choice and didn't join just to learn how to shoot a gun). However, Florian stayed a year longer than necessary (not so good news as it kind of takes away the duress defense - yay law school.) I asked him if there were any women in the army. He told me there were, but he thought there shouldn't be because women were weaker than men and women shouldn't fight in combat anyway because they are needed in times of war to make babies because you don't need many men but you need lots of women around and, hey, that's just biology Ja?
At this point I distinctly heard the needle scratch the record in my brain as I realized I was heading for the remote bush with a gargantuan German, an ex-army atheist who was also potentially a misogynist.
As they say in Germany, Scheisse.

I suppose I could have bailed, run away when we stopped for gas, claimed a sudden attack of appendicitis and had him drop me off at the hospital. But there was also another side to my new buddy. We had stopped at the Kiwi House in Otorhanga to see New Zealand's famous flightless bird. Florian thought the birds were cute and I reasoned that anyone who thought an animal that looked like a rat crossed with a midget tyrannosaurus crossed with a ball of belly button lint was cute couldn't be all that bad. I decided to stick it out.
We pulled into the tiny town that was home to Steve, the guy who rented out the kayaks and canoes to paddlers. Later I would learn that Steve had spent years making money off of hunted possums that he would spend weeks in the bush hunting. He also has - and I'm not making this up - wrangled deer by jumping onto their backs from a helicopter. This was apparently the thing to do in the 60s and 70s and the New Zealand helicopter pilots were so good that they were recruited to train the U.S. pilots who were going to Vietnam. Steve's wrangling and hunting skills notwithstanding, his housekeeping skills were not so good. Florian and I had planned to spend the night in the rooms he rented out, but even with my admittedly low standards of personal hygiene, I just couldn't do it. We're talking spiderwebs in every corner, mattresses covered in a palette of stains, and swarms of New Zealand flies. New Zealand flies are to regular flies as Megalodon is to a sand shark and their plump fly bodies littered the ground like rabbit droppings.
Fortunately, Florian had a van with a mattress in the back and I was more willing to risk sleeping in a small enclosed space with a stranger than risk contracting a many syllabled disease from the mystery mattress stains. Going to sleep on the side of a remote road in New Zealand next to someone I'd hung out with for only a few hours was a new kind of risk for me and I was gratified to wake up alive the next morning.
We set out in out canoe shortly after we woke. Florian in back, me in front. I turned to wave goodbye to the last vestiges of civilization we would see for three days. Having survived so far, I was beginning to relax and observe some of my new adventure buddy's quirks. Despite the stereotype that Germans lack a sense of humor, Florian made me laugh. Admittedly, this was often at his expense (seriously, if you've never heard someone sing German reggae then you are missing out on one of life's keener pleasures). I also noticed that he had a serious side that made me imagine a strict upbringing by people with long and pinched faces. He was a good counterpoint to my levity and we had an easy morning floating down the Wanganui River.
And "floating" is the operative word. The river was moving and so were we, so we only had the occasional half-hearted paddle to get us in position for the rapids before going back to enjoying the scenery. And wow, what scenery. The river had carved into the limestone a deep gorge sometimes several hundred feet deep where dozens of waterfalls poured down the lush walls of ferns into the slowly drifting river. The occasional wild goat munched on grasses by the bank accompanied by a symphony of calling birds. The slow flow of the river along with our many bathroom breaks (the effect of hearing all those waterfalls) meant that we got to the halfway point of the first day in a little over seven hours. We had been assured that the first day would only take us six hours. It was at this point we realized the guide book meant six hours of paddling not six hours of drifting. We set to work.
If you've ever paddled a Canadian style canoe with about 50 pounds of gear and 200 pounds of German inside it then you know that it's about as hydrodynamic as a bull with just about as much willingness to go where you want it to. It took us four more hours to reach the hut by which time we were tired, hungry, and I was wet having falling in fully dressed while securing the canoe. Florian had been too polite to laugh. That night I was too exhausted to worry about the possibility that I'd be hacked to pieces in the remote bush by an ex-German army officer. I fell asleep immediately.
The next day - still alive! - we were a little more prepared for the hard work of paddling. I was still annoyed by Florian's "women are weaker" comment so I made sure to paddle harder and longer than him. I'm not sure my arms would have made it had we not stopped midday to hike the Wanganui River's major - and perhaps only - attraction: the Bridge to Nowhere. (The bridge was built in the 1930s to help improve access to the remote areas around the river, the only problem being that the builders completely neglected to connect the bridge to the roads.) After the hike, we both took a long swim to escape the head. We floated on out backs alongside the canoe, drifting with the black water in a deep gorge. Florian, too, seemed swept away by the majestic beauty and solitude of the river. His seriousness ebbed and he started to make some jokes.
The second night we made a fire in the fireplace of the hut. It wasn't really cold, but it gave us an opportunity to sit around and stare at the fire and out over the river. There was a moment when Florian swung the hut's ax to chop some firewood when I was worried all my worst fears would be realized. But it was a testament to our new friendship that I only stepped about eight ft. away and and only briefly looked for an escape route.
Steve picked us up at the end of the next day and I began to realize I was going to miss my German friend. The river had been a fast track to friendship and we had a melancholy farewell. Before he left, I asked if he thought I could make it through basic training in the German army.
"You are pretty tough." he replied.
Okay, so it was a hell of an equivocation, but the concession coming from him felt like the best compliment ever.
I grinned.

The Aptly Named Mt. Doom

2007-11-23T14:16:00.000-08:00

To be honest, I've never been a huge fan of Lord of the Rings. Part of this is because huge chunks of the book read like the Bible. "Aragorn, son of Arathorn, son of Abraham, son of Ezekiel" stuff that makes you feel like Tolkein, or God for that matter, ran out of plot ideas and stalled for time by making up names. There's also the problem, as my cousin Danelle pointed out, that there are pretty much no female characters, which leads me to dislike the books on a deeper, philosophical level. And before you start quibbling and pointing out the general badassery of Eowyn, I'll just reply that she's just the book's token female character in much the same way that teen movies have the token black character who serves no other purpose than to let studio executives pat themselves on the back for their progressive commitment to diversity before sending their kids to almost exclusively white private schools.
Nevertheless, my dislike of the books in all of their resounding maleness does not extend to the movies where the over representation of the fifth limbed species of human leads less to philosophical dislike and more to "can we rewind that scene where Aragorn walks in dirty and sweaty and exactly how I'd imagine he's look if I got to have my way with him for several hours in a field in Rivendell because I'd really like to see that again." And even rough looking men with swords excluded, I was still totally excited when an Israeli girl I met in Auckland suggested we climb up the volcano that served in the films as Mt. Doom, known to locals and people who aren't nerds as Mt. Ngauruhoe.
The hike up Ngauruhoe is a three hour side trip on the longer Tongariro Crossing, a day long trip with an almost 700 meter ascent that weaves between the active volcanoes Ngauruhoe and Tongariro. It also boast plenty of trip-an-you-die moments, this-looks-like-it-could-be-on-Mars moments, and what-did-that-German-in-front-of-me-have-for-breakfast
oh-wait-it's-just-the-smell-of-sulphur-springs moments.
My hiking partner, Nomi and I decided that if we were going to hike it, then we might as well trek it, so we decided to turn the day hike into a three day adventure that would take us around the mountain, a 41.5 km track known as the Tongariro Circuit.
We set out. I had vivid daydreams of throwing the One Ring into the volcano, thereby saving the free world and climbing off the mountain while all of creation cheered my immense bravery, giving me the first pick of all the men in the village. The weather was beautiful; the only cloud in the sky a halo shrouding the tip of the mountain.
After hiking up a comfortable slope through alpine grasses, we came to a steep ascent up a wall of volcanic rock. With three days of gear to weigh them down, my thighs were burning with each step. I kept hearing Dr. DiFiori's voice in my head from when I went to him because of knee problems. "Your legs are underdeveloped." I also found myself silently and not so silently cursing the people hiking the one day track with their insultingly small day packs on their backs. By the time we reached the base of Mt. Doom, I felt like some demented acupuncturist had put a trillion needles in my thighs and then touched them with a live wire.
The volcano stretched proudly up into the sky, as steep as the sides of this A. There was no trail as there was no plant life to worry about, so it was up to each poor sucker to figure out how best to climb it. The ground was volcanic ash and rock which had the consistency of sand. Each step up had you sinking at least half a step back. I looked up and saw that only one person out of the dozens of hikers that morning had attempted it, an orange speck on the looming wall of black. He didn't appear to be moving, and I imagined him to be lying face down on the ground with a mouth full of volcanic dust.
Nomi and I looked at each other, and without saying a word, we hurried past the turnoff for the summit. If we had been Frodo and Sam, we would have gotten halfway up Mt. Doom before saying "Nah, I don't really feel like destroying the ring today. Let's climb down out of this wind and have some lunch." Let's just hope the fate of the world never falls into my hands because I'm pretty sure I'd give it up in exchange for a peanut butter sandwich.
We made our way over the rest of the track and after a disconcerting stretch covered in snow (Dude, I thought it was supposed to be summer), we tucked ourselves into the cabin for the evening.
Nomi decided to head back the next day due to the unlucky combination of one pair of beige pants, a period, and no tampons. Not being afflicted myself, I decided to continue with a jovial band of middle-aged Australian women who were also staying at the hut.
We hiked down into the Oturere valley, the area used as the evil land of Mordor in the films. The day passed without incident, and by the end of the six hour hike, I felt comfortable enough with my new hiking buddies to ask some personal questions.
"So how do you all know each other?"
"We just kind of met through Kim."
"Oh. You just randomly met?"
Okay, I was prying. But the women were so fun. They seemed like a female version of the merry men with Kim as Robin Hood. I was looking for some tips on where I could find my own group of cheery hikers when I reached middle age.
"Well, you see, we're all Jehovah's Witnesses and we met through that." came the nervous reply.
"Cool!" I replied, showing how hip I was with the idea of fringe religious sects.
We hiked on in silence, and I couldn't help but feel slighted by the fact that here I had been hiking for hours with no less than six Jehovah's Witnesses and not one of them had taken the time to, well, witness to me. Didn't they want me in their club? Was I not cool enough? I was still milling over this new form of rejection while heating up my insta-rice over my wobbly camp stove when the Department of Conservation ranger came into the hut to warn us to prepare for snow and 80km winds the next day.
Now on the flight over, I had been laughing at all those poor northern hemispherians who were preparing themselves for winter while I was getting ready for my second summer in a row. I was sure there was some fitting adage for my situation involving chickens, or baskets, or bushes, but I've never been one for cryptic moralizing, so my response was this: Snow? Fuck. With a very long, sighing "u".
True to the ranger's word, we woke up to snow that continued to call for the next five hours of hiking. I held up pretty well and actually manage to enjoy myself in the peaceful, swept beauty of the snowy landscape. That is until the final climb up and over the last ridge. The snow was several feet deep in places and the promised wind was kicking like a demented can-can dancer. It would had blown me off the ridge had I not been wading knee deep in snow. With ever step I repeated the following words: I'm-Going-To-The-Beach. I felt like I had had my fill of Lord of the Rings adventures for the time being and I was ready for some serious Endless Summering.
The next day I was on a bus and the day after, I was getting sunburned on the beach while looking out over perfect waves.
Frodo never had it this good.

You Can't Put a Price on Integrity (It's about $1 NZ)

2007-11-18T16:00:00.000-08:00

Being a budget traveler, you tend to do things to save a few dollars that you would never do if you weren't on vacation: eat instant soups made out of vegetable stock, walk three miles to your destination to save a couple of cents on the bus fare, sleep in rooms with three or four strangers - even if they happen to be French.
A few days ago in Auckland was a pretty typical budget traveler day for me. I decided to head out to Rangitoto island - a basically uninhabited volcano about four miles off the coast. I decided to go hiking, which is especially appealing as it is free and in a place where there are no cafes to tempt with their steaming hot bowls of latte goodness. (The Bowl O' Latte being one of my favorite New Zealand inventions...even better than their invention of sheep.)
I had a breakfast of bread, cut two slices of, you guessed it, bread for lunch and began the two mile trek down to the wharf. Because Rangitoto is an island, there was pretty much no way I was going to get there without shelling out for the ferry. But that didn't mean I was going to pay full price without a fuss.
"One ticket for Rangitoto please."
"That will be twenty dollars." The ticket lady replied.
"Do you have any student discounts?" I asked sweetly.
"'Fraid not."
"Single persons discounts?" Seeing that they had a discount for families with children, I figured it would be discrimination if they didn't extend something to the unattached of us.
She shook her head.
It was a cold morning, but I took my sweater off and pulled my shoulders back hoping to get the "Hey look, I'm not wearing a bra today" discount. Unfortunately, this tends to only work with men.
The ticket lady was unimpressed and turned to do some other work behind the counter.
"Backpackers discount?" I called after her as a last ditch effort.
"Only if you have a Backpackers Budget Card."
Success. I had the card that entitled backpackers to stay at independent hostels for three dollars less each night, so I got my discount and boarded the ferry.
Rangitoto was everything you expect a good volcano to be. At the base, paths wove over barren scratches of porous volcanic rock before disappearing into lush groves of kidney ferns and Kowhai trees. Near the summit, lava caves formed by rivers of the molten stuff left darkened passageways perfect for exploring and smacking your head on camouflaged overhangs of rock. The summit also affords the best views of Auckland, which, like most cities, looks the best when you're a good distance away from it.
Only 600 years old, Rangitoto is a young volcano and boasts plant life unlike that of any other place in the world. here, alpine mosses take a vacation and grow at sea level and the epiphytes that cling directly to the rocks are so abundant and so varied that I felt the urge to crouch down and examine each kind. I felt as dorky as my fellow hosteller Paul, a zoologist who proclaimed to me in his posh British accent just minutes after we met, "I quite like lemurs" and proceeded to spend ten minutes extolling the virtues of different breeds of lemur.
After my look-at-all-the-pretty-epiphytes nerdgasm and exhausted from hiking around all day, I headed back to the main land. I had worked up a bit of an appetite and decided to head to the Hare Krishna restaurant I had spied earlier on during a trek around the city. As a vegetarian, I cannot express deeply enough my love for the Hare Krishnas. You can head to almost any city in the world and wherever the Hare Krishna temple is, you're sure to find super cheap vegetarian eats nearby where the Hare Krishnas fuel up for their chanting and dancing.
Auckland is no exception, and the Food for Life Hare Krishna Cafe was filled with photos of Gurus, flaking posters of Krishna and trance inducing chant music. It also offered a $5 combo meal with rice, curry, dhal, and rubbery yet surprisingly tasty nuggets of mystery.
Now, I'm pretty sure this is the best deal in Auckland and after three days of instant soup sprinkled with reconstituted soy globules, it was a small financial sacrifice to pay for a real meal. But when I went to pay, the lovely gentleman who served me asked, "Are you a student? Because it's four dollars with the student discount."
"Yes." I lied without even so much as a pause.
I reached into my backpack to grab my law school ID that hadn't yet expired even though I had dropped out 18 months ago.
"It's okay. I don't need to see your ID." Hare Krishnas are evidently very trusting people.
"I'm a student on vacation." I couldn't believe how easily and unconsciously these lies floated out of my mouth.
Now, I'm not one to say that lying is totally, unequivocally wrong. I also don't really have much problem lying to religious people. I went to a Christian boarding school where lies were completely necessary to ensure a normal, well-adjusted teenage life. (By the way Pastor Walls, I wasn't in the church so late because I was praying; I was totally making out with Kerry Carpenter.) I think part of the reason I don't feel bad about lying to these people is because many religions have limited condemnation capacity. After all, once you're going to Hell, those little additional lies cease to matter in the grand scheme of things. (Unless, of course, you believe in that whole Dantean conception of Hell where eternal torment has different levels of tormentedness and you better hope you've not committed Simony because it's straight to the lowest circle and some prime real estate on the cusp of Satan's anus.) But assuming Hell is Hell, once you're damned, there's no real reason to worry about your lies.
The difference with the Hare Krishnas is that they believe in that whole Karmic Wheel thing where every action has consequence in this life or the next. While trying to figure out the ingredients in the nuggets of mystery, it occurred to me that cheating the Hare Krishnas out of a dollar was a pretty surefire way to kick that Karmic Wheel into overdrive. And the last place you want that wheel to spin around and kick you in the ass is on a trip where you will be undertaking long, dangerous hikes where Karmic return could come in the form of a freak snowstorm in December or a slip and fall down a mountainside only to find out you've returned as an earwig in New Jersey.
Even excluding the whole karmic return thing, I still felt bad about cheating the restaurant owners, be it the temple or the nice Indian family that seemed to be running it out of a dollar. After all, it's not like a place that charges $5 for a plate of food is exactly raking it in and the owners are taking month long trips to Tahiti each year. So I decided from now on to do the right thing and not sell my integrity to save a dollar or two while traveling in New Zealand. Besides, I really don't want to have to live in New Jersey.

Visa and Customs

2007-11-07T12:45:00.001-08:00

New Zealand will allow the citizens of many countries to come to New Zealand for up to a year for what is delightfully and oxymoronically called a “working holiday.” And while I was a bit keener on the holiday part of all this, I figured that being able to work without fear of getting deported was probably a good thing.
I applied for the visa, and being a mostly upstanding citizen (other than that one night in Chicago which thankfully didn’t end up with a police record) from a country where there is not too much antibiotic resistant tuberculosis, I was immediately given the visa and offered residence in New Zealand for a year.
Unfortunately, however, the online application didn’t have an idiot test. If there had been, I surely would have failed and been weeded out long before they made the dangerous mistake of opening their borders to me.
Let me explain.
I had my plane ticket and was proudly looking at my electronic visa when I realized the birth date on it was listed as the 5th of May rather tan the 25th. Now this difference of a mere 20 days doesn’t really matter to you or me. I can even prove my indifference to the date by willingly accepting presents, cake, etc. on both the 5th and the 25th. Despite this casual attitude toward dates, I have leaned that governments and bureaucracies tend to be a teensy bit more of a stickler for accuracy. This is especially true when it comes to filling out official forms. (I’m looking at you Mr. IRS.) I had no desire to start my trip on the wrong side of the New Zealand authorities, so I figured I better correct it – preferably before landing in the country and being face to face with a customs agent.
I made a few fruitless calls to the embassies in San Francisco and Washington and went on a disconcerting trip through and answering machine message that inexplicably circled back on itself and caused me to press the same sequence of number choices six times before I realized I was in pre-recorded robotic voice hell. I finally got in touch with someone in Los Angeles who told me I had to call immigration in Auckland, so I bought some minutes on Skype which declined my credit card because the bank flagged it as fraud as up to that pint I had only ever used it for food and books and never for something that would indicate I had anyone to call. (My bank knows I don’t have any friends.)
So I called the bank, navigated another prerecorded message, assured them that it was, in fact, me making the purchase, got the minutes, called New Zealand and immediately got hold of a friendly, helpful human being on the other end. I was pleased with myself for having the prescience to select a country with such friendly bureaucracies. She told me all I had to do was photocopy the ID page of my passport and fax it to a number she gave me and that they would take care of it for me. I thanked her for her help and was ready to hang up when she said, “You should also write a quick explanation of what happened.”
I didn’t stop to ponder what this might entail until I sat down to type. After all, how do you come up with a reason for your own stupidity?
This was the first draft:

Dear New Zealand Immigration People:
Reviewing my electronic visa for which I applied online, I realized the birth date is incorrect. The date on the visa is the 5th of May 1983 whereas the correct date is the 25th of May 1983.
I cannot pinpoint the exact cause of the error; however, several explanations come to mind each of which seem equally plausible:
1. I am not genetically predisposed to working with numerals that function as symbols for time. In layman’s terms, I am an idiot.
2. The “2” key on my computer is temperamental and works only about 30% of the time. Coincidentally, this is also about how often my brain works.
(I also figured I’d throw in one that shifted the blame to them.)
3. As you are in the wrong hemisphere, the upside down one (my sympathies), you must do everything backwards so where the month should have been, your form was asking for the day. This is an understandable mistake and I don’t hold it against your fine country.

I eventually changed the reasons to something along the lines of “careless error”, but I kept the word “whereas”. Bureaucrats get hot off of those kinds of words. (Henceforth and heretofore are also sufficient for inducing the cubicle-bound wet dreams of besuited paper pushers.)
After about a week I was sent an email that confirmed that my visa had been updated. I sent this reply”
“Thank you so much!!!”
I really did include all three exclamation marks. I figured it was the least they deserved after spending the time to rectify my stupid mistake. After all, I must have taken up at least 10 minutes of New Zealand government employee time – 15 if they really took the time to read and contemplate the two extra exclamation points. This means that I already cost the New Zealand government money before even stepping a foot inside the country.
Upon arrival, I realized I might be made to suffer for it. The customs agent greeted me with a sedate smile hidden behind a blond goatee.
“Passport?”
I proudly presented it along with a slightly battered copy of my printed out electronic visa. He typed, frowned, squinted, and then typed some more. All of a sudden he became very grave and picked up the phone.
“Immigration officer to desk 17 please. Desk 17.”
I was instructed to stand behind his booth and wait for the officer. Desk 17 guy just looked at me while I waited. I decided that if anything was wrong happy oblivion or naiveté would probably keep them from treating me too harshly, so I smiled and hummed softly to myself. I may have twirled my hair. The immigration officer strode up within seconds and demanded, “You got this online?”
“No, it’s an electronic visa that got sent through the mail. Of course I applied for it online dumbass.”
Just kidding.
I actually gave him the puppy eyes and murmured a nervous “uh huh.”
He took my passport, ordered me to collect my luggage and the sit on a row of chairs against the far wall. If this had been the U.S. and I a foreign traveler and this had happened to me, I would have desperately been evaluating my odds of ending up in a secret Romanian prison before nightfall.
But this was New Zealand, and the officer was back before too long to let me know that everything had been sorted out. Turns out, I had wasted 10 minutes of their time; they had wasted 10 minutes of my time.
Well played New Zealand. Well played.

Why New Zealand (Short Version)

2007-11-04T19:47:00.000-08:00

Because the country totally rocks. (And there are no poisonous spiders.)

Why New Zealand (Long Version)

2007-11-04T19:40:00.000-08:00

As I signed off my email last month, I mentally reviewed my situation before going to sleep. Twenty-three, shit, no twenty-four. No job, living with my parents for the first time in about a decade. Faint ideas of traveling to New Zealand, but no plane ticket, and I couldn’t find my passport.
Crap.
I think there would have been less of the “crap” sentiment if I could figure out exactly how this happened. Perhaps rationalizing my failures would make them less acute or at least help me find someone other than myself to blame. If I had done this pre-sleep checklist a year or so ago, it would have gone something like this:
Fabulous little apartment three blocks from the ocean?
Check.
Cute, successful fiancé?
Why yes, thank you. He’s sleeping right next to me. He’s a scientist and is going to find a cure for cancer. Contented sigh.
On path to resounding success, big, expensive sports carness and a beautiful house on the beach?
Check and check. See, I’m a law student at a great school, and we all know that lawyers are fabulously wealthy and even though I’ll do public interest law for a year or two (yay, white liberal guilt) let’s be serious, I know I’ll go into divorce law and help some pinched, surgeried women take their cheating husbands for all they’re worth. And hence, I’ll have money for cars and houses and such.
So that’s the conversation I would have had with myself before falling into a mostly contented sleep and having my recurring dream involving hanging from a fraying rope over a cavernous gulf. Looking back, it appears that my unconscious has a healthy sense of symbolism coupled with an uncanny ability to predict the future. Which brings me back to trying to figure out exactly how I fell in to joblessness and unrealized travel dreams.
Well, I dropped out of law school. That was definitely part of it.
After a year spent mostly in the company of law books and hard backed chairs, I fell the need to have some time to stretch my legs. I began to notice a progressive and disturbing flattening of my ass from sitting for hours each day on chairs only fit for puritans. My leg muscles were beginning to shrink from lack of use; my spine was beginning to curve from many fruitless attempts to make myself look smaller in class and thus avoid the dreaded Socratic method. No other education philosophy sounds more like a medieval torture device. Whenever I hear the words, I think of a Spanish Inquisitor peering over a starved, rat-chewed prisoner and croaking, “Confess your heresies or you will be subjected to the Socratic method.” At which point the accused screams, “No! Put me on the rack. Burn me! But not that, anything but that….”
I think the hard backed chairs fit nicely into my medieval torture chamber imagining of law school. They form an important part of the whole weed out, education-by-attrition aspect of the first year of law school that seems a standard throughout the country. In 2004, when I went to take the LSATs at Northwestern’s law school in Chicago, the lecture hall was filled with miniature wooden pews. Pews. Tiered, right-angled oak benches complete with gothic carved trefoils on the outer sides.
And only about a third of them had cushions.
I spent most of the morning—in between solving only-on-the-stupid-LSAT logic problems involving pizzas, days of the week, and toppings—trying to figure out exactly who decides whom of the law students gets to sit on a cushion when they come in for class. Is it a free for all when the students come in as perhaps a wily ruse by the professors to get their students to come to class on time? Is the Socratic method a front for an elaborate cushion-winnowing process whereby students who answer questions correctly are tossed one of those purple tufts of comfort? Could this have something to do with the way attorneys on T.V. always seem to be jumping up from their chairs?
Whatever the answer, it seems that being able to sit for extended periods of time on hard chairs is a litmus test for lawyers. At least they don’t have to wear hair shirts.
As far as I know.
In any case, a year of sitting for hours on hard surfaces left me with a serious need for outdoor, leg stretching, butt muscle exercising, good-God-let-me-walk-before-I-lose-the-ability types of activities.
Often during the last few months as a law student, I would sit in class staring out of windows at the perfect southern California weather and dream of the nearby mountains and wide-open spaces. That is, until the professor would call on me asking a question about a case I hadn’t read and I would have to make up an answer that would leave me rambling and make me feel like a Miss USA contestant trying to answer a question on foreign policy.
I know Los Angeles with its 12 million inhabitants living in one concrete plated organism of urban sprawl doesn’t exactly seem like the most obvious place to experience the great outdoors, but what many people don’t realize when they think of that cauldron of smog, traffic, and celebrity is that L.A. is in fact surrounded by mountains. Granted, they’re not the yeti-myth-fueling, slip-and-you-die type mountains of the Himalayas or Canadian Rockies. The Santa Monica Mountains to the north of the city boast a top altitude of 3,111 feet. That’s half a mile plus a couple of very tall trees high.
Nevertheless, when you consider that the highest peak is about five miles from the ocean, it means that there’s enough elevation change for some relatively ass kicking hikes. Add in the risk of rattlesnakes and pockmarked, deceptively easy to climb but difficult to get back down again sandstone rocks and you have the makings of a pleasantly extreme environment. Every year, people underestimate the terrain and have to be rescued from hills and canyons that are only a few miles from the reach of sub developments and vein like streets speckled with black SUVs. Any place where people have to be rescued is a place where adventures are to be had.
A few months before dropping out of law school, I got a taste.
My favorite L.A. hiking guide had a seven mile hike which included a three mile trek up the bed of a creek in a canyon in Malibu – a few miles up the coast from L.A. I packed one and a half liters of water, no food, and left a little after one in the afternoon. I figured seven miles would take me about three hours and I would be back in time for an early dinner. It started out pleasantly enough with a quick easy path between flowering shrubs and shady trees. The path was wide and even enough for horses, their C-shaped prints clearly visible in the sandy soil. A trickle of water ran down a wide creek bed. It was late March and L.A. had pretty much hit the point where it kisses goodbye to rain for nine or ten months. It had been an unusually wet winter. The Mojave Desert a few hours inland from L.A. had experience by some accounts the most spectacular spring in a century. The Mojave Desert usually looks like surface of Mars as conceived by Dr. Seuss, complete with eerie scattered granite rock formations and scraggly Joshua trees poking optimistically out of the barren dryness. And while the land is usually empty save for rock, Joshua trees, and a few desert creepy crawlies, this year the dusty floor had become covered with lush grasses and bright wildflowers due to the usually amounts of rain from December to February.
By March, however, the land had gone back to its, well, antediluvian state, and while the creeks were not yet dry in Malibu, I didn’t anticipate and difficulties and was fully expecting an easy stroll up a mostly dry creek bed.
Oh, how wrong I was.
Nature is like a siren. It urges us ever closer to danger. One minute it’s “Oh, look at that pretty butterfly” and then you’ve followed it with your face turned up off a cliff. For me, the butterflies with their palm-sized flashes of color coaxed me up the canyon and I didn’t notice the sides of the canyon closing in and the creek bed narrowing. Before long, I found myself carefully hopping from rock to slippery rock sticking out of the running water.
Now, this canyon hike was not a marked trail. Frankly, there would be no need to mark it because once you’re in the canyon there’s really no way to get out. The up side of this is that there is pretty much no way a hiker can get lost. Even someone like myself with my dubious navigation skills. (I once woke to see the sun touching the Pacific and got up and made coffee before I remembered that the sun sets in the west.) So while it was unlikely that I would get lost, the downside of this whole no-marked-trail thing was that each hiker was left to navigate her own path through the trees and scrub that crisscrossed the jungly canyon.
Honestly, I don’t use the adjective “jungly” lightly, made up as the word may be. I’ve been to the jungles of Indonesia-places where ferns grow to head high prehistoric proportions, where you fully expect to see a pterodactyl come swooping down at any moment. And while this canyon didn’t have the dense canopy to keep out the light, the undergrowth was just about as think. Without a regular stream of hikers walking a defined path, there was no impediment keeping the spiders from stringing their nasty, insidious webs between every single branch. Without the sunlight in the high walled canyon to glint off the silks, these webs would pretty much be invisible.
So it went like this:
1. Duck under low branches.
2. Jump to next rock hoping to God it wasn’t loose and wouldn’t tip over the second you landed.
3. Crawl through narrow gap while balancing on two tiny slippery rocks and…
4. Get a face full of spider web.
5. Desperately try to bat web off of face, cough up the threads that you inhaled and get rid of the poisonous spider that is probably at this very moment hiding in your hair waiting to exact his revenge for ruining his lair. And his supper.
6. Lose balance due to all this flailing and put one leg knee deep in water.
7. Repeat.
There were also snakes, but they were of the green, probably-not-poisonous type and didn't bother me as much as the dear-God-I hope-that-wasn’t-a-brown-recluse spiders. I’m just a little bit arachnophobic.
The spiders, along with the difficulty in finding a navigable path, slowed my progress considerably. On most other hiking paths I could have hopped along on a broken metatarsal faster than I was making progress up this canyon. But the valley was so lush and dripping with life and every 100 feet felt like such an accomplishment that I never considered turning back.
The shadows began to lengthen and darken, but I consoled myself with the guidebook’s assurance that a fire road led out of the canyon after about three miles of bushwhacking. According to my book, a series of power lines passed over the canyon. Once these were directly overhead, the book assured me the road was a mere fifteen minutes hike away. At least, this is what I remembered. I had decided not to take the book with me, assuming there would be no way to get lost in a canyon.
By the time I reached the power lines, I had been hiking for almost four hours. Sunset was probably an hour and a half away, I was sucking more air bubbles than water out of my Camel Back and I realized there would be no way to navigate back downstream once it got dark. I decided to press on.
Every corner I came to, I expected to see the nice fire road shining, revealing a happy path that would have me back to my car within the hour. Meanwhile, the boulders in the canyon were steadily growing. I found myself climbing over rocks that were head high. Several time I climbed up seven or eight feet only to find that there was no way to progress farther and I would have to scramble down which usually meant sliding down on my belly hoping my feet made contact with solid ground below. Occasionally there would be no way to progress other than by making Indiana Jones style leaps from one rock to another over drops to pools below. But because, unlike Indiana, I am not an archeology professor habituated to running from the Nazis across dangerous terrain, my style was not quite suave adventurer, but more of a scrunched face, arm windmilling affair.
After about half an hour of this, I found myself repeating a new mantra. “Fifteen minutes my ass.”
There was no sight of the fire road, and if I didn’t find it soon, it would be too dark to progress or retreat without an even greater risk of breaking a leg or slipping and cracking my head open on a rock. I would be forced to spend the night huddled on a rock with no sweater, no food, and no water.
Shit.
I also began to worry that maybe I had somehow missed the road. Perhaps one of these boulders had blocked it from my sight. The guidebook had said fifteen minutes hadn’t it? Hadn’t it? Should I retrace my steps and try to find it? Should I keep climbing until the creek becomes impassible?
I kept hiking for another hour. The disaster scenarios playing out in my mind became more and more elaborate and unrealistic. Broken ankle. Cracked open skull. Poisonous water snake. Rabid pack of coyotes. Mountain lion. Serial killer camping out waiting to capture, torture and kill poor unsuspecting female hiker whose body is found six weeks later becoming one of the most notorious unsolved murders in L.A. history.
I was wondering who would play me when the made the inevitable B-horror movie about my untimely demise when I found the fire road. I almost missed it but spied some wet footprints on the bank. Even though I had not seen another hiker all day, it was comforting to know some other people had been this way.
The sun had set, but there was still enough twilight to hike by and the road wouldn’t be easy to lose. Only problem was that the fire road crossed the canyon and I couldn’t remember which way I had to go to get back to my car. I chose left. The road wove up in a series of tight switchbacks. Legions of ticks jumped in the grass and I contemplated the prevalence of Lyme’s Disease in Southern California.
Within a mile, the road was over a thousand feet above the canyon and after a worrying stretch where the path seemed to be leading farther into the mountain range rather than bask to the parking lot, it slowly started to pitch in the right direction: west and down. I was parched and exhausted, but felt like the worst was over.
Then a startled skunk sprayed me.
To be fair, I don’t think I got the worst of it. I had always imagined skunk spray to be, well, a spray. But whatever that skunk had had to eat that morning had caused it to emit its stench in a mucusy flying blob. I can relate this with certainty because it passed about a foot from my nose. I think if that concentrated grenade of stink had actually hit me I would still be taking tomato juice showers in an attempt to get it out of my skin. And while it wasn’t a direct hit, my clothes still reeked after a wash and it was a few hours before the taste of rotten eggs and garlic worked its way off of my tongue.
I got back to my car exhausted, dehydrated, stinky and convinced that spiders had crawled into my clothes and were even now feeding off my blood.
Over the next year, I hiked almost every trail in the Santa Monica Mountains. I saw deer, coyote, rattlesnakes and a bobcat. I got lost and scrambled up peaks that perhaps no human had stood on for centuries. I did yoga by waterfalls and laughed at all the poor suckers sitting in torts class the world over. Exercise and risk taking let me leap from one endorphin high to the next. I was happy. I was giddy.
I was addicted.
And like every proper junkie, I was looking for a bigger fix.

The obvious solution was the Sierra Nevada range in California. These mountains stretch from north to south over much of the length of the state and keep the dusty air and conservative politics east of them out of California. The Pacific Crest Trail weaves north throughout these mountains starting at the Mexico border and then up into the Cascade Mountains on its way to the Canadian border. The trail passes over 1,000 lakes. That’s a lake for every three miles for those who aren’t keeping track (or lack basic math skills). The trail is filled with precipitous descents and climbs over snowy peaks requiring knowledge of ice picks and crampons. A hiker can expect to take about 6 months to complete the trail so timing is everything. Leave too early and you spend the first months wading through feet of snow. Leave too late and you’ll get snowed on during your final leg in Washington in some of the most difficult and remote terrain and you and your hiking buddies may have to Donner Party it to survive.
All of that sounded well and good and even fun, but there are also bears and mountain lions and the occasional wolf up north. I’m a vegetarian and while I would appreciate the irony of being eaten, frankly, I have higher goals for my epitaph.
I needed a place where there was no chance of becoming dinner for a clawed, toothy, furry thing. Also, given my let’s just say mild arachnophobia, any place that didn’t have poisonous spiders would immediately make its way to the top of my list.
As far as I know, only two places fit the bill: Great Britain and New Zealand. Both are also islands. Both have lots of sheep. I’m not sure this is a coincidence. One is also one of the most densely populate places on the planet and the other has 50,000 square kilometers of national park.
I had found my destination.
I saved up some money, left LA, moved home for a few months, and prepared to turn my failures into a wild adventure.
Now if only I could find my passport.