April 2022 – Penultimate

I’ve been close to death many times in my life but it’s a pretty understandable result of my living an adventurous life deliberately. Besides a couple of decades of the wildest Army training, I’ve done a lot of rock climbing, some whitewater rafting, extreme hiking, mountaineering and all manner of such nonsense. I’m not very unusual in this regard, really, and lots of my friends throughout these adventures have had some near-misses and several have died from accidents and (the adventure of?) war. I cast war this way in equal parts flippancy and truth.

Most of these situations were dramatic, but the only one I think about frequently was subtle. It wasn’t a parachute accident or a near drowning or a rocket attack or a cliff-climbing mistake. If you were all captive, I’d tell you about each one of these dramatic incidents and I’d drag them out. Perhaps if we were all in prison together, after years of being bored, I could trot these stories out one by one. Actually, now that I think of it, I’d like that. If I could put us all in prison for this purpose, God help me, I’d do it. But, I’d try to pick a prison where the food is decent. I’d do the research―I’m not a monster.

Back to the incident. I think I dwell on it occasionally because it was so blatantly, and by the numbers, my own fault. Oops. If, in running my life, I had to answer to a committee that had invested in my living a full normal life, I would be apologizing profusely to them at our next shareholders meeting. For this one incident only. The rest were all various mixtures of bad luck, equipment failure, freak weather, war, and sometimes my own fault but only partially so, if at all.

So, I went trail-running in an Arizona desert one hot day. I brought with me one thin bottle of water, 12 oz. (Don’t get ahead of me.) I wasn’t worried about the water because I’d gone on long runs with this much or less water many times before, in Massachusetts. I loved the Arizona deserts and the austerity and the heat as soon as I saw them. Felt great that day. I couldn’t see anybody around for miles and miles and took off running along a thin dusty path that wound through long stretches of desert, dry arroyos, and small desert mountains way off in the distance.

Miles later, I got to the mountains and was rounding the nearest mountain where the trail looped around the back of the mountain . . . I’d stopped running when I got to the mountain and was walking around the back side and wasn’t feeling well. I had finished the water and my legs began to get a little shaky.

Bright, bright sunshine.

I suddenly remembered the survival theory of “If you don’t have to run, walk. If you don’t have to walk, sit. If you don’t have to sit, lie down.” I was walking and soon realized I’d have to sit. I sat down, stunned. Over long minutes I took stock of my situation. I got scared enough to suddenly dart my glances about looking for shade. Nothing. I was on the side of a mountain comprised of fields of small boulders, red, tan, and black. I was in shorts and T-shirt. It was a rock desert with no shade relief. It was midday. I knew I was in trouble. Something had broken in the balance of keeping my body running normally. I was getting very weak and then, after a few more minutes, nauseous. I desperately tried to not vomit, and thereby lose the value of the one small bottle of water I had drunk. I was sharply aware of how alone I was, how far from help, and how suddenly and steadily my condition was degrading. I knew that nothing was going to improve with the assault of sun and heat that was now underway and which I could not escape.

I began to feel faint and had to slowly lay down on the hot boulders to keep conscious and any movement threatened to make me vomit or pass out. I was down to just breathing. And thinking.

Dead calm quiet, dead calm air and dead hot heat.

I thought about my situation a little more. Holy shit, I’d made the grave rookie mistake of getting super-dehydrated, and doing so far from any means of help. Here the narrative forces me to admit what I dared not before: no cell phone. I loved running light and clean occasionally and this was one of those days. Most of the time I hike or run listening to podcasts or music -and I like to take pictures too- so an iPhone was an 80% on any given hike or run up to this point. Not this day though. So, I couldn’t call anyone. And I really couldn’t walk, it had progressed so rapidly. I was stuck right there, in the sun, for the many sunny and increasingly hot hours of the foreseeable future. And I was already Stage 2 of the four stages of dehydration towards death. And I knew it. Death was suddenly a wolf sniffing me on a breeze.

I kept looking about for shade the way one keeps checking the same pockets and places for lost keys. It was so close to noon that there was absolutely no shade. I say this because you would think I could duck behind some big boulder perhaps close by―but no. Nothing, not even boulders big enough to give shade if it were indeed late afternoon, and believe me, I was focused. To paraphrase a famous quote: “Nothing focuses a man’s attention quite like the prospect of his own death.” And suddenly feeling so physically weak was a mental game-changer. It was dispiriting to not even be able to, say, build something to create shade, or continue walking, even if incredibly slowly. But I couldn’t do even that. I was laying there, staving off vomiting, and thinking about Stage 3: organ failure. (It goes 1thirst, 2fainting, 3organ failure, 4death) Would a long hot afternoon laying undiscovered be enough to induce kidney failure? With my drop in blood pressure already inducing fainting? I knew that intermittently Soldiers would die in Army training from dehydration during the course of one day; it hits the news every other year or so. Nightfall would grant me some temperature relief but would I be conscious, or even alive to celebrate it? From where I’m at, can I live through 7 or 8 more hours of this, stuck here at this point on the trail like an ant under a magnifying glass?

Because I had such excellent training in how not to be this guy, I thought about all of the rules I had just broken:

One. Pre-hydrate. Nope, and if anything, I’m positive I had a large coffee on the beautiful drive to that trailhead―as is my routine. Also, skipping breakfast robbed me of additional nutritional readiness. And, since coffee is a diuretic, if anything I’d anti-pre-hydrated.

Two. Bring a ton of water with you every time. We had formulas to adhere to throughout years of Army training and I was often an enforcer of water-readiness. (# quarts per hour per man depending on the mission, climate, etc.)

Three. Acclimate. I was new to Arizona and didn’t do ‘acclimation’ hikes that gradually increased as the body incrementally adjusted to a desert environment. Though, again, I was not only trained to do so, but I often taught such scheduling strategies to junior leadership. So, another brainless moment for me.

Four. Plan. Plan everything and share the plan with someone who will care if you don’t return. For obvious reasons. But, as I was laying there, I knew that the very next people who would take an interest in my whereabouts were going to be desert vultures.

Five. Safety plan. Not bringing a cell phone gives me an ‘F’ outright but there are many routine cheat-sheets I’ve been taught for all manner of safety considerations and I’d implemented exactly none of that knowledge. Instead, I’d just trotted off into the desert like Forest Gump, admiring the odd tiny desert flower here and there, until my chemical biology began to mudslide. And then it crashed. I crashed.

So. I went 0 for 5.

And I had a good long time to think about it. And that’s what differentiates this from all of the other, acute situations I’ve been in. There was a weird long stretch of time wherein I had to continue to process that I wasn’t in walking shape, was being baked like a large ugly salamander in a bed of small boulders and was about to pass out at any second. I kept fighting off waves of dizziness and some blurring that occurs in the initial stages of passing out.

It was a weird kind of dread, and hard to describe. It had a really disturbing dreamlike feel to it, and I guess the main emotions were surprise and sadness. Well, maybe surprise and sadness served on a light bed of fear with some regret and humiliation as side dishes. But no water! Usually they bring you glasses of water when you get seated. I should’ve complained.

But I lived, and here I am talking about it.

I got lucky. Holy shit, did I get lucky.

After my predicament had fully sunk in, and perhaps for the next 40 minutes or so, I was laying there, losing. Then, a woman came around the corner at the base of the mountain. I had seen her, miles back, and had run by her on the trail. I’d forgotten about her in my delirium but even so, I’d never have hoped that she, the only other person out there, was out for a mega-hike herself this afternoon and would go all the way to the mountains, all the while staying on my particular trail within a trail network that had several branches along the way. But here she was.

And she had plenty of water. She was a very intelligent, fit, and nice middle-aged woman who grasped my situation immediately. Soon I was sipping water. Soon I was sitting up. After a bit, we were walking together and my shakiness was abating slowly but steadily. It still took a long time to feel normal again but we got to where we could plod along and be back by late afternoon.

We had a really nice talk on the way back after I got done gushing about what a friggin’ Saint she is, and how stupid I felt. She was a Principal at a school system in Chicago and was an avid outdoor gal on vacation nearby in Arizona. She recommended some great desert hikes for me and I eventually did all of them. She mentioned, obliquely, and tellingly, that she’d noticed my single bottle of water as I ran by her hours before. Maybe she mentally committed to following me right then. Again: Saint.

So, I got lucky. There could just as easily have been nobody on those trail networks that day and I would have found out what the next 5 or 6 hours of baking would do to a big ugly helpless salamander. I soon found out that I was often the only one around as I ran all the local trail systems for the better part of a year after this incident. Of course, and don’t embarrass me by asking, I immediately started doing all the right things. I acclimated properly and once later did a long, successful and interesting hike in 117 degrees. I then always had plenty of water and a cell phone―running with a Camelback hydration backpack filled with electrolyte-treated water and sometimes also small packs of nutritional supplements for athletes.

I could’ve maybe survived by sucking dew off rocks and plants if I could’ve lasted until the next morning but the big money was on me being irretrievably unconscious before the sun set. I’d set myself up beautifully for such ignominy. Unconscious, bloated and horribly sunburned. That’s how they’d find me. That was the vibe.

So many lessons in this one, aren’t there?

Here’s the most disturbing part for me: had I succumbed, this would be a pretty weak story in Valhalla.

(there are no straight lines in nature)

Family legend has it that I once touched a hot stove and then said ‘ouch’, but, other than that incident, there aren’t a whole lot of straight lines that have been discovered within my thought processes. A team of explorers went in with pith helmets and machetes and haven’t been seen since. I guess they got lost in thought.

A Ha-ha-ha.

So, today we’ll start at Stop & Shop and end up at the biggest mystery of the universe.

I’m at Stop & Shop supermarket Sunday and turned around and almost jumped straight out of my boots when confronted by their big floor cleaning robot. Have you seen these guys? Tall, grey, monolithic, they move slowly down the aisles cleaning the floor underneath and of course they must have some great sensor system to keep it out of trouble. But man, that f’ing thing scared the bejesus out of me. It is about 6 feet high, a littler wider at the bottom where it cleans the floor but is overall vaguely of human form.

It is vaguely of human form, sure, but alien, and lifeless. Maybe that lifelessness is the spooky part, the part that provokes that visceral jump. And that feeling is not just fear, fear of the unknown or the unexpected, but it is a fear mixed also with repulsion. And the repulsion hangs in the soul long after the fear subsides with a “Ha, it’s just one of those cleaning things!”

And, before robots, we had other lifeless representations of the human form to feel creeped out about. I remember museums as a child, and scenes of tableaux about historic events and such where they had figures staged; I got the same feeling of wariness and repulsion even though the figure representations were always poorly done. Most looked as if a 4^th grade class had enthusiastically embraced a big papier-mache’ challenge.

And in between robots and old bogus museums, we saw the widespread emergence of store mannequins modeling clothing throughout big clean department stores. This one is fascinating. (If you saw the Twilight Zone episode where the store mannequins come alive at night, you get double extra credit.) Store mannequins, though more lifelike than anything outside of Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, still rock the creep factor. For mannequins, this is an unexpected directional pull; the more lifelike but still not living these mannequins get, the more disturbing they become. And there will always be associated with them the special horror wherein a hiker or jogger will find a dead body and inevitably tell the police “I thought it was a mannequin at first.” There is such an inherent and weird dislike, and in some ways, an elevated dislike.

OK. Visceral. Inherent. I guess I should say that we are programmed from primitive times to fear lifelessness, and especially human form lifelessness. And lifelessness equates to death, the lack of life. So, all of these representations of the human form without life must remind us of death, or at least some kind of evil or zombie-like death thing. And we fear that. We abhor lifelessness.

Why do we fear death? What happens after death? (We’re at the biggest mystery of the universe part now.)

Well, the fact that the repulsion is not affirmatively learned, and is instead automatic, makes me think that maybe somewhere down deep we all know that when we die it really is indeed game over. Dirt. Worms. The long dark empty nothing of your own endless forgottenness. You are soon completely forgotten as the living world moves on. This must be the worst thing that a sentient human creature can imagine, and so even general representations of our death carry an instinctive dread.

Now, can this response coexist with a belief in some kind of utopian afterlife? Well, it does. I’m not saying it should, but I’m saying it does. There are tons of people who believe in an amazing afterlife through some God-centric belief structures and yet they still react to lifeless representations of the human form the same way I do. I’ll bet the Stop & Shop cleaning machine has claimed many a God-fearing shopper as a fright victim. Can these two things be reconciled: the gut-reaction, with the afterlife belief? I feel like I have to pick a side: I’m at a roulette wheel with one chip and I have to place it on the red or the black.

It may be that we were programmed as primitive beings to harbor a dread of death, and what I’ll call ‘the afterdeath’, and, as time evolved, we invented religion as a way to try to de-program the built-in fears of the afterdeath. By replacing those fears with an afterlife belief system, religions have an answer, and that answer is quite palatable though entry into the various clubs depends upon strange rules. But religion is an answer, and an answer is often better than no answer.

Though, if you’re still with me, this makes me realize that, ironically, the religious are the deprogrammers and not themselves the ones in need of deprogramming―unless one wishes to lead them back to nothingness.

Well, pick a side.

Me? I’ll trust my gut.